by Brian Harper
The technique was less effective this time. “What the hell happened” Philip yelled.
“Just a minor accident.”
Judy Danforth spoke up. “You mean it wasn’t a quake”
Quake. Too bad he hadn’t thought of that. “No, but it sure did feel like one, huh Some explosive charges of ours went off by mistake, is all.”
“Went off by mistake” Philip again. “Listen, we heard gunshots earlier. Now a bomb. What in God’s name is going on”
“Gunshots You must’ve imagined that.” The closet doorframe had been slightly warped, but the hinges were still intact, the padlock and chain undamaged. “Things have been real quiet here, except for this little incident.”
“Where’s Ally” The feverish cry was Barbara Kent’s. The closet doors thumped with hammering fists.
“Don’t fret, ma’am, your daughter’s fine.” He glanced at Gage, now at his side. “Chopped fine,” he whispered through the mask.
The kid giggled.
“Where is she Bring her here, let me see her, please, let me talk to her!”
Tyler figured a Ouija board would be necessary for that conversation. “We’ll, uh, collect her shortly.”
Collect. That was rich.
The woman’s screams and pleas continued unacknowledged as Tyler and Gage left the suite.
“Four-Adam-eight-one, come in. Eight-one …”
Cain listened to the crackling radio in the twilight dimness of the living room. He had moved in here with Lilith so they could escape the smoke and lift their masks.
“Ready” he asked tensely.
She answered in Trish Robinson’s voice. “That’s a roger.”
The mimicry was excellent.
Cain thumbed the transmit button and held the radio close to her face.
“Eight-one,” Lilith said, reciting the words he’d taught her. “Go.”
“Hey, eight-one”-Lou’s raspy voice was sweetened by relief-“it sure took long enough to raise you.”
Like trying to raise the dead, Cain thought.
“Sorry for the delay.” Lilith spoke briskly, her lisp gone. “We were code seven. Grabbing some chow.”
“Yeah, well, I kind of let that code seven slide. It’s been an hour.” Irritation was replacing relief. “Look, what’s your location”
“Hospers Road, west of the highway.” He’d told her to say that. There was a strip of fast-food franchises out that way, a likely place for two cops to scarf down a meal.
“Okay,” Lou said, “we got a ten-thirty-three at the Cracker Barrel on Johnson.” A ringing alarm, just as Cain had thought. “You back in service or what”
“Ten-four, we’ll take it.”
Lou signed off. “Twenty-one twenty-five.”
Cain lowered the radio, and Lilith gulped a breath.
“Think she bought the story” Her lisp had returned.
“Hell, yes.”
“How long before they figure it out”
“I’d guess at least twenty minutes before they realize the unit’s disappeared. After that, a half hour or more until they think of sending a car here.”
“That should be long enough. But … but I was okay I sounded like her”
“You were perfect.” He kissed her lightly on the mouth. “You were her.”
A shy smile. “I can talk like Trish anytime.”
“Even in bed”
“Sure.” She twirled her finger lazily against his neck. “Too bad we don’t have time to do it right now.”
“Sorry. Got to save myself for Mrs. Kent.”
“You bastard.”
But she shivered with a thrill of expectation, and he understood that she looked forward to having him inside her after he’d taken Barbara Kent-as if Barbara’s death would linger on him and excite her with its residue.
He knew her mind so well. And he did love her. Though occasionally he toyed with sweet things like Ally, they were of no lasting significance. He and Lilith were soul mates. Or perhaps, he sometimes thought, it was nearer to the truth to say they had no souls.
The idea did not displease him. A soul was a conscience, and conscience was weakness. He and Lilith were predators, sleek as sharks, primitive and deadly. Her lisp and her round angelic face were the camouflage that hid her gleaming fangs.
“Come on.” He clapped his hands. “We need to see the bodies.”
“And then … Barbara Kent”
Lilith stared up at him, a child anxious for the arrival of Santa Claus, terrified the magic sleigh would miss one special roof.
