by Carly Bishop
“The problem here,” Kiel said, taking on the doubting Thomas line, “is that Trudi Candelaria still claims she didn’t kill Spyder.”
“Yeah. I’ll bet. Poor little rich girl, pure as the winddriven snow.” Crandall rolled his eyes. “Another cryin’ shame, that dame being set free.” He wiped his hands on his shirt and reached into a small cooler for a can of tomato juice. “Want one?”
Robyn declined. Crandall downed his in one guzzle.
“Detective Crandall, I need to get to the bottom of all of this for my own peace of mind. If that mine shaft collapsed because someone wanted to be rid of Keller, I intend to find out and bring whoever caused his death to justice. I know you must have spent a great deal of time—“
“You have any idea the hornet’s nest you’re messing with?” he interrupted.
“I believe I do.”
“Well, missy, you may have been the prosecutor’s wife, but it’s highly unlikely you do. If someone made sure Keller bit the dust—and my chief candidate would be Willetts, you understand—then you’re next if you come sniffing around.”
“That’s why I’m with her,” Kiel said.
Crandall eyed Kiel, apparently judging him man enough to protect her. “All fine and good,” he said, “and all due respect, ma’am. Bein’ the widow, I understand why you’d want to get the bastards. But I seriously doubt you have the stomach or the inclination to get past square one.”
“You’re wrong, Detective Crandall. I do.” Robyn produced a résumé, a list of her credentials and writing credits, from her shoulder bag. Crandall crunched up the small empty can, tossed it to the ground beside his tackle box and took her sheaf of papers.
In the course of her research, people who had not read her work or heard of her often assumed she was a cop groupie or Hollywood-type looking for a quick and dirty TV movie-of-the-week idea.
Because he’d worked closely with Keller on the case against Trudi Candelaria, Crandall wouldn’t have made those assumptions. But she wanted him to respect her for more than the fact she was Keller’s widow. She let her extensive experience in follow-up criminal investigations speak for itself. Crandall should know up front that her own credentials demanded a high level of consideration for their own sake.
Crandall’s brows rose as he flipped through her impressive but easily read papers. He flicked them shut at the end and looked at her. “An authoress, huh?”
“Just ‘author,’” she corrected him, smiling through her irritation. “Detective Crandall, can you tell me where your investigation into the unidentified tire tracks was going?”
Crandall narrowed his eyes. “You’ve already talked to Willetts.”
Kiel knelt and skipped a flat stone across the surface of the mountain stream. Shading his eyes, he looked up at Crandall. “We’re talking to everyone involved, Detective. Yes, we have spoken to both Trudi Candelaria and Stuart Willetts. We need a full record, and we need answers to the questions he raises.”
Crandall’s brows drew together. “Even knowing he’s more than likely the one who killed Trueblood, and damned near got his wife as well?”
“Especially knowing that, Detective,” Robyn answered firmly. “According to Stuart Willetts, Keller was interested in the tire tracks. Willetts said they were never accounted for.”
“That’s right, and there’s a reason. Willetts would like to pretend otherwise, but those tracks were leading us nowhere. And the only thing your husband was interested in was bringing in a guilty verdict on Trudi Candelaria.”
Robyn swallowed. Crandall’s characterization of Keller didn’t sit well with her. She knew prosecutors who wouldn’t get off their pet theories short of being blasted off with a stick of dynamite, but Keller? He would never in a hundred years have discounted real evidence.
“Why don’t you tell us what you found out about the tread, anyway?” Kiel suggested, his tone of voice as lethal as an Avenging Angel’s might well get.
Eyeing Kiel warily, Crandall pulled a pack of Marlboro’s from his breast pocket and lit one, dragging heavily. “The tread pattern was as common as ditch water. Not new, not old.”
He recalled the brand, the size, and that there were at least seven dealers in a hundred-mile radius who could have sold the tire. A list of buyers was unrevealing. No one even remotely connected with Spyder Nielsen drove a car that had those tires mounted on it at the time he’d conducted the investigation.
