Mine shafts were often filthy and were known for having sharp rocks that could cut your rope. They were also known for having apparently stout anchors—objects you might tie your rope to—that were actually rotten and could fail at the worst times.
Rappelling down sounded easy but was fraught with danger since you often couldn’t see whether the end of your rope had reached a stable surface. A little bit amusing, but also frightening, was the recommendation that you tie a large knot near the end of your rope. One that was too big to pass through your carabiner so you couldn’t accidentally rappel off the end of your rope in the dark. Also sobering was the recommendation that said large knot be used to form a loop at the end of your rope. Then you could put a foot in the loop while you stood at the literal “end of your rope,” wondering what to do next.
Climbing back up pretty much necessitated the use of “ascenders,” mechanical grips that would slide up the rope, but not down. Adam repeatedly encountered the advice that exploring mines was highly technical and not for amateurs.
Damn, he thought. Not something I want to do unless there’s no other solution.
Suddenly he realized that quite a bit of time had passed. He got up and went back to where Kiri’d been working on the house computer. She was gone. He went to the bottom of the stairs and called out, “Did they ever show up on the video?”
“Yeah,” she called back down, “everything’s working fine.”
Adam wanted to go up to hang out with her some more. Instead, he returned to the nook with the house computer. She’d closed down the program that monitored the cameras. He opened it back up.
He could see it was still recording. The upper three windows were still black—except for the little red dots and the faint glow on the one screen. He hunted through the menus without finding anything that suggested the cameras for the upper three images were turned off. He was about to give up when he saw a menu item for “lights” and another one for “infrared.”
He clicked on the infrared icon first. A ghostly monochromatic image appeared. Sure enough, the red dots were on what he still thought was a rack of electronic equipment. And I’ll bet the glow that lets me see the rack comes from infrared heat produced by the electronics behind the faceplate, he thought. He assumed that clicking on the infrared icon lit a ring of infrared lights around the camera lens like he’d seen on security cameras in other locations. When he clicked it and the infrared lights came on, the entire room lit with infrared so the camera could see everything, not just the hot electronics. However, he’d bet that if he was in the room it’d still seem dark except for the status LEDs.
He clicked on the lights icon. Suddenly the images were brightly lit and he could see in color. His previous impression had been correct. It didn’t look like the inside of a tunnel. Rather, the walls were smooth and flat with sharp corners like the inside of a building. It kind of did look like a workshop, though much of the equipment was completely unfamiliar to him.
The back door of the house opened and he heard Lindl and his dad coming in. Adam moused up to shut off the lights and infrared for the upper three cameras, then closed the program. Stepping into the hall, he said, “The police are gone, right? We couldn’t see any of them on the security camera.”
“Yeah,” Morgan said unhappily. “Admittedly, I don’t know much about police procedures, but it seems a little bit early to abandon surveillance of a location where a murderer’s supposed to be hiding.”
Adam said, “Did you think the detective seemed a little freaked out by the whole thing?”
Morgan lifted an eyebrow, “Yes, I did.”
“You think he might have claustrophobia or some other kind of thing that makes him go a little crazy in dark tunnels?”
Morgan snorted, “Or, maybe that’s just the way he always is.”
Lindl said, “I don’t think much of Mr. Detective.”
Morgan sighed, “It’s going to be pretty easy for us to be down on him since he’s decided Kiri’s the guilty party. From his viewpoint, he’s got a locked room murder with a vanished perpetrator. I think the conventional wisdom’s that most murders are carried out by people known to the victim including family members. He’s probably just playing the odds.”
That’s just like dad, Adam thought, quick to see the other guy’s viewpoint. Too quick. He said, “What’s the motive? I’ll concede Kiri had the opportunity. She was, after all, in the mine with him. But you’re supposed to have motive, opportunity and…” He glanced at Lindl and Morgan uncertainly, “Something else, I’ve forgotten what it is.”
Lindl said, “Means. The perpetrator’s supposed to have the ability to carry out the murder too.” Seeing Morgan and Adam looking at him, he shrugged and said, “I’ve watched some cop shows.”
Morgan said, “Okay, does Kiri know how to shoot a gun?”
Lindl nodded. “The detective asked her that and she told him she did.”
Adam said, “So she had opportunity and means. Still, she didn’t have any motive!”
“That we know of,” Morgan said slowly. “Something might have happened that we don’t know about. He glanced at Lindl. “She told me that Daryn, ‘was an amazing dad.’ That didn’t exactly sound like someone with an axe to grind.”
Lindl said, “Yeah, Dad was…” Lindl’s voice broke a little, “He was really good to us.” He blinked a couple of times and a tear ran down his cheek, “It’s hard to even imagine Kiri being mad at him.” He wiped at the tear, “I mean, sure, she was mad because he didn’t pick her up. But no way mad enough to…” He shook his head and turned to go up the stairs. Adam had the feeling he wanted to escape the conversation.
Morgan and Adam stared at one another. Adam said, “There’s no way.”
