Dead Silver

11

She knelt and stared down at our find with her face alight with excitement-but wary, too, as if something might leap out and bite her. That wasn't so far from the truth.

"The earring was hers," she said.

"Is that what she was wearing in the photos?" I asked.

She nodded, her hand moving toward it.

"We better be careful about touching this stuff," Madbird said.

I'd gotten so jacked up about making the find that I'd lost sight of the implications, but his words brought them into focus. In spite of Renee's reluctance about the police, this development just might wind its way in that direction. They would not be pleased if we'd gone pawing around first.

"Oh, right," she said unhappily. "I hadn't thought of that." She pointed at the earring with her forefinger, tracing its shape in the air. "That's the Seibert brand, quarter-circle S"-the logo of the family ranch where Astrid had grown up. "They had a place where they mined sapphires. No, not mined…" She held her hands apart as if she was gripping something, and shook the imaginary object back and forth.

"Screened," Madbird said.

"That's it. Her grandfather collected them over the years-not to sell, just for fun-and he finally decided to do something with them. He had a belt buckle made for himself and these earrings for his wife. They got passed down to Astrid."

"What about the jewelry box?" I said.

Renee shook her head. "I never saw it, so she probably didn't have it at this house."

I could see how Astrid would have hidden it in the privacy of her own cabin, a sort of bad-girl stash for the photos and trinkets of her sexy secret life.

Renee kept gazing silently at it.

Then, with sudden fierceness, she said, "Daddy wouldn't have kept things like this. He wouldn't."

Madbird caught my eye and nodded toward the door. He was right-she was deeply preoccupied, and we were in the way.

"We're going to take off," I said. "We'll come back and straighten up whenever you're ready."

She rose to her feet, dusting off her knees. "Thanks so much, you guys. Oh, wait, I have to pay you."

"Let's worry about that later."

"It ain't like we don't know where you live," Madbird rumbled. That won a smile from her.

He said good night and split off to his van. Renee walked with me to my truck. I hated the thought of leaving her there alone, especially to pore over those grim relics.

"Do you know anything about checking for fingerprints?" she said. "I know I blew it with that first batch. But these-if there were someone else's prints besides Daddy's…" She let the sentence hang unfinished. "I looked on the Internet. A lot of places sell kits."

"I don't think it's any job for amateurs, Renee. Especially with something like this."

"I looked for laboratories, too, where I could pay to get it done. But I didn't see anything."

It didn't strike me as likely that she could just box the stuff up, send it away someplace, and get back a neat little report.

"Have you thought about a private detective?" I said, although that might entail a larger-scale investigation than she wanted, and would definitely be expensive.

"It crossed my mind. But this is so sudden, and there's so much else going on. I'm just groping around right now-trying to find out what the options are."

Another possibility had crossed my own mind. I'd kept my mouth shut because it was dicey in several ways. But it made sense in others. My wish that I could do something more to help finally pushed me into voicing it.

"Renee, if there's one person around here who'll know more about this case than anybody else, it's the sheriff, Gary Varna," I said. "He and I have, uh, been acquainted for a long time. If you want, I could see if he'd be willing to talk this over and keep it off the record. Maybe he'd even do the fingerprinting. And, you know, act on it if something new came along, and forget about it," I finished lamely, "if not."

"That's very sweet. Let me think about it. I want to look those photos over before I decide anything."

"I thought we decided to leave them alone."

"I won't touch them with my bare hands. I have a hemostat I can use."

"You carry a hemostat?"

"My fiance gives them to me. Instead of tweezers, you know? They work a lot better."

I factored in her fiance's gift of surgical implements along with her expensive engagement ring. The word "doctor" took shape in my mind.

"Are you coming tomorrow?" she said.

I winced inwardly. I hadn't planned on attending her father's funeral, and she was probably only asking out of politeness.

Still, I said, "Sure."

"I'll be glad to see you there. Thanks again, Hugh."

I drove home accompanied by unwanted images that I couldn't keep from sneaking into my thoughts-the dignified, acclaimed man whom I'd known as Professor Callister, snaking his way on his belly across the dank earthen floor of that crawl space to the trophy he'd created out of murdering his beautiful young wife. Gloating over the photos, fondling the jewelry, using them to indulge in a solitary vice sickening beyond words. Or maybe he'd just hidden them and then left them untouched, satisfied with knowing they were under his feet.

But my mind, emotions, or whatever unit they formed found that a very hard sell.

I had only been around him when I was quite young, not often and never closely. But I remembered that between the ages of, say, five and ten-after I'd gotten old enough to have a sense of the world I was in, but before various forms of training had started me thinking in the ways they dictated-I had often seen into adults quite clearly: whether they were genuinely well intentioned toward me, or hostile under a nice veneer, with their teasing disguising cruelty. As an adult, when I looked at those same people, my early impressions were by and large borne out.

I didn't know if that was common among children-I didn't have any of my own, and I hadn't dealt with kids much in my later life. But even if it was, they couldn't process their feelings rationally, and the harsh, evident truth was that those kinds of warning sensibilities were easily buried by adult manipulation or force.

John Callister, though, had never paid any attention to me except to give me a grin and a friendly word, treating me humorously but sincerely, like an equal. I had never gotten the slightest hint of unkindness or creepiness lurking under a facade.

But if he was innocent, the real killer had gone free, and might even be close by.