Tina Trimble was the oldest of five kids, all born to a single, underemployed, and overwhelmed mom who tended to move around a lot, just ahead of creditors. The moves were often hasty, so the whole family's worldly possessions came down to whatever could fit in the car and a few black plastic trash bags.
Tina learned early the value of organization, efficiency, and getting everybody in the car fast. Stepfathers drifted in and out, and Mom had a steady stream of boyfriends, who tended to be boozers, abusers, and jerks from all the dirtiest corners of the oil boomtown of Casper. So Tina also became a surrogate parent to her three sisters and youngest brother, whom she started babysitting when she was only six or seven. That was her life, slightly out of control, just the way it was. It'd be a long time before she understood that not everybody grew up that way.
After high school, she took a job at the local Target store. Reliable and conscientious beyond her years, Tina moved up quickly. She landed on the store's security staff, where she busted shoplifters daily, calling the occasional uniformed cop to take the hard cases away for booking. She thought cops were cool, so decisive and commanding. Under control.
One day, one of the cops urged her to take the test and put in an application. She studied up, took the test, and passed, even though she was only twenty years old, a year shy of the age limit. But as soon as she turned twenty-one, the Casper Police Department immediately offered her a job.
Tina spent the next five years on patrol, loving every minute. It satisfied her craving for structure and responsibility. When her chance came to join the local drug task force, headed by DCI, she volunteered.
Two years later, in 2005, an agent's job opened at DCI. They already knew her to be a trustworthy, fastidious cop, and they needed more female agents, so it was a no-brainer. She got it.
Trimble was assigned a cubicle desk on the other side of a wimpy little office wall from a crusty old investigator in the Casper field office's bull pen. Her team leader—the state's less threatening term for a sergeant—told her to learn quickly how to write reports and to read up on one of the team's particularly fascinating cold cases: the Uden mystery.
She did, and the next morning she was full of questions for her new cubicle mate, SA Lonnie TeBeest.
“When are you going to arrest them?” she asked him.
“What?” TeBeest was surprised by the question. “How do you know about that?”
Rookie SA Tina Trimble was suddenly a little intimidated. “I was told to read it.”
“Yeah, well, I'd arrest them right now if I could,” he said.
TeBeest never talked much about Gerald and Alice, but Trimble sat close enough to hear it unfolding. The receptionist would page TeBeest on the intercom, and Trimble would hear him on the line, sometimes very exercised, sometimes cajoling.
There were times, too, when the receptionist would page TeBeest on the intercom. She knew it was Claire. He always said the same thing: “Nothing new.”
TeBeest wasn't real demonstrative, Trimble observed. He once warned her not to get too close to the task force guys who floated through the office, volunteers from other agencies who could be temporary or half-assed, both things he hated. He described them as puppies who might dash into the street at any moment and get run over. Don't get attached, he'd say, and don't bother to learn their names.
But he cared deeply about some things. He was hip-deep in the Uden case now, and just eavesdropping on his phone conversations, Trimble sensed the depth of his commitment.
She also sensed that the case was close to a break. She expected…something. It was like an old-fashioned movie serial. She was a kid sitting in the back row of a dark theater, being held in constant suspense.
But it never broke.
A few years later, in 2009, she volunteered as a grunt on the aborted dig at the Remount mine, where she personally found a few fragments that were both meaningless (to the investigation) and tantalizing (to her).
She also saw TeBeest away from his desk, on the ground, as passionate as any cop she'd ever known. She'd been peripheral, digging in a trivial hole for a body that obviously wasn't there. He stood at the edge of a chilling precipice, believing that being there made all the difference.
He wasn't a mentor, really, because he didn't care to teach a damn thing. He wasn't a big brother, either, because he wasn't soft and cuddly that way. It made her smile to think of him as a big M&M—hard on the outside but softer deep down. OK, way deep maybe.
But not everybody with a good heart wears it on his sleeve. She knew TeBeest was at the center of a genuine storm, and he was all in. Suddenly, the Uden case wasn't just a paper chase to Trimble. She'd seen it in all its repugnant glory. It had real-life consequences for him and for people who depended on him.
She wanted to be a cop like that.
Wyoming's first Cold Case Team gathered on October 23, 2012—less than a month after Director Steve “Woody” Woodson authorized it. SA Tina Trimble was in charge.