“So, one of two things happened,” Robyn suggested. “Whoever had those tires replaced them right after the murder, or else there were people coming and going from the Nielsen residence that you knew nothing about.”
“Sure,” he acknowledged easily. “Or else,” he went on in a sarcastic tone, “that tread print was meaningless—maybe from some coke-brain ski bum with too much money taking a spin around the neighborhood.”
Crandall dragged on his cigarette one last time, flicked it into the stream, then reached for a beer. Kiel shot Robyn a glance. “Detective,” he asked, “did you run a check to see who among Spyder’s friends and enemies might have bought new tires after the murder?”
“Yes, sir, I did,” Crandall snapped, twisting the cap off his beer. “But it was a freaking waste of time and energy, and everyone but Willetts knew it. We had our murderer dead to rights.” He swigged the beer and exhaled sharply.
Robyn let him stew, waiting for her to say something.
“Look,” he said at last, “I don’t know what you’re after here. Trudi Candelaria whacked Spyder. Period. Your husband was going to send her up for a very long time. Did she do Keller, too? Or cause him to be whacked? You want my opinion, it’s possible. But for my money, Willetts stood to lose the most.”
Detective Crandall’s answers corroborated what Robyn had thought she wanted, but she found herself disliking Crandall. She wanted to ask why, if Keller’s murder was such a clear possibility, if Willetts did in fact have so much to lose, or Trudi herself, why Crandall hadn’t thought of it himself before now.
But as a matter of course the coroner had called Keller’s death accidental, and she needed the cooperation of the police on the case too much to risk alienating this man with that kind of question.
She knew highly successful true-crime writers, peers and friends of hers who antagonized cops left and right as a matter of style. There were just too many roadblocks cops could throw up if they were crossed. She’d resorted to the tactic with cops she suspected were dirty, but it had never been her first choice of a way to deal with cops who were out there risking their own necks day in and day out to protect the community and keep the peace.
Crandall polished off his bottle of beer. “Anything else I can help you with?”
“The capacity,” Kiel suggested.
She nodded. “Trudi would have had to have bought the expertise, someone who knew how to make a mine shaft collapse like it did. Stuart Willetts wouldn’t have that kind of specialized knowledge, either. Any ideas?”
Picking up his fly rod, Crandall shook his head. “None. Explosives are out of my league. But you know what they say…follow the paper trail. Money talks.”
“THE TROUBLE WITH following the money,” Robyn mused, pulling back onto the two-lane road leading back to the resort town, “is that everyone in Aspen has plenty.”
“Could you get to Trudi’s bank records, anyway?”
She shook her head. “That would require a subpoena, and that would take convincing the D.A. in Aspen to look into the possibility that someone hired expert help to blow up the Hallelujah. How likely is that, based on no more than my suspicions?”
Kiel shrugged. “Not likely at all. Not unless you hire your own experts and they come up with evidence of explosives.”
“Kiel, that’s a great idea! Why didn’t we think of that in the first place?”
He grinned. “Too obvious, maybe. But the trick is finding someone you trust to do the job.”
“Actually, I do know someone. Lucinda Montbank. Keller and I leased a co
ndo up here a month or so before the trial start date. I was fooling around, looking for some useful way to spend my time. About that time I was offered a chance to do a piece for the Smithsonian on historical murders and mayhem in mining towns.”
“So Keller was here prosecuting a high-profile celebrity murder, and you were rooting around looking for some juicy historical scandal?”
“Not exactly,” she protested drolly, snapping down her sun visor. “I’m a serious writer, Kiel, as opposed to a scandal-mongering one.”
“Oops.”
Good Lord, but his smile left her half witless. “Don’t ‘oops’ me,” she scolded. “This piece was pitched to me by one of the most venerable institutions in the country.”
“But you were having fun.”
“Okay. Sure. True-crime writing isn’t your usual barrel of monkeys. The whole idea sounded like fun.” She paused. Reality pitched in its two cents. Keller was dead because the idea sounded fun to her. “It didn’t turn out that way…of course.”
