Chapter Three
Bethany averted her gaze, then forced herself to look back.
Working with search and rescue meant facing difficult things, she told herself.
After the initial horror of realizing there was a human skeleton on the floor of the cave, curiosity took over, and she was able to study the scene before them more closely.
“It’s not one skeleton,” she said. “It’s two.
” There were definitely two skulls, side by side at one end of the tangle of bones.
“It looks like they’re…embracing?” Ian asked.
“Are we sure they’re even real bones? Maybe it’s just a prank.” She started forward, but Ian held her back.
“I don’t think they’re fake.” He pulled her farther away.
“What’s that around them?” she asked. “Rags or a blanket?”
“Maybe their clothing, rotted away.”
“Which would mean they’ve been here a long time.” That would also explain why there wasn’t more of them left and no smell of decay, just a mustiness to the air.
Ian tugged her arm again. “Let’s go back down and call the sheriff. There’s no cell reception in here.”
She had little memory of the journey down, her mind still back in that cave, picturing what looked like two Halloween decorations, cuddling like lovers. How could that be real?
When they were back at the trailer, Ian called the sheriff’s department to report that he had found what looked like human remains in a cave in Humboldt Canyon. His voice was calm, though she noticed his white-knuckled grip on the phone.
He ended the call and looked at her. “They’ll be right here. We’re supposed to stay put and wait.”
“I still think they’re not real,” she said. “Someone must have put them up there.”
“You mean to scare me off?”
She shrugged. “My brothers said people are upset about you closing the canyon to the public.”
“I don’t think they were fake,” he said.
“How can you be sure?”
He shook his head but didn’t answer. They fell silent, seated on opposite sides of the desk in his office. Waiting.
Not much time had passed before the crunch of tires on gravel propelled them out of their chairs and outside.
A Rayford County Sheriff’s Department black-and-white SUV rolled to a stop in front of them. Bethany tensed. Only one thing could make all of this more awful.
The driver’s-side door of the vehicle opened, and Sergeant Gage Walker stepped out. The sheriff’s brother was familiar to her from search and rescue calls, and she relaxed a little as he came toward them.
“Bethany, what are you doing here?”
A second deputy had emerged from the passenger side of the vehicle. She let out a groan. Her older brother, Aaron, followed behind Gage, a scowl making him look fierce. Like Bethany, Aaron had inherited their dad’s dark curls, which he kept clipped short.
After four years with the Waterbury, Vermont, police department, he had agreed to help his parents and brothers move to Eagle Mountain and ended up accepting a position with the Rayford County Sheriff’s Department after one of their long-time deputies had left to run a family business.
She ignored his question and turned away.
Gage nodded to Bethany, then addressed Ian. “You called in about human remains.”
“We climbed up to those caves to look around.” He pointed out the caves, high on the opposite cliff wall. “We found two skeletons. They look like they’ve been there a long while. Just bones and rotting clothing.”
Gage squinted up at the caves. “How did you get up there?”
“There’s a trail,” Ian said.
“Then let’s go see.”
Ian led the way, Gage and Aaron close behind. Bethany trailed after them.
Aaron stopped and turned to her. “You need to stay down here.”
“No.” She kept walking, prepared to push past him if necessary.
“Let her come with us,” Gage said. “We’ll need to get her statement, and I might have questions.”
She resisted the urge to stick out her tongue at Aaron. Childish, maybe, but if he was going to be the big brother bossing her around, it was so tempting to slip into the role of bratty little sister.
No one said anything on the climb up. The various implements attached to Gage’s and Aaron’s uniforms rattled together as they moved.
By the time they reached the top, both men were sweating.
Bethany remembered that they would be wearing ballistics vests.
Aaron had let her try his on one time—it had been heavy and hot.
She felt a stab of sympathy for her brother, though she didn’t say anything.
“In here.” Ian led the way along the ledge to the cave. He stopped at the opening and pointed.
Gage moved in first, followed by Aaron. The beam of a flashlight bounced off the rock walls. Ian and Bethany moved in a little closer.
“The bones look old,” Gage said. “The clothing is rotted away. That takes years in this climate.” Still holding the flashlight beam on the bones, he looked back at Ian. “This isn’t as popular as Caspar Canyon, but climbers have been coming out here for years. How did no one find this before now?”
