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The following morning, Maddock, Spenser, and Kendra parked in front of a modest home in Pasadena. Spenser double-checked the address against her notes.
“This is it. According to the listing, she still lives here.”
After being dropped off by their celebrity rescuers, Maddock and the others had spent hours searching the web for clues to the identity of the body beneath the Striker mausoleum. Finally, Spenser had identified a young man named Daniel Morris, who had disappeared in 1993. When last seen, he had been wearing a tracksuit like the one on the corpse, and his hair in the photos was also a match. They learned his mother, Hetta, still resided in the area. They had found her address and decided to pay her a visit.
“Remember the plan,” Spenser said. “We take the lead. You try not to appear intimidating.”
“I thought Bones was the scary looking one.”
“You’re plenty intimidating when you want to be,” Spenser said. “Just smile and let us do most of the talking.”
“If you were worried about me frightening her, you should have brought Dakota.”
“My brother is a kind and gentle soul with a knack for saying and doing the wrong thing. It’s not worth the risk.”
“Fair enough.”
They mounted the steps and knocked. A white-haired woman with a lined face answered the door. Spenser introduced herself and handed over a business card.
“My show delves into mysteries and legends of all kinds,” she explained. “We have been looking into Daniel’s disappearance and we wondered if we could chat with you.”
Hetta was delighted to have company and eager to talk about her son. She invited them to sit at the kitchen table, where she served fresh coffee and day-old pastries.
“Daniel was a good boy. He worked hard and his teachers said he had an inquisitive mind.”
“Did he have a job or go to school?” Spenser asked.
“He worked at Drakeland, beginning the day he turned eighteen, and he positively loved it. He was suspended from work about a week before he vanished.”
“May I ask what happened?” Spenser said.
“Daniel said he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and could not come up with a suitable excuse. He wasn’t upset about it. He said it would give him more time for his hobbies.”
“What was he into?” Maddock asked.
“History, mystery, and treasure hunts.”
“A man after my own heart.”
“Did Daniel ever try to solve a mystery on his own?” Spenser asked.
Hetta laughed. “He was seven years old when he cracked his first case—the mystery of the missing chili dog. The culprit was our dog.”
“How about treasure hunts?” Maddock said.
“He went on his first a few years ago. He got lost searching for the Lost Dutchman Mine in Arizona, had to be rescued. I tried to convince him to give up the hobby, but it was like he was obsessed with finding gold or lost artifacts.”
“He caught the bug,” Maddock said. “Treasure hunting can be addictive.”
Hetta nodded sadly. “It took over his life. When he wasn’t working, he was either shut up in his room, at the library, or off to some secret location. His personality changed—he became secretive, irritable.”
“Do you have any theories about what happened to him?” Spenser asked.
“I fear he went on one of his treasure hunts and got himself killed.” Her eyes fell. “After all these years I don’t expect him to be found alive, but it would be a relief to learn what happened to him.”
“Did he leave any clues behind? Any indication where he was going or what he was looking for?” Kendra asked.
“A police detective took most of his books, notebooks, and his desktop computer. Funny, he never returned them, and when I called the department, they denied having taken them.”
Maddock wondered if an impostor had stolen them. Someone connected to the men he and Bones escaped the previous night. “Do you remember anything about the detective? His name, what he looked like?”
Hetta considered the question. He was big, I think he had blond hair. The only thing I remember clearly is his signet ring. It had the pattern of a cross inside a clover.
“The detective,” Spenser began, “did he say anything that might give us a hint where to look?”
Hetta propped her chin in the palm of her hand and stared out the window. Her eyes went misty, and she lapsed into contemplative silence. “Not that I recall.”
“Do you remember his name?” Spenser asked. “Perhaps he would speak with us.”
“He’s not around anymore. He quit the force shortly after it was decided that Daniel’s case was no longer an active investigation. He was later found murdered in Drakeland, of all places.”
“That is strange,” Spenser said. “Is there anything else you can share with us that might help?”
“The detective also took an interest in Daniel’s email. I know the password and never changed it in case he ever turned up and wanted to log in.” Her voice broke.
“I promise we won’t be intrusive,” Spenser said. “We’re very interested in solving the case.”
