Hot on the Trail Mix

by P. D. Workman

  “Fine,” Terry said. “Be advised that you may be asked to come in for questioning, Miss Victoria. If you refuse an official invitation, we will have reason to believe that it’s because you were involved in Ryder’s death.”

  She raised one eyebrow and still didn’t say anything.

  Terry turned around to go back to the house. He saw Erin standing in the doorway, and his face tightened. He hadn’t expected her to witness their conversation. He tried to smile as he approached her.

  “Erin. I didn’t realize it was that late.”

  Erin nodded. She stepped back and did not accept a kiss from him as he reached the doorway. He walked past her into the house. Vic was looking across the yard at Erin. She didn’t smile or wave, she just turned around and went the other way, up the steps into her apartment. Erin stepped back into her house and shut the door.

  “I’m sorry,” Terry said immediately. “It’s my job. I had to talk to her about it.”

  “You know Vicky isn’t in the clan.”

  “I know she says she isn’t. That’s not quite the same thing.”

  “I don’t understand what you could be thinking. She’s baking by day and off murdering people by night? That’s not happening.”

  “No, I don’t think that. But it doesn’t mean she couldn’t have had an altercation with someone. And it doesn’t mean that Ryder’s death didn’t have anything to do with the Jackson clan. We have to consider it. Just like in New York they have to consider whether any drug-related killing is cartel related.”

  “But if Ryder’s death was related to the Jackson clan, that doesn’t mean it has anything to do with Vic. They’re two separate things.”

  “They are two intertwined things.”

  “She’s estranged from her family.”

  “She’s estranged from her parents. Or her father. And even that could have changed. You and I wouldn’t necessarily know anything about it.”

  “That’s semantics.”

  “She is still in touch with Jeremy, and you don’t know what his clan involvement may be. And either one of them might still be in contact with the two older boys. And she could secretly be in touch with her mother or have made up with her father.”

  “I don’t see how somebody getting killed in a cave out in the sticks could have anything to do with the clan.”

  He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times before answering. “And you know I can’t tell you. But I would think you could trust me to the point that you know I wouldn’t be asking Vic about the clan if there wasn’t a possible connection.”

  “Do you know there was a connection? Or you just think there could be one?”

  “It’s a point to check.”

  “Fine. So you checked, and there’s no reason to believe that Vic or the clan are involved. So you can mark that off of your to-do list.”

  Mentioning a to-do list made Erin suddenly think of her planner and that she needed to add a few items to her lists. And maybe she would look again at the pages she had composed about the murder. Maybe she could make a connection that Terry and the police department hadn’t.

  She got her planner out of her purse.

  “Does that mean the conversation is over?” Terry asked.

  “Yes.”

  He stood there for a moment. Erin headed to the bedroom to change and spend a few minutes with her planner. She looked at Terry, who still hadn’t moved.

  “But I don’t know who won,” Terry protested, the dimple appearing in his cheek as he let out a breath and laughed.

  “Obviously, I did.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Chapter 22

  Erin and Vic had been texting most of the morning. As soon as Terry headed out for his shift, Erin let Vic know that he was gone, and she came over to the house.

  “Sometimes that boyfriend of yours drives me mad,” Vic renewed the complaint she had already texted to Erin.

  “I know. He’s just trying to do his job, though. A man died, leaving a young family behind. He’s trying to figure out what happened.”

  “He should know that Willie and I didn’t have anything to do with it. If we had, we wouldn’t have bothered to call the police. We would have just left him out there. The bones would have gotten covered over by silt. No one would ever have known he was there.”

  Erin shrugged. She wasn’t going to argue the point. She hadn’t appreciated Terry interrogating Vic about it, and she wasn’t about to defend him.

  “Let’s go.”

  Vic had permission to borrow Willie’s truck. “We really should get another car.”

  “We?”

  “Well, I meant you. Just that when you and I go somewhere, it would be nice not to have to borrow one of the men’s vehicles.”

