“When what? Somebody slipped in and magically caused that dirtbag’s heart to stop? It’s a wonder he lived as long as he did. Besides, you heard the nurse: Rivers was being kept in a secure room with a locked door. Those guards were there to make sure only authorized visitors signed in and out.”
He pointed at the log in Corrie’s hand—a clipboard. She glanced at it.
“Those BLM rangers may not be the sharpest knives in the drawer, but you had no reason to call their professionalism into—”
“Hey! Look at this!” Corrie said. As Morwood was speaking, she’d been idly scanning the top sheet on the clipboard. Now she turned it toward him.
Morwood peered at the top sheet. “Sheriff Watts, arresting officer. Laforge, BLM, federal transfer and processing. Swanson, FBI, questioning—we know all about that last visitor, don’t we?”
Corrie pushed the clipboard closer. “Look at the final entry.”
Morwood frowned. “Bellingame, Military Police, FORSCOM, questioning.”
“What’s FORSCOM?”
“United States Army Forces Command.”
“So he came from White Sands. What was an MP doing questioning Rivers?”
“He didn’t come from White Sands. The nearest FORSCOM installation is Fort Bliss, adjacent to the missile range.”
“Same goes for Fort Bliss. If they’re adjacent, they’re part and parcel of the same thing, right? What’s their interest?”
“Bliss and WSMR are more like night and day. Fort Bliss houses armored divisions, brigades, and an air defense command. Oh, and an intelligence center for tactical ops. Fort Bliss is the real deal … and they don’t give tours.”
“They had even less reason to question Rivers, then.”
Morwood took the clipboard from Corrie. “This speculation is a waste of breath. This MP might hail from Fort Bliss. Then again, he could be from Fort Bragg. Or Fort Knox.” He stepped out of the alcove and walked quickly back toward the secure hospital room, Corrie at his heels.
The doctor and nurse were still outside the door but had turned away, preparing to leave. They stopped when they saw Morwood approaching. He walked past, to the ranger. “Akime?” he said.
The ranger straightened. “Sir?”
Morwood showed him the clipboard. “The last name on this list of visitors. MP Bellingame. It says he was admitted at eleven fifteen last night.”
The ranger stared at the clipboard as he might the head of a gorgon.
“Were you on duty at the time?”
“I was.”
“So you saw this man?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you admitted him?”
“He said he had some questions for the prisoner, sir.”
“Did he say what base he was from, or who had sent him?”
“He showed me his credentials, which looked good. I … didn’t make a note of his base.”
“You didn’t ask to see his orders?”
“That isn’t protocol, sir.”
Morwood’s jaw worked briefly. “And how long did he stay?”
Akime thought briefly. “About ten minutes.”
“Was anybody else in the room with them at the time?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you hear anything unusual while the officer was inside? Raised voices, for example?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Did you hear the prisoner being questioned at all?”
A long silence. “No, sir.”
“Doesn’t eleven o’clock at night seem an odd time to be interviewing a prisoner?”
“It isn’t my job to question that sort of thing, sir.”
“And did you look in on the prisoner after the MP left?”
“Yes.” The ranger shifted his weight again. “About fifteen minutes later. Give or take.”
“And what was he doing?”
“Sleeping. Like he’d been doing before the MP arrived.”
“Don’t go anywhere.” And turning away again, Morwood walked toward the nurses’ desk.
“What are you going to do, sir?” Corrie asked from beside him.
“Do? I’m going to make sure they preserve the security video of this visit from MP Bellingame.” He gestured at a camera in the corner of the hall. “I’m going to make sure Rivers gets an even more thorough autopsy than previously envisioned. And no—not for the reasons you brought up. The request should have gone through channels, and I want to know why it didn’t. I’d also like to know what questions our MP had for the prisoner.” He hesitated, then said, rather stiffly, “I commend you, Corrie, for thinking to examine the visitor log.”
