The procedure having been established and executed, Gearhart continued toward the door.
Without breaking his stride, the tall, broad African-American set his cap squarely on his head and made sure that his black tie was tightly knotted before stepping outside. The sheriff's black-and-white was parked directly in front of the recently remodeled two-story building. Ignoring the cold drizzle, he walked to the car and eased in.
Ordinarily, Gearhart would not be investigating a routine 3611 -10-a Santa Barbara County noncriminal missing-persons report. Nor would he have involved Chief Deputy Valentine or the LEO. More often than not, missing persons in Santa Barbara County were boaters who'd been knocked around in a storm, a child who'd wandered away from the beach, or a hang glider who'd become disoriented in a cloud and smacked into a tree. But the Caltrans DCM said that there was blood at the site-a great deal of it. When a 3611-10 became a possible 187-which referred to the homicide section of the California Penal Code-Gearhart became involved.
The sheriff started the engine, turned on the windshield wipers, and adjusted the rearview mirror. He caught sight of his dark eyes. They said, God help anyone who fucked with his county.
They were right.
There was violent crime in Santa Barbara County. The sheriff's office had a most-wanted list of murderers, rapists, kidnappers, child molesters, bank robbers, and even a terrorist who had posed as one of Santa Barbara's over one hundred homeless people in order to hide explosives at the shelter in the center of town. However, most of those crimes predated Gearhart's term. Since being elected sheriff of the SBSO two years before, the popular officer had turned crime fighting into a team sport He'd expanded the Reserve Deputy Program, enlarged the Aero Squadron to patrol the mountains and coast, set higher fund-raising goals for the civilian Sheriff's Council, and beefed up the youth-oriented sheriff's Explorer Post-which an editorial in the radical Coastal Freeway dubbed the "Gearhart Youth," a nasty allusion to the Hitler Youth. That had earned the paper and its editor a permanent place on Gearhart's personal shit list. Not that he'd ever had any love for the press. They'd helped cost him and his fellow soldiers a victory in Vietnam with their endless coverage of protests, sit-ins, and fashionable anti establishment bullshit. Now the press was simply hooked on the public's right to know. Which was fine, except that reporters usually took that to mean they had the right to pry, insinuate, slant, and panic.
Since Gearhart's election, the SBSO had enjoyed a sense of purpose and community. The number of names on and below the most-wanted top twelve had dwindled. Directly across the street, the county jail was half as full as it had been when Gearhart took office. The minimum security Honor Farm was nearly empty. Murders were primarily crimes of passion and the county still had them. But people who wanted to rob, rape, kidnap, and molest tended to stay clear of Gearhart's beloved hills and shoreline.
The sheriff activated his red-and-blue flashing lights though he didn't turn on the siren. There was no need to disturb the community while it was still so early. Swinging from the parking lot onto Calle Real, he followed it east for nearly two miles before turning left onto Route 154, the only western approach to Painted Cave Road. He would stay on the twisting road straight into the mountains, through Los Padres National Forest. Just over five miles up, a winding right turn would put him near the sinkhole.
As he drove through the light morning traffic, Gearhart was proud of the fact that the people of the county and its three hundred Sworn Deputy Sheriffs hadn't been the only ones to benefit during the past two years. Perhaps the greatest winner had been someone who had survived almost daily belt-whippings as a kid, two tours of duty in a losing war, and eighteen years of fighting not only Los Angeles street gangs but judges and politicians who believed that the answer to crime wasn't hard time but compassion and gentle rehabilitation. Until one of those pundits had his car jacked or his wife mugged, they weren't going to believe that they were wrong. But they were.
After a lifetime of losing, Malcolm Gearhart had no intention of ever losing again.
Chapter Seven
Jim Grand always carried a small, slender penlight. He fished it from his pocket. Then he slid the night-vision goggles to his forehead so he could turn on his light without being blinded. He thumbed on the switch and a thin cone of white light spread across the cave wall.
Grand stared at the image.
Painted on the western wall of the cave was a volcano. The nearly pyramidal peak was massive and black and covered in a long, flat red cloud. Coiled in the base of the volcano was a serpent, its red tongue rising through the center to the top. There the tongue forked in two directions, becoming streams of red that ran down the mountain's smooth sides. The lava collected in flat, spidery pools along both sides of the volcano. On the far side of the wall, one leg of lava stretched all the way to what looked like a fissure and stopped, though the art did not. Grand twisted slightly and swung the light around. What he saw on the opposite wall was even more remarkable.
On the southern wall was another painting, different, yet not. It was virtually a mirror image of the first, with a black mountain at the center. Only instead of red flows the lava was white. And instead of a serpent there was a dolphin inside the mountain, spraying two streams of water.
Whatever it was. Grand had never seen Chumash renderings so large. And while the northern painting seemed to suggest that the Chumash had witnessed a volcanic eruption-either here or in the north, before their migration to Southern California-the white mountain puzzled him.
Could it be an underwater volcano? Or maybe a geyser of some kind.
He snapped off the penlight, tucked it away, and slipped the night-vision goggles back on. Relaxing his legs, he lowered himself the rest of the way to the ground. The surface of the cave was lumpy granite softened by ancient water flows. He removed the ropes and tied them together so they wouldn't slip from the pulleys. Then he stepped back from the wall. He studied the red volcano for a moment, then turned to look at the opposite wall.
Grand's initial reaction was that he was looking at some kind of geological yin and yang, the polarity of fire and water. Why it was painted and what it meant he had no idea; not yet, anyway. But he would. This was the kind of puzzle Jim Grand lived for.
He took a moment to describe the art on tape and then turned to the right. Though he wanted to spend more time with the paintings, just to examine the artistry, be also wanted to examine the rest of the cave. The particular cavern might have been sacred, but Chumash may have lived in other sections. If so, there might be other artifacts, from weapons to tools to clothing, in which case he would need to get graduate students up here before hikers and treasure hunters found the site.
Grand walked forward.
"Now that I'm on the ground I can also see the bottom of the cave more clearly. There are definitely fissures on both the northern and southern sides. There's also runoff from the rains spilling into both. I'm going to take a look."
The lingering pain of the previous night faded. His tired mind was alert. Feeling sinfully rich, Grand started walking to the nearer of the two openings, which was about fifteen feet away. His echoing footsteps were like gentle drumbeats on the smooth rock.
"The opening on the northern side is seven or eight feet high," he said. "It's about five feet wide at the bottom, three feet at the top, and surprisingly symmetrical. I don't see any of the jagged breaks that indicate a stress fracture. I also don't see any scoring outside, so it wasn't hand-cut."