An Eye for Gold Read online

  Tom was smiling, “You have a devious mind, Em Hansen. Who’s our man on the ground?”

  It was all beginning to come together. But my heart sank. “Someone who’s been over that country looking for gold would know each and every shaft big enough to sink an automobile into.” I gritted my teeth. “And here he comes at night, bringing Morgan Shumway over the back road through the Black Rock Desert into Reno, and there’s an old squatter named Sam standing by the road trying to flag him down.”

  Tom said, “Wait what are you talking about?”

  “Sam’s an old squatter who lived out there. He was changing a flat on the road the other night. He tried to flag down a passing car, but they wouldn’t stop. Next thing he knew, he was waking up seeing stars.”

  “Where did you say this Sam lives?”

  I shook my head. “I said lived. He had badly progressed cancer, and that blow to the head eventually finished him. I helped take him home yesterday. He died last night.”

  Tom ran his hands through his salt-and-pepper hair. “Do you remember anything else that Sam told you?”

  I let my mind idle, so his words could float up. “Something about a white hat. Hey, that could be Shumway’s Stetson! Remember the one he set down on the table in that restaurant? Looked like a real cherished item. It had a grosgrain ribbon around the brim. They don’t make them like that anymore, do they? It was cream-colored, but in the dark . . .’ He’d send his clothes to the laundry, but he’d never wash that hat.”

  Tom showed his teeth. “I’ve got you now, you so-and-so,” he muttered. “Just as soon as I get back to Salt Lake I’ll get a warrant,”

  “I guess it just goes to show you,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The bad guys don’t always wear black hats.”

  Tom nodded. “And what color hat is MacCallum wearing today? Sounds like you suspect him of murder.”

  I shook my head. “He’d have to be pretty cold to kill an old man like Sam. Besides, he’s missing.”

  Tom said, “But what if Chittenden’s known where he is all along, and has him help Shumway out with a little biologist disposal? But then Sam sees him, so he parks the car down the road and runs back and sneaks up behind him and gives him a tap on the head.”

  We sat quietly together for a moment staring at the floor. Then I said, “The only flaw in all this is, how would Chittenden know that Shumway was approachable in the first place? The two of them wouldn’t exactly travel in the same circles, and he wouldn’t risk approaching just any environmental lawyer.” But even as I spoke, I remembered Shumway’s companion at the restaurant, the young blonde who had flogged her daddy with stories of her wine-bibbing boyfriend, the guy who flew his own jet “Oh, yeah. The daughter.”

  “Yes,” said Tom. “The daughter. She seemed to address daddy with a certain disregard. That had to come from somewhere.”

  I said, “That was quite a big diamond she was wearing. Is our boy Chittenden engaged?”

  Lefty chimed in. “Nah, ol’ Roderick’s the type who’d keep himself quite a string of girlfriends. Give ‘em shiny baubles and they go down like ten pins. And if you’re talking about a rock the size of your thumbnail set in a wad of gold, it’s a zircon. He showed it to me last time he stopped in, said he’d won it in a crap game over in Reno. Kind of fits, doesn’t it? Lots of show, but he keeps all the real goodies to himself. Nevada is one big playground for boys like Roddy. Some places are called the land of opportunity. Nevada is the land of opportunists.”

  Nobody laughed. I shook my head in disgust, thinking of all the soon-to-be-worthless stock Gretchen MacCallum held. When the limited partnership went down, the rest of Granville would probably go with it. And unless we could pin something on Chittenden, he would be sipping rum punches in the Caribbean and laughing over the whole episode like it had been just another jolly good sortie he’d flown in his jump jet.

  Tom said, “We still don’t know where MacCallum is.”

  I said, “No, and we still don’t know who killed Pat. It’s possible we can tie her to Shumway. How about this: He’s suing to list the creature even though she says it isn’t a subspecies or endangered. She doesn’t like the way Shumway stinks, and threatens to expose him. He says he’s going to call her back but doesn’t, so she takes off. And bam, she’s dead. While she was waiting for that phone call, he’s moved into position out on that road.”

