Kelsey had known that she wanted to be in law enforcement all her life. Despite the fact that she’d already been a Marshal, she’d had to go through the academy at Quantico to become part of the Krewe.
She’d been tougher than Jane from the get-go, but she’d taught her a great deal about inner strength; Jane thought she’d gained a great deal of her own confidence with Kelsey’s help. Jane was also proud of being a very good shot—if not quite as good as those in their Krewe who’d been practicing at the range much longer.
She was grateful to have them here. She’d never worked any case without at least another few members of her Krewe before. It had just been days, of course, since she’d left them, but it felt like a lifetime.
Then again, she’d only come here to do a facial reconstruction.
“Lily is pretty interesting,” Kelsey said. “I’ve never been anywhere quite like this. And may I say that you’ve, uh, managed to fit right in?”
Jane remembered that she was in period attire and grimaced. “Just being part of the theater crowd.” She turned to Heidi. “Thanks for finding Logan and Kelsey and bringing them here.”
“My pleasure.” Heidi smiled. “Well, back to the grind. We’re all doing double shifts today—so many people in town. I would’ve thought...well, that these events would’ve scared off more people. I mean, after I found that old corpse out by the Apache village...” She gave an elaborate shudder.
“I’m sure you’re safe with your trail rides, Heidi,” Logan told her.
“With another guide and parties of up to fifteen...yeah, I hope so,” Heidi said. “Anyway, I’ll see you around.”
They all said goodbye. “You’ve found something?” Logan asked Jane.
She confirmed that the door was closed and then showed them the note. “It’s not addressed to anyone, but I believe it might be from Sage—written to Trey Hardy.” She glanced at Kelsey. “I’ve tried to keep Logan up on what’s going on—”
Kelsey nodded. “He’s filled us in on what he knows.”
“I was honestly surprised that Sloan was okay with bringing you in. But as we’ve discussed, he doesn’t seem to entirely trust his own people. Logan suggested he’s afraid that one of his deputies might have—inadvertently or not—shared information. There’s also the possibility that someone in town instigated whatever it is going on, and I suppose it could be over the gold.”
“From what I understand, that shipment was about a hundred pounds of mined gold, but at about fifty dollars a gram...someone could consider it enough to kill for. But we’re talking about millions today. Trey Hardy was dead before the gold was stolen, so what would Sage have meant by this—if she was writing to Hardy?”
“I don’t know,” Jane said. “I just don’t. Trey Hardy might have suspected something about what was going to happen. And even though he wasn’t a killer, he might have been condemned to death once he stood before the circuit court. He was a gentleman outlaw, so he might’ve been ready to tell what he knew, to see that people weren’t killed.”
Logan remarked, “Maybe Hardy’s legend made too much of him being a good guy. Jesse James, for instance, comes out looking like Robin Hood, but if you were the one being robbed by him it probably wasn’t so great.”
Jane shrugged. “I don’t know. I want to think of Hardy as being a good guy.”
“Well, legends are based on real men and women, and none of us is all saint or sinner. I’ll leave you two to your reading. I’m going to go into the county station and see if they can give us anything from forensics. I’ll keep in touch.”
“Where should I start?” Kelsey asked Jane.
“I’ll keep going with this. Why don’t you go through the old newspaper clippings and see if there’s anything new you can discover.”
Valerie Mystro stood by the car staring at Sloan. She appeared completely bewildered. She batted her lashes and played the betrayed heroine to the hilt.
“I don’t understand why you’re here, Sloan, why you’d be waiting for someone who simply wanted to be friendly and bring a basket of goodies to the hospital. Everything that’s happened is terrible, but your fixation on the theater is ridiculous! Yes, I went to the hospital. Jimmy Hough was a nice kid, although Caleb was obnoxious to everyone—insulting Alice and me when he wasn’t trying to pick us up or bribe us to have sex. I thought I was doing something good!”
“Valerie, this is one of the two busiest days of the year for the theater—but you had time to drive out to the hospital?” Sloan demanded.
“I felt bad! Caleb was murdered—and those two almost died, as well. Give me a little credit here, will you? Sloan, you think it all has to do with the theater because of the skull. Don’t forget, I’m the one who found the skull and was nearly scared out of ten years by it!”