Morgan nodded slowly, “That’s how I feel too. But really, we barely know her—”
Adam found himself saying fiercely, “I know her. I’ve been talking to her a lot. She’s really smart, and, and— she’s beautiful, and sweet, and I— I know she’s been kind of rude to you, but…”
Morgan tilted his head curiously, “You sound like you’ve got a thing for your cousin?”
“No!” Adam said, a little overemphatically. “But even if I did, she’s not a blood relative.”
“I know that,” Morgan said soothingly. “Does she?”
Adam shrugged, embarrassed that his dad had sussed out his feelings so easily.
“Um,” Morgan said, “maybe you should make sure she does. You wouldn’t want her deciding you were,” he paused as if searching for the right word, then continued, “inappropriately interested.”
“Yeah, well, she’s not going to be interested in me, so it isn’t going to be an issue.”
“Why wouldn’t she be?” Morgan said, as if simply curious.
“She’s way out of my league,” Adam said, sounding surly even to himself.
Morgan laughed, “You might be surprised. Smart beautiful girls sometimes have a hard time getting dates because they intimidate all the guys.”
Adam snorted, “She’s intimidating all right.”
“And she’s in trouble.” After a few moments passed, Morgan looked up the stairs and said, “And she’s got some secrets she’s keeping from us.”
“Oh, yeah.” Adam glanced up the stairs, then said, “You should come look at the intake from the security cameras.”
A few minutes later Morgan was staring at the images in the upper three windows looking as bemused as Adam felt. “And you didn’t ask her what these were?”
“No. She was actively trying to keep me from seeing them. She even called them static test images, or something like that. As if they weren’t real.”
Slowly, Morgan said, “I guess we don’t know that they are real.”
“Come on. They’re not… generic enough to be some kind of test images.” Adam waved at the screen, “That stuff looks like it’s got a purpose.”
Morgan grinned at him, “It’s got a purpose, huh? How in the world did you come
to that conclusion?”
“Um, the middle one looks like a bunch of high-end, really expensive equipment. It doesn’t look like something an advertising flack lined it up just so it’d look pretty, it looks like it’s set up to be used. The left one looks like a lot of tools and supplies, and the right one looks like a machine shop.”
“How can you say that? You don’t even know what some of that stuff is.”
“I know, but…” He looked at Morgan again, “Don’t you get the same feeling?”
Morgan looked at the images again for a little while, then shrugged, “Yeah, I do. But I couldn’t explain it rationally.” Then Morgan looked like a light went off. “Daryn has quite the workshop down in the basement. We should go down and look around to make sure those three cameras aren’t just showing the stuff down there.”
“Really?” Adam said, getting up.
Morgan led Adam down the hall where he opened a door beneath the stairs and showed him stairs going down.
They looked around the basement. Although Adam felt astonished by all the tools and equipment, he felt certain that no camera angle could be achieved down there that would look anything like what they saw on the security cameras upstairs. Besides, there weren’t any security cameras. He turned to his dad, “What was your brother building down here? You know, that he needed all this equipment.”
Morgan said, “Kiri says he made his living as an inventor. When the kids were little he invented toys. I got the impression she thought it was great because—not working 9 to 5—he could be around for her and Lindl. She said that when they got too old for toys, he moved on to inventing stuff for adults, but she didn’t actually tell me what any of his inventions were.”
Adam looked around, “You think maybe there’s a hidden door into rooms where he’s keeping the really exotic equipment we see on the security cameras?”
Morgan’s eyebrows went up, “That’s an interesting idea.” He turned his eyes upward, “Do you think this basement’s full-sized?”
“What’s ‘full-sized’ mean?”
“The same size as the house above it,” Morgan said, looking around as if he were estimating distances. “It’d be pretty unusual for the basement to be bigger than the house above it.”
Adam looked around, “I think it might be? We’d need to take measurements, or at least pace it off.”
“Well,” Morgan said, looking around himself, “let’s do some pacing then. Tomorrow, when it’s daylight, we can try to pace off the outside of the upstairs and get some idea how close they are to the same size.”
Once they had some numbers for the dimensions, they went upstairs to their rooms. It wasn’t very late, and they hadn’t done much in the way of physical activity that day, but Adam felt exhausted. When he opened the door to the room he was sharing with Lindl, his cousin was asleep.
Still wearing his clothes, but asleep.
Chapter Three
Saturday morning
Just after midnight
It’d been quiet for what seemed like forever. Dan slipped his phone out of his pocket and turned it on. The damned thing always made god-awful noises when it powered up, so he put it between his thighs and squeezed them together to try to muffle it.
He could hear it playing its boot up tones, but he thought they were deadened enough that they wouldn’t have been heard more than ten feet away.
He was cold, damp, and terribly uncomfortable, essentially sick of lying on his side in his cramped little pocket off the mine tunnel.
Dan had been standing in the entrance to one of the mine’s side tunnels when he’d first grabbed Djai’s daughter. To his dismay it’d turned out she hadn’t been lying when she said she’d called the police. The cops had started yelling as soon as he’d squeezed off a shot; a shot that was her fault since she’d punched him in the nuts. Unable to believe how badly his little endeavor was turning out, Dan had quickly moved further down the side tunnel. He’d needed a place to hide the weapon and a story that made him sound innocent.