Kiel noticed, maybe more than Robyn did, that for the first time the memory of Keller’s death hadn’t slammed her on the spot for an emotional loss. “How did Lucinda Montbank fit into the picture?”
“She’s an old flame of Mike Massie’s. Mike and Keller were best friends. Old college roommates. When I mentioned my writing commission, he gave me Lucy’s name. She’s a mining engineer. Very wealthy. Her great-great-grandfather was one of the movers and shakers when the big legal battles over mining rights were going on in the 1880s. He was half owner of the Hallelujah.”
“So that’s why you and Keller were in the Hallelujah that day?”
“Yes. Lucinda still owns the rights.”
“Where were you in the story, embroiled in the legal battles?”
“Yes. Not only that. There was a lot of skullduggery, claims jumped, frauds. Some of these guys would sell off a claim and be glad to get out with five hundred bucks and then want it back when a strike was made. But the big boys fought big battles. More than ten million dollars finally came out of the silver mines.”
Kiel grinned. “Not exactly spitting contests, were they.”
“Not hardly.”
“So what was the big battle about?”
“It came down to this. When a strike was uncovered on the surface, what they called the apex, Colorado law held that the owners could follow a continuous vein as far as they could into the mountain.”
“No matter if the vein led into the underground space of a dozen other surface claims?”
“Exactly. It was a classic battle of what’s good for the few versus the good of the many. A couple of men would have outrageous fortunes at the expense of dozens of others with perfectly legitimate surface claims. The ‘apexers’ would have an unfair monopoly. The newspaper editor called the whole thing a racket, and local juries turned the statute on its head all the time. These surface claim guys would secretly build barricades. To retaliate, the apexers would force steam and sulfur fumes down the shaft to drive them out.”
Kiel shook his head at the lengths humankind would go to for treasures that finally bankrupted their souls. “How did it all shake out?”
“When it came to one of the biggest claims of all, a Denver jury upheld the apex claim. Not long after, the guy who won the suit, a man named Jerome Clarke, was killed in an avalanche—or at least that’s how the books have it.”
“End of clash, then?”
“Yes. Lucy’s great-grandfather, old Lucien Montbank, crafted the compromise. A new company was formed with everyone’s holdings, then interest in the new company was doled out to both the apexers and the sideliners. Montbank made out like a bandit—but without the compromise, the mining operations were all shut down and idle, anyway. Lucy was a huge help in my research for the article.”
“Lucien. Lucinda.” Keller cocked a brow. “Any Lucifers in the family tree.”
“Probably,” Robyn said, laughing. “Lucy has gotten away like a bandit for a lot of years, too—she’d be the first to tell you about it. But she knocked herself out getting me access to records that are in temperature-andhumidity-controlled library collections. She also has an incredible collection of period pieces—weapons, telegraph stuff, flyers, wanted posters.”
“And the Hallelujah.”
“Yes. She gave me permission to explore the Hallelujah. She actually offered to go with me, but—” Robyn gripped the steering wheel and sighed. “We, that is, Keller and I…God help me. We were so much in love.” She scraped a tear from the corner of her eye. “He’d done a lot of rock climbing and cave exploring—spelunking. I wanted him to go with me. Whenever we had a chance, we…took off and did things alone, so…I refused her offer.”
Blindsided by her too-quick, unexpected flash of grief and the catch in her voice, Kiel felt himself sucked back into Keller Trueblood’s memories, the fearsome dark hole lying in wait behind the boarded-up entrance to the old Hallelujah mine….
KELLER AND ROBYN had packed a lunch of sandwiches and Granny Smith apples, blue corn tortilla chips and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.
Robyn wore a scoop-necked peach-colored tank top over her bare breasts, cutoffs and a bright red bandanna around her neck. Already aroused just from being around her on a braless day, which they had intended to squander, an already sunburned Keller wore jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt he had to go out and buy for the occasion.
