Into The Fire jb-4

by David Wiltse

  Browne returned his attention to Becker. "So I looked in the regional records. Now those go back to before wereally even organized, just names and telephone numbers on the backs of envelopes in the beginning, people you might call if you were going to be in their area and wanted to go down. You'd call it a network these days, but you go back far enough, and hell it was just a friend giving a name of somebody a friend told him about who might know somebody else who was interested. You know what I'm saying. All of that is in that file cabinet over there."

  "A lot of work," Becker said.

  Browne shrugged. "What else have I got to do these days? Anyway, you were right, your friend Swann isn't a joiner. He never did belong to the society."

  "Well, I knew it was a long shot…"

  "I said he didn't join-that don't mean he wasn't in the file. I got his name on a paper napkin, along with the name of Herm Jennings, who suggested I call him."

  Browne pulled a pale-green paper napkin from his desk drawer. "The check mark after his name means I called the man to see if he was interested in joining. He wasn't, or I would have put a circle around the check.

  That's my system. I don't remember ever talking to him; it must have been twenty years ago or more, so I called Henn Jennings this morning.

  Herm can just barely recall him as somebody who went down with him and a couple of others one time. That's how he knew he was interested in caving. But that's all he remembers; it's not like he ever really knew the man."

  "Twenty years ago? That would make him about fifteen at the time."

  "That's right-that's usually when you get started, when you're in your teens and don't know any better."

  "Did Jennings remember where they went, by any chance?"

  "No, I asked him that. But you can be sure of one thing, if he went with Herm, he went someplace good, someplace tough. That's the only kind of hole Herm visits. And if Herm passed his name along, the kid could carry his own weight, fifteen or not."

  "Bingo," said Becker.

  "That's a bingo? Don't sound like much to me."

  "It shows he knows caves in this region," Becker said.

  "It shows he's been at it a long time. And that he's good.

  That tells me all I need to know."

  "Well, then, good, glad I can help."

  "You've just started helping, Mr. Browne. What I really need are your maps."

  Browne turned to Pegeen. "I've got the most thorough maps of all the known caves in my region. They're better than the government maps, better than the geologists' maps, better than anybody's."

  "I'm sure they are," said Pegeen.

  "No question. I can tell you every hole in West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky that's wide enough to squeeze your shoulders through-and I been in most of them myself I drew more than half the maps personally. You didn't think there was any goddamn surveyors crawling down there, did you?"

  "I would think not."

  Browne nodded emphatically.

  "You got that right. Some of them ain't much bigger than a rabbit run; some of them got more room than a hotel. This whole region is honeycombed with tunnels and caves and caverns and mines-hell, it's a wonder it don't all collapse. It's the limestone substrata, you know.

  Water just carves that rock like butter. You get any kind of trickle going and pretty soon-a million years or so-the water's cut its way through that limestone like a jigsaw.

  You ever go caving?":'Not really," she said.

  'Not really or not at all?"

  "Not at all."

  "You ever want to try, you let me know. I'll take. you down personally."

  The day I go down in a dark hole with you, old man, she thought. "I'll remember the offer if I ever get the urge," she said, straining for politeness.,"That's right, you get the urge, you think of me," Browne said, winking at Becker.

  The old son of a bitch thinks I'm blind as well as stupid, Pegeen thought. She watched Becker absorb Browne's attempts at male conspiracy with just the faintest hint of a smile He wasn't going along with the joke-not that it was really a joke; men always had some faint dream of success, she knew, no matter how pathetically delusional it was; they stoked themselves on fantasies of women overwhelmed by their magnetism and leaping over all bounds of decency, age, decorum, and common revulsion just to get at them-but Becker wasn't telling him to mind his manners, either.

  Browne had a sheaf of charts on the side of his desk and he tapped it proudly, as if it were a codex of the classics.

  "You tell me what you're looking for, and if it exists, 'I've got it here."

  Becker thought a moment. "It should be somewhere remote, somewhere you could enter and exit unseen. It has to have a sizable chamber in it somewhere, big enough for a man to stand and move around."

  "Easy access or difficult?"

  "Access to the cave?"

  "That's one. Some of these entrances are halfway up a mountain. You got to climb up before you climb down."

  "Not too difficult. He's carrying, or dragging, a hundred-pound weight in addition to his gear."

  "Okay, that lets out some. How about access to the chamber, you want that easy or hard?"

  "He doesn't expect to be found in there," Becker said, "so I guess it's got to be hard. He won't be anyplace where some random caver is going to walk in on him."

  "But he's still hauling the hundred-pound weight?"

  "Oh, yeah. He'll have that with him-going in."

  "Going in?"

  "He won't have to bring it back out."

  "Well, okay, I won't ask what he's dumping in there, but if I found out he's left his shit in any cave I'll kick his ass for him." Browne turned to Pegeen. "Sorry about that.

  "What?" Pegeen asked.

  "Language," he said.

  "Oh, shit. You can't say anything I haven't heard before. Look, if he's got this-weight-with him, that means he can go down easier than he can go up-on the way there. Coming back, I suppose he could go up all right."

