An Eye for Gold Page 6

  I snapped to attention. “Who? The biologist?”

  “Yes.”

  Making a turn past a staggeringly tall and opulent pile of hotel with jazzy lights advertising all-night breakfasts, the local operative said, “We don’t know much yet. They’re saying it’s a one-vehicle roll-over accident”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “The timing’s too cute. And Chittenden obviously—”

  The older agent raised a schoolmaster’s index finger in caution. “Hold on, Em. Some days a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes people make life very inconvenient for everyone around them by having a road accident And it’s natural that what’s-his-name would want to make an everything’s-fine appearance.”

  “Garbage.” I wiggled out of my shoulder restraint so I could lean forward onto the back of his seat. I was annoyed at the way I’d been written off by the president of Whatzis Resources, and more annoyed yet that the FBI agent had once again managed to wiggle out of telling me his real name. That made me reckless, which in this case meant pushy. “So who are we going to see here?”

  “The BLM agent who brought the biologist to our attention.”

  “How long has he known we were coming?”

  “Since yesterday afternoon.”

  “Bingo. He files something on her, you say you’re following up on it, he’s a sieve for information, she’s dead. Chittenden probably had him on the payroll.”

  “No, Em.”

  “ ‘No Em,’ why?”

  “Because it is not in the best interest of our smiling Brit that the biologist be dead.”

  “Why?”

  “You will shortly know all.”

  “Well, okay, so then why’s Chittenden here?”

  The older agent turned his eyes heavenward and sighed. “Em, I’d say that with you along, I’m out of a job, except I’m not here to investigate a murder.”

  “What do you mean? You’re here to investigate a biologist. Now she’s a dead biologist. That makes it a murder investigation.”

  “Murder comes under local jurisdiction.”

  “Are you trying to tell me the FBI never investigates murders? Come on.”

  “Only on federal lands.”

  “Most of this state belongs to Uncle Sam. Maybe five percent tops is private. What’s not BLM is military testing ground or Indian reservation. Just how federal do you need it to be?”

  He sighed. “Yes, a lot of this state is government land of one sort or another, but let me put this another way: I’m here to investigate an alleged fraud against government policy. The death of this biologist—murder or not—is at present just a new sidelight which may or may not have anything to do with this possible fraud.”

  I moved slowly back against my seat again, frustrated. Murder was much more intriguing than fraud. Murder was high stakes, a vicious rending of the ultimate human taboo. Fraud was by comparison impersonal and tepid. “Fine,” I said testily. “You mess with your fraud, and I’ll look into the murder.”

  ‘Torn” turned to look at me over the back of his seat. He was smiling again.

  I HOPED THAT when we got to the Reno office of the Bureau of Land Management, the two FBI agents would introduce themselves by their real names, but they showed their identification to the receptionist rather than speaking their names. “We’re here to see Stephen Giles,” the younger agent said.

  The woman picked up her phone and dialed. A few minutes later, the man they had asked to see appeared at the front desk and led us down a hallway to a small conference room.

  From the first moment, something about Stephen Giles struck me as odd, or at least unusual, but it took me some minutes to analyze exactly what. I suppose I was already looking for even the slightest support for the theory I had formed in the car on the way from the airport, and he was handy; except that after meeting him, I promoted him from information sieve to possible murderer.

  I couldn’t help staring at him. He was just below average height, about five foot eight, and though he held himself as straight as a dancer, he lacked a dancer’s poetry of motion. He was dressed in chinos and a polo shirt, and wore white leather athletic shoes. And this last he appeared to fill honestly. He was not athletic, exactly, but fit. Healthy, or should I say, lacking in physical ailment His legs were nicely shaped, and his slacks fit him exceptionally well, but for some reason the effect did not appeal to the woman in me. That was odd, but what really set my mental buzzers off was something in his expression and overall bearing, an oddity of affect which seemed to hang over him like a mist: he seemed weirdly absent, like a pre-recorded holographic projection rather than the actual man.

