I was hurting.
My visits yesterday and today brought me to the theory that Dodd Oxley stole the gold nuggets the scammers planned to use to re-salt the Shangri-La mine, explaining the change in fortunes and the Oxleys’ isolation.
Big deal.
What did I do with that?
I was back to whether Deputy Itson would have … what? … murdered Melissa Oxley because her father stole gold from the people who’d scammed his grandfather?
Stated like that, it was far-fetched.
I could say I’d wasted my time on this tangent, but did I have anything better to spend my time on?
Which brought me back to my pain point.
What to do next?
Besides wait.
* * * *
My phone rang. I grabbed it before the second ring.
“Hi, Tom.”
“Are you okay?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“The note you left on your counter was a little … cryptic.”
“Oh. You’re at my house, huh. I just said I didn’t think Shadow would want a walk right now, but he’d love to visit with you and Tamantha.”
“Why no walk?”
“We, uh, took a few walks.”
“Since yesterday?”
“Yeah.”
“Hit a dead end on your inquiries?”
“Maybe.”
“No more ideas?”
“Temporary lull.”
“Uh-huh. What do you usually do when this happens?”
“It doesn’t usually happen,” I said loftily.
“What do you do on the rare occasions this happens. And —”
“That’s better.
“—I think I know. Free Cell.”
I didn’t mention being sick of it. “It would not be politic to play endless games of Free Cell here in the newsroom, where other people who are working hard could see.”
“What’s your backup?”
I considered. “I noodle.”
“Doodle?”
“Not doodle. Though I understand for people with an artistic bent, which I completely lack, that can free up the brain enough to unclog a jam. But for me, it’s noodling — hopping around the Internet looking for tidbits of any shape, size, or texture that might spark some primordial version of thought. Something — anything — to put into my brain to get the sludge moving.”
He said nothing.
“You think it’s time for me to noodle.”
“Sounds like,” he said.
So, I noodled.
I looked up more on gold mine scams. And somehow got off onto a guy from Scotland who made up a whole country as part of his scam in the 1820s. Might be a stretch to use that in a “Helping Out!” segment.
I looked up Caroline Lockhart, the Huntington sisters, Bill Nye. Needham and Mrs. Parens had told me the good stuff.
Now I was searching online for news from Horse Creek County with a vague hope it might turn over a rock with an answer of why Melissa Oxley went there.
What I found, instead, were a couple lines from the Independence citing Horse Creek County Sheriff’s Department reports about a bicycle reported stolen and found at the Slake-ur-Thirst Bar in Colter.
The bike theft Deputy Itson talked about. There was even a photo of the bike leaning against a wall.
The name of the bar caught my attention. Unless the owner’s last name was Slake, it was a fairly clever and original name.
I looked it up online.
No website. But there was a phone number and locater map.
More noodling by zooming in on the map while I called the number and got a recording with the hours. If I wanted to visit the Slake-ur-Thirst Bar, I’d have to noodle longer, because it was not a brunch kind of establishment.
I switched from the zoomed-in street view of the Slake-ur-Thirst Bar — it looked like a tumbleweed could knock it over — to the satellite view.
The first thing that struck me was how much could be seen.
Growing up in Illinois, then living in Dayton, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C., trees canopied much of a satellite view, providing privacy. In New York, the density of buildings masked many individual structures.
But in Wyoming, especially in Horse Creek County, the dun-colored earth and what rested on it was wide open to the spying eye from the sky.
The parking lot claimed prominence, fading into the earth at its edges. The roof of Slake-ur-Thirst presented a sturdier looking rectangle than the street view. It also showed a couple arms extending from the rectangle.
I focused on the one on the left. A bike leaned against the wall of the main part of the building would be blocked by that arm from the view of anyone in the parking lot. Interesting.
I zoomed out a bit to get a better grasp of the relationship to the highway.
I’d over zoomed out, leaving a strip of dun-colored earth across the bottom of the screen, then the darker tint of the highway, the parking lot, the building, then more expanse of nothing to the top.
My finger hovered, about to correct the zoom to show only the building, lot, and highway.
Almost nothing to the top. Not completely nothing to the top
I pulled my finger back and squinted.
Above and to the left of the bar’s building, ran an angled line.
It was much lighter and narrower than the highway. A pencil stroke compared to a paint brush swipe.
I shifted the center of focus to the line and zoomed in more.
A path of some kind.
It appeared to end at the highway, to the left of the building, not far from the indistinct edge of the Slake-ur-Thirst’s parking lot.
But where did it come from?
I zoomed out slightly, recentering on the path, but keeping the building visible on the right to give me a landmark. The path disappeared off the top of the screen.
Letting go of the landmark, I scrolled up, still following the path.
A new line appeared. Horizontal, perpendicular with the path. This line wider than the path and narrower than the highway that now disappeared off the bottom of the screen. It was not as dark and precise as the highway, either, but just as straight.
I shifted to street-level, not sure there would be anything, since this wasn’t a street. There was something. A shoddy rendition of the view Jenks’ first video captured, with broken bluffs in the distance, a tumbleweed playground in the middle ground, and a broken-up road in the foreground.
A road.
The road. Shangri-La Mine Road.
But a closer look said this was not the same view as Jenks’ video. The angle was off.
I backed off a bit on the zoom, remembering the video, squinting at the scenery.
Zeroed in on where I thought the VW Beetle was found. Then switched to the satellite view. Another tap to cut back on zoom.
And there was the highway. With the edge of Slake-ur-Thirst just showing up on the screen.
From my approximated location of Melissa’s car to the bar was a little over a mile on an as-the-crow-flies trajectory — if the crow took no detours, which they tend to do, despite their reputation.
Adjusting the distance by following the path’s route, it was about two miles.
But when I’d asked Jenks, he’d ticked off miles and miles —
Because I’d asked him about driving between that spot and Colter, not how far it was overland.
I called Mike. “How familiar are you with Horse Creek County?”
“Middling.”
“There’s a place called Slake-ur-Thirst—”
“That I know.”
“Figures.”
“Don’t know how they did it and never asked, but when I was a kid, they used to get more NFL games pulled in than anywhere else around.”
“A kid? At a bar?”
He chuckled. “They were stricter about my training than coach was. They already had an eye on me for UW.” Playing football for the University of Wyoming was a communal affair.
“There’s a path near the bar that connects to Shangri-La Mine Road.”
“Oh, yeah. I sort of remember that. There was a bet one night and they settled it, running the path in the dark.”
“How long to ride a bike?”
“It would be easier on horseback.”
“No horses were stolen. A bike was. Wait, I’m sending you a screengrab.”
“Was there a moon that night?”
“A moon—?” Light, of course. “It was a full moon. Or right after. Also the bike…” I pulled up the photo from the Independence. “It has a headlight.”
“Trouble is, as I recall the area, a bike light would be visible for miles. At least off and on with the ups and downs. Moonlight’s a better bet.”
“It was bright. No clouds. That’s why it got so cold that night. I’m going to check out this path.”
“Not by yourself.”
I clicked my tongue. “You think Shangri-La Mine Road and Slake-ur-Thirst are dangerous?”
“Somebody’s dead,” he said solemnly, “and you’re sure it wasn’t suicide.”