Authors: Mark Nykanen
“This is nothing.”
He flew the chopper up river. They were low enough to make out the waves.
“Where do you end up if you capsize a boat down there?” Ry said.
“You don’t want to capsize down there. You can try and ride it out, but you’re going to take a devil of a beating on those rocks. We’ve lost more than one boater in there.”
“No run out?” Ry said.
“Not for about nine or ten miles. That’s nine or ten miles of hell, if you’re caught in there. Course, you’re not going to be caught in there unless you know what you’re doing. That’s the theory anyway.”
“The reality?” Ry said.
“The reality is we’ve lost more than one boater in there,” Flanders repeated.
They flew in silence before Lauren realized that Flanders was right: they were unlikely to find anyone, living or dead, in such swift currents. She asked him to show them where bodies had washed up in the past.
Flanders pulled back on the controls, and the chopper rose up so swiftly that the bright canyon walls blurred. As they lifted over them, they saw two hikers waving. Lauren waved back, envious of their innocence.
They hurtled downriver to the first run out, where the canyon bled into the desert, which looked as wide and flat as the rock gorge had been narrow and steep.
“Chances are, if she ended up in the river, we’d have seen her body hung up on something by now. For the first few days, I’d check this area each time I went up.”
Flanders turned the bird to the west and roared back over Stassler’s compound.
“You ever see any evidence of a mine on this land?” Lauren said.
The pilot shook his head. “No, can’t say I ever have. Course, after a mine’s closed down, it’s nothing more than a little hole in the ground, if that. Now, if they close them up like they’re supposed to, that’s different because then they fence them off, but I’ve never seen anything like that here. This was ranch land. Seen some cattle skulls.”
They flew two more hours, covering Moab and the immediately surrounding environs. But the longer they were up, the more hopeless Lauren became. Looking down reminded her of what a huge job it was to find someone in mountain and canyon country. You could spend weeks at it and cover only a fraction of the possibilities. What were you thinking? she asked herself. That you could succeed where the sheriff and state police, with far more experience in search and rescue, had failed?
She imagined it must have been much worse for Kerry’s family, to feel so small above land so large, and to know that somewhere out there was your daughter. Dead? Alive? Dying? To feel so powerless when so much was at stake.
“Let’s go check the Division of Mines,” Lauren said to Ry after they were back on terra firma.
“You think your hotel guy really knows something?”
“I don’t know if he’s being cute or cagey, but maybe he’s on to something that no one else has thought about.”
“I doubt it.”
“Ry, come on. What can it hurt?”
They paused only long enough to grab lunch at a burrito wagon parked in the shade of a cottonwood tree. A female German shepherd walked by with its owner. Leroy checked her out, but didn’t bolt. Lauren nudged Ry, “Look-look-look-progress!”
Ry chuckled. “I doubt he sees it that way.”
The Division of Mines hunkered, appropriately enough, in the basement of the county building. It was run by Barbara Hershing, a woman in her sixties with a florid complexion and a dress that might have fit her twenty pounds ago. She was cheerful, if not discouraging.
“I’ve never heard of a mining claim on the Johnson land. I guess you’d call it the Stassler land now,” she corrected. “You know the Johnsons were descended from Brigham Young himself? Are you LDS?”
“No,” Lauren said, hoping the woman would remain helpful anyway. She’d already done them the favor of looking up the tax number instead of packing them off to the assessor’s office upstairs.
“Let’s see what we can find,” she continued as she pulled out a pair of dusty volumes from a shelf. “We never did get these on the computer. We got all the new mining claims on it, but that’s easy,” she snorted, “only get a few of those a year.”
She flipped through a volume, paused over a page, and ran her finger up and down columns of numbers as she shook her head. But then her finger froze.
“Well, I’ll be a chicken in the Sunday pot! There was a mine out there after all. A claim filed way back in 1910. Can you beat that?”
She looked up, amused by her finding.
“What kind of mine?” Lauren said.
“That’s the interesting part,” Hershing replied, “a silver mine. We had a few of them around here. Never amounted to much. I’ll be darned.”
