Maybe Henley would be willing to listen to her, but he had no more authority than she did. And he definitely wasn’t the kind of guy to go out on a limb to help anyone. There was Galiardi, or any number of her colleagues at the CSRT, but they had already demonstrated their susceptibility to the application of pressure from above. Who else would possibly…
Special Agent Porter.
She had seen that look in his eyes numerous times, that look that said he couldn’t be bullied, the relentless look of a hunter. He had been on both of the ghost ships. He’d been down here investigating every one of the deaths. If there was anyone who would not only believe her, but be willing to do something about it—
A faint whimpering sound.
Sturm held her breath and listened. At first she heard nothing and assumed the noise must have come from one of the metal tunnels branching from the room as it buckled under the weight of the rubble, until she heard it again. There was no denying it. It sounded almost like someone crying.
She raised her beam to the ceiling and looked into each of the smaller tunnels. The acoustics made it impossible to tell exactly where the whimpering originated. It sounded like it was coming from all around her at once. She turned a complete circle. There had to be a dozen separate branches leading in as many different directions. She stuck her head into each of them and listened as hard as she could.
The sound grew softer and softer until she could barely hear it at all.
She found the right branch on the fifth try. The hollow, haunting sound echoed as though from far away. It was the most pathetic, heart-wrenching noise she had ever heard. She had to kick off the wall to pull herself over the lip and into the metal tunnel. The stench of dead fish intensified as she shimmied on her belly, barely able to gain any traction. The tube sloped upward toward tar-thick darkness that choked her light back to the lens.
* * *
Sturm had no idea how long she’d been crawling. Minutes? Hours? It felt like an eternity. Time seemed to lose all meaning down here in the smothering blackness. The sound had ceased. The resultant silence contained an urgency that spurred her to move faster. Eventually, her beam limned the trapezoidal shape of the partially flattened opening of the duct. Dust motes swirled beyond the orifice.
She crawled over the edge and tumbled to the floor from higher up than she had anticipated, dropping her flashlight in the process. The bulb died with the impact. After a moment of running her palms across ground that felt like a combination of fine-grained cement and coarse gravel, she found it and shook it back to life. The small bulb produced a weak, brassy glow no brighter than a candle’s flame. It immediately started to fade. She barely had time to survey her surroundings before the light extinguished again. A slanted iron girder, roughly six feet overhead at its pinnacle, supported slatted wood that must have once served as the floor of the level above her. The substrate beneath her appeared to be a combination of dirt, broken bricks, powdered concrete, and condensed salt carried through the gaps in the rubble by the breeze from the sea and the rain. It was mounded in the corner to the left as though fashioned into a nest by some burrowing animal or other. Another small tunnel opened on the opposite side from the one through which she had entered.
She listened to the darkness for the sound that had summoned her here, but all she could hear were the faint stirrings of the construction somewhere out there and the even fainter sound of the wind whistling through the debris.
And then she heard the whimpering sound again.
Closer.
She was nearly right on top of it.
Sturm turned her beam upon the ground, flashing it quickly from side to side. Her heart pounded in her chest and she could barely breathe. The sound had been distinct. There was no doubt in her mind that she had heard—
A child.
She could barely see the profile of the child’s face in the rear corner, eyes pinched tightly shut, tears glistening on plump cheeks. The whole face was covered with what appeared to be a dry, cracked crust of mud. The form was ambiguous, but Sturm sensed it was female. The little girl had buried herself in the dirt and grit as well as she could, leaving only the side of her face, her shoulders, and one bare hip above the mound. The crown of the doll’s head breached the dirt where the crook of her elbow was buried. The little girl shivered again and let out a whimper that pierced Sturm right through the chest. Never in her life had she seen something so terrible, so heartbreaking.
Sturm knelt beside the girl and carefully brushed the dirt from the top of her head, revealing an oblong cranium with a scalp so smooth it could have been recently shaved. More tears streamed from those closed eyes and she whimpered again.
“It’s all right,” Sturm whispered, stroking the grime from the girl’s slender neck and upper arm. “I’ve got you. Everything is going to be all right.”
The girl flinched as Sturm freed her pale arm, then the doll she remembered like it had been her own. Every inch of skin that Sturm uncovered was naked and pale to the point that she could see the bluish network of veins beneath it, even in the weak glow of her flashlight.
Sturm slipped off her uniform shirt and draped it over the girl’s torso while she continued to brush off her legs. Her flesh was cold to the touch and stippled with goosebumps despite the complete lack of visible body hair. She couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old.
The girl started to openly weep, her shoulders heaving with uncontrollable sobs. Sturm felt her own cheeks dampen with tears.
Who could have done this to a child? What kind of monster strips a little girl and abandons her in this kind of hell? The thought struck her a physical blow. Jesus Christ in heaven. Had someone raped her?
