The Night Killer Part 19

Diane c.o.c.ked an eyebrow. "Indeed? Had you approached the Barres?" she asked.

"I spoke with them at the Waffle House in Renfrew. I was working up to it. You don't just start off asking if you can see their grandfather's diaries," he said.

"You do if you are an honest person," she said.

"I couldn't be honest. I had to be discreet," he said.

"Why don't you start at the beginning and tell me your story?" said Diane.

"I will, but also for the record, it wasn't my intention to approach Andie and use her. My intention was to feign an interest in the Indian artifacts in relation to courses I was interested in taking, and see if I could get a look at the diaries. This is a research museum, or so I was told. I was going to speak to the archaeology collections manager. I was going to use what I figured were proper channels. I needed directions to the manager's office and Andie was there to give them-and she was your a.s.sistant. She was charming and helpful and was interested in me. We had instant chemistry. My asking her out wasn't completely about getting information."

"What is your interest in me?" asked Diane.

"You discovered the Barres' bodies. Their deaths are of interest to me," he said.

"Tell me your story," she repeated.

Diane leaned back in her seat. She still wasn't sure what to make of Liam Dugal. His straightforwardness was less comforting than she thought it would be. Too much mystery.

He nodded as if he were relieved to be getting down to business.

"As you must know, I run a detective agency with a partner. We're relatively new and take on anything that is legal-or on the edge. We get a lot of divorce work and such. I don't like it, but we need the work and it pays the bills. Things started looking up several weeks ago when we were hired for a missing-persons case. A wealthy Atlanta couple had lost track of a daughter-and her boyfriend. The daughter is twenty-three and a rather free spirit who makes unwise choices in boyfriends."

"Why all the cloak-and-dagger?" asked Diane. "Finding someone's lost daughter is legitimate work."

"The man who hired me is hypersensitive to publicity. I don't know why. It seems like some kind of phobia to me, but he insists it's all about personal privacy and business. At any rate, he's writing the check, so I'm playing it his way. He wants me to be discreet."

"But if it's his daughter . . ." said Diane.

"He doesn't think she is really missing. He just doesn't know where she is at the moment. The parents are estranged from the daughter and she has a habit of just going off without telling them. It was her sister who finally insisted. The sisters are fairly close. Apparently they talked at least once or twice a week, but the sister hadn't heard from her in over three weeks at the time they came to us," he said.

"What about her boyfriend's family?" said Diane.

"He has a worse record than she does of falling out of sight, under the radar. They've had him show up after a year of hearing nothing from him. He's a free spirit too-taking jobs on merchant s.h.i.+ps, research s.h.i.+ps, that kind of thing."

"Perhaps that's where they are-at sea?" said Diane. "What brought you to the mountains?"

"The boyfriend is an avid treasure hunter. The sister considers him a step up from the dope heads her sister has tried to rescue, thinking they were tortured souls-she's rather naive," said Liam. "His family says he's been interested in treasure stories all his life. But he caught the bug big-time while he was working on a treasure-hunting s.h.i.+p that actually found a sunken wreck with a modest amount of gold. Since then he has followed one lost-treasure story after another. I traced them here-well, to Rendell County-where he was looking for yet another lost treasure."

Chapter 34

"Treasure? Like buried treasure? Here?" said Diane. "Don't tell me. It wasn't the lost wagonloads of Confederate gold?"

"No, not that. And not buried, exactly. But it was gold. He was in search of a lost gold mine," Liam said.

"You are kidding me," said Diane.

"Not at all."

"How did he arrive at that?" she asked.

"Well, in between the boyfriend's road trips and sea adventures, he worked odd jobs for money to bankroll his treasure hunts. One of his jobs was as a janitor in a nursing home between Rosewood and Atlanta. Not the best of homes, but not too bad either, for what it is. One of the inmates-"

"I think they are called residents," said Diane.

"Oh, right. There's an elderly woman, Cora Nell d.i.c.kson, with early Alzheimer's whose room he cleaned," said Liam. "She grew up in Rendell County. Her family had lived in those parts for generations. According to one of the residents I spoke with, Mrs. d.i.c.kson told the story over and over about how her father was cheated out of his share of a lost gold mine. This was close to a hundred years ago she was talking about. Most everybody thought she was just batty. But my boy, being of the particular bent of mind that he was, believed he had found someone with just the kind of once-in-a-lifetime secret information that could lead him to that lost treasure he fantasized about."

