An Eye for Gold Page 27

  The sheriff was coming? Oh, hell, I thought, and, taking care not to make a sound, I hustled past Virgil’s office, waved brightly to the guards as I hurried out through the metal detector, burst out into the full glare of daylight, and raced to my truck. Rodriguez had been found dead. I did not want to become part of a sheriff’s investigation. I would highball it out to Winnemucca, phone Tom Latimer from the first phone I came upon, give him the dope I had on Kyle and Laurel and whomever else seemed stuck to this case, and have him call Sheriff Obernick and Deputy Weebe to keep me the hell out of it.

  As I fired up my truck and pulled away, following the cloud of dust that billowed out behind Laurel’s red Chevy Blazer, it occurred to me that Virgil had not reported her departure to the sheriff.

  BY THE TIME I pulled into the outskirts of Winnemucca, I had begun to calm down. The sun was almost kissing the mountains in the western sky, and I was beginning to realize how hungry I was. And yet I felt jarred, and longed deeply to report my findings to Tom and be done with them. I decided that a public phone booth was not the place, and instead found an inexpensive motel in which to spend the night. I turned off the main drag and drove parallel to the railroad, searching for something less upscale than the Red Lion, which was already flashing neon into the evening, advertising its slot machines and casino delights.

  I found a nice old place called Scott’s Shady Court Motel and checked into a tiny room that was tucked into a back driveway. The room was one of a funny little row of conjoined cabins with individual high-peaked roofs. Across the front of each, above the door, was painted the name of a female saint. I held the key to Santa Susana.

  Inside, I dumped my duffel on the bed, grabbed the phone, and dialed Tom Latimer’s number. He did not answer. He had left for the day.

  Taking a deep breath, I dialed Faye Carter’s number next. When she answered, she sounded surprised and jubilant to hear my voice, but when I told her what was going on, she sobered up fast and put Tom on the phone.

  “Tom,” I said. “I’m in Winnemucca. Can you take down the number at this motel?” I dictated it to him, then continued. “Listen, today I found out a bunch of things, and you need to know them, whether you think this is a murder case or not.” Then I stopped, because I knew that whatever I said next I was going to sound like the idiot I now knew I was.

  “Go on, Em,” Tom said, his voice gentle. “It always goes like this when you’re starting out.”

  I ignored the assertion he was making and continued. “The sheriff just found another body. The other biologist, that guy Rodriguez.”

  “No shit”

  “No shit whatsoever. I was up at the Gloriana Mine when the call came through. I . . . well, I have to back up.” I told Tom about meeting up with Kyle Christie, about the mill tour, and the woman named Laurel. I added my speculation about the condition of Kyle’s career, and tossed in the obvious enmity between Kyle and Virgil Davis. That led me back to Davis’s fond farewell to Laurel.

  “You have been busy,”

  “Tom said approvingly. ‘Tom, I am out of my depth. The fun and games are over. Okay, I’ve walked into my share of murder cases in my day, but that was then and this is now. I was a dumb kid with my eyes stuck shut. I’m a big girl now, and I want to live to grow up into some kind of an adult.”

  Tom cleared his throat. “Sounds reasonable.”

  “So what do you think I ought to do? I heard Virgil say he’d keep everybody there, and I took off like a jackrabbit Sheriff Obernick’s going to wonder. He doesn’t know who I am, and—”

  “I’ll take care of that.”

  I let out a breath. “Thanks, Tom.”

  “You going to be at this number all night?”

  “Yes. I’ve got to clean up and get something to eat. But yes, then I’ll be here, with the door locked. No more silly games. I’ll be a good girl and stay put”

  Tom chuckled. “Sure you will. I’ll call you back when I have something. This may take a while. You go on out to dinner, but try to stay out of any place that might have anyone from that mine in it you hear? Or just send out for a pizza.”

  “I hear,” I said, but knew that in a town like this, that wasn’t going to be easy. Tourism was probably the biggest industry in Nevada, but mining was a close second.

