by Jerold Last
“What do you feel now?”
The FBI agent looked all around the clearing before replying. “I’d say no to a human or a large animal being close enough to be watching us.”
“Have you done a lot of surveillance work?” I asked him.
“Sure, that’s most of what we do when we’re out in the field,” he replied.
“If you were going to set up either video or still camera surveillance of this clearing for some reason, where do you think you’d put your camera or cameras?” I asked.
Culpepper surveyed the clearing again, much more slowly this time, concentrating on the periphery. “Up high somewhere, either part way up a tree or somewhere on the hills over there.” He pointed north and west, where the clearing ended in hills surfaced with trees, shrubs, and grass, which were broken up by areas of dirt and rock that indicated old mining areas. The hills themselves sloped gradually upward to eventually meet the mountains that make up a large part of this region of Denali National Park.
That sounded right to me. I was becoming more and more impressed with Agent Culpepper’s quiet competence as we got to know each other. “How about I take the trees while you take the hills. I’ll be looking for signs of cameras hidden in the woods while you’re looking for a camera somewhere on the hill. Keep your eyes open for some kind of flash of light from somewhere in the forested area that could indicate sunlight reflecting off of a lens. It’s a long shot, but there has to be something going on here that explains killing two innocent tourists to conceal whatever they might have seen that they shouldn’t have.”
We separated and started walking very slowly, me along the edge of the clearing staring up into the surrounding trees, Culpepper walking a standard search grid on the hill to the north. Suzanne was busy with a big stick she had found, slowly and carefully digging away layers of ashes in the fire pit she had explored so fruitfully the last time we were here. She approached the task with the care of an archeologist unearthing precious artifacts of an ancient civilization at the site of a newly discovered temple or the ruins of a long buried city.
The kind of searches we were doing require a lot of patience and a lot of luck. We had been at it for almost an hour when Culpepper motioned to me that I should come over to where he had been searching near the middle of the hill. As I came close to him he whispered, “I think there’s something you’ll want to see here.”
I walked over to just behind where the FBI agent was standing. He looked down and to his right. I followed his gaze. The shrubs and brush had been artfully arranged to conceal the entrance to a cave or old mining shaft, the outlines of which were just visible behind the screen of leaves and bushes concealing the opening. Barely visible unless you looked at it from exactly the proper angle was the lens of a video camera peeking out through the screen of brush. We were standing at the end of the carefully constructed barrier of bushes, slightly behind the camera.
I motioned to Culpepper to follow me several yards uphill. “This is where we don’t say or do anything that will tip off whoever is conducting the surveillance that we found the hidey hole they’re trying so hard to conceal,” I whispered. “Don’t talk in your normal voice anywhere in the clearing or around this area and be very careful not to step in front of that camera, which I assume has a wide-angle lens. If we start ever so carefully at the edge of the constructed cover here, maybe we can get enough of the brush out of the way to see what’s inside without doing a guest appearance on the video surveillance camera.”
Jason worked from the top right corner looking at the screen of brush, while I removed more of the cover from the left side and top of the camera, hoping there was only just the one camera here for surveillance. We finally were able to make a hole in the brush screen a few feet in diameter, considerably wider than my arm, without disturbing the rest of the screen or the video camera. Culpepper wordlessly handed me an FBI issue flashlight, just like the ones we see CSI agents using on TV. The flashlight produced an incredibly high intensity light coming out directionally in a narrow beam.
I motioned Culpepper to stand immediately beside me, well away from the video camera’s field of view. I slipped the flashlight into the gap we’d made in the screening brush, turned it on, and took a look into what had been nothing but impenetrable darkness a second before. We were looking into an old, apparently abandoned, mineshaft. There was evidence of recent activity on the floor, including simple mining tools---hammers, picks, and drills---scattered about. The floor was littered with the products of the work being done, rocks of various sizes from small pebbles to fist-sized chunks with irregular shapes.
The video camera was a standard surveillance model you could purchase anywhere for less than $100 that would simultaneously record to an internal hard drive for archival footage and broadcast what it was seeing via the internet for real-time surveillance if someone had a computer at the other end of the link.
I changed places with Culpepper so he could take a look. A moment later the brush we had removed went back to fill the hole we’d made as Jason and I rebuilt the screen to look like it had before we disturbed it. The two of us moved back behind the mineshaft, out of range of the camera, where we could talk safely in whispers.
“If anyone is watching the computer, our cover is blown!” I whispered. “If there’s only the one camera in this clearing we might be able to bluff our way out of trouble if we don’t let on that we found the mine. As far as they’re concerned, all they’ll see is Suzanne digging in the fire pit. But, if they have any other cameras covering this area, we’re officially going onto the list of people they need to kill. It’s time to get out of here.”
We circled around, picked up Suzanne who had some new goodies making a bulge in the pockets of her jeans, and got our bikes. She understood the need for silence. We walked the bikes a hundred yards or so away from the clearing toward the fire road, but about 50 yards further to the north than the clear trail indicating the way we had come into the clearing earlier that morning.
