Morgan glanced to his left and saw Kiri standing, wide-eyed, about six feet away. He lifted his left hand to block her coming any closer, then waved her away. Turning back to the detective, he said, “You didn’t let me finish. I’ve installed some software on the computer system and it’s trying to restore the deleted files.”
“Yeah, sure it is,” Chatfield said, his disbelief evident. “And, I’ll bet it hasn’t found them, has it?”
“Because the files are no longer correctly labeled, the program has to search the entire drive in detail. That can take a long time.”
The detective rolled his eyes, “Sure it can. Let me talk to the girl.”
Adam stepped up next to Morgan, tugging on his arm and leaning his mouth close to his ear. As Morgan looked down, he saw Adam had his phone in his hand. He whispered, “I found a legal advice site online. It says they can’t arrest you in your home without a warrant.”
Morgan turned his attention back to the detective, “You’ve already said you intend to arrest her. Do you have a warrant?”
“I don’t need a warrant. I have probable cause to believe she murdered her father.”
“It’s my understanding that you do have to have a warrant if you’re going to arrest her in her home.” Morgan glanced again at the uniformed policeman and decided the man looked uncomfortable with the situation.
“Just tell her to come here.”
“Hang on, I’m going to call my attorney before we comply with that request.”
Looking disgusted, Chatfield said, “You’ve already lawyered up? You should be worried; you’re living with a killer.”
“I’m not. I trust her absolutely. And to address your first point,” Morgan said, getting out his phone, “I’m lawyered up to deal with my divorce. I suspect that arrests are not his specialty but that he’ll know a lot more about them than I do.” He looked down at the phone to call up his contacts.
Sounding disgusted, Chatfield turned away as he said, “I’ll be back with a warrant. She’d better not go anywhere.”
Morgan called after him, “What’s the evidence you’re basing this ‘probable cause’ on?”
Chatfield just shook his head and kept walking.
Though his knees felt a little weak, Morgan stayed in the doorway until the two men were in their cars and had started driving away. He turned to see how Kiri was taking the events. She looked shrunken, her head hanging down. Lindl had his arms around her. Adam fidgeted next to them, looking like he wished he knew what to do. Morgan got down on one knee so he could look up into Kiri’s downturned eyes, “It’s gonna be okay.”
She lifted hollow eyes, “It’s not—”
Lindl produced a gentle snort, “You’re such a pessimist. Don’t forget you’re innocent!”
Morgan called Vic Naylor, profusely apologetic to be bothering him on a Friday night. Naylor was polite enough to claim he didn’t mind. After Morgan had explained the issues, Naylor said that they’d been correct that they had the right to refuse arrest in their home without a warrant. This was apparently based on the “man’s home is his castle” doctrine. “But, if he comes back with a warrant, you’ll have to let him take her away. It’d be a good idea to prepare her for that eventuality.”
“Like how?”
“Well, she could pack a bag or something like that. They may not let her take things into lockup with her, especially on a murder rap, but if they do she’d be way ahead of the game. You should also try to figure out how she might keep up with her schoolwork. Pack her textbooks in the hopes that they’ll let her keep them. Like everything else, you can find advice on-line about what to do and take with you if you’re going to jail.”
“Will we be able to get her out on bail?”
“Juveniles aren’t released on bond. Instead there’s usually some kind of quick preliminary hearing. Then they’re usually released to their parents, or guardian in her case. Um,” Vic hesitated uncomfortably, “if the charges are serious, like murder, they can be held until their trial. And, they’re often tried as adults.”
Damn! Morgan thought, another problem to pile on top of all the others. “Do you have any recommendations as to how I could find her a lawyer in this area?”
“Tilly Arvind, one of my law school classmates, is a defense attorney in Asheville. I haven’t kept up with her, but she was smart and really nice. You could look her up and tell her I sent you…”
When Morgan checked his laptop again, it still hadn’t found any video files from the right time period. He went upstairs, finding all three of the kids in Kiri’s room, looking glum.
He said, “I’d like to do some brainstorming, are you guys up for it?”