  “Hello,” he said dolefully. “I’m Stephen Giles.” As he spoke, he looked anywhere but at any of us, and his face was pinched up with the pensive, slightly pained expression of a man who is here but dearly wishes to be somewhere—or sometime—else; in fact, he seemed to have already faded halfway there.

  The effect was not just visual. As the agents asked questions, his answers consistently lagged a beat or two behind the moments I expected them, as if his voice was being relayed from outer space.

  The man who called himself Tom Latimer asked, “Have you come up with anything new since we last spoke on the phone?”

  Stephen Giles paused. “I hadn’t expected you to follow up so quickly. I hope you haven’t come all this distance for nothing.

  “You just let me worry about that, Mr. Giles,” the agent replied. “This is nice the way you have the file all laid out on the table for us. Very pretty. No, you stay,” he added, as Giles began to fade toward the door. “We’ll need you every inch of the way.”

  Giles hung his head despondently. I wondered at his lack of interest in a case he had brought to their attention.

  “Why don’t you give me a thumbnail on this situation,” I suggested. ‘I’m a geologist. I’m here because this case connects with gold mining somehow.”

  Giles looked directly at me for the first time—at my nose, my clothes, my ears, but not my eyes—sadly mapping me into some provisional anteroom of his universe. He glanced quickly at die two FBI agents, who nodded. He sighed. Then he said, “Well, yes, this involves geology—gold mining—but only peripherally.”

  “Just how peripherally?” the younger agent asked.

  Giles stared into space. He seemed so preoccupied that he had, in a matter of seconds, forgotten we were there.

  “How is the BLM involved?” I prompted.

  Giles took a breath and let it out. “Granville Resources bought up the old claims to the mineral rights on the property in question, but it’s federal land. The BLM manages it They want permits to drill exploratory holes. Look for precious metals.” He laid a hand almost passively on a map that lay in the center of the conference table, then pushed his hand forward until the index finger lined up with the boundary of a smaller area marked “Phase I: Proposed roads and drilling positions are marked in red.”

  I glanced at the index map near the edge of the map. Phase I lay at the south end of a range marked Kamma Mountains, which lay about fifty miles north of the town of Lovelock, and about a hundred miles northeast of Reno.

  “In order to develop their claims, they need to drill test holes, and test holes require access roads and drilling pads,” Giles said.

  I took a step toward him, purposefully crowding him to see what happened, and said, “The claims are on federal land, so the General Mining Law of 1872 governs the mineral rights, correct?”

  “Yes,” he replied, stepping sideways away from me.

  “Any Tom, Dick, or Harry can claim the minerals, but they have to prove out the claim,” I continued, taking another step toward him. “But Granville has bought up old claims, presumably ones that have already had some mining activity.”

  “Yes.” Having fetched up near the wall, Giles began to stiffen, as if contracting into a protective shell. He continued to avoid eye contact. “Yes, But nowadays we require that certain environmental measures be observed. Especially for po
tentially large projects like this one, we require that an environmental impact report be filed. Granville hired a consultant to make certain that the project would pose no threat for endangered species.”

  “And Patricia Gilmore was that consultant.” I took one more step closer.

  “Yes. No.”

  “Which was it?” I said, now extending my neck toward him. I peered into his face.

  “She was part of a team,” he said, a piquant whine slithering into his voice. His defensiveness screamed to me that he had something to hide. I turned up the heat even farther. “I saw a lot of smoke from a range fire as we were flying in today. It was near Lovelock. Is that where Ms. Gilmore was working, perchance?”

  My question got a clear reaction. Stephen Giles stopped breathing for a moment.

  The older FBI agent now stepped toward him and asked his own question, his tone unnaturally soft. “Is there something about that fire that’s bothering you, Stephen?”

  Giles stuttered slightly as he replied. “Th-there have been a lot already this year. Cheat grass.”

  “Cheat grass?” the older agent inquired.

  Giles’ face contorted into a sickly ghost of someone trying to be winning, and his voice carried the slight sing-song of one reciting a prepared script. “Yes. Big problem. It’s a short-lived annual, an exotic that came in with the cattle. It makes a poor forage for the antelope and other native fauna.”

  I said, “Endangered native fauna.”

