White Fire p-13

by Douglas Preston

  “Who is Betty Brown Kermode?”

  He rolled his eyes and looked around furtively. “Where to begin? First, she owns Town and Mount Real Estate, which is the real estate agency in town. She’s the head of the Heights Neighborhood Association, and was the force behind getting the cemetery moved. She’s basically one of those self-righteous people who run everything and everybody and brook no dissent. Fact is, she’s the real power in this town.”

  “A woman like that’s got influence over the chief of police?”

  Ted laughed. “You met Morris, right? Nice guy. Everyone has influence over him. But especially her. I’m telling you, she’s fearsome — even more so than that brother-in-law of hers, Montebello. I’m sure Morris had every intention of giving you permission — until he called Kermode.”

  “But why would she want to stop me? What harm would it do?”

  “That,” said Ted, “is what you’re going to have to find out.”

  7

  At nine the next morning, Corrie pulled her Rent-a-Junker up to the gates of The Heights. There the guard — not nearly as friendly as the last time she’d passed through, with the chief of police — spent a long, insolent amount of time checking her ID and calling to verify her appointment, all the while casting disdainful looks at her car.

  Corrie was careful to remain polite, and at length she was driving along the road toward the clubhouse and development offices. A cluster of buildings on the valley floor soon came into view: picturesque, snowcapped and icicled, their stone chimneys smoking. Beyond, well up on the far side of the snow-blanketed valley, Corrie could see a massive dirt scar of ongoing construction — no doubt the new clubhouse and spa. She watched backhoes and loaders busily at work digging footings. She couldn’t help but wonder why they needed a new clubhouse when the old one looked pretty amazing.

  She parked in the visitor’s lot and entered the clubhouse, where the secretary pointed her toward the offices of Town & Mount Real Estate.

  The reception area of Town & Mount was sumptuous — all wood and stone, with Navajo rugs on the walls, a spectacular chandelier made of deer antlers, cowboy-style leather-and-wood furniture, and a stone fireplace in which a real log fire burned. Corrie took a seat and settled in to wait.

  An hour later, she was finally ushered into the office of Mrs. Kermode, president of Town & Mount and director of the Heights Association. Corrie had dressed in her most corporate mode, a gray suit with a white blouse and low pumps. She was absolutely determined to keep her cool and win Mrs. Kermode over with flattery, charm, and persuasion.

  The previous afternoon, she had done her damnedest to dig up dirt on Kermode, heeding the Pendergastian dictum that if you want something from somebody, always have something “ugly” to trade. But Kermode seemed to be a woman above reproach: a generous donor to local charities, an elder in the Presbyterian church, a volunteer at the local soup kitchen (it surprised Corrie that a town like Roaring Fork would even have a soup kitchen), and a businesswoman of acknowledged integrity. While she was not exactly loved, and was in fact heartily disliked by many, she was respected — and feared — by all.

  Mrs. Kermode surprised Corrie. Far from being the dowdy woman conjured up by the name Betty Brown Kermode, she was an extremely well-put-together woman in her early sixties, slender and fit, with beautifully coiffed platinum hair and understated makeup. She was dressed in high cowboy style with a beaded Indian vest, white shirt, tight jeans, and cowboy boots. A Navajo squash blossom necklace completed the ensemble. The walls of her office were covered with photographs of her riding a stunning paint horse in the mountains and competing in an arena, charging through a herd of cows. A water cooler stood in one corner. Another corner of the office was dominated by a magnificent western saddle, tooled all over and trimmed in silver.

  In an easy, friendly way, Mrs. Kermode came forward and shook Corrie’s hand, inviting her to sit down. Corrie’s irritation at being kept waiting for an hour began to dissipate in the warm welcome.

  “Now, Corrie,” she began, speaking with a pronounced Texas accent, “I want to thank you for coming in. It gives me a chance to explain to you, in person, why Chief Morris and I unfortunately can’t grant your request.”