“Then Barbara,” Cain promised. “She’ll be joining her little girl real soon.”
44
Dead end.
Ally stopped short, her flashlight beaming a pale yellow oval on a smooth limestone wall. The spot of light wavered badly, tracing lopsided spirals, because the hand that held it was palsied with stress and exhaustion and fear.
Behind her, Trish whispered, “Damn.”
Her voice shook as badly as Ally’s hand, no doubt for the same reasons, but at least Ally could hear her now. The ringing in her ears had subsided to a distant, monotonous chime.
“Guess we’ve got to double back,” Ally said. “Try the other route.”
The cave system was a labyrinth. Several times she’d had to decide which branch of a fork to take, relying on the compass as her guide. At the last intersection she’d guessed wrong.
She began retracing her path, leading the way with the flash. Her bare feet, scraped bloody by the unforgiving stone floors, hurt with every step.
But she couldn’t complain. She had seen how badly Trish was limping. Must’ve sprained her left foot or ankle. If Trish could go on, so could she.
She didn’t ask what they would do if the alternate route was a dead end also. Or if the flashlight’s battery gave out. Or if they blundered onto a false floor-a common hazard in caves-and plunged into a lower gallery from which they could not emerge.
Lots of worries, lots of dangers, and no need to talk about any of them.
Besides, there was another question on her mind.
“So who was she” she asked without looking back.
“Who was who”
“Your friend. The one who used to go with you to the old farmhouse.”
In the beat of silence that followed. Ally knew she had inadvertently fingered a nerve.
“Her name,” Trish answered finally, “was Marta. Marta Palmer.”
More silence, unbroken save by their ragged breathing and the scuffle of shoes and bare feet on the uneven floor.
Ally’s flash ticked like a pendulum, lighting the narrow passageway, picking low stalactites out of the gloom. An elaborately ridged section of the gallery wall passed by, the limestone sculpted into flowing draperies, water and time conspiring to rival Michelangelo. Brown streaks of iron oxide colored the rocks, creating the surreal impression of cave paintings.
Frigid air, stirred by no breeze, wrapped her in its chill. Not too cold for her-but Trish in her wet clothes must be risking hypothermia.
Maybe it was best to keep her talking. Besides, Ally didn’t like the ominous quiet of this place.
“Is she dead” she asked. “Marta, I mean.”
This time she did look back, the flashlight swinging with her gaze. She saw Trish’s eyes widen in the glow.
“How … how’d you know” Trish whispered.
“The way you said her name. I just had a feeling.”
“You should be a psychologist.”
“Anthropology’s my thing.” Hesitation. “I guess maybe you don’t want to talk about this, huh”
“I can talk about it. It’s just that I usually don’t. See, she was only nine years old. And so was I.”
There was weariness in her voice, a deeper weariness than any born of injury or fatigue. This was the listlessness of old grief and remembered tears.
They arrived at the fork in the maze and started down the alternate corridor. Somewhere ahead was a so
ft, susurrant whisper. An aquifer, probably.
The caves were wetter here, the walls slimed with even more of the ubiquitous gray-green muck. Ally circled around a birdbath-sized pool, the murky water speckled with small darting things. Pupfish She’d read someplace that they lived in caves.
The pool receded, but the hiss of rushing water grew louder, and the chill deepened.
“Marta was your best friend,” Ally said tentatively.
“Did I make it that obvious”
She waited for a further response, some explanation. None came.
Irrationally she was hurt that Trish wouldn’t share this secret with her.
Get over it, she chided herself. It wasn’t as if Trish was her sister or something. She was under no obligation to bare her soul to some inquisitive teenager she hardly knew.
The hiss resolved itself into gurgles and splashes, echoing eerily. The aquifer was close.
Her flashlight probed the dark. In the fan of light, shapeless mounds of calcite rose up like volcanic crags out of a mist. Automatically she recalled their technical names: helictites, culuphilites.
They could grow big enough to block a passageway. This latest worry teased her briefly before she pushed it aside.