  Erin conceded. “Yes.”

  “You were talking about getting Clementine’s Volkswagen fixed up. Are you going to do that?”

  “I don’t know. I guess at some point. I don’t really want to get something else. I might as well use what’s available. No point in locking it up like the good company china.”

  They climbed up into the truck. Erin did up her buckle. “You know the way? Do you need me to set it up on the GPS?”

  “I know where it is.”

  Erin sat back and tried to be cool and relaxed as Vic drove them out of town and out onto the highway. She watched out the window, wondering how many families and others who did not have the money to cover rent or a mortgage squatted and tried to eke out a living from the land. Getting rid of the one major expense would help, but they would still need to eat. Hunting and gardening would provide some, but not everything. And there were clothes and bedding and other supplies. They would need a way to make some money. Some cash was necessary to survive in the modern world.

  Vic turned from the highway onto a secondary road, and from that road to a gravel road. Vic’s gaze and posture were alert as she watched for whatever landmarks she knew along the way.

  They pulled into a clearing and Vic shut off the engine. Erin looked around. They weren’t far from Bald Eagle Falls, and yet they were in the middle of nowhere. She looked at Vic.

  “Here?”

  Vic nodded. She walked around the clearing, looking down at the ground. She kicked at something in the grass.

  “This is where their cookstove would have been. You see where they cleared the grass and put down some rocks?”

  Erin nodded. “Okay, yes.” They had been careful to avoid setting the grass on fire. They weren’t inexperienced in camping.

  “There are some clods of dirt that were pulled up by tent stakes.” Vic pointed several out. “The underbrush has been cleared here. There is probably a path to their latrine.”

  “So this was a permanent camp? They intended to stay here?”

  “Semi-permanent. They were probably here for a few weeks. But when you squat on someone else’s land, you take the risk of getting run off. Especially if you’re trying to jump someone’s mineral claim.”

  “Where is the cave? Is it a mine or a cave?”

  “A lot of the caves around here are both. If there are mineral deposits visible in the cave, it’s worth trying to follow the veins. Get whatever you can that’s close to the surface before you put in the effort to dig deeper.”

  “So… what kind of minerals are there?”

  Vic led Erin into the trees. Erin couldn’t see any cave. They didn’t go too far, though, before encountering a rock face. Erin looked at Vic and then looked around for the entrance to the cave. But it all seemed to be overgrown and the foliage undisturbed.

  Vic led her around the rock face and, eventually, they reached a crack. Erin followed it as it widened, and finally she reached what she assumed was the entrance to the cave. She had seen and been inside a few caves, and knew that the entrance was not necessarily an indicator of how big it was inside. A wide hole could lead to a small, shallow cave, and a small cave could open up into a wide cave and multiple branches leading to a whole network of tunn
els. She bent down and looked into the hole. It was wide enough to allow a man Willie’s size or larger. She couldn’t see the inside beyond the entrance.

  “Will you go in?” Vic questioned.

  “No.”

  “Just for a second? See what it’s like inside?”

  “Without a gun to my head—no.”

  She could see Vic considering this comment, but then deciding that she wasn’t going to encourage Erin at gunpoint.

  “Do you mind if I go in for a minute?” Vic asked. “Just to refresh my memory.”

  “Yeah, go ahead. Just don’t get lost or hurt in there, because I don’t plan to come in after you.”

  “I won’t be long. Do you want to wait here, or back in the clearing?”

  “I’ll wait here.”

  Vic nodded. She turned on her phone’s flashlight app and disappeared into the cave.

  Erin looked around. The cave wasn’t easy to find, but it wasn’t hard either. If someone knew about its existence, it wouldn’t be hard for them to discover. And if someone didn’t know about it, they could still find it while scouting for water or a latrine location, hunting, or berry picking.

