Nevada Rose

by Jerome Preisler

  His heels crunching on the ground, Barrett came over and knelt beside her.

  “The gravel would have been in tall heaps before the rain,” he said. “Usually, what gem prospectors do is sieve through the raw minerals from a quarry pit right here alongside it. When the mounds build up too high, they truck them away.”

  Sara snapped a series of pictures with her camera, a hot bar of sunlight beating solidly on her shoulders. Though it was not yet ten o’clock in the morning, she guessed the temperature on the exposed, east-facing slope had already inched well over eighty degrees.

  “The stuff’s everywhere,” she said with an encompassing gesture. “I’m thinking the current’s force must have been tremendous.”

  Barrett was nodding. “Don’t know if you’ve ever seen a river overflow its banks, but it isn’t too different. These wide distribution patterns of whatever’s on the surface are what happens with flash floods.”

  Sara considered that. “Wouldn’t all the water rushing down the slope have filled the pits?”

  “Hang on a sec, and I’ll check something out for you.” The deputy slid over the side of the pit on his heels, pushed a couple of fingers into the dirt and pebbles at the bottom, and rubbed them together. “The dirt still feels real moist—almost soggy when I stick my knuckles into it,” he said, looking up at Sara. “Goes to show how saturated it was…which means the answer to your question’s yes.”

  “So where did all that water go?”

  Barrett shrugged. “As you can tell, it gets warm up here. Whatever doesn’t soak into the ground’s gonna evaporate pretty darn quick.”

  Sara was quiet a moment. She had briefly flirted with the notion that Adam Belcher’s body could have fallen or been dumped into one of the flooded quarry pits after he was killed. But that couldn’t have occurred if there were no stagnant pools. And say for argument’s sake that Barrett was wrong and they’d had a chance to form…how would Grissom’s pregger crabs have gotten down there in the pit with him? Even if the storm had washed them into the pit from wherever they lived underground, the fragile little creatures would have been too busy dying in the open sun to deposit their eggs.

  One more theory nipped in the bud.

  “Okay,” Barrett said. He’d come scrambling up out of the pit. “From all the hammering and picking our boys were up to, I suppose we’ve established that they didn’t take too much time out for siestas.” He smacked dust and grit off the knees of his uniform trousers. “Where you want to go poking around next?”

  “Inside the cave I just found.”

  Sara and the deputy turned at the sound of Grissom’s voice to see him reappear from behind the shoulder of rock he’d rounded on his own minutes earlier.

  Grissom looked at their questioning faces and poked a thumb over his shoulder. “It’s maybe thirty yards back that way,” he said.

  Barrett nodded and reached for the mining helmet clipped to his trail belt. “I knew this would come in handy before too long,” he said.

  A distorted oval about two feet wide and four high, the cave mouth was recessed under a jutting stone overhang that kept it shaded from the profuse sunlight. Grissom led the others back around to it, Sara right behind him, Barrett following her by half a step.

  “The interior of the cave’s a tight squeeze for the first ten feet or so,” Grissom said, holding an electric torch he’d taken from his backpack. “Then it widens considerably—or at least, that’s how it appears from out here.” He turned toward a clump of ocotillo stalks growing in the shade of the projecting ledge and motioned to Sara. “I want you to have a look at something before we go in.”

  She came up beside him.

  “What do you see?” he said.

  Sara bit her lower lip to suppress a smile and knelt. What do you see? It was Gris’s favored line when introducing evidence or potential evidence to the investigators who trained and worked under him. Never offering what he saw but posing a guided question. Old man Socrates would have approved of his style.

  All right, what?

  Sprouting from crevices in the naked rock, some of the ocotillo’s normally upright branches were flattened, a couple of them snapped as if they’d been stepped on, Sara observed. Shuffling closer, she produced a pair of heavy gloves from her knapsack and then moved the branching, spiny growth with one hand.

  She spotted the partial shoeprints instantly—there were three, maybe four of them, their toes pointing toward the cave entrance.