  I hung up the phone and lay down on the bed and thought about things for a while, then realized what a total ass I’d just made of myself. As I began to calm down, I began to realize also exactly how hungry I was, but even more so, how dirty and dry I felt. I had been camping for three days in the desert without a bath.

  I dug into my duffel bag. Fortunately, I had thought to pack a swimming suit I shucked off my clothes, put on the suit, grabbed a towel, and headed around the end of the buildings toward the swimming pool I had noticed on the way in. It was enclosed in a skeletal building. It was by then past eight in the evening, and the pool building was a sea of shadows, so I felt around for a light switch. An eery blue light suffused the room as underwater floodlights came to life. I stepped inside and stood at the edge of the water, which stretched at least forty feet before me. I stared into the blue depths, marveling at this anomaly of cool, clear water in the middle of the desert.

  I was alone. I dropped my towel on a chair, tucked my room key down inside my suit, and dove in, letting the cool waters rush past my face. The sensation was bizarre. I felt drier inside than out

  I turned face up and swam, looking upward through the alien liquid, trying to make sense of what my body was experiencing. I was in bliss and total confusion simultaneously. I wished I did not have to rise to breathe.

  BACK IN MY room, I tried once more to telephone Ray. When I got his terse, “This is Ray, leave a message,” message, I hung up and sighed. There are no atheists in fox holes, and there are no tough girls who can do without their cop boy-friends when they’re sitting in motels with local sheriffs looking for them. Just then, I would have walked across broken glass to feel him hug me.

  I had plenty of canned food with me, but had a hankering for a steak and some fresh vegetables. So I went first to a large chain supermarket near the main route through town, but just inside the door, I was confronted by a line of electronic slot machines. A man was sitting at the nearest machine, on a thickly padded stool attached to the machine, feeding in quarters. He looked like he had been there a long time. I turned tail and ran back to my truck.

  Eventually, I found something that looked more like my speed on a side street called Malarkey, at the intersection of Railroad Avenue. It was a restaurant and bar in an old residential hotel called the Martin, a white stucco job across from the railroad depot. I let myself in through the bar, which was a large, fairly well-lit room full of locals who were visiting at side tables over beers and whiskeys. A few men were playing electronic poker through machines that were set flush into the top of the bar. A woman came out and asked me if I was there for dinner. “Yes, please,” I answered.

  She smiled. “Well, there’s no tables just now. Do you want to wait or is it okay to sit with someone else?” When I looked surprised, she explained. “This is a Basque restaurant. We serve family style. You can have a table to yourself or go like the locals.”

  Forgetting Tom’s warning to avoid miners, I smiled, welcoming the thought of sitting with someone who was truly from there, unlike the crowd of migratory imports I had just met at the mine. “I’m starved. Find me a seat.”

  “Let me check.” The woman went inside the adjacent dining room and spoke with two men who were seated at a table for four. They nodded, and she came back for me. “You can sit with Larry and Joe. They’s good guys. Don’t mind them, they’s had a little wine. Celebrating. Larry’s made some extra money.”

  After I had sat down and the waitress had taken my order for entrée and imbibition, I said to the men, “Hi. I’m Em Hansen. Just visiting here in Nevada. Thanks for having me at your table.”

  The two men smiled and nodded. One was dark and broadcheeked and had coal bla
ck hair and eyes. I took him for an Indian. The other’s ethnicity was harder to place: He was also dark-haired, but in a more European sort of way, though he looked like he didn’t see the sun very much. “I’m Joe Anchordoughy,” he said. “This is Larry Scarface.”

  “Anchordoughy,” I said. “What country does that name come from?”

  “I’m Basque,” Joe said. “My friend here’s Paiute.” He grinned at him. “Give a war whoop for the lady, Lar.”

  Larry laughed and took a sip of his beer. “Paiutes are not warlike, Joe, you know that.”

  “You had your moments.”

  “Let’s not get into that”

  I changed the subject. “What do you do for a living around here? Ranch?”

  “No,” said Joe. “We’re both hardrock miners.”