“Does it say anything about the mine? How deep it is, anything like that?” Ry said.
Hershing looked down, then spoke hesitantly. “It does, but you can’t trust these old claim descriptions much. A lot of these old miner types didn’t want anyone knowing how they had their mines laid out …”
Lauren wondered if the same could be said of Stassler.
“… but it does say that it had a main shaft about a hundred feet down, and that it was about a half mile long.”
“That sounds big,” Lauren said.
Hershing shrugged. “Like I said, I wouldn’t put too much stock in this. Back then no one bothered to check on them to see if they were confabulating.”
“Can we get a copy of that?” Lauren said.
“Honey, that’ll cost you.”
“How much?”
“Oh, about a dime.”
As they walked upstairs to the main floor of the county building, Sheriff Holbin spotted them and strode right up.
“I heard you were down there.”
“We were. We were looking up something in the Division of—”
“Have you seen Jared Nielsen?” he interrupted.
“The last time we saw him was on Wednesday. We went riding with him.”
“I know all about that,” Holbin said. “I mean since then.”
“No. Why?”
“Because he was scheduled to take a lie detector test this afternoon, and he never showed up.”
“I thought that was scheduled for yesterday,” Ry said.
“It was, but the examiner couldn’t make it down here till today, so we postponed it. Now Nielsen’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone? Did you check his room?”
Sheriff Holbin gave her a weary look. “Yes, ma’am, we checked his room. He’s still got some of his stuff there, but his bike’s gone and so’s his SUV.”
“I thought you had him under surveillance,” Ry said.
The sheriff crossed his arms. “We did. But he took off during a shift change, which makes me very suspicious. It’s like he waited for the one time when we might not be looking. We still shouldn’t have lost him, but we did. I’ve got an alert out to the state police.”
“So you really think he took off?” Lauren said.
“I think he broke a promise to me, and I’ve got a warrant out for his arrest on flight, and I aim to use it too. So if you do happen to see him,” Holbin eyed them both closely, “tell him he’s made the biggest mistake of his life, and he’ll be a lot better off if he turns himself in.”
Jared Nielsen didn’t feel that he’d made a mistake, much less the biggest one of his life. He felt the damn sheriff was dragging his feet, putting off the lie detector test, expecting him to sit tight and be a good little boy. Enough of that. He could take the lie detector test any old time, but time was running out for Kerry.
He drove the Expedition slowly across the desert to keep his dust trail down. More like creeping. After about twenty minutes he saw the Green River off to his right, and the steep gorge from which it rushed. He’d ridden his bike across this same stretch of land when he’d reconnoitered early yesterday morning. He knew that on Stassler’s side of the river, there was a cave where he could stash the Expedition. A few caves, actually, but the one he had in mind looked like it had been bored into the rock with the nose of a 747.
He drove the Expedition right in, as if it were a garage. It was about thirty feet deep, and would certainly hide the SUV from all but the most serious search. The ceiling was high enough for his bike, up on the roof rack, to clear easily. He planned to ride it across the ranch to the compound.
The dashboard clock said five after three. He’d timed this as carefully as he could, but he’d still got way ahead of himself. Too eager. And he needed to hide: once he’d slipped away from the cops, he couldn’t sit around sipping espresso drinks downtown. He planned to wait for the sun to go down, ride his bike in with the last of the light, and spend the night looking for Kerry. He would have preferred to search during the day, but according to her, Stassler sometimes didn’t leave the compound for a week at a time. At least at night he had to sleep.
Jared lowered his bike from the rack, and checked his day pack to make sure he had all his gear, water, food. Enough for two days, if he had to lie low. If Kerry was in there, he was going to find her. The newspapers said the sheriff had been out here and looked around, but Jared wasn’t going to “look around.” He’d comb through every inch of the place. She hadn’t fallen into some mine, and she hadn’t been up on that crappy jeep trail, so in his mind that didn’t leave a whole lot of possibilities outside of El Creepo and his ranch.