  “Well, well, well,” she said.

  Grissom reached into his windbreaker for a photograph.

  “This is a shot of Green Man’s shoe bottom,” he said, passing it to her.

  What do you see?

  Once again, she only needed to examine what Grissom had shown her for a moment.

  “The outsole patterns on these partials look like matches,” she said.

  Sara handed him back the photo, angled her camera at the footprints, and clicked the shutter button. Meanwhile, Barrett had joined the two of them by the ocotillo patch and was leaning to inspect the shoeprint and the photograph over her shoulder.

  “Those tracks are kind of dark,” Barrett said. He scratched his neck. “It almost seems whoever made them walked through mud.”

  The material that had been on the sole of the shoe or boot had indeed struck Sara as very different from the dry, chalky sand crusting the slope. But her thoughts were on something else about the prints.

  “How come there are only these few prints?” she puzzled aloud. “No others leading up to them, none leading away from them.”

  “I think that’s a two-part question,” Barrett said. He sat on his heels and gestured at the ground outside the cave opening. “There are ripples in the sand here…take a close look, and you’ll see them.”

  Sara scooched over to him. They were faint but definable. “Are those watershed patterns?” she asked.

  Barrett smiled. “I could tell you had some country in you,” he said. “My guess is that the storm runoff came seeping into the cave at another end and then channeled out this way.” He motioned downhill. “See…there’re more ripples. The wind gets strong up here toward late afternoon, and I figure that’s mostly wiped them away. But look real careful again, and you can make out how they kind of zigzag with the path the water took along the curve of the slope.”

  Grissom peered contemplatively downhill and then craned his head up at the rock shelf above the cave. “So you’re saying the stream of floodwater from the cave opening washed out whatever prints were directly in front of it.”

  “Right.”

  “And that the overhang and ocotillo branches must have sheltered the prints alongside the opening from direct rainfall, and whatever other streams of water came running down the slope.”

  “Right again.”

  “All of which suggests the prints were left before the storm…that also right?”

  Barrett nodded. “It’s what seems to make sense to me.”

  “Me, too,” Grissom said. “Which, if we’re correct, leaves us with a very big unresolved question.”

  Sara looked at him. Her mind had been working with his—and she realized at once what he was getting at.

  “If the ground up here was dry before the storm—and it would have been—how could those shoe bottoms get wet mud stuck to them?” she asked.

  Grissom waved his electric lantern at the cave. “That’s where the footsteps seem to be going,” he said. “Let’s follow the evidence and see if we can get some answers.”

  His head and back bent, Grissom edged in first. Sara was next, then Barrett.

  Squeezing through the tight little cave entrance, Sara passed from bright daylight to deep, claustrophobic gloom. As she switched on her helmet lamp, she saw Grissom straighten up from his crouch. Just inside the passage, its roof must have been four feet high. A few paces in, it rose at a sharp incline.

  Step, step, step, and Sara unhunkered her shoulders. Then she suddenly felt a fluttery breeze
from above, glanced up, and saw the roof of the cave move.

  The roof?

  Okay, dumb, not the roof, she thought. Then what?

  She squinted into an overhead darkness teeming with bats. Startled from their roosts, they swirled beneath the cave’s corrugated stone ceiling in a thick cloud—dipping and tumbling through the lancing beam of her halogen light like pieces of a solid black jigsaw puzzle spilled from an overturned table.

  She ducked, swatted at a few as they wheeled chaotically around her, and threw her palms in front of her face to guard it from the swooping creatures.

  Pausing ahead of her in midstride, Grissom looked around at the agitated swarm. “Corynorhinus townsendii,” he said above their leathery flapping. None to Sara’s surprise, his tone was all rapt fascination—for Grissom, this was paradise. “Townsend’s big-eared bat. They use caves and mines as maternity colonies in the summer.”

  Great. She beat the air with her hand. “What do we do?”

