Death of a Second Wife (A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery) (28 page)

“April fifth. That’s when Bolduc saw the red shoes. When did that shipment of gold arrive?”

“April fifth. The gold passed through customs on April fifth.” Marco’s tone turned serious.

“How would they have transp
orted it?”

“Who knows? By armored car, if everything was normal and legal, but since it was not legal, they might have used something less conspicuous. I do not know.”

“Where was everyone on April fifth?” I said. “I was at home grading term papers on April fifth.”

Brian said, “Stephanie was already here. She flew to Switzerland a week early to make wedding arrangements. Dad flew over that Friday. What day would that be?”

I pulled out my little datebook and rifled through to April. “The ninth. So he wouldn’t have been here yet.”

“Patrick and Babs and Erin flew over together, and I think they got here after Stephanie but before Dad.”

“What about Juergen?”

“Don’t know.”

“He was here before I was,” I said, “but I don’t know how long he’d been here.”

Marco paid t
he waitress for the beers he’d ordered. “Do not look at me. I was in Florence.”

“What do we do next?”
I asked.

“I have told Kronenberg he needs to check out the landing strip you told me about
, and if he is any good, he will have done so already.” Marco sipped his beer and wiped the foam off his mustache with his wrist. “With police computers at his disposal, he will already know more about Anton Spektor than you were able to dig up, and he will possibly have already talked to him and heard his story about why he has been spying on your house. I say ‘his story,’ because we must not assume he will tell Kronenberg the truth.”

“It has to be the bunker,” I said. “That must be what they’re interested in, and for the past two weeks, the bunker has been off-limits
to everyone but the police. We need to tell Kronenberg to search inside the bunker with a fine-tooth comb.”

“He cannot do that,” Marco said. “He has no probable cause to suspect anything else related to his case is there to be found. Without that
, he cannot get a warrant.”

“Plus, they’ve already searched it,” Brian said. “They’ve had it taped off for more than a week.”

“Then we have to do it—and soon,” I said. “Unless we’re wrong on all counts, things will start unraveling fast now that Kronenberg is on to the guys in the glider.”

Twenty-
Nine

The next morning, Lettie and I were on our second cup of coffee in the kitchen when Erin popped in and announced: “I have to go to the bunker. Last night, Juergen asked me to bring down some wine and some other booze—he wrote me a list. It was late when he thought of it and he had to leave early this morning and drive to Zurich.”

“Oh! May I go, too?” The opportunity had fallen into my lap so easily. This would be better than going with Juergen because Juergen wou
ld’ve given me the guided tour and I’d have had to leave when he did. I’d have had no chance to snoop around on my own. Lettie said she wanted to come along, and a minute later the three of us were tramping through the morning dew. In my head, I prepared to be dazzled. Pictures I’d seen of the gold at Fort Knox flashed through, and I reminded myself I was only looking for a few bars. How large would they be?

Erin punched the entry numbers on the keypad and swung open the thick metal door. I looked around th
e meadow before entering, to see if anyone was watching us.

The room, about twenty by twenty feet square, was concrete on all sides, floor, and ceiling.
One wall held nothing but a wine rack with hundreds of metal-wrapped bottle necks sticking out. Neat laminated labels—Chardonnay, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc—tacked to the rack here and there, sectioned the whole into smaller units. Skis, ski poles, boots, bicycles leaned against the opposite wall. More shelving held canned goods, liquor, and an incredible array of party paraphernalia. Punch bowls, pitchers, trays, and chafing dishes that looked as if they hadn’t been used for some time. A waffle iron with a frayed cord, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since my grandmother’s estate sale.

“Where are the guns?” L
ettie asked.

Erin
headed straight for the wine rack, Juergen’s list in her hand. I spotted a simple wooden door with a brass knob in the back wall and opened it. Beyond the door lay a bathroom with shower stall, sink, and exposed pipes that led to a cylindrical water tank in one corner. I flipped a light switch. It worked.

“Here they are!”
Lettie said.

I backed out and turned. Guns and ammunition filled the whole wall adjacent to the exterior door. Long guns like rifles lay flat on shelves, handguns i
n a wooden box, lidded but unlocked. Boxes and boxes of ammunition, some so old their cardboard had yellowed, their labels faded. This was where Stephanie and Gisele’s killer had stood and selected his or her weapon. I lifted the lid on the box of handguns and peered inside. An ominous empty space lay between two guns.

“Why don’t they lock this stuff up?” Lettie stretched her arms toward the weapons cache. “This is so dangerous!”

“It
is
locked up, Lettie.” Erin set a bottle of wine on the floor. “The bunker door is always locked. If they ever had to hole up in here, like in the event of an attack, they’d probably have to dash in quickly and they’d have nothing with them. That’s why they use a keypad rather than a key. Imagine you and your family are running for your lives and you get this far, but no one has the key.

“And if you needed to defend yourselves, you certainly wouldn’t want the guns locked up and the key back at the house, would you?”
Erin had it all figured out.

I looked around again. In the corne
r between the guns and the party supplies, a wooden table supported an ancient-looking metal box with dials, needles, and knobs. A short-wave radio from the forties, no doubt. This place gave me the shivers.

“Let’s see what else is here,” I said. Lettie fo
llowed me through the door into the bathroom. On the far wall of that room a smaller door, only about four feet high, lay between the shower stall and a chemical toilet. I heard Erin calling to us from the big front room.

“I’m going back to the house,” she said. “Do you want me to leave the door open? If I close it, you can always open it from the inside.”

“Leave it open!” Lettie called back.

