We flew Jarre Creek three times at three different altitudes: three thousand feet up, fifteen hundred feet up, and Fritz’s favorite, the low-level zoom. That last time he rocked it down through Jarre Canyon so low that we had the sheriff’s deputies scrambling for cover. Fritz had a grin on his face so wide that I whipped the lens his way and recorded that too. Who says cowboys only ride horses?
I was back on the ground with the memory card from the camera in my hand when a van pulled up. “Which one of you is Em Hansen?” he asked. A nice-looking man with big, dark eyes climbed out.
“That would be me,” I said, and handed him the card.
“Ah, you’ve gone digital, you lovely thing,” he said. “Let me just shoot this straight into my machine. I’ve already downloaded the latest air photos, which were taken about a year ago.” He led me straight to the back of the minivan he had arrived in and opened the door. Inside was a wealth of electronic equipment. When he saw my eyes widen, he laughed. “Hey, we come prepared. I’ve got complete equipment here—computer hooked up to microscope, scanner, fax, printer, geophysics, and the very latest in geostatistics software. You’re gonna love us, baby!” He arranged himself on a seat that swung out from under a shallow counter and flipped a few switches, activating a keyboard and a big flat-screen monitor, then leaned back and rubbed his hands together in glee.
Deputy Mayhew was just walking up to the van. “Tim, long time no see,” he said.
“Hey, Ernie, you in charge of this show? How’s the wife?”
Tim got right to work. Inside of five minutes, he had overlain my images with his digitized air photos and normalized the two scales to match. “This flood did damage, all right. This bank has caved,” he said, “and here we’ve got a fresh deposit of sand. Nice transverse bar, pretty as a picture. But wait! It is a picture!” He chuckled at his own joke. Then he set about analyzing the image for discrepancies, massaging the keyboard to develop probability maps. He pointed at the places where his maps indicated highest probability for transportation and deposition of an object the size and buoyancy of a human body. Then he overlaid the highway map and clicked a few more keys. The resolution of his map sharpened.
“What does that do?” asked Michele.
Tim chuckled. “Killers are just like water-well drillers. They like to make their hole at a place where it’s convenient to back in their rig. So my software here weights the search for good access points.” He put his finger on a bright red bull’s eye. “So the S and R people already probed these areas?”
“Yes.”
“How long a stick they use?”
I said, “Two meters. But I’ve been watching. If they hit a rock at three inches, that was it. They were looking for soft sand.”
Michele asked, “And you are looking for … ?”
I said, “A burial, of course.”
“You prefer an act of God or poor driving skills?” asked Tim.
I said, “Show me the bank that should not have failed in this storm, and I’ll show you where the body is buried.”
Tim giggled maniacally. “You sound very sure of yourself. Come on, you’re taking all the fun out of this. Hey, Jerry!” he called, leaning toward the tailgate to get the attention of one of his colleagues. “You took Fluvial Geo-morph from Stan Schumm up at CSU, right?”
“Yo.” A lanky guy with blond hair that stood up in random tufts appeared at the tailgate. We explained the question to him. He climbed in next to Tim and went over several screens, turning his hands this way and that as he mentally reckoned the varying flow directions of the stream bed. “There,” he said, putting a long, crooked finger on the screen. “That’s an inside bank. The thalweg—the strongest part of the current—would have been on the opposite side of the creek at peak runoff—see, there’s a fresh cut on that side, and it looks right, while this doesn’t. It should have been depositing sand instead of eroding it. So unless you’ve got some kind of muskrat or beaver undermining that inside bank, that’s it.”
Tim tapped a few keys, putting the road overlay on the photographs using his GIS—geographic information system—database. “Like a spy in the sky,” he said merrily. “Mm-huh, about a quarter mile upstream from this crossroads.” He twisted in his chair and stared downriver. “Let’s lock and load and put her in gear.”
Deputy Mayhew said, “We didn’t search there. Don’t you think that’s too far downstream?”