They had plenty of work to do and no shortage of unsolved mysteries from which to choose, even in Wyoming. There were two Jane Does whose stories were entangled. There was the strange 1974 case of a confessed killer who supposedly left a dead man tied to a tree near Dubois that was never found. There was a 1989 disappearance of another Riverton woman who was never found but whose vanishing would eventually lead cops to a serial rapist.
But the team's first case was the 2011 murder of a thirty-five-year-old Texas woman who'd recently moved to the small town of Newcastle, where she was shot one night in her home by an unknown intruder. The evidence and memories were fresher, and there were no expensive excavations. It promised a quicker score for the fledgling squad.
The Uden case was the centerpiece of the team's next meeting.
On an unseasonably tepid Monday morning in January 2013, the team gathered in the conference room of the City of Cheyenne's annex building, across the street to the north from the Hall of Justice, behind a Subway sandwich shop.
At Director Woodson's invitation, Lonnie TeBeest drove down from Spearfish, South Dakota, that morning. It was mostly a courtesy. The team already had everything it needed. TeBeest could answer any questions they might have—they didn't—but he was mostly there only to see that his case hadn't died. When they asked if he had anything to add, TeBeest underscored how Alice had always controlled her police interviews, setting the times, choosing circumstances, briefing Gerald on the questions.
For example, he told them, she defined the length of her interviews by announcing, in advance, upcoming appointments she couldn't miss. She knew if she could outmaneuver her interrogators until then, she could walk out. Rope-a-dope.
It wasn't accidental that she and Gerald were never in the box at the same time. That way, she could preview the questions and get her story straight with Gerald. So TeBeest suggested it might work best if future interrogators kept them separate between interviews.
He also delivered several contractors’ rough estimates for the excavation. None amounted to the previously estimated $50,000, but they weren't free either.
TeBeest had nothing more to add. But these were smart and experienced homicide detectives, and TeBeest wasn't inclined to tell them how to do their jobs, especially on a case he couldn't close.
He had no idea if the cold-case team knew what he had tried and failed to do. Some weren't in his orbit. If they'd asked, he would have told them because he knew the story line by heart, but they didn't. Maybe they just had the same feelings about murdering children that he did.
The team knew instinctively what TeBeest had known for a long time: the Remount mine, whether it was an empty hole or a secret grave, held the next answer they needed. If it held a body (or four), the case might be cracked wide open. If nothing, the case was likely at a dead end.
The meeting adjourned after a couple hours of discussion. TeBeest's torch was passed, so he left. He drove back to Spearfish that afternoon, thinking about what he did and didn't do. Not because of that cold-case meeting, but because that's how he'd been spending his windshield time for the last several years.
While TeBeest was on the road, the team wasted no time. Tina Trimble personally proposed an idea that had been shot down a couple times in a previous DCI administration as too dangerous and too expensive: excavate the Remount mine. Find Ronnie Holtz or hit rock bottom, whichever came first. Either way, the answer they needed was in that cold hole.
Woodson wasted no time, either. This case wasn't a whodunit but a “how do we prove whodunit?” He totally agreed that the mine was the key that would unlock two intertwined decades-old cases—or slam the door shut on them forever.
He gave Trimble the green light to dig. He'd glanced at the cost estimates, but they weren't important. He wasn't going to let money obstruct justice.
He sent a clear message back to his team: Explore all options and let me worry about the money. And make it happen…sooner rather than later.
Woodson himself called TeBeest and let him know the dig was on again. After he hung up, TeBeest felt relief like a hundred-year flood. After all those years of delays and bullshit, finally somebody who knew what he was doing—and cared—was getting things done, he thought. Maybe it won't pan out, but we have to look.
Just like that, the wind changed direction, as it's known to do in Wyoming. Finally, instead of a hindering headwind, it blew now at the backs of the good guys.
Four months on the job, and Woodson was already making good on his vision for the Division of Criminal Investigation.
Now in their seventies, Gerald and Alice's golden years were more or less blissful. They lived on a quiet Missouri farm, doted on the occasional grandchild, sat on the porch together, generally avoided neighbors, and were pretty sure they'd literally gotten away with murder.
The cops had long ago stopped interviewing the kids and coming around. It'd been eight years since the Wyoming agents came to Missouri and revealed to Alice they knew something about Ron Holtz, but if they had anything—like, say, a body—they would have arrested Alice on the spot. They didn't.
So life moved on. Well, mostly.
