by Carly Bishop
“Yes. High school kids could do it.”
Kiel’s brows drew together. “Did anyone ever make any effort to find out if that’s what happened the day Keller was killed and Robyn’s leg was crushed, or was it just assumed that the Hallelujah collapsed on its own?”
For a moment Lucy stared blankly at him. “I doubt any attempt was made. There was no reason to think anyone would do such a thing. And there weren’t that many of us who even knew Robyn and Keller would be there.”
“Who knew?” Robyn asked softly.
“I knew. I’m sure Stuart Willetts did as well, which meant Trudi knew.” Lucy shook her head in disbelief. “If Trudi knew, or Stuart, either one, that’s pretty telling, isn’t it? But I believe the hikers who reported that the mine had collapsed never told the rescue parties or authorities that they heard a blast that might have caused the collapse first.”
“We’ll check those records,” Kiel said, “but in the end, it all comes back to whether or not someone set charges that caused the Hallelujah to collapse.” He shrugged. “Unless we find proof of that, all the rest is sheer speculation.”
Lucy warmed her cappuccino from the carafe, then pressed an invisible buzzer concealed in the arm of her chair. The twenty-fiveish young minion poked his head in the door in about two seconds. “See if you can get hold of Adelmeyer or Palmer for me.”
When Lucy’s young aide left, Robyn looked at her for an explanation.
“They’re both mining engineers. Gene Adelmeyer is ex-FBI, and an explosives residue expert, in addition. Tee Palmer is just an old miner with an instinct that won’t quit. He’s a cousin of mine, actually. Lives like a busteddown hermit, but he has several hundred thousand dollars salted away—and that’s only what he trusts the bank to hold.” She smiled fondly. “I’d bet there is a million more in ore he’s stashed beneath his cabin in leather pouches.”
Robyn felt encouraged. “They both sound perfect for the job.”
Lucy shook her head. “They are, Robyn, but I hate to hold up such hope of proving anything.”
Staring at an 1880s vintage cabinet displaying rock picks, axes, blasting caps and a couple of six-shooters behind authentic period glass panels, Kiel turned back. “Why is that?”
Lucy smiled, her expression somewhere between seductive, admiring and regretful. “Because it wouldn’t necessarily even take a stick of dynamite to cause a collapse. I could show you stopes—the spaces left after the ore has been taken out—where huge slabs of rock have separated from the ceiling and fallen down all by themselves. It doesn’t take much.”
“Are you saying it’s impossible, Lucy?”
“Not at all, Robyn. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll go to the ends of the earth if necessary to find the top men—but the Hallelujah is an old mine. All I’m saying is that in the realm of possibilities, even you or Keller could have inadvertently caused the collapse.”
“Lucy,” Robyn protested, “when the mine began collapsing Keller and I were standing in the middle of the end of a small tunnel—“
“It doesn’t matter, Robyn. Even if we discount the possibility that your being there somehow upset the balance, a lot of blasting took place down in those shafts. Every hundred feet, a new level, new blasting. There’ll be trace evidence of powder and dynamite all over creation that could be well over a century old.”
“How does that keep us from identifying new blasting activity?” Robyn asked. “Granted, it’s a year old now, but—“
“If I were going to try to make an old mine shaft collapse in an attempted murder,” Kiel interrupted, catching Lucy’s implication, “and if I wanted to cover my tracks, I’d use plain old-fashioned dynamite.” He looked to Lucy. “Isn’t that right?”
“Exactly.” Lucy blinked slowly. “You sure as hell wouldn’t use signature materials, or even anything remotely modern.”
Chapter Nine
Robyn and Kiel met with Gene Adelmeyer at Planet Hollywood that night. He promised to take surface and core samples, based on Lucy’s computer graphics representations of the Hallelujah. The samples would be tested in his Denver labs for explosives residues, but as Lucy had suggested, if dynamite had been used and not any modern-day explosives, dating the blast residues would likely prove impossible.
Tee Palmer proved more elusive. If he kept a cell phone, Robyn thought, he wasn’t particularly slavish about keeping a functional battery. If he’d gone prospecting, there was no telling when he could be reached.
