“I have another place. I told you I’d planned this for years. Do you think I wouldn’t make alternate arrangements in case something went wrong?” He smiled. “Alternate arrangements, alternate ending. Not as satisfactory as the one where I take you to Vancouver to Zander, but still a very interesting conclusion. But I’m still hoping to bring the other scenario into being.”
She had reached the trail and looked down at the lights of the coin factory. “What a shame. After all your hard work, setting up those gas vents. It all went to waste, didn’t it? I hope you were equally inventive in your second attempt at containing me.”
“You’ll have to judge for yourself. But you can be sure that you won’t get away from me again.” He looked down at the backpack. “We won’t be taken in by your tricks again, will we, Kevin?”
She shivered. Doane’s tone had been so loving, so matter-of-fact that it struck her as particularly eerie. She should be accustomed to it by now. Don’t let him see it.
“I’m fresh out of tricks,” she said as she started down the hill. “So I suppose I’ll just have to find a way to send you to hell to join your son. May I ask where we’re going?”
“Why not? There’s an old ghost town close to here. No one has gone there in years … but me. It will be a perfect place for you to finish your work on Kevin.”
Ghost town. She tried to keep any hint of eagerness or excitement from her expression. It had to be the ghost town Zander had mentioned, where he had stashed the phone and gun. Yet she couldn’t be that lucky. “Then why didn’t you bring me there first instead of that coin factory?”
“I told you, an alternate solution, an alternate location.” He pulled out his phone. “Now be quiet. I’ve got to call Blick and tell him that we’re moving in a different direction. He has his own part to play.” He gestured with his rifle. “Keep moving. Don’t think I’m not paying attention to you.” He was dialing quickly. “This will only take a minute. I have to—Blick?” He spoke quickly into the phone. “I’m leaving the coin factory and going to the ghost town. You know what you have to do. I’ll expect you up here right away. Wait, don’t hang up. What about Goldfork? Did you get it?” An instant later, he was cursing. “Failure after failure, Blick. Find her and get that journal from Kendra Michaels.” He drew a deep breath. “No, afterward, I told you where your priority lies. I have a feeling that everything might be closing in on me here. Things aren’t quite what they should be.” He hung up.
“Kendra Michaels?” Eve said. “What’s Kendra got to do with Blick?”
“Your friend, Kendra, is interfering in my plans. She’s searching for you, but she’s getting in my way,” Doane said grimly. “Another sign that your Quinn and Venable may be getting a little too close.” He nudged her again with the rifle. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Lisbon, Colorado
“HEY.” KENDRA LEANED in the passenger-side window and shook Margaret awake. “Ready to join the living?”
Margaret opened one eye, then the other. “It’s light out.”
“Excellent observation. And to think I was having doubts about bringing you with me.” Kendra pushed a tall drink cup through the window.
“What’s this?”
“I got you a green tea. No one who sleeps as soundly as you could possibly be a coffee drinker.”
Margaret smiled and took the cup. “It doesn’t make any difference. I lived next to a rock quarry for a while, and dynamite charges couldn’t wake me.” She glanced around at the old-growth trees and mountains in every direction. “Where are we?”
“Lisbon, Colorado. That’s the Continental Divide you’re looking at.”
Margaret nodded and gazed at the scenery a moment longer before looking at her phone. “It’s seven A.M.?”
“Yes. We got here a couple of hours ago. I thought this valley would be a good place to watch the sunrise, but I slept right through it.” She nodded toward a small white shack situated next to the lot where they were parked. “The coffee place just opened.”
“You’re not mentioning the journal. When we changed seats a few hours ago, I was too tired to ask you any questions. Did you find anything interesting?”
“Only a sadist would find Kevin’s journal interesting,” Kendra said soberly. “He was terrible. But there were a few things in it that sort of puzzled me. I’ll have to read it more closely.”
“By all means.” Margaret climbed out of the car and stretched. “Beautiful place, Kendra, but I have to ask—why here?”
“We found traces of gold in the trunk of Doane’s car. It wasn’t processed, at least not the way gold is now. This area was big during the gold-rush days, and some people still pan for gold around here.”
“Really?”
Kendra nodded toward a man, a woman, and three children climbing from an SUV. “Mostly tourists. There’s a gold-panning operation on the other side of that hill. There might be someone over there we can talk to.”
They followed the family up the path running alongside the parking lot, over a small hill, and found themselves looking down on a gentle stream babbling over rocks and a large tree that had fallen into the water. Two tents were set up next to the stream, staffed with young men and women renting out waders and pans. Two dozen or so people, mostly families, stood in the stream awkwardly moving their pans back and forth.
“Cool.” Margaret smiled. “But nobody here really looks like they know what they’re doing.”
“He does.” Kendra pointed to a bearded man, about seventy, who wore a bright orange vest adorned with the same company logo as on the equipment-rental tents. He was moving from party to party, demonstrating the proper technique for gold panning. “We’ll talk to him.”
They moved down a series of stepping-stones in the water and walked alongside the stream.
