Silencing Eve Read Free Page A

was silent. Let it be true, she prayed. “Are you sure?”
    “We’re still waiting on DNA, but I’m sure. I think each of those bodies was wrapped in thermal-reflective sleeping-bag liners to hold their body heat for the infrared scopes. I went down with the forensic team after they extinguished the fire and found traces of the reflective material at the site.”
    “But there were a dozen witnesses who saw Eve and Doane go into that saloon just a few minutes before that blast. How could they have gotten away without someone’s seeing them?”
    “Doane obviously knew the area very well. They were in a ghost town in the bottom of a small, bowl-shaped valley. Locals call it the punch bowl. It had been raining heavily, and the street was muddy. The strange thing was that it wasn’t flooded.”
    “Why was that strange?”
    “With water coming down from every side of the valley, it had no place to go. It should have flooded, unless … it was draining to someplace.”
    Catherine thought about it. “Like a cavern?”
    “Very good. There were fissures that ran behind the buildings. Water drained through them to a stream in an underground cavern. It feeds an even larger stream that runs down the mountain. We didn’t know about the cavern and the underground stream, but we used the water from that bigger stream to help put out the fire.”
    Catherine could feel the excitement surging within her. “You think Doane took Eve out the back and down into this cavern?”
    “It’s a twenty-foot drop, but the water is deep enough that it wouldn’t have been a problem. The fissure was so narrow that when Doane first got to the ghost town, it was easy for him to cover it with brush to hide the cavern. And the explosion completely covered up the fissures with debris, so we didn’t even know they were there until I looked for them later. Doane did a good job of covering his tracks.”
    “Do we know whose bodies were in there?”
    “Not yet. There wasn’t much left of them. We were lucky they weren’t vaporized. But the fact that it was so muddy gave me some interesting tracks outside in front of the saloon. An off-road vehicle arrived, and Terence Blick, a partner of Doane’s, stepped out of it. Then Blick walked around to the back, unloaded something heavy, and walked into the saloon with it.”
    “You got all that from footprints?”
    “I had a run-in with Blick a couple days before. I stopped to see if I could help a policeman he’d shot down, and I saw Blick’s footprints then. He was wearing different boots, but the stride was unmistakable. He swung his legs in such a way that the right and left prints were directly in front of each other, almost single file. Fairly unique. And the footsteps sunk about three inches deeper after he walked around to the back of the truck.”
    “You think he took a body into that saloon. But there were two bodies in there.”
    “I believe the second corpse could be Blick himself.”
    Catherine slowly nodded. “Doane killed his own partner?”
    “Blick’s footprints went in, but never came out. But the off-road vehicle was driven out of the town. I’d bet Doane charged Blick with securing a woman’s corpse, but he needed a second one, a male. So he killed him. He went outside in the street with Eve and showed us all that she was there, then went back inside. He slipped out the back and jumped, either dragging or carrying Eve with him, into the cavern before Venable’s team arrived with their infrared gear. He had a raft down there and rode the stream about three miles away, where he had Blick’s vehicle parked. I saw the prints on the bank. The tire tread belonged to a set of Super Swamper TSL. That meant it was almost certainly the same 4 × 4 off-road vehicle that Blick drove into the ghost town. Doane took Eve away while the town was still burning.” She smiled bitterly. “Quite a distraction.”
    “How long did it take you to piece this together?”
    “Too long. Hours.