Gerald and Alice owned a cat named Muffin and a faithful golden retriever, Lady, for many years. In one of their moves, they couldn't take Lady, so naturally Gerald's only option was to kill her (Muffin was spared because she was reasonably self-sufficient). But, ironically, Gerald simply couldn't pull the trigger, so he took Lady to the local veterinarian to be euthanized. He cried like a child when they bought a grave plot and properly buried her at the town's pet cemetery.
When Alice couldn't ride along on many of Gerald's cross-country hauls, he found other companionship. In a bird.
For $350, he bought a baby sun conure—a kind of parrot—that he fed with an eyedropper for several weeks. Then he strapped a cage in his passenger seat and hit the road. The bird learned a few words as it grew, and it especially liked to ride on Gerald's left shoulder, watching the passing traffic out his driver's-side window. Gerald loved his parrot, who performed little tricks and loved attention. The clever parrot's name was O. J.
Over the long winter of 2012, Gerald and Alice had the second-biggest fight of their married life (the biggest was when Gerald wanted to start drawing Social Security at age sixty-two, and Alice wanted the bigger paychecks at sixty-five). Now Gerald was almost seventy, and his roads seemed to be getting longer every day. He wanted to retire. He genuinely believed the $11,000 in his 401(k) would sustain them until they died.
But Alice protested, hard and loud. It was always about the money with Alice. Three years older, she wasn't working anymore, but she wanted more than their Social Security and Gerald's meager pension were paying. She wasn't a wasteful spender, but she apparently needed more pocket change than the average unsanctified nun who'd promised God a certain degree of poverty.
But ultimately, she agreed to allow Gerald to retire as long as their lifestyle continued without a hitch.
It didn't. Their savings dwindled, and Alice's standard of living thinned out, so she demanded Gerald go back to work. Just eleven months after he retired, Gerald unretired and hit the road again—at about the same time as DCI's Cold Case Team was considering a new strategy to literally burrow for Ron Holtz, Virginia Uden, and her missing sons.
It didn't pay to argue. When Alice was happy, life was easier. And bad things happened when Alice wasn't happy.
Almost forty years after Ronald Lee Holtz went missing…twenty years after Alice's tormented son Ted shared his mother's vile secret with an off-duty cop…four years after diggers merely scratched its repulsive surface…seven months after Steve Woodson gave his long-overdue blessing to a new dig, Tina Trimble and her cold-case squad prepared to dig a little deeper into the Remount mine.
From that moment, the team began laying the considerable groundwork for the complicated task of excavating a dangerous, possibly toxic hole on private property that might swallow some of them completely as they searched for a corpse that might or might not be there, using methods that were part forensics, part earth-moving project, and part hazmat emergency.
Just three days after getting the go-ahead, a DCI agent tracked down Sharon Mack in Chugiak, Alaska. Now forty-one, the wife of a commercial shrimper in a tiny village north of Anchorage, and the mother of two adult children—one of whom was severely disabled—Sharon was also the biological daughter of Ron Holtz.
She'd been six months old when her teenage mother fled the violent, drug-addled, psychotic Vietnam veteran in Colorado in 1971. So to her, Ron Holtz was a ghost in her deep past, something between a memory and a secret. Her grandfather discouraged her early on from asking too many questions about her real father. “No good could come from it,” he warned.
Sharon was legally adopted by her stepfather at age five, but he died when she was twelve. That's when she moved from Colorado to Alaska with her mom, who soon had another boyfriend, who eventually left too. Then along came another stepfather when Sharon was seventeen. And there was always her grandfather, Conway Holtz, until he died in 1995. She had no shortage of father figures in her life…just no actual father.
Her specter-dad obsessed her, although her mother never talked about him. Why doesn't he come looking for me? she wondered, more than a little sad.
In 2009, Sharon's half-sister had called with an enticing, if slightly incoherent, tidbit: Some cop—maybe FBI?—had told her that Sharon's dad maybe had been murdered by a “black widow”—I dunno, maybe somebody else's wife?—somewhere—maybe Florida? Anyway, the cops—I forget the name—wanted Sharon's DNA just in case—or maybe they found a body someplace. I just don't know. She had no names, no numbers, no clue.
Curious, Sharon called the FBI field office in Anchorage and repeated the story, as muddled as she'd heard it. The agent sort of chuckled. He checked his computer and found only some missing persons listings from Wyoming about Ron Holtz. Otherwise, the FBI had no pressing need for her or her DNA. She just dropped it.