  Erin put her face close to the hole, turned on her own flashlight app, and looked around at the interior. There were a couple of branching tunnels. The walls glittered with water or crystals. But Erin wasn’t going to go any farther than that.

  Where had the Ryder family gone? Were they still somewhere close? Or had they gone back to Bald Eagle Falls, or to another, more distant point? Maybe to Jenny’s parents? Did she have a family? Adrienne hadn’t said. Maybe it was just that simple. When she realized her husband wasn’t coming back, Jenny just pulled up stakes—literally—and went back to her own people.

  Chapter 23

  Vic was longer than Erin had expected her to be. Erin hung around the entrance to the cave, anxious. She didn’t want to entertain the idea that Vic might be hurt or in trouble. She did not want to have to crawl into the cave to check. She didn’t want to crawl in there for anything.

  When Vic and the others had been caught in a mine collapse, it had been Erin who had heard the rumbling thunder of the explosion and falling rock, and who had called it in so that they could get search and rescue in to do their thing. She remembered standing there just inside the mine entrance, facing a wall of loose rock. She had tried to shift it at first, but it soon became apparent that it was a much bigger job than she could ever hope to accomplish. Even with the number of townspeople who had come out to try to move it, they had not been able to dig the trapped explorers out. Search and rescue had needed to drill into the tunnel from an adjoining tunnel to get them out.

  She looked in again and shone her light around. “Vic? Everything okay?”

  At first, there was no answer, just her own voice echoing off of the rocky walls. Then Vic answered, sounding very far away. “I’ll be out in a minute. Everything is fine.”

  “Okay,” Erin said softly, and sat down in the dirt to wait. It was longer than a minute before Vic came out, and Erin was relieved to hear her approaching footsteps and finally see Vic’s face. She let out a sigh of relief.

  “I’m fine,” Vic assured her. “Nothing happened. Here, I took some pictures. Figured if you won’t go into the cave, the cave will come to you.”

  Erin hesitated. “Is it okay, do you think? There isn’t anything… gory?”

  “No. The remains were taken out the day that we found them, so it’s just an empty pool now. You can see… a little bit of dried blood in some of the pictures. If it’s too much for you, just give the word. You don’t have to look at anything you don’t want to.”

  “Okay.”

  Vic met her eyes, not turning her phone around yet. “Okay? You’re sure? You want to see?”

  Erin nodded.

  She and Vic sat down on the ground, leaning against the rock wall, and Vic brought up the pictures on her screen. They were not too bad, the phone’s flash doing a pretty good job lighting the scene up well enough to take in the details. Erin saw a large underground cave. Vic had taken several shots to give her a feel for the size of the cave and what it looked like from each side. Then they moved on to the pool where the remains had been found. Even though Vic had said that there was nothing left there, Erin still found herself tensing before examining the pictures more closely.

  There were no bones, no body parts; everything looked quite clean. Like it was a man-made fountain built there just for them to look at. Erin could see the silt in the bottom. She didn’t know how deep or shallow it was. Maybe there was enough that it could have completely covered the remains, and maybe there was only an inch or two. Erin didn’t think that mattered at all.

  “If it only happened a week or two ago, then how could he be a skeleton already?” Erin asked. “I thought bodies took a lot longer than that to… skeletonize?”

  “It depends on the condition. This may look like a still pool, but there’s actually a good amount of water draining through here. So it helps to… wash stuff away as it decomposes.”

  Erin nodded.

  “And there was… you know, there are fish, and they’re not picky about the source of food.” Vic grimaced apologetically.

  “Okay. Yeah. So in those conditions, the process was pretty quick.”

  “Right. That’s what I understand anyway, from what has been released so far.”

  “What else have they released?” Erin thought about Jenny reading the paper or coming across a story on the internet. She would know that the cave was close to where she had camped with Rip and the children. Would she guess that the remains were her husband’s? Or maybe she already knew that from gossip, and that was why she wasn’t around for anyone to talk to. If Rip had been a gambler or an addict, Jenny might have lost it, furious with him for losing their hard-earned money once again, leaving her with no way to feed the children. Even though they didn’t have much money, that didn’t eliminate money as a motive.

