5
As soon as Colcord stepped into the cabin, he was hit with a cloying smell, thick and chemical, that stuck in his nostrils. The smell was strangely familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.
“Stinks like a wet basement,” Cash said, “with an old piece of cheese rotting in the corner.”
“Creative take. Think the killers cleaned up?”
“Sure smells like it.” Cash wrinkled her nose.
Colcord paused to survey the scene. The small room was filled to the brim with junk, but it did not look like it had been trashed in a search. Stacks of delinquent library books leaned like towers of Pisa. Broken furniture legs were heaped on top of an old mining cart, along with the skeletons of umbrellas. Stuff was everywhere.
They moved slowly into the center of the main room, floorboards creaking underfoot. There was what looked like a doorway to a small kitchen, blocked with a faded curtain. A cot stood in one corner, next to a woodstove. Colcord could feel the weight of silence in the cabin; the place gave him a bad vibe.
“I saw this in a home décor magazine once,” Cash said. “Hoarder chic.”
Colcord gave a reluctant chuckle, but his heart was beating hard in his chest. He paused to scan the book titles in a pile.True Bigfoot Stories,Eyewitness Accounts of Killer Bigfoot Encounters,Hydrothermal and Placer Gold Deposits,Understanding Surveillance Technologies, andThe Tao of Pooh. He pointed to a copy ofThe Fly-Fishing Guide to Colorado’s Flat Tops Wilderness. “Hey, I’ve got this one.”
“Sounds like you two could have started a book club,” Cash said. “And just a reminder, don’t touch anything unless necessary, else you’ll face the Wrath of Romanski.”
“You see those wicked bear traps in the woods?” said Colcord. “We better be careful in case he booby-trapped the place.”
“I’ll keep an eye out,” Cash said.
It was warmer in the cabin, stuffy almost. Colorful vodka bottles, some broken, lay about among rocks, pieces of metal, and scraps of paper with drawings of monsters and sketched maps. A workbench and stool took up one corner, surprisingly neat. Among the curling wood chips lay small carvings of wildlife—some of them quite beautiful. For an eccentric recluse, the guy was creative, Colcord had to admit. He spied a large basket of unpolished red and polychromatic jasper pushed under the workbench. Next to it stood a rack with a green canister of oxygen and a maroon bottle of acetylene, with attached hoses and regulators—a portable welding setup, evidently for the sculptures.
He went over and inspected the unmade cot. Peering under it, he noted various tins and a small cashbox. Someone had recently dragged it out from underneath, disturbing the dust, and then pushed it back in place. Could thieves have murdered Grooms for money? Colcord reached out to open it.
“I’d take a photo before you move it,” said Cash.
“Lord almighty,” Colcord said under his breath. He made a big show of snapping photos, then carefully slid the box out from under the bed. A large wolf spider, startled by the movement, scuttled across the floorboards, and it took Colcord an effort to keep from jumping back, knowing he’d never live it down with Cash.
The cashbox was unlocked. He unlatched and opened it.
“Whoo-boy,” he said. Tucked in the corner were two rolls of what looked like hundred-dollar bills, held together with rubber bands. Several hefty nuggets of gold and a stack of Morgan silver dollars sat on top of a carefully folded piece of paper.
“Mind if I handle these,Agent in ChargeCash?” he asked.
Cash laughed. “Sure. Just take plenty of photos.”
Colcord chuckled. His mother had been an unassertive woman who let his father take charge of the ranch animals and the alfalfa fields whileshe ran the house. Cash was the complete opposite: bossy, forceful, and irritating as all hell. It took some getting used to. But he couldn’t help but feel a fondness for the woman. There wasn’t a phony thing about her. She was Frankie Cash through and through and made no apologies for who she was. He supposed that’s why he tolerated her—why he had requested her for this case. That and the fact she was maybe the best CBI agent he’d ever worked with. Hell, after surviving the Neanders together, she was like an old war buddy.
Colcord plucked out the nuggets with his gloved hands, took out the paper, and unfolded it. It was a meticulously hand-drawn schematic map of a mine complex, like a treasure map, with notations in red pencil and anXmarking the spot. A blue symbol was scrawled at the mine entrance—aJrotated ninety degrees from the left. The letter-number combinations CH4and CO2were written underneath it.
“What’s that?” Cash asked.
“TheJ—not sure. But CH4and CO2stand for methane and carbon dioxide. Looks like these are notations about gas hazards in a mine Grooms must have explored. Risky business, that.” He took a few more photos of the map, then folded it and put it back into the box. Carefully removing one of the tins, Colcord opened it and exposed more rolls of hundred-dollar bills and chunks of ore: quartz threaded with wire gold. He peered under the cot, counting seven tins. If the other tins looked like this one, it was a hell of a lot of money.
Cash whistled. “Bold retirement plan,” she said.
Colcord came to a realization. “If they were looking for something, it wasn’t money.” He put the items back where he had found them, careful not to disturb the dust.
The floorboards creaked under their collective weight as they made their way to the doorway into the kitchen. Colcord drew the curtain aside. There, on the table, lay Willy Grooms. At first glance, he looked to be peacefully sleeping. He was dressed in an old-fashioned nightgown, white, with a lace hem. His hands had been crossed over his chest like a corpse in a coffin… or a vampire. Silver dollars were pressed into the eyes, and the body appeared surprisingly clean. The skin was pale and rosy, even his weather-beaten face. There was no smell of decay—only that cloying chemical odor, as if the place had been scrubbed clean. Colcord did a double take.The old man looked more alive than any dead body he had ever seen. Unnaturally so. He had to stop himself from checking for a pulse, telling himself Dr. Huizinga would do that when he arrived, and he didn’t want to contaminate the body with his DNA.
“Poor Willy,” Cash said.
“Take a look at that.” Colcord pointed to a cut on the right side at the base of Grooms’s neck, just above the collarbone, where a purplish bruise radiated around a small wound. “Was he stabbed in the neck?”
“Maybe,” Cash said. “And look at that foot.”
Colcord turned his attention to it. Both feet were bare; the right one was covered with blood. It had been crushed, all the angles wrong, the toes broken and the skin lacerated. The left foot was normal. What the hell could have done that?
Colcord turned his attention to Grooms’s eyes. “Jesus, I think his eyes might be gone,” he said, noting the sunken nature of the coins in the sockets.
“Just like what the Neanders used to do.”
Colcord felt a rush of adrenaline, his body stiffening at memories he wished to forget. “You think it could have been them?”
“I hope to hell not. But I’ll feel a lot better when the cavalry gets here. This place is giving me the creeps.”
“I don’t like it either. There’s something about it…” Colcord couldn’t quite figure out how to finish the thought. Damn, whatwasthat smell? He shook his head again, bothered. All he knew is that he wanted to get the hell out of there, and as soon as possible.