  “That won’t stick,” Tom said. “Because When Pat dies, Shumway’s sitting at the next table from us in Salt Lake City.”

  He was right. “Okay, how about Chittenden? We saw him in Reno the next morning, so he was there.”

  “He was not there,” Tom said. “I checked. He had just flown in from cooperate headquarters, where the evening before he was front and center at a big dinner for board members.”

  “But he could have taken calls there. And made calls. He maybe had someone there at the mine, and told him to go out there and wait for Pat where there weren’t any witnesses and put a scare into her. She was not easy to scare. Things might have gotten out of hand.”

  “But who would that be?” Tom asked.

  “Exactly,” I said. “Who? Because whoever it is, he’s still out there, hiding in plain sight.”

  LEFTY FOLLOWED US out to Faye’s plane as we loaded up. Tom turned to her and shook her hand. “Thank you, Ms. Lamore,” he said.

  “Oh, think nothing of it,” she said. “I may be a whore, but that doesn’t mean I like people screwing with commerce.”

  Tom gave her an appreciative grin.

  “Come back any time,” she said.

  “Thanks.” He turned and climbed into the airplane.

  Faye gave Lefty a long, heavy-lidded look that said, Give up, he’s mine.

  Lefty replied with a throaty laugh.

  On our way back to Lovelock, I watched the miles of desert sweep away beneath us. We passed back over the Eugene Mountains, where a mine and a mill and all its workers waited in ignorance as their employer sucked the life fluids out of their operation. They would be shut down soon, and all would scatter in frantic search of increasingly scarce jobs. Many would never work in their chosen professions again.

  We passed next over the great, black burn that had jumped up around Pat Gilmore’s crash, and I found myself wondering how she would have felt to know that in screwing up and crashing her truck, she had obliterated many of the animals she had gone to school and trained so hard to defend. Then my brain bumped over a mental speed bump, and I remembered that I had, only half an hour before, once again included her in the tally of persons killed to keep Chittenden’s scam going. Which had it been, murder or accident? As we skimmed lower and lower on our approach back into Lovelock, I turned around and looked at Tom. “I need to talk,” I said.

  He nodded. “Wait till we land.”

  On the ground, Ian busied himself with his cell phone while Tom led me aside into the shade of the nearest building. “Speak,” he said.

  “Pat Gilmore,” I said. “First, I decided that she had been murdered by Stephen Giles or someone else in order to keep her mouse data under wraps. I based that deduction in part on the timing. That was a beautiful example of drawing the wrong conclusion from the wrong evidence, and Deputy Weebe pulled the same stunt with different evidence. He thought someone had shot out her tire, because there was no spare with the truck when it was hauled into Lovelock.

  “Next, I drew the wrong conclusion from the right evidence. I found the spare, and decided that she hadn’t been murdered, that she had just had an unfortunate accident. But now, I’m looking at this again. If someone did rig that crash, her spare tire might still fly out into the sagebrush.”

  Tom cut me off. “You think someone killed her. Who?”

  “I don’t know. Because now that I know more, I think it was pretty stupid to kill her. Why not just fire her and let Rodriguez and Shumway run their scam?” Besides, I heard Virgil Davis say that he and John Steinhoff found her body, so either they were b
oth in on it, which I doubt—”

  “Why?”

  “Because Virgil has a soft spot for women. He let me in yesterday, and he let Laurel Dietz go. I had just two quick moments to take her measure, but she’s . . .”

  “What?”

  I chose my words carefully, and adjusted my tone so it would not sound like sour grapes. “Well, she’s one of those women whom men think are cute little cupcakes, all sweet and fluffy and wouldn’t say shit for a bucketful, but I had a different take. I think she’s a taker. I think she’s tough as nails.”

  Tom said, “And you don’t think Virgil and John could be tough?”