In 2012, the same sister told Sharon that if her mother hadn't left Ronnie forty years before, they'd all be dead. It chilled Sharon to think that the people who should have loved her father the most, particularly his own father and sister, were now his greatest detractors.
Now, a year later, a state agent from Wyoming sought a fresh DNA sample from her, the only known direct descendant of Ronnie Holtz, in case they found him dead or alive. She agreed, even though she had no realistic expectation the case was going anywhere. Her genetic fingerprint would be entered in the National Missing Persons DNA database for any future testing. A formality.
In the early afternoon on January 23, 2013, as a favor to the Wyoming DCI, an Alaska state trooper came to Sharon's house. He collected four painless swabs from her mouth, then shipped them to the University of North Texas's Center for Human Identification. She didn't know agents would soon be boring into an abandoned mine she never knew existed, much less that a lot of smart people thought they might finally find out where Ronnie Holtz ended up.
Over the next six months, while the ground thawed, the team got its ducks in a row. Some ducks lined up perfectly, others not so much.
Agents again secured the necessary permission to search the mine from the Remount's new owner, an amiable rancher named Steve Bangert, who grew up in a small Nebraska town, the son of a Korean War veteran who'd lost both legs in combat. Bangert now lived with his family at the Remount, where he tended a few hundred head of prize Texas longhorns. A casual observer couldn't tell he was a billionaire, his day job being the CEO and founder of a big-time Denver investment bank, where he routinely wore blue jeans and shitkicker cowboy boots in the high-rise executive suite.
Dr. Rick Weathermon, the university's forensic osteologist who'd lent his considerable expertise to the fruitless pigpen and futile 2009 dig, was eager to take another shot at the Remount hole. But he knew bones, not mine safety, and DCI had learned in 2009 that they couldn't just grab a few garden shovels and start grubbing around like a khaki-clad prison chain gang.
So agents inquired whether the Wyoming National Guard might know anything about confined-space recovery operations, which often require geared-up specialists to work in narrow and constricted spaces that are dark, cold, and filled with hazardous stuff. But the Guard was deployed before their specialists could gear up.
DCI agents also interviewed Alice's oldest son, Tommy, just to see if there might be anything else they should know before they broke ground. But this son blamed his dysfunctional family's complete fragmentation on three decades of nosy investigators. He hadn't spoken to his mother in a long time, although he had heard she had some kind of cancer or heart disease. She never told him about any killing, but his sister Thea did; when he asked Alice about it later, she ended the conversation. He'd volunteered to search for the Uden boys in 1980 but got kicked off the team when cops learned he was their stepbrother. He really wasn't any help, but they had to ask.
A few new lab tests came back on several items found in the 1980 search, but none contained anything helpful.
And, of course, the agents had to juggle their usual caseloads too. Cold cases might have gained importance at DCI, but the live cases didn't suddenly become unimportant.
By midsummer, the last and biggest unknown was exactly how a motley bunch of cops were going to be able to safely gouge into a rocky slope to find—hell, just to recognize—as many as four dead humans among a hundred years of large animal remains. The prime time for digging before fall, when the first snow could fly, was slipping away.
Then somebody had a brainstorm. Wouldn't the Cheyenne Fire Department have some training and equipment for rescues in cramped spaces, like babies who fall down wells?
Why, yes, as a matter of fact they did.
The Cheyenne Fire Rescue team jumped in with both feet. After surveying the massive hole, the firefighters drew up plans for the safe insertion of trained diggers without any equipment heavier than a shovel. It was already twenty-five feet deep, and bedrock might be ninety feet down. A lot can go wrong nine stories deep in a narrow, unnatural pit of rot.
Their first priority was to keep searchers safe. They'd drape a stout canvas tarp around the walls to prevent dirt and rocks from falling onto anybody at the bottom. Air quality would be constantly monitored for unsafe levels of hydrogen sulfide, methane, and other gases. They'd be ready to pump fresh air in and bad air out, if necessary. Diggers would safely rappel into the hole and climb out on ropes anchored securely outside. And a rope-and-pulley web would be rigged directly above the opening to shuttle buckets of mud, bones, and other offal to the surface, where it could be examined closely, then filtered further as needed.
But the shaft wasn't just a hazardous hole in the ground. It was a potential crime scene that must be protected to keep pertinent evidence uncontaminated.
So Dr. Weathermon set the perimeter. He diagrammed a forensically sound, orderly work space that resembled a big target. At its center was the Hot Zone—the craggy maw, which was ten to twelve feet across—where diggers would do the real, grueling labor of shoveling.
