Pulling Jimmy away from a crime scene is like pulling an open bottle from the hands of an alcoholic: there’s bound to be some resistance. But we’ve wasted too much time standing idly by while we should be looking for Susan.
“We save the ones we can.” The mantra spills from my lips out of habit or just some misguided hope. “Susan’s still out there and we’re close. I can sense it. If he’s burying bodies here, he must have a cabin or a bunker nearby that he’s operating from. It only makes sense. As remote as this place is, there’d be no reason to pack a body out for disposal. This whole area is one big hiding place.” I give Jimmy a light punch to the left chest; it’s like punching an oak wearing a T-shirt. “Come on, you know I’m right. Let’s go find her.” Then, in a softer voice, I add, “Please?”
The word is long in coming: “Okay.” Pulling it out of him is like yanking a rubber boot from ankle-deep mud. “I’ll let Walt know,” he says.
Jimmy wanders off and I wonder if I’m going to have to wait another hour before he breaks free again, but he’s back in less than two minutes and we make our way with long strides back to the quads.
The dirt road is a logjam of emergency vehicles, with the Kawasakis hemmed in tight on the right shoulder of the road. It takes some maneuvering, but we skirt around the barrier of cars and SUVs and soon the hum and vibration of the Brute Force ATV again becomes my world.
My eyes never leave the road, darting from the left to the right and back again, looking for any sign of Sad Face. Five minutes pass, then ten, twenty. I’m just about to suggest backtracking a few miles and taking a road that cut to the southwest.
Then I see it.
It’s not shine; it’s not even overly promising; but it’s worth investigating. At the edge of the road are two parallel tracks heading due north—vehicle tracks. The two narrow strips are well worn, suggesting frequent usage, but the driver was careful to always drive exactly in the same path each time, keeping the tracks narrow and less noticeable.
I’m right next to the trail before I see it, and almost decide to just keep riding. Instead, I brake hard and hail Jimmy on the headset as I circle back.
“Whatcha got?”
“Looks like someone’s been off-road,” I reply. “You can tell the trail’s been here awhile, but there are also signs of recent activity.” I pull the quad onto one of the ruts and reach down. Picking up the crushed golden petals of a California poppy, I hold them up as evidence.
“Very recent,” Jimmy confirms. He tips his helmet down the rutted way. “Lead on.”
But there’s little leading to do; the trail dies quickly.
Three hundred feet beyond the road, the earthen ruts suddenly sputter and fail. And spilled upon the ground at the terminus of this wayward spoor, as if in testament to the sudden death of the trail, a rust-textured amaranth shine lies upon the dirt. It paints the wild grasses and the low brush. Like the slime trail of a neon slug, it presses itself into the earth and leads north to a dense copse of trees.
Blackness lies within.
“This is it,” I whisper. “It’s all fresh.” My voice mutates into a barely controlled staccato. “He was here within the last few days, and he’s been here a lot.” I look around and gasp. “He’s all over the place.”
The thicket is two, perhaps three acres, yet even in the midday sun, the belly of the small wood is cast in deep shadow. The trees are uninviting and the array of thorn-riddled bushes around the edge couldn’t have been better placed. It’s almost as if they were intentionally planted and cultivated … and perhaps they were. This is exactly the type of spot Zell would have chosen; his own woodland fortress. What better way to protect it than to plant a wall of thorns around the perimeter?
“Over here,” I yell, bolting forward, weaving past the thorns and into the center of the copse of trees, where I tear into a pile of brush, tossing aside dead bushes recently stacked there and nearly hitting Jimmy with one of the shrubs in the process. It doesn’t faze him; he’s as eager as I am and tears into the brush pile.
“I see it!” Jimmy shouts, kicking the last of the debris out of the way. It’s the end of the trail; the Holy Grail. Laid out upon the ground is a rectangular black metal hatch about three feet by two feet, with a thick clasp on one end that’s secured with a solid brass Master Lock padlock.
“Call it in!” I cry, searching my pockets for anything metal that we can use to pick the lock and finding nothing.
“Walt, this is Jimmy, do you copy?” There’s a pause, then, “We found it, Walt. We found Zell’s bunker.” He rattles off the GPS coordinates. “Hurry, Walt. We don’t know if she’s got air down there—or when she last had water.” As an afterthought he adds, “And we’re going to need some bolt-cutters.” Pause. “No, I think it’s too big to shoot off.” Pause. “Copy that.”
Finding my pockets useless and nearly empty, I turn to the backpack and am just about to upend it and empty the contents on the ground when a thought suddenly occurs to me. Dropping the bag, I glance around, searching the ground.
Jimmy’s yanking on the hasp to no avail and gives up in disgust. Like me, he begins to search the ground, but we’re searching for two different things. Ten seconds later, he has what he wants and returns to the hasp with a two-inch-diameter branch in hand. He’s trying to get an angle on the latch when he notices me and pauses, watching.
“What are you doing?”