“Why didn’t you stay at the hospital?” Sloan asked.
“The guard frightened me! I was just going to drop off the basket, ask Jimmy and his mom how they were doing and rush back before anyone knew I was gone. But the way he barked at me and asked what I was doing—well, I just turned around and left.”
“Let me see the basket.”
“You got a search warrant?”
“You don’t want to let me see the basket?”
“Sure, you can see the basket—if you ask nicely. I watch TV. I know I could make you get a search warrant!”
He rolled his eyes. “All right, all right!”
She leaned into the driver’s window to lift the basket off the passenger seat. It was a little straw basket with a bow and a card that said “Feel Better Soon.” She handed it to Sloan; he went through the contents and found cookies and candy.
He didn’t want to admit it, but he felt a little foolish as he handed it back. “Valerie, I’m sorry. But it looks suspicious for you to leave when you’re supposed to be playing your role for the town, and more suspicious when you run out because a guard wants to know who you are and what you’re doing when you’re visiting people who barely escaped attempted murder.”
“Sloan, I was just trying to be friendly, like I said. And,” she added, “even though he was a total prick—and probably because it looked good—Caleb Hough donated to the Theater Restoration Fund. I wanted to make sure his wife continued to do so.”
Sloan was silent for a minute.
“Sloan, please—can I get back to town before they notice I’m gone?”
He walked away from the car. “Okay. But do me a favor. Be a friend by not going anywhere near the Hough family right now, okay?”
“You’re being paranoid, and you need to be out there finding out who really did this, not persecuting good citizens!” Valerie said angrily.
“Trust me, I’m trying,” he said as he turned away.
“I’m learning about gold mining. It wasn’t found on the surface or in the streams here. It was an accidental discovery when they were expecting to find silver. But once they came across the gold vein, they created a processing station right by the mine, and they used fire and chemicals to melt the gold and mold it into bars. While the gold was being processed, it was protected by Pinkerton guards,” Kelsey told Jane.
Jane looked up at her and smiled. “I’d wondered about that. I mean, I know it wasn’t going to be like a pirate cache of gold coins.”
“No, but they were pretty sophisticated. So, the gold would have been formed into bars before shipping and it would’ve been relatively small in bulk, and thus easy to carry on a stagecoach. There were guards the whole time it was loaded. And there were actually two armed guards on board, and the driver was armed, as well. I sincerely doubt that one person could have been responsible. And then the dead men had to be buried, the stagecoach dismantled and made to ‘disappear’ and the gold hidden somewhere. It was a pretty complex operation.”
“One they must have been planning for a long time,” Jane agreed. “Two guards and an armed driver. So, maybe a party of three?”
“And someone in the know,” Kelsey said. “Only someone working for the mine, someone involved in its administration, would be aware of exactly when the gold was due to leave the mine.”
Jane glanced down at her book. “Well, this is like looking for a needle in a haystack. It could have been almost anyone living in the area at the time except...” She paused. “The administrators at the mine would have known—but local enforcement must have known, too.”
“Yes, I imagine they would alert the sheriff’s office.”
“Okay,” Jane said, thinking it out as she spoke, still and staring down at the pages in front of her. “We know that Hardy was shot before the stagecoach was attacked. What if Hardy suspected something concerning the sheriff and the deputy—something he’d picked up in jail because he could hear them when they talked? So Aaron Munson was afraid Hardy would blow the whistle on them before they got the gold. He went in and shot Hardy—never imagining that the townspeople would react so violently.”
“That’s possible. But it would mean Munson was dead when the stagecoach was robbed—and disappeared from the face of the earth.”
“But not Fogerty!” Jane said. “His book points at a man named Tod Green, a man claiming to be a rancher, who was in town at the time. A guy called Eamon McNulty was the director at the theater. McNulty and Green got into a huge argument and they had a duel in the street. Green died.”
“What happened to McNulty?” Kelsey asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t found another reference to him, other than the fight.”
“Okay, say the sheriff, his deputy and McNulty were in on it together. They set this Tod Green guy up to take the fall. Munson was lynched before the robbery, so he was no longer a player. But Hardy suspected what was going on and he told Sage McCormick about it. Sage disappears. We’re virtually certain she was murdered because her body was found in the theater.”