The next circle immediately surrounding it, another twelve feet, was a no-man's-land where Weathermon, his anthropology team, and some specially trained agents would get the first close look at the bucketloads of muck, trash, and bones the hole disgorged. They'd wave a metal detector over it and rinse it; bigger items were pulled out for inspection, while the remnant muck went to the screens for further sifting. Everybody else would be asked to stay out as much as possible.
The outer ring was for the support staff who would sift the mud for smaller artifacts and bones, photograph the potential crime scene, run errands, give first aid, and generally supply the necessary grunt work.
Weathermon outfitted them with several archaeological screens that captured anything larger than a quarter-inch wide because very few human bones would be small enough to fall through. Any hidden bones that sifters found in their screens would be set aside for Weathermon to examine as he wandered among them.
This time, Deputy Director Steve Holloway, still in charge of the state crime lab, would only play a peripheral role. Weathermon and the firefighters would call the shots, and Woodson would make all the final decisions, if necessary.
In the end, the excavation team would comprise fifty professionals from Cheyenne's Fire Rescue, the Division of Criminal Investigation, the state crime lab, the University of Wyoming's anthropology department, an ambulance crew, and the Red Cross—and Director Woodson's personal guest, SA Lonnie TeBeest (retired).
Director Woodson had done something else: He thought out of the budget box. He personally appealed for help from Wyoming's Department of Homeland Security, which underwrote various major crime-fighting projects. His request was granted.
Since Wyoming's only four-year university and the Cheyenne Fire Department saw the two- or three-day excavation as both a “good cause” and an excellent training opportunity, they volunteered their work freely. The only cost to DCI would be some food and a $46 per diem to its agents.
All told, DCI would probably pay less than $2,000, far less than the estimated (and possibly imaginary) $50,000 that had constipated DCI's bean counters less than two years before.
On August 26, 2013—almost thirty-nine years since anybody saw Ronald Lee Holtz alive—Wyoming detectives embarked on their last, best chance of finding him.
In Wyoming, the end of August means it might snow at any moment, so SA Tina Trimble was eager to get started. She'd been entrusted with more than TeBeest's case. She'd inherited his fervor to close it too.
But nobody was more eager than Lonnie TeBeest to burrow into that damned hole again. He'd driven five hours from Spearfish the day before, checked into a Cheyenne motel, and rose early.
Woodson picked him up that morning in the lobby. Neither had slept well because they'd both staked a lot on this little expedition. Woodson had been pushing against an entrenched system, and TeBeest had been tugging mightily from the other side. In their own separate ways, both were expectant—and nervous about being proven wrong.
Forty-five minutes later, they stood at the edge of the Remount Ranch's McLaughlin Shaft. Even at only twenty-five feet deep, just as they'd left it four years before, it unnerved them. They circled around the hole, staying a few steps back and leaning over as far as possible to see inside, as if a giant tongue might suddenly dart out and suck them down.
The team prepared for the digging. Tarps went down all around the hole, filtering screens were erected, the overhead pulley system was suspended between the surrounding trees, and firefighters—wearing respirators to protect them from airborne dirt and stench—prepared to rope down into that cramped, vertical shaft on their bleak recovery mission. Everybody was assigned a task or two. TeBeest and Woodson were assigned to muddy grunt work on the screens.
By lunch, the first spades full of black, rancid earth were turned.
Again, that unholy sepulcher upchucked some vile slop. Various cow and horse bones, from skulls to hooves and everything between, came out in great clusters. Plumpish blobs of grave wax were everywhere. Everybody was slimed in a sticky black goo created by years of decaying meat, human refuse, pine needles, and dirty runoff water.
The stink was overpowering. Some of it was the unmistakable stench of decomposing flesh. But the pit also contained years of dead cows with bellies full of last meals. The actual stomach had long ago decayed, leaving big wads of half-digested grass and feculent gastric juices that smelled worse than black plastic bags of vomit, dog shit, and lawn clippings left sealed in the summer sun for a week.
At first, the mood wasn't as squalid as the task. Cops and firefighters exchanged plenty of playful trash talk. Moments of gallows humor punctuated the work—What do you call a dead man in a hole? Phil. When a salamander squittered out of the hole, Trimble captured the cute little guy with her bare hands and showed him off to everybody.
