“Let me try something,” Linda said. “Back up a little.”
“You can’t slide in there.” The photographer was young and agile, but far from sylph-like.
“No way, José, ” she replied cheerfully. “But the camera certainly can.” She slipped back into her promo voice. “Releasing an unspeakable evil trapped for centuries within the very bowels of the earth. ”
As Estelle waited for Linda to maneuver her arms forward, she looked back toward the comfortable wash of sunlight where a fair collection of people now waited. More than once, she’d heard Game and Fish officer Doug Posey’s characteristic bellow of laughter, and Bill Gastner’s quiet, quirky narrative, but another voice or two she couldn’t place.
“We’re going to need a tarp,” Estelle called. “When Linda’s done, I’ll pass out one item at a time, but it’s going to be a while. Once we move things, that’s it. The site is worthless after that.”
“Roger that. We got all day,” Torrez said.
Padrino called it just right, Estelle thought.
“Yowser,” Linda said. “Kinda interesting.”
“What’s the preview show?” Estelle asked.
“Just a sec.” Linda squirmed forward and Estelle reached out and slipped her fingers under the photographer’s belt. She tugged just enough to let the girl know she was there.
“That’s far enough.”
“Well, almost, it is.” Holding the bulky camera in one hand, Linda worked the spotlight and tripod a little farther, shrinking back as the heat of the bulb passed uncomfortably close to her face. For a long moment she lay quietly. Estelle could hear her measured breathing. Behind them, out in the morning sunshine, a voice rose a little and said, “Well, damn, ” followed by a string of hushed conversation she couldn’t understand.
“The air is coming from a hole that’s kinda down from me? This little cave kinda ends, except for that one hole. It’s about the size of a five-gallon bucket. The hole, I mean. Kinda like a chimney, so to speak. Cool beans. Wouldn’t I like to be a little lizard.” She laughed and added, “Not so much.”
“Can you see the floor of this chamber?”
“I can’t. It dives down a little, just enough to put it out of sight. If the camera’s auto focus works, it can see. Lemme show you what I got after I try something here.” The something here included another series of flashes, some cautious maneuvering, and a grunt or two. Estelle kept her hand locked around Linda’s belt.
“Okay. Let’s look.” She shrank back, and the two of them pushed away from the opening. Huddled in the shade of the rocks outside the entrance, Linda fussed with the camera’s controls. The Nikon’s preview screen was bright and clear. The spectrum of color ranged from light to dark grays, with a twinkle here and there from minerals imbedded in the rock. Linda had managed the muted flash just right.
“Time for big screen, huh,” Linda said as Estelle brought the camera closer to her face, straining to see details of the image. “Let’s chip it to your laptop.”
“Oh, sí. ” She turned the camera toward Linda so the photographer could see her own handiwork and pointed at the lower left area of the preview screen. “Can you shoot over here a bit more?”
“What’s the caucus?” The intrusion of Bobby Torrez’s voice was startling. “What do you have?”
“We have remains,” Estelle said. “It appears to be a partial skeleton. But it’s really hard to tell.”
“You going to need Perrone?”
Linda laughed loudly. “I pronounce this guy dead, dead, dead, Bobby. And if he isn’t, then we’re in deep, deep caca. ”
“Someone needs to alert him that remains are coming,” Estelle said. “The sooner we start the I.D. process, the better.”
“You’re talkin’ recent?”
“I would guess any time within the last…who knows how long.”
“I need to take a look.”
Linda laughed again. “Mr. Cork,” she whispered to Estelle.
“I ain’t no bigger than the both of you,” the sheriff said. “Back out of there.”
“In a bit,” Estelle said. “Let us take one more series.” She touched the screen again. “Right over here. If you can hold the camera right up against the ceiling, looking down.”
“I can do that,” Linda said cheerfully. After a dozen photos, she asked for the power pack and cord, and with that supply of juice, she continued one photo after another. At eighty-seven, Linda finally sighed with satisfaction.
“I don’t think there’s a grain of dust that isn’t recorded,” she said. “And you’re going to be interested in what’s over to the left, way behind the rocks.” She squirmed backward and presented the camera so that Estelle could see the preview screen. “Scroll backward. About number fifty or so, you’ll see it.”
Looking at negatives morphing out of the old-fashioned developing solution in the dark room trays was spooky enough, but for the most part that era was past. This time, the little screen’s effect was disturbing enough in the dark, musty confines of the cave. The round object that the camera had recorded could be nothing else. The skull rested in a crevice, eye sockets staring down at the dust.
For a few seconds, Estelle froze, and then let out a long, slow breath. “There he is…or she is.” The skull lay in no particular relationship to anything else in the cave. Some creature had found a bonanza here. The skeleton was scattered and pillaged, the remaining bones nothing more than little lumps of indistinct gray.
Estelle scrolled through all of the photos once more, and finished the series satisfied that Linda had documented every square centimeter of this dismal little grotto. “Freddy, what did you find,” she whispered.
Chapter Twenty-two
For long enough to frustrate Sheriff Robert Torrez, Estelle studied the screen of her laptop, examining the photos downloaded from Linda Real’s camera. The sheriff’s “just do it ” approach was sometimes the best strategy, but in this case, Estelle was loath to disturb the cave until everything that could be documented had been…and until she had a clear notion of how she wanted to go about the recovery process.
Little things might come back to haunt, she knew…coming back with new questions that could not be answered once the scene had been not only disturbed but eliminated.
“For one thing, the gun was out of the holster,” she said, and Torrez made a little growling sound of impatience.
“That’s quite a photo,” Bill Gastner interjected. He reached out and touched part of the photo that was displayed in all its digital clarity on the laptop computer’s screen. “Dust and debris on the inside surface of the leather, at least right there at the mouth of the rig. Even I can see that. And the gun that Freddy had wrapped up in that damn cloth was completely covered with all kinds of shit. Had it been in the holster all these years, it would have been at least a little bit protected. I can think up all kinds of theories…the guy went in to retrieve his jaguar specimen, gun in hand. Then blam. Either the cat swatted him silly, or he had a heart attack, or…” Gastner waved a hand. “Any number of things.”
“Cat with a bullet through the brain ain’t going to swat anybody,” Torrez said. “So where was the gun, then? Estelle says there wasn’t any disturbance of the cave farther on in. If that’s true, then it don’t look like Freddy crawled any farther back in than you guys just did. He found the gun, and then what? Ran out of light? He just had that one flashlight. That’s all we found on his four-wheeler.” He smiled at Gastner. “You think somebody havin’ a heart attack would squirm into that cave, rather than out? ”