  Giles did not reply. His head pitched forward and he stared at the section of floor that lay a few inches in front of his shoes.

  “So Patricia Gilmore was part of a team?” I persisted.

  Giles spoke to the floor. “It has the potential of being a very big project.”

  “Open pit?”

  After a moment, Giles said, “Perhaps.”

  I pondered this. Another hole in the ground like the one I’d seen from the air would indeed be a big project. “If that open pit happens to replace the favored nesting ground of some dwindling species of bird or fox or lizard, or worse yet, the only known habitat of same, then there will be no project, eh? Scratch one source of jewelry and cell phone connections.”

  A subtle riffle of anger swept across Giles’ face.

  The older FBI agent said, “Quit beating up on the witness, Em.”

  I didn’t care what Mr. FBI What’s-his-name said, this guy bothered me. And yes, I was beginning to behave badly. “So tell me why you wanted the FBI to talk to Patricia Gilmore,” I insisted.

  At this question, Stephen Giles turned quite pale. He stared forlornly at the maps and memos he had spread out on the table. His eyes went out of focus. Then he flinched slightly, as if awakening with a start, and said quickly, “She had in fact found an endangered species, or one we think might be endangered. But her reports here say it’s not” He sighed again, a long, pitiful exhalation of breath, and his voice slipped back into a whine. “In fact, her numbers say it’s increasing its range.”

  8

  KYLE CHRISTIE BRAKED HIS RENTED FORD EXplorer to a stop and contemplated his next move. This was a novel activity for him, because without Donald Paul MacCallum, he had no next move. Up until now, he had successfully obscured this fact from the management of Granville Resources, and it was important that he kept that deal going. Up until now, he had been able to stay in the game by keeping track of MacCallum. But this morning—of all Goddamned mornings to choose—MacCallum had vanished.

  MacCallum had not been in his room at the Desert View Motel in Lovelock—Kyle had peered through the open curtains onto his empty, unruffled bed, just to double check. No Don, and Rita had confirmed that he hadn’t paid up and left, and neither had he been across the road in the cafe at Sturgeon’s Casino. And, as Gretchen’s early morning call would attest, MacCallum was not in Denver. Inquiry by telephone had also proved that he was not at Granville Resources’ regional offices in Reno. And he was not in the hospital, or the morgue. These last Kyle had deduced from a conversation with the Pershing County Sheriff’s deputy who had interrupted Kyle’s own breakfast at Sturgeon’s.

  “What do you know about Patricia Gilmore’s death?” the deputy had asked, rather nastily, R. WEEBE, his name-plate read. He was a short man with a spreading waist. Even standing up with some rather high-heeled cowboy boots on, the deputy’s eye level had barely matched Kyle’s.

  Kyle had slumped slightly on his cafe stool to see under the brim of the deputy’s hat Weebe’s jaw muscles had tightened. Kyle’s pulse had raced as the sure knowledge that he had already blown this interview hit his brain stem. How he hated short men who hated him for being tall. Little did this one know that, no matter how short or tall, officers of the law, just like officers of corporations, had, even on the best of days, only one effect on Kyle: he wanted immediately to find a dark place to hide until whatever was happening was over.

  “It was an accident, wasn’t it?” Kyle had asked Deputy Weebe in answer, slipping reflexively into the “don’t ask me, I’m a dumb shit” tone of voice at which he was so adept, and which now, reviewing his performance in the relative safety of the vast open desert landscape, he realized angrily must be part of why dregs like Weebe so easily pushed him around.

  Kyle’s mind nattered at him like a chattering monkey, continuing to replay the scene at Sturgeon’s Casino. The deputy had not replied to his question. Instead, after an unnervingly long moment, the deputy had demanded to know, “Where’s this guy MacCallum this morning?”

  Kyle’s stomach had loosened half a notch as he deduced two things: that MacCallum was not sick or dead, because deputies tended to be up on such statistics, and that the deputy was more interested in MacCallum than he. So Kyle had replied with yet another question: “Why do you guys need to talk to Don P. about Pat?”