  Browne lifted his eyebrows at Becker before continuing. "Okay, so we eliminate anything that goes up after entry."

  He shuffled through the charts with practiced ease.

  "We have them graded according to difficulty," Browne said, "but we don't have any code for taking something down that you don't bring back up. That's just not done, at all, period." He muttered to himself for a moment, riffling and shuffling the charts.

  "Here's one," he said, marking the plastic coating of the map with a grease pen. "And here, and here. You could probably do it here, but it's a pisser. On the other hand, no one's going to be wandering in by accident. This one's very tough, very difficult. Is this guy an expert?"

  "We don't really know," said Becker. "He might be.

  We have to assume he's good."

  "He'd have to be-at least he'd have to know what he was doing to get into any of these. You do want them tough, right? I mean, no tourists being led in there by a guide.

  Unless there's some chamber that no one's going to go to, but no, not with guides, I don't think so. Too much of a chance of being seen coming or going."

  "Well, here's ten, twelve, fourteen of them. They're all remote. They all have a big chamber, and the chamber is down or at least level when you're going to it. No one's going to be trying these things on the weekend, or if they do, you could hear them coming a long way away once you're in the chamber. Of course, we don't know if your man even knows they exist-half of these are pretty obscure. Some of them don't show any more on the surface than a breathing hole.":'A breathing hole?" 'Sure. A cave breathes, you know. If you go down very far you get a constant temperature, year 'round; it's colder than the air above ground in summer, warmer in the winter. When it's hot, you get this shaft of air sucking down through the hole like a vacuum cleaner. When it's cold aboveground, you get just the opposite, a steady breeze of warmer air.

  It's damned mysterious if you don't know what you're seeing, but if you find a breathing hole, you've got yourself a major cav
e at the other end of it."

  "Are they marked in any way or can someone just fall in?" Pegeen asked.

  "Most of them are marked, or boarded over, the ones on public land, anyway. On private land there's usually a damned billboard out by the nearest road so the owner can charge you a few bucks if they're what you call user friendly. But if they aren't big enough to walk into, you're not going to get any tourists, so some of them on private property are pretty much the way God made 'em. They may have had signs or markers once, but if they're out in the woods somewhere, the owner doesn't go there himself, the sign falls over, you know. Out of sight, out of mind. If your man doesn't know where they are, he's not going to find some of these."

  "We have to assume he knows about them," Becker said.

  "How come?"

  "He has an affinity for them. He likes them dark and tight.

  Browne laughed. "Lots of us like them that way. Sorry, Miss."

  "Some of us like them long and hard and pointing up" said Pegeen.

  'Hub?"

  "Caves, Mr. Browne. We all have our preferences."

  Browne looked to Becker uncertainly.

  "I'll need copies of these maps," Becker said.

  "You're a born diplomat, Haddad," Becker said when they were once more in the car. "You should have gone for the foreign service."

  "He's an asshole."

  "Probably only because you're around," Becker said.

  "Thanks a lot."

  "It's not your fault, it's his, but people are going to have a reaction to you, you might as well get used to it."

  "Do you find that it works the other way? Do women have a reaction to you?"

  Becker grinned. "That would be for you to say."

  She turned to him.

  "I'll speak for the male point of view," he continued.

  "You deal with the female."

  You know, you bastard, she thought. You know exactly how women react to you. Her ears were blazing.

  "There are no mines on that list," she said.

  "I don't think he'll try a mine again," Becker said.

  "Why not?"

  "He got caught. Five years late, but he still got caught.

  Those were early attempts. He's smart, he'll learn from his mistakes, he'll refine his methods. They always do, they keep adjusting until they- find what works best for them."

  "Then what?"

  "Then they speed up," he said. "When they think they're safe they just keep taking victim after victim."

  "What makes you think he's going into caves? Why not anyplace private?

  An old warehouse, a house in the country…"

  "For one thing, he told me where he was going."

  "He told you?"

  "in a manner of speaking. He goes where gravity takes him. Down. And he knows the use of ropes. He told me that, too. In some ways going into a cave is just like going down a mountain-plus you need rope work to get back up, if it's steep enough. He'll go for a cave, it's what he needs.

  Emotionally."

  "He's got an emotional need for caves?"

  "They have fantasies, that's their problem. They have fantasies so strong that they are compelled to enact them.

  And fantasies.have a context, an ambience, if I can say that-they don't take place on Main Street at noon, they exist in a specific environment which is nearly as important as what he does. Your fantasies take place somewhere, don't they?"

  "Mine?"

  "You do have fantasies, don't you, Haddad?"

  "No."

  "I see."

  "I don't." Unless you count thinking about older FBI agents walking in on me when I'm naked, things like that, she thought.

  "Okay. But a lot of us do. And where they happen matters."

  "Do you mean restraints, blindfolds, that kind of thing?" Pegeen asked after a pause, knowing she ought to let the subject drop but unable to let it go.

  "What?"

  "I don't have that kind of fantasy."

  "Okay," Becker said.

  "Do you?"

  "What?"

  "Never mind." Pegeen was blushing again.