  “My take is that their story is true, that they came on the scene very soon after the crash. For one thing, Virgil said the sage adjacent to the truck was already burning, so they hauled Pat’s body out and ran for it. You see, it doesn’t work that the brush should be burning before the truck, and I don’t think that two men who are capable enough to set up that whole mining facility would be so lame that they couldn’t make up a better story than that.”

  “You’d think.”

  “So then, someone rigged the accident and lit the sage to cover it. Can you get a forensics team on that truck?”

  He smiled patiently. “They’ve been on it since last night I got a crew out of Reno, a little leg-up to the local authorities.”

  ‘Tom!”

  “I was going to tell you. There’s been so much going on—”

  “Tom!”

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “Hold on. Let me tell you. So far, they have found that the percussion marks on the inside of the truck do not match the photographs which fortunately the medical examiner took of Pat Gilmore’s wounds. The killing blow was at the top of her forehead.”

  “What shape was that wound?” I asked.

  “Small. Squarish. They couldn’t find anything inside the truck quite that size and shape. And—and you’ll like this—they have found a charred bit of sage wood jammed inside the accelerator of her truck.”

  I blinked, playing the movie in my head. “So someone killed her, stuck her in the truck, jammed the accelerator open, and popped it in gear, aimed at that curve. He—or she—could do that easily. The truck was an automatic, so all he’d have to do is set the brake, jam open the accelerator, then reach in and release the brake. But the truck flipped, so he couldn’t get his twig back out of the accelerator.”

  “There are marks on the hood consistent with failed attempts to jack the vehicle back over onto its wheels.”

  “And he saw someone coming—Virgil and John, it was dusk, so they had their headlights on, and he would have seen them miles off—so he lit a fire and ran for it.”

  “That would be my theory,” Tom replied. “And I would think that, this time, you were drawing the right conclusion from the right evidence.”

  Was I correct? I reminded myself how recently I had made all the wrong presumptions regarding that death, and had then done it again. I didn’t really know these people, didn’t know what made them tick. For all I knew, Virgil and John had rigged the whole thing and played their game of poker with perfectly straight faces. Surely they had more to lose than most anyone else out at the mine if the project shut in. They had built a whole kingdom out there.

  Tom shook his head in sympathy. “It may be a crime you cannot solve, Em. You’ve got to be willing to let those ones go, and pass them on to someone who can at least apply heat. in the right places. And sometimes, folks do get away with murder.”

  I jammed my hands in my pockets, thinking bitterly of all that charred desert, and of Pat Gilmore dying so wrongly out there on her way to do what she thought was right. “Okay,” I said, but it wasn’t. “Where do we go from here?”

  “I’ve sent someone out to grab those soil samples from the Kammas,” Tom answered.

  “So you think Shumway killed Rodriguez,” I said.

  “It’s my first guess,” he replied. “And this time it is the province of the FBI. Federal lands, crossing state boundaries, defrauding the government.” He stretched. “Well, that’ll be it, then. Thank you, Em.”

  The case was beginning to unravel right through my fingers. I should have been glad to let it go, and to be rid of Tom and the risk such jobs bring, but I wasn’t. I said, “But all this still doesn’t tell us where MacCallum is. If he’s alive.” Even in the desert’s heat, I fought off a chill as the image of those thirty-foot-tall vats of cyanide came suddenly to mind.

  Tom folded his arms across his chest, watching me.

  I stared back. “Well,” I said, “I suppose I’m holding you up. You got to get going. Go catch yourself a crook.”

  He smiled. “I’ve ordered up a search warrant for the Gloriana Mine complex. It’s just into Humboldt County, so we have to go back to Winnemucca to pick it up.”

  “Well, have fun.”

  “It’s been nice working with you,” he said.

  I looked away. Neither of us moved.

  Tom’s smile spread slowly into a grin. “Admit it, Em, this is the work you like to do.”

  I looked up into his eyes in total misery. “I can’t decide, Tom.”

