“We found this when we came down,” the sergeant said. “There’s several passages down here. Looks like they might have been sealed off from the rest of the warehouse. If there’s another way up, we haven’t found it. One of my guys leaned against part of the brick and it gave way. That’s when we called the detectives.”
We walked maybe twenty feet and made a sharp turn. Here the passage opened into a slightly larger room where four other Phoenix cops were clustered. Part of the wall had collapsed and I could see, in a flashlight beam, some debris beyond.
We approached silently. The opening in the wall was small, just big enough to hand through a nineteen-inch TV set. The bricks had fallen in, exposing a cavity inside the wall. On the other side were some wooden framing and more old brick. The cops shone their lights and we peered in. It was a small skull, human looking, along with more bones, all a yellowish color, collapsed into a heap. There was some unidentifiable fabric or maybe leather. Then I saw another small skull.
For a long time nobody said anything. We stooped in silence and stared through the hole in the wall, as if we expected the flashlight beams to re-animate the dead.
“Look at that, off to the side,” Lindsey said.
“Don’t touch anything!” It was a patrolman who looked like a young Jack Kerouac.
“Oh, okay,” she said sweetly, her sarcasm lost on a roomful of cops. She plucked away Jack Kerouac’s flashlight and focused it on an object that looked a little larger and thicker than a silver dollar. It was metal, tarnished and brass-colored under a coating of dust. My eyes were getting too bad to make out the design on its head.
“Pocket watch,” Peralta said. “See, there’s the watch chain off in the dust. Looks like some initials on the cover, but I can’t make ’em out.”
“It looks like a large Y and a small H,” Lindsey said. I could hear the scratching of a cop’s pen on a notepad and a memory compartment rattled open in my head.
“Y-H?”
“No,” I said, absent-mindedly standing up straight, nearly cracking my head on the low ceiling. “It’s H-Y. It was a cattle brand.”
Everybody was looking at me now, the passage thick with cologne and dust.
“Hayden Yarnell,” I said. “The cattle baron.”
Cop faces stared at me impatiently.
I nodded toward the bones. “These must be the Yarnell twins. His grandsons. They were kidnapped back in the Depression and never found.”
Lindsey whispered what we were all thinking: “Oh my God.”
