The one-page letter was unsigned and undated, but I had the date on the postmark. And I had the log of Jason Lockyer's incoming long-distance phone calls at the university and at each apartment. It should be straightforward to find out who had written the cryptic note.
By half-past one I had changed my ideas about that. The incoming log showed nothing from Colorado anywhere near the right dates. As a final act of desperation I at last went to the log of Jason Lockyer's outgoing calls, ones he had placed himself. I had looked at this log before, but he made so many calls to so many places that I had not been able to see anything significant. Sweet success.
It jumped out at me in the first ten seconds of looking. Six days after this letter had been mailed, Lockyer had placed a series of four phone calls in one day to Nathrop, Colorado. One call had lasted for over forty minutes. I checked in my National Geographic atlas. Nathrop was a small town about seventy miles west of Colorado Springs. It lay on the Arkansas River with the Sawatch Range of the High Rockies rearing up to over fourteen thousand feet just to the west.
Nathrop, Colorado.
For the first time, I had a place to look for Jason Lockyer that was smaller than the continental United States.
Within two minutes I knew I would be going to Nathrop myself. Calling that telephone number was a tempting thought, but there was a danger that it might make Jason Lockyer run before I had a chance to talk to him face to face. The real question was, would I tell Eleanor Lockyer what I was doing? She was my client, so the natural answer was, yes, she had to know and approve. But now I had to face Tom's question: did I want to find Jason Lockyer for her when he didn't want to be found?
I went to bed. I spent the rest of the night tossing and turning in mixed feelings of satisfaction and uneasiness.
)
A biologist who specializes in self-sustaining ecospheres has disappeared, and the private investigator hired to find him discovers a secret society conducting dangerous experiments in the Colorado Rockies.