Robyn had loaded her camera and bought four more rolls of film while Keller walked down the street to borrow a hammer and crowbar from a construction crew working two blocks from the condo they’d leased in Aspen. He left the crew with a couple of hundred dollar bills for a deposit. Piling into a Jeep, with only a roll bar and no roof, singing at the top of their lungs with a Jimmy Buffet oldie on the radio, they headed for the Hallelujah.
Chapter Seven
Keller and Robyn hiked in, guided by one of Lucy’s detailed maps, spread out the picnic blanket at the entrance, ate their lunch and drank a little wine. Keller would have made love to her then and there and skipped the damned Hallelujah altogether, but Robyn put him off. One of them was always making the other wait. FPT, they called it.
Fever-pitch training.
There was no shaft house at this entrance. Robyn took up the crowbar and started trying to loosen the nailed-up boards. Even at ten thousand feet the early afternoon sun bore down relentlessly. The going was tougher than either of them expected even though Lucy had warned her this secondary entrance, while safest, would be tough getting into.
Keller stripped to the waist. Robyn’s skin shone with perspiration. A stain of sweat soaked her tank top between her breasts.
At last they broke through. Keller grabbed her by the sweat-dampened bandanna around her neck, pulled her close enough to kiss her long and hard to celebrate … and then didn’t.
Her turn at FPT.
She took a deep breath and blew off the rush of hormones that felt like adrenaline. “Do you think you can keep your hands to yourself for an hour now?”
He matched her stance. “Two hours.”
“Three.”
“Half an hour, then. Have it your way.” He stuffed a bicycle helmet on her head and one on his, switched on the battery-powered lantern, took her by the hand and led the way, crouching low to clear the wooden slats remaining at the entrance.
Robyn was captivated. The dark, dank smell, the cool fifty degrees, the age of it all. The history lured her on. Creaking wooden rafters and stale air were no deterrents for her.
Keller didn’t much care for it, but soon Robyn was leading and he wanted her to have this. He’d spent days, weeks on end, wrapping up his cases in Denver so he could take on this celebrity murder trial as special prosecutor.
He could give Robyn’s interests a few hours, especially since he felt guilty that because they were married, she was steering clear of the highest-profile murder case to come along in the last few years. The Candelaria case was troubling him. He needed her insight. He no longe
r wanted himself cut off from her observations, as he had once thought. Their agreement to stay out of each other’s work was, he thought, not liberating or even ethical, just truly misguided.
He intended, tonight, to spill his concerns, and get her take on the issues he faced regarding Candelaria. For now, he wanted to share what was consuming her interests.
For the sake of returning safely, they turned left at each of three forks in the shaft. An hour in, scribbling notes to capture every grubby, claustrophobic, magnificent detail, searching out tiny veins of ore, her imagination firing, Robyn went through five rolls of 1600 ASA film while Keller took out a penknife and started carving their initials in the bark of a tree trunk used for a beam to shore up the ceiling of the mine shaft.
Her eyes were lit up like moonbeams on mink. “Oh, Kell, what do you think?”
A menacing pop rang out, far back up the tunnel. What he thought was dust passing through the beam of their lantern he realized was really water vapor, but that was small comfort. In a cave created by nature, you could trust that the vast cavernous spaces down to the smallest crevasses weren’t going to cave in, but he didn’t have that kind of faith in the winding branches of some old silver mine. “The truth?” he asked.
She nodded.
He thought she knew what was coming because of her off-center grin. “I think this place scares the crap out of me.”
“Come on, Kell. Can’t you feel it?”
“Death and doom, you mean?” He owed her the truth of his feelings, didn’t he?
“Well, that…but really, Kell, I mean, this is almost as good as time travel! Some of these tunnels go a mileand-a-half in, right below a restaurant, and come out on the other side of the mountain. Think of Molly Gibson, the Smuggler. Can’t you just imagine the lives of the men who slaved here, day in and day out, for their three bucks? Round the clock, hundreds of them, carving this tunnel out of the mountain?”