“For a flood deposit, maybe, but not for a burial,” said Tim.
We drove in caravan to the site, Tim’s van, Deputy Ernie in his cruiser, Michele in her rental, and Fritz and me in his. When we arrived at the site, we noted that while the scarp at the top of the bank looked fresh on the air photographs, it was hard to see from the center of the channel, where Jarre Creek was now settling back within its inner banks. There was in fact a screen of willows separating it from the area disturbed by the flood. I started to walk toward it, but Tim put out a hand. “We take it from here,” he said and nodded to another man, who was just pulling up in a pickup with a very avid-looking dog riding in the passenger’s seat. “Daisy, honey!” he called to the dog.
The dog stuck her muzzle out the open window of the truck cab. She had tall, pointy ears and a long, black snout. As her handler led her out on her lead, her narrow waist and long, sweeping tail danced with excitement. She already had an eye on the site.
I said, “What is she, some kind of German shepherd cross?”
“She is pure Belgian Malinois,” said her handler proudly. “They were bred for sheep but kept alive during the Second World War because they were so smart about carrying messages for the Resistance.” He took her to the bank, knelt beside her, removed her leash, and said, “Find, Daisy!”
The dog leapt down the bank and zigzagged across the ground, her nose down on the dirt.
“Can she find Gilda without even knowing what she smells like?” Michele asked.
The handler asked, “How long has this lady been dead?”
I said, “Anywhere up to three days.”
He grinned. “A good cadaver dog can smell a corpse newer than that, and Daisy’s the best.”
On cue, Daisy yelped and scratched, looking up to her handler for the next command.
“Daisy, come!” he said.
The dog burst from her position, galloped up the bank with the long, liquid gait of a wolf, and came to a halt seated at his side.
“Good girl,” he said, petting her and slipping her a treat.
Daisy raised her nose toward her master and gave him an adoring look.
“She found something?” asked Michele.
The man said, “Yes, something. It could be a deer, though such animals usually have better sense than to tarry by a creek bank when it’s raining like that.”
“Now what do we do?” asked Michele.
“We wait for the geophysicists and archaeologists,” said Tim. “The geophysicists will use ground-penetrating radar to map the variations in density where the soil’s been dug up. The archaeologists will do a careful excavation of the grave. They’ll get infinitely more data than a couple of deputies with shovels can ever hope to get.”
They arrived at six-thirty, having needed time to grab their gear after work. They went to work setting up cameras and grids and began mapping and digging.
Michele and I began a search through the weeds above the bank. It was there that Michele found the suggestions of footprints—about a men’s size nine, or a women’s eight—and I found what I was looking for: a twisted cylinder of plastic with a wire sticking out of it.
“What is it?” Fritz inquired.
“A blasting cap,” I said. “Michele, would you get the good deputy over here please? I want him to watch me bag this thing for evidence. But first, let’s get Tim’s surveyor to plot its position relative to the grave.”
AT 7 P.M. I CHECKED MY PHONE FOR MESSAGES AS MY stomach began to growl with hunger for dinner. No one had called, not Julia, and not Noel calling to report on her.
Where was she?
Michele’s cell phone rang a moment later. I heard her say, “Yes, this is she. Yes. Thank you. Okay, I’m writing that down.” When she’d ended the call, she announced, without looking at anyone, “The FBI found the pilot who flew the Baron to Gallup. They have voice recordings to prove which pilot made the calls, and eyewitnesses on the ground report only one man getting out at Gallup, and … it wasn’t Attabury.”
“Then where is he?” I asked.
“That has yet to be determined,” was all she could stand to say.
TIM OSNER’S CREW WAS REWARDED FOR ITS PAINSTAKING efforts. At 7:49 P.M., just as we were arranging the vehicles to shine headlights on the site because it was beginning to get dark, the archaeologist in charge of the site struck something soft yet unyielding with her trowel. She switched to a brush and uncovered a hand and then an arm. As the excavation proceeded, the mortal remains of the woman known as Gilda emerged from their rustic grave, and, after the corpse was carefully photographed and removed, the search for evidence was carefully widened, revealing the telltale shapes of shovel marks left by the murderer, who had hurriedly dug her grave under the cover of the willows. The condition of the body indicated that it had been interred for several days.
