On the passenger’s seat lay the newspaper he’d bought in Napa. He’d not yet found time to read the story about the Winslow murder. With the newspaper were a few Denver Post articles downloaded from the library computer. Judith Kesselman, gone missing forever.
As he ate a Hershey’s bar, a Planters, he read the printouts. University, public, and police officials were quoted. Everyone except the police expressed confidence that Judith would be found safe.
The cops were guarded in their statements. Unlike the academics, bureaucrats, and politicians, they avoided bullshit. They were the only ones who sounded as if they truly cared about the young woman.
The officer in charge of the investigation was Detective Ramsey Ozgard. Some of his colleagues called him Oz.
Ozgard had been forty-four at the time of the disappearance. At that point in his career, he’d received three citations for bravery.
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At fifty, he was probably still on the force, a likelihood supported by the only other personal information about him in the articles. When he was thirtyeight, Ramsey Ozgard had been shot in the left leg. He had been approved for permanent disability. He had turned it down. He did not limp. Billy wanted to talk to Ozgard. To do so, however, he could not use his real name or his phone.
As the candy, Pepsi, and No-Doz began to lubricate the flywheels of his mind, Billy drove to Lanny Olsen’s place.
He did not park at the church and walk from there, as he’d done before. When he arrived at the isolated house at the end of the lane, he drove across the ascending backyard, past the pistol range with the hay-bale- and-hillside backstop.
Lawn gave way to wild grass, to brambles and sparse brush. The terrain grew stony and furrowed.
He stopped two-thirds of the way up the slope, put the Explorer in park, and engaged the emergency brake.
He could have benefited from the headlights. This high on the hillside, however, they could be seen from the residences down near the county road. Worried about attracting attention and inspiring curiosity, he switched off the lights. He killed the engine.
On foot, using a flashlight, he quickly found the vent hole, twenty feet from the SUV.
Before vineyards, before the arrival of Europeans, before the ancestors of American Indians had crossed a land or ice bridge from Asia, volcanoes shaped this valley. They had defined its future.
The old Rossi winery, now the aging cellars for Heitz, and other buildings in the valley were built of rhyolite, the volcanic form of granite, quarried locally. The knoll on which the Olsen house stood was largely basalt, another volcanic stone, dark and dense.
When an eruption is exhausted, it sometimes leaves lava pipes, long tunnels through surrounding stone. Billy didn’t know enough volcanology to conclude whether the dormant vent on this knoll was such a pipe or was a fumarole that had expelled fiery gases.
He knew, however, that the vent was four feet wide at the mouth—and immeasurably deep.
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This property was intimately familiar to Billy, because when he had been fourteen and alone, Pearl Olsen had given him a home. She never feared him, as some had. She knew the truth when she heard it. Her good heart opened to him, and in spite of her recurring cancer, she raised him as if he were her son. The twelve-year difference in Billy’s age and Lanny’s meant they were never like brothers, although they lived in the same house. Besides, Lanny had always been self-contained and when not on duty with the sheriff’s department had lost himself in his cartooning.
The two of them had been friendly enough. And occasionally Lanny could be an engaging honorary uncle.
On one such day, Lanny had involved Billy in an attempt to determine the depth of the vent.
Although no young children played on the brambly knoll, Pearl worried for the safety of even imaginary tykes. Years earlier, she’d had a redwood frame bolted to the stone rim of the vent. A redwood lid was screwed to the frame.
After removing the lid, Lanny and Billy began their research with a handheld police spotlight powered off a pickup-truck engine. The beam illuminated the walls to about three hundred feet but could not find the bottom. Past the mouth, the shaft widened to between eight and ten feet. The walls were undulant, whorled, and strange.
They tied one pound of brass washers to the end of a length of binder twine and lowered them into the center of the hole, listening for the distinctive ring of the discs meeting the vent floor. They only had a thousand feet of twine, which proved inadequate.
Finally they dropped steel ball bearings into the abyss, timing their fall to a first impact, using textbook formulae to calculate distance. No bearing ever hit short of fourteen hundred feet.
The bottom did not lie at fourteen hundred feet.
After that long vertical drop, the vent apparently descended further at an angle, perhaps more than once changing direction, too.
After the hard clack of the initial strike, each bearing ricocheted from wall to wall, rattling on, the noise never suddenly coming to a stop but always fading, fading until it dwindled into silence.
Billy guessed that the lava pipe was miles long and descended at least a few thousand feet under the floor of the valley.
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Now, by the glow of the flashlight, he used a battery-powered screwdriver to extract the twelve Phillips-head steel screws that held the redwood lid—a more recent one than they had removed almost twenty years ago. He
