Mountain Rampage (17 page)

Chuck looked down at Clarence from the porch, thinking of what Kirina might be saying to Hemphill right this instant. He spoke from the deck railing, his voice hard. “They may want to talk to you again.”

Clarence stepped backward, stumbled, and almost fell.

“You had more than ‘a little nip,'” Chuck accused him. Clarence's eyes flitted between Chuck and Janelle.

Janelle held out her hand. “Give it to me.
Now
.”

Clarence pulled a steel flask from his back pocket and handed it over.

She shook her head in obvious disgust as she took it. “I can't believe you.”

She unscrewed the lid and upended the flask at arm's length. A stream of golden liquid cascaded to the graveled parking area in front of the cabin, splashing Clarence's feet.

He extended his hands. “That's Cuervo Gold,” he pleaded.

The last of the flask's contents dripped to the ground. “I don't care if it's Cuervo Titanium.” She screwed the lid back on the flask and threw it back at him.

As Janelle and Clarence climbed the stairs to the deck, Chuck said to Clarence, “I take it, based on your ‘little nip,' your interview went okay.”

“It went fine,
jefe
. I told them I was sleeping like a
bebé
last night. I acted all innocent—which was easy since I am.”

Janelle faced him on the deck and snapped, “You really think they bought it?”

“Why wouldn't they?”

“Your
knife
, Clarence. The blood on the ground the night before.”

“Oh, yeah.” Clarence tilted his head. “That.”

Janelle turned to Chuck. “What's next?”

Chuck said to Clarence, “You want to tell her?”

“Tell her what?”

“What we decided,” he prodded.

Clarence brightened as he remembered. “Falcon House,” he said to Janelle. “Chuck figures one of those guys is the killer.”

Chuck explained. “On account of what Clarence heard last night. And saw.”

“The argument behind the dorms?” Janelle asked.

“
Si
,” said Clarence.

“A lover's quarrel,” said Chuck. “That's what he heard.”

Clarence wobbled a finger back and forth. “That's what I
think
I heard.”

Chuck told Janelle, “He's going to see what he can find out.”

“He's
what
?”

“
No hay problema, hermana mia
,” Clarence said. “I know everybody over there. I'm just gonna stop in, ask around, see what's what.”

“See what's
what
?” Janelle rounded on Chuck. “You're telling
me your big plan is to send Clarence into Falcon House to root out the murderer?”

“He's just going to stop in, like he always does.”

“Yeah,” Clarence seconded. “Like I always do.”

Janelle took in the two of them. “You're nuts. Both of you.”

“We have to do something,” Chuck countered. “If we don't, they'll just build a circumstantial case against Clarence while the real killer goes free.”

Clarence explained, “Either the killer took off and he's long gone—which means there's nothing we can do about it—or he's laying low at Falcon House, pretending he's just one of the guys.”

Janelle clarified, “One of the
mexicanos
. That's all there are over there, when it comes to guys, right?”

“
Claro
. I'll wander around,
habla
a little
español
, see if anybody's acting nervous or suspicious or whatever.”

Chuck told Clarence, “Remember, we can't talk on the phone or text each other anymore. I'll swing by and check in with you later, face-to-face.”

“
Bueno
.”

Janelle turned to Chuck, clearly dumbfounded. “That's it? You're going to send him into the middle of everything—while he's
drunk
?”

Clarence leaned forward, attempting to take the brunt of her wrath. “I'm not drunk.” He tapped the empty flask in his pocket. “And I'm not gonna be, am I?”

Chuck added, “That's not the whole plan.” He considered the cascade of events over the last forty-eight hours—Nicoleta's murder, the blood on the ground, his own entrapment in the mine, the collapse of the mine floor, the rotting bighorn sheep carcasses on Mount Landen. So many moving parts. “He's not the only one who'll be doing something.”

Janelle shot Chuck a withering look. “Don't tell me you're thinking of going off and doing something risky, too.”

“Clarence won't be risking his life in Falcon House, and I won't be taking any risks either.”

“Then what's this other part of your big plan?”

“I'm going to do some research.”

“Mr. Archaeologist,” Janelle huffed. “Always something more to study.”

Chuck recited his favorite quote from the first page of the very first archaeology textbook he'd been assigned at Fort Lewis College more than twenty years ago: “‘An archaeologist's task is to amass evidence piece by painstaking piece, until the compendium of proof shines a bright light on the precise truth.'”

He held his breath while Janelle absorbed the words. Her eyes went to the tall ponderosas that shaded the cabin on all sides. She looked back at him and jutted her chin in defiance. “All I know is, I'm not staying here alone with the girls. If you're going off to do some
research,
then we're coming with you.”

T
WENTY
-S
EVEN

“There's more you should know,” Chuck told Janelle as he drove the truck out of the resort complex, headed for town. She sat opposite him in the front seat. Carmelita and Rosie, still engaged in their computer battle, sat in back.

Chuck described the scene he'd encountered in the fen on the north side of Mount Landen—the headless rams, the stench, the swarms of flies. As he finished, his phone vibrated in his pocket. He let the incoming call go to voicemail.

“You think the dead sheep have something to do with the murder?” Janelle asked.

“No, I really don't.”

“And you don't think the puddle of blood and Clarence's knife have anything to do with it, either, right?”

“I don't know what to think anymore.”