He hadn’t wanted to use the light on his phone because it would’ve acted like a beacon for the cops. Instead, in the dark, he’d used his hands as his eyes. He’d kept his left hand out in front of him to keep himself from running into things. He’d slid his right hand along the wall of the tunnel as a guide, keeping it as high as he could reach because he wanted to find a high recess to hide his weapon. Since he was tall, he figured any ledge he felt would be higher than most people would notice.
He’d also slid his feet along the tunnel floor rather than lifting them in a normal walk. He didn’t like the noise it made, but he really didn’t want to fall into a hole like the one Rob went down.
Dan had gone quite a distance before he felt the ledge. He’d stopped and looked back along the tunnel where he’d come from. He hadn’t seen any lights. He’d listened carefully but hadn’t heard anyone either.
Finally, he’d used the flashlight on his phone to look around, especially up at the shelf. Because the rock was almost black, even as tall as Dan was it’d been hard to see the shelf. Grabbing the lip, he’d jumped up and felt around. It’d been deeper than he could feel. After some hesitation, he’d set his phone up on the ledge, with the light shining upward, then grabbed the ledge with both hands and pulled himself up for a looksee. The space behind the ledge had turned out to be really deep. In fact, when he pulled himself up there—which had been a huge struggle in its own right—he’d found it was a small-diameter tunnel that went back around a little corner. It hadn’t been just a great hiding place for the gun, but a place he could hide himself.
He’d crawled back there and turned off his phone, partly to make sure it stayed silent, but also to be sure it didn’t run down its battery searching for a signal. Then he’d settled down to wait.
The cops had come and gone. Occasionally a light had flashed up into the alcove momentarily, but apparently no one had noticed the depth of the recess. At least, no one had tried to actively check it out.
It would’ve been perfect if it hadn’t been bone-chillingly cold. And if lying on the rough rocky surface hadn’t been incredibly uncomfortable. And, if he hadn’t been so damned hungry.
Also, the unending dark gave him the creeps.
He learned he couldn’t judge the passage of time. He knew that because he’d powered up the phone a couple of times now. The first time had been when he thought he hadn’t heard the police for about twenty-four hours. It’d proven to be two in the morning on Friday. Since this whole mess had started Thursday afternoon, that’d meant he’d only been in the tunnel about twelve hours total at that point. He’d considered trying to sneak out of the mine then, but decided that it’d surely be guarded on the first night.
He’d been glad of that when there’d subsequently been a lot more lights, shouting, and marching about the next day. It’d suggested a much more extensive search of the mine. He hadn’t wanted to turn on the phone and see what time it was, but he thought they’d brought in more people for a more thorough search and it had to have been during the day on Friday.
As many times as they tromped by his hideout, he frankly found it somewhat astonishing that no one noticed it.
When all that’d settled down, he’d gotten out his phone and checked it again. It’d only been seven in the evening on Friday night.
Now, even though he felt like he’d been waiting forever, his phone said it was only twenty minutes after midnight, early on Saturday morning.
He’d been hoping it’d say two in the morning because any guards would be less alert, but he decided he just couldn’t bear to wait any longer. He crawled out of the alcove and over to the edge between the ledge and the tunnel. After waiting a few minutes for any sounds or lights indicating that someone might still be around, he turned on the phone’s flashlight and positioned it where it’d light his descent. He thought, Breaking my leg getting down from here’d probably turn out to be a lot worse than just getting caught.
Getting down off t
he rough ledge had been thoroughly unpleasant, but not as difficult as climbing up had been. He turned off the light on the phone, put his left hand on the wall and started back toward the entrance. He knew you could get lost in caves and tunnels, but he’d gotten all the way to the spot with the alcove keeping his right hand on the wall. Keeping his left hand on the same wall should take him back where he’d come from. Also, the hole Rob fell into would be on the right going back.
After so long in the dark, he desperately wanted to have light, but he didn’t want to use up any more phone battery and he wanted to see the police long before they saw him. He felt sure the cops’d have their lights on.
After walking for what seemed like forever, lights came on up ahead. For a moment he panicked, thinking he was going to have to go back and try to hide in that horrible little alcove again. Then he remembered that the first part of the tunnel had overhead lights. I’ll bet they turn on by motion detection, he thought.
He stopped and stood silently motionless, listening for any sounds and watching for any flickering in the lights suggesting there might be people out there. Not sensing either of those things, he moved slowly ahead, stopping to listen again.
It was just the lights on the roof of the tunnel.
He paused again, but didn’t see or hear anything. Starting forward again, he thought a little hysterically, I’m heading toward the light! He thought he must be feeling’s as much joy as survivors of near-death experiences described. Despite the urge, he kept himself from breaking into a run.
He stopped to listen again when he was about twenty feet from the door at the entrance. When he was actually at the entrance, he listened again. He didn’t hear anyone either time. Suddenly his blood froze, What if the SOBs locked these doors with that huge damned padlock?! The door and the lock were too heavy to force, though he knew he’d try anyway. Saying a little prayer, he gently leaned on the left door.
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