Two of the dripstones had fused to form a pillar, its hourglass figure oddly aesthetic, a touch of beauty in this dismal world. Past the pillar was a dark void and a hint of freshwater spray.
Ally stepped closer to the void, the flash revealing a gap in the limestone wall. Framed in the gap, a vertical shaft. She spared a second to peer downward.
Fifty feet below coursed a subterranean stream, flowing around smooth rocks, falling away in a foaming cataract that descended out of sight. Reflected glare from her flash dappled the mossy walls in a scintillant light show.
Despite pain, despite fear, she felt her mouth smile at the spectacle. She glanced at Trish. “Really something, huh”
Trish merely nodded, her gaze faraway.
Ally moved on, Trish following. The stream’s babble diminished to a static hiss that blended with the distant clanging in her ears.
Overhead, the gallery’s roof whitened with old deposits of guano. Bats had roosted here once but appeared to be long gone. She wondered if there was an egress nearby. Bats usually-
“We played together all the time.”
Trish’s voice was a whisper, but coming unexpectedly it seemed explosively loud in the settled stillness. Ally jumped a little.
Then she found a context for the remark. Trish and Marta. Two nine-year-old girls.”Did you” she asked as she caught her breath.
“Explored vacant lots, chased butterflies, got ourselves ice cream on the way home from school. Small-town stuff.”
“What town”
“Called Barnslow. Up in central California, in the mountains. Fifteen hundred people. Band concerts in the summer. A safe place, nobody was afraid-until Marta … until she …”
Trish took a breath and said it.
“She was murdered.”
Ally pursed her lips. The news ought to have been shocking, but she’d grown up in the ‘90s, when the violent death of children was taken for granted, as much a part of everyday life as headaches and traffic jams and inconvenient weather.
“I’m sorry,” she said pointlessly.
Trish didn’t seem to hear. “It was a stranger who did it. They never caught him. Just someone passing through. He …”
Her brief pause spoke of censorship, some hurtful fact suppressed.
“He must have picked her up while she was walking home from school. She had a jump rope with her, and I …”
Another glitch, another edit.
“They found her in the weeds, with the jump rope around her neck.”
“She was strangled,” Ally said, then winced. Brilliant deduction.
“Strangled, yeah.” Trish coughed. “And left in the weeds behind the farmhouse where we used to go, the farmhouse where we would sit on the porch and talk about boys and make up futures for ourselves. She was there in the weeds, sprawled in the weeds.”
That phrase, in the weeds, seemed to hold some significance for Trish, but Ally couldn’t fathom it and was afraid to pursue the issue.
“Is that why you became a cop” she asked instead.
Trish made a noise like a chuckle. “You guessed that too Yeah. I knew it was too late to save Marta. But there are other girls, and other strangers passing through, and … and bad things do happen-even in small towns.”
Ally knew there was more to the story, but Trish didn’t want to tell it. Maybe the memories were too hard to face.
New silence, deeper than before, trailed after them as they proceeded down the passage. Clutching limestone fingers snagged the ragged hem of Ally’s dress. She pulled free again and again.
Abruptly she realized the snags and scrapes were becoming more numerous, the groping fingers emboldened.
The passage was narrowing. The walls were closing in.
She looked over her shoulder, caught the same awareness in Trish’s eyes.
“Another dead end” Ally whispered.
Trish didn’t answer.
Swallowing fear, Ally crept forward, hunching lower as the ceiling kissed her hair. Hardly any room to maneuver now. Ahead, a still narrower space terminating in darkness.
Desperately she probed the shadows with her flash. The pale fan of light found a small round hole at the end of the passage, looming like a hungry mouth.
“I think there’s a tunnel,” she breathed, her throat tight.
“Big enough for us”
“Don’t know.”
On hands and knees now. Crawling to the tunnel’s mouth, if that was what it was.
She played the flashlight inside. The beam illuminated a gun-barrel tube winding into the dark.
The passage was barely wider than a doggie door, but probably navigable.
