With the door open, a dank, musty stench rolled over her. Enough light now filtered into the cell for her to see it was an inhospitable place. Lined with the same bricks as the main chamber, the small cell also had a curved ceiling, which limited the space in which an occupant might stand. Though the sides of the cell were shrouded in darkness, she could see on her right the edge of an iron bed with a stained mattress. On the floor to her left, nearly lost in the shadow, she saw the toilet facilities: a dented galvanized bucket and a roll of moisture-rippled toilet paper. She thought it an inhuman place to keep someone until she remembered that this cell or one of the other four had once held Vernon Odessa. Then it seemed far too good for him.
She turned to examine the cell door and found that, like the main door, there was no keyhole on the inside. She went around and checked the tray pass-through, which was covered by a mesh grid fitted with a latch on its upper edge and hinges on the lower. With the grid locked in place, it would be impossible for an occupant to reach through the slit. She looked up at the keyhole. Even if the occupant had the key, no one possessed an arm long enough to reach the keyhole through the pass-through.
Wondering if the cell might contain a hidden escape passage, she went inside and started checking the walls for loose bricks.
Eight minutes later, she came back into the staging room, confident the cell she’d just examined was structurally sound. But maybe that wasn’t the one Odessa had been in. She didn’t want to do it, but all the others would have to be examined, too.
She found each of the other cells empty, unlocked, and without a working light. Despite the lack of decent illumination, her efficiency at examining the cells improved as she went along, so she finished the entire job in less than thirty minutes. All the cells were equally sound.
Then how the hell did Odessa escape?
Even if he had somehow stolen the keys necessary to unlock his cell door and then the main door, there was no keyhole on the inside of either door.
And . . .
Thinking about how the unlocked cell doors opened without the key she’d found on the trestle table, she left the cellblock and shoved the main door closed. Just as she’d now suspected, that door didn’t lock automatically either. It had to be done with the key.
This seemed to negate the possibility that whoever had locked Odessa up had forgotten to lock both doors. If that’s what had happened, how did Odessa lock himself back in after the murder?
Or maybe he didn’t.
If the person who put him in seclusion had forgotten to lock the doors and had discovered the mistake in the morning, wouldn’t it be best to just keep quiet about it? Especially since Odessa was suspected of committing a murder that night. Whoever might have forgotten to lock him in could probably be charged with criminal negligence or some other crime.
But she still had no explanation for why Odessa would come back to the hospital after the murder.
Deciding to worry about that detail later, Marti put the cell key back on the trestle table where she’d found it. Returning to the hall, she closed the big door, locked it, and hung that key on its nail.
Her thoughts then turned to how Odessa might have gotten out of the building once he left the basement. All the security doors leading from the patient wings to the administrative part of the hospital were kept locked. And all the exterior doors were likewise to be locked after five o’clock . . . so how . . . ?
As she crossed the basement’s concrete floor on her way to the stairwell, she saw through the gloom another metal door on her right. Approaching it, she saw that this one was secured with a hasp locked in place with a padlock.
Remembering something Trina Estes had said about the hospital on her first day, Marti wanted very much to see what was on the other side of this door. But a search of the surrounding walls revealed no key.
Now what?
In a clear indication of how badly she wanted that door open, she decided she needed a pair of bolt cutters. But where could she get them? There was probably nothing open this late locally that sold hardware.
Clay . . . He might own a pair. Then she remembered seeing a gas station just west of the hospital that sold trailer hitches and various types of animal pens. They should have some kind of cutters for metal.
FIFTEEN MINUTES later, Marti once again stood in front of the locked door, a little ashamed at having used her feminine wiles to talk a horny young guy at the gas station into lending her just what she needed. Realizing she was just getting herself into deeper and deeper trouble, she put the jaws of the borrowed bolt cutters on the padlock blocking her way and sliced it off with surprisingly little effort.
The door made no noise when it opened, and she found herself staring into another black space. Fumbling around the wall just inside, her fingers felt a light switch like the one on the cellblock. But when she pressed this one, nothing happened.
Having anticipated something like this, she flicked on the flashlight she’d had the foresight to bring from the trunk of her car and played it into the darkness.
It was just as she’d thought. This wasn’t a room. It was the tunnel Trina had mentioned. As she stepped through the door, she hoped the story about it being infested with bats wasn’t true.