In the meantime, Lucinda Montbank provided Robyn and Kiel with underutilized office space in her building. Cartons of records were checked out of the county courthouse vaults, with nothing more than a Montbank personal guarantee, and transported the three blocks down Main Street to the building her company occupied.
Robyn put in calls to the Savannah Beach, Georgia, couple and the University of Colorado students who had been hiking independently in the vicinity of the Hallelujah the day of the accident.
Lucinda’s memory was accurate. Neither group, upon reporting the collapse, had mentioned hearing a blast that could have created the cave-in, and when Robyn finally got through to them, they all repeated that they hadn’t heard a blast.
“Which doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, Robyn,” Kiel said.
She sat at a desk in an office Lucinda had provided, layers deep in files and court records. Tossing her pen down, she leaped up and began to pace.
“Kiel, this is all feeling like a wild-goose chase to me. Like some ridiculous notion I latched onto as if it were a lifesaver, when really it’s an anchor pulling me down!”
Kiel exhaled sharply and put aside the notes of interviews Keller had conducted with Detective Crandall. “Robyn, look. I know this has to be frustrating. I’m frustrated. But there is something screwy in all this. Maybe Candelaria didn’t murder Spyder—or even Keller. Maybe Willetts is getting the short end of the stick here. But I was sent because some injustice was done. I think we just have to be patient and work through what we have until something turns up.”
Rubbing her hands up and down her arms to dispel the chill, Robyn nodded. “I know. But it sure feels like we’re going in circles. Have you come across anything useful in Kell’s notes?”
“One thing. A sort of recurring theme in his cartoon figures. Come look.”
He showed her the first several pages of notes Keller had taken in interviewing the witnesses he had thought were going to be key to the presentation of the prosecution case. There were drawings all over the place, quick impressions Keller had recorded in that fashion. Then Kiel narrowed what he showed her to the pages devoted to discussions with Ken Crandall.
Keller had perfectly captured the square shape of Detective Crandall’s body, and a more triangular headaspects he caricatured that Robyn had not noticed but recognized immediately as Crandall.
“Look. This is the first time.” The doodle was just a caricature. “The second.” Beside Crandall, a heap had been sketched in, like a pile of smelly manure.
Robyn laughed. “Look at how you can tell this pile of doo-doo stinks.”
Kiel smiled. Keller had used what cartoonists call a waftarom to indicate the stench, but Kiel had the presence of mind not to name it, not to reveal he knew what Keller knew.
He flipped between pages as if he had Keller’s perfect recall to several more. Beginning with the third one, the cartoon figure of Detective Ken Crandall was wielding a shovel.
“What do you think Keller was indicating here?”
“One of two things, I guess,” Robyn said. “Either Crandall was digging through piles of manure to get at the truth, or he was shoveling manure at Kell. Stuff he couldn’t believe. Is that what you were thinking, too?”
“Yeah. And it would seem to me that by the time Keller signed on as special prosecutor, digging for the truth of the matter should have been a done deal.” He pulled another notebook full of Keller’s scribbling, from later dates. “This is how it changes.”
Looking at the next one of
Keller’s sketches that Kiel showed her, Robyn frowned. The pile in the margin, sketched at the edge of Keller’s notes, had been reduced now, half behind Crandall’s blocky figure and triangular head, half still before him. A tire lay submerged in the remaining half.
“This must mean Crandall was looking for the tire that left that tread mark in the snow at Spyder’s estate.”
“Looks like it. And now this.” In the next one Kiel showed her, the tire was barely visible in the smelly heap behind Crandall’s caricature, only the waftaroms had gotten thicker. Kiel turned pages once more. “We’re almost to the end. See here?”
It was difficult to pick out in the margin, but she could see the outlines Kiel traced with his freckled finger.
“The smelly part is behind him, and Crandall is now digging a hole in the ground.”
Robyn rubbed her forehead with her knuckles. “Why a hole in the ground?”
“Just what I wanted to know. A few minutes ago I came upon this one—and you can see we’re right up to a day or so before you two went to the Hallelujah.”