  “Well, I was hoping to explain—”

  But Kermode was in a hurry and overrode Corrie’s attempt to present her talking points. “Corrie, I’m going to be frank. The scientific examination of those mortal remains for a…college thesis is, in our view, disrespectful of the dead.”

  This was not what Corrie expected. “In what way?”

  Kermode gave a poisonous little laugh. “My dear Miss Swanson, how can you ask such a question? Would you want some student pawing through your grandfather’s remains?”

  “Um, I would be fine with it.”

  “Come, now. Of course you wouldn’t. At least where I come from, we treat our dead with respect. These are sacred human remains.”

  Corrie tried desperately to get back to her talking points. “But this is a unique opportunity for forensic science. This is going to help law enforcement—”

  “A college thesis? Contribute to forensic science? Aren’t you exaggerating the importance of this project just a teensy little bit now, Miss Swanson?”

  Corrie took a deep breath. “Not at all. This could be a very important study and data collection of perimortem trauma caused by a large carnivore. When a skeleton of a murder victim is found, forensic pathologists have to distinguish animal tooth marks and other postmortem damage from the marks on the bones left by the perpetrator. It’s a serious issue and this study—”

  “So much Greek to me!” Mrs. Kermode gave a laugh and waved her hand, as if she understood nothing.

  Corrie decided to shift tack. “It’s important for me personally, Mrs. Kermode — but it could be important for Roaring Fork, as well. It’s doing something constructive, something positive with these human remains. It would reflect well on the community and the chief—”

  “It’s just not respectful,” said Kermode firmly. “It’s not Christian. There are many in this town who would find it deeply offensive. We are the guardians of those remains, and we take our responsibility seriously. I just can’t under any circumstances allow it.”

  “But…” Corrie could feel her temper rising despite her best efforts to keep it down. “But…you dug them up to begin with.”

  A silence, and then Kermode spoke softly. “The decision was made long ago. Back in 1978, in fact. The town signed off on it. Here at The Heights we’ve been planning this new clubhouse and spa for almost a decade.”

  “Why do you need it when you’ve already got a beautiful clubhouse?”

  “We’ll need a larger one to serve Phase Three, as we open up West Mountain to a select number of custom home lots. Again, as I’ve repeatedly said to you, this has been in planning for years. We are responsible to our owners and investors.”

  Our owners and investors. “All I want to do is examine the bones — with the utmost respect — for valid and important scientific purposes. There’s no disrespect in that, surely?”

  Mrs. Kermode rose, a bright fake smile plastered on her face. “Miss Swanson, the decision has been made, it is final, and I am a very busy woman. It is now time for you to leave.”

  Corrie rose. She could feel that old, horrible, blood-boiling sensation inside her. “You dig up an entire cemetery so you can make money on a real estate development, you dump the bodies in plastic boxes and store them in a ski warehouse — and then you tell me I’ll be disrespecting the dead by studying the bones? You’re a hypocrite — plain and simple!”

  Kermode’s face grew pale. Corrie could see a vein in her powdered neck throbbing. Her voice became very low, almost masculine. “You little bitch,” she said. “I’ll give you five minutes to vacate the premises. If you ever—ever—come back, I’ll have you arrested for trespassing. Now get out.”

  Corrie suddenly felt very calm. This was the end. It was over. But she wasn’t going
to let anyone call her a bitch. She stared back at Mrs. Kermode with narrowed eyes. “You call yourself an elder in the church? You’re no Christian. You’re a goddamn phony. A fake, grasping, deceitful phony.”

  On the way back to Basalt, it began to snow. As she crawled along at ten miles an hour in her car, windshield wipers slapping back and forth ineffectually, an idea came to her. Those anomalous marks she’d noticed on the bones…with a flash of insight, she realized there was possibly another way to skin this particular cat.

  8

  Lying on the bed of her room at the Cloud Nine Motel in Basalt, Colorado, Corrie made her decision. If those marks on the bones were what she thought they might be, her problems would be solved. There wouldn’t be any choice: the remains would have to be examined. Even Kermode couldn’t stop it. That would be her trump card.

