They bickered on like that for a while, and Darger felt her chest loosen some. Something about these quarreling partners had brought her back into the moment. And as ridiculous as it was, she was thankful for it.
Once they were all strapped up, Darger followed Loshak down the basement steps to where most of the SWAT team waited, ready to breach the hole in the concrete once and for all. The two agents stood on the wooden landing at the bottom of the stairs, staying back from the crowd of the black-clad raid team.
The adrenaline had all the SWAT guys fidgeting in place. Bouncing on their toes. Rocking their weight from foot to foot. Adjusting their grips on their AR-15s. It was like none of them could keep still.
While the team leader barked at them, Darger focused on one member of the squad. His breath was fogging up the inside of his helmet and clearing over and over, a small cloud misting one side of his visor.
That kind of stressed excitement was somehow contagious, Darger thought. Like the epinephrine seeped out of their pores, spritzed itself into the air, infected all who came near.
Stimulation. Provocation. Blood lust.
Then the team leader’s speech built to a crescendo. He waved an arm.
And the SWAT team lurched forward as one. Edged closer to the ragged hole in the concrete. The furniture had been cleared away, laying the circular vacancy bare.
The SWAT officers dove in one after another. Sliding down a rope that’d been looped over an I-beam and draped down into the void rather than using the ladder they’d set up for exiting the hole once the raid was over.
The word spelunking rang in Darger’s head as she watched them zip down the line. Swallowed whole by the basement floor.
The crowd kept surging that way. Tightly packed bodies inching, pressing, shifting forward. A wave of humanity crashing toward that side of the basement, funneling into the floor like they were spilling down a drain.
Darger recognized Hendrix and then DeBarge shooting down into the chasm — one wearing a clever smile, the other looking gravely serious.
Loshak stepped down from the landing to the concrete floor. Darger didn’t want to follow his lead, but she did.
She did not, she realized, want to go down into that hole. Did not want to step off of this plane and disappear into that portal into the dirt. Her chest got tight when she thought about it, sharp tendrils of electric current spiking through the meat of her forearms, radiating outward from her hands.
No, she didn’t want to do it. But she would. For the girls that may be down there, she would.
Once all the SWAT officers had gone down, Ambrose waved them through, smiling faintly beneath the glare of his faceguard.
Darger grabbed the rope, hooked one foot in, and swung out over the pit. She could feel her eyes go wide as she looked down into the open space where more floor should be.
Then she descended. Thrust downward. The rope loose against her palms. Airy. Skimming past.
The light changed around her. That hard edge where the concrete ended and the earth began darkened beside her, snuffed out the fluorescent glow of the basement above.
Her feet touched down on the dirt floor. Knees bending. Ankles flexing.
She stood. Craned her neck to take in her surroundings fully, eyes dancing from the ceiling to the walls and back again.
The circle of light above, the hole in the concrete, looked somehow wrong — an escape hatch hung out of reach. Below that, sheared off dirt formed the sidewalls. There was a slight gradient to it, the darker soil toward the top slowly giving way to a pale sandstone shade as it worked its way down. A crooked tree root snaked through one section to her left, looked like a bulging vein in the tunnel wall.
Finally, she let herself gaze down the long shaft ahead — the tapering dirt cylinder where the SWAT officers jogged onward even now. Lights dotted the way, a string of glass globes set along the upper right-hand side of the tunnel, forming intermittent bars of light that couldn’t quite beat back all of the darkness.
The SWAT team’s flashlights joined those bare bulbs, twirling over the wall, beams swinging everywhere in front of her.
Loud clangs drew her head to her left. Metallic. Piercing.
Loshak climbed down the ladder, his shoes pinging against the aluminum rungs, the feet of the thing gritting against the floor, kicking up dust. When he reached the bottom, he turned and smiled at her.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said, lifting a finger. “But I’ll have you know that I only took the ladder because I’m too damn old for the whole gym class rope thing. Too, uh, what’s the word… rickety.”
“I was actually wondering why I didn’t take the ladder,” Darger said.
But her eyes were already locked on the tunnel ahead again, looking at the way it pinched tighter as it proceeded from here. She shuddered, her shoulders shimmying back and forth.
“You alright?” Loshak said, his voice going softer.
She took a breath.
“I’m fine. Let’s move.”
Chapter 55
Darger had only trod a few paces when the tunnel went crazy in front of her.
Shouts erupted first. The voices were sharp. Excited. Maybe scared. The emotion in them made the hair prick up on the back of her neck.
Next the twirl of the flashlight beams on the wall, too, seemed to intensify. The beams swung wildly. Stabbed and slashed everywhere. Something frantic in their motions.
Darger’s gaze stretched down the tunnel. She squinted. Tried to make sense of the tangle of lights, of all the loud noise.
She realized that the SWAT team had stopped ahead of her. All those black-clad officers seemed to be packed in tightly, leaning toward something ahead, jostling against each other some, but not advancing any longer.
“They must have found something,” Loshak said.
They picked up the pace, quickly drawing up on the mob. Sporadic shouts still rang out among the throng, and now Darger thought she understood one of the words.