Sturm set her light aside, scooped the girl up from the dirt, and cradled her in her lap. In the fading brass glare, she looked upon the girl’s features. What she had mistaken for mud was unequivocally blood. The girl wore it from her forehead all the way down to her neck, save for the pale ribbons cut by her tears. Her lips protruded from beneath her broad nose; features distinctly African in origin that belied her pale skin. She looked for the source of the blood. Any visible cuts or open fractures. Maybe it was just the light, but she couldn’t see so much as a bruise.
“I’ll get you out of here,” Sturm whispered. “We’ll make sure that whoever hurt you never has the opportunity to do so again.”
She brushed her hand across the girl’s prominent, hairless brow.
The tiny bulb flickered and died.
Sturm swore she saw the girl’s eyes snap open and the circular reflection of the beam in large pink irises. The eyes widened in surprise before they disappeared into the darkness.
She continued to stroke the girl’s forehead, her cheeks, around her eyes, whispering soothingly the whole time.
The girl snuggled into her chest, shivering and curling her fingers into fists in Sturm’s undershirt. Her fingernails were so sharp that Sturm felt them pierce the skin on her ribs.
The girl continued to cry with a sound worse than anything Sturm had heard in her entire life. She felt the sorrow and the pain deep in her bones, in her heart, in her soul.
“It’s going to be okay,” Sturm said.
The girl stiffened against her and jerked her head away from Sturm’s hand.
“We’ll get you out of here, honey. We’ll find our way out of these tunnels and—”
The girl leapt from her lap. Sturm couldn’t see her in the pitch black, but she could hear her breathing, maybe three feet away, close to the ground, her breath coming in rapid, open-mouthed bursts.
“Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Sturm shifted forward onto her hands and knees and slowly crawled forward. The girl scrabbled to the side, making scraping sounds on the dirt.
“Everything’s going to be all right. We’ll get you back to your mommy and—”
Sturm nearly yelped when her knee pressed down on the hard plastic hand of the doll. She pried it out from
beneath her and held it out in front of her, as though the girl could really see her offering.
The doll was snatched from her hand. She felt the movement of air and heard a scurrying sound cross the room. The clamor of nails on concrete. Then only silence.
Sturm swept her hand across the dirt until she found her flashlight, then shook it back to life. In the waning glow, she watched a cloud of stirred dust settle to the ground.
The girl was gone.
TWENTY-FOUR
Seattle, Washington
11:53 a.m. PST
“You’re telling me there’s a naked little girl crawling around down there under all that rubble,” Porter said. He stared at the officer standing before him, at her filthy uniform shirt that hung open over her stained undershirt, at the torn knees of her dirty pants and her shoes that were so covered with dust it was impossible to tell they had even been polished black, at her tangled hair and her face so covered with dirt that the whites of her eyes stood out like beacons. There were obvious tear tracks on her cheeks and her hands shook with the kind of nervous energy only junkies knew. He recognized the signs of sleep deprivation without having to look too hard and knew it was only a matter of time before whatever reserves she had drawn upon failed her. “Okay. So what do you want me to do about it?”
With those blue eyes, so pale they appeared almost unnatural, she seemed to stare at him and through him at the same time. When her call had been routed from his office to his cell phone, he had been tempted to let it go to voicemail. After hearing what she had to say, he wished he had. But she had said the magic words that had made it impossible for him to do anything other than honor her request. I can’t think of anyone else I can trust. So he had agreed to meet her in person and evaluate the details before he made any kind of firm commitment. He’d found her waiting on the curb half an hour later, looking like she’d been dragged through the sewers by a herd of stampeding bison, and he’d known right then and there that he was about to so whatever she wanted him to do.
“You believe me?” she said. “I thought for sure…I mean, I was certain you wouldn’t…”
“I kind of thought we’d grab some coffee or something on our first date, but skulking around under condemned ruins will work, too.”
“What?” Her face flushed red beneath the coat of grime. “This isn’t a—”
He offered his most disarming smile and a wink. She merely stared at him for a long moment before the corner of her mouth curled into a smirk.
“Do you enjoy pushing people’s buttons or are you simply helpless against the urge?”
“Depends on the person, I suppose.” He glanced at his watch. Spears and his men wouldn’t make their move until sometime after dark, which left him with plenty of time to kill. Perhaps this wasn’t a bad situation at all. It would give him a chance to not only familiarize himself with the maze down there, but it would afford him the opportunity to potentially discover whatever was hiding down there before Spears did and disappeared with it under the cover of darkness. Besides, if Sturm was right and there was really a little girl under there, she was in worse danger than she had been when she was in the clutches of whoever might have taken her down there. If that was even what had happened. There was something about the appearance of this child that just didn’t sit right with him. The place had been crawling with police officers last night. Why had she not come running for help? And with some unknown creature killing people in those warrens with her… “So are you going to show me where you found this little girl or what?”
* * *
The damn tunnel was so tight he could barely squeeze his shoulders through. Had he not left his jacket in the car, he might have found himself wedged in there and unable to follow her at all. He had already ripped the seams of his button-down and his deltoids felt as though they were being flayed to the bone. He pondered Spears and his men and wondered how they expected to move through here with enough speed to be able to not only scour the area in one night, but procure their quarry as well. They had to have something else in mind, but, for the life of him, he couldn’t seem to figure out what it was.