Lindl and Kiri looked dubious, but he and Adam had brainstormed problems before, so Adam agreed with some enthusiasm.
The first thing Morgan did was discuss the possibility that Kiri might wind up going to jail briefly until they could get her out under Morgan’s responsibility and/or prove her innocence. He told her what Vic had said about how she might prepare herself for a trip to jail. She nodded, “I’ll read about the law that applies to situations like this too.”
Morgan thought that having a plan for dealing with the issue probably sat better with her than simply sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Next,” Morgan said, “I think a couple of us need to go check on the mine. We need to know if the police are still guarding it.”
Lindl said, “I can do that, but why does it matter?”
“Well, first of all, I’m assuming those guys are hiding somewhere in the mine or the cops would have found them and Chatfield wouldn’t have been blaming Kiri. With the cops gone, they could just walk out of the mine and disappear. That’s why I should go with you; you don’t want to be alone if you run into one of those guys.”
Adam frowned, “Are you thinking that if the cops are gone, we should start guarding the entrance ourselves?”
“No, but we should certainly turn the cameras back on so we’d get a record of them leaving. Do you guys know if the cameras are infrared so they’d be able to see someone at night?”
Kiri nodded, “I’ve seen animals in the dark, but it might be a good idea to have someone go up there after dark while someone else watches the link to make sure everything’s still working.”
“Good idea. Next, how well do you guys know the inside of the mine? Do you know of any places where those guys might be hiding?”
Kiri said, “I don’t know where they might be hiding, I never went very deep into the mine. But I’ve been wondering if one of them might have fallen in a down-shaft. I know about one shaft. It isn’t far down the main tunnel. We had some roped stakes fencing off that shaft, not to physically keep us out, just to warn us of its location. Last night I saw the rope and stakes were knocked down. Maybe one of those guys stumbled through the fence and fell down the shaft.”
“Not both of them?”
She shrugged, “I saw the fence was down when I first went in there. The big guy grabbed me after that.” After a pause, she said, “Since that’s the guy that shot Dad, it wouldn’t break my heart if it turned out he fell down a different shaft. One deeper into the tunnels that I don’t know about.”
“Adam, since you’ve done some rock climbing, you at least have some expertise. Can you look into how we might check out any down-shafts to see if they’ve got dead bodies in them?”
Adam’s eyebrows rose, “I’m not sure rock climbing and going down a mine shaft are all that similar—”
“I’m not asking you to climb down a shaft,” Morgan said patiently. “I’m just thinking you might understand the issues and equipment involved better than the rest of us.”
Adam shrugged, “Sure, I’ll look it up.”
“Next question,” Morgan said. “What do you guys think Daryn was doing up there in the mine? Presumably it’s something that might make a lot of money since it attracted some thugs.”
Lindl glanced at Kiri and she just shrug
ged.
Morgan just sat quietly looking at them for a couple of minutes. He’d heard somewhere it was considered to be a good interview technique. Supposedly, if you let a silence stretch after a question, people got uncomfortable and just started talking. But neither of them spoke. He reached in his pocket and pulled out the little block of silvery metal. “This was in your dad’s effects. Do either of you know what it is?”
Adam looked curious, Lindl looked baffled and Kiri looked surprised. Adam said, “Can I look at it?”
Morgan handed it to him. Adam’s eyebrows shot up, “Whoa, heavy!”
Morgan kept his eyes on Kiri and her eyes stayed on the piece of metal. Adam was slowly turning it over, scrutinizing every surface. Lindl held his hand out to Adam and Adam handed it to him. Lindl said, “Wow, it really is heavy.” He handed the block of metal to Kiri without being asked. “You think it’s solid silver?”
Morgan said slowly, “It’s too heavy to be silver.”
Adam said, “Could it be white gold? Gold’s supposed to be really dense.”
His eyes still on Lindl and Kiri, Morgan said, “It’s also too heavy to be gold.”
As if he were playing a straight man, Adam said, “Really? What’s heavier than gold?”
