The rest of the stack was much of the same. Old cases, old information, none of it pertinent to the mystery at hand. I sorted through it with interest, but didn’t add any of it to the other pile I’d made. It didn’t take long to reach the bottom of the stack, and I gathered up all the papers and set them aside, turning my attention back to the few pieces I’d pulled out.
I spent a few minutes reading over each of the articles Rocke had copied, glad for the new information. My map didn’t have most street names past the larger roads labeled, but with my laptop’s help, I was able to track down the locations of each attack given in the newspaper articles and put them on my map alongside the others, clearly marked with dates so that I wouldn’t confuse them. Unsurprisingly, each of the attacks Rocke had dug up was within the last area that had been sold back to the city by Henderson Mining, an area that included all of the current attack locations. A few of them were even on the same streets.
One thing stood out to me about the old attacks, however. Not one of them had ever involved an animal larger than a goat. Neither had there been any dogs killed. In each case until now, the chupacabra had only killed farm livestock, and usually small livestock, judging from the few pictures of the carcasses the articles had contained.
So what’s different now? I wondered as I ran my mind over the mental list of victims. Why dogs? And a cow? I berated myself for not making a list of the animals that had been attacked so far. After I found Rocke, that list would be my first order of business. There was definitely something odd about the current string of attacks.
I set my pen down after marking the last of the old attacks on my map, each well within the boundaries of the resold land. Well, that lends a lot of credence to that theory, I thought, looking down at the clusters of circles. Then again, it could just be because that’s the outskirts of the city.
So then, what did Rocke do next? I leaned back in my seat and rubbed my hand across my chin again. My next line of action would have been to check with city officials to see if there were any open mineshafts near any of the attacked homes. So I could assume that Rocke would have worked along the same lines.
Except that he asked David Jefferson about checking on land the mine owned, I thought, remembering my conversation with the missing man’s wife. And he probably wouldn’t have done that unless he’d already checked for anything in town. Start in the area closest to the problem, and make your way outward.
But Jefferson had told Rocke that company property was off-limits. And if he’d listened, that would leave him with one last area he could check on his own. I shifted my eyes to the southern-most section of his map, where a series of hastily scrawled lines circled the properties not yet owned by Henderson Mining.
That’s it, I thought, double-checking the territory between my map and his. If he’d been following the same train of thought I was, then the next logical place for him to check would have been the southern-most parts of the valley.
But if he had, why was his car out front? Even eyeballing it, the area he’d circled was easily twenty, twenty-five miles away. He definitely wouldn’t have walked there. I shook my head, still puzzled. Maybe I was going down a dead end.
A beep rang in my ears, and I jerked my head up, searching for the source. Another beep, this time with a flash of light, and I locked onto Hawke’s phone over by the sink. Apparently it had recovered enough to power up, and the screen flashed into the open air.
I rose from my chair and stepped around the bed, eyes still watching the phone. If Rocke had locked it, than it was going to prove completely useless unless someone called. But if he’d left it unlocked … I picked it up and swiped my thumb across the smooth plastic screen.
The screen lit up, the lock image vanishing and revealing a plain, black background filled with a grid of icons. Success! No family pictures, not even a background picture. Simple, plain and straightforward. It was Rocke’s phone alright.
The phone icon in the lower corner had a red eleven sitting next to it, so I tapped it and watched as a list of all his missed calls appeared. None of them had names attached, however, and I didn’t feel like calling any of them back to find out if they had any useful information. Not yet, at least.
A moment’s fiddling brought the phone back to the main screen, and from there I clicked the next icon over, a small brown envelope I hoped stood for text messages. A new window opened, again listing a bunch of numbers, but each followed with a small snippet of text this time. I tapped the top one with my thumb.
“Mr. Rocke,” the lowermost message read, “I’ve called you twice and you haven’t answered. I lost another goat last night! Aren’t you supposed to be doing something about this?” I scrolled upwards, scanning the earlier messages, looking for names or other signs of identification, but I didn’t see anything. Two of Rocke’s clients had lost goats, so the message was either from the Salas family or the one I hadn’t met yet. I backed up and looked down at the next message. It was something about saving money on a new car. Spam. I moved on.
“Well, good luck, then,” the message read. I tapped it and pulled up the rest of the conversation. “I still don’t think you should do it,” the message continued. “And you should definitely find a guide before you go. A lot of those caves are unstable, like I said, and I can’t help you. You want to risk it, though, go ahead.”
There was a single line in reply from Rocke. “I’ll be careful. Thanks anyway.” My curiosity piqued, I scrolled up to the top of the messages, searching the text as it flashed by for a name.
There! My scrolling came to a stop as I reached the top of the chain and saw that the first message had been addressed to David Jefferson. My heartbeat picked up as I followed the exchange of messages. It wasn’t long, and I gathered the gist of it almost immediately. Rocke had made one last attempt at getting someone—not even himself—to look into mines on company property, and Jefferson had refused, as expected. What came next, though, I didn’t expect.
Rocke mentioned that he would move on to the southern parts of the valley—confirming my earlier theory—and Jefferson urged him not to. What followed was a strange exchange, with Jefferson quite clearly trying to convince Rocke to stay out of the southern half of the valley, and Rocke having none of it.
