Sheriff Colcord took the lead for his search team, navigating using his JPEGs of the mine layout. He was impressed by the Denver PD SWAT team—they were well-trained men and women, not all that different from what he’d experienced in Iraq, where forty percent of the troops he’d commanded were women.
They moved fast and silently through their sector, which was complex and random, as the nineteenth-century miners had followed every vein and seam to the end. Now that it was brightly illuminated, he could see that it was the perfect environment for an ambush, with many holes, stopes, drifts, and risers going every which way. The scent of burning hung in the air, but as they examined the ground, they found no evidence of any recent occupation. Colcord was a hunter and an experienced tracker, and it amazed him how careful they must have been to leave no trace of their passage, when even a few overturned pebbles or a layer of grit or sand could capture the brush from a foot, a skid, or a drag mark.
When they reached the far side of the sector, they turned back and swept the next set of tunnels leading back through the zone, and then back again. As time went on, it began to seem like a fool’s errand, all the tunnels empty and silent. The killers were evidently not there. But if they vacated the mine, where did they go? And how did they get out?
Yearwood had said clearly that Jackman connected with the two other mines, Fryingpan and Hesperus. But those two mines had been retrofitted for Erebus’s labs, and he’d seen with his own eyes that the security in those labs was tight. He had no doubt the tunnels into the lab area had all been sealed by Erebus.
Something was not right about this. The stolen maps and Maximilian’s failure to mention the existence of the Jackman Mine had shaken his confidence in Erebus’s cooperation and made him suspicious. But why would they try to hinder the investigation? One of their own security guards had been murdered and his body desecrated. Maximilian and Erebus had every reason to cooperate and in fact had cooperated overall. But he still felt uneasy.
They needed to go back into those labs. Not a tour, but a surprise search. Were they engaged in some sort of forbidden research? Making a doomsday virus or some other biological WMD? Or breeding killer saber-toothed cats or genetically altered freaks or monsters? It felt preposterous—the stuff of thrillers. But whatever it was, he felt that Erebus was hiding something, maybe even from most of their employees. Gunnerson had implied as much. That something might be in those labs.
The search party came to another intersection of tunnels, and he checked the map on his phone.
“Straight through,” he said. “There’s a large cavern up ahead.”
They moved through the intersection and continued on. The air was particularly dead in this zone, and Colcord found himself breathing harder. He thought of Cash—she was amazingly fit, despite her rather heavy size. Fitter than he was. He vowed to do something about that as soon as this case was over, join a gym or start hiking regularly in the mountains. His thoughts drifted back to her—the more he got to know her, the more he liked and respected her, despite that sharp tongue. He wondered what had happened back in Portland, Maine, that sent her out to Colorado.
The tunnel emerged into the cavern labeled as a stope on Yearwood’s map—an area where a large amount of ore had been removed. The blazing lights of the team illuminated the space. In the center stood an ancient ore crusher, used for breaking big rocks into smaller ones, with a huge, rusted flywheel, crusher bed, and a long, operational handle.
Dangling from the handle were two small, neatly woven ornamental balls.