by Steven James
I took a stab at it. “Kuznetsov?”
“Yeah. After he left the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology near Novosibirsk, Russia, his last known whereabouts was in Almaty, Kazakhstan.”
“The plot thickens.”
“It always does. One other thing: we traced a call to a pilot who has past ties to Blake. Went to do a knock and talk. The guy’s not home. His wife says he’s fishing in New Hampshire, but couldn’t tell us where.”
“And his plane?”
“Gone from Teterboro. We’re monitoring flight departures and arrivals at airports nationwide. Municipals. Everything. If he did take off with Blake and we catch up with him, I might have to fly out myself and have a little sit-down with the man. Eighty thousand miles so far this year, what’s one more trip? Anyway . . . It looks like we’re about to get started here again in the conference room. I should probably go in a sec. Why’d you leave a message earlier for me to call you back?”
“Man, I need some advice.”
“On?”
I gave him a quick rundown of the situation with Christie. “She’s upset and I’m afraid I might’ve had something to do with it.”
“You think?”
“Well—”
“Did you apologize?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Finding nothing in the rest of the locker area, I went to the shower area and began to systematically pass my light across the wall, eliminating one tiled-off portion at a time.
No private shower stalls here, just that traumatic group showering area that all the guys used to dread when I was in school.
“So,” he said, “Is it ‘yeah’ or ‘yes’?”
“What’s the difference?”
If the guy did escape through here, there has to be an access door somewhere.
“‘Yeah’ means you’re getting a little defensive with me. ‘Yes’ means you’re still open to admitting that you’ve been a dick.”
“Then ‘yes.’”
“Good to know.”
“But I haven’t been a dick.”
“That’s still to be determined.”
All four of the shower area’s metal drains and all but one showerhead were gone.
“When I was growing up,” Ralph said, “Mama used to tell us that the two most important things you can say to someone are ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I love you.’ But you have to say ’em in the right order or they won’t do any good.”
I examined the grooves between the tiles on the walls. In some cases, they appeared deep enough to have hidden a door of some type.
That had potential.
“The right order?” I ran my hand along the wall, feeling for any trip levers or sliding tiles. “I’m not sure I know what you mean, Ralph.”
“If you say, ‘I’m sorry. I love you,’ that’s good. The apology, then the declaration of undying devotion. But if you say, ‘I love you. I’m sorry,’ that’s bad. People use the first way to try to save a relationship, the second way when they’re about to end one.”
“Hmm.” I wasn’t completely sure I agreed with Ralph’s mama, but I could at least see where she was coming from.
“Did you tell Christie you love her?” he asked.
“Not in so many words.”
“Which words then?”
“Well . . . I guess, ‘You too.’”
“Ouch. That’s no good. Do you love her, Pat?”
“I think so.”
“Bro—you did not tell her that, did you? That you think you love her?”
“No. Of course not.”
“How long have you two been together? Since April, right?”
“We met at the end of April, had our first date on the second of May.”
“Well, there you go.”
“There I go?”
“Think like a woman, Pat. What’s today?”
“August second. Ah. Okay, I get it. That’s three months.”
“You forgot your anniversary.”
“But Christie and I aren’t—”
“Yeah, well, maybe she thinks you are. Or she wants you to be.”
I let that sink in. “I see.”
“Are you messing with me here or are you really this ignorant when it comes to women?”
“Not messing.”
“I was afraid of that.”
There’s nothing here, Pat. No bomb shelter. This isn’t how he fled the school.
“Doesn’t that seem a bit petty of her, though?” I said.
“And that right there is something only a guy who’s being a dick would ask. The correct question is, ‘How do I salvage things from here?’”
“How do I salvage things from here?”
“That’s better. The next time you see Christie, you look her in the eye and tell her you’re sorry and that you love her, in that order. And don’t forget to pause.”
“Pause? Oh—so I’m not saying that I’m sorry I love her.”
“Lead with ‘I’m sorry,’ end with ‘I love you.’ Trust me. And don’t put it off. Christie’s special. You’re not gonna do any better. You don’t want to lose her.”
“Agreed.”
You should tell him about Sharyn.
No, that wouldn’t solve anything. It would just complicate matters even more.
“Promise me you’ll do it,” Ralph said.
“I will.”
“Promise.”
“I promise. ‘I’m sorry.’ Pause. ‘I love you.’”
“Alright. By the way, just so you know, DeYoung might be calling you this afternoon to ask about why you’re wanting to meet with Maria from OPR.”
“Thanks for the heads-up. And for the relationship advice.”
“Thank my mama.”
He hung up, and I was ready to call the search for the bomb shelter quits and just get to the briefing, when I glanced back at that sole remaining showerhead.
An incongruity.