At a little past seven Jared pulled on his pack, mounted his bike, and headed out across the desert. Shadows from the foothills darkened the dusky light, turning him into a spectral figure. His camouflage clothes and the layer of mud he’d painted on his frame and handlebars added to his cover. He rode with great care because all of the territory ahead was new to him.
Rugged terrain challenged him for more than an hour before the silhouette of the compound grayed the dying light.
The foundry stood closest to him. He ditched his bike by some purple sage, and lowered himself for a series of sprints from the sparse shelter of one desert bush to the equally sparse shelter of another. No sign of El Creepo.
He drew closer to the rear of the foundry. He wanted to check it out first because he considered it the least likely place to run into Stassler at this time of day; Kerry had said that he liked working in the morning, and that’s why she’d always had her afternoons free.
After the foundry, he’d search the main house. That’s where he’d spend the night too, find a spot to keep an eye on Stassler, and in the morning when El Creepo went to work, he’d slip into the barn and guest quarters. That would be the weirdest part. The thought of taking such an enormous risk with Stassler so close made his groin tighten. But he might not have to. He might find Kerry long before he ever had to enter the barn.
As he drew closer to the foundry, he was grateful that Stassler didn’t own a dog. The last thing he needed right now was for some big old hound to start barking, or worse yet, to start trying to eat him. He had no weapons, unless you counted his Swiss Army knife. He wished he had a gun, wished this even more as he crouched no more than twenty feet from the foundry’s rear door.
Before scrambling up there, he looked around one last time. She’s out here. Jared had an almost unshakeable faith in this. Then his eyes rested on the ground, and he feared that she was already dead, stuffed into a crude grave. But that possibility seemed too cruel. You don’t wait all your life for a Kerry, only to have her taken away. He refused to believe in anything so bleak. And he’d refuse to believe in Stassler’s innocence only after he’d had a chance to scour every inch of the compound.
He made the dash to the foundry, and crawled all the way to the corner. He wanted to see if the creep’s Jeep was parked by the barn. It would be a great break if he’d taken off. Kerry had said that when he did go into town, he’d do it in the early evening.
The Jeep wasn’t there. Jared wanted to shout with joy, before it occurred to him that Stassler might have parked it in front of the barn. The only way he’d know was to work his way to the front of the foundry.
Think about it, he told himself. If it’s out there, is it going to change anything? No, it’s not. So stick to the plan. Get inside the foundry, and see what you can scope out from there. Then if he’s gone, you can decide if you want to go for the barn and guest quarters tonight.
Jared retreated to the rear door, metal, the kind you find in a warehouse, and locked. No surprise there; she’d said he was secretive. There were double-pane windows too, with thick metal mullions, but they were also locked. This was proving grimmer than he’d thought. Before breaking glass—and it could take serious pounding to smash through two layers of tempered glass—he’d check out the roof. He’d been a climber since his dad had taken him to Yosemite when he was twelve, and he’d brought enough gear to scale anything in the compound. A foundry had to have a furnace, and a furnace had to have a chimney. Usually the brick kind. He was slim and strong. It might be doable. Plus, from the roof he could scope out the front of the barn for the Jeep.
On his first attempt, he snagged the grapple at the end of his climbing rope on the edge of the flat roof. He did this as smoothly as a fly fisherman hooks a trout, although as he started up the wall, suspended on the end of the rope, he had no thought of himself as the creature who’d been caught. Instead, he felt the first rush of success, especially when he hoisted himself up and spotted a skylight that was cracked open.
Excellent, he said to himself. Totally, totally excellent. He gathered up his rope and pack, and crept across the roof. He peered through the skylight, but made out only shadows down in the foundry.
He scurried to the front of the roof, and looked across to the barn. There was Stassler’s Jeep. An ill feeling muddied his belly. Not until that instant had he realized how much he’d been hoping El Creepo would be gone. And not until that instant had he recognized how much fear could flood his system.
It’s no different than you thought it would be, but reminding himself of this didn’t make him feel any better. He inched away from the edge, uneasy with the knowledge that for all his precautions, Stassler could spot him by simply looking out a window in the guest quarters, which were on the second story of the barn.
Better move.