“What a lucky killer,” Tim mused. “What’s the likelihood you’re gonna get a storm like that so soon after, so you can toss the cart into the drink? I can see him thinking, if anybody finds her—a coyote digs her up, or someone digs in the bank for road metal—they’ll ascribe it to the forces of nature.”
“But why throw the cart in this creek?” Michele asked. “It brought us right to the corpse.”
“Guilt,” said Tim. “Killers may think they’re trying to cover their crimes, but they often expose themselves in convoluted ways. They’re like Lady Macbeth trying to get that spot of blood off their hands.” He stared into the grave. “This one was clever, but not quite clever enough.”
THIRTY-TWO
SATURDAY MORNING, MICHELE FINALLY LOCATED Hugo Attabury.
This did not require a house-to-house search of the continental United States. He turned himself in. He walked right into the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department offices under the guidance and protection of his new lawyer, a hotshot defense attorney from Chicago. The man who flew his plane to New Mexico Wednesday evening had dropped him off at a private airport near Albuquerque, where he had gotten a cab to the main airport, showed proper identification but paid in cash for a flight to the Windy City. He was now ready to talk to Michele Aldrich and swore that this time, he’d be telling the truth.
I was allowed to watch his deposition through the one-way glass of the interrogation room. He stated that the situation was straightforward: He had in fact flown Afton McWain to Salt Lake City on the Thursday evening in question. He had gone there to have dinner with a man who wanted to invest in his development enterprise. McWain had heard that he was going there and had asked for a ride. With the thought that a little time together might provide the opportunity to persuade McWain to drop his case or at least tone it down, he had said yes. Attabury’s investor had sent a man to pick him up at the airport and had given McWain a ride into town. They had dropped him at the south end of the Salt Palace Convention Center, where he said he was expecting to meet a friend. When Attabury had last seen McWain, he was very much alive. No, he had no idea whom he expected to meet there. And yes, he could produce the driver of the car, who saw him back to the airport three hours later to retrieve his airplane and fly home to Colorado. During the intervening time, he had been at the home of the investor, and if he damned well had to he would produce that man as well. Having said all of this, Attabury folded his arms across his meaty chest and refused to say another word.
Michele didn’t even bother to ask any questions, let alone three times or in three different ways. She just sat and listened. She wasn’t in charge of the interrogation. Attabury had specified that he would answer only to Deputy Ernest J. Mayhew. The whole party was over in less than fifteen minutes.
I was beginning to truly worry about Michele. She had dark circles beneath her eyes, and she seemed almost listless as she sat in that windowless room. I suppose she didn’t know what to do next.
After Attabury and his high-priced lawyer left the room, Fritz and I stepped in. We had returned to Denver for the night, and this time he had slept on the couch, suggesting that I seemed well on the road to recovery and asserting that, even as cushy as the carpet was, he was in need of something softer.
But he stayed with me like a shadow, and he was there with me when I rejoined Michele. Deputy Ernie sat in a straight-back chair giving Michele a rather stony look. It didn’t take a mind reader to know what he was thinking.
I said, “Deputy, I’ve been meaning to ask you a few things. You grew up here, am I right?”
He turned toward me, shifting his opinion from her to me. No longer was I a comrade in arms who had nearly been killed by the enemy; now I was just another interloper from out of state who didn’t know the hearts and minds of the locals. “Yes, I did,” he said slowly.
“Then you’ll excuse me, but you must know all the other fellows we’ve been asking questions about. Misters Entwhistle, Upton, and Johnson. And then there’s this group from away, the investors.”
He looked away. “Oh, them.”
