“Shows what you know, Pocahontas. That was a wolf.”
26
ALTHOUGH SHE’D NEVER PHYSICALLY BEEN TO THE PROPERTY before, Lucy knew where she was the moment the police cruiser she was riding in turned off the highway and stopped at the gatehouse. Two-lane highway…but rural Idaho, not New Mexico…onto a gravel road.
Then as she waited with her mother and the others at the guard tower for a signal from Ireland to proceed to the gravel pit, a train whistled over in the direction of the highway. A train, just like in the peyote dream, then one mile to where the road splits off to the right. And I was thinking in Euskara!
Some people might have called it déjà vu, but Lucy had no doubt that somehow the spirit of peyote had chosen to guide her through the final torment of Maria Santacristina. But for what reason, she wondered. John’s not here, and I’m not going to tell anybody else about this. They’ll think I’m nuts. Still, I am supposed to be here for a reason.
Lucy glanced down the road toward the gravel pit and shuddered. She looked back to her mother, just as Marlene got off the radio and gave a thumbs-up. “Okay, everybody,” she shouted. “Plan A worked. Let’s go!”
Everybody piled back into the cars and the convoy turned right down the road. After about three-quarters of a mile, they reached the entrance and stopped. The gravel pit was huge—more than a hundred acres according to the maps—and now that they were there, it looked bigger than that. Although the snow had melted from the sunny, southern exposures of the barren landscape, there were still large patches on the north sides of hills and in depressions.
“Which way?” asked Swanburg, who was riding in the first car with Marlene, Lucy, and Ned.
“Straight ahead about a mile,” Lucy said.
The others turned to look at her. “Just a hunch,” she said, and turned to look out the window.
Swanburg shrugged and looked at the small Global Positioning System display on the laptop computer next to him. “Looks like as good a place as any to set up shop.”
A mile farther, the convoy stopped again. The Baker Street Irregulars got out of their respective vehicles and gathered around the pickup truck, where they began unloading their equipment from the back. All except for Warren, who opened the kennels, leashed his three dogs, and took them for a walk.
As they worked, Marlene walked back to the minivan, whose occupants were climbing out and stretching. She spoke to their leader. “Are you okay?”
Jose Katarain, aka Eugenio Santacristina, reached up and held Marlene by her shoulders. “I am the most okay I have been since my daughter disappeared,” he said. “Today, we find Maria and take her home to her mother. Thank you, my friend.”
“We’re not there yet,” Marlene cautioned. “This science isn’t exact, but I feel in my heart that you’re right. So let’s get started. You know what you’re supposed to do?”
Katarain snapped to attention. “Yes, my captain. We six are to set up and patrol a perimeter within line of sight of your people.” He turned to the others near the van and snapped off an order they immediately obeyed. One man climbed back inside the van and began handing out rifles to the others, who expertly checked the weapons out and then slammed home the bullet clips like they’d been doing it all their lives.
Marlene nodded with approval. When she first made the suggestion to use Katarain and any Basque men who may have had some paramilitary training, Ireland balked about using civilians. “They’re as likely to hurt themselves as the enemy.”
Ireland had agreed after talking to Katarain, but he clearly was uncomfortable. “You were right,” he told her later, sarcasm dripping from his tongue. “He’s had military experience, and so have a few of his friends. I don’t have to tell you what kind of experience, though it may come in handy in an exercise like this. But like I told you, it puts me in an awkward position. I’m sworn to uphold the law in Payette County and that man is a wanted terrorist.”
“Relax, he’s our terrorist now,” Marlene said. “And by today’s standards of evildoers, he’s an Eagle Scout. Anyway, once we find his daughter, he goes back to being a loyal taxpayer. Then the ball’s in your court.”
Ireland had given her one of his “Give it a rest” looks, then said, “It’s the only reason he’s not in the Payette County jail right now.”