  “Not we,” Grissom said calmly. “You and the deputy are scaring them.”

  Barrett took a swipe at one clinging stubbornly to his shirt. “Excuse us,” he said.

  “Keep still,” Grissom said. “They’ll settle back into their roosts.”

  Sara stopped moving. Barrett cursed under his breath but did likewise.

  The squealing cloud of wings and fur churned around them for another minute before it finally began to subside, the bats returning to the top of the cave in bunches, folding themselves back into its recesses and crevices.

  Sara waited, felt something brush against her sleeve, and flinched a little, assuming it was a straggler. But it was just Grissom.

  “Come on,” he whispered, nodding for her to follow him. “Don’t flash your helmet lamps up at their roosts, and they’ll stay put.”

  Moving along behind Grissom, she observed signs of miners at work, presumably before bat mating season, also presumably the Belchers. There were hammered-out gouges in the cave walls, small mounds of stone, an anodized steel bucket, a broken-tipped, casually discarded pick, egg trays for packing gems…

  Then she heard a sound and realized she’d been hearing it since the bat attack. She glanced downward, checking out the moist crackle of her own footsteps.

  “Gris—”

  “I know,” he said. “Take a look at this.”

  As he slowly passed his torch over the cave floor, Sara saw it glistening with wetness in the light. Ahead were small, scattered puddles and, running through the middle of the tunnel, a still, thin slick of water channeling toward its mouth.

  She imagined Adam or Charlie stepping in the water, tracking to and from the cave with their tools, buckets, and rocks.

  “Guess we know how those shoeprints got where they are outside,” Barrett said. “What I want to find now is the source of the stream.”

  Grissom held the lamp out in front of him and strode forward, rounding a bend in the passage. “Found it,” he called back over his shoulder.

  He’d kept his voice low…being considerate of the bats, Sara thought gladly.

  She and Barrett hastened to catch up. Once they turned the bend, the cave wound farther on into the mountainside for about ten yards. At its rear was a fairly deep drip pool and, beyond it at an appreciable incline, an opening through which an almost perfect rectangle of daylight came streaming in to reflect off the pool’s glassy surface.

  Grissom had paused to study the opening.

  “That look natural to you?” he asked Barrett.

  The deputy shook his head. “Too horizontal and way too neat,” he said. “It’s an adit.”

  Grissom waited for an explanation.

  “That’s an opening prospectors’ll dynamite into the hillside,” he said. “Gives them easier access to underground mineral deposits.”

  Grissom stood there looking thoughtful. He dropped his pack and knelt to get an object out of a pouch—a jar with a short rubber tube on one side of its circular lid and a sort of curved metal spout or pipe on the other.

  “Your turn to tell me what something is,” Barrett asked, pointing to it.

  Grissom rose from his haunches. “An aspirator,” he said matter-of-factly, and put the loose end of the tube into his mouth.

  Barrett scratched his head, watched Grissom step to the rim of the pool as if suddenly oblivious to him.

  Sara came up beside the deputy, seeing his confused expression.

  “He uses it for sucking up tiny animal specimens,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “The aspirator,” she said.

  Barrett looked at her for a long moment. “’Course,” he said at last. “I mean, seriously, why not?”

  Grissom had told the deputy it was an aspirator. But his most influential college entomology professor, a hands-on guy named Bauman, had called it a pooter, which was the traditional field collector’s term Grissom preferred. Not that he would have quibbled—the simple little suction device had the same function regardless of what name you used for it.

  On his knees now, he leaned over the slippery film of algae surrounding the drip pool and breathed in hard through the pooter’s plastic mouth tube, drawing up dozens of tiny Stygobromus lacicolus amphipods he’d seen crawling around at the water’s edge. A fine mesh screen element in the collection jar would prevent him from swallowing the creatures—or getting any in his lungs—and keep them trapped in the jar till he could transfer them to various other containers at the lab.

