by Steven James
Okay, that was unexpected.
Well, knowing Mia, maybe not so unexpected after all.
Ty’s buddies backed away a couple steps, and the looks on their faces told Daniel that Mia and Kyle were probably going to be just fine.
“Go,” Kyle urged Daniel. “Find her.”
The killer has Nicole.
You have to stop him.
But as he turned toward the car, Ty came at him. He swiped the blade and Daniel leapt to the side, but it grazed his left arm, leaving a narrow red slash behind. Not deep; he’d be alright, but it was enough to get Daniel’s attention. At school and out on the road near Nicole’s house, he’d held back from punching Ty.
Now he broke his streak.
He swung hard, left-handed, to protect his throwing hand, connected against the side of Ty’s jaw, and sent him spinning around, off balance, but it took him only a moment to recover. He came at Daniel again with the knife.
But Daniel balled up his fists and swung them simultaneously at Ty’s hand, hitting it the way his dad had taught him to do to knock a knife away from someone. By hitting the nerve endings, the hand involuntarily opens. And that was what happened—the knife went spinning across the pavement.
While Ty was momentarily stunned, Daniel landed another punch, this time an uppercut that put Ty on the ground. Hard.
Go. Find Nicole.
“Get going!” Kyle retrieved the knife before Ty could get to it. “We’ll be alright.”
Daniel jumped into the car and fired up the engine.
To get around the SUV blocking the road he had to drive half on the shoulder and smack the vehicle’s side panel to ram it out of the way, so he did. He didn’t care.
Right now he needed to get to the cave.
Ty leapt up and hollered at him about the SUV, even chased him for a little ways.
Well, too bad.
Daniel phoned his dad and told him where Kyle and Mia were and that he needed to get over there.
“Are you with them?”
He didn’t reply, just ended the call.
River Drive wasn’t far from school, his dad could be there in a couple minutes, and Kyle and Mia could take care of themselves until then.
His dad called back. Daniel didn’t answer.
Their house was on the way to Wolf Cave. If Nicole and her kidnapper were inside, Daniel realized he would need a flashlight to get to her. He swung by home, rushed inside, grabbed his headlamp and caving gear, then tore out of the driveway, aimed the car east, and sped toward Wolf Cave.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-ONE
There was no official parking area near the cave, just a gravel pull-off near the trailhead.
As Daniel neared it, he could see that a car he didn’t recognize was already there.
It was a wild cave and you had to know what you were doing to make your way through it. No overhead lights, no paved walkways, nothing like that.
In addition to tight crawl spaces and loose boulders, there were pits and drop-offs to avoid—one shaft that plunged more than 120 feet. The kids called it Devil’s Throat. An underground stream snaked through the west end of the cave. With the recent rains they’d had, it might have risen, might be swift.
It was not a gentle cave.
It was an angry cave.
He parked.
And looked in the window of the other car. Yes. Dog hair all over the black cloth seats. He’d seen this car at the funeral, had momentarily taken note of it, but only now remembered. Only now made the connection.
Trevor was in the car. That’s what Emily had said.
This guy put him in here while he was with Emily. He might not have known she would bring her dog along with her out to the lake. He needed to get her alone.
Though the text from Nicole’s phone had said to come alone, Daniel knew he would need his dad eventually. It would still take him a while to get here, so he texted him his location, then grabbed his pack of caving gear.
From the road it was a ten-minute walk to the cave.
Daniel did not walk.
As he sprinted through the woods he tried to thread everything together.
There were flowers on Emily’s and Grace McKinney’s graves.
But you don’t know Mr. McKinney put them there.
Stacy said it isn’t who you think it is.
But Stacy wasn’t real, was only a figment of his imagination, an invention of his subconscious, so somewhere his mind held the answer. He needed to find that place, root it out, unriddle what he already knew.
The girls died on game nights. It has to be someone who was in those towns on those nights.
McKinney?
Maybe.
He neared the cave.
There was no game two weeks ago on the night Emily disappeared. So maybe . . .
He came to Wolf Cave’s entrance and slowed to a stop.
The ground opened up in a tumbledown hole that descended quickly into thick darkness.
As he stood beside it trying to calm his breathing, he felt a breeze coming from the entrance, as if the earth were exhaling around him.
He knew it was from currents of air passing through the cave and meeting with the warmer air out here in the sun, but still, it gave the impression that the cave was some great living beast buried in the hillside, breathing on him.
Daniel put on his headlamp and started his descent.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-TWO
The path down was muddy and strewn with moss-covered rocks, making the trek into the darkness even more slippery and treacherous than it appeared.
Despite carefully watching his footing, he slipped twice as he scrambled into the deepening shadows of the first room of the cave.
The sunlight bleeding down through the entrance was no longer warm, but was overpowered by the cave’s cool interior.
