An Eye for Gold Read online

  “And what did he say? Exactly,” I asked, leaning over his shoulder to look into the book.

  Weebe read the entry. “He said, ‘Good thing she was in Pershing County when she flipped that pickup, or you wouldn’t be investigating her death, Deputy Weebe, sir.’ ”

  I straightened up and peered at Weebe in the dim light of the street lamps. His toothpick went round and round and round. “You never actually went out there, did you?” I asked. “I mean, you never saw Pat’s truck before it was hauled into the yard, and that was days later, after the fire was put out, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

  “Well, I was just wondering. At the time you spoke to Kyle, did you yet know that the truck had flipped?’

  The toothpick stopped turning as Deputy Weebe’s jaw went slack. Then it rose again as his lips formed a little circle and he said, “No.”

  “Of course, Virgil Davis and John Steinhoff saw it They could have told him.”

  Weebe stuck his thumbs into his gun belt. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “ ‘Cause I remember the sheriff telling them to keep their lips zipped ‘til he’d had a chance to investigate.”

  IAN WAS WATTING at the motel when I returned. He had checked into Santa Paula, a few doors down from my room. He did not look glad to see me. ‘Tell me about the autopsy,” he said abruptly. He remained standing in the middle of the room, even though I had sat down.

  I put my feet up on the midget table that inevitably shows up in motels. “Body probably killed in Utah. Someone went to a lot of trouble to bring him back to Nevada.” I told him about the oolites and brine shrimp in the shoes, and about the footprints leading down from the shaft.

  Ian didn’t seem to like my analysis of the evidence. “Couldn’t he have driven back out here, gotten unlucky, and—”

  “No, the lividity was wrong, too. Blood settles to the lowest parts of a body shortly after death. It leaves a dark bruise. He’d been moved.”

  Ian crossed his arms and said nothing.

  “You getting anywhere with that guy in the BLM office in Reno?” I asked.

  “The mysterious Stephen Giles? A few things,” he said. “I thought you wanted to stay out of this.”

  “Just passing the time.”

  “Well, he threw up and then slammed a tourist’s arm in his car door,” he said derisively, “but that just suggests that he has a weak stomach.”

  I said, “Yeah, weak stomach. Where was he?”

  “Downtown. I’ve been looking into him, though. I put a tail on him. He’s an odd one. Keeps a storage locker at the edge of town. Near as I can tell, there’s nothing in it but a leather suitcase wrapped up in plastic wrap and a cardboard box.”

  “What’s in them?”

  “I don’t have cause for a search warrant.”

  “And you have nothing on Don MacCallum.”

  He looked bored, but the fact that he kept talking let me know that he wanted me to be impressed with him, for all the most resentful reasons. He said, “MacCallum’s still AWOL. No one knows anything, or at least, no one’s saying if they do.”

  “And Laurel?”

  “Laurel Dietz? The one who high-tailed it away from the mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Gone. She went south toward Lovelock, like you said. Obernick saw a red Blazer with a blonde in it as he was coming north along that road, but he didn’t have any reason to stop her. By the time the highway patrol knew to look for her, she was gone. Kyle took great pains to let the sheriff know that she’d been there and just left—he went so far as to say he’d seen her messing about in the hills not far from where Rodriguez’s body was found—and we of course had your report shortly after. Could have made it over the Sierra into California. We’re looking.”

  “They said she was going to corporate HQ.”

  “If so, she didn’t get there on a commercial flight. Yet. They’re watching the Reno airport.”

  At the mention of that location, an idea came to me. “Chittenden has a company jet. What if it was waiting at the general aviation terminal? She could be—”

  Ian whipped a notebook out of his breast pocket and scribbled a note. “I can see why Tom wanted you,” he muttered.

  I sighed in exasperation, sick of the heaviness of his contempt.

  Ian shook his head at me. “It’s a real compliment, you know. Tom’s legendary. Most rookies would give their eye teeth to work with him.”

  I snapped my head forward, astonished. “Legendary? What do you mean? I thought he was some wise guy who got crosswise with some higher-up and got stuck out in the boonies.”