Having just learned them, Morgan recited, “Rhenium, platinum, iridium, and osmium.” After a second, he said, “Well, and americium and uranium too, but they’re both radioactive. Doesn’t seem likely that Daryn would’ve been carrying them around in his pocket.”
Quietly, Kiri said, “What is its density?”
Morgan shrugged, “The scale in the pantry isn’t accurate enough to know for sure. I get a figure of twenty-two point five grams per cubic centimeter, but it could be off by as much as a gram per cc.”
“Wow,” Kiri said, almost inaudibly.
Excitedly, Adam said, “Platinum’s worth even more than gold, right?”
“It has been in the past, but it isn’t right now.”
“Dang.” Adam said, sounding disappointed, “If it is platinum, how much would it be worth?”
“Almost $10,000.”
Adam and Lindl both drew their heads back in surprise.
Kiri didn’t look surprised at all. She held the block of metal out to Morgan. As he took it, he said, “I’ve got the feeling you have a pretty good idea where this came from.”
She shrugged, “Sure. I suppose it came from the mine.”
Morgan tilted his head and looked at her curiously. When she wasn’t forthcoming, he finally said, “Kiri, I’m going to try to do my best for you, whether you come clean with me or not. By that I mean that I’ll do my best to love and care for you in the place of my brother, to get you through college, and to support you however you may need it. And, if Detective Chatfield and the rest of the police force keep coming after you, I’m planning to do my best to defend you.” He sighed, “But, it’s pretty concerning to realize you’re keeping secrets from me. If there’s something going on up in the mine I don’t know about; I could end up tripping over my own tongue when I’m trying to talk to the police. Or, when I’m explaining things to your defense attorney.”
He stopped talking, but kept his eyes on her. She looked uncomfortable, but her lips had formed a thin line. She didn’t speak. He narrowed his eyes, “Was your dad doing something illegal? Is that it?”
“No!” Kiri said, looking astonished. “No, he would never—”
Morgan tossed the chunk of metal up in the air. As he caught it, he said, “Then, where did this come from?”
Kiri just looked stubborn. Morgan decided to give it a rest and stood up. He said, “I hope you’ll think about this. It’s going to be hard fighting on your side if I’m fighting blind.” He turned to Lindl, “You ready to go see what’s going on up at the mine?”
Lindl nodded and stood up. He took a step toward the door, but then turned to Kiri and said, “He’s on your side Kiri. I think you should tell him.”
As they left the room, Morgan turned back to Kiri, “it’s dark outside now. Can you turn on the security camera recording and watch to make sure you can see Lindl and me on the cameras when we get up there?”
Kiri frowned, “Are you saying it’s okay to start recording again now?”
“Yeah, the hard drive from the house computer’s completely copied over to that external drive. It’s okay if we start recording on the house computer again. I’d suggest, if you can figure out how, that you set it to save seventy-two hours instead of just twenty-four.”
She nodded, looking thoughtful.
Kiri just sat silently on the bed after Morgan and Lindl left. She was staring out the dark window as if she could see the mine. Adam thought he should try to start a conversation, but didn’t know what to say. Kiri was far different from any girl Adam’d known before. His feelings about her were ambivalent. Well, that isn’t true, he thought. His feelings about her ranged from fascinated to alarmed, but they certainly weren’t ambivalent. He had a hard time keeping his eyes off her. Her startlingly blue eyes, set off by her pale skin and jet black hair were striking. Sometimes he wondered whether she wore colored contacts and dyed her hair, but he’d decided she probably didn’t. When he’d first seen her, she’d seemed so thin he thought she might be anorexic. Now that he’d seen her run and gotten a closer look at her arms he realized she might not have much body fat, but she was in seriously good shape.
Despite the physical attraction, he didn’t like the way she was so standoffish to his dad. Like almost all teenagers, Adam had his own conflicts with his dad, but he’d come to realize that Morgan was a lot better father than most of his friends parents. A way better parent than his mother. He’d seen the effort his dad was putting in to help Lindl and Kiri despite having massive problems of his own. Seeing her treat Morgan badly even though he was working so hard on her behalf irritated him.