I bent down and stepped through into a long hall hacked out of native rock. The musty smell of wet rock and mildew m
ingled with gloom and deep silence. “Can you find a light switch out there, Lettie?” I couldn’t stand up all the way. The ceiling forced me to keep my head and shoulders painfully bent. I felt around on the wall near the little door—no switch. And Lettie was having no better luck in the other room. Even with the door open, it was too dark in here to see anything more than lumps along both walls. I had almost given up when a string brushed my face and made me jump, banging my head. A light cord. I pulled, and an overhead bulb lit up. Luckily I had banged my head against rock and not the bulb. It was screwed into a bare socket.

Now I saw long rows of
boxes. Gas masks. The World War II equivalent of a hazmat suit stretched out on a bed of boxes like a headless corpse along one wall. I sat on the floor, and called to Lettie that I’d be in here a while because I wanted to look in all these boxes, but there was no room for two people.

“I’ll wait
outside, if you don’t mind,” Lettie said. “In the sunlight. This place is giving me the creeps.”

Opening box after box, I found nothing but supplies: extra light bulbs, batteries (years past their shelf date,) toilet paper, soap. No gold bars. By the time I had scooted myself the length of the hall and opened every single bo
x, my legs had gone numb and my back ached. I had to scoot back to the doorway, unwilling to attempt standing until I could straighten all the way up.

“That’s about it, Lettie
. No gold.” Holding onto the necks of wine bottles as I went, I wobbled out to the bunker door where Lettie stood, bathed in sunlight. “I guess it was a long shot, anyway.” I turned, surveying the whole room one more time. “Now, if I wanted to hide gold bars, where would I hide them?”

Lettie stuck her head inside. “Where would you hide
a tree?”

“In a forest.”

“Where would you hide gold bars?”

“In a pile of gold things? Gold-
colored boxes? Something that looks like gold bars? I don’t see anything.” My eyes found the yellowed boxes of bullets. They were about the right size and shape, but they looked nothing like gold bars. But could the bars be inside these boxes? With a sigh, I realized I would now have to open every damned one of those ammo boxes.
Wait a minute. I’m not looking for gold, I’m looking for silver. The gold bars had been silver-plated to get them through customs.
“Duh! Where would you hide silver bars?”

Lettie responded as expected, “In a pile of silver things.”

My gaze swerved around the walls to the party paraphernalia on shelves near the canned goods. The silver punch bowl, the silver trays, the silver pitcher. Some now tarnished from long disuse, some still shiny. I ran to the wall and reached for the huge punch bowl. I couldn’t lift it. The bowl sat on a shelf a little higher than my head, and, reaching up, I found I couldn’t even budge it.

Lettie found a five-foot stepladder against one wall and dragged it over. From this higher vantage point I could peer into the bowl and see its contents. I began pulling items out and
handing them down to Lettie. Two silver dippers, a silver bread basket, serving knives and forks, a silver cigarette box.

Three silver bars. Snatching one out, I almost dropped it because it was twice as heavy as I expected it to be. “God, it’s heavy!” Some numbers and marks, all meaningless to me, had been impressed into the metal. The silver color seemed somewhat dulled by
a light coating of tarnish. “I need a file or something.” Lettie handed me one of the knives. Scraping one corner of the silver bar, I released the dazzle of pure gold hiding just beneath the surface.

Lettie’s eyes were like saucers. “What do we do with th
ese? Where do we take them?”

I thought about it for a minute. “Nowhere. Let’s put this one back with the ot
her two in the punch bowl, close the door, and call the police.”

* * * * *

Lettie and I decided we dared not let the bunker go unwatched for even one minute. Someone could have been watching us from the house, from the tool shed, or, with binoculars, from any of several nearby peaks. She agreed to stay outside and watch the bunker’s entrance while I ran inside the house to call the police. Odile greeted me, wiping her hands on her apron, and showed me the number for the LaMotte police station, written on a neatly laminated card and taped to the wall beside the phone. I started to dial, then reconsidered. If Odile heard what I was about to tell Kronenberg, it would be all over town within the hour. Praying I’d remembered to recharge my cell phone, I wrote down the number and headed for my bedroom. I found the phone still plugged into the wall, yanked it out, and took it to the porch.

Neither Kronenberg nor Seifert was there, but a female voice gave me Kronenberg’s mobile number. I called it.

“Kronenberg.”

“I’ve found the missing gold bars.”

Kronenberg shouted something in German to someone nearby and began asking me for more details. As we talked, I could hear him panting. Running. “We will be there in thirty minutes. Wait for us and don’t leave the bunker unattended until you see us.”

Next I called Marco and found him in the hotel restaurant eating breakfast. While he was still on the phone I heard him ask
for the check, rush out of the room, and through a revolving door. “Wait!” he said. “How do I get there?”

“Do you have a car?” I remembered he did have one. He had driven up from Florence. “Never mind. You’ll never find it if you drive. You need to go to
Dorfstrasse and locate the tunnel entrance.” I explained how he could recognize it. “When you get there, push the button and I’ll buzz you in. Take the elevator up and, when you leave the little hut, head west. There’s a path. Follow it.”

Thanks to the dif
ficulties of maneuvering the big-wheeled police vehicle up what I had dubbed “Sheer Terror Canyon” and across the rocky terrain to the meadow, Marco arrived long before the police did. Meanwhile Erin, Patrick, and Brian had learned what was going on and had taken spectator positions on the porch.

Kronenberg already knew the entry combination to the bunker, and I told him where to find the gold bars. Marco, Lettie, and I waited outside. After the two policemen had been inside only a few minutes they stepped
out. Kronenberg said, “There is no need to be careful about contaminating the scene. Too many people have been in and out in the last few weeks. Any fingerprints we find on the bars may possibly help us, but the serial numbers should tell us where they came from and when.” He turned to Marco. “Captain Quattrocchi, you know more than I do about how this illegal importing works. Whom do I contact? What should I do next?”