  Ian laughed at my ignorance. ‘Tom Latimer? No, he had his pick of places to be. Don’t you get it? He’s got this incredible success ratio, and years and years in the Bureau. They wanted him in management back at Quantico, but he turned it down. Wanted to stay in the field. Said he could see the world more clearly from the edge of it. They call him ‘the Zen master.’ ”

  I snorted with disbelief. “He’s a smart shit, but—”

  Ian threw aside all artifice of acting cool. “I can’t believe you! You’ve been handed the chance of a lifetime. Tom Latimer asks you in on a case—Tom Latimer—shit, he’s trying to recruit you! And you think he’s some sad sack also-ran put out to pasture, and you give him the air! That’s wild!”

  I stared at the floor, hoping it would open up and let me fall through it

  32

  IAN WOKE ME WITH A KNOCK AT MY DOOR AT FIVE. I’d say it was bright and early, but it was in fact so early that it was not yet bright. “I’m on my way to the airport to pick up Tom,” he said.

  “Airport?” I asked, yawning. I was standing there in an oversized T-shirt that read CHEYENNE FRONTIER DAYS, kind of squinting at him through a four-inch gap between the door and the jamb.

  “Yeah, the one right here in Winnemucca. He wants you to report. I’ll be back in half an hour. I think you’d better shower and dress and get your head together.”

  “Thanks,” I said, not the least bit sure I felt thankful.

  He disappeared. I heard him start up his car and roll out of the lot. Only then did it begin to occur to me that if I was expected to get up and receive Tom, I was not yet off the hook. That did not bode well. I had had quite a bit of trouble getting to sleep after everything I had seen the day before. On a normal day, a crashed, roasted pickup truck would have left me feeling a little blue, but add to that an unknown Native American staring at me from a blind woman’s dooryard like she’s expecting me, Kyle Christie, an old man found dying by the road, a rumbling gold mill, a stinking corpse, and the conversation I’d had with Ian, and I may as well have mainlined caffeine.

  I think I got to sleep at two-thirty or three. As I showered off and dressed, I thought with some irritation that going short on sleep when up past my eye sockets in a murder investigation was beginning to be an all-too-familiar experience. Least of all did I like admitting to myself that I was once again just that: up past my eye sockets in a murder investigation. I vowed to do the bare minimum required to get untangled from this mess and get back on the road.

  But to where?

  I sat on die edge of my tumbled bed, hair still wet, duffel packed. I stared at my hands. I still had no idea what I was doing, except perhaps running away, and that was not acceptable.

  I heard a car pull up outside, then lan’s knock. Hefting my duffel to my shoulder, I stood up, put one foot in front of the other, and headed toward the door.

  TOM CHOSE THE dining room at the Red Lion Inn for our meeting because at that early hour it was virtually empty. There were a few chain-smoking diehards still up from the evening before jamming money into the electronic slots in the lounge outside the cafe door, and there was one early-rising mother scrambling to order pancakes and juice for her children, but aside from that, the place was empty. We sat in a booth under the windows that looked out across the parking lot I faced the glass, wanting to keep an eye on my truck, to remind myself that
I had a means of escape.

  “The highway patrol found Laurel Dietz’s Blazer,” Ian reported. With Tom listening, his voice had returned to more civil tones.

  “Where?” asked Tom, as he perused the menu.

  “Lovelock airport. We checked Right Following to see if anyone filed a flight plan out of there yesterday afternoon or evening, but no luck. Several people did, however, see a jet land there. That would have caught my attention, too. It was in fact such a rare sighting there that no one knew what kind it was. We’re looking for more witnesses and circulating photographs of likely small carriers.”

  “Why not just find out what kind of jet Granville flies?” I asked.

  Ian fell into a brooding silence.

  I said, “It was a clear night, and there’s no law against flying around without a flight plan, but somewhere along the line, it would have eventually linked up with Flight Following, unless Chittenden’s a total cowboy.”

