Remo pulled into the gravel parking lot, where a few scrubby weeds had already grown up to give the place a deserted look. The yellow crime-scene tape had turned to tatters in the weeks since the buildings were gutted. The investigation by local and state police was at a standstill. The eyewitness accounts of the vandalism weren’t reliable. The former manager of the museum claimed it was two men who caused all the damage, without tools, and one of them was at least eighty years old. Yeah, right.
The local cops would have forgotten the crime, too, if they could, but there was the matter of the missing millionaire. Obviously he’d been murdered, and the prime suspects were the directors of the company Fast- binder’s grandfather founded—the company that was warring with Jacob Fastbinder III until the day he disappeared.
“You’d think somebody would clean up this place,” Remo said as they strolled among the shadowy piles of wreckage. Once the museum was a showcase for unique mechanical antiques, lovingly restored by Fastbinder himself. Some of the first commercially produced radios were there, and mechanical calculators from the early 1800s. There was a huge restored cotton gin, one of the original machines responsible for the industrial revolution. A shelf of typewriters displayed a Remington Model No. 2 from 1876 and a 2003 AlphaSmart electronic—both of which retailed in their time for less than two hundred dollars.
And there had been robots, large and small, some pointless, some actually useful. The most versatile robots had not been put on display, though. Fastbinder used them instead to steal secrets from the U.S. Military.
None of the mechanical marvels remained after Remo and Chiun worked them over, and the scraps that were left could never be salvaged and rebuilt. The museum would have to be cleaned with shovels.
They left the museum and headed for the house. Fastbinder had made a home out of an old distribution facility, large but low ceilinged. The cinder-block walls were covered to the eaves with sand drifts.
The lazy breeze stalled and reversed course just long enough to carry to them the smell of rotting human flesh. The smell was stronger when they stepped inside.
“Three weeks, maximum,” Remo declared. “Whoever it is, they died after our visit.”
Chiun nodded and picked his way through the remnants of Jacob Fastbinder’s home and workshop. If anything, he and Remo had been even more thorough in their destruction of the machines here, including an army of robots that ineffectively fought against them to buy Fastbinder escape time.
Chiun descended into the crater that was left when Fastbinder’s earth drill tunnel collapsed. That’s where the smell was.
A bizarre picture materialized in Remo’s head: Jacob Fastbinder surviving, somehow, for weeks and weeks, and digging his way up from the dead earth drill, only to succumb and die after all these weeks— and within a few feet of the surface.
“Naw. Couldn’t be him. Could it?”
“No.” Chiun declared, waving his hand at the ground at super speed to fan away an accumulation of dust blown in through the shattered windows.
Remo felt better when he saw a shallow oblong impression appear in the surface. “Somebody dug down, not up.”
“Of course. Now you dig down, too.”
“Your turn. I dug up Jesus in the desert, remember?”
Chiun stepped out of the crater and stood stoically watching, his hands tucked in his sleeves.
Remo started scooping handfuls of sand out of the crater, flinging it so fast that it scoured a pile of rusted metal scraps, which shone like chrome before the sand covered them.
“So I have to do everything. I
“When you finally accept a pupil of your own, you may order him about willy nilly. For my information, do you plan on doing this any time soon?”
“Why, you looking forward to retirement?” Remo asked as he unearthed a body.
“Perhaps?”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m gonna wait twenty years before I get a pupil.”
“Thank goodness. I dread living in that dank and drafty cave.”
“I’m getting a pupil right away. First kid I see, I’m drafting him on the spot.” Remo gingerly lifted out the corpse and peeled off the blanket that was wrapping it. “Okay,” Remo corrected himself. “Not that kid.” She was sixteen, maybe seventeen, and had once been exquisite. Death transformed her into a horror of bulging, sightless eyes and a gaping white mouth. She was nude, with a pair of jeans and a T-shirt wadded at her feet. Remo took her slim pink wallet.
Chiun stepped into the empty grave, testing the consistency of the soil between his fingers. “The ground was not dug deeper than this,” he declared.