  The pooter returned to his knapsack, he filled a separate vial with water from the moveless pool, capped it tightly, and took some scrapings of the algae growing around the pool’s borders.

  Minutes later, Grissom got to his feet, his samples gathered and carefully stored away. Hoisting his knapsack over his shoulders again, he paused for a long, thoughtful look at the adit and the shaft of invasive sunlight it allowed into the cave.

  Behind him, Sara seemed to be snapping a whole lot of pictures.

  He knew she’d turn something up.

  Shoeprints outside the cave, more shoeprints inside.

  Turning from Grissom and the drip pool, Sara had spotted them leading toward a shallow recess in the cave wall. Prints galore, and many in the tunnel weren’t even partials but nice, clear, complete markings for comparison with Green Man’s hiking boots…and not only his boots, she thought.

  She aimed and clicked her camera, paying close attention to one thing and another about them. And then noticing something else besides.

  That something being wheel marks, at least to her eyes. But from what?

  “Looks to me like they were made by a wagon or pushcart,” Barrett said, reading the interest on her face. He’d come up behind Sara as she snapped away. “Probably something the brothers used to bring rocks out of the cave.”

  She thought about that for almost a full minute. And took more pictures.

  7

  THOUGH CATHERINE WASN’T quite gaping at her computer screen when Warrick popped his head through her office door, she was close to it, the information she’d just pulled off the Internet having widened her eyes considerably.

  “Cath,” he said. “You’re here early.”

  She glanced at the time readout at the bottom of her monitor. It read 10:30 A.M.

  “So are you,” Catherine said, thinking that neither of them was technically due in till around two in the afternoon, she being the swing-shift supervisor and Warrick being one of the CSIs assigned to her team.

  Of course, if one were to be a hundred percent honest, the delineation between one shift and another got kind of noodly here at headquarters when you were working a case, which was just about always. Most often, in fact, you spent so much time gathering and analyzing crime-scene evidence that the shifts bled together so you wondered why anybody had bothered setting them up in the first place.

  But Catherine guessed it was better to impose a theoretical structure to the day than none at all. If the homicidal maniacs of the world would only cooperat
e in practice by doing their dirty deeds in neat, punctual shifts, and clues could be discovered according to precisely defined timetables—killers and their hunters alike running their schedules in synchronous harmony—life would be marvelously divine.

  “…Mark Baker at the golf course about an hour ago,” Warrick was saying.

  “What about him?” Catherine frowned. “Sorry…my mind’s in about ten different places at once.”

  Warrick gave her a puzzled look and then repeated himself, reminding her about the meeting he’d set up with the ballplayer and his lawyer at the charity invitational and summarizing how it had gone.

  Catherine listened attentively this time. “You think he’ll come in for a physical on his own volition?” she asked.

  Warrick wobbled his hand in the air. “I’d put the chances at about fifty-fifty,” he said. “Millar won’t budge when it comes to advising him against it.”

  “Conscientious defense attorney that he is,” Catherine said without optimism. She produced a sigh. “It’ll be easier for everybody if Baker does this voluntarily. We should give him a day or so to decide before applying for a subpoena.”

  Warrick nodded his agreement. “So,” he said, pulling a chair up to her desk. “What’s with you being cooped up in here while the early birds are plucking worms out of the ground?”

  “You could argue I’ve been doing the same thing,” Catherine said. “I ran a few cross-database searches on our art connoisseur and plastic surgeon par excellence Dr. Layton Samuels…and also on his devoted wife, Eleanor.”

  Warrick raised an eyebrow. “Is it just my imagination that the word devoted sounded kind of loaded coming out of your mouth?” he asked.

  Catherine sighed wearily. “According to federal records, the Samuelses are officially residents of New Canaan, Connecticut. That’s where Layton practiced medicine until about ten years ago and where they still own a home,” she said. “Connecticut’s also the state where Eleanor Samuels made a court filing for a legal separation from her husband around the middle of last month. The grounds were spousal neglect.”