Chapter 20
BEFORE MOVING forward, Marti examined the tunnel with the beam of her flashlight and saw that the walls here were lined with the same old brick as she’d seen in the cellblock. Though this ceiling was slightly higher, it, too, was studded with toothy stalactites, but the tips of these glistened with the water forming them. She couldn’t see very far ahead because the tunnel seemed to turn to the left, just beyond the reach of her light.
Wondering how much time had passed since anyone else had been in here, she crouched down and played her flashlight along the floor so the beam raked the concrete at a shallow angle. Despite the ability of such a technique to reveal details normally invisible to casual observation, she saw no signs of footprints in the dust. But with her nose down near floor level, she caught the distinct and unpleasant odor of ammonia. And she could now hear the far-away sound of what seemed to be little voices chattering in earnest conversation.
She stood up and started walking . . . and immediately thrust her face into a spider web. Flailing at the gossamer strands that seemed to be all over her, she danced forward another couple of steps, wondering if the spider responsible for the web might now be in her hair. Shuddering at the thought, she brushed violently at her scalp with her free hand, worried that if the creature were there it might jump on her hand and run up her arm. All this kept her working on her hair like an obsessive–compulsive.
Finally, wiping at a strand of web that had somehow gotten into her mouth, she got control of herself and calmed down. Once again moving with deliberation, she found that as the tunnel turned to the left, it also began a gentle descent to a deeper level. The ammonia odor was now so strong she could smell it even standing erect. And the little voices were louder, too.
She moved cautiously forward, the beam of her flashlight darting from floor to wall to ceiling. She’d gone about fifteen yards when her flashlight suddenly lit up a furry patch on the ceiling. The beam had no sooner fallen on the fuzzy growth than it burst apart, sending a dozen chattering bats in all directions.
One came directly at her face, and she threw up her hands for protection. As she did, the flashlight slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. She felt a rush of air against her hands, but the bat made no actual contact. Dropping to one knee, she recovered the flashlight and shot the beam at the ceiling, where the bat colony was now in full pandemonium, furry bodies flying everywhere, filling the air with urine and screeches of protest.
Something wet hit her on the shoulder.
Crouching there in this circle of hell, Marti’s thoughts ricocheted back to a lecture she’d had in medical school on ra
bies, and she remembered that most human cases in this country in the last ten years had come from bats. And there was some evidence you could get it even if you weren’t bitten. Saliva or urine in your eyes, aerosol transmission . . . nobody knew exactly how, but at the moment the mechanism didn’t seem important.
She felt another spray of liquid soak into her shirt.
Most women, and men, too, would have retreated and called it a night. But that wasn’t the way Marti was constructed. Obstacles in her path just made her more determined to succeed. If she had not been so stubborn she might have realized that even though she hadn’t seen their escape route, the bats would probably soon be leaving on their nightly search for food. As it was, she had decided from the moment she went on a search for bolt cutters she was going to explore that tunnel . . . from start to finish. And no colony of flying mice was going to stop her.
With that decision already made, she got to her feet, lowered her face so the bats couldn’t urinate into her eyes or mouth, and started forward at a brisk clip, the beam from her flashlight trained on the floor.
She saw her next problem, and then was into it at almost the same instant: bat guano at least an inch deep on the floor. She was now directly under the densest part of the colony, so she couldn’t slow down and choose the best route through it. Straight-ahead as fast as possible was the answer.
She tried to pick up the pace, but her left foot slipped on the wet droppings, sluicing to the side so she almost went down into the disgusting carpet of filth. She pulled her errant foot back under her, but just as she felt she was regaining control, her right foot went AWOL.
Slipping and sliding like a kid on ice skates for the first time, she fought her way down the tunnel, wings brushing her hair and face, mad bat chatter so loud it seemed to be coming from inside her head, a steady shower of urine fouling her clothing. This had definitely been one of the worst decisions she had ever made. But there was no way she was going to retreat now.
She pushed herself forward, knowing this had to end soon.
Or did it?
Maybe the colony occupied the entire remaining part of the tunnel. If that was the case, every slimy step she took was just taking her farther away from sanity.
Then, suddenly, she was once again on solid footing. The rush of wings around her dropped off noticeably, and she could hear that the center of the lunatic squealing was definitely behind her.