  But only if she could prove it.

  And to do that, she needed access to the bones one more time. Five minutes, tops — just long enough to photograph them with the powerful macro lens on her camera.

  But how?

  Even before she asked herself the question, she knew the answer: she would have to break in.

  All the arguments against such an action lined themselves up before her: that B&E was a felony; that it was ethically wrong; that if she got caught, her entire law enforcement career would be flushed down the toilet. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be all that difficult. During their visit two days before, the chief hadn’t turned off any alarm systems or other security devices; he’d simply unlocked a padlock on the door and they had walked in. The shed was isolated from the rest of the development, surrounded by a tall wooden fence and screened by trees. It was partly open to one of the ski slopes, but nobody would be skiing at night. The shed was marked on trail maps of the area, and they showed a service road leading to it from the equipment yard of the ski area itself, bypassing The Heights entirely.

  As she weighed the pros and cons, she found herself asking the question: what would Pendergast do? He never let legal niceties stand in the way of truth and justice. Surely he would break in and get the information he needed. While it was too late to achieve justice for Emmett Bowdree, it was never too late for the truth.

  * * *

  The snow had stopped at midnight, leaving a brilliantly clear night sky with a three-quarter moon. It was extremely cold — according to the WeatherBug app on her iPad, it was five degrees. Outside, it felt a lot colder than that. The service road turned out to be snowmobile-only, covered with hard-packed snow but still walkable.

  Leaving her car at the very base of the road, by a tall stand of trees and as inconspicuous as possible, Corrie labored uphill, her knapsack heavy with gear: the Canon with tripod and macro, a portable light and battery pack, loupes, flashlight, bolt cutter, ziplock bags, and her iPad loaded with textbooks and monographs on the subject of osteological trauma analysis. The thin mountain air left her gasping, the smoke of her condensing breath blossoming in the moonlight as she hiked, her feet squeaking in the layer of fluff atop the hard-packed snow. Below, the lights of the town spread out in a magical carpet; above, she could see the warehouse, illuminated by lights on poles and casting a yellow glow through the fir trees. It was two o’clock in the morning and all was quiet. The only activity was some headlights high on the mountain, where the grooming equipment was being operated.

  Again and again, she had choreographed in her head the exact series of steps she’d need to take, rearranging and refining them to ensure that she would spend as little time in the shed as possible. Five minutes, ten at most — and she’d be gone.

  Approaching the shed, she did a careful recon to assure herself that she was alone. Then she stepped up to the fence gate and peered over it. To the left was the side door that she and the chief had used, illuminated in a pool of light, the snow well beaten down before it. The door was securely padlocked. By habit, she carried a set of lock picks. In high school, she had practically memorized the underground manual known as the MIT Guide to Lockpicking, and she took great pride in her skills. The padlock was a ten-dollar, hardware-store variety — no problem there. But she would have to cross the lighted area in order to reach the door. And then she’d have to stand in the light while dealing with the lock. This was one of two elements of unavoidable danger in her plan.

  She waited, listening, but all was quiet. The grooming machines were high up on the mountain and didn’t look like they’d be passing by anytime soon.

  Taking a deep breath, she vaulted the fence and darted across the lighted area. She had her set of lock picks ready. The lock itself was freezing, and her fingers quickly grew stupid in the cold. Nevertheless it took only twenty seconds for the padlock to spring open. She pulled the door ajar, ducked inside, and gently closed it behind her.

  Inside the shed it was very cold. Fumbling a small LED light out of her backpack, she flicked it on and quickly moved past the rows of snowmobiles and antique snowcats to the rear of the structure. The coffins, laid out in neat rows, gleamed dully in her light. It only took a moment to find Emmett Bowdree’s coffin. She removed the lid with care, trying to keep the noise to a minimum, then knelt, playing the light over the bones. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and her hands were shaking. Once again, a voice inside her pointed out that this was one of the dumbest things she’d ever done, and once again another voice responded that it was the only thing she could do.

  Get a grip, she whispered to herself. Focus.