Now that’s odd. I thought back to my conversation with Jefferson’s wife. As best I could remember, she hadn’t said anything about her husband telling Rocke not to go into the areas that weren’t owned by the company, just that he’d refused to get Rocke into company areas for fear of his job.
Why is that different here? I checked the time and date on one of the last messages. It was from two days ago, late in the afternoon, the afternoon before Rocke and Jefferson had dropped off the map. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
Could Jefferson have changed his mind and decided to take Rocke to keep him out of trouble? I checked the number on the messages and flipped the phone back to the call log, checking the number against the list. None of them were from Jefferson, at least, not after the text messages had begun.
Huh, I thought, frowning. It was still highly suspicious. The kind of information that I wouldn’t doubt the sheriff would make use of if he ever found Rocke’s phone.
Then again, just because the list of recent calls didn’t line up with the number Jefferson had been using to text Rocke didn’t mean he hadn’t called him. There were plenty of other ways he could have contacted him, liked calling from his home phone. Except that Jefferson’s wife said he hadn’t come home that night. A work phone, maybe?
I jumped back to the list of text messages and sifted through them, but none of them stood out or provided me with any extra information. With a few finger swipes, I was already into messages that had nothing to do with the current situation. I backed out to the home screen.
So, I thought as I stared down at the grid of icons. Rocke was going to look on land Henderson didn’t own. Did he? And did Jefferson go with him? If he had, that could explain why they’d both vanis
hed on the same day, as well as why Rocke had left his car in the parking lot. Then again, the last message on the phone seemed to suggest that wasn’t very likely, even if it did make a lot of sense. And again, I didn’t have any way of knowing whether they’d spoken afterwards, short of calling back every number on the phone, and that wasn’t something I wanted to do.
I can always ask Mrs. Jefferson for her home phone number, I thought. Or better yet … One of the features of the room was a local phonebook in the night table’s drawer. I set Rocke’s phone down and went to grab it.
It took a moment to find their name, but once I did, I cross-checked it with the numbers on the phone. It came up, but time-stamped before the text messages had started. So much for that, I thought, dropping the phone book on the sink counter with a hollow thunk.
I browsed through the icons for a moment, looking at the apps Rocke had installed on his phone. There wasn’t much: A contact book. A notebook app pinned to one of the walls with little entries that didn’t seem to be associated with any case—not the one that was happening here, at least. A GPS app. On a whim, I tapped it. A map a came up, almost instantly recognizable to me as the city and surrounding valley. I tapped at the screen, but nothing happened since the phone was still loading.
To my surprise, an overlay appeared on the map: a winding line that began near the outside of the city and headed south, making right-angle changes from time to time but clearly heading in that direction. Two points, one labeled “You” and the other “Destination,” marked themselves onto either end of the line. I stared at the phone in shock for a moment, then I darted to the bed, flipping my map around and comparing it to the route Rocke had entered into his GPS. If I was reading it right, the last thing Rocke had done with his phone before setting it down in his car had been to pull up directions to the southern end of the valley. Smack in the middle of the land Henderson didn’t own yet.
I still couldn’t say why he’d left his phone behind. Or why he hadn’t left me a message. But I knew one thing. If I was going to find Jacob Rocke, it would be somewhere inside that carefully marked-off area.
And I think I know just how to do it, too, I thought, nodding to myself as I stared down at where I’d circled Felix’s home. I made a note of Rocke’s destination on my map, out in the middle of nowhere, between several roads but not actually near any of them. I didn’t know if that was exactly where he’d gone, but I knew where to start looking, now. I carefully folded the map and placed it in my pocket, then picked up my staff, and headed for the door.
It was time to go scour a few square miles of desert. And I knew exactly how to do it.
Chapter 7
“So,” Felix said, glancing at me out the corner of my eye as I turned my Rover down another fork. “Ya think yer buddy’s in trouble, huh?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head as the car bounced around us, its tires seemingly finding a way into every bump and pothole in the dirt road we were driving on. How did a dirt road in the middle of nowhere even have enough traffic to form potholes? “He could be,” I said as the road began a long, lazy climb up another hill. The southern end of the valley wasn’t nearly as level as the middle or the northern end. In fact, we had already lost sight of Silver Dreams several times.
“It’s been two days since anyone that I know of has heard from him,” I said, glancing over at Felix and the grinning, furry bundle sitting on his lap. “As near as I can tell, it’s most likely that he’s out here somewhere. Past that?” I shrugged. “That’s what I need Mercury for.” Mercury gave a small bark when I spoke her name. Although I hadn’t spoken it, she knew I was talking about her.
“You sure you’ll be able to get her to sniff him out?” Felix said, looking down at her skeptically. “I never trained her to follow scents before, aside from cows and whatnot. She’s not a rescue dog.”
“Trust me,” I said, turning my eyes back to the meandering dirt road in front of us. “She’ll be able to. I’m a shaman. She’ll know exactly what I’m asking her to do.” Mercury barked again, her tail wagging.
