Grundage Creek Road went up a steep gorge, the creek rushing below over boulders and through pools. The old road had been carved and blasted by hand out of the rock walls of the gorge, and it went to the old sawmill and ghost town of Grundage. Colcord fly-fished this river on occasion. It was here, as a teenager, he had caught a four-pound cutthroat trout on a two-pound test line. It was the indelible memory of that day—the sunlight glittering off the water, the fish leaping and fighting, the aspens rustling in the breeze—that he replayed again and again in his mind like a mantra during some of his worst days in Iraq.
He slowed down as he passed by the hole where he had caught that trout. There was a teenage boy there, just like he’d been, lashing the water. It gladdened his heart.
The road went from bad to worse and finally, where the gorge opened up into a broad valley, petered out into a rutted track. A hand-painted sign said, NO TRESPASSING THAT MEANS YOU. And then another sign, with a crude painting of a six-gun aiming at the viewer: YES YOU.
Colcord shook his head with a smile. Colorado was full of these old-timers, these independent backwoods types. God love ’em.
The track soon ended in the ruins of the old Grundage sawmill, a batten board structure now caved in, with a scattering of log cabins beyond it, the remains of the former settlement. One cabin appeared lived in, with cheerful red curtains in the windows and smoke issuing from a stone chimney.
Colcord pulled up well short of the inhabited one. There was no car out in front, but a horse grazed in a pasture nearby, tossing his head and nipping away flies. Colcord got out of the vehicle and stood next to it, waiting for the inhabitant to see him, if he hadn’t already. He saw one of the curtains over the window move. He waited a moment, then reached into the Suburban and gave the horn a little toot.
A moment later, the door opened, and out came Yearwood, looking just as Colcord expected: moth-eaten cowboy hat, overalls, and a beard as long and white as one of those ZZ Top band members’. A double-barreled shotgun, broken open, was draped over his left arm.
“Mr. Augustus Yearwood?” Colcord called out.
“What you want?” came the shrill reply.
“Sheriff Colcord, Eagle County. I’m investigating the murders up at Erebus.” He held up his star.
Silence. Colcord wondered for a moment if Yearwood had even heard of the murders, but then the old man raised a hand and in a much friendlier voice called out, “Welcome, Sheriff. Come on in!”
Colcord followed him into the interior of the log house. Yearwood shut the shotgun and propped it up next to the door. He was about the skinniest old man Colcord had ever laid eyes on, a string bag of bones.
“Coffee, Sheriff?”
“Yes, please.”
“Take a load off while I git it.” He pointed to a seat.
He disappeared into the back of the cabin while Colcord sat down in a homemade chair constructed of screwed-together oak branches, with an old Navajo rug draped over it. It was viciously uncomfortable. A big stone fireplace with a woodstove built into it issued a welcome heat.
Yearwood returned with two steaming mugs. Colcord took his while Yearwood sat himself down in the only other chair in the room. The old man leaned forward on his elbows, his beard draped over his knees, his eyes flashing with a fierce eagerness. “Now, tell me about the murders up at Erebus.”
Christ, thought Colcord, this guy’s as excited for news as Burch. It dawned on him that this must be a huge news story in the outside world to have reached all the way up here. He felt a momentary chill. If this case didn’t get solved, and fast, he might as well kiss reelection goodbye.
He pushed that idea out of his head and focused on the interview at hand.
“Mr. Yearwood,” said Colcord. “I hear from my old friend Burch that you might be familiar with the mines up in the Erebus Valley.”
“Yes, sir, I am. I spent five years up there prospecting. That’s some of the most beautiful country in our God-given land. Shame those bastards at Erebus took it over.”
Colcord nodded. “Are you familiar with the Jackman Mine?”
“Sure. There are three mines up there, sort of—Hesperus, Fryingpan, and Jackman. I say ‘sort of’ because they started out as three mining claims, but they all eventually connected inside the mountains. I prospected in all three of them, especially Fryingpan. They call it that because the two partners who filed on the claim got into a disputation, and one bashed the other’s brains with a frying pan.”