  Tom reached out and touched the top of my head in much the same way my father once did. “Want to just come along for the fun at the mine?” he asked. “You’d be useful up there. You know your way around the facilities. I could use your help. And no bullshit. Everything straight up and out in the open.”

  The sudden kindness in his touch tingled down through me, and I thought of Ray. I could not decide between the two paths. I wanted to cry. “Sure,” I answered. “Why not? I can do that and still head out to the Black Rock afterwards, right? The day is still young.”

  “Climb in,” said Tom.

  I squinted at him. “Huh? No, I’ll meet you there. I’ve got my truck here, remember?” I forced a smile, and said, “You think I’m going to let you hijack me again?”

  “Fair enough,” he said, giving me a pat on the cheek. As he headed back toward the airplane, he turned and called, “But give me a good lead. Phone me. That warrant may not be ready when I get to Winnemucca, and I still have to get my ass up that mountain.”

  I GOT MYSELF some lunch in Lovelock, then dawdled a while at a little pioneer’s museum by the highway. After the first hour, I called Tom’s cell phone number every fifteen minutes to see if he had gotten the warrant and started out but I got no answer. I wished I had Ian’s number, as he seemed more inclined to answer it. I reached Faye, who was again waiting at the Winnemucca airport, but she had not heard from Tom, either. She said, ‘Tom’s phone is on a different service provider from mine. That could mean he isn’t receiving your calls, or perhaps his battery’s just weak.”

  I finally got restless and headed out, figuring it was better to be a little ahead of him than way behind. I didn’t want to miss the party.

  As it was, I arrived and found no other cars in the visitor’s parking lot in front of the mine offices. It was hot as blazes, so I wasn’t about to wait inside my truck. Instead, I got out and sat in its shade.

  After about ten minutes, one of the security guards came out to see what I was doing there. “You lost?” he inquired, making a joke of things.

  I looked up and smiled. I recognized him from the day before. “No, just waiting for a friend,” I said.

  “You can wait inside if you want,” he replied. “I remember you. You’re the one who went through the metal detector yesterday like your pants was on fire.”

  “Yeah, that was me,” I said, smiling sheepishly.

  “Come on in,” he said. “We’ve got cold water in a cooler in there.”

  “That’s mighty kind of you,” I answered, and got to my feet

  Inside, he had me sign the necessary forms again and showed me back through the metal detector and into a small waiting area just beyond it. “I’ll tell Virgil you’re here,” he ‘* said, in a fatherly tone.

  “Oh, that won’t be necessary,” I said hurriedly. “I’m just w
aiting for, ah—”

  “Company policy,” he said, and dialed a phone.

  A moment later, Virgil appeared from around the corner in the hallway. “Em Hansen, right? Won’t you come with me, please?” His expression was stern, rather like a school master who was taking a child into his office for a chat. I followed him, and sat in the side chair he indicated. He sat on a stool at a drafting table instead of at his desk. “So,” he said, “You’re with the FBI.”

  I smiled apologetically. It didn’t seem the moment to try explaining the peculiarities of my non-relationship with the FBI.

  “I suppose you aren’t going to tell me anything of what you were doing here yesterday, or why you’re back again today.”

  I thought of telling him the truth, that I had arrived the day before as an honest-to-gosh tourist but figured he wouldn’t believe me. Instead, I just shook my head.

  Virgil folded his arms across his chest “They told me you’re a geologist, too,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “If you were an exploration geologist and you wanted to disappear for a while, where would you go?” His tone was sad, and full of longing.

  I knew immediately, of course, that he was speaking of Donald MacCallum. “So he’s still not shown up?”

  “Correct.”

  “Has anyone checked with his wife lately?”

  “No. I hate to call her again. I think she’s begun to worry.”

  I pondered this. “Let me try,” I said. “Can I use your phone?” I glanced at the clock on Virgil’s drafting table. It was almost mid-afternoon. She would be awake now, and greeting her children home from school.