Katarain divided his men into three two-man teams and sent the first two to patrol areas on the far side of the gravel pit. “Myself and Esteban will patrol down toward the entrance to the gravel pit in case there are patrols or anyone escapes from the compound,” he said, pointing to the younger man who’d been in the van handing out the weapons. Then with a wave he set off.
Marlene walked back to the last truck in the line, where a small, dirty man in a battered miner’s helmet leaned against the driver’s-side door, smoking a cigarette. He looked up sideways when she walked up and grinned, exposing a set of crooked, tobacco-stained teeth.
The man’s face and head were so covered with long, wiry pewter-gray hair that all she could see was a small dirty space around his yellow eyes and the tip of a pointy nose. So much gray hair also poked out of every opening in the pink, faded long underwear he wore beneath his overalls that she was sure his entire body was as furry as his head.
“So what’s next, missy?” he said with a voice that had definitely been ravaged by too many filterless cigarettes.
Marlene looked back at the Baker Street Irregulars. “We wait for them to work their magic and then we dig,” she said, nodding at the trailer. “Tell me about your machine.”
During their meeting in Colorado, as James Reedy had pointed out, even in late March the ground would still be frozen in that part of Idaho. “Hard as iron; you could swing a pick all day and not get anywhere,” he said. “We’re going to need an air track drill and someone who knows how to operate one.”
He was confident that both could be found, because there were still active hard-rock mines in the area. “Gold and silver, mostly,” he said. “I’ll call around and see if I can find a miner with the right machine.”
Who he found was R. P. Brown, a five-foot-eight, 140-pound gold miner who boasted about not having had a hot bath since the previous December, when he’d treated himself to one for Christmas.
“The man smokes, cusses, drinks, and fights like a fiend—which is why we’re pretty familiar with him at county lockup,” Ireland said when asked what he knew about the man. “But I’m told he’s also the best hard-rock miner in these parts, and while you wouldn’t know it to look at him, some say he’s been pretty successful at finding gold in them thar hills.”
Brown had turned out to be every bit as disagreeable as promised. In fact, about the only person on the team he seemed to get along with was Jojola. They seemed to have an understanding and had even been seen laughing together over some private joke. When Marlene later asked what was so funny, Jojola waved a hand in the air. “Oh, nothing really, the old codger’s just got a lot of the trickster in him. As you know, the coyote is my totem, and I suspect his, too, so we get along fine.”
No one else wanted to be around “the old codger,” but his mine was only five miles from the Unified Church property and he had an air track drill. Not that it was free, mind you.
Marlene had first met him two days earlier. After listening to her describe the search for Maria Santacristina, he’d agreed to loan the machine and run it “for five hundred dollars, half now, half when I’m done digging. And you pay my gas to get there and my diesel to run the machine. And it’s five hundred more if anybody starts shootin’ at me.”
Now he was looking at Marlene through his glittering yellow eyes as if there was something suspicious about her question regarding how his air track worked. But when he realized that she was just curious, he actually looked pleased that she asked.
“Well, missy, that there bitch is a Gardner Denver Model 3100,” he said proudly. “It’s really just a big fuckin’ hammer on tracks. The business end of that baby is driven by an
air compressor and will pulverize its way through the toughest rock, and go through this frozen ground like shit through a goose.”
Marlene was trying to figure out how shit went through a goose when Brown decided he’d said enough. “Now, if you’ll leave me be, I’ll get Sally down from her carriage. The others look like they’re getting started.”
Brown was right about the others. Marlene arrived back at the truck just in time to watch Jesse Adare start the gas-powered motor of the large model airplane he’d snapped together in a matter of minutes. Sounding like a swarm of angry bees, the plane darted down the road and then lifted into the air.
“Turning on the camera,” he called over to Jack Swanburg, who was monitoring the laptop computer he’d set up on a portable table.
“Coming in nice and clear,” Swanburg yelled back.
Adare had explained to her earlier that day that he planned to send his aircraft up with a specialized camera that would send its images back to the laptop computer as a three-dimensional contour map. The first step would be to locate the Bucyrus steam shovel, and then, by aligning the image the plane’s camera was sending back over the photograph taken of the Cadillac, get an approximate direction the photographer on the ground had been facing.