  "No."

  "Oh."

  Becker watched her drive, Pegeen kept her eyes studiously on the road.

  "My fantasies are about people," he said finally. "Not equipment."

  "I see," she said. "That's normal. Probably."

  "I don't know about normal. It's common. I think most of us fantasize about different partners."

  Pegeen nodded and thrust her lower lip forward as if pondering the subject.

  "Movie stars, people like that?" she asked.

  'No, just people. Women I meet, women I know."

  Pegeen nodded again in a way that she hoped appeared noncommittal.

  "Uh-huh."

  "Not you, though," he said.

  "Not me?"

  "You don't fantasize like that?" he said.

  Pegeen felt herself in such a turmoil she didn't trust herself to speak.

  She had thought at first that he meant he didn't fantasize about her, and her stomach had seemed to fall away, and then she realized her mistake and was crushed by a sense of her own foolishness. He hadn't meant her, he wasn't thinking about her, the intensity of her awareness of him wasn't even communicating itself across the width of the front seat.

  When she trusted herself to breathe again, she steered the conversation back to business and vowed to herself to keep it there.

  "What makes you think Swann is even around here?"

  "They always come home, in a general sense. If an escaped come from New York ever had sense enough to hide out in New Mexico, we'd have a hell of a time finding him, but they seldom do. First place to look is their mother's house. He grew up around here, lived less than thirty miles from here when he committed the assault on his landlady."

  "What if he did? What if he took off for Portland?"

  "Then we'll have a hell of a time finding him. But they usually don't.

  People stick with what they know. He's comfortable here. He knows how people think, how they talk, the way they do things. Swann's in the region somewhere or he's a rarer breed than I think."

  "So what do we do now, go check out all these caves?"

  "No, we wait for Swann to tell us which ones to check.

  "How does he do that?"

  "By his choice of victim. When he takes her, he's going to go to ground pretty close by. He did that with both the girls in the coal mine; he'll do it again. You don't want to have to travel very far with a victim in any event, it's much too dangerous."

  "How will we know when he's got a victim, or if he does?"

  "Oh, there's no 'if' He'll take someone soon if he hasn't already, and I'm willing to bet he already has. He was in prison for three years, thinking of little else. He'll take someone fast. He'll need to before he bursts. When he does, we'll get a missing persons report. That's Swann's flaw, you know. He's not like most of them, who specialize in drifters, street urchins, migrant workers, prostitutes, people nobody would miss for a long time.

  He's so confident of where he takes them, so sure that he won't — be found there, that he doesn't care if there's a search for the victim.

  The two girls in the coal mine were connected to solid citizens. A hunt began for them almost immediately. Swann didn't care-he was already underground, doing whatever he does to them and apparently equipped to stay there for a long time. Judging by the amount of melted candle wax and old food tins they found in the mine, I'd say he was down there at least a week."

  Pegeen shuddered at the thought of that week for the girls. "The bastard." 'Bastard' hardly does it justice. Our problem is that there's a delay in reporting missing persons. In the case of adults, cops won't even register the report until the person is gone for three days. That means Swann has got that much of a head start whenever he strikes, and my guess is he doesn't need more than an hour or two at the most to cover his tracks."

  "So we wait for the missing persons report to
come in that meets our profile? There must be something more we can do while we're waiting."

  "Sure. We go to a sporting goods store and get what we're going to need."

  "Beyond that," Pegeen said.

  "I'm open to suggestions," Becker said.

  Pegeen carefully assessed his tone to determine if there was anything suggestive in it. Reluctantly, she decided that there was not.

  "I'll let you know if I think of anything," she said.

  Missing persons reports trickled in with the sluggishness that reflects the degree of importance attached to the matter by most police departments. The simple fact is that most missing persons are not miissing-they have simply chosen to depart without telling anyone.

  Husbands and fathers debunk to avoid responsibility; teens and young adults flee school or their parents; employees quit or go on five-day benders; friends prove not to be friendly enough to say goodbye. For every person reported missing who is actually the victim of foul play, there is a full year's worth of reports on people who simply wandered off in this most transient of countries. Police know this, even though the concerned or distraught friends and relatives cannot imagine the missing departing of his or her own steam. The person has, after all, abandoned them, and who could be so fed-up or stressed-out or done-in to want to go to that extreme?

  Even though the reports dribbled into the Nashville office slowly, they did so in great quantity. They didn't come quickly, but they kept coming, for this is a nation on the move and Becker had pinpointed a sizable portion of it for his search. The reports were fed into a computer which sorted them according to their conformity to Becker's victim profile.

  Becker and Pegeen reviewed the most likely cases themselves, adding human perception and intuition to the process.

  "Here's a likely one," she said, lifting one of the printout sheets. She and Becker sat at adjoining desks in the Nashville office, isolated and largely ignored by everyone else in the room.

  "Mandy Roesch, eighteen years old, Hazard, Kentucky.

  No problems at home, no boyfriend-probably not pregnant then-sang in the church choir, scheduled to start classes at Memphis State in the fall.

  Doesn't seem the type to have just taken a hike."