Since before she’d even gotten the call about Rivers, Corrie had been trying to figure out a way to ask Morwood something—something she worried he might not approve. Given this unexpected crumb of praise, she figured now was as good a time as any.
“There’s something else, sir,” she said.
Morwood had already pulled out his phone. “What’s that?”
Corrie took a deep breath. “Search the Gower farmhouse.”
“I thought that was you there with me, yesterday,” Morwood said, dialing.
“No, sir,” Corrie said. “I mean, I want to conduct a search of the farmhouse. A formal search.”
Morwood stopped dialing and—slowly—lowered the phone. “Now, why the hell would you want to do that?”
“Because I believe it’s the most likely place to gather additional evidence about our corpse, sir. Our radioactive corpse.”
“You saw the place. Any number of people have stayed there since the Gowers were forced out—including, I might add, J. Robert Oppenheimer himself. And you heard General McGurk say the roof has been replaced. Do you suppose that was done at the first sign of a leak? That old cabin has suffered nature’s fury, and army ownership, for three-quarters of a century.”
Corrie knew Morwood wasn’t done, so she stayed quiet and let him continue.
“But that isn’t what bothers me. What bothers me is that the army, as a pro forma rule, requires a warrant for any FBI search of its property.”
Corrie had learned this, as well—and it was the primary reason she’d been hesitant to make the request.
“We’ve talked about this before, Swanson—as recently as in the jeep, barely twelve hours ago. The general was kind enough to take us out personally, as his guests, to see the old place. How do you think he’s going to feel if we repay that courtesy by asking for a search warrant?”
“Sir, I’d think that given the unexpected death of our prisoner, and the still unknown nature of his last visitor, he would understand the need.”
“So what, specifically, are you looking for?”
“Gower must have had a powerful reason to be sneaking onto a closed military base to wander near his old family homestead. That reason may still be in that house—letters, papers, things stuck in a drawer.”
Morwood paused a moment and finally exhaled in exasperation. “I’ve got some calls to make. While I make them, I’ll consider your request. Consider it.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t thank me yet. And even if I let you file that warrant, and you file it successfully, the general might feel offended, and with good reason. I want you to bend over backward to show your gratitude by not pissing him off. WSMR’s a major presence around here.”
“I understand.”
“Now, go do some calming paperwork. I always find that soothing. I’ll get back to you.” And with that he turned away, raising his phone again.
Corrie knew better than to say anything more. After shooting a quick glance in the direction of the room recently occupied by Pick Rivers, now deceased, she made for the elevator that would take her to the hospital lobby.
27
CORRIE SAT IN the jeep’s passenger seat, feeling the wind whip her hair as they sped across the grasslands. It was the following afternoon, and everything was going as well as could be hoped. Morwood had approved her request for a s
earch warrant—despite his bluster, maybe he’d planned on doing so all along—and General McGurk had apparently raised no objection, because she’d been admitted through the White Sands main post gate with barely a glance at her paperwork. Corrie had hoped to show her gratitude to the general, but she never even caught a glimpse of him in the brief time she spent at the headquarters area. Within minutes of her arrival, a jeep, driven by a uniformed PFC, had pulled up at the visitor waiting area—vehicle and driver practically clones of those from her previous visit—and now, almost an hour later, they were slowing as they approached the basin that contained the ranch house.
The view was as impressive as before, with the flanks of the San Andres rising up behind, and it was a cooler day, with a crisp touch of fall in the air. The driver pulled up in front of the house and yanked back on the parking brake. Corrie thanked him and
got out of the jeep.
“I’ll probably be a while,” she told the soldier.
“No problem, ma’am,” the private said. “I’ll be waiting on the porch.” He climbed the creaky steps, took a seat in a dusty old rocking chair, and opened a magazine he’d kept rolled as tight as a swagger stick, settling in for the long haul. Apparently being her chauffeur was his assigned duty for the day. The magazine, she noticed, was Boating—an odd choice, given the arid landscape that surrounded them.