Hetta opened her laptop computer and logged into her son’s email account. She turned the computer around so Spenser and Maddock could see.
They checked his Inbox and his Sent and Deleted folders, scanned the subject headings. All of them appeared to be ordinary personal correspondence. Spenser clicked through a few at random just to make certain there were no clues there.
“Check the Draft folder,” Maddock said. Inside was a single, incomplete email dated two weeks before Daniel disappeared. The email was addressed to a Professor Zander English.
Dear Professor English
My name is Daniel Morris, and I am a student of history. I am hoping you can help me with my research into a Spanish treasure believed to be lost in the Utah desert. I am also wondering if you are familiar with a symbol that keeps turning up in my research. That was where the email ended.
“I wonder if he wrote a new email, or did he never get around to finishing it,” Spenser said.
“Let’s take another look at his Sent folder, starting with the day he wrote the draft letter,” Maddock said. They checked the folder and there were no outgoing emails to Professor English. “If he ever sent that email, someone deleted it.”
Maddock glanced at Spenser. They still needed a six-letter keyword to open the cryptex. But how to nudge the conversation in that direction? He took another look at the draft email. None of the six-letter words it contained seemed likely. Then he noticed Daniel’s email address: digger76@wol.com.
“Did Daniel go by the name Digger?” he asked.
“Digger was the name of our family dog. We got him when Daniel was four years old. They grew up together. Daniel was seventeen when the old pup finally crossed the rainbow bridge. It nearly broke him.”
Spenser’s eyes flitted in Maddock’s direction, and she quirked an eyebrow. They were thinking the same thing. At Spenser’s request, Hetta escorted her and Kendra to Daniel’s bedroom, which she had left intact since his disappearance. Meanwhile, Maddock excused himself to the restroom. Inside, he locked the door and turned on the water. He retrieved the cryptex from his pocket, took a deep breath, and spun the first dial to the letter D. He turned each dial to spell out the word DIGGER.
His heart raced. If he was wrong, he would destroy its contents. “Here goes nothing.” He gave a firm tug and the cryptex slid open! Inside was a slip of paper. There would be plenty of time to examine it once they got back to Spenser’s place. For now, it would remain a secret. He closed, locked, and pocketed the cryptex, and went to join the others.
Adventure-themed posters and prints with Drakeland tie-ins adorned the walls of Daniel’s bedroom. The lone exceptions were a floor plan and a track layout of Drakeland’s Ghostly Manor ride.
“What was his interest in this? Was that where he worked?” Maddock pointed at the two diagrams pinned to the wall above a small desk.
Hetta shrugged. “He only said he thought it was cool.”
They looked around a bit more but found nothing of interest. Kendra even turned on the spirit box and tried to talk to Daniel, but she got no answer. Despite their success with the cryptex, a somber cloud hung over them as they thanked Hetta and departed.
“I hated that,” Spenser said as they merged onto Pasadena Freeway and headed back toward Los Angeles. “Pretending we didn’t know what happened to her son. We could have eased her burden.”
“She’s going to find out soon enough,” Maddock said. “And I’m not sure she will find peace once she finds out Daniel was murdered.”
Spenser sighed heavily and turned to stare out the window. Suddenly she perked up. “The cryptex! What was inside it?” She slipped her hand into Maddock’s pocket.
“Buy me dinner first,” Maddock said.
“Hush.” Spenser fished out the cryptex, entered the keyword, and opened it. “There’s a tiny scroll in here. She took the paper out and unrolled it. On it were a few sentences written in tight cursive handwriting. She scanned the paper and gasped. “No way!”
“What is it?” Maddock asked.
“According to this, someone passed along secret information about the treasure to Brigham Young. After his death, a written record of said info was hidden inside his funeral hearse.”
“Any idea where Brigham Young’s funeral hearse is?” Kendra asked.
“According to a note someone added, I assume it was Daniel, the hearse at Drakeland’s Ghostly Manor is the same one that carried Brigham Young to his funeral.”
“Daniel must have tried to retrieve it,” Maddock said. “I’ll bet that’s why he lost his job.”
“Well then,” Spenser said, “I guess we’re going to Drakeland.”