We stopped and I quickly explained to Suzanne what we’d found and what it meant. “There’s a video surveillance set-up sitting in an old mineshaft up on the hill where Jason and I were exploring. The mine and the video camera are concealed with an obviously manmade screen of leaves and brush. Someone went to a lot of effort to be able to watch who came into the clearing in front of the mine, and what the visitors did when they got here. The camera was broadcasting in real time to anyone with a computer and an Internet address for the surveillance gear.
“The floor of the mine showed obvious signs of activity, with rocks and tools scattered all over. Someone has been illegally mining for gold in the abandoned diggings. I think we’ve just found a solid motive for the Roberts being murdered. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The same thing could happen to us if we get careless!”
Jason pulled out his cell phone. “I’ve got to call Gretchen Kaufman. We need to get a forensics team into the mine before they can clean it up. We should be able to get fingerprints from the tools laying around and from the camera.”
The FBI agent looked intently at the phone then shook it. “There’s no signal here. I have to get back to the road.”
“Slow down, Jason,” I ordered. “The last place in the world any of us wants to be is near that road until we know it’s safe. That’s the first place they’ll look for us once they figure out we were here.”
The FBI agent looked rebellious, but seemed to be willing to take orders from me, at least for now. “We can’t just stand here wasting time and doing nothing,” he argued vehemently.
“I agree. Let’s see what our high technology satellite phone can do.”
I speed dialed Gretchen on the phone I’d been carrying in my pocket. She answered on the third ring. “Gretchen, it’s Roger. Agent Culpepper just made a key discovery in this case. Let me give him the phone so he can tell you what he found and what he needs. Please hang on for a few seconds.”
Culpepper lo
oked surprised and grateful that he was being given the credit as he took the phone from me. This was obviously a change from his former boss Ed Barclay’s leadership style that he welcomed. “We’re out near the clearing where the bodies were found. We think we’ve found the motive for the killings and some forensic clues that will lead us directly to the murderers. Why don’t you assemble a technical crew and come out on the chopper as fast as you can. Once you’ve got everything arranged, call Roger back and we’ll tell you what we found out here.”
He handed the phone back to me. I put it on vibrate so it wouldn’t ring when she called back. “We need to find a safe place to keep the mine and clearing under surveillance while we wait for the helicopter to get here. That would also be a great time for Suzanne to tell us what she found back there.”
We walked back toward the clearing, as slowly and silently as we could. We made sure we stayed behind the possible line of sight of the video camera we’d found in the mine, just in case.
I thought about the probabilities. “We don’t want to get too close, in case they have sensitive listening gear set up around the clearing. But we want to get close enough to the clearing to see if anyone is coming. With the forest as thick as it is here, that would be awfully close. I think we should leave the bikes here, where they’re very well concealed. There’s a pretty good chance we’ll be leaving here by helicopter anyway. Let’s find some cover up high, somewhere more or less directly over the hill where the mineshaft comes out.”
Don’t you think we’d be safer inside the mine?” suggested Culpepper. “We’d see anyone coming long before they could see us and we’d have a defensible position if they come armed.”
I thought about his suggestion. “No, I think there’s a lot of risk doing that. They may have more surveillance equipment inside the mine. There may be other entrances into the shaft we don’t know about. I don’t like the idea of potentially being trapped in a small mineshaft with nowhere to go. If we’re out in the open we can always run if there’s more of them than there are of us.”
We hiked, slowly and carefully, to the edge of the forest nearest to the hill. It took only a few minutes more to find a good place to hide. It was about 10-15 yards above the entrance to the mineshaft and about 75 yards to the east of the entrance. We’d see anyone entering the clearing, but would be invisible to them as we hid behind trees and bushes. We settled ourselves into our sheltered vantage point, in essence a glorified duck blind, and prepared to wait for the cavalry to arrive with reinforcements.
I pulled the satellite phone from my pocket and speed dialed Gretchen’s number. It took four rings this time, but she finally answered. “Gretchen,” I began, “We’re settled into a safe place now so we can watch the clearing where the killings took place. Do you have any estimate of when you and your CSI team can be here?”
I could hear the thumping sound of a helicopter’s rotors in the background as Gretchen answered. “We’re just taking off from the roof of headquarters here in Anchorage. I’ll call you when we’re a couple of minutes away from where you are. If you say it’s OK, we’ll land in the middle of the clearing. Now would you like to tell me what you and Jason found that’s got you so excited?”
This was neither the time nor the place to get chatty and risk being discovered in our little hideout. “You can have the short version now, and Jason can fill in the details for you after you get here. There’s an old mine in the hill at the north end of the clearing. Someone’s been doing some illegal gold mining in it. They also set up a video camera to let them keep an eye on the clearing via the Internet, so they obviously didn’t want anyone to catch on to their little racket without seeing it happen. The mineshaft is well concealed and full of mining tools, which should be full of fingerprints from the gang doing the illegal mining. We’ll see you in a little while.”