Her pack was heavy with evidence-collection paraphernalia—most of it probably unnecessary—and she hefted it out of the back of the jeep and slung it over her shoulder. She then did a slow 360 of the Gower Ranch. She’d done her share of practice searches at Hogan’s Alley and elsewhere in Quantico, along with one real search—the archaeological dig site where she’d first met Nora Kelly—but this felt different to her. It might be the loneliness and desolation … but more likely, she thought, it was the strong possibility that she’d find nothing, that this was a waste of time. Despite how hard she’d fought to get here, Morwood’s objections had resonated in her head. Eighty years of abandonment was a long time. Gower had been kicked off the place three years before he died. And in the last eighty years, the house had gone through several incarnations, including bunkhouse for famous scientists, and, finally, an abandoned structure of minor historical interest. Anything of significance had probably been thrown away years ago or crumbled into dust.
In spite of all that, certain facts remained to create in her a lively feeling of suspicion, if not conspiracy. Gower had been lurking in this general area for a reason, caught by chance in the Trinity blast with an extremely valuable cross of gold. Where did he get it? Why was he carrying it? The man who’d found his corpse was now dead, under suspicious circumstances. The FBI had not been able to track down Rivers’s final visitor. There was no MP Bellingame on the roster at Fort Bliss, nor anywhere else in the army, it seemed. Hospital security cameras showed an African American man in a natty MP dress uniform, face obscured by a white MP officer’s cap. What revved up her suspicion even more was that the man seemed to be aware of the placement of the hospital’s security cameras. During his ingress and egress, he could be seen casually turning his head this way or that, or looking down at a clipboard in his hand, in such a way that all they got was a fuzzy image of the lower half of his face. Even Morwood found that significant and had lit a fire under the M.E.’s office to complete the autopsy ASAP—with full tox panels.
Her thoughts returned to the layout of the Gower Ranch and how she would methodize her search. She started with searching the corrals—but there was nothing there, not even historic horseshit. She moved on to the crumbling stone barn, dutifully taking out her FBI-issue camera and shooting a dozen photographs of the outside. Inside, it smelled of dust and hay. There were still some rusting tools hung on a back wall, a stack of crumbling bales of alfalfa, a few empty horse stalls. The floor was dirt, and she kicked at it here and there, finding nothing. Someone had used one of the walls for a dartboard; a couple of darts, so old they had real feathers for fletching, were still rusted into place. But there was nothing of interest.
Time for the house.
She walked over, climbed onto the porch, nodded to the private—at present ogling a twenty-four-foot Boston Whaler—opened the unlocked door, and stepped into the house. As she walked through the foyer into the living room, with the bare kitchen just beyond, she felt an almost overpowering sense of familiarity … and not because she’d been there just two days before. The place reminded her of the old double-wide she’d shared with her mother, growing up in Medicine Creek. There was the same atmosphere of loneliness, of lost hopes and dreams, of the long decline of opportunity, slipping away like sand between one’s fingers. As she stared past the living room into the kitchen, one ugly memory in particular returned to her: sneaking in late one night, hoping to creep past her drunken mother’s room without her hearing—in vain.
You think you can just live here for free, eat here for free, come and go as you please?...You don’t have any skills, what can you possibly be worth?...Don’t you walk away while I’m talking to you—!!
Her mother was out of her life now—probably for good. At least she’d reconnected with her father, Jack. He was living near the Delaware Water Gap, working a steady job. They were still rebuilding their relationship, one brick at a time. But already, that foundation felt solid beneath her feet.
She shook these memories away and examined the old ranch house. Was Gower trying to sneak back in here to get something? Had he been deterred, given it was an active bunkhouse for Trinity workers leading up to the test?
