She managed to search three more mines that day—the Rose of Peru, the Gold Standard, and the Brooklyn Mine. The road in was easy at first, then got rocky, and the truck tires slipped. The Rose of Peru Mine, active between 1939-1941, was where, about a hundred and forty feet down, the body of a pregnant nineteen-year-old had been found by a team of rescuers a few years before. Nineteen. Pregnant. Dead in a mine. How did these things even happen? But no one was searching for Cyrus yet, except Izzy. Tire marks and bullet casings had given the young woman’s killer away, but Izzy saw no signs of these things now.

She exited the mine, hiked past some abandoned cabins, climbed a few small hills, and went about a hundred yards in to the Gold Standard. The hill to the entrance rose, steep, and gravel crunched under the teeth of her boots. She stuck to the road along the left side of the canyon for a few hundred yards and entered at the main adit, followed the air lines that ran along the top and bottom of the tunnel to a split in the path, took the left branch that dead-ended in what felt like at least a hundred and fifty yards, then tried the other side. A vertical shaft dropped about thirty feet, bridged only by cross-sticks of timber wood. Shining the moon of her flashlight down, she stepped carefully onto the planks, and they shifted slightly, so she jumped across the rest of the way. Nothing there, either. Just the dank air, caved-in littered tracks, rocky walls, and low ceiling of another deserted mineshaft.

Izzy surfaced and followed the road about a quarter of a mile farther to the Brooklyn Mine Camp. Rotten carcasses of cabins, one strung with a strand of broken light bulbs, huddled in the sun. Pink mud piles in the distance indicated cyanide, she knew, the substance to leach the gold out of the ore. You had to be careful breathing here. Although part of her wanted that cyanide in her lungs, could she sacrifice herself to find him?

This shaft, fifty or sixty feet deep, yawned near the entrance of the mine. A perfect place to dispose of bodies, but it looked empty. She entered the mine and followed the ore cart tracks, but someone had filled in the adit. How easy for some sick fuck to do that, she thought. Just bury someone, pour some concrete. She ran doubled over—through the tunnel.

When she emerged, she stopped and stared up at the sky. Night was coming. A perigee moon, weighty and white.

“It’s not safe in those mineshafts,” Ted had said when he’d called to check up on her. “You know that, right?”

Nothing. Nothing was safe.

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