27 

“Well, that’s just great,” Ramsey said, as they made their way to Amanda’s truck. “Six hours to kill and nothing’s moving.”

“But some things take time,” Amanda said. A breath of wind plucked a stray lock of her hair across her eyes, and she reached to tuck it behind her ear. “Hank makes too much bad blood, then he’s out of a job.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ramsey said. He jammed his hands into his jacket pockets. “What about the DNA?”

“Ready this afternoon.”

“Okay,” Ramsey said. It wasn’t. “This Schroeder thing bothers me.”

“Me, too. You want to do something about it?”

“Such as?”

“How are you and boats?”

 

He drove his loaner, following her truck down to the harbor. They parked in a lot adjacent to the Farway yacht club, a three-story building of pale pink stucco with a red tile roof. Amanda chose a solar-powered, six-meter long console skiff with a two-fifty centimeter beam. The solar array, mounted on a diagonal lattice, attached at two points aft and astern, just behind a heavy duty rub rail. The skiff had a large forward casting deck and face-forward seats snugged against an open cockpit.

Amanda handed him an orange life jacket, then passed him two plastic bottles of water and several plastic-wrapped muffins. “I’m pretty good, but that water’s only a few degrees above freezing. If something happens, you’d be dead in less than five minutes.”

“So how’s a life jacket going to help?”

“Keeps you afloat and warm,” she said. “The jacket’s got pryolene pouches of various chemicals surrounded by compressed air in a buoyant shell. When the interior sensors detect a temperature drop, the air pouches rupture and the resultant chemical reaction creates iron oxide and—” She broke off when she saw his bemused expression. “Rust. The chemicals make rust, and making rust generates heat. Trust me on this.”

The trip to Cameron Island took a good forty-five minutes. That was just fine with Ramsey who found the ride surprisingly relaxing. As they got nearer to the island’s mainland shore, he saw strips of sand beach and individual piers but no boats. There were houses further up from the shoreline on ruddy red bluffs.

“Sandstone,” Amanda said when he asked about the color. “There are quarries on most of the islands, but they went bust a long time ago.”

Amanda circled to the far shore. This side was wilder and riddled with striated sandstone sea caves carved by wave action and repeated freeze/thaw cycles. They docked in a natural cove, beaching the boat on a tongue of sand bar, then clambered out. They stood, side by side, looking out over the lake. The water was blue as a sapphire and dotted with far-off islands rimmed bronze with red sand. Now and then, a solitary cloud scudded across the sky, and from somewhere, Ramsey heard the lonely cry of a seabird. The only other sounds were the faint rush of wind and the slap of water against sand.

“This is beautiful.” Ramsey filled his lungs with air that smelled clean and wet. He looked over at Amanda. “You could spend a lot of time here and not even know it, or a lifetime and not care. All this”—he gestured toward the lake—“it might be enough.”

“Actually,” she said, “it almost is.”

 

An hour hiking a rugged track inland took them where Isaiah Schroeder’s body had been found over three years before. They lost the sound of the water when they were thirty meters from shore, and the terrain changed abruptly from the flat open expanse of red sand beach to a dense thatch of hardwoods whose branches were bare but studded with swollen buds. The terrain was rocky, with humps of rubble displaced by massive tree roots. The going was rough, and Ramsey stumbled enough to know that tripping and accidentally discharging a rifle wouldn’t be a stretch. The track abruptly angled into a steep climb, and when they huffed to the top, they emerged on a rocky, forested plateau.

Ramsey stepped over to a tangle of exposed roots on the lip of a bowl-shaped depression to the right of the plateau. Pulling out his noteputer, he scrolled to a set of images taken of the scene then sidestepped down until he was ten meters from the lip. “Okay, the report says Schroeder probably tripped on his way down the hill. Rifle discharged, blew out his head and he landed with his head pointing . . . I’m all turned around. What direction is this?” He waved the noteputer to his left.

“South.” Frowning, Amanda reached for Ramsey’s noteputer. “Let me see that.”

“What?”

“Now that I actually see this . . . Here, look at the pic and then look at the hill . . . you see it?”