I switched off the phone and double-checked it was set to vibrate, not ring, for incoming calls.
I looked at the others. “You heard my end of the conversation. They’re just taking off from Anchorage. Gretchen will call when they’re a couple of minutes from here to confirm it’s safe to land.”
Turning to Suzanne, I asked, “what did you find in that old fire pit this time?”
Suzanne reached into the pocket of her jeans. She had several small stones in her hand. They were obviously fragments of rocks that had been broken off a larger rock with a hammer. Clearly visible in the rock fragments were veins of quartz and flecks of gold dust. “It looks like they discovered a rich vein of gold in that old mine. I assume our killer had these in a pocket of the clothing, probably a bloody jacket that he burned right after killing Roberta and Francis. This gives us our motive for the killings, as well as a strong evidentiary link between the illegal gold mining and the murders.”
Jason Culpepper let out a low whistle. “If we find some fingerprints in the mine, or if we’re really lucky and we find some video on someone’s hard drive that shows the gang who are doing the mining, we could actually solve this case. I have to admit I had my doubts about the two killings ever being solved when Suzanne explained to us how badly we messed things up the first time around. You have to give Ed Barclay some credit. He did a remarkably good job of keeping the FBI investigation away from everything that might be important in this clearing. I wonder if he thinks the few thousand dollars he made out of the entire bear poaching scam are worth all the time he’ll be spending in jail for obstruction of justice and whatever else he’s convicted of.”
I ticked off my mental list of things we should be prepared for. “If Gretchen gets here before we have any guests, we need to be sure there aren’t any snipers out in the woods. Otherwise, everybody risks being shot in the cleared area they’re planning to land in. Jason, do you have any military experience or just the quickie course at Quantico they send all would-be FBI agents to?”
Culpepper smiled grimly. “I’ve been hunting all my life, mostly game, sometimes people. I also served three years as an army Ranger if you’re wondering how I’d do if you ask me to secure the area.”
I smiled back, just as grimly. “I assume you’re armed?”
Culpepper drew his pistol to show me. “Standard issue Glock 22; 15 rounds, .40 caliber, fully loaded.”
I wasn’t satisfied yet. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
He replied with a one-word answer. “Yep.” No details, no further information, no bragging. He was clearly the real deal.
I needed to know one more thing. “How long will it take you to remove any litter we may collect around the clearing? I promised Gretchen it would be safe to land.”
The FBI agent did some mental calculations for a moment before asking, “How long do you think it would take to make a complete circle around the clearing in fairly heavy forest going in about 50-75 yards deep at periodic intervals? I’m thinking maybe 15 minutes all told. Let’s say 20 minutes max.”
“Sounds about right to me,” I replied. “Do you need me to help cover you?”
Something passed across his face, almost a smile. “I assume you’re armed?”
“I’m carrying a Baby Glock 26 in my pocket with three magazines, 10 rounds each, 9 mm caliber. Gretchen gave it to me in Anchorage. Do you need to see it?”
Culpepper actually smiled. “Nah, I’m just yanking your chain. My Ranger training was to do this kind of reconnaissance alone. It’s quieter that way and you don’t have to worry about shooting the wrong guy out there.”
It was my turn to do a little mental arithmetic. “Anchorage to Denali by FBI helicopter took us about an hour and a half, plus or minus, when we flew up here the other night. They were just starting out when I called. That means they should be here in about an hour, maybe a bit longer. Why don’t you plan on starting your cleanup tour around the clearing in about half an hour?”
“Sounds good to me,” he replied, checking the action on his pistol.
Most of the next half hour was spent quietly resting up for what might be a few min
utes of intense action if the illegal miners showed up before Gretchen’s helicopter arrived. The good news, if there was any, was that the motive for the murders seemed to be an attempt to conceal the illegal mining operation going on in the National Park. If this theory was correct, there wasn’t going to be any remaining motive to try to kill us after the FBI team had retrieved the evidence from the old mineshaft and closed down the entire illegal mining operation.
The bad news was the killer or killers might get away with murder, in the literal sense of the term, if they just walked away from the illegal mine and didn’t do anything to bring further attention to themselves. The illegal mining might get them a stiff fine, but probably little or no significant time in prison.
Jason Culpepper looked at his watch for the ninth or tenth time, stretched, and whispered, “It’s show time.” He slipped silently into the forest behind us and began to slowly circle the clearing. I tried to spot signs of his movement, but he was every bit as good moving and stalking game in the woods as he said he’d be, and was completely invisible from our vantage point.
Jason returned on schedule, carefully letting us see him from 20 yards away to avoid any friendly fire. He flashed a thumbs-up sign and rejoined us just as the sounds of a helicopter arriving from the south became obvious. A moment later we could see the helicopter, which was hovering a few hundred yards south of the clearing. They landed almost immediately after I gave Gretchen the all-clear announcement over our cell phone. We stayed under cover until passengers started streaming uneventfully into the clearing from the aircraft.