The Rover hit another pothole despite my best attempts, metal rattling as Felix and I shook around inside it like beads inside a maraca. I shook my head as the shuddering subsided, shooting my passengers an apologetic look.
“Sorry,” I said. “She rides a little stiff.”
“I noticed,” Felix said, one of his hands wrapping around the handle above the passenger window. “Maybe we should have taken my truck.”
“Yeah,” I said as the Rover hit another pothole, shaking us back and forth. Mercury let out another bark. “That probably would have been a better idea. I had no idea these roads were so rough.” Another bump, and I heard my staff make a sharp thwack sound from the back seat as it connected with the door. “Why are they so rough, anyway?” I asked. “There’s no rain.”
“Not often,” Felix agreed, nodding. “But what we do get can wash parts of the road out. Plus, they aren’t really maintained much anyway. Hell, half of them are old wagon or horse trails from back in the day.”
“Anybody maintain them?”
“Not really,” he said, shaking his head as I slowed the Rover to climb over a large break in the road. “Half of these ‘roads’ aren’t even official. The company uses the hell out of ‘em, though.”
“Henderson Mining?” I asked.
“Eeyup! What with all their surveying and whatnot. Shoot, a year or so back it seemed like they had trucks running all over these hills, doing who knows what. I still see them from time to time.”
“Probably looking to expand the mine,” I said, my mind jumping to the folders I’d seen on Henderson’s desk.
“With dump trucks?” Felix raised an eyebrow in my direction. “What kind of survey work takes dump trucks? You’ll want to turn here,” he said, pointing at an even more questionable-looking road that split off from our current path. Or maybe “dirt track” was more appropriate.
“You’ve got me there,” I said, turning where he’d indicated and feeling the Rover shake under me as it hit bump after bump in the uneven surface. “I don’t know the first thing about mining, though. Maybe they were hauling equipment?”
“We’ve got trucks for that,” Felix said, shaking his head. Dust swirled around us as the Rover slowed, finally catching us after nearly fifteen minutes of pursuit. “I’m just a grunt in the operation, but I know a bit about silver mining, and I can’t make heads or tails of what they’ve been up to out here.”
“Running illegals?” I joked. Felix rolled his eyes, not even bothering to respond.
“All right,” I said as the Rover crested a hill and pitched downward. I pumped the brakes a little to keep our speed down. “What do you think they’re doing?”
“Hell if I know,” Felix said, shrugging. “Half the time I think someone’s just joyriding on the company dime. Taking the big trucks out for a spin, since they don’t get much use otherwise.”
“Isn’t the company having money issues, though?” I asked, frowning as I thought about what I’d heard of the company so far. “Wouldn’t that be a bad idea?”
Felix shrugged again. “My pa used to do it back in his day, even though the company was on hard times then, too. It’s always been on hard times, Hawke, ever since I was born. Didn’t stop him or his friends from borrowin’ equipment and taking it out for a spin sometimes. I mean, usually they were just borrowin’ it to do something fun or pull a tractor out of an irrigation ditch or—hell, you get what I mean.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “So why not just ask them?”
“No idea who they are. I work day shift. These guys must work night shift, because I only ever see them heading out to play while I’m at work. Mine’s a big place, could be anybody.”
“Well,” I said as I drove off the road a bit to dodge a larger-than-average rock. “Maybe one of them should borrow a grader or something sometime.”
“Ah, now yer’ makin’ it sound like work,” Felix said w
ith a laugh. He took a long look out the side window, head pivoting as he looked up and down the landscape. “We’re getting close,” he said after a moment. “Another mile or so, and we’ll be about as close as you can get to where Rocke was hiking.”
I nodded, eyes still fixed on the road ahead of me. We were moving deeper into the southern part of the valley now, the buttes and hills around us becoming more or less constant and climbing higher around us with each passing foot. The dust behind us had shifted, becoming heavier and more laced with red. Not a blood-red, but a dusty, dirty red, like a coke can left to sit out in the desert sun for too long.
The “road” we were on began to snake up the side of one of the buttes, growing a little narrower as it climbed. Felix leaned forward, Mercury giving him a quick lick on the cheek as he eyed the road ahead of us. Then he nodded and leaned back.
“Careful here,” he said, the usual playfulness gone from his tone. “These roads collapse sometimes.”
“Does anyone fix them?”
“Not unless they need to,” Felix said. “Back when I was younger, my friends and I would bring shovels and picks along when we went camping, in case we got blocked off.”
“You didn’t want to hike?” The Rover rounded a bend in the side of the butte, the slope on our right growing more pronounced as we came closer to the top.
Felix let out a laugh. “No, that wasn’t it,” he said, shaking his head. “We just wanted something to do, and it was an accomplishment. We’d pick a spot out in the wilderness, and see if we could get the truck out there, even if it meant pulling down a creek-bed so we could cross it.”
“Sounds like fun,” I said as the road began moving downhill once again. Around us, the rising sides of the buttes were fast becoming canyons. At least, that’s what it looked like from my perspective. A shadow fell over the Rover, our descent finally bringing the towering pillars of rock between us and the sun. “Were you ever worried about the Wraith?”
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