  The deputy had been chewing on a toothpick. He had moved it around so dexterously that Kyle had recognized the artistry of long habit, and had watched with tense fascination as the deputy’s toothpick du jour worked the rubbery folds at one corner of his mouth. Kyle’s overheated brain had struggled abstractedly to match this grotesque effect to previously-observed patterns that now niggled at the edges of his memory. MacCallum had explained this phenomenon to him: “Us geologists are wired that way, Kyle. It’s how the intuitive mind works. Our brains gather data—in any order, and it doesn’t have to be complete—and we’re constantly trying to form a coherent pattern from the random information we’re seeing. Little glimpses of things. And bang, as soon as it looks like anything we’ve ever seen or heard about before, we have a pattern. Or wham, if the picture is entirely new, then that’s our pattern. Brain files it away for reference. Compare, contrast. Themes and variations. This is like that, only a little bit different, but still it fits such-and-such category. It’s qualitative, Kyle. Screw the numbers. If you want to do gold exploration, you’ve got to be loose.”

  Confronted with the way that toothpick creased the sheriff’s cheek, Kyle had taken a quick breath and let it out, as MacCallum had taught him, trying to kick his conscious mind out of the loop so that the intuitive levels MacCallum swore lay beneath it could rise and advise him. For once, MacCallum’s exercise had worked, as Kyle realized with a jolt that the deputy’s skin was deforming exactly the way Kyle’s deflated bicycle tire had when he had tried to pop it over the wheel rim with a screwdriver. That was just before the screwdriver had slipped and gouged a ragged hole though the palm of his hand.

  That image was so discomforting that it had taken Kyle several seconds to return mentally to the cafe and the rubber-faced deputy, only to discover that the intimidating little shit-head was belligerently asking, “I said, why do you want to know?”

  To which Kyle had replied, “Huh?” letting his own mouth sag open.

  The deputy had responded with a dose of the old yo’-in-a-peck-o’-trouble-boy stare. “You interest me,” he had said. “Pat Gilmore’s dead. Sheriff Obernick tol’ me he figgers it for an accident, bad luck, que lástima Pa
t Gilmore. But I ain’t so quick to dismiss such a tragic end to a life so young and full of purpose. And now here you sit lookin’ kinda uneasy about the whole situation. That bears watching.”

  Kyle had tried looking less stupid and more innocent, but had managed only to look like his breakfast was giving him gas. Hell, he thought, I was born guilty, the way these ass-holes treat me, but he said, “Well, we can all be thankful that she was on your side of die county line when she flipped that pickup, or her death would have been dismissed before lunch time. I admire that in a law enforcement individual, Deputy Weebe, sir.” He pronounced the name “weeb,” one syllable.

  Weebe’s toothpick had stopped in mid-gyration with a crunch. With heavy contempt and a spicing of menace, he had said, “That’s Wee-be,” and had added, “son,” even though the deputy was at least fifteen years younger than Kyle. “Get it right.”

  “Thank you, Deputy,” Kyle had answered. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “You do that,” the deputy had said, then strolled off to a table, where he’d sat down and ordered three eggs scrambled, toast, and a rasher of bacon.

  Kyle had made a show of taking his own sweet time eating the rest of his hash browns, toast, and eggs, even though they now went down like plaster of Paris, and he had even ordered a lingering third cup of coffee to make certain that this Weebe creep got bored and left before he did. Because Kyle could not stand to tuck his tail quite so far between his legs as to slink off like a flea-bitten dog. And because he had not wanted to be followed as he drove out here to look for MacCallum.

  Now, as Kyle set the parking brake, stepped down onto the dirt road, and relieved himself of the daughter products of that coffee onto an anthill, he meditated bitterly upon his meeting with the deputy and tried to decide which of the narrow, twin-rut dirt tracks that left from here to try first. Kyle found himself hurrying as he rebuttoned his fly, his fingers as stiff as if the Deputy were standing there watching him. He’d definitely fucked up somehow, he decided; the memory of the interview was sticking to him like a booger he could not dislodge from his finger. Furious, Kyle fantasized that he could fling the sticky little deputy into the anthill and watch the hungry little insects rip him to shreds.