by Dave Stanton
“Melanie!” I shouted again.
Her eyes jumped, and she looked perplexed for a moment, then she crossed her arms over her breasts and ran out of the room. I quickly closed the door. For a minute I stood there, holding the door shut, not fully convinced she wouldn’t be back. I saw the light go off in the hall, and I waited another minute before returning to bed.
“Oh, boy,” I said.
CHAPTER 5
I woke abruptly the next morning, at the tail end of a Kafkaesque dream. The conversations lingering in my mind centered on a problem involving Candi and some undefined threat. I couldn’t remember much detail, but the dream seemed to have gone on for a long time.
It was 7:30, and when I dressed and went into kitchen, I was surprised to see Melanie up and preparing breakfast.
“Good morning,” she said. “Would you like coffee?”
“Yeah, thanks.” I found the pot, poured a cup, and sat at the counter. Melanie was wearing jeans and an apron over a pink shirt. I didn’t see a hint of the makeup she wore a few hours ago. She stood over the stove, scrambling eggs, and said, “I found bacon in the freezer. Would you like some?”
“Sure,” I said. She seemed energetic and chipper, moving about and cooking breakfast.
“Sleep well?” I asked.
“I did. Like a log. Didn’t even wake up once.”
“Oh. That’s good.”
“How about you?” She glanced over her shoulder at me.
“I woke up about three. Heard a noise.”
“Really? It’s usually very quiet here.”
“I’m sure it is.”
Melanie hummed as she tended to the stove. She looked quite content, and I imagined that preparing breakfast for her husband and daughter might have once been a comfortable routine for her.
“I’ll be right back,” I said. I walked back to the guestroom and grabbed my notepad. Melanie apparently had no recollection of her nocturnal excursion into my room. It would be as good a time as any to interview her.
I returned to the counter and drank from my coffee cup. “Melanie, I’d like to ask you some specific questions.”
“Fire away,” she said, over the sizzle of bacon.
“You said the intruders demanded gold. And you said Jeff talked about gold, but you don’t know if he owned any, or if he did, where he got the money to buy it.”
“That’s right. But, just so you know, Jeff bought some silver coins about a year ago. It was only a thousand dollars’ worth. He kept it in a safe deposit box at the bank in town.”
“You’re sure he didn’t keep any hidden here?”
“Not that I ever knew. He kept it at the bank.”
“I thought he didn’t trust banks.”
She turned from the stove and set her eyes on me. “He didn’t. But it was in a safe deposit box, not an account.” She removed strips of bacon from the griddle and prepared two plates.
“I don’t know if Jeff was keeping anything from me,” she said, sitting across from me at the table. “But in the few weeks before he died, he was acting a little strange.”
“How so?” I asked, both pleased and a little puzzled at how open and cooperative she seemed. It was in marked contrast to our conversation about gold during the drive across the desert. But I shouldn’t have been surprised, for I’d already learned to expect the unexpected from her.
“Well, he’d make phone calls, or get phone calls, and go outside to have conversations. That wasn’t typical for him. Plus, he’d driven to Las Vegas a couple times. He has no business in Vegas. He drove to California all the time, but not Vegas. It was out of his way. All his jobs were in California.”
“How’d you know he was in Vegas? Did he tell you?”
“No. But there’s an app on his phone that allowed me to see where he was.”
“Did he know about that?”
“Yes, but he never used it, and I think he forgot about it.”
“Did you check on him often?”
“Every now and then. He spent half his time driving from here to Southern Cal or Northern Cal. So I’d sometimes check to estimate when he’d be home.”
I jotted some notes. “What do you think he was doing in Vegas?”
She finished chewing and sipped from her coffee cup. “I thought he may have been talking to gold or silver brokers. Jeff wanted to convert our savings into precious metals. But we had to keep all our cash in the bank, to run the business.”
“Did he ever withdraw large amounts, maybe buy gold behind your back?”
“Not a chance. I managed the books and knew where the money was.”
“Did you argue with him about it?”
She patted her mouth with a napkin. “Jeff knew I didn’t fully buy into his theories on the economic collapse. I told him we needed to keep our portfolio diversified, and it would be foolish to put all our eggs in one basket.”
“How did he react to that?”
“After a while, we stopped talking about it.”
I tapped my chin with my knuckle. “Why would he talk with gold brokers if he had no money?”
“He sometimes got money from side jobs, but it wasn’t a lot.”
“Would you have cared if he spent that money on gold?”
“Not really. It’s better than wasting it on toys or…”
“What?”
“You know, drugs, hookers, booze. Jeff may have been a little kooky, but he was a good man. He wasn’t into that stuff.”
“There’s a lot of that stuff in Vegas.”
She shook her head. “That wasn’t his thing.”
I ate a forkful of eggs and scribbled a few more notes. “You said Jeff sometimes went outside to make phone calls. Any idea who he was talking to?”
“Elias Pullman, for one. He’s a die-hard survivalist, lives about ten miles up the highway.”
“Anyone else?”
She shook her head. “Jeff was too busy to have many friends.”