Why is that still here? Why didn’t the scrappers take that one too?
I pocketed my phone and felt around the showerhead, tried twisting it and tilting it sideways, but it didn’t move.
However, when I pulled down on it as if it were a lever, I found what I was looking for.
With a faint but audible click, and then the sound of heavy gears grinding against each other, the tiling parted and an entrance just over a meter wide and slightly shorter than me appeared.
I angled the Maglite into the darkness, revealing a narrow tunnel that sloped down beneath the gym.
Since this place had been designed to withstand a bomb, the door leading into the passageway was reinforced. Considering the goal the builders had, I imagined that the seal would’ve also been airtight. The concrete walls certainly did look thick enough to repel—or contain—bomb blasts.
The darkness before me seemed somehow starker and more foreboding than the darkness around me did, almost like something solid that I needed to crack open. So, etching it aside with my light, I stepped into the cramped opening and started down the tunnel.
35
Someone had been through here recently.
I could tell because, although a few cobwebs hung in torn, thready clumps from the corners of the ceiling and the wall to my right, the walkway before me was clear of them.
I wasn’t able to make out any sole impressions on the concrete floor.
The farther down I went, the more the temperature dropped, just like it would have if I’d been descending into a cave.
Cool.
Damp.
Mildew in the air.
After about twenty meters, the pathway leveled off and opened into a wide, low-ceilinged bomb shelter that looked large enough to hold several hundred peop
le during an air raid.
Only one other tunnel was present, extending from the far end, about thirty meters away. As I moved toward it, I had to hunch over to avoid scraping my head on the coarse concrete ceiling.
Dust-covered boxes and crates, as well as eighteen large cylindrical drums—some of medical supplies, others of MREs—were shoved against one wall, surrounded by stacks of canned soup, fruit, and beans.
I entered the mouth of the second tunnel, which, for some reason, was nearly two meters wide and tall enough for me to stand in.
I’d learned earlier that some of the tunnels connected to cellars throughout the city, and I wondered where this one would emerge.
I walked for a few minutes through the muzzled stillness of the tunnel and eventually saw something flat and about a foot high on the ground at the far edge of my flashlight’s beam.
It only took three more steps for me to realize that it was a mattress and was positioned at a place where the passageway widened slightly, allowing space for an old wooden crate on one side of it, and four of those supply drums from the bomb shelter on the other.
The crate supported a large plastic water jug that would’ve looked a lot more at home in an office break room than it did here.
The mattress was squalid and filthy and topped with a snarl of ratty blankets.
Beside it, a lump of indistinguishable clothes bulged like a cancerous growth from the floor of the tunnel.
A scattering of discarded, open cans of food—some spewing contents threaded with sinewy mold—lay strewn between me and the makeshift living quarters.
When I tapped one of the cans aside with my foot, two cockroaches scuttled out. One hurried away from me, but the other came straight at me.
Instinct took over, and with my heel, I ended that roach’s chances of surviving a nuclear holocaust. Christie’s daughter, who is a dedicated vegan and a PETA member, would have been appalled.
Me, not so much.
I rubbed the roach’s remains off the bottom of my shoe, and as I neared the mattress I thought I heard a distant click.
I paused.
Listened.
Nothing except for the metronomic dribble-drip of water somewhere out of sight.
Dribble.
Drip.
Targeting my light before me, I saw that I was still alone.
A tower of nineteen books stood balanced in a precise stack beside the mattress.
Each had its unique, uniformly handwritten Dewey Decimal numbers on the spine, and I figured it was likely they’d been brought down here from the library of the school above me.
Someone was a fan of the classics: Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, Sister Carrie, and more.
Not titles that topped my list.
I go for stories with a little more suspense and a lot more testosterone.
And a twist.
I always like a good twist right there at the end.
The books must have become waterlogged at some point, or the constant humidity down here had taken its toll, because every one of them was swollen and oddly deformed.
A rectangular piece of paneling lay across the four drums, forming a makeshift table that held a dozen burned-out votive candles surrounding a painting of Jesus hanging on the cross. A clutter of trash was carefully arranged emanating out from the painting like rays from the sun.
An altar.
Someone had made an altar down here.
Together, the mattress and altar swallowed up nearly the entire width of the tunnel so that it would be tough to pass the living area without walking across the mattress.
I recalled an exchange from a book I’d read when I was in college. I wasn’t sure of the author, or even the book’s title, but three lines of dialogue had stuck with me over the years:
“I keep my idols in a closet.”
“I keep mine on a pedestal.”
“Which of us is the greater sinner?”
I guess we all offer our ultimate devotion and affection to something, whether it’s a relic, an actual idol, a Porsche, a graduate degree, or the image of that person staring back at us from the mirror.