Liam tapped his index finger against his temple. "It became his obsession. He collected all the old stories, tales, and rumors he could get his hands on about lost gold mines in North Georgia. Then he read the account in some history book about Spanish conquistadores looking for Indian gold mines hidden in the mountains. He was convinced that Mrs. d.i.c.kson's father stumbled across one of those lost Indian gold mines."

"This is nonsense," said Diane. "There is no Indian gold."

"This isn't my delusion. It's his. But the fact that gold was actually found in North Georgia and that there was a big gold rush there in the early eighteen hundreds added to the credibility of the story," Liam said.

Diane could see Andie's attraction to Liam. Not only did he have a handsome face, but dark blue eyes that were almost sad and certainly vulnerable. Liam looked like a guy that many women might have found they had chemistry with.

"How do the Barres fit into all this?" said Diane.

"Mrs. d.i.c.kson's father, Emmet Lacky, knew LeFette Barre, Roy Barre's grandfather. If they were still alive, Emmet Lacky and LeFette Barre would both be about a hundred and ten now. When they were young they did a lot of rambling around the mountains together-hunting, fis.h.i.+ng, the kind of things boys did back then. That would be in the early nineteen hundreds. It was during those ramblings they were supposed to have discovered the lost gold mine. They are reported to have said it had a vein of gold six inches thick."

Diane raised an eyebrow. "That's a lot of gold," she said.

"I thought so. But I'm not up on that kind of thing. At one point she described slashes of gold and quartz together, and I think that's about right geologically," he said.

"In any event, according to Mrs. d.i.c.kson, her father, who was only a boy at the time, had a bad sense of direction and never found his way back to the mine. But he told her LeFette Barre had a compa.s.s in his head. She was of the opinion that LeFette Barre had mined the cave and left her father out. She believed that's how he was able to buy up so much land in the county. She was sure Roy Barre still mined it. All this was more than the boyfriend could resist. He quit the janitorial job soon after hearing all Mrs. d.i.c.kson had to say and he and my girl went looking for the lost mine in Rendell County," Liam said.

"My partner is trying to find records of where any of the Barres may have sold gold, but so far we've come up empty. So at this point, we don't even have confirmation that there is or ever was any gold."

"Do you know if the Barres own the mineral rights to their land?" asked Diane.

"Yes, they do. So did Roy's father and LeFette Barre before him," Liam said. "The boyfriend found that out too."

"How did he and the girl know where to look?" said Diane. "Rendell County is a wide area of rugged, mountainous terrain. You could spend a decade there and never come across the spot."

"They began by going straight to the center of it all-the Barres. I learned that the Barres did speak with them. But I think they pretty much blew the kid off-politely, but I gather they thought he was a crackpot and it was a crazy story."

"The Barres didn't know the story of the lost mine?" asked Diane.

"It seems not, which I find strange. I imagine the boyfriend did too," he said. "Probably thought they were lying."

"Did the Barres tell him about the diaries?" said Diane.

"No. Cora Nell d.i.c.kson told him. I'm sure that's one of the reasons he went to visit the Barres. Mrs. d.i.c.kson thought there was just one diary. That's what she told him. She knew about it from her father, but that was from when he was young. There probably was only one then," he said. "In the national park I found the campsite of my girl and the boyfriend."

"How do you know it was their campsite?" asked Diane.

"I found items belonging to them. The site was pretty much trashed-looked like animals. But I found a piece of paper with some notes written on it, a kind of to- do list, caught in the underbrush. It was badly damaged by the weather. Most of the writing was washed out or torn away. The part I could read mentioned the Barre diary."

"Do you have the paper?" said Diane.

"Yes, but that's all there was on it," he said.

"That's all you could see," said Diane.

"Well, yes," he said.

"We might be able to discover things on it not visible to the naked eye," she said.

"That's right, you have a crime lab here. You think you might be able to bring out more of the writing?" he said.

"Possibly. At the crime lab or the museum's conservation laboratory. Take your pick," she said. "We work a lot with restoring old doc.u.ments."

