Chapter 147

"Okay so I'm about two meters off the ground. I'm hugging the road. I've got the camera set to pan ahead rather than under. Let's see what we see." Russell directed the drone down the dirt road.

There were trees and very hilly terrain.

"Hey wait!" cried Grace. "Go back a little bit and turn towards your left."

"What do you see?"

"Can you rotate the camera 360 degrees?" asked Grace.

Russell turned the camera around.

"There! Tire tracks! There is a turn off here, and I reckon that's where our truck went."

"Good eye Grace!" cried Kate "Follow those tracks!"

"What is hidden away down here? This is so crazy, disappearing trucks, barbed wire, hidden roads. There has got to be something sketchy down here." Dylan was following his detective instincts.

"Wait, can you go up? A little higher?" Regan asked.

"I'm worried about hitting a tree branch. Let me turn on the motion sensor snap shot camera. To see if I can find a safe path up."

Russell looked at the top view and realized there wasn't as much tree cover as they had thought. There were actually a bunch of rocky cliffs around them. He could pull up a good five or six meters.

"Okay Regan, here we go." Russell said as he maneuvered the drone up about four meters

"Can you back up a little bit?" she requested.

He moved the drone back.

"Stay there!"

"Okay"

"That is an entrance to a mine or a tunnel of some sort. Look right there!" Regan shouted and pointed at a specific part on the screen of the monitor. "I know what it looks like, I inspect mine sites all the time."

"She does. We met when there was an illegal mining operation that Regan and I investigated together. It totally messed with the ecosystem and the local economy," Dylan agreed.

"Could it just be a legal mine? Like whoever owns this place could also have mineral rights and be exercising them?" Kate wondered.

"No way, we would never approve a mine here. I looked into this area when I thought I was going to mine gold at Drovers to see if it was worth buying rights to other properties nearby. I also checked the area really carefully when we were dealing with the toxic waste site issue. The water table is too varied around here to have large scale digging or mining operations. It's what saved Drovers from being a toxic dump site. The runoff from here and the Ramsey River are too closely tied for mining to be done safely here. Any significant digging here would likely require a great deal of water being pumped out and draining the river and all of the creeks that run off it."

"Regan, you just solved the mystery of the low water levels!" Kate exclaimed.

"Yeah, but how do we fix it?" Grace asked

"Russell, can you note the exact latitude and longitude coordinate of where the drone is right now? Dylan asked.

"Yes. it should be automatically recorded into a file matching the timestamp, but hang on, I can display it right here."

"I'm going to call this in, but with only a drone feed video, and a dummy license plate, we may have a tough case to get anyone out here," said Dylan.

"But Regan is a respected expert in her field. Isn't that worth something?" asked Kate.

"To me, it's all I need, but in a court of law, we need hard evidence. Regan could serve as an expert witness, but that is only one piece of evidence. We would need more to convict. If these guys are stealing water from the community, they deserve to be shut down and go to jail. I want to do this the right way. Investigate, gather evidence, and then get a conviction," said Dylan.

"But we can't go there, it's private property. Dylan, you can't go in there without a warrant, or else any evidence you gather would be obtained illegally," said Kate.

"But wouldn't what we saw count as probable cause?" asked Grace.

"I'm a detective, not an attorney, I would say it probably would count as probable cause, but I can't be sure. There is no clear immediate danger that we can see to allow me to act immediately. No one is being held hostage or anything like that. I can't guarantee this footage would count, and I don't want to risk an investigation like that. If I go in and the judge decides I didn't have probable cause, it could nullify any evidence we find. I'm going to call it in, send the footage in, and Regan, if you can write up a statement, I'll send that along and we'll go from there."

"Of course, I'll write up a report as soon as we get back.

"Ironman, if you can just go all around the area of that entrance, get the best footage you can and then bring K2 back. there isn't a lot more we can do now." said Dylan.