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“Cross?” I say.
Dalton shakes his head and motions for us to follow the creek. When we catch a tinkling sound, I go still, turning that way.
“Bear bells?” I whisper.
Dalton shakes his head. He’s right. The sound is pitched different and more erratic. We continue walking as the sound grows louder. It’s a plinking, like rain but not quite. Then I see what’s making the noise. It’s some kind of metal contraption for sieving something from the water. Dalton reaches into the screen and picks up a flake half the size of my pinkie nail. Heholds it out to me, and as the sun catches the flake, sparkling, I suck in a breath.
“Is that… gold?”
“Seems like it.”
He surveys the shore. Then, with a grunt, he strides to something.
At first, I have no idea what caught his attention. Then I see the tent. It’s mottled tan camouflage, with evergreen boughs leaning against it to disguise it better. Dalton pulls his gun and clears his throat.
“I’m standing outside your tent,” he says. “I don’t want to startle you. I’m looking for a friend who went missing out here on a hike. Can we talk to you?”
Silence.
“Actually,” Dalton drawls, “I’m stretching the truth there. I think I’m the missing one. I wandered away from my buddy to take a leak, and I don’t know what the hell happened, but we got separated, and I could really use your help.”
Still nothing.
I motion to Dalton. Then I creep to the tent flap, approaching from the side. He positions himself out of the line of sight—or gunfire—and I yank open the tent flap. When the shadows inside stay still and steady, Dalton shines in his flashlight.
“Clear,” he says.
I cautiously move to look inside. It is indeed clear, with nothing but a rolled-up sleeping bag and a small trunk. I crawl to the trunk and open it. Inside there’s clothing and military-style rations and nothing else.
I back out and tell Dalton what I found. He’s located another trunk. That one’s locked.
“Placer mining,” he says. “Looks like someone found themselves a bit of gold.”
“Please do not tell me we’re building a town five kilometers from the site of the next Klondike gold rush.”
Dalton snorts a laugh. “That’d bejustour luck. Nah, a flake doesn’t mean a find. And whoever has this spot is keeping it well hidden. People around here have learned their lesson about that. The problem is that, well, miners can be a paranoid bunch, even the most stable among them.”
“Great.…” I look around. “And I think we can safely say thatthisis where those coordinates lead?”
“Yep.”
“Which means that gold plus one dead body plus one injured lost person and one still-lost person are likely not unconnected events.”
“Yep.”
“Shit.…”
Our dead woman had a list with three sets of coordinates, two of them crossed off. That’s not an invited guest. She was looking for this spot. Looking for this camp. Did she find it and was killed to keep it a secret? If so, the miner was hardly going to leave those coordinates with her.
We still search for signs that the crime scene might be here—the place where our mystery woman bled out. If so, then the blood would attract critters, and we see no evidence of anything digging at the dirt, looking for what was presumably buried there. There are no boot prints or any other obvious signs of trace. It’s a micro mining operation minus a miner. That’s all we can tell, and if either victim—Bruno or the mystery woman—is connected to this camp, then we aren’t eager to stick around until that miner returns.
“Okay,” I say, my voice low. “The trunk is how I found it, and I don’t see any signs of our footprints. Anything I’m missing?”
“The traps we sprung?”
My brows shoot up. “Traps…?”
“If the miner hid their tent like that, they’re worried about someone stumbling over the claim, so they’re going to set up alerts to let them know if someone did.” Dalton starts pacing around the site. Then he drops to a half crouch and lifts what looks like very fine thread, invisible against the dark ground. “One.”