“Then when we’ve narrowed the search area, we’ll look at the contour map and guesstimate the probable flow pattern of the groundwater through the area,” Adare said. “That’s where the pipes and dogs will come in.”
“Of course, that’s assuming the steam shovel is a relic and hasn’t moved,” Swanburg noted. “If it has, then we’ll try something else.”
The steam shovel had not moved and a short time later, the team was looking across a stretch of the gravel pit toward the ancient mechanical dinosaur, perhaps a mile away. It was still a lot of ground to cover, and the searchers were well aware that as soon as word about the raid on the Unified Church got out, the group’s lawyers were likely to come crawling out from under their rocks, seeking injunctions to stop their work.
“We need to get this done today,” Charlotte Gates said.
As Adare had said, now was when the pipes and dogs came in, as well as a lesson in subsurface hydrology. As the team gathered around the truck, Reedy pulled a large six-foot-long canvas duffel bag out and explained that “the easiest way to look at what we’re going to do is to imagine that you’re standing above an underground river.
“Essentially, water flows underground the same way it does above,” he said. “Gravity pulls it downhill, and it follows the path of least resistance, although over time, water is a powerful force for change and will make its own path, as in the Grand Canyon.”
Reedy went over the facts. One, the car was buried somewhere between them and the steam shovel. However, the photographer had not been high enough for them to be able to accurately gauge the distance between the car and the shovel. “Unless you have more of a perspective from the air, distances can be deceiving in a photograph. Nor do we know if the photographer used a zoom lens and cut out some of the distance between himself and the car.”
Therefore, they were going to have to “feel our way upriver, so to speak, and narrow the search area as much as we can. And that,” Reedy said, unzipping the duffel and pulling out long, thin pipes, “is where these babies come in. I had them made special by a tent company—titanium, pointed on the end for penetration, and drilled in several places in that first couple of feet to allow water to seep in.”
Warren took up the narrative. “We’ve noticed in the past with the dogs that they would hit on groundwater that came to the surface hundreds of yards below a grave farther up a hill,” he said. “Then we had one case where the dogs kept hitting on the leaves of a bush but weren’t interested in the ground around it. We dug up the bush, thinking maybe it had grown up on top of the grave. There wasn’t a body, but the dogs were all over the water at the bottom of the hole. It was our botanist who said that kind of bush had very deep roots and suggested that the roots had pulled the scent up into the bush and it was coming out of the leaves. That’s when we came up with the idea of using these pipes to tap into the groundwater and letting the dogs sniff the tops to see if they’ll hit.”
Like tag-team wrestlers, Reedy jumped back in. “The idea is to narrow a search area downstream from a suspected grave by placing the pipe in an arc across the flow of that underground river you’re standing on. Then, through a process of elimination, we’ll let the dogs follow the scent back upstream.”
Taking one last look at the contour map, Reedy and Adare set off with the pipes and began to hammer them into the ground, spacing them about twenty feet apart in an arc. Then they moved another fifty feet “upstream” and hammered in another set of pipes.
As they were working, Jojola and Tran arrived and filled everybody in on the operation over at the Unified Church compound. “Ireland’s guys have about eight hard-core types holed up in a barrack, but they’re not going anywhere,” Jojola said.
“How long before our racist friends start calling their lawyers and word gets out?” Marlene asked.
Tran laughed. “Ireland can move fast when he wants,” he said. “But he can also move slow. He’s taking his time processing everybody. Then he’s going to load them all up on the county jail bus and ship them to the ‘pokey,’ where he’ll process them again.”
Two hours later, the group was standing with Warren and his dogs. The hounds had followed the scent up and to the right of the main “stream” until reaching a set of pipes the dogs had no interest in. “I’d say we’re now upriver from the grave,” the dog handler reported.