Dank. Damp.
Smelling of lichen and mold.
From being in here before, he knew there were three main sections to the cave, but there were also numerous side tunnels that fingered off, some supposedly making their way all the way down to the underground river that fed into Lake Algonquin.
Who is it? Who has her?
Where would she be?
The photos in Mr. McKinney’s hallway showed two different chambers, both of which Daniel had recognized.
The first was close, just to the left.
To get there he needed to pass through a relatively small room—only about the size of two minivans. A narrow passageway on the other side of it led to one of the cave’s largest caverns, a sweeping, expansive room more than eighty feet long and fifty feet wide.
Daniel made his way through the small room into the larger one.
Massive stalagmites and stalactites rose from the cave’s floor or hung thick and heavy from the ceiling. A few columns reached all the way to the roof of the cave from stalagmites and stalactites that had met in the middle sometime in the distant past.
Someone had been in here burning candles on one of the boulders, and melted wax had oozed down the sides of the rock and cooled, making it look like some kind of artificial formation itself.
“I’m here,” Daniel called. No response save the echo of his own voice coming back to him. “I came alone!”
Alone . . . Alone . . . Alone . . . the cave replied.
“Where is she?” The words reverberated eerily through the cavern. “I know you’re in here.”
In here . . . In here . . . In here . . .
When the echoes faded away, the only sounds that remained were the rasp of his quickened breathing, the dribble of water seeping from the ceiling, and the rushing gurgle of the stream as it coursed through the cavern nearby and then disappeared into the unmapped portions of the cave.
Alright, it didn’t loo
k like they were here. Maybe the other room from the photos.
To get there, Daniel had to slide sideways through a series of tight squeezes that slanted deeper into the earth.
If her kidnapper had brought Nicole down here, it would not be good. This was the most dangerous part of the cave, the one that ended at Devil’s Throat.
Daniel had rappelled into it twice with his dad. The last time they’d been down there they’d discovered the carcass of a raccoon at the bottom. It seemed unlikely for an animal to have found its way that far down the cave in the dark, and he’d wondered if someone had brought it in after it was dead and thrown it down.
The carcass was covered with spongy-looking white mold. It was a little hard to identify the type of animal because of the force of impact when it had landed on the boulder-covered bottom.
He adjusted his headlamp and worked his way through the passageway.
A line of thin stalactites about a foot long hung from the ceiling. No large formations in here.
The sound of the stream became fainter and fainter as he moved away from it through the cave.
He got on his hands and knees and edged forward through a small crawl hole. From here it wasn’t far to the chamber that held Devil’s Throat. Just another fifty feet or so.
Daniel sorted through what he knew, trying to make sense of everything that’d happened since he arrived at the church for Emily’s funeral.
The girls in the photos were wearing necklaces, all wearing the necklaces with the heart-shaped lockets.
Maybe you saw their photos in the news after they died, and the pictures, just like the reference to Trevor, lodged in your mind and only jarred loose when you heard about Emily’s death.
Maybe . . .
They say our brains record everything, and Daniel’s had always been able to notice things, to calculate things, that no one else seemed to be able to do—
That’s why Emily held up the necklace for you at the game. Because you already knew it was the key to this.
She did it at a football game.
Then there was the photo of his offensive coordinator near that girl who’d died.
He thought of the photos of the football games.
Who would have been there from your school?
The team. The coaches.
Roosevelt High.
Coulee High.
The press photos of the girls—
Who could have gotten access to your things in the locker room?
Who could have seen you and Kyle enter Mr. McKinney’s house while all the teachers were in their parent meetings at school?
The teachers were there. Yes, but not—
Oh.
Yes.
Daniel knew who it was.
He was at the prom. He could have seen you leave with Nicole.
He’s around students all the time. He could hear which kids like each other. He could have heard about Emily liking Kyle.
He can enter and leave schools without anyone being suspicious.
Of course.
And he had to be at the games. It was his job.
Daniel shone his light forward.
He was almost to the cavern that held Devil’s Throat.
Football.
Yes, the yearbooks, the football games, the photos all pointed to one person.
“I’m here,” Daniel shouted as he reached the edge of the crawl hole. “I know who you are!”
“Oh, really?” the man shouted.
Really? . . . Really? . . . Really? . . . came the echoed reply. It was distorted by the acoustics of the cave, making it impossible to tell who was speaking.
But that didn’t matter to Daniel.
He already knew who was waiting for him in that cavern.
Yes, his offensive coordinator, Coach Jostens, had been there at those games.
But it wasn’t him.
It was the man who’d photographed him beside that Roosevelt High girl who’d died.
“Yes, I do,” he yelled, “and you better not hurt her, Mr. Ackerman!”
CHAPTER
SIXTY-THREE
“Come out where I can see you,” the photographer called.