  I about gagged on the glass of red wine the waitress had just slipped in front of me, and I covered my reaction by helping myself from the communal bowls of salad and garlicky soup that stood in the middle of the table. “Where?”

  “The Gloriana, west of here.”

  “That’s an underground mine?” I asked politely, resigning myself to making pleasant conversation for the duration of the meal.

  “Yeah, like I said, hard rock.”

  “I’m not sure I know the distinctions,” I said.

  Joe took a bite of his steak and chewed, mulling my question. “Well, you got your open-pit mines, and then your hard-rock, which is underground. Then of course you got your coal, which is something else again, either underground or open-pit or drag-line.”

  “You worked them all?” I asked.

  “No. A hardrock miner don’t like open-pit. Don’t like coal, neither. The back’s too low. A’course, a coal miner don’t like hardrock. The back’s too high.”

  Larry laughed appreciatively.

  “What’s the back?” I asked.

  “What you’d call the ceiling,” Joe answered. “The rock you’re working at is called the face.”

  “Oh.” I wondered where the terms came from, but didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know if they referred to what the world was like if you were working lying on your belly with about two feet of clearance, as in some coal mines. “So tell me; it’s dark down there, right? How do you stand that?”

  Both men laughed with delight “A’course it is,” Joe answered. “You’re a mile down inside the earth. No lights in there!”

  “Well, then, you wear a headlight, right? But don’t you . . . um . . .”

  “Get claustrophobic?” Joe asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Nah! We like it, don’t we, Lany?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded with enthusiasm and took another crusty roll and smeared butter on it. Both men were eating with hearty appetites.

  “No, really,” I persisted. “You say you’re a mile down there. You’re inside the earth, in a tight space, working with explosives. Doesn’t that worry you?’

  “No. We know the risks. We avoid them.”

  “But don’t you miss the sunlight?”

  Joe thought on this awhile, munching at another mouthful of steak. “No, I like it It’s always the same temperature, the same humidity. I’m all alone, no one’s bothering me . . .”

  “You’re alone?” I said, appalled. “But you come out for lunch, and—”

  “Nope. Stay under all day. Ten-hour shift. Takes too long to come up for lunch. Besides, like I say . . .” ‘

  Larry spoke. ‘It kind of grows on you. It’s like coming home.”

  Joe laughed again, and shoveled more salad onto his plate. “Strange way to serve the Lord . . .”

  I EXCUSED MYSELF before dessert and headed back to my motel to see if Tom had called. There was a message that he had, and that I was supposed to call Faye’s number. She answered on the first ring. “Good. It’s you. Here’s Tom.”

  “Em,” he said. “There’s going to be a postmortem. I want you there.”

  I flopped back on my bed and said, “What?”

  “They’re calling in a medical examiner from Reno. The body is there in Winnemucca. I want you to get a look at it before they carve him up.”

  “Now, really, Tom!”

  “You wanted to get cleared of this, right? I told them you were working with me. You want to make that stick, or do you want to run for it and take your chances? You left the scene today, darling. It’s your choice. And I need that evidence.”

  The ceiling seemed to be spinning a lot faster than one glass of wine should have made it go. “Okay,” I said, my voice faint. “Give me directions.”

  He did so. “You’ll have to hurry; the man’s almost there. After you make your observations, report to both sheriffs—the body was found right on the line between Pershing and Humboldt Counties, you lucky dog—and tell them what tests you want run.”

  ‘Tests?” Panic began to rise in my chest “I don’t know anything about—”

  “Yes, tests. I told them you are a forensic geologist You going to make a liar out of me?”

  I closed my eyes. “No. But Tom—”

  “No buts. I just stuck my neck out for you, and you are going to perform. Make something up if you have to. When you’re done, go back to your motel and stay put Ian—you remember him, the agent from Reno—will be there in about two hours. I’ll be out first thing in the morning.”

  THE BODY STANK. It had begun to putrefy, and I was glad that most of it was draped with a sheet I wadded up my jacket and held it to my face as I lifted that sheet from the feet trying to look like I had the barest clue what I was doing.