The final cartoon piece Keller had sketched during his interviews with Detective Crandall was chilling. The hole Crandall’s caricature had dug had consumed him, and the county courthouse, accurate in every detail from its distinctive roofline to the central tower with the United States and Colorado flags flying over it, was distorted. From its base the building was being pulled, dragged in the direction of the hole.
“It’s as if,” Robyn said, “Crandall had dug himself into a hole and was pulling the halls of justice down with him.” Cold seized her shoulders, and she began to pace again. “This is too creepy, Kiel. I was here. We’d rented that condo. I was living with Kell. If he thought anything like this, why wouldn’t be have said something to me? Anything?”
Kiel shook his head. “Didn’t you agree it would be better, professionally and ethically, to steer clear of Keller’s cases when you married?”
She thumped the pile of Keller’s notebooks. “There’s a big difference, Kiel, between knowing every little thing that was going on as Keller recorded them like this, and telling me the case was taking a dive. I mean, look at this, Kiel. This is the county courthouse getting dragged down into a bottomless pit! It would not have been any ethical blunder to say to me, ‘Robyn, there are big problems here.’ I didn’t have a clue!”
“This isn’t much to go on, Robyn. Maybe Keller thought there were problems, and maybe he thought cops like Crandall would finally drag the judicial system down. We don’t know.”
She breathed out and crossed her arms over her chest. “But why wouldn’t he have said something to me?”
Kiel flashed on a moment when he was experiencing himself as Keller going down into the Hallelujah with Robyn. Keller had been thinking that there were serious problems with the Candelaria case, and he’d intended to tell her about them the night he died. “I have a feeling,” Kiel said, “that Keller would have told you everything if he’d lived.”
“I suppose. But it doesn’t feel right, Kiel. We should never have made such a stupid agreement. I could have dealt with knowing what was going on without writing about it.”
“I’d bet Keller was arriving at the same conclusion himself.”
She stared at Kiel, at his bronze coloring and bright, intense blue eyes, at the freckles that made him so stunningly attractive and as different from Keller as he could possibly be—and deep doubts assailed her. Doubts over things Kiel knew that only Keller should have known, and things he said, such as, Keller had come to the same conclusion.
How did he know?
Was he only the most brilliant of Avenging Angels, to guess so often and so well what Keller knew and wanted and thought? Or was it all a savvy manipulation worse than Stuart Willetts had ever dreamed of, a creepily intuitive ability to discern what she most wanted or needed to hear?
A part of her mistrusted him so much that she wanted to run. A part of her believed so much in his integrity and truthfulness that she doubted herself more than she doubted him. And there was the lesson Greatgrandmama Marie would say her soul had invited.
To trust herself.
If she wasn’t still so afraid of the darkness, the void Keller had left, as well as the real, profound, literal fear of being in the dark, she could begin. For now, she had to believe, to trust that an angel of God would not lead her into an even more terrifying darkness.
Kiel had stuck a pencil behind his ear. Now he sat back and planted his feet up on the desk he’d been using. “Do you want to talk to Crandall again?”
She plunked down in her own chair. “I think that would be a useless drill. He will only say what he’s already told us. And why not? Why should he tell us anything now?”
“Come on, Robyn. You’ve interviewed plenty of people who have absolutely no reason to want to tell you the truth. You just keep hammering away until they crack, isn’t that the way it goes?”
“Yes,” she granted. He was quoting her now, straight out of Where Angels Fear to Tread. Every person involved in that case had a secret, and a hidden agenda. But she’d tried to find the truth. Hammered away until, finally, one person cracked, and then another and another.
“The thing is, I don’t want to spend weeks on end if the whole process can be short-circuited. What if we were to go see Judge Ybarra?” The Honorable Vincent J. Ybarra had occupied the bench in Colorado v. Candelaria. “Maybe Keller went to him.”
“There’s no record of it here.”
“Off the record, then. Maybe there were sidebar discussions or in-chamber meetings with Keller that didn’t show up in the record.”