“I don’t think these caves were visible before that mudslide a few weeks ago,” Ian said. He pointed at the slide path, still evident above and below the cave opening. “This whole section of the cliff sheared off in that slide, revealing these caves. This is the largest, but there are two others.”
“Have you looked in them?” Gage asked.
Bethany gasped. “Do you think there are more bones?”
“We didn’t look in them,” Ian said.
“Aaron, check out the other two caves,” Gage said.
Her brother moved past. The rest of them focused on the skeletons once more.
“If this was all covered by rock and dirt, how did the bones get here in the first place?” Gage asked.
“Maybe there was a smaller opening?” Bethany speculated. “They could have climbed in and gotten trapped.” She shuddered at the thought.
“There are holes in both skulls.” Ian pointed. “I didn’t get a really good look, but I thought I saw something metallic in the skull on the left. Like a bullet.”
Gage moved nearer, keeping close to the cave wall until he was beside the bones. He shone the light on the skulls. Now Bethany could see a small, round hole in both—above the temple in one, in the middle of the forehead in the other. Gage nodded. “I think there is a bullet in there.”
Bethany looked at Ian. “You didn’t say anything about a bullet before.”
“I didn’t want to upset you.”
“Ian. I work search and rescue. I’ve dealt with more upsetting things.” A child in pain was a lot tougher to deal with than these dry, long-dead bones.
“Sorry,” he said.
Aaron returned. “The other two caves are empty,” he said. “Neither of them are as large as this one.”
“Let’s go back down, and I’ll call the coroner and we’ll get your statements,” Gage said.
Back at the trailer, Gage made a phone call, then sent Aaron to take Ian’s statement. He turned to Bethany. “Tell me what happened.”
“Ian rented a Jeep from us,” she said. “I agreed to deliver it. He offered to show me around, so we decided to hike around the area. We found the caves, looked inside and there were the bones.”
“Whose idea was it to go into the caves?” Gage asked.
“Mine. I don’t think he’d noticed them until I pointed them out.”
“What do you know about Ian Seabrook?”
What did she know? He was good looking. He drove a Porsche.
He seemed to like babies, and he seemed to like her.
“He’s planning to build a via ferrata here in the canyon, and I guess that’s upset some people in town,” she said.
“His father is a billionaire. And I guess he’s a really experienced climber? ”
Aaron emerged from the trailer, where he had been interviewing Ian. “We’ve got to wait for the coroner,” Gage said to him. “Take your sister home, then come back here.” He tossed Aaron the keys.
“Come on,” Aaron said and headed toward the SUV.
Bethany looked back to the trailer. “I should say goodbye to Ian.”
“We have to go.” He slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. She was tempted to return to the trailer and refuse to leave, but she wouldn’t have put it past Aaron not to pick her up and put her into the SUV, which would be beyond embarrassing, so she climbed into the passenger seat.
Aaron didn’t wait until they were out of the canyon before the grilling began.
“What are you doing with that guy? You don’t know anything about him.
For all you know he murdered those two people,” he said.
“You should have waited and had Carter or Dalton deliver the Jeep. It’s dangerous for a woman alone with a strange man. Don’t you have any sense?”
“If you think Ian had anything to do with those two people who probably died a hundred years ago, you need to go back to Law Enforcement 101,” she said.
“You still don’t know anything about him. You shouldn’t have come out here alone.”
“If I’m never supposed to be alone with a man, how am I going to date?”
“Now you’re saying this was a date?” he said. “With a guy you met, what, five minutes ago?”
“Listen to yourself! You’re being ridiculous.”
Aaron’s face was red. He didn’t look at her as he turned onto the county road. “You don’t know what it’s like, getting a call about two bodies, then finding your sister on scene. For all I knew when we showed up, there was a murderer nearby.”
She hugged her arms across her chest. “Obviously whoever killed those two is long gone. And you don’t need to worry about me. Or Ian. He’s a nice guy.”
“He’s good looking and he’s rich. That doesn’t mean he’s a nice guy. He sounds pretty ruthless to me, finding a way to make money off of something that was free to everyone for decades.”
“I’m not going to talk to you when you’re blathering nonsense like this.”