She elbowed her way through the crowd, finding the throng here oddly rigid. Everyone stood straight up, their chins tucked, their bodies tense. It felt like picking her way through a cluster of statues.
And then she broke through the last row. Reached the front of the crowd and stopped dead.
In the passage before her, she saw exactly what she’d feared she would.
The image sucked the breath out of her chest. Held the muscles around her ribcage utterly taut. Made it feel like her lungs were imploding.
The officers had formed a semi-circle around it. Kept some three or so feet shy of it out of instinct. That made sense, Darger thought. She, too, hesitated there a moment, held in the safety at the edge of the crowd, staying an arm’s reach away until she was able to take a breath again.
Finally, she dared to get closer. Edged that way with choppy steps. Knelt next to it.
A body sprawled in the center of the tunnel, laid out on its back in the dirt. The skin of its face had been cut off.
Chapter 56
Within minutes, a few of the bunny-suited crime scene techs were swarming the tunnel just as they had up in the house — as above, so below. They snapped photos of the grisly corpse, grim expressions etched onto their features as they manned the cameras.
Darger couldn’t take her eyes off the body for long, her gaze perpetually drawn back to that naked butchery where the face used to be.
The skin had been peeled off from the forehead down to the jaw — the whole face reduced to red stringy musculature and bulbous eyes set in a skull. The patches of exposed white bone looked stark against the red tissue, and the face itself seemed oddly small having been stripped of its flesh. Frail and gaunt. The shallow chin looked utterly out of proportion with the neck and shoulders below.
Most of the blood had gone tacky and dull, but the face still sheened in a few places. It glittered where the forehead had been stripped down to curved bone along the hairline. Sparkled at the thicker muscles at the corners of the jaw.
They wouldn’t know exactly how long the body had been down here until the medical examiner got to work, but based on the shiny places, it couldn’t have been all that long.
Darger felt Loshak at her side. Both of them stared at the body now.
A face without skin looked vaguely industrial, Darger thought. Red sinew wired the cheekbones to the jaw like the suspension cables of a bridge. Angular bone jutted here and there like the metal struts along a factory ceiling.
For Darger, the nose was somehow the most disturbing element of all of this. What remained of the flayed cartilage looked like lumpy gristle. And the nostrils appeared bigger than before. More exaggerated. Two pits in the center of the face. It made this body look more animal than human.
Below the nasal cavity, the exposed teeth glistened, permanently grinning now. But that wasn’t the most significant detail there — a tooth was missing. The front left incisor had been cut out.
“They checked him for a wallet. Didn’t find anything,” Darger said. “You notice he’s dressed all in black, like the others?”
Loshak nodded.
“I think we found the elusive Worm,” Loshak said. “I mean, why else cut out that tooth? Had to eliminate a possible identifying feature.”
“That would only delay the inevitable, though, wouldn’t it?” Darger said, her voice sounding hollow. “If anything, it only made it more obvious that this had to be Worm.”
Loshak shrugged.
“I figure once the landfill bodies hit the newspaper, ol’ Cowboy went into damage control mode. Panicking. Had to tie up any loose ends. He was probably waiting to dump the body later tonight, under cover of darkness.”
“That would make sense.”
Chatter behind them broke up their conversation.
The SWAT team was lining up again. Ready to press on. Ready to see what other terrors this dark passage held.
Darger tried to steel herself for whatever came next.
Chapter 57
Darger’s skin grew taut as she plunged forward in the tunnel. Her legs felt wobbly beneath her. Nervous liquid thrashed in her belly.
She forced herself to focus on the dancing lights of the SWAT team ahead. They drifted and jerked and flitted around like fireflies. Traced glowing lines on the tunnel walls.
Loshak kept quiet as they proceeded, probably sensing Darger’s claustrophobia-induced nerves. He shuffled along beside her, his footsteps scuffing at the sand like a crunchy drumbeat.
They kept going, descending gently, weaving around the support beams set in their way. Soon they reached the point when the dirt gave way to stone, the manmade section of the tunnel connecting to an underground cave.
At this development, Darger’s skin tightened further, and her whole body suddenly felt clammy. She tried to shake the feeling off.
They moved into the stone passageway. The craggy walls kept their distance for now, but Darger could only imagine that the cave would get tight in places. Squeezing. Crushing. She shuddered again, her shoulders jerking harder this time.
“You sure you’re all right?” Loshak said. “I don’t think it’s absolutely necess—”
“I’m fine. Let’s just keep going.”
Something in the flashlights changed ahead then. That cluster of fireflies widened. Spread like a puddle. It confused Darger at first, but as they strode closer, it all came clear.
They’d reached a large cavern. It felt like the space had expanded here, asserted itself, some act of will pushing the rock surfaces back in all directions. The ceiling grew higher above them, gnarly stalactites hanging down.
All told, the chamber was about the size of the sanctuary of a small church, mostly flat along the floor with some crevices making divots here and stalagmites jutting up there.
The SWAT team had stopped, the whole group milling around again, like a pack of dogs not quite sure how to proceed. That nervous energy seemed to resurface in their body language right away. It was like whenever they weren’t charging forward at something, they didn’t know what to do with themselves, and Darger wondered how true that was for most people in life, herself included.