The bearded man looked at them and pointed back to the tents. “You rent your waders and pans over there, ladies. You might just strike it rich!”
Kendra smiled. “Do you own this operation?”
“Yes, ma’am, Martin Salle, at your service. I have over forty years’ experience working this area.”
Margaret’s eyes widened. “Forty years? In all that time, I’m surprised you didn’t strike it rich.”
There was nothing critical or catty in her tone, but her remark still caused Salle to look at them suspiciously. “Do you want to rent a pan or not?”
“We’re more interested in information,” Kendra said.
Salle raised his hand to shield the sun from his eyes. “What kind of information?”
Kendra pulled out her phone and showed him a photo of Doane on the screen. “Do you know this man?”
He studied it. “Afraid not. Should I?”
“Not necessarily. We think he may pan for gold in this area.”
“Huh.” Salle lowered his voice. “Did he run out on one of you?”
“No, nothing like that.” Kendra paused. “Are you sure you don’t know him?”
“Oh, I’m sure. It’s just that…” He stepped closer to them. “Look, the only people panning around here are doing it for fun, for a hobby. Like fishing. No one really thinks they’re going to score. It’s like buying a lotto ticket. They do it because it relaxes them. I know most of them, and this guy isn’t one of them.”
“Are there others who do what you do?” Margaret asked. “For tourists, I mean.”
“Sure. There are four or five companies that operate more or less regularly. And half a dozen other people who lead private gold-panning tours. But again, that guy isn’t one of ’em.” Salle looked downstream over his shoulder. “Sorry, but I gotta get back to my group. You might want to ask around at the visitors’ center if you haven’t already.”
“Where is that?”
He pointed to another hill behind him. “Over there. There are bathrooms, a little museum, and a gift shop all in one building. I seriously doubt he pans around here, but if he does, maybe someone there knows him.”
Salle
turned his attention back to his group, leaving Kendra and Margaret to step across the stream’s most shallow section and make their way up the hill.
“Do you think he was telling the truth?” Margaret asked.
“About not knowing Doane? I’m pretty sure. If he had, there probably would have been at least a flash of recognition when I showed him the photo. There wasn’t one. I was looking for it.”
Margaret smiled. “You have a lot in common with animals.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“No, just an observation. Animals are very perceptive about people. They don’t understand our spoken language. So they depend on everything else to make judgments about us. Our tone of voice, body language, the way we smell … Kind of how you absorb everything to form a complete picture. It’s interesting.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. That’s why many animals are such good judges of character. People rely almost entirely on their words to deceive. If you’re not focusing on just that, you have a much better idea about the kind of person you’re dealing with. Of course, you take it to an entirely different level.”
“You mean you’re giving me more credit than you would a poodle?”
“Sure, dogs are terrible judges of character. They like almost everyone they meet. It’s probably from being away from the wild for centuries.”
“I don’t have to talk to them to realize that.”
“Of course you don’t. Unlike people, animals don’t try to hide their feelings. I think that’s one reason I’ve always felt so comfortable with them.”
Kendra studied Margaret as they proceeded up the path. She was obviously accustomed to the skepticism that greeted her, and she didn’t seem at all concerned with convincing others of her abilities. It was yet another factor that made Margaret and her eccentricities easier to accept, Kendra realized. What you saw was what you got, and she didn’t really care what you did with it. “And you don’t trust what your fellow human beings are telling you?”
“Some of them. But I instinctively want to believe people are good, and that gets in the way of my judgment.” She shrugged. “But I couldn’t live any other way, so I just have to try to be careful.”
“You appear to know yourself very well.”
“You think so? It’s kind of hard when we all change with almost every experience.” She slanted her a look. “You’re an experience that will most likely change me, Kendra. It probably has already. I wonder what—” She broke off as they came over the hill. “Is that what they call a visiting center? Tiny, very tiny.”
“Well, it appears to only serve this particular tourist area.”
It took them another couple minutes to reach the visitors’ center, which turned out to be a small one-room building staffed only by an elderly woman passing out maps and pamphlets. The “museum” consisted mainly of framed black-and-white photos taken during the gold-rush era, interspersed with a few scant displays of vintage mining tools and clothing.
Kendra pulled out her phone and once again accessed Doane’s photo. “I have a feeling we’re wasting our time here. As soon as the lady is through talking to those people, I’ll see if she recognizes Doane. I guess then we can get on the road and try to find—” She froze, her gaze caught, held by something that she’d seen out of the corner of her eye. She whirled to face the wall.
Could it be?
“Kendra?” Margaret’s glance shifted between Kendra and the sepia-toned photograph that had grabbed her attention. “What is it?”
“That picture over there.” The photograph showed a clunky mechanical contraption, perhaps four feet tall, resting on four iron legs. A long handle jutted from the top, perpendicular to the rest of the device.
“It looks like some peculiar robotic animal,” Margaret said. “What about it?”
“Trust you to see an animal in a machine,” Kendra said absently as she stepped closer to the framed photograph. “This is incredible.”