“Were you ever suspicious he might have been cheating on you?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Jeff? No, he wasn’t like that. He was a loyal husband.”
“Are you sure?”
“A wife knows.”
“Okay.” I gulped the dregs of my coffee and got up for a refill. “Do you know where Jeff’s cellphone is?”
“Oh,” she said. “No, I don’t. I mean, maybe the intruders took it. Or, maybe the police did.”
“Did he usually leave it in a specific place?”
“On the table near our bed. But it’s not there.”
“How about computers? You and Jeff had PCs, right?”
“Yes, but they were both stolen, my mom said. I’ll need to buy a new one.”
I looked out the small bay window above the kitchen sink. The morning was overcast and gray. “Do you have the login and password for Jeff’s e-mail account?” I asked.
“Maybe. I’d have to guess at it.”
“Okay.” I studied my outline. “Back to the gold. Do you think Jeff kept any in his gun safe?”
“I doubt it,” she replied. “It would take up too much room, and the safe was pretty full with his arsenal, as he called it.”
“Can you find the combination? I’d like to take a look.”
She tilted her head. “It should be in one of a few places. Come on.” She got up and I followed her to the master bedroom. Inside, it smelled faintly of perfume, and I recognized it from Melanie’s visit to my room. The scent prompted a vivid recollection of her nude body, and I quickly pushed the thought aside.
Melanie opened her nightstand drawer and poked around, moving things, then she went to the closet. She stepped into the recess behind the hanging clothes and knelt. I heard the thump of boxes and papers shuffled.
“Need any help?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said a moment later. “I got it.” She emerged with a sheet of paper.
We went to the small office and Melanie reached in the drawer and released the mechanism that all
owed the bookshelf to swing outward. I went behind her down the stairs, into the cool cellar.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve done this,” she said. She punched buttons on the safe’s keypad, and then had to start over. “I hope he didn’t change the combination,” she said, but I heard a loud click. She turned the handle, and the heavy door opened.
The lighting in the room was not great, and the safe was in a shadowy area. Melanie stepped back and said, “Check it out.”
The interior was crowded and Melanie was right, there was no room for gold. I counted eight rifles on one side. Four AR-15 assault weapons, an Uzi submachine gun, a large bore hunting rifle, and two shotguns, one sawed off. The center shelves were stacked with ammo. But my attention immediately went to the left, where a handheld rocket launcher, dismantled into two pieces, rested in the space. The warhead looked like two gray metal funnels attached at the mouths.
I shook my head. It would be a perfect weapon to destroy a car, assuming one knew how to aim it. But it didn’t do Jeff Jordan a bit of good, locked away while murderers entered his home. Neither did his other arms, for that matter. And his arms were plentiful, for on the inside of the safe door were eight holsters, each holding a handgun. One was a Beretta .40 cal, the same piece I owned. The others were an assortment of Glocks and revolvers.
Below the holsters were five zippered compartments. I unzipped the largest and found boxes of various ammunition. I zipped it shut and opened the next two. One was stuffed with manuals, and the other two held more bullets. I closed them and unzipped the smallest compartment at the bottom. It was not as full as the others.
Inside were two items. One was a small address book. I glanced at the pages, and noted what looked like a carefully drawn diagram. I dropped it in my shirt pocket, then picked up the second item, a black pouch. It was made of a silky material and felt like it contained a handful of sharp pebbles. “What’s that?” Melanie said, looking over my shoulder.
I moved into better light. “Hold out your hand,” I said. I pulled on the tie string and shook the contents into her palm.
“Oh, my,” she said, staring at about twenty glittery stones. They were multi-colored, the shapes varied and irregular.
“Were you aware of these?” I asked.
“I had no idea,” Melanie replied. “Jeff never said anything about this.” The stones, despite their rough edges, were dazzling in the light. There were a mix of clears, yellows, blues, and pinks.
“Do you think they’re real diamonds?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But fake diamonds wouldn’t be in raw form like this. I think we should talk to a jeweler. Is there one in town?”
“Yes, a couple.”
I held open the pouch, and she dropped the rocks back inside. “Best leave them in the safe,” I said. “Let’s head outside, I want to take a walk.”
******
It was about ten degrees above freezing outside, but the dry air felt colder. We stood outside the front door, looking over the terrain. The sky was white and there was no wind. I could see the glint off a metal fencepost a few hundred yards away.
“The bulk of your acres are this way?” I said, pointing to the right.
“Yeah. Our home is built near the backside of the property line.”
“Show me around.”
We began down a faint trail. A pair of thousand-gallon propane tanks sat to the side of the rectangular building next to the house.
“For chickens?” I asked, walking to the building.
“Yes, and storage.”
We went inside. The air was foul and spider webs hung from the rafters. A long row of empty chicken coops lined both sides, and I walked past them to where bags of feed, rolls of chicken wire, and shovels, rakes, and other yard tools were leaning against the walls. Nothing struck me as out of place or unusual.
Back outside, we continued down the path. We headed across a field of purple sage, stepping over icy patches. A row of stakes in the ground led out toward the fence.