Sturm dropped out of sight ahead of him. A heartbeat later, he heard her hit the ground and scramble to her feet. He had no choice but to try to catch himself with his arms when he followed her over the edge and fell down into the dirt. She stood in the middle of the room with his backup flashlight, shining it into the corner where he assumed she had found the sleeping child. He sat on his haunches and played his beam across the ground. It didn’t take long to find Sturm’s footprints, but they were the only ones he could see. He directed his beam at the wall and worked his way clockwise across it until he highlighted another tunnel on the opposite side.
“I followed her through there,” Sturm said, “but I never caught up with her.”
“Where are her footprints?”
“What?”
“Her footprints, Layne. There’s not a single print in here other than yours.”
“You think I’m making her up? Do you really believe—?”
He held up his hand.
“I didn’t say that.” He furrowed his brow as he tried to remember something Galiardi had said the night before. As far as we can tell, every single one of his—or its—footfalls were deliberately placed where they wouldn’t leave prints. “I want to ask you a question, but I don’t want you to take it the wrong way. Did you get a good look at this little girl?”
“What are you really asking me?”
“You said your flashlight was dying and you were barely able to see well enough to find your way in here before it gave out on you…”
“It was a girl, Agent Porter. A ten or eleven year old little girl. She was completely naked, so there wasn’t a whole lot that she was able to hide from me.”
“Tell me again what she looked like.”
“I already told—”
“Humor me, Layne.”
She closed her eyes as though to better view the image in her head and then apparently thought better of it and opened them again before they decided to stay closed of their own accord.
“Caucasian female. Four-foot-six to four-foot-eight. Weight approximately—”
“Skip the cop talk and tell me what you saw.”
Sturm turned away from him when she spoke and allowed her light to wander through the rubble.
“Her skull was misshapen. It tapered back from her forehead, almost like one of those helmets you see the competitive bicycle racers wearing. Her scalp was smooth. Not just shaved, but bald. Every part of her was bald. Even her forearms and legs.”
“Did you see her hands or her feet?”
“No. Or if so, I don’t remember noticing anything distinct about them.”
“Her face?”
“It was covered with so much dried blood that it was impossible to see any distinguishing characteristics.” She paused. Porter waited her out. “Other than the structure of the bones. Her forehead was ridged at the brow, almost Mongoloid. Her nose was broad, and…I don’t know…flat. And her lips jutted forward, like she’d bitten into an orange slice that was too big for her mouth and somehow closed her lips over it.”
“Tell me about her eyes again.”
“They reflected the light. You know, like you see when your headlights hit a deer on the side of the road.”
“What about the color?”
“I didn’t get a clear look. And the light was already fading—”
“Quit hedging your bets and tell me.”
“They looked pink. Pinkish-red. But that had to be because of the light.” She shook her head. “I make her sound like a mutant or something, but I’m telling you, she was just a little girl. A kid, for Christ’s sake. A poor abused child. Lost and alone.”
Porter focused on the image her words had conjured in his mind, which was anything other than that of a normal little girl, but he hadn’t seen her and Sturm looked like she hadn’t slept in days, so could he really trust the accuracy
of her account? He imagined a child with teeth so large her mouth could hardly contain them and reflective eyes that suggested a degree of night vision. The lack of footprints. The fact that she had remained hidden when the police had converged with their bright lights and flashing cameras. This child’s appearance and behavior both fell outside of the norm, but she couldn’t possibly be capable of doing what he was thinking now. Could she? A child overcoming and slaughtering an entire crew of grown men? Of tearing out their throats and finding her way across the Pacific Ocean on her own? It seemed impossible, and yet there was no denying that there was something down here, something that was of the utmost importance to a private defense contractor and whatever government agency was greasing the wheels on its behalf to keep the entire police force and the FBI out of their way.
“Look at this,” Sturm said. She knelt near the western wall and glanced back at him. “This was done recently.”
Porter walked across the dirt and leaned over her shoulder so he could see. Her beam was focused on a section of fallen flooring from the level that had once been eight feet above them. The warped slats were broken on both ends, but still held together in a segment the size of a square of sidewalk by a pair of support posts. The wood had been carved down to the pale pine grain by what appeared to be the tip of a nail or other small, sharp implement. The edges of the etchings were still rimmed with sawdust and chips of wood. There were hundreds of individual characters, none of them more than an inch high, in at least a dozen horizontal lines. Or were they oriented vertically? He couldn’t tell. It was obvious that someone had spent a great deal of time carving them, though. He’d never seen anything like it. The characters almost reminded him of a cross between an archaic form of Chinese and the kind of primitive petroglyphs the Indians left scattered across the Southwest, only less elaborate and with straighter lines that tapered downward like arrowheads.
Predatory Instinct: A Thriller Page 15
