LITMIR.BIZ

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led Hemphill and Chuck across the site to the daypacks. Kirina and the students looked on in silence.

      Clarence picked out his backpack, a black North Face with a large compartment for food, water, and clothing, and a small, outer pocket for sundries. He checked the outside pocket and came up with nothing. He rummaged inside the main compartment, extracting his rain jacket, a sack lunch, and a liter bottle of water, but no knife.

      He turned to Hemphill. “It’s gone.”

      “You live in Raven House, right?”

      Clarence nodded.

      “Any reason it might be back in town, in your room?”

      “I keep it in my pack. I use it to make the crew’s excavation sticks.”

      In response to Hemphill’s furrowed brow, Clarence explained, “They’re for digging out and cleaning found objects. Everyone thinks trowels and dental picks are best, but for close-in work, you want wood because it doesn’t scratch. I make different sizes, with blunt and sharp points.”

      “You know your way around a knife,” Hemphill observed.

      Clarence’s eyes filled with fury. Before he could cut loose on the officer, Chuck jumped in. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded.

      “Just an observation,” the officer said, his voice flat.

      Chuck made no attempt to hide his anger. “Sounds like you’re making use of the same keen observation skills you used last night. Take a million pictures, keep my students up all night, and for what? A little bit of blood soaking into the ground.” He exhaled, attempting to calm himself. “Look, you and I both know what happened. Somebody took a chicken from the cafeteria, cut it up, dropped it, made a mess, whatever. Probably one of the cooks. He doesn’t want to admit to it because he’s afraid he’ll get in trouble.” Chuck pointed at Clarence’s pack. “A guy who would steal from the cafeteria would have no problem stealing somebody’s knife, too.”

      “I considered that,” Hemphill said. “Then I got back to HQ, put a drop of the blood we collected on a slide, and stuck it under our microscope.”

      “HQ,” Chuck mimicked, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “CSI: Estes Park.”

      Hemphill’s face flushed, but his voice remained steady. “I was a paramedic before I joined the department. It’s pretty simple, really. Red blood cells are distinctive from animal to animal. Pig to cow, cow to chicken.” He paused. “Chicken to human.”

      Chuck straightened. “I take it your microscope told you something.”

      “We won’t know for sure until we get the official test results back in a few days. But the red blood cells on the slide had the distinct donut shape that is unique to one creature and one creature only—Homo sapiens.”

      “You’re saying last night’s blood was…is…human.”

      “That’s the early indication.”

      At Chuck’s side, Clarence drew a breath.

      Chuck’s heart thumped hard in his chest. No wonder Hemphill was still on the clock after working the scene through the night—and why he’d deemed it worthwhile to hike all the way to the mine this morning. “But you don’t have a body, right?” Chuck asked. “And no one has turned up injured at the hospital?”

      Hemphill’s silence provided the answer.

      Clarence faced the police officer. “That’s my knife in your picture. You and I both know it.” His voice rose. “But I sure as hell didn’t stab anybody with it.”

      Hemphill stiffened, his arms tight at his sides.

      Chuck clenched and unclenched his jaw. “If you have no more questions,” he told the officer, “then I think we’re done here.”

      Hemphill pivoted and held the photograph out to where Kirina and the students stood in a knot beside the excavated cabin site. “Can any of you tell me how this knife might’ve ended up behind your dorm building last night? Or how it could have gotten blood on it?”

      Chuck opened his mouth, ready to break in before the students said anything incriminating. But what if one of them offered information that would free Clarence from suspicion? Chuck settled back on his heels.

      Hemphill allowed several seconds to pass. When none of the students responded, he said, “Thank you for your attention.”

      He turned and spoke only to Clarence. “We’ll be in touch.”

EIGHT

      Not until the police officer was well away from the mine site did Chuck turn to the students.

      “Lunch break,” he said.

      Kirina clapped her hands. “You heard the man.”

      The students removed their sack lunches and water bottles from their packs and spread out around the site in twos and threes, sitting on boulders or the stacked cabin logs or cross-legged on the ground. They leaned close to one another, whispering and directing furtive glances at Clarence, who stood in place, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

      Chuck picked up his pack and motioned for Clarence to do the same. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, leading Clarence across the mine site to where Samuel sat looking at his sandwich.

      Chuck gave the young man a reassuring tap on the shoulder. “You did great in there.”

      Samuel offered a pallid smile. “So did you.”

      “Let’s you and me never do that again, okay?”

      Samuel aimed his chin at the mine tunnel. “I’m never going back in there.”

      “You won’t have to. No one will.”

      With Clarence following, Chuck crossed to the far side of the mine site and angled up Mount Landen’s northeast ridge. Though he was breathing hard by the time he reached the ridge crest, he hadn’t escaped the questions presented by Officer Hemphill’s appearance at the mine.

      Clarence reached the top of the ridge a minute later. He bent forward, his hands on his knees, his stomach heaving. When his breathing calmed, he straightened and joined Chuck in looking north off the ridge into Fall River Valley far below. The valley was bisected by Fall River Road, a tan ribbon snaking through the trees. The park’s original route to the high country predated the construction of Trail Ridge Road by several decades. These days, the road was a little-used gravel byway.

      High above the valley to the north and west, the three tallest peaks of the Mummy Range, Ypsilon, Chiquita, and Bighorn, jig-sawed the skyline. The midday breeze coursing over the ridge was warm, the sky clear and blue.

      By this hour on any normal summer day in the Mummies, massive thunderheads should have been building above the mountain peaks, leading to afternoon storms that would lash the high country with rain, sleet, hail, even snow. But this was no ordinary summer. In contrast to the heavy summer rains and raging floods that had washed out roads and devastated downtown Estes Park a few years ago, this summer the park was gripped by drought attributable, scientists said, to the extremes of global climate change, just as the floods had been.

      Though the months-long drought was hard on the park’s flora and fauna, the string of cloudless days had made the students’ work at the mine easy these past weeks. Collapsible nylon shelters, toted by the students to the site at the beginning of the summer to protect their excavation work from downpours, remained stowed in stuff sacks at the edge of the site. Not once over the last seven weeks had the students been forced to don their raincoats.

      Chuck and Clarence sat facing west on a pair of rocks, the summit of Mount Landen high above them, Fall River Valley more than a thousand feet below.

      “Time to figure this thing out,” Chuck said.

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