The whole system worked like an old grandfather clock, more or less smoothly except for a couple beats. They worked in shifts, so the digging never stopped. Lunch was delivered by some Cheyenne delicatessens. The buckets came up constantly. Their muck was slopped on a tarp for highly educated people to pick out the big chunks. Finally, the rest was squished, shaken, and sprayed through a metal filter to find any good stuff.
Alas, the first day ended without any good stuff. The firefighters had deepened the hole another ten feet, and nobody had gotten hurt. But among the piles of bones discarded around the perimeter, everything from cow skulls to owl femurs, there was nothing human. Nobody said it out loud, but more than a few of the searchers felt a little discouraged as the sun went down. The hole might be dry. Drinks were had.
Day two dawned more chastened than day one. The team kept its routine, moving buckets of mucky rot from the hole to the perimeter, passing through the professors’ scrutiny and quarter-inch screens along the way.
Somebody reminded Weathermon of the story about the great-grandfoal of Flicka—or at least her real-life inspiration—who died and was tossed in the mine in the mid-1970s, around the same time as Ronnie Holtz supposedly went down there. So the good doctor kept his eye peeled for the bones of a young horse. Hey, even scientists can hope.
Around midmorning, an excited digger called up from the hole. He'd found something.
A barrel.
Fifty hearts skipped a collective beat. The whole area went silent, except for the wind in the tree canopy above. Ron Holtz had supposedly been crammed in a barrel, they knew. Might this be it?
The tension built as diggers strapped the barrel securely and hoisted it slowly from more than three stories below the surface. Weathermon and the workers above got their first glimpse as it emerged from the dark hole: a rusty and crumpled metal barrel that obviously contained something.
A cowboy who stumbled on an old feed barrel would simply pry it open with a shovel or a stick, but this was a forensic operation searching for a murdered corpse. They couldn't just hack open a collapsed steel drum if it might contain crucial evidence in a homicide investigation. With some care and deliberation, trained investigators gently peeled it open to find…decayed antelope guts.
Everybody exhaled. Ronnie Holtz remained an elusive ghost, but the dismay was real. Nobody was more disappointed than TeBeest, who'd ridden this wretched roller coaster for twelve years: occasionally up, mostly down.
Work continued, a little more somber. Bucket after bucket came up full of wet muck, empty of smoking guns.
Just past noon, Weathermon left the cordoned work area to grab a sandwich and soda from the nearby sag wagon. He, too, felt everybody's chagrin. Nearly forty feet down in that damned pit and…nothing. His brain calculated a hundred fool's errands. Maybe this was the wrong hole. Maybe this was just another snipe hunt. Maybe Ronnie Holtz wasn't down there at all. Maybe he wasn't even dead.
The bone collector returned to the dig and wandered among the screeners, looking at the small bones they set aside for him. Nothing human.
Then one of his assistants from the university called him over. She'd found a bone he needed to see.
He instantly recognized it as an immature horse's humerus, a distinctive upper foreleg bone. Had it belonged to the Flicka great-grandfoal? Could Ron Holtz be near? Oh, for God's sake, was he really investing his whole scientific examination on a secondhand family yarn about a fictional horse?
Well, at the moment, yes. Weathermon had nothing else.
Before he had time to talk himself out of this foolishness, the skull of a young horse came up.
“OK, everybody,” Weathermon told the team, “we need to pay attention now. The bones will be small.”
But in that next golden hour, when Weathermon expected so much more…nothing. Aside from a few more young horse bones, nothing more came up. More buckets, more glop, more sinking spirits. Everyone was briefly buoyed by the discovery of the young horse's skull, but the excitement wore off.
Around two, a digger hollered he'd found another barrel, but it was just the metal snap ring that had once held a barrel's lid in place.
TeBeest and another DCI agent who operated one of the screens knew time was running short. They kept straining dirt, filling the corner of their screen with smaller bones caught by the filtering. They worked now without much chatter as the professor wandered silently among the screens, discarding everything on the growing heap of useless bones.
As he had for two days, the bone expert stopped at TeBeest's screen and looked closely at the pile of smaller bones he'd set aside. One caught his eye. He washed it again and turned it over several times.
“Stop!”
Weathermon's shriek was loud enough to be heard back in Cheyenne. Everybody froze.
TeBeest's heart was pumping fast, but only partly because of Weathermon's dramatic screech.
“Better call the coroner,” Weathermon said.
Ironically, TeBeest had found the first evidence that a human, maybe Holtz, was in that shaft. It was a human metatarsal, one of five bones in the foot, between the ankle and the toes. To the casual observer, it looked like a bone from a chicken wing; to the bone specialist Weathermon, it was as unique as a human skull.
