“Which is?” Ramona asked.
“You’ve got me. The price of gold can change daily. It’s somewhere over five hundred dollars an ounce, I’d guess. Maybe way over.” Matt laughed. “I wish the pennies in my Lincoln collection were worth that much. I’d probably get seventy-five bucks for all of them, max. I like to think of the collection as my emergency cash fund. That’s pretty sad, isn’t it? Do you think there are any more Krugerrands in there?”
“I don’t know,” Ramona said, “but it does raise my curiosity to know what else might have been hidden here and why.”
“I’ll take a look. Finders keepers, right?”
“Get real, Detective,” Ramona replied with a smile.
Matt gave the coin back to Ramona and ducked inside the well house.
Using one of the tarps that had served as part of the canopy, Ramona assembled her collected evidence, tagged everything, and filled out the evidence log. She’d just finished up when Matt emerged from the well house holding another bagged coin for her to see. It was contained in a clear plastic sleeve, which had some letters and numbers on it in permanent ink.
“It was buried just a little bit deeper in the pit,” he said. “This one is a twenty-dollar U.S. gold piece. It’s called a Saint-Gaudens after the man who designed it. These are highly collectible and usually sell way above the value of the gold content.”
“What do the numbers and letters on the plastic sleeve mean?” Ramona asked.
“They have nothing to do with the grading of the quality of the coin, which looks to be uncirculated to me.”
“Uncirculated is good?”
“About the best there is. It’s one step down from brilliant uncirculated. I’m thinking the numbers and letters represent an inventory designation given to the coin by either the owner or a dealer who sold it.”
“So give me a guess on its value.”
“It could be thousands,” Matt replied. “It depends on rarity and condition.”
“From the evidence Don Mielke collected at Clifford Talbott’s ranch house, Brian Riley was down to his last five thousand dollars in cash,” Ramona said. “Do you think he may have come back here for the coins?”
“Maybe, but there were no gold coins listed in the evidence inventory from the ranch house.”
“Riley could have hidden the coins in the house before Talbott arrived and shot him. Ask Mielke to send an investigator out there to look.”
Matt keyed his handheld and made the request just as Chief Kerney and Sergeant Istee came into sight.
“Good morning,” Kerney said as he entered the small clearing. He handed each detective a thermal mug of coffee that had been freshly brewed in the mobile command vehicle. “Bring us up to speed.”
Coffee in hand, Ramona talked about their morning finds and showed them the two coins. “It will probably take all day for Detective Chacon and me to finish up here,” she added.
“Not if the four of us take shifts,” Clayton said.
“That’s a good idea,” Kerney said. He turned to Ramona. “Why don’t you and Matt head back to the S.O. command vehicle and see what you can find out about any open or cold cases involving stolen gold coins while we take a turn inside the well house. Take the fingerprint evidence with you and run it through any computer database you can think of while you’re there.”
“Will do,” Matt said.
“Have you told her?” Kerney asked Matt with a nod in Ramona’s direction.
“Told me what?” Ramona asked.
“No, I haven’t,” Matt answered.
“Shall I?”
“Go ahead, Chief.”
“Sergeant Pino, meet Sergeant Chacon, effective the first of next week. You’re losing him to the Property Crimes Unit.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” Before Matt could answer, she swung around to face Kerney. “Do I get to pick his replacement?”
Kerney nodded, laughed, and slapped Matt on the back. “See how soon you’ll be forgotten?”
Grinning from ear to ear, Matt faked a sad head shake.
As the two left the clearing, Ramona continued chewing out Matt for not being forthcoming.
“I’ll take the first shift,” Clayton said.
“There could be footprints in the frozen ground underneath the hard-packed snow in front of the entrance,” Kerney said. “I’ll start on that.”
“That’s a good idea.”
Kerney threw some wood onto the fire and picked up a small shovel. “Let’s get to it.”
The two men worked steadily for an hour without uncovering anything of value. There were no footprints under the packed-down snow in front of the well house door, and the buckets of snow Clayton had removed from inside the well house and melted over the fire contained no trace evidence visible to the naked eye.
As they warmed themselves by the fire, Clayton asked if anyone had inspected the
“Not that I know of,” Kerney replied.
After a careful but futile up-and-down look at the exterior walls, they returned to the fire burning in the oil drum.
Clayton threw another log on it. “We’ve been assuming that Riley followed a path to the well house when he came here yesterday. What if he didn’t? What if it wasn’t a path to begin with and he simply went cross- country.”
Kerney looked back through the trees in the direction of the double-wide. “If he did go cross-country, he took a fairly direct route from the residence to the well house.”
“This well house hasn’t been used in years,” Clayton replied. “It was abandoned long before Tim Riley bought the land and moved his double-wide onto the property. Maybe there’s an old path. That’s where we have the best shot at finding any footprint evidence.”
Kerney made a three-sixty scan. The clearing and the well house were in a slight depression on the downslope of a mesa. Below, through a break in the trees, he could see the narrow canyon floor where the railroad tracks followed the creekbed. He looked up at the mesa. Near the top, a quartet of deep arroyos converged into one and snaked down to join with the creek within fifty feet of where he stood.
“What are you thinking?” Clayton asked.
“I’m thinking this well was drilled here to tap into the groundwater supplied by that nearby arroyo. In its time, it would have been a more reliable source of water than the creek. I’m betting it once served a homestead that probably sat below us on the canyon floor.”
“The old electric motor inside the well house is stamped with the maker’s name and a patent date of 1936,” Clayton said.
“I doubt that rural electrification would have reached Canoncito before then.”
Clayton looked at the treetops. “I don’t see any electric lines or poles running up here.”
“Scavenged long ago,” Kerney suggested.
Clayton walked to the edge of the clearing, squatted down, and gazed through the trees at the canyon. “There’s a snow-covered mound on the flat just to the left that doesn’t fit with the topography. It’s just behind a fence. That could be the rubble from the old homestead.”
Kerney joined Clayton. “Just eyeballing it, I’d say that mound falls easily within Riley’s property boundaries.”
Clayton stood, broke off a small dead branch from a pinon tree, walked to a point ten feet east of the tracks through the snow, and marked an X next to a large juniper tree. “The original path is here.”
“You’re sure of that?” Kerney asked.
“Yep. Coming up from the canyon this is the easiest, most direct route. New growth obscures it in places now, but this is the path. Riley couldn’t see it because of all the snow, so he just made a beeline straight to the well house.”
“Let’s find out if you’re right.”