Michele said, “Yes, them. I’ve been running checks on them with our colleagues over at the FBI. The principles of that organization are under investigation in two other states for money laundering and other suspected connections to drug running and racketeering. You’re aware of all that.”
“Yes.”
I said, “It must be terribly distressing having this going on in your town.”
“Spare me, Miss Hansen.” Mayhew inclined his head such that he could look at me from underneath his eyebrows.
I said, “All right, I can see that you’d like us to make this quick, so would you please show Miss Aldrich your photograph of that evidence I entrusted to you out at Jarre Creek yesterday evening?”
He frowned but opened his clipboard and produced the photograph. It showed the blasting cap as it had been found lying in the grass, before anyone had touched it. He shifted heavily in his chair, frowning with growing annoyance. He could tell he was being put on the spot, and he did not like it.
I said, “You know what that is, don’t you?”
“It’s a blasting cap. You told me that. They’re used by road crews, right?”
“I suppose they are, sometimes. Has anyone been working on the road out there any time lately?”
He shook his head. His hand was stiff on the clipboard, like a spider doing a protracted push-up.
I said, “Well now, I have another theory why that blasting cap was out there. You’ll note that it’s lying on top of every blade of grass and leaf it’s touching, which suggests that it had not been there very long, but it’s splattered with sand and clay from the surrounding soils, so it was there during the storm, right?”
He did not deny my logic.
Michele’s eyes were beginning to widen. She was ahead of the deputy, miles ahead. “You use those things in gravel quarries, don’t you?”
“Yes, you do,” I replied. “Now the question I have for you, sir, is who among the men we’ve been trying to question has ever worked in a quarry?”
Deputy Ernest J. Mayhew closed his eyes. After a moment he let out his breath in a sigh. “He told me he was here all that day and night, and I believed him,” he said.
“Who?”
“Johnson.”
“Bart?” I couldn’t believe it.
“No, his son, Zach.” He hung his head. “We’ve known each other since we was kids.”
Michele turned toward the door, ready to head for the courthouse to get a warrant for his arrest.
The deputy held out a hand. “Stop, Miss Aldrich. This crime is not under your jurisdiction.” There was a phone on the table. He lifted the handset off its cradle and dialed a numb
er. When the party answered, he said, “Sheriff, I’m afraid I need you to come down here. We got us some interrogating to do, and, well, it’s an old friend of mine.”
I waited patiently for the conversation to end, then said, with the respect due a man who could make an admission like he just had, “Ernie, may I observe while he’s being questioned? It’s just possible I’ve jumped to conclusions.”
Deputy Mayhew lifted his great head and looked at me. “That would be fine, Em.”
ZACH JOHNSON SAT IN THE CHAIR BY THE TABLE WITH his fingers twisting and one leg jumping like it was attached to an electric charge. His thinning hair stood in wild sheaves around his head, and graying whiskers sprouted around his chin. “No, Sheriff, I never did nothing like messing with no blasting caps outside no quarry. Sure, I know how to handle them things, but I ain’t had my hands on none in years.”
The sheriff of Douglas County was an affable sort who looked like he would be more at home in a T-shirt and sweats than the uniform he wore. He sat opposite Zach, all slouched down in a chair with his feet up on the table. Zach hadn’t been formally charged, but he’d been brought in from the café in a cruiser and had been read his rights.
Next to Zach at the table sat Todd Upton, who had followed the police cruiser in his BMW. His hands lay on the table like sausages. He hardly even blinked. “You don’t have to tell them anything, Zach,” he said.
Michele stood next to me, itching to use her interrogation skills on such an easy subject. Her hands were twitching, and her lips moved with soundless words.
Fritz stood somewhere behind me. I could sense his quiet, rock-steady presence. I wondered what he was thinking. Did he find my line of work distasteful? Did he think I was taking undue risks? Could he ever be interested in getting together with a woman who lived my kind of life? With a sinking heart, I thought, He wants more children. What kind of fool would want the mother of his children out mixing it up with criminals?
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