Director Woodson, the lifelong cop, had one question for Weathermon.
“Are there any animal bones that can mimic human bones?” Woodson wasn't doubting his expertise. He was already building a case.
Weathermon snorted. “No,” he replied. “This is human. No doubt about it.”
The only smile bigger than Woodson's was TeBeest's. Everybody was high-fiving.
Forty feet at the bottom of the shaft suddenly became, officially, a crime scene. Woodson pulled the firefighters out of the hole and sent an experienced DCI homicide detective down there to unearth any more remains. Human bones started pouring from the hole. First, a bucket with two humeri, then more buckets with ribs, femurs, tibia, scapulae, pieces of pelvis, a pile of vertebrae.
Then a skull with a perfect little hole in the back.
That dreadful mine also belched up another little artifact of a long-ago death, a fragment of a story they once didn't know if they should believe: A dog's collar with a single name. Jefe.
Weathermon laid out a fresh blue tarp in the shade of the ponderosa pines, out of sunlight that might crack cold, wet bones that had spent decades below ground. Within the hour, his assistant had put them back together in what looked like an exploded view diagram of a human skeleton.
Weathermon studied the bones, which were remarkably clean and therefore not ancient. The skeleton definitely fit Ron Holtz's profile. The robust sciatic notch in the pelvis and heavy eye orbits indicated male; the femur put his height around six feet; the pubic symphysis suggested a man twenty to thirty years old.
But something bothered the professor. Telltale features of the cranium and femur suggested this might be a Native American, not an ordinary white guy, but they might simply be remnants of a long-ago interracial romance, or just aberrations.
It wasn't important at the moment. They'd come here to find a dead man, shot in the back of the head and dumped unceremoniously in this deep, dark hole. They found him. This was no longer just an archaeological excavation; it was a murder investigation. The final determination of whether this was Ronnie Holtz was in the hands of DNA profilers and the medical examiner.
When the dead man's bones were packed up safely in a box for the coroner, Weathermon turned to TeBeest, who beamed under the protective shade of the pines. He shook the old cop's hand.
“You did it” was all the bone man said.
TeBeest was euphoric…on the inside. He tried hard not to let anyone see how jubilant he was because…well, just because. He figured Claire knew, and that was good enough.
That night, everybody celebrated.
Weathermon went home to Laramie and popped a beer. He loved his job and got a lot of satisfaction when his old bones meant something, but he hated not being able to talk about the crimes he dug up.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” his wife asked him that night. She knew he couldn't say too much.
He just nodded and smiled.
Meanwhile, the cops and firefighters met for steaks and beers in Cheyenne. They were still on a high, lots of backslapping.
Except Tina Trimble, who suddenly felt the fever and chills of the flu coming on. Her stomach ached. Dammit. She'd planned to attend the upcoming autopsy in Loveland, Colorado, which she expected would give her everything she needed to get an arrest warrant for Alice Uden. The flu just wasn't gonna help.
Sure enough, after a sickly night, the next day at DCI's Cheyenne headquarters was worse. She drove home to Casper, and by the time she arrived, she was doubled over with stomach pain. Then came nausea and waves of diarrhea like she'd never known. She crawled into bed and waited for things to get better.
They didn't.
Two days after Ronnie Holtz was plucked piece by hideous piece from that putrescent Remount mine, he lay on a morgue table in McKee Medical Center in Loveland, Colorado. More specifically, his bones—minus a left rib and a few small bones in his hands and feet—lay in a disarticulated pile, waiting for a morgue assistant to put them all in order, like a morbid two-hundred-piece puzzle.
His right collarbone had either degenerated or been gnawed by animals, but Ronnie Holtz was in pretty good condition for a young man, considering he'd been dead for almost forty years.
Tiny bits of his dried bone marrow and dental pulp were sent to the state crime lab to be compared to Sharon Mack's DNA profile, just to confirm this was actually Ronnie Holtz. Analysis quickly showed that this pile of bones was 1.11 million times more likely to be Sharon Mack's father than any random pile of bones. Those were good odds.
Ironically, if Ronnie Holtz's bones had been found in 1984—only ten years after he was last seen—they couldn't have been identified precisely because DNA profiling didn't yet exist in the forensic toolbox. He would have remained an unidentified adult Caucasoid male. At best, prosecutors could have made only a circumstantial case, if they went to court at all; at worst, his nameless bones would have been piled in a pine box and buried in a pauper's field under a soon-forgotten number.