  She wished she had brought her planner with her to write these new insights down. If she could capture all of her thoughts, she would have everything sorted out all that much faster.

  “Okay to look at some more?” Vic offered.

  “Yeah.”

  “So everything has been taken out, but there were a few bits of personal property in the cave.” Vic showed her some ground shots with nothing very interesting in them. “Like, a backpack, some water, that kind of thing. Not very much and, like I said, he had no spelunking gear to speak of. No headlamp.”

  “He could have used his phone like you did. Just for a quick look around.”

  “He’d have to know where he was going, to know that his phone light wasn’t going to die before he turned around again. And… there was no phone recovered there.”

  “Oh, yeah. They dragged the pool? So they know it wasn’t in there, just buried in the muck?”

  “I guess so. We didn’t get to see that whole process, but they did bring a pump truck down here to drain the pool and run everything through a mesh to catch anything small. I don’t know how much they would have been able to go through the silt. It’s pretty thick. Maybe they used radar.”

  “No phone. He must have had a phone. You can’t survive in today’s world without one, can you?”

  “I know I couldn’t,” Vic agreed fervently. “And I would think that if you were trying to get a job, find land to live on, maybe find a mine that could help to keep you on your feet, you would need a phone for those things. Assuming he didn’t have a laptop and Wi-Fi connection.”

  Erin looked around her. “I think that’s a fair bet.”

  “Wait, let me check,” Vic said, minimizing the photo app and switching over to her settings. “See… no Wi-Fi signal, and barely any cell signal. We had to walk out to the road to get a strong enough signal to call the police.”

  “So, maybe he didn’t have a phone because there wasn’t any point. He couldn’t make it work out here.”

  “I don’t know. I sti
ll think you would have to have something, even if it was just an ancient flip or a sat phone. What if… a kid fell and hit his head? Or there was a wildfire? Or someone… had a confrontation and wanted to reach the police?”

  “Yeah. I don’t think there are too many people these days who don’t have a cell phone.”

  Vic went back to her photo app. “So, this is one that might bother you.”

  Erin took a deep breath to steel herself. She had seen plenty of scary things. She had seen dead people. Cases that weren’t just accidents. And Vic didn’t have any remains to show her. Just whatever things were left in the cave.

  “Yeah. I’m fine,” she said in a strong voice.

  “Good. Here.” Vic swiped to the next picture and showed it to Erin. There still wasn’t very much to see. Just a place on the cave floor that was darker than the rest.

  “What is that?”

  “That’s blood. And they took the murder weapon, but it was right here too.”

  Erin looked at the bloody cave floor. She tried to measure the distance to the pool with her eyes. Everything was distorted because she didn’t have anything to show scale.

  “So… that’s where he was killed, you think. And how far to the pool?”

  “All the way on the other side of the cave. Maybe… twenty feet.”

  “And he didn’t crawl in there himself? Hit his head on an overhang and just got disoriented…”

  “No. It wasn’t an accident. He didn’t crawl over there under his own power. The injury was… very traumatic… if not instantaneous, then close to it.”

  Erin could see better now why they were so sure it was murder. If the death was close to instantaneous, and he had lost that much blood and hadn’t been able to crawl across to the pool where he was found, there was clearly someone else involved. Someone who had, at the very least, dragged the body to the water to hide it there. And at the most… who had stalked Rip Ryder, followed him into the cave, and intentionally killed him. And then dragged him to the pool.

  “How big a guy was he?”

  Vic raised her eyebrows at the segue. “Hmm. I’d have to ask Willie. I couldn’t really tell you from what I saw. Willie knew him before he died and would be better at answering that. If there are no pictures of him online and Terry won’t tell you that.”