Though she’s got some huge problems of her own, he reminded himself. I should cut her some slack. And the stuff she knows! During several conversations Adam had been flabbergasted by how much she knew about various topics. Once, while they’d been sitting on Adam’s bed, listening to Lindl playing one of his transcendental guitar pieces, Adam had snorted and said, “And some people say music’s just math.”
Adam had simply been trying to disparage people who missed the beauty in music, but Kiri took him seriously. She launched into a discussion of the mathematical relationships between the octaves and the ratios between the notes in the twelve-tone scale. The depth of her knowledge astonished him, although he couldn’t follow a lot of the math terminology she used.
When she wound down, he’d said, “I was just trying to say that some people miss the beauty by focusing on the science.”
She’d stared at him for a moment, then said abruptly, “Probably true. I can’t play worth a damn.”
He’d felt embarrassed, but hadn’t known what to say to excuse his faux pas.
Adam heard the back door open and close, telling them that Lindl and Adam’s dad were on their way up the hill to the mine.
Kiri got up to go downstairs, so Adam got up and followed her. He tried to think of something to say, but everything that came to mind sounded inane, especially in the face of the many difficulties she faced. It’s hard to come up with idle chitchat around her.
Sitting down at the computer, she clicked on the icon for the program running the security cameras. A moment later, a window popped open on the screen. It had six smaller sub windows under a toolbar. That seems like a lot of cameras, Adam thought. He’d just started to study the top three when they went blank, one after the other.
They hadn’t seemed to be showing the inside of the mine. He would’ve thought he’d been looking at the inside of some ordinary rooms. Workshops, or something like that, from the equipment inside. The walls had been smooth, not rough like the walls inside the mine. His eyes dropped to the lower three windows. Two of them showed the inside of the mine tunnel. Irregular, rough, dark walls arching over a rough floor
with rails running down the middle of it. The third of the lower three windows was showing the mine entrance. When he was up there he hadn’t seen the entrance from the same angle as the camera, but he could still tell what it was. Curious, he asked, “What were we looking at in the upper three windows?”
“Static test images,” Kiri replied, quite unsatisfyingly.
What’s a static test image? Adam wondered, but didn’t press her. He squinted and leaned in closer. One of the windows had a couple of glowing red dots where he thought he remembered seeing what’d looked like cabinets for electronics. There was a faint glow near the dots. I think those red dots are LED status indicators for the equipment.
Kiri clicked on the title bar of the window and dragged it upward, then around the desktop a little. Because of the initial upward movement, Adam had the distinct impression that she’d thought to move it up so that the upper three sub-windows wouldn’t be visible. Since you had to drag it by the title bar at the top of the window, it’d proved impossible to drag it that high. Adam suspected there was a workaround for that problem, but he didn’t think she wanted to spend the time to figure it out with him watching. She really doesn’t want me thinking about or asking more questions about those upper three windows, he thought.
Kiri opened Chrome and typed in a query. “While I’m waiting for those guys to show up on camera, I guess I’ll do a Google search for advice on goin’ to jail.’”
“Good idea,” Adam said, still thinking about what the three upper security camera windows had been showing. I wonder how she turned them off. “Um, I guess I’ll start looking up information on how to climb down mine shafts.”
Kiri nodded but didn’t say anything, apparently focused on what she’d found about jail.
Adam got his laptop. Logging on, he started doing searches for information on caving and exploration of mine tunnels. It turned out that climbing down mine shafts had some similarity to rock-climbing, at least as far as the kinds of the equipment used. However, mine shafts and caves were dark, and frequently wet and slippery. This made them dangerous to climb or descend using hand and toe holds like you did while climbing rocks outside. Those would be holds you could neither see in the dark, nor grip in the wet. Climbing ropes could be quite helpful while descending a steeply inclined tunnel, but in vertical shafts you might wind up suspended in space and completely dependent on your rope.
The Transmuter's Daughter Page 12