All of us have our gods, even the people who don’t believe God exists.
Sharyn had mentioned that the family who’d lived in the house where Jamika was found had a painting of Jesus on the master bedroom wall.
This one looked to be about the right size.
I held my hand beside it, compared it to the photo on my phone—the one that I’d taken in that room down the block on Runyon Street.
Yes.
Same size.
But that’s not what caught my attention the most.
Now I saw that Christ’s face had been scratched away, and a snipped-out photo of a girl had been glued in its place. A few errant scratch marks were still visible, emanating from beneath the photo.
My heartbeat caught, then raced forward immediately into a tight beat-thumping-beat-thumping-beat when I recognized who it was.
Sharyn.
Back when she was a girl.
When we were dating, she’d always underplayed her past life as a movie star. In fact, we’d been together for nearly two months before she even told me that she was Scarlett Farrow.
I was never a big film buff and hadn’t seen the movies she’d been in, but I knew this photo. It was one of the most famous pictures of her from that time, an iconic photograph of her glancing uneasily to the side as if she was aware of danger approaching. It’d been used in the promotion for the film she was best known for, the one that she was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress in, a thriller named Sanctuary.
At the time, she was one of the youngest stars ever to be nominated for an Oscar.
And here, someone had clipped out her photo and inserted it over the place where Jesus’s face would’ve been as he hung dying on the crucifixion hill.
Scarlett Farrow, when she was only ten years old.
Sharyn Weist, when she was still Scarlett Farrow.
Facts might be open to interpretation, but context does not lie. If nothing else, this photo revealed a connection between her and whoever had pasted it onto that picture. I couldn’t accept that her picture was here simply by coincidence.
Across the tunnel, a grimy mirror faced the altar, a lightning bolt–shaped crack splitting it through the middle.
At the base of the painting, between two of the rays of trash, lay a crumpled photo.
A young man and a boy stood in a driveway beside a palm tree–lined street. The older of the two looked maybe seventeen or eighteen and had his hand resting on the slender shoulder of the smaller boy, who might’ve been five or six. The iconic hillside HOLLYWOOD sign peered across Tinseltown from behind them.
The colors of the photograph were faded with the years, and the cars parked along the idyllic drive reminded me of the car my parents used to drive when I was a boy growing up in Wisconsin. I pegged the photo at maybe a quarter century old.
Both boys were wearing karate uniforms—the older of the two with a black belt sashed around his waist; the younger boy’s belt was white.
Martial arts?
The man you fought in the attic?
Don’t get ahead of yourself, Pat.
I studied the other items on the altar.
The trash contained the head of a doll, an Atari game cartridge, and a clown’s yellow wig.
Which was next to a broken Joan Baez album.
And the cap of a laundry detergent bottle.
Oh.
Wait.
The head of a doll? It sure looked like it matched the doll that was in the master bedroom where Jamika was found.
Also, the photos from the first four crime scenes showed objects that related to the rest of these items: Atari games, record albums, dete
rgent bottles, costumes.
This isn’t just trash.
Is he leaving clues at the scenes—or is he taking mementos?
I glanced down and saw a pile of black cloth that had been deposited on the ground beside my foot. Up until now the shadow of the altar had hidden it well, but from this angle it was visible.
Prodding it with my foot, I realized it was a hoodie.
I knelt and examined it more carefully and found four drawstrings rather than two.
Not just one hoodie.
Two of them.
If there were two people, that could explain how the suspect got away from the gym after that fall—he might’ve had help.
Stop assuming, Pat. These could be from the same person. Analyze and evaluate, don’t guess and speculate.
Some hoodies have knotted-off ends on the shoelace string that’s used to tighten the hood. These had plastic-tipped ends like most shoelaces.
And that might turn out to be a lot more helpful.
Crouching beside the hoodies, I snapped several photos of them, then angled the phone to photograph the altar.
However, this time when the flash went off and illuminated the tunnel around me, it revealed something else.
A man.
Standing less than four meters away, just on the other side of the mattress.
36
I whipped the flashlight up at him.
Dirty beard, wild hair, torn clothes.
He was staring directly at me but was turned slightly to the side so that only one of his hands was visible.
He gave a labored, phlegmy cough and shambled forward a step.
“Stop.” I rose to my feet. “Sir, I need you to stay where you are.”
He pointed at the mattress. “My bed.” His voice had that quavery, tenuous feel that so often follows years of substance abuse. “Get away from my beeeeeed.”
“I’m an FBI agent. I’m not here to hurt you. Show me your hands. Both of them.”
He revealed a lighter in the one hand I could see. On the side of it, even from here, I could make out the imprint of the caduceus, the intertwined snakes curling up a rod, the symbol that’s often used in the medical profession.