“What’s incredible?”
“This … thing. Whatever it is.”
“The little sign says it’s a nineteenth-century coin press. What’s so amazing about it?”
“Doane had one of these in his car recently.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw fresh marks in his car after it was brought up from the lake.”
Margaret shook her head. “I don’t see how one of these things could even fit.”
“It could fit. I know it.” Kendra could understand why Margaret was doubtful. She should be questioning herself. She had to figure out why she was so certain that this was the answer. Yet the minute she had caught sight of that press, something had clicked. She had visualized that machine in the trunk. From the time she had seen those indentations in the trunk at the lake, it had been there in the back of her mind. She had been working at it, trying to puzzle it out. “Okay, I see what you mean. It does seem a little too large. Let me think about it.”
Kendra concentrated, studying the contours of the press for a moment longer. Then she began replaying in her mind’s eye each scratch, dent, and impression she had observed in Doane’s car.
How had he done it …
Then it all came together. “It was disassembled and moved in three trips. The iron legs extended from the trunk all the way through the backseat. Trip one. The bottom half of the body went in the trunk for trip two. The top half of the body went into the trunk for trip three, and the handle might still have been attached to it and poked through to the backseat.”
Margaret stared at her in amazement. “You’re sure of the order?”
“I’m positive. Given the way the marks intersected with each other, it’s the only way it could have happened.” Kendra raised her phone. “I have photos of the trunk right here. Do you want me to show you?”
“No, thanks.” Margaret smiled at Kendra’s burst of intensity and excitement. “I’m not sure I’d see the same thing that you do.”
“Of course you would. Once I explained it to you. It’s very clear.”
“If I marched to your drummer, maybe.” She chuckled. “But I don’t have to see what you see to believe you. I march to kind of a different drummer myself.”
“I noticed that.” And it was enough that Margaret believed that Kendra’s deductions were valid. That faith was more than Kendra had offered Margaret.
Kendra turned to the elderly woman who had just finished her conversation with the center’s only other occupants. “Excuse me. May I ask you something?”
The woman walked over to her. “Yes, honey?”
Kendra pointed to the photograph. “This device was used to make coins?”
“Yes. Most gold-rush towns had their own coin factories. Sometimes more than one. Prospectors would bring their gold to be weighed and get gold coins in return.”
“So it was kind of like a mint,” Margaret said.
“That’s exactly what it was. Back then, not all money was made by the government. Private companies could manufacture it themselves. Believe it or not, the Denver mint began as a private coin factory.” She pointed to the photograph. “That’s where this picture was taken. This press is still there.”
“Are there others around?”
“Oh, sure. Museums have them, some belong to private collectors.”
“Any in this area?”
The woman thought for a moment. “Hmm. I don’t know of any offhand.” She glanced at a family that had just entered the center. “You’ll have to excuse me now.”
Kendra gave one last look at the photo of the coin press, raised her phone and snapped a picture of it, then jerked her head toward the door. “Let’s go, Margaret.”
Margaret was frowning as they left the center. “Okay, I accept that Doane had a coin press in his trunk. Why? And where did he get it when he was under surveillance?”
“Pretty faulty surveillance, or he would never have been permitted to leave Goldfork. As to why, that’s what we’ve got to find out.
He was either transporting it from one place to another or perhaps disposing of it. Either way it’s a damn odd object to be moving when he was focused on going after Eve.” Kendra was taking her phone out of her pocket. “I think we may need a little help.” She was quickly dialing a number.
“Who are you calling?” Margaret asked.
“Hello, Venable.” Kendra spoke into the phone. “Miss me? Didn’t I tell you I’d keep in touch?”
“I don’t miss you as much as that dead police officer’s buddies. You might find yourself on the receiving end of a statewide APB if you don’t talk to them soon.”
“Don’t you think I’d do that if I could? I just don’t have time.”
“Somehow I thought that might be your answer,” he said dryly. “So what’s keeping you so busy?”
“I need information. Quinn says you’re good at marshaling resources among all the government agencies and coming up with the right answer. Is that right?”
“Of course,” he said sarcastically. “Why else does the CIA exist but to provide you with what you need?”
“I’m transmitting you a picture I just snapped of an antique coin press. It was used to make gold coins during gold-rush days. I’m positive Doane had one of these, or a similar model, in his car recently.”
Now she had Venable’s full attention. “‘Positive’ is a strong word.”
“As positive as I can be without actually seeing the machine in the trunk. Pass this photo along to the forensic team going over Doane’s car in Atlanta right now. They’ll back me up if they compare it to the impressions and scratches on the trunk and backseat. This thing was disassembled into three major parts and moved. That’s why there was gold dust on the scene. It had probably been caught in the press’s inner workings for over a century.”
“Okay, good. I’ll see what we can find out about it. I’m not sure what it will do for us, though.”
“I’m not sure either, but we’re not exactly swimming in leads. I’m excited that we managed to find this one.”
“I’m a little excited myself.” He paused. “So are you coming in? We have a lot to talk about.”