  “What chew looking for?” asked Sheriff Obernick, a beefy guy in a Stetson.

  Deputy Weebe leaned toward me, chewing a toothpick like he was at a barbecue. “Forensics guys allus look at the shoes first,” he said knowingly.

  I exhaled quietly. At least I’d started at the right end. I bent and looked closely at the shoes, and just to make it look like I was really on the ball, I pulled my hand lens out of my jacket pocket and got in really close. What I saw made me forget all about the stench.

  “What is it?” asked Deputy Miller, of the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.

  “Sand,” I said. “Very round sand. You got any hydrochloric acid here?”

  “No,” said the medical examiner. “Why?”

  “I think these are oolites,” I said, my mind swimming with wonder. “I wonder how he got—”

  “You see what?” asked Sheriff Obernick.

  “It’s in the welts of his shoes,” I said. “Oolitic sand forms by the shores of lakes. You get it by Great Salt Lake, in Utah.” I straightened up for a moment and thought. “But of course, there were lakes here, just a few thousand years ago. Ten at the most. But—” I bent again, and stared at another portion of the shoe. “Ah. He has been to Great Salt Lake.”

  “How do you know that?” asked the medical examiner skeptically.

  I pointed at what I had been looking at and handed him the lens. “That is a brine shrimp,” I said cheerfully.

  The medical examiner made hmm-hmm noises, appreciating what I had noted. “Yes, well, we have lakes around here, too. Pyramid, Walker. Perhaps he had been over there just before he—”

  I said, “No, brine shrimp require hypersaline conditions in a perennial lake. Those you do not have here. I was just at Great Salt Lake a few days ago, and read a brochure.” I realized that this sounded weak, so I added, “But of course, the thing to do is to take some samples and send them to the lab back at Quantico.” I smiled smugly. I was getting away with it.

  “Hmm, yes,” said the medical examiner. “Of course. What other tests would you like run?”

  I thought fast. “Well, why don’t we just place one whole shoe in a sample container and send it in?” I said. “That way our folks can look at all the clays that might be there, and . . . well, like that.” Then, to take the spotlight off myself, I asked, “What’s your take from your initial examination of the body?”

  The medical examiner spoke. “Dead
several days, at least. Head wound. The sheriffs here tell me that the body was found belted into the driver’s seat of a vehicle up in the Kamma Mountains, down in an abandoned mine shaft, but it’s clear to me that he was dead before he got there.”

  “Lividity?” I asked.

  “Yes. The body had rested on its back as the blood settled, not in the front of his body, as would be the case if he’d died face downward hanging from the seat belts.”

  “Had the rigor mortis been broken, too?” I asked, playing my last card of knowledge of dead bodies.

  “Hard to say. First guess? The rigor formed and passed before he was placed in the seat.”

  Sheriff Obernick said, “There were footprints on top of the tire tracks coming back downhill from the shaft. We’re working on that.”

  “Good,” I said. “Make sure you get photographs before you try to make a cast. That soil would be crumbly. And get a soil sample for Quantico, too. We can type the clays.”

  Obernick nodded. I tried to remember to breathe.

  Outside in the parking lot a few minutes later, I asked Deputy Weebe a question. “Do you remember questioning Kyle Christie the morning after Pat Gilmore was killed?”

  He nodded. “Like it was yesterday.”

  “Do you remember precisely what he said?”

  Weebe half-closed his eyes in concentration. “Sure. I asked him what he knew about Pat Gilmore’s death, and he said, ‘It was an accident, right?’ ”

  “That’s pretty good recall,” I said, encouraging him.

  He pulled a small notebook out of his pocket. “No it ain’t. I allus write things down.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “Well, I asked him where this guy MacCallum was, and he said, ‘Why do you guys want to talk to him?’ Now, that sounded real cagey to me, so I put a little heat to him. Told him I wasn’t no fool as to think that Pat’s murder was no accident.”