“This marks our water line,” Melanie said. “The well is out there.” She continued down the trail, and I fell in behind her. As I walked, I took the address book from my pocket and flipped to the page with the diagram. It was hard to decipher, but I thought it might have been a map of the property. But if it was, it was drawn to be less than obvious, or maybe even to obscure its purpose.
We hiked along, nearing the well site, until we reached a large, cultivated plot, perhaps fifty yards square.
“This is where we grew our crops.” She shook her head. “Most of it looks dead now.” We followed the trail at the head of the plot to a small structure near a four-foot wire fence at the property line.
“The well’s beneath us.” Melanie rapped on the wood facing of the structure. “There’s a pump inside.” I opened the unlocked door. A thick, cast iron apparatus was bolted to the concrete floor. There wasn’t much room for anything else.
I closed the door and squinted into the domelike, colorless clouds. “Do you know where Jeff was killed?” I asked.
“No, no I don’t,” she stammered. “I mean, I assumed it was here… somewhere.”
“You spoke with the police, right?”
She nodded. “I talked to them on the phone, right before I left the hospital. Two cops asked me a bunch of questions.”
“Did you get their names?”
“I don’t remember them.”
“Cedar City cops, right?”
“Yes, I think so, why?”
“Sometimes state police get involved in crimes like this. Especially in small towns. Do you remember what they asked you?”
“For descriptions of the intruders, mostly.”
“Huh,” I grunted. “What’s this way?” I stood looking out over flat terrain that rose into a series of knolls.
“Not much. Riding trails mostly. For ATVs, or horses.”
I took the lead this time. When we reached a trail with parallel tracks, Melanie said, “This runs right down the middle of the property. Jeff would sometimes go exploring, out in those hills.” I looked down and saw both tire tread and horseshoe tracks leading down the trail.
“Come on,” I said, heading away from the house.
“There’s nothing out there.”
“You can go back if you want.”
“I think I will. It’s freezing out here.” Melanie turned and began hiking away.
“I’ll see you in twenty minutes or so,” I said.
I went the opposite direction, out toward the far reaches of the acreage. After a minute I stopped and again studied the diagram in the address book. There were two parallel lines drawn, and from them were five offshoots, like branches on a tree. Each branch was marked with a small X on either the right or left side.
I looked back toward the house, and saw Melanie hiking along, hugging herself against the cold. Then I turned and continued down the trail. It took a couple minutes to reach a smaller path to the right. I checked the diagram and followed the path for another minute until I saw broken strands of yellow crime scene tape nailed to a pair of twenty-foot junipers. Between the trees was a small clearing, and near the base of one tree a hole had been dug. It was about two feet deep and a foot in diameter.
Studying the diagram again, I concluded that this was the location of one of the five X marks. It was also evidently where Jeff Jordan was murdered, or at least where his body was found. I peered into the hole, took a picture, then stepped back and took more pictures.
It would have been easy to draw a few conclusions at this point. The intruders forced Jeff to lead them here, where gold, or something, was buried. Once the criminals had what they’d come for, they killed Jeff and either killed or kidnapped his daughter. Whether she was dead or alive, I wasn’t sure, despite Melanie’s intuitions. But if they’d killed her, I couldn’t imagine why the body hadn’t been found.
That left me to consider that they’d most likely kidnapped her. Since no ransom had been
demanded, there must have been some other motivation. The possibilities for a ten-year-old girl were grim.
As for the bag of uncut gemstones, maybe they were junk and of no significance. But if they turned out to be worth more than a thousand bucks or so, it would definitely indicate Jeff was involved in something he had not shared with his wife.
I went back to the main trail and followed it for a hundred yards until a single track veered to the left. I checked the diagram and took the path, which became so faint that I wasn’t sure I was actually on it. But I kept going, pacing toward a single juniper near the property boundary that coincided, more or less, with an X in the diagram.
When I reached the tree, I searched for any sign a hole had been dug. The sage was thick and tightly bunched and I found only a few spots where a square foot of ground was free of brush. Sweeping aside loose dirt with my boot, I saw an area where the ground looked slightly indented. With my heel I scraped an X on the spot.
It was midmorning, and the day showed no sign of warming. If anything, it had gotten colder. I blew into my hands and took off at a fast jog toward the chicken coop. I got there without breaking a sweat, went inside, grabbed a shovel and a pickaxe, then jogged back to where I’d marked the ground. I was sweating now, and by the time I’d dug down a foot I was wiping my brow to keep the salt out of my eyes.
Because of the angle, digging the final twelve inches took twice as much effort as the initial foot. I worked without pause, swinging the pick and shoveling the hole clean. It took ten minutes before the pick crunched into something pliant. I worked with the shovel until I saw the top of a plastic container. Jamming the shovel aside it, I was able pry the container free after a minute.
The pick had cut a crease in the lid, but not deep enough to reveal the contents. The container was about eight inches square and weighed ten pounds or so. I peeled the lid up, then untied the cord binding the canvas sack inside. It was full of coins, gold coins. I removed a couple and held them in the daylight. Although I’d never held a gold coin, I was pretty damn sure these were the real McCoy.