“I see. Interesting. Did you, ah, find anything in the mines? Gold?”
“Hell yes. There’s still little bits of wire gold in there, just enough to make it worthwhile. That complex is the biggest hard-rock mine in Colorado, yielded over a billion dollars in gold and silver. What you got there is the so-called Cronus Pluton, a magma intrusion into Precambrian rock that was uplifted during the Laramide orogeny fifty-five million years ago. The Cronus Pluton is mostly quartz-rich granitoid and diorite with dispersed silver and gold in wire form, following quartz veins going every which way. So to git it, they had to take out a hell of a lot of rock, just blast the shit out of the mountain. You could put Notre Dame in some of those stopes in there, but the pluton is so hard and consolidated that they got away with it, mostly without shoring and bracing.”
Colcord had temporarily lost the geological thread. “So you’re saying the Jackman Mine is big?”
“Big? It’s huge. And like I said, it’s all just one mine. Started out as three, but eventually, the adits and stopes linked up inside the mountains. Those miners were chasing a bunch of diffuse ore bodies and veins that were like a maze.”
“I went to the historical society,” Colcord said, “but someone stole the maps to the Jackman Mine.”
“That so? Those maps were there back when I was prospecting.”
“It seems they were recently taken. Any idea who?”
“No, sir. Not a clue.”
“Burch said you might remember where the openings to the mine were.”
“I got better than that. I got my own hand-drawn maps of Jackman. Those filed maps were never accurate. Mine are better.”
This was almost too good to be true. But Yearwood didn’t make a move to get them. Instead, Yearwood asked, “So you think them killers are hiding inside Jackman?”
“It’s a possibility,” said Colcord.
“How many?”
“At least six.”
“Six? That’s a gang. They say they beheaded their victims. That so?”
Colcord realized Yearwood expected a fair exchange of information. “Yes, that’s what the medical examiner thinks.”
“What do you think they done with the bodies? Et ’em?”
“There’s no evidence of cannibalism.”
Yearwood was clearly disappointed. He shook his head. “There’s a lot of tough terrain up there. You may never find ’em.”
“Mr. Yearwood, you know that country as well as anyone. Where would you hide?”
The question was immensely gratifying to Yearwood. He leaned back and stroked his beard. “Aside from inside the mines—that’s your best bet—there are some couloirs up above the tree line with rockslides—granite boulders as big as houses. There are all kinds of holes and crawl spaces and caves in those rockslides. There are some deep forests in there a man could disappear into, thickest in Colorado. There are rock shelters, crevasses, prospect holes, ravines. You got a big problem on your hands trying to find that gang.”
“Where are these couloirs and ravines?”
“They’re on every mountain up there, especially the Barbicans, then going northward on Mount Erebus and below Espada Pass over into Flat Tops, in a place called Hookers Canyon.”
Colcord asked, “Can I get copies of those maps of yours?”
Yearwood rose and went to a padlocked wooden door at the far end of his sitting room. He unlocked it to reveal a closet stuffed with rolled maps, hundreds of them stacked like cordwood. He began pulling them out, and the rolls cascaded into the room. He sorted through them and brought one over to Colcord. “There it is: Jackman Mine.”
“Can I take this and copy it?” Colcord asked.
“No. I don’t let them out of the cabin.”
Colcord took out his cell phone. “Photograph it?”
After a moment, Yearwood nodded. “Why not? My prospecting days are over.”
Colcord unrolled it near the window. It was surprisingly detailed, drawn in a careful, neat, sure hand.
“What about this area here?” he asked, pointing to where the map petered into blankness.
“I didn’t map the whole damn place, just what I prospected.”
“So you don’t know how much farther these tunnels go?”
“I don’t, but I’ve no doubt some of them adits connect to Fryingpan and Hesperus.”
Colcord weighed down the corners with ore samples and photographed it, sector by sector. As he did so, he wondered just who might have stolen the maps—and once again he wondered why Maximilian never mentioned the Jackman Mine.