“See what?”

“Isaiah’s body is nearly perpendicular to the fall line. The head’s actually uphill. Now you tell me: how do you trip downhill, presumably headfirst, and end up sideways with your head uphill?”

“Lemme see that.” He took back his noteputer and compared the image with the hill, eyes clicking back and forth. “You’re right, and I’ll tell you something else. He’s turned around. The rifle’s under his chest on the right hand side, but his left side is closer to the top of the hill. So how did he fall, do a ninety-degree turn left, and shoot himself on the right? The blood spatter was concentrated downhill. Can’t happen unless . . .”

“Unless he was facing the hill,” Amanda said. “On his knees. With his hands tied behind his back.”

 

Ramsey broke the silence first. “If you were Schroeder and you beached where we did and walked this track, where would you end up?”

She thought. “The old quarry, I think. Another half hour, give or take.”

Ramsey tucked his noteputer into his right hip pocket. “Let’s go.”

 

The trail was steep, corkscrewing up the quarry’s eastern rim. Ramsey had never seen a quarry before, but the hole reminded him of iron red craters gouged out by meteors on a desolate moon. The quarry was a bowl, roughly nine hundred meters in diameter, with sheer rock sides and random piles of rust red rubble like giant ant mounds. Far below, the rusted innards of an old ore car straddled a meandering rail track spooling from an arch blasted in the rock.

He touched Amanda’s arm. “Are those doors blocking the mine entrance?”

Amanda shaded her eyes. “Could be. Probably to keep tourists out, but I don’t know if you mine sandstone like other ores or minerals, or whatever. Might just be for storage. You wouldn’t want to leave trucks and ore cars out in the rain.”

The way down was treacherous and slippery with spoil. The two halves of the door were heavy timber strapped with iron on corroded hinges and secured with a rust-encrusted padlock bigger than Ramsey’s fist. He yanked a few times but the lock didn’t give. If he pulled on one door, a gap about a quarter meter opened up, but when Amanda pressed her face to the opening, she couldn’t see anything.

“But I smell something.” She gave Ramsey an odd look. “Cigarettes. In fact”—she turned, testing the air—“I smell something like chemicals only burnt. Don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do. Someone’s been around.” He peered at the gravel strewn in front of one door and said, “Has it rained here? Say, within the past week or so.”

Amanda shook her head. “Why?”

Ramsey pressed the pad of his index finger to the sandstone floor then held up the finger for Amanda. His skin was peppered with reddish-black flecks. “Rust,” he said. Then he pushed up and inspected the lock. “Look, you can just see where some of the rust’s been scraped off around the keyhole.”

“Then someone’s been here.”

“That’s right,” Ramsey said. He bent down again, his eyes searching the ground. “And not very long ago. And here, there’s this one pothole.” He put his nose to the rock and sniffed. “That’s the chemical smell. Like it’s been blasted.”

“Limyanovich?”

“I don’t know. Boaz said he’d taken the ferry to the island. But you saw those shoe shanks. Why would a guy hoof all the way out here in expensive shoes unless he’s coming to some sort of meet?” Ramsey paused, his eyes scouring the rubble. “Did they find a lighter on Limyanovich?”

“No. Why?”

He nudged bits of gravel aside then used two pieces of flat rock to tweeze something from the ground and showed her. Captured between the rocks was the crushed butt of a cigarette.

 

The padlock held. All Ramsey managed to break was a sweat and a rock he used to try and bash the lock free. Then they ran out of time and had to head back to meet Ketchum. They’d eaten muffins on the way in, and Ramsey used plastic wrap, wrong-side out, to carry the butt and rock samples from the tiny, chemical-smelling crater.

They didn’t talk much on the boat ride back. Ramsey thought, guzzled the last of his water. He was sweating so much he felt basted. He’d have to shower before he met with Ketchum, and come to think of it, he had to find a laundry or get the hotel to wash his things. Between hiking and just plain living, he was running out of clean clothes.

Then, as Farway’s waterfront swung into view, Amanda sighed. “And it started out to be such a pretty day.”