“Which is why we're on our way to the library.”

“‘An archaeologist's task…'”

Janelle looked at her hands. “It's too much to take in, all of this.”

Chuck had been about to tell her of his entrapment in the mine, too, but she was frightened enough as it was. He clamped his mouth shut.

He parked in front of the library and turned to the girls, his arm over the front seat. “Time to turn those contraptions off.”

“Awww,” they grumbled.

He aimed a thumb at the library. “They say there's real, live books in there.”

The girls looked through the windshield.

“We're at the library!” Rosie rejoiced. She bounced up and down in failed attempts to loosen her seatbelt.

At Rosie's side, Carmelita beamed. Chuck held a palm out to her and she gave him a high-five.

“Me, too,” Rosie demanded.

She delivered his extended palm a ferocious slap. He shook his hand in fake pain before stretching to release her buckle.

Inside, Rosie took the hands of Janelle and Carmelita and tugged them down the hall toward the children's wing, where the three had spent a number of afternoons over the course of the summer.

Chuck checked his phone as he headed for the rear of the library. The call had been yet another from Sartore. He shoved his phone back in his pocket. He'd get back to the professor. But first: research.

He asked the librarian at the back desk if Elaine was in.

“She's on break,” the young man replied. “Outside.”

Chuck circled the building until he found Elaine seated on a discarded fiberglass desk chair against the chiseled stone wall of the library. A large, green dumpster shielded her from the traffic on Elkhorn Avenue. Her cane leaned against the wall beside her. Smoke curled from a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth.

Upon spotting Chuck, Elaine yanked the cigarette from her lips. “Now you know all my secrets,” she said as he approached.

“I don't imagine I know
all
of them yet,” he replied. “Nor am I sure I want to.”

Her lined face broke into a grin and she released a phlegmy croak of a laugh before growing serious. “You've had a little excitement up your way.”

“She was a nice young woman, by all accounts.”

“They always say that in situations like this.”

“Sounds like you know something about her I don't.”

She took a drag on her cigarette and blew smoke in a long stream out the side of her mouth. “I've been around long enough to know that when someone dies, there's usually a reason for it—and the person who's dead is usually part of the reason.”

“God, but you're a hard-ass, you know that?”

“The years tend to do that to you.”

“If you're not careful.”

“Careful's the last thing I've ever been in my life. Or ever wanted to be.”

With an open hand, Chuck gestured to an invisible audience. “How to grow up to be one smart-as-a-whip, tough-as-hell broad, Exhibit A.”

Elaine's watery eyes glowed. “I'll grant you, I'm pretty wise at this stage of the game.”

“Or just wizened?”

Elaine honked, smoke escaping from her nostrils. “You're more of a hard-ass than I am.”

“Just softening you up before I report back.”

She pointed at a second discarded library chair, this one listing on a bent leg. “Pull up a seat, Indiana Jones.”

Chuck settled into the chair with a heavy sigh. “It's good to talk to you.”

“It's always good to talk to me. What'd you learn?”

He took a moment to work his thoughts backward past Nicoleta's murder, the dead bighorns, and his forced stay in the mine to the oozing black material and the white object in the bottom of the shaft. “I'm not really sure.”

“That's not much of an answer.”

He rubbed his eyes with his fingertips, realizing yet again how exhausted he was. “The rock went away near the bottom. Everything started falling apart and I fell in and this black stuff covered me up. I thought I was a goner.” He knew he was rambling, but he couldn't help himself.

The tip of Elaine's cigarette glowed red in the shade of the building as she took a drag. “I don't understand a word you're saying.” She blew smoke past him.

He straightened in his seat. “Sorry.” He blinked hard a
couple of times. “In the mine, near the bottom of the vertical shaft, the rock gave way to something else.”

He described the black gunk and how it had collapsed around him at the slightest touch. He did not mention the white object he'd spied deep in the crevice.

“Black
gunk
?” Elaine asked.

“Black…
stuff
. Not as runny as mud, but really wet. Saturated. And granular, like coffee grounds.”

“Lots of it?”

Chuck shivered at the memory of the black material covering him in the pit. “Yes.”

“You brought some of this ‘gunk' back with you?”

Chuck looked away. “No.”

“Foolish man.” Elaine took a long pull on her cigarette, drawing it down to the filter, and dropped the stub in a metal can resting on the pavement next to her chair. She placed her hands on the hem of her dress at her knees. “I'm going to have to see some of it,” she said, smoke seeping from her mouth with her words.

“You don't know what it is?”

She blew out the last of the smoke. “I've got an idea. But I'll have to see the real thing before I'll know for sure.”

Chuck waited as a semi-truck and trailer rumbled by on Elkhorn Avenue. The thought of roping back down the vertical shaft filled him with less dread than he'd have imagined; he would need to descend only far enough to gather a sample of the black material.

He knew he had far more important things to worry about than some unexplained black stuff in an old mine, but there was still the coincidental-or-not timing of the puddle of blood and the discovery of the vertical shaft a few hours later to consider.

Besides, returning to the mine wouldn't take long, no more than three hours or so. He surveyed the wooded slope rising
beyond Elkhorn Avenue at the north edge of town. It was still well before sunset, enough time to drive to the mine, grab a sample of the black material, and most likely get back before Hemphill finished interviewing the last of the students.