  Tom put down his menu and looked at me. “Why would Chittenden send his jet, and where would he take her?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “He didn’t send his jet he flew it himself.”

  Tom narrowed his eyes. “How do you know that?”

  I narrowed mine right back at him. “Dinner in Salt Lake City. A man named Tom Latimer is putting the munch on a woman named Em Hansen to help him with a case. At the next table are a man named Morgan Shumway and his daughter. The daughter is telling Mr. Shumway that her new boyfriend flies a jet. Flies it himself. You’re still holding out on me. You know something about her you haven’t told me. And you want me to go look at dead men’s shoes. You little—”

  Tom held up a hand. “No. Wait. Until now, I hadn’t made that connection myself.” His face hardened. “That’s why I wanted you trained and in the Bureau, Em. You pick up things others miss. And don’t get paranoid on me. I have to keep things under wraps for the very best reasons, as well as the worst. I ran a security check on you before I made you that offer, but that doesn’t mean you’ve promised to keep your mouth shut. You—”

  I cut him off. “What I overheard was that Chittenden wanted Laurel Dietz double quick with her maps and data. Your guess is as good as mine why he yanked her out of Nevada.”

  “No,” Tom said. “In this case, my guess is not as good as yours. You know what those maps and data were intended to be used for. I do not.”

  I closed my eyes and let out my breath, giving myself a moment to think. I was tired; no, exhausted. And just like Tom had implied, I was shooting my mouth off. “Well, on the face of it, maps are exploration tools. MacCallum had been out taking mineral samples at locations all over the Kamma Mountains.”

  “What controls the locations of the gold?” Tom asked. “Why doesn’t he look in the valleys?”

  “There may be gold in the valleys, but it would be buried under thousands of feet of sediment. It’s hard enough to locate a vein when you’ve got an outcrop to lead you in to it”, “So Laurel Dietz was reconstructing a discovery that MacCallum had made,” Tom said.

  I leaned back and folded my hands. “I thought a lot about that last night,” I said. “And there’s something wrong. Maybe she did. But the thing is, it’s not that easy to find gold, or it would all already have been found. The initial prospecting just defines a drilling target. And even the drilling takes a lot of luck, and—” I thought of what Kyle and the other male geologist he had spoken with in the hallway at the mine offices had said. “It takes an eye for gold. Not everybody has it It’s that unquantifiable knack, that ability to see something that isn’t showing itself yet It’s a special thing about the really good geologists. They take a bunch of data, discontinuous, incomplete data, and fill in the gaps. The fossil record is incomplete. Most of the rocks ever formed have been buried, torn apart, or outright destroyed. Evidence gone. So they make an interpretation.”

  “But that’s not science,” Ian challenged.

  I leaned toward him and put an index finger on the table. “Some people call that shoddy science, because an interpretation is not a fact They call it more of an art, in the sense that historians practice an art, or should I say, a liberal art Well, the thing is, interpreting history is how this science has to be done. We can’t directly observe things that happened millions or billions of years ago, so we look at what’s happening now, see what pattern that leaves on the face of the earth, and interpret the past by matching patterns. We collect all die evidence we can, pull together our interpretations, and build an hypothesis. We test the hypothesis as best we can, and if it stands, it becomes a theory.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. At the core of my being, I really didn’t care what Ian thought about my science, but I wanted Tom to understand. I wanted him to understand that I was not shooting from the hip except as a way to scare up enough data to get my process started. ‘Tom, a good theory predicts things that have not happened yet, or things that are not yet discovered. And if it doesn’t, we amend it and test it again. That’s why I like science. It does not fight the facts, it bows to them, even woos them. And geology is in my view the most romantic science of the bunch. At its best, the practice of geology looks not only into the past but also in so doing helps train its practicioners to make a best possible, best educated interpretation of what we’re going to observe in the future.” I sat back, my words spent

  Ian was looking blank.

  Tom was smiling with his whole face.

  The waitress brought our breakfasts.