“It’s worth a try.”
Robyn nodded. “I think so.” She reached for the final notebook where Keller’s distorted sketch of the courthouse being dragged into Crandall’s hole appeared. “If only he’d been a little less cryptic!” Nothing in Keller’s written notes helped to interpret his thinking on the issue.
“He wasn’t expecting to die, Robyn. He knew what they meant, and at the time, that was all that mattered.”
Lucy chose that moment to check in with them. “Robyn, Kiel. Hi. What are you up to?”
“Our eyeballs—in Keller’s paperwork, trial transcripts, case notes. We’re almost done.”
“In only two days!” Lucy exclaimed. “How very diligent of you.”
It wasn’t so much a matter of diligence, though. It was true that between midday on Wednesday and now, at midday on Friday, she and Kiel had made their way through seven weeks of Keller’s time spent interviewing witnesses, cops, Detective Crandall, Chloe Nielsen, Spyder Nielsen’s agent Shad Petrie, even Trudi’s ex, Pascal Candelaria. But mostly their speediness had to do with Kiel’s being an angel who required no sleep, who could focus his concentration in a way mortals could not.
And on Robyn’s part, it had a lot to do with avoidance. Better to pick up one more file than sit there looking at Kiel through her lashes trying to figure out why he had captured her interest when Keller would never vacate her heart. Better to comb through another volume of courtroom transcripts than look up, and notice him noticing her and feeling that totally inappropriate zing…the tug of distant memories, the insistent rapping of more recent ones.
Of making love with Kiel Alighieri.
So it wasn’t diligence. What it was was avoidance.
“Come have lunch with me.” Lucy gave Kiel a desultory look. “Just us…girls.”
Another avoidance mechanism. “Kiel? Would you mind?”
He glanced at the ivory charm hanging around her neck. She wondered again whether the intricate subtle wings were supposed to be some kind of high, heavenly voodoo amulet to protect her outside his presence. The notion seemed too whimsical altogether. Heaven and voodoo didn’t quite go together in the same breath, but who knew?
The small charm brought her comfort in the night when her confusion about Kiel, and what went on between them that she couldn’t quite remember, began to loom before her. She had even w
ondered if he was taking deliberate swipes at her conscious mind to erase her recall.
The wings reminded her through the day that she was not in this dangerous situation by herself.
Sometimes she needed the reminder. Sometimes her stomach pitched and twisted with how vulnerable she was making herself doing what she was doing here, virtually daring Keller’s murderer to silence her, too. She needed Kiel’s ivory charm when she remembered that leaving sleeping dogs to lie made much more sense than stirring them to snarl and snap and do to her what they’d done to Keller.
And yes. She needed to go let her hair down with Lucy and forget that she even needed the small wings. “Kiel?”
He tossed a pencil down in the open binding of court records and jerked his bronze-haired head toward the door. “Take your time. We’ll follow up on this other stuff later this afternoon.”
“Thanks.” Robyn put a bookmark in the next page of Keller’s accumulated notes and stood.
Lucy had a table reserved at a private club. She walked arm in arm with Robyn, remarking on the shame it was that a fungus of some sort had attacked all the aspen leaves. “No gold this fall. Sort of sad, sort of telling.”
“Telling?”
Lucy shrugged. “Sure. Like the old Casey striking out at bat story. No joy in Mudville tonight.” She hugged Robyn’s arm to her side. “Robyn, I can’t tell you how sick I am that Keller died here, how it pains me to think of what you’ve been through in the last year.”
“Life goes on, though, doesn’t it?” How many times would she have to reassure herself and everyone around her of that before she knew in her heart that life would go on?
Lucy understood that. “The world goes on. Aspen goes on. Spyder was murdered, and then Keller died— possibly murdered. But nothing is ever the same. So, yes. The dismal fate of the aspen leaves reminds me that things aren’t what they’re supposed to be. And they might never be again, for you.”
Robyn wanted to protest that dismal was too harsh, and that if she couldn’t see her way past the ruined leaves this season, she would again—but they had arrived at the entrance to Lucy’s club and turned in.