“Does it go in the right direction” Trish asked.
Ally checked the compass. “Maybe. We’re heading due north now, but the tunnel looks like it bends west.”
“We’ll have to take it.”
As if we’ve got a choice. Ally thought.
She eased herself horizontal and wriggled inside.
“Hope you don’t have claustrophobia,” she said, tasting dust from the crawlway’s chalky floor.
“Speaking in public-that’s my only phobia.”
“Funny,” Ally grunted, worming forward. “Mine too.”
Or it had been, anyway. After tonight she expected to face a dazzling profusion of new fears, unhealed psychic wounds that would bleed into her dreams and make them nightmares.
Was Marta Palmer a wound in Trish’s mind, her dreams Ally thought so.
There were some things you could never escape from, it appeared. Even adulthood wouldn’t rescue you. Even college wouldn’t take you far enough away.
She crawled on, deeper into the dark.
45
Activating his flash, Tyler followed Gage into the cellar.
The concrete staircase, though cracked and chipped, was intact. Ragged stumps were all that was left of the banister. The wall bristled with bundled spikes of wood splinters, sharp as porcupine quills-bits of the railing driven into the hairline fissures between the cinder blocks by the sheer force of the blast.
Below lay hell in miniature.
Flashlight beams played over a waste of rubble, the funneled light fanning through a sooty mist. Spot fires glimmered in dark corners. At the rear of the cellar, water sheeted down from a broken plumbing pipe.
Cain and Lilith combed the wreckage, shadow figures amid the smoke.
Ghosts, Tyler thought with an irrational chill. Demons.
“Hey, boss,” he called, feeling a sudden need for noise in this silenced place. “Next time you kill somebody, could you make a more serious effort”
Cain glanced up at him. His eyes glinted through slits in the ski mask. “They did go out with a bang, didn’t they”
&nb
sp; Tyler nodded. “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.”
Eyes burning, he reached the bottom of the stairs. Lilith’s extinguisher hissed, the hose a lashing snake, as she smothered a smoldering pile of debris.
With his flash Tyler found the blast crater in the center of the room. At the deepest point, a great slab of the concrete foundation had been blown free, exposing raw bedrock like an open wound.
So much for percussion. As for fragmentation …
He read that story in the shrapnel glittering around him, the thousand shards of cutlery strewn on the floor and studding the wreckage.
The destruction was total. Those two charming ladies must have been killed a hundred times over.
So where were they
Panning the cellar with his flash, he saw no splash of maroon, no body parts, not even a forlorn shoe or a scrap of the cop’s uniform.
He beamed his flashlight at the crater again. Maybe the two of them had been standing right over the bomb when it blew. Maybe they’d been atomized-nothing left but dust.
Was that possible He didn’t think so.
The beam wavered, searching the floor, and found a second hole, this one at the lip of the blast crater.
But this hole hadn’t been made by an explosion.
It was round, perfectly round.
“Cain.”
The way Tyler said it, low and tense, made the older man turn instantly in his direction.
Cain’s gaze followed the beam of Tyler’s flash. He saw the hole, made a noise. A slow shuddering exhalation like a death rattle.
“Christ …”
Then he was crossing the room, circling the crater, peering into the smaller hole. Tyler joined him.
It was a well. A dry well, the drain uncovered, a sinkhole dropping into subterranean darkness.
“They got away.” Cain stripped off his mask, heedless of smoke and dust. Fury purpled his face. “Robinson and the kid-they got away.”
46
Flat on her belly, working by feel in the absolute dark, Trish wriggled along a narrow tubular crawlway.
Ally was somewhere ahead, but the glow of her flashlight had vanished when the girl disappeared around a bend. Hampered by the handcuffs, Trish was finding it difficult to keep up.
By slow degrees she advanced, head hunched tortoiselike between her shoulders to avoid limestone overhangs. The walls and ceiling were coffin-close. Despite what she’d told Ally, she felt stirrings of claustrophobia.