He s.h.i.+fted to one side in his seat and pulled his billfold from his pocket. He opened it and pulled out a weathered piece of paper stored alongside his bills and handed it to Diane.

She raised her brow. "You kept it in your wallet?" she said.

"Yes."

Diane took out an acid- free envelope from her desk, wrote on it, and slipped the paper inside.

"What do you think happened to them?" she said.

Liam breathed in and out deeply and was quiet a moment. "I think they're most likely dead," he said.

"Why?" said Diane.

"They haven't been heard from in six weeks now. I know they went to the university library here in Rosewood and copied several geologic maps. I think it was to locate caves and abandoned mines in the area."

He glanced over at the picture of Diane hanging by a rope, descending into the vertical entrance to a cave.

"Is that you?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Andie said you are a world-cla.s.s caver," he said.

"Andie exaggerates," said Diane.

He brought his gaze back to Diane.

"Does she? But you are an experienced caver?" he said.

"Yes."

"My client's daughter and her boyfriend were not. In fact, they weren't cavers at all. What happens to inexperienced people who go exploring caves?" he said. "Or abandoned mines?"

"They frequently need to be rescued, and they sometimes die," said Diane. "Is that what you think happened to them?"

"It makes sense," he said.

Diane had to agree. But the possibility also ran through her mind that, depending on when they became lost, they could still be alive-somewhere underground-in need of rescue.

"What were you doing out in the woods in the dead of night?" she said. "I don't believe you were photographing nocturnal animals."

"No. I was camping near where my client's daughter had camped and, just as I said, I did see your light and hear the dogs and was curious. And I do have an uncle who raises Walker hounds."

"How did you find their campsite?" asked Diane. "The national park is a big place."

"Well, the first lead was a credit card charge where they ga.s.sed up the boyfriend's motorcycle at a convenience store in Rendell County. I talked with the clerk there. She didn't remember them, but I know from the girl's credit card records that they were there."

"How do you know it was his motorcycle?" said Diane.

"The tag number was on the charge receipt."

"What else?" asked Diane.

"In accordance with my client's wishes, I haven't used his or his daughter's name, but I did tell a few people up there I was looking for a young male relative of mine and wondered if they had seen him. Several had met him, or had seen him and the girl on the motorcycle, and remembered him asking questions about several specific areas by name, and how to get to them.

"I copied the same maps the boyfriend had at the university. I have some experience reading maps of that kind. I knew from the maps and what the locals had told me the area he was looking in. I found their campsite after a methodical search. I was looking for caves shown on the maps near the campsite and radiating out. I thought if I could find the right cave or abandoned mine they last visited, there might be some signs of them. But I had pretty much hit a wall."

"Did you find the motorcycle?" asked Diane.

"No," he said, "and that is troubling too."

Diane was wondering if Liam's story was true. He sounded convincing-at least, his part in it sounded convincing. The treasure story itself sounded far-fetched. But sometimes young people believed far-fetched things . . . and did far- fetched things. There were a lot of treasure hunters in the world, young and old. For Andie's sake, Diane wanted Liam to be telling the truth.

"What are you going to do now?" asked Diane.

"Ask you for your help," he said. "First, can I look at the diaries?"

"I'm arranging for speed-readers to go through them," said Diane. "You have no idea the volume we are talking about."

"Do they know what to look for?" he said.

"Now that I have more information to give them, they will. Up until now, I only knew to instruct them to look for anything that might lead to murder. Vague, I know, but that's where we were until your story. I also know now that the information will probably be in his early diaries. Of course, he may have revisited the topic in later entries," said Diane.

Diane looked over at the picture of herself in the cave. She wondered if this really was why the Barres were killed-over lost treasure. Could the murderers have been Liam's client's daughter and her boyfriend? Or could they simply be lying low all this time, looking for treasure? It was not uncommon that free spirits didn't do what their kin expected-especially when it involved calling home. Or perhaps they did become frustrated with not finding anything and, if they thought Roy Barre had lied to them, they were frustrated enough to kill him and Ozella.

"Do you play poker?" Liam asked.

Diane looked at him. "No, I don't play poker. I've been told I have so many tells that I ought not bother," she said.