Daniel entered the chamber, stood up, and directed his light toward the far end of the cavern.
Quickly, in the breadth of a moment, he took everything in.
The room swept before him: twenty feet wide, but seventy feet long. It contained no gentle, sloping formations, only jagged boulders and rough fall-down.
Devil’s Throat lay at the far end and slit through the floor of the cave like an uneven gaping wound. It spanned the cavern and yawned open four yards wide.
A natural outcropping stretched across the other side, ten feet higher than the floor Daniel was standing on. It was just wide enough for five people to stand on, shoulder-to-shoulder. A few large boulders lay on top of it.
Running along the right side of Devil’s Throat was a narrow rock shelf just large enough to walk on that allowed cavers to traverse around the yawning pit toward the higher ledge. Someone had tied a thick rope off one of the boulders on it so people could access that level of the cave if they dared.
The rope had knots every foot or so to help climbers keep from slipping down and falling into the shaft. It was precarious and dangerous. Daniel had been up there twice.
At the far edge of the saber of light cast from his headlamp, Daniel saw Nicole and Ackerman standing on that rock platform on the other side of Devil’s Throat. The photographer was behind her, holding her fast.
Daniel called out, “Nicole! Are you okay?”
“Yeah! Get out of here, Daniel. He wants you to—”
Ackerman interrupted her: “Daniel, come here.”
“Leave, he wants—” Nicole began.
He grabbed her hair with one hand and yanked. “Quiet now.”
“Ow!”
“Stop it!” Daniel yelled.
Ackerman wore a headlamp, Nicole did not. It would have been a good way to make sure she didn’t run off while he was bringing her down here. Without a light she would’ve been lost in complete and total darkness if she’d tried to get away.
Daniel crossed the room toward them, trying to think of a way to save her.
Come on, man, think! How can you do this? You need to get her away from him!
“You called my name before you came in here,” Ackerman said. “How did you know it was me?”
“The press photos that ran in the newspaper articles about the dead girls: in the pictures, the girls were all wearing the same-style necklace. That couldn’t be a coincidence. You’re the one who took the photos. You’re the only one who’d know they would have them on. You chose to submit those photos to the papers. You found a way to give them the necklaces, and whoever killed those girls had to have been at our away games. You went to take pictures for the newspaper.”
Daniel arrived at the edge of Devil’s Throat.
“That’s not enough,” Ackerman said.
“There was a picture in Mr. McKinney’s hallway of the two of you in here. The key is the cell phones—someone put them in his closet. He’s your friend, you cave with him. You planted the phones—maybe you were in there because you know him, maybe you snuck in through the unlocked cellar—I don’t know. Your home studio is right there in the neighborhood. Is that it? Is that how you saw us enter Mr. McKinney’s house?”
“Very good.”
“Then what? Did you stop by his place that night and see that the phones were gone?”
“Nicely done. Yes. That’s when I knew it was time to end this.”
“Daniel, go—” Nicole hollered.
“Quiet!” Ackerman cut her off again. He moved her closer to the edge of the outcropping.
“Don’t!” Daniel yelled.
“You chose girls from the schools Mr. McKinney taught at on purpose, targeted ones he had in class back when he was a teacher there,” Daniel said. “You’ve been planning this, setting him up for years. Why?”
“To make sure there were arrows that pointed somewhere other than at me.”
Why is he telling you this? That can’t be good. He’s not going to let you walk out of here alive.
“But why did you plant the cell phones now, this week?”
“I heard your dad was looking into Emily’s death a little more closely. That was reason enough.”
Daniel dropped his pack of equipment. “Were there more than those three girls?”
“Just those. But there will be. Once you start”—he took a deep, satisfied breath—“it’s very hard to stop. Now—”
“But why?” Daniel’s voice was strained as he thought of the appalling crimes Ackerman had committed. “Why did you kill them?”
“The thrill. The challenge. The adrenaline—you must know what that’s like from your games. It can be addicting, can’t it? Now, let’s get this over with. Do you see that rock shelf on your right?”
Daniel glanced toward it.
Waist-high. Not very large.
Nicole’s cell phone sat among a cluster of rocks. The smallest was softball-sized, the rest were as big as bowling balls.
“What about Mrs. McKinney, did you kill her too?” Daniel said.
“That was actually an accident. That’s why I chose drowning for Emily. To wrap it all up in a sweet little bow. Enough talking. Now, toss your phone down the shaft.”
There were a few questions Daniel still had, but Ackerman seemed to have thought things through pretty well, and right now Daniel realized he needed to focus completely on rescuing Nicole and not worry about tying all the remaining threads together.
“Throw it down,” Ackerman repeated.
Daniel tossed his phone into Devil’s Throat.
It clattered against the walls, then, after what seemed like an impossibly long time, it shattered to pieces with a sharp crack! on the bottom of the shaft.