She decided to start in the back rooms and work her way to the front. Stepping into the kitchen, she walked around, opening cabinets and drawers. Most were empty beyond some cheap cutlery, a box of salt, and some rusted mousetraps. The enameled woodstove was empty, the floor beneath it thick with dust. There was no electricity, but she opened the refrigerator anyway: inside was an old bottle of milk, its contents reduced to a scaly film. With effort, she edged the refrigerator away from the wall: more dust. The floor was linoleum, faded and hideously patterned, edges curling up.
She moved on slowly, examining first the bathroom, then the small room that had served as a bedroom. This latter had a huge dresser that, she hoped, might prove a gold mine, but all she found was an empty, crumpled-up packet of C-ration cigarettes and—in the bottom drawer—a Farmers’ Almanac from 1938.
She picked up the almanac. It was foxed with age. As she flipped through it, she found various markings in faded pencil. Some dates were underlined; others had check marks beside them. There were a couple of marginal notes as well, in a crabbed, barely legible hand.
She thought a moment. Nineteen thirty-eight. Gower would still have owned the ranch then. Even if those scribblings belonged to someone else, there could be important information hidden in the pages. She took an evidence bag from her carryall, slipped the almanac inside, and sealed and marked it. Then, taking a last look around the room to make sure she had missed nothing, she exited and walked into the living room.
She stood inside the doorway and took a deep breath. This was the last place left. Through the ragged curtains of one dirty window, she could make out the PFC, leaning the chair back at a dangerous angle and flipping the pages of his magazine. She paused briefly to clear her thoughts and then began taking in the room, trying to envision what it had been like eighty years before, when it had been a home instead of a ruin. She let her eye linger on each item in turn: the frayed sofa; the table with its two chairs; the framed pictures hanging on the cracked walls; the shelves displaying various bric-a-brac.
She moved over to the shelves, examining each item in turn: some ancient Reader’s Digest collections and other books; a few empty wine bottles that must, to some eye, have seemed attractive; the stack of magazines, cowboy hat, and Parcheesi board Watts had pointed out.
Corrie let a finger trail over the spines of the books. It left a line in the dust behind it. There were some Zane Grey titles, a Gideons Bible courtesy of the Sage
Brush Motel, and a well-thumbed copy of Early Legends of the Western Frontier by one Hyman S. Zim. She took this last book down and flipped through it; though it was battered and obviously well read, there were no notes as there had been in the almanac. Still, it was likely this had been one of Gower’s own books, and it might contain references to something that could prove helpful. She slipped it into another evidence bag, made for the couch, then—remembering the likely rat infestation—sat down at the rickety table instead. Its wooden top was as busy as a Keith Haring painting with carved doodles, drawings, and messages—most likely made by bored soldiers, waiting for some drill or test or whatever. There were a couple of dates: July 1945, Sept. ’44. These must have been made by Trinity workers. A few of the carved drawings were crudely anatomical, and the messages of the “Kilroy was Here” variety. Corrie dutifully snapped pictures of them anyway. Then she put her camera away and sat back in the chair—gingerly—with a sigh.
It had been worth the effort to get the warrant, if only so she wouldn’t kick herself later, wondering if she’d missed the one step that would have cracked the case wide open. Even so, it seemed likely that when Gower’s land was confiscated, the man must have taken everything of value—especially if it had to do with treasure hunting.
Then she paused. Would Gower have taken everything with him? If so, what was he doing crossing the desert near the ranch on July 16, 1945?
She’d done more background research on White Sands and the Trinity test since her first trip onto the base. Despite what the great-grandson had said, when Gower first left his farmhouse, the land was only being leased by the government for the White Sands Proving Ground. It wasn’t until later that the parcels of ranchland were taken permanently, and by the 1970s they were all an integral part of the missile range. In 1942, when the Gowers were evicted, Jim Gower had every reason to think he’d get his ranch back before long—nobody knew an atomic bomb was soon to be detonated in the neighborhood—and maybe he hid something awaiting that return.
The Scorpion's Tail (Nora Kelly Book 2) Page 15