  I picked up a stick of bacon and stabbed it into the yolk of one of my basted eggs, dipped, and munched. It’s a disgusting habit, I suppose, but it tastes wonderful. “Well, anyway, the point is that I don’t think that Laurel Dietz can take someone else’s raw data and necessarily figure out what they were thinking, let alone direct an exploratory drilling project from it.”

  “The mystical MacCallum is needed for that” Ian said.

  I shot him daggers with a glance. His comments were beginning to get under my skin, and I felt like telling him that he could do with a little more original thought and passion and a little less boot licking if he wanted to get anywhere with Tom.

  I took a few forkfuls of hashbrown potatoes and washed it down with some orange juice, then raised my glass to the waitress to order more. As long as this breakfast was on the FBI, I was going to eat my fill. “So I don’t know what the gag is with Laurel. I don’t know what was said to Chittenden over the phone. I don’t know what Chittenden wants. He seemed like a loose cannon to me when we met him at the Reno airport.”

  “So you remember him,” Tom said.

  “Yes, of course. All bright eyes and ain’t-I-something, with a sly something underneath. I wouldn’t accept a ride with him if I was stranded in a blizzard.”

  “No?” said Tom. “But you’re right, he does fly his own jet. Used to fly for the British navy. Harrier jump jets.”

  I put a hand over my face. Jumping mice, now jumping jets. It was a bit much. I uncovered my eyes and looked at Tom. “So maybe he flies the way they do business on the Vancouver Exchange,” I said.

  Tom smiled with satisfaction. “Give the lady a cigar.”

  Ian cut in, somewhat pettishly. “What are you talking about?”

  Tom answered, “There is a contrast between the way stocks are traded on the American exchanges and in Canada. We have a Securities and Exchange Commission expressly to impose rules on how business is done, to keep things kosher.”

  “And Granville Resources is traded on the Vancouver Exchange,” Ian continued, looking at me more than at Tom.

  “Yes,” said Tom. “Granville Resources is what’s called a junior company, a small upstart next to some of the big mining corporations. More volatile. Somewhat less easy to—as you say, Em . . . predict.”

  ‘Tom,” I asked, “What are the environmental regulations regarding foreign-traded companies doing mining business in the United States?”

  Tom put down his fork. “Therein lies a rub. We have had a
few problems with all this in recent years. Like the Summitville project in Colorado. Canadian company came in and started a heap-leaching operation, then left, leaving a huge mess for the American taxpayer to clean up. Foreign companies are required to post a bond for clean-up, but this regulation is in conflict with our desire to stimulate commerce, so the bond is often pitifully undersized, as in the Summitville case. We tried to sue for payment in Canadian courts, but there is no reciprocity between the two countries.”

  “Shit.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But Granville seems different,” I said. “Here they have a whole project hung up while they wait for an environmental permit.”

  “Yes,” Tom said, leaning back and taking a sip of his coffee. “That part confuses me. That’s where I need you again.”

  “What?” I slammed down my fork. “Listen, Tom, it’s all fun and games to get me looking at a dead man’s boots so I can get off a leaving the scene of a crime charge, but I’ve had enough now! I’m going to be a good girl. I’m—”

  Tom was staring at me over his coffee cup. He took another long sip.

  I curled my fingers into fists and shook them over my plate. “Tom . . .”

  Tom said, “Ian, will you excuse us for a moment?”

  Ian got up, dropped his napkin onto his seat with more force than was necessary, and headed out of the restaurant.

  Tom leaned back in his seat. He took one more sip of his coffee and set it down, staring at the cup. “Sure. Just chuck it all, give up this career business, and go make some babies with Ray,” he said.

  I raised my shoulders to my ears like he was a bad wind I was trying to deflect.

  He said, “You’re what, thirty-three? You don’t want to wait any longer. Nice baby on your lap, just the thing, then you’ll feel fulfilled.”

  “Shut up!” I began to shake.

  His voice grew quieter. “No, you’re right. I shouldn’t push you into a job or a career or anything else you don’t want A woman your age should be knee-deep in Little League and diapers. Hang over that washing machine. Worry about stains.”