"Okay, I guess," Colin shrugged. "I like the woods better."
"You'll be able to come back to the woods again sometime," the detective promised. "But for now we have to go."
"We going to take him back to Barona?" Lisa asked.
"No choice," Tirrell told her grimly. "We've got to raise the alarm and get on Martel's trail immediately, before he buries himself and Jarvis in some deep hole on the far side of the Tessellates."
"But won't a lot of righthands in the sky alert him?"
"Maybe, if he sees them. But we have to risk it. All we know for sure is that they left here traveling southeast, and that direction could have changed drastically after he rejoined the main group."
"Stan?"
The voice drifting down from the treetops made Lisa jump; but before she could locate its source Tirrell had whistled again, and with a crackle of conetree branches Tonio landed beside them.
"Boy, am I glad to see you," he exclaimed, giving the detective an unashamed hug. "I heard the explosion and was trying to sneak back to see what happened. I thought maybe you'd been blown to bits."
"Almost, but thanks to Lisa and Colin we got out before the timer ran down," Tirrell told him. "We can now add an attempted murder charge to Martel's list when we nail him. You didn't happen to check out the direction his gang was headed, did you?"
" 'Fraid not—I was afraid to poke my head more than half a meter off the ground." Tonio frowned as he glanced around. "Say, where's Jarvis? Didn't he get out with you?"
"No. The shoe, as they say, is on the other foot." Tirrell waved southeast. "He's now been kidnapped by Martel."
Tonio snorted. "Serves him right," he said; but to Lisa his voice lacked real conviction. "I suppose we've got to get him out, though."
"Yeah—and we're going to have to call in some help to find them."
"Maybe they just went back to the temple site," Lisa suggested.
Tirrell shook his head. "No. It's clear that most of his kids aren't in on this with him, and that makes the temple site too public a place to keep Jarvis. Besides, he left under the impression that Tonio was already on his way with reinforcements, so he wouldn't go anywhere that Tonio knew about. However—" He paused, a thoughtful frown beginning to crease his Face. "He doesn't know we're on to what the temple site really is—and he'll need to have a refinery somewhere where he can separate out his gold."
"You think he might go there?" Tonio asked.
"It's worth checking on. Lisa, we're going to need more of your help, I'm afraid. We're going to fly over to Plat City and drop Colin off at the police station there. Then we'll get some detailed maps of the region and I'll want you to show us exactly where the dump site is. With luck, Tonio and I may be able to find Martel's refinery on our own and determine whether or not he's there."
"What if he is?" Lisa objected. "He'll probably have kids on guard, and if he catches you, you'll be in the same situation we just got out of."
Strangely enough, Tirrell smiled. "Not really," he said. "I think I know how to even the odds a little. Let's get going—we can talk more on the way."
Chapter 26
The dump site was in a grassy valley three or four kilometers from the temple site, an unexceptional place with a handful of trees, a narrow yet surprisingly gentle river, and two or three barren hills poking through the scrub weed. It was only as Lisa guided them to one of the latter that Tirrell could see it was in actuality an immense pile of broken stone.
"They dug all this stuff out of that mountain?" Tonio asked, eyeing the rocks with obvious amazement.
"This isn't half of what they've actually mined," Tirrell told him. "Loose rock always looks bigger than the hole it came out of." Sliding his backpack onto the ground, the detective found a relatively flat slab at the edge of the pile and unfolded the small-scale survey map he'd obtained from the Plat City police. "They've probably been quietly hauling the stuff away, most likely during weekdays when all the kids are at work. Probably leaving this much here on purpose so no one'll realize any of it's missing."
Fiddling with one of the smaller stones, Tonio flew over to land at his side. "You figured out where we are?"
"I think so." Tirrell was actually somewhat more certain than that, having followed their course on the map all the way from Plat City. "We're on the southern edge of the De Sable Plateau, next to the main branch of the Rashoni River. Flows generally south, then goes southwest down the far side of the mountains and off my map."
"Is that why the water's moving so slowly?" Lisa asked. "Because we're on a flat area?"
"Basically. The size and number of tributaries and the channel dimensions are important, too, but you basically can't have anything this slow in mountains except on a plateau."
"Makes it nice and easy to anchor their boat while they load up, doesn't it?" Tonio commented. He teeked his stone hard into the side of the heap, causing a minor rock slide. "Well, what are we waiting for? Let's head on down and find him."
Tirrell was already folding up his map when something in his righthand's voice—overconfidence?—made him pause. Let's head on down and find him. It was a perfectly reasonable and obvious statement... but this was Martel they were dealing with, and Martel had stayed free this long precisely because he worked hard at avoiding the obvious. Still, shipping the ore via water was the simplest and cheapest method available. Why bother teeking the stuff to the riverside if all he wanted was to leave a false clue before carting it away overland again?
Unless...
Unfolding the map again, Tirrell studied it closely. Yes... yes; it was possible. And right or wrong, it wouldn't take long to check out.
"Stan?" Tonio asked impatiently. "We going or not?"
"We're going," the detective answered slowly. "But we're going to start by heading upstream. The current's slow enough that even a heavy boat shouldn't have any trouble fighting it, at least for a few kilometers."
"You think he's set up a refinery way up here in the mountains?" Lisa asked, looking puzzled. Wouldn't that have been the hard way to do it?"
"No, to both questions," Tirrell told her, taking one last look at the map before folding it to show only the region immediately upriver of them. "What I'm thinking might be crazy, or it might be brilliant—and I won't know which until we check it out on the actual terrain."
"Well, let's do it then," Tonio said. "Don't worry, Lisa," he added to the other preteen. "He gets these brilliant hunches all the time. You just have to learn to put up with them."
Tirrell smiled, and a small tight place in his stomach relaxed for the first time in hours. The resurgence of Tonio's sense of humor was a good sign, an indication that the righthand was finally catching up with the emotional shocks and stresses that had been pummeling him all day. To capture Martel at the cost of damage to Tonio's personality was not a trade he would've liked having to make. "So skip the noise and give me a lift," he said, scooping up his backpack with one hand and holding out the other. "You can explain to Lisa on the way that my hunches usually come out right."
They found it a bare kilometer upriver—not the refinery, but the clue that Tirrell, despite his outward confidence, had only half expected to find.
"What are they?" Lisa asked as they hovered over the grooves cut into the narrow band of moist ground separating the riverbank from the harder rock beyond.