Since I’d crapped out with the walls, I dropped to my hands and knees and scoured the floor, looking for lines cut into the thick rugs. Nothing. Not so much as a single fiber out of place.

“This is weird,” Donovan murmured, shining his flashlight across several sheets of paper.

“What?” I asked, still crawling around on the floor.

“It looks like Dawson’s hired several gemologists in the last few weeks from a variety of firms,” the detective replied.

“There are receipts here made out to Jeweltones, Gems, Inc., and Grayson Enterprises, among others.”

I frowned. “What would Dawson need with gemologists? He’s mining coal, not precious stones.”

“I don’t know.” Donovan pulled out his cell phone and snapped copies of the receipts to examine later.

By this time, I’d made a complete circuit of the office on my hands and knees, and I still hadn’t found anything useful. Besides Dawson’s obsession with the Old West, the only other thing interesting or noteworthy, at least to me, was the dwarf ’s rock collection. Such collections weren’t uncommon among Stone elementals. Even I’d had one as a kid, before my family had been murdered.

A tall, wide glass case against the back wall of the office housed the collection. Three shelves full of rocks perched above a large block of black granite shot through with silverstone. Some of the stones were worthless. Polished quartz you could find just about anywhere. Odd bits of fool’s gold. Others had some serious value. A sapphire almost as big as an egg. A teardrop-shaped ruby. A lovely square-cut emerald. I could hear the stones, of course.

The soft, pretty murmur of the quartz. The sly whisper of the fool’s gold. The flashy elegance of the gemstones.

My eyes dropped to the bottom shelf, and I focused on the slab of granite. It was nothing compared to the gemstones, but still, I wondered why Dawson would even have it in his collection to start with. The others rocks varied in value, but they were all uniquely shaped or interesting in some way. The granite was just a slab of granite. Black and rather boxlike in its appearance. I knelt down and peered at the stone even closer. Hmm.

There was a lock on the glass case, but I took care of that with a well-crafted Ice pick. Behind me, Donovan kept sorting through papers. I opened the door on the case. The stones’ various murmurs washed over me, but I forced the melodies aside and focused on the granite. Its vibration was low and muted in comparison to the other rocks, but I rather suspected that was the point. Still, it only took me a second to attune myself to the stone. And I realized its vibrations sounded… hollow. As though the stone was only a thin layer covering something else—like a secret chamber.