Bethany looked away. She understood why the climbers were angry with Ian, but hearing him talk about the via ferrata, how it would allow people who weren’t serious climbers to enjoy challenging themselves, she had felt his excitement.
Just because you made money off of something didn’t mean it was a bad thing.
“I’m not going to tell Mom and Dad about this,” Aaron said.
Just when she was ready to stay angry with him, he did something like this. “Thanks,” she said.
“I’m not doing it for you. I don’t want to upset them.”
“Nobody needs to be upset. I’m a grown woman. I’m perfectly capable of looking out for myself.”
He shook his head but wisely said nothing. She sat back, fuming.
Even Aaron must’ve seen that she had never been in danger today. She was curious about the bones and a little sad about the people who’d died, but they had nothing to do with her.
* * *
The Rayford County coroner turned out to be a stout older man named Butch Collins, who scrambled up the path to the caves with more agility than Ian would have expected.
Ian followed Butch and Gage up the trail, half expecting one of them to tell him to go away, but they didn’t.
He stood outside the cave while they went inside to reexamine the bones, and tried to think how those two people had ever gotten up here.
Maybe more of the cave opening had been exposed years ago.
Butch and Gage emerged from the cave. “The bones are quite old,” Butch said as he stripped off nitrile gloves.
“I’ll know more once I’ve done some tests, but I’d guess they’ve been in that cave for several decades at least. There’s some evidence of gnawing by rodents, but apparently no large animals could get to them.
If we can learn their identities maybe we’ll have a better idea how they ended up there. ”
“Once we have a few details about age and gender, we’ll search missing persons,” Gage said.
“If we get some names, we can look for dental records. Barring that, we’re lucky to have a top-notch forensic facial reconstructionist in the area.
She could recreate the victims’ faces, using their skulls, and that might help us identify them.
But that kind of work is expensive, and it takes time.
We’ll start with the simplest approach first. Even with names, finding the murderer is going to take real luck. ”
“I’m supposed to start construction soon,” Ian said. How long was this going to hold things up?
“We’ll get a team up here to examine the area for evidence,” Gage said. “Depending on what we find, you should be able to clear the area, though it may be a few weeks.”
“I could shift the work to the other end of the canyon for the time being,” he said.
“That would be good,” Gage said. “Just keep people away from here until we’ve finished our investigation.”
They followed Butch down the trail and met the investigative team at the trailer. “We’re going to be here a while,” Gage told Ian. “You’re free to go home.”
“This is my home, for now,” he said. “I live in the rest of the trailer.”
“The trailer isn’t part of the crime scene, so you can stay here, but you’ll have to keep out of our way.”
“Of course,” he said.
“Bethany mentioned some in the climbing community aren’t too happy with your plans for the canyon,” Gage said. “Have you had any trouble?”
“A few nasty notes. A few remarks from people.” The sign left on his gate today had been typical. “Nothing that felt like a real threat.”
“Not much of a welcome to town.”
“I can deal with it.” He studied the man in front of him. Gage Walker came across as a straight shooter. “Do you know Bethany well?”
“Not well. We’ve run into each other on a few search and rescue calls.”
“Her brother didn’t seem too happy about her being here with me.”
“They’re a close family.”
“I met one of her other brothers when I rented the Jeep. They come across as a little overprotective.”
“I have two daughters,” Gage said. “Having a job like mine, where you see all the terrible things people do to each other, it feels like there’s no such thing as overprotective.”
Ian couldn’t argue with that. “Do I need to be worried about those two skeletons?” he asked. “I mean, whoever killed them is probably long gone, right?”
“Probably,” the sergeant said. “I’d like to know what happened to them, but I don’t know if we ever will.
It’s hard to investigate a murder so long after the fact.
The best we can do is try to identify them.
At least then we might give their families some closure.
” He glanced toward the cliff face, which now had a line of people making their way up the trail and swarming around the caves.
“We’ll be out of your way in a few hours, I expect.
If we have any questions, we’ll let you know. ”
Ian went back into his office and tried to focus on work, but his mind kept replaying the events of the afternoon.
Not just finding the bones, but being with Bethany.
She had left without saying goodbye. She probably never wanted to see him again.
Nothing to put a damper on a budding friendship like a couple of skeletons.