Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

me was that not a bit of gold was found in the footings of those camps. The gold all left here for a bank vault in some faraway city. What remained in these canyons was a certain way of looking at land, waters, and women and a hollow yearning afflicting some members of every generation that neither gold, nor sex, nor wine or whiskey can repair.

5 / Rocks and Bones

WORKING IN THE CANYONS that would be flooded by the Auburn Dam, I couldn't help but become a student of it, in the same way a ranger at a Civil War battlefield can recite the minutiae of Pickett's Charge or the Bloody Road. Soon I knew the story of the dam's political advances and geological defeats, the campaigns to rally its supporters and turn the tide on its critics, and the technical details of what had been done so far in the construction site, which we were required to patrol once a day so the curious wouldn't impale themselves on a piece of rebar or get sucked into the diversion tunnel and drowned. And wherever we went, people asked us questions about the dam.

One autumn morning I stopped in at the Auburn Police Department to get permission to use their gym for one of my defensive tactics training sessions. While I was there, an officer I knew introduced me to their new guy, Rich Morita, who'd just been rotated in off patrol for his first stint at investigations. We made small talk over Styrofoam cups of weak detective coffee, and when Morita learned that I worked in the dam site, he asked me if I had a few more minutes to talk. I said I did. The officer who'd introduced us drifted back to his desk.

I followed Morita across the detectives' office to two battered cardboard file boxes on a counter along one wall. He removed a folded piece of paper from one of them and smoothed it out on the counter. It was a primitive computer-plotted map of the lower North Fork and the western edges of Auburn, with a scattering of red stars on it.

He cleared his throat and began: "I got this from the Bureau. The red stars are old mineshafts."

"Okay. Go on," I said.

"On September 8, 1982, a woman named Karen Dellasandro disappeared from her home here"—he dropped an index finger on one of the squiggles of streets in the Skyridge housing development along the canyon rim—"where she lived with her husband and two kids. He was a sheriff's deputy."

"Right. A sergeant at the jail. I've met him, and I've heard the story—a little of it, anyway," I said.

Morita corrected me: "He's not with the Sheriff's Department anymore. He transferred to the Southern Pacific Railroad Police, but he still lives around here. Anyway, there was a missing persons investigation by Auburn PD, and over the months that followed it began to be looked at as a possible homicide and focused on her husband as a potential suspect. But here's the problem—"

"I know," I interrupted him. "No body."

"Right. No body. She was never found. And no murder weapon or anything else that could bring the case to trial as a homicide."

"So?" I asked him.

"Well," he continued, "during the first investigation they tried about everything they could think of to find her, and around Thanksgiving of 1982 they even consulted a psychic. The psychic told them she'd seen Karen's grave around the arch of the dam's foundation, downhill from those radio towers on the hill by the Auburn Dam Overlook—you know the place, less than half a mile from the Dellasandro home."

"Yeah, I know the place."

"On the fourth of December, the sheriff's search and rescue team assisted our detectives in a ground search of that area with four of their dogs. It was one of several searches they made in various areas of the county around that time, most on hunches and tips and few, if any, on solid leads. Anyway, I guess by that time there wasn't much construction going on, and—"

"But a psychic—I mean, that's really grasping at straws."

"Well," he replied, "it's the closest open land. It's less than five minutes from their house, so he could have left his kids asleep in their beds that first night. The place was deserted once the Bureau people went home at five. And our profiler from the FBI says, based upon what is known about the type of crime, he would have put her body somewhere close where he could keep an eye on her. It's about control—"

Again I interrupted him. "And of course, once the Bureau gets everything worked out with the dam, the grave goes under a couple of hundred feet of water."

"That too." He nodded patiently. "Anyway, the psychic said she saw a grave, a mound of earth, I guess—and in the ground search they didn't find anything recent enough to dig up. But they found three old mineshafts, or what they described as mineshafts, and for some reason—maybe they ran out of time, or they hadn't brought lights and caving equipment—they didn't search them."

"And..."

"And there's a note in the report ..." He rifled through the stacks of manila folders in one of the boxes. "Well, it's here somewhere—saying the PD was going to come back and look in them later. But I've gone through the rest of the reports, and there's no indication we ever did."

"I'm getting your drift."

"Yeah," he said. "That's what I want to ask you. Do you know of any mineshafts on that side of the dam site? They're not on this map the Bureau made for me."

"Well," I responded, "I don't recognize the particular mineshafts you're referring to, but I can tell you that there are old mineshafts all over in these canyons, and a lot of them are not on present-day maps. And the dam site is full of things that look like old graves—miles of slit trenches the geologists dug and then filled back in, to study potential faults