That morning, forensic pathologist Dr. James Wilkerson focused on the one unmistakable peculiarity he didn't expect to see in most healthy adult Caucasoid males: a neat bullet hole in the back of his skull. He needn't have performed almost six thousand autopsies to know that was significant.
Wilkerson described the wound in the precise, court-worthy argot of forensic medicine.
Entrance gunshot wound to the right back of the head located 3.5 inches from the top of the head and 1.5 inches to the right of the anterior midline. The hole is approximately one-third inch in dimension with inwardly beveled fractures…. Within the skull on X-ray there is a small-caliber, deformed projectile and it is recovered at autopsy…. No exit is identified.
In plain language, he might have said the poor guy was shot from behind, probably close range. The “projectile,” later identified as a .22-caliber bullet, made shrapnel of his cranium, so all those tiny bits of bone did their own damage.
Bullets travel damn fast, so fast that they zip through soft brain matter faster than brain matter rips, doing extra damage by stretching and shoving biological material as they zip.
The bullet hit the inner wall of Ronnie's skull above his left eye and ricocheted around in his brainpan, immobilizing him instantaneously. His skull was fractured in several places by the force of the bullet and blast. He might have bled profusely.
But while Ron Holtz might have seemed clearly dead to his killer, he mightn't have been clinically dead for as long as thirty minutes after he was shot. If Alice had quickly loaded him into a cardboard storage barrel after she shot him, he might actually have been technically alive when she did, although he certainly wouldn't have been conscious.
The deformed bullet that killed Holtz was found stuck in some dirt, leaves, and empty insect eggs on the right inner wall of his skull, where gravity eventually caused it to rest. That meant that Ron Holtz had spent the last forty years with his head canted to the right, open in the back to any hungry bugs looking for shelter. In fact, his bones were found in a curled or folded fetal position, bunched up with his knees to his chest…a cramped position that might be necessary to jam a tall man's corpse in a barrel.
There wasn't much guesswork to be done. The cause of Ronnie Holtz's death was a gunshot to the back of his head. And since he probably didn't shoot himself, Wilkerson ruled it a homicide.
Ah, but as they'd say in Wyoming, the Uden investigation was snakebit.
For more than thirty years, a series of unfortunate circumstances—some avoidable, some not—had prevented devoted detectives from busting their best and only suspects, Gerald and Alice Uden. From a slow start and disgraced sheriffs to missed sightings of dead bodies and internal political obstacles, the entire case seemed to be irreparably derailed several times, but it was always brought back from the dead by dogged cops.
Now, SA Tina Trimble couldn't make the arrest because she was laid up, gravely ill. The symptoms were so bad she considered death to be her better alternative. After two painful days in bed, her husband demanded she see a doctor.
At first, the doctor suspected food poisoning. For two days at the Remount excavation, she'd eaten sandwiches catered from delis in distant Cheyenne. They might have arrived with some foodborne bacteria, or germs might have multiplied as the sandwiches sat in the summer sun, even in coolers. But forty-nine other people ate the same food and didn't get sick.
It was also possible she'd inhaled or swallowed something dangerous from the nasty, necrotic mine shaft, but again, nobody else who was there—some even closer—was sick.
“Did you handle any snakes or turtles or any reptiles?” the puzzled doc asked.
No snakes or turtles, Trimble said…then remembered the salamander she'd caught.
A few blood tests later, mystery solved. Trimble had salmonella, and it had likely come from that cute little amphibian. At the mine, she'd washed her hands with store-bought sanitizer, but that wasn't enough to kill the powerful salmonella germs. Although some strains of salmonella are barely noticeable, others can be fatal in vulnerable people, especially when it causes dangerous dehydration.
Trimble was a long way from being cured. The doctor gave her antibiotics and twenty pills of a potent antidiarrheal medicine, then sent her home for much-needed bed rest. For a week, she was up and down so often that her husband slept in another room. She was forced to return to the doctor's office when she developed huge, painful lumps on her legs. It wasn't especially soothing to hear that they were signs of the infection leaching out of her body.
For nine days, Trimble was bedridden.
And for those same nine days, Gerald and Alice Uden lived a pleasant, unmolested life on their Missouri farm, utterly unaware that Trimble and her team had found Ronnie Holtz. Their justice had been delayed yet again.
That was about to change.