The squad leader hopped up on a raised shelf in the rock and yapped fresh commands at them with his raspy voice, but Darger couldn’t focus on his words. Not after what she’d just noticed.
Five small cave mouths led out of this space, and some of them looked tight. Very tight.
The SWAT team lurched back to life. Divvying up. Smaller groups headed for the various passages open before them.
Darger tried to take a step forward, urged her legs to keep moving, but she could only stand there, eyes locked on those narrow passageways cut into the stone.
Loshak turned and grasped her by the arm.
“If the caves are getting to you, there are ways up top you could be more useful. I overheard Agent Zaragoza mention that they’d found deeds for at least five other houses owned by Cowboy’s shell companies. A couple of them are within a few blocks. You could go take a look, maybe help figure out exactly what was going on here. Believe me, there are more than enough of us down here to handle whatever we find.”
Darger thought of the girls that may be down here. May. She didn’t want to leave them, even if she knew Loshak and the others were more than capable of taking care of things.
But then she stared into one of the smaller cave openings before her. Watched two SWAT members get down on their bellies to wriggle through a passage about the width of a coffin.
She looked back at Loshak and nodded her head.
Chapter 58
A tranquil suburban landscape rolled past outside the rental car’s windows — picket fences, stone veneers, sweeping driveways with basketball hoops tucked off to one side.
Something about the juxtaposition made Darger’s jaw clench. Here was the peaceful, idyllic surface, but she’d gotten a glimpse of what lurked beneath the facade. She imagined the people in these homes learning what was happening a few blocks from here, down in the dirt.
A cartoonish voice sounded in her head.
My God! What will the people at the country club think?
She blinked and involuntarily pictured the foam growing in the hollow of Cowboy’s mouth, spilling over the sides of his lips. Shuddered again.
The second property owned by Cowboy was less than a mile from the house on Hidden Valley Lane. Another suburban home nestled amongst all the other little boxes. No different from the rest, at least viewed from the photographs she’d found on Zillow. The dark brick facade was a deep, almost chocolate shade, and the big front door was cornflower blue. Darger wondered what might lay inside those walls, though. Horrors? Banalities?
Information, she hoped. Evidence that would cement the story of what exactly happened here, what exactly this maniac had been up to.
She took a left into the cul-de-sac. The green lawns sprawled ever wider here, vast expanses of manicured grass separating the homes from the asphalt and each other. Colorful bursts of landscaping jutted up everywhere along the brick and stone structures. Lilacs and rhododendrons and magnolia trees, wagging their leafy limbs in the breeze.
Darger parked in the driveway outside the Ash Avenue house. Scooped Cowboy’s oversized key chain from the passenger seat and clutched it in her fist as she traversed the pale sidewalk to the front door.
It took a while to find the right key, but when she did, the blue steel door swung aside. She stepped into the house. The security system squawked, but she punched in the code one of the techs had already tracked down via the company and silenced it.
A potpourri scent wafted about the foyer. Something cinnamon in the odor, Darger thought, almost like pumpkin pie spice.
She closed the door behind her and stood in the dim entranceway for a moment, facing the open passageway into the house proper, letting her eyes adjust to the low light inside.
The quiet swelled in this place. Some hushed feeling coming over Darger as she stared into the grand living room beyond the foy
er, a cavernous room with naked wood beams stretching across the ceiling. She felt immensely aware of the empty space here, a little in awe of it, as though she were standing in some famous cathedral instead of a house in the suburbs owned by a recently deceased psychopath.
Her gaze shifted over vases and paintings and elements of decor at odds with what she knew about Cowboy. It was all a little modern. Clean lines. Muted colors. Minimal. Like something she’d expect to see in an upscale hotel room.
Finally, she took a step forward. Watched as the rest of that mammoth living room came into view to her right.
Button tufted leather furniture perched around the space, its shiny exterior the color of mocha. Glass masks covered the center of the wall above the fireplace — crude, almost featureless faces, all tinted different shades of translucent green and blue. Abstract paintings hung in recessed spots in the walls, built-in displays for this strange art that mostly looked like red and blue smears to Darger.
She paced across the room, footsteps clacking on the tile and echoing around the yawning enclosure. No flat screen mounted on the wall here. No point of focus save for perhaps the decorative masks. It seemed like one of those rooms set up for display only, staged, a space no one had actually lived in. Maybe it was.
Thick wood slabs formed lintels over each doorway leading out of the room, this rustic detail matching those exposed beams overhead — pale timber with grain etching darker lines all over it in warped concentric circles. She passed under one of them, moved into the kitchen beyond.
Stainless steel appliances faced off here. The gleaming quartz of the countertop coating the island separated the fridge from the stove and dishwasher. A farm style sink was situated opposite that, a copper behemoth set deep into the counter.
She kept moving. Slipped into the hall past the kitchen.
And the faintest prickle of goosebumps settled onto the backs of her arms as she entered the back half of the house.
She slowed. Took more care with her steps, moving heel to toe to stop her footfalls from clapping and echoing.
Violet Darger | Book 7 | Dark Passage Page 24