  Following her mental script, Corrie pulled off her gloves again, laid her backpack on the ground, and unzipped it. She quickly inserted a loupe to her eye, tugged the gloves back on, pulled out the broken femur she’d noticed before, and peered at it under the light. The bone showed several long, parallel scrapes in the cortical surface. She examined them carefully for any sign of healing, bone remodeling or periosteal uplifting, but there was none. The longitudinal marks were clean, fresh, and showed no sign of an osseous reaction. That meant the scraping had occurred perimortem: at the time of death.

  No bear could have made a mark like this. It had been done with a crude tool, perhaps the blade of a dull knife, and — clearly — it had been done to strip the flesh from the bones.

  But could she be sure? Her field experience was so limited. Removing her gloves again, she fumbled out her iPad and called up one of her school e-textbooks, Trauma Analysis. She looked through the illustrations of antemortem, perimortem, and postmortem injuries, including some with scrapes similar to these, and compared the illustrations with the bone in her hand. They confirmed her initial impression. She tried to warm her frozen fingers by breathing on them, but that didn’t work and so she pulled her gloves back on and beat her hands together as quietly as she could. That brought back a little sensation.

  Now she had to photograph the damaged bone. Once again the gloves had to come off. She hauled out the portable light, battery pack, and small tripod from her backpack. Next came her digital camera, with the massive macro lens attachment that had cost her a fortune. She screwed the camera into the mount and set it up. Placing the bone on the floor, she arranged things as best she could in the dark, then flicked on the light.

  This was the second danger point — the light would be visible from outside. But it was absolutely indispensable. She had arranged things so that it would be on for the shortest possible amount of time, without a red flag of turning it off and on — and so that right afterward she could pack up and leave.

  God, it was bright, casting a glow over everything. She quickly positioned the camera and focused. She took a dozen photos as quickly as she could, moving the bone a little bit each time and adjusting the light for a raking effect. As she did this, she noticed, under the strong glare, something else on the bone: apparent tooth marks. She stopped just a moment to examine them with the loupe. They were indeed tooth marks, but not those of a grizzly: they were far too feeble, too close together, and with too flat a crown. She photographed them from several angles.

&n
bsp; She hurriedly put the bone back in the coffin, and moved on to the next anomalous mark she’d noticed on her first visit — the broken skull. The cranium showed massive trauma, the skull and face literally crushed. The biggest and, it seemed, first blow had occurred to the right of the parietal bone, shattering the skull in a star pattern and separating it along the sutures. These, too, were clearly perimortem injuries, for the simple reason that survival was impossible after such a violent blow. The green-bone nature of the fractures indicated they had occurred when the bone was still fresh.

  The anomaly here was a mark at the point of the blow. She examined the point of fracture. A bear could certainly shatter a skull with the strike of a paw, or crush it with its jaws and teeth. But this mark did not look like either teeth or claws. It was irregular, with multiple indents.

  Under the loupe, her suspicions were confirmed. It had been made by a rough, heavy object — almost certainly a rock.

  Working even more quickly now, she took a series of photographs of the skull fragments with her macro. This was proof enough. Or was it? She vacillated a moment, then on impulse took out a couple of ziplock bags and slipped the fragment of femur and one of the damaged skull fragments into them. That was proof.

  Done. She snapped off the light. Now she had incontrovertible evidence that Emmett Bowdree had not been killed and eaten by a bear. Instead, he had been killed and eaten by a human. In fact, judging from the extensive nature of the injuries, there might have been two or three, maybe more, who participated in the killing. They had first disabled him with a blow to the head, crushed his skull, smashed his bones, and literally ripped him apart with their bare hands. Then they had stripped the meat from the bones with a crude knife or piece of metal. Finally, they had eaten him raw — attested by the tooth marks and the absence of bone scorching and other evidence of cooking.

  Horrible. Unbelievable. She had discovered a hundred-and-fifty-year-old murder. Which begged the next question: Were the other ten miners killed in the same way, by humans?