Everyone turned and looked at the snow-covered field between themselves and the last set of pipes where the dogs had “hit” on the scent. The area was half the size of a football field. They sighed collectively, thinking about the work still to be done, when a snow-white owl flying low above the ground swooped in and snatched a mouse from a spot near the middle of the field. Lucy looked at Jojola, who nodded, but they said nothing.
The next step fell to Reedy, who went back to the truck and returned with an eight-foot-long pole with what looked like white coffee cans attached to either end. He plugged a cable from the pole into a harness apparatus that he slipped on and then opened the chest pack, which contained a readout screen.
Reedy flipped a few switches and began to walk slowly over a piece of ground, then called out to Swanburg, who with Ned’s help had moved his table and computer to the search site. “You getting this, Jack?”
“Clear as a bell,” Swanburg shouted.
Marlene, who had walked over to stand behind Swanburg so she could see the computer screen, couldn’t tell what she was looking at that was so clear. It looked like a bunch of colorful globs reminiscent of the psychedelic poster she’d hung in her college dorm room.
“That’s called a gradiometer,” Swanburg said, pointing to where Reedy was making adjustments to the machine on his chest. “I won’t go into all the scientific mumbo jumbo. But the short explanation is that the earth is essentially an enormous magnet with magnetic fields running north and south. As we all know, ferrous materials—objects made of iron, including the steel used to build Cadillacs—can become magnetized and will have magnetic fields of their own, also running north and south. These can be differentiated from the earth’s fields, as well as any objects around them, with the gradiometer, which essentially gives us this colorful map that indicates the intensity of any particular magnetic field. Right now, it’s not picking up much of anything, thus the confused blobs.”
“Can that thing be used to find gold?” a rough voice behind Swanburg asked.
R. P. Brown had strolled up behind Swanburg, where he’d been trying to act uninterested while still peeking over the scientist’s shoulder with Marlene.
Swanburg chuckled. “Sorry, R.P., no. It’s only good for objects with iron content.”
“Damn,” Brown swore. “Then what the hell good is it.”
“Well, it has many uses,�
� Swanburg observed. “Obviously, it’s handy for finding buried iron, like ore deposits, or utility pipes, or we’ve even used it to find buried steel drums, one of which had a body stuffed inside, and other illegally dumped toxic wastes. In this case, we’re hoping to find a 2003 Eldorado.”
Brown was unimpressed and went grumbling back to his Sally. But Marlene hung around and kept asking questions. “So when Jim walks over the car, one of those blobs will suddenly look like a bird’s-eye view of a Cadillac?”
“Well, actually no, the lowest values on the readout will be directly above the car,” Swanburg answered. “And none of it will look like a car. Remember when you were a kid and someone, maybe a teacher, put iron filings on a piece of paper and then rubbed a magnet underneath? Do you remember the shape the iron filings created?”
“It looked like a butterfly,” Marlene said.
Swanburg beamed. “Exactly. The iron filings lined up in a sort of halo around the negative and positive ends of the magnet—sort of like the outer edges of a butterfly’s wings.”
“So when we find this butterfly’s wings we dig down between them,” Marlene said.
“Now you’re thinking,” Swanburg replied. “At least that’s the plan.”
“Will we know how deep to dig?”
Swanburg shook his head. “Nope. A gradiometer measures magnetic intensity, not depth.”
“Okay, set on this end,” Reedy yelled. He looked around and suddenly seemed to realize he was one man with a lot of area to cover, and it was already past noon with the sun high overhead and the snow slushy for walking. “Uh, anybody have an idea on where to start?”
“Where the owl caught the mouse,” Lucy called out. The others looked at her. “Humor me,” she said, and walked across the field until she found where the tips of the owl’s wings had left the slightest imprint on the snow where it seized its prey. “Right here, Jim, try right here.”
Reedy glanced at the crowd around Swanburg with an amused look on his face. “Actually, I was kidding,” he said to Lucy. “We usually divide up the search area into grids so that I don’t miss a section. I start in one corner and work from there.”
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