in college. He was on patrol driving alone at night on a rural road in Minnesota and had a heart attack and ran into a tree. No one found him until morning, but they think he was alive all night and couldn’t reach the radio. He drank vodka, smoked Marlboros, and ate blood-red steaks he had to beat the black flies off of. He was my hero.’
Ten minutes later, the dog handler and the bloodhound were back on top and the handler had taken his hat off and was telling Raveneau, ‘There’s a manhole cover over a storm drainage line. He may have gone in there.’
They went down the steep slope and took a look. From the spot where the dog had stopped your eye followed a line of brush and grass where the scar left from the installation of drainage pipes still showed. Raveneau sighted where it ran down toward the valley and it all began to make sense. He hiked back up the steep slope, slick with dry grass, and got a tire iron and the crowbar he carried in his trunk, and used the crowbar to lift the iron cover. It was the kind of thing he and Donny would crawl into as kids.
After looking down the manhole they started making calls, trying to get someone from the local Public Works or Sewer Department, whoever handled run-off. Turned out the sewer people handled storm drainage easements and an engineer walked them through a map, pointing out the easement line.
‘It’s a forty-eight inch culvert that drains these hills,’ he said. ‘There are branches that feed into it and there’s an easement through the property you’re speaking of.’
‘Will I be able to walk down it?’
‘No, in most of it you’d have to work your way along in a crouch. As you get lower the pipe will get bigger. Everything up in these hills feeds in. But most of it is not too steep. Slick in places, I’m sure. Do you really want to go in there?’
‘No.’
They drove back up and SID reported that they still hadn’t seen any sign of movement in the house. Raveneau turned to la Rosa after retrieving a Maglite.
‘He could be in there and my phone isn’t going to work, so give me forty minutes and then come find me.’
‘That sounds brilliant.’
‘I’m going to follow it until I find the access ladder that comes up in the easement crossing the Stoltz property, just like the Public Works guy described.’
In the concrete pipe the air was cold and smelled of mud and the algae. Where it got steeper he fell several times and his back ached from squatting and shuffling forward. His flashlight only reached so far and there was a possibility he’d encounter Stoltz, so he was ready for that and tense all the way along, a walking target with a light.
When he reached the ladder that should lead up to the Stoltz property he found a daypack suspended there. For several seconds he held the flashlight beam on it, and then took photos with his phone before unclipping it and looking inside. He climbed the access ladder, shouldered the lid off and looked out along a tall row of pines at the back of the guest house. With the manhole resting heavily on his shoulder he called la Rosa.
‘I’m looking at the back of his house. I found a daypack suspended in here.’
‘What’s in—’
‘A laptop. I’m on my way back with it.’
FIFTY
Raveneau lingered, standing on a rung of the manhole ladder, his head and shoulders above ground. He rested a hand on cold dry pine needles and studied the terrain. Overhead, the sky was white and cold. In the walnut orchard to his right, the soil looked damp and dark. Mom’s house loomed off the side of the guest house and he could only guess at what the property was worth or why Stoltz, living in circumstances most could only dream of, would come after them. The easement for storm drainage ran alongside a tall row of pines planted long ago as a windbreak. Branches reached over him. They shadowed the easement and at the end of the trees he saw a hedge that ran all the way up to the back of the guest house alongside the beds of roses. That had to be how he did it. That was his route.
The iron lid scraped loud enough to be heard some distance and he dropped his flashlight as he climbed back down. Fortunately,