Wanting to get completely away from the horror she’d just been through, she kept moving at a brisk pace, thinking about what the bats had done to her. Her hair and shirt were wet with bat piss, her shoes were caked with bat shit. God only knew if any of them had bitten her. Bats had very small teeth, and their bites weren’t often obvious.
What was the percentage of bats with rabies? She couldn’t remember . . . pretty low, she thought.
After Lee’s murder, she had replayed the night many times in her mind, thinking about what she should have done differently, how she might have stopped what had happened. The only thing that had saved her from descending into madness was the realization there was no way to change the past. Dwelling on it accomplished nothing. What mattered afterward was how she would deal with her new reality. Acceptance of that proposition had given her life purpose, and she had moved forward.
While much of her momentum had been aimed at Vernon Odessa, she began to apply the lesson she’d learned to other aspects of her life, so now she spent very little time lamenting things in life that went haywire. This meant her mind quickly moved from her ruined clothing and the possibility she had been infected with rabies virus to refocusing on the task at hand.
With her sights reset, she immediately had an idea.
She stopped, turned around, and played her light on the floor, looking for bat guano footprints. Not even seeing her own, she slowly made her way back toward the colony, which by now she had left well behind her.
Finally she saw the faint imprint of a shoe and another close by. Fitting her own foot into the first print, she saw that these were the ones she had made. She then looked carefully all around the area to see if there were any others.
After a minute or so in which she found nothing, she moved a little closer to the colony. There she saw more of her own prints even more clearly outlined.
She shifted the light closer to the wall and . . .
She knelt and looked closer.
More footprints . . . and definitely not hers. Someone else, with much bigger feet, had also walked through the guano, some prints going the same direction as she was, others back toward the basement. But when?
No way to tell. Nor were the prints distinctive. Unlike the tread marks her shoes had left, these were smooth and featureless.
At first it seemed like an important discovery, but then she realized that the other prints could have been from anyone: a security guy, a biologist interested in bats, someone working for a pest control firm . . . possibly even Sheriff Banks.
Disappointed because there were so many explanations for the extra footprints, she got up and headed toward the yet-unexplored part of the tunnel.
Her little flashlight had a narrow beam and illuminated only a small section of her surroundings at a time, so she had to keep it in constant motion to see what each region she passed through looked like. But apart from varying numbers of stalactites, one section of the tunnel was pretty much like another.
Then her light showed her something new.
Ahead of her, the tunnel branched in four directions.
Which way to go?
Deciding that the easiest way to keep track of where she’d been was to start with the one on the right, she resumed walking.
After she’d gone about fifteen yards down the chosen passage it ended at another metal door. Though there was no lock on her side, the door refused to open, immediately raising the concern that if there were no way out on this side of the bat colony, she’d have to go through those devils again.
Reminding herself that worrying about things prematurely was wasted energy, she retraced her steps to the original tunnel’s branching point and took the second fork.
Three minutes later, she found that this one, too, ended at a locked door. On her way back to the branching point, the thought of another dash through the bat colony was a little harder to dismiss.
Tunnel three ended like the other two. Figuring it was likely a waste of time but needing to finish the job, she headed down the fourth tunnel, already thinking it might be better when she left to turn off her flashlight as she passed the bats. Maybe they wouldn’t pee so much if they weren’t upset.
Should she get a series of rabies shots when she got out? They weren’t as painful as they used to be, so maybe that’d be the safe thing to do. But she’d have to find some place that had the vaccine. Surely Linville Methodist had some . . .
It gradually became apparent that this passage was longer than the other three. By now she’d lost all sense of direction, so she had no idea where she was in regard to the landmarks above ground. She walked for another couple of minutes before the final door appeared in the beam of her light.
Without any real hope that she’d finally found an escape route from the bats, she grasped the metal handle on the door and pulled.
And, by God, this one opened.
Passing through it, she found herself in a brick-lined stairwell.
But where was she?
She went up a short flight of metal steps to a small landing that led to a second set of stairs in a switchback. Reaching the much larger landing at the top of the latter, she saw two more metal doors, one straight ahead and one to her left.
Advantage Marti, for when she tried the door straight ahead, it opened without even a hinge squeak. From the landing she played her flashlight into the room beyond and saw stacks of old furniture and computer equipment. A
pparently she’d surfaced in the storage building where she’d obtained the extra furniture for her office, or in another structure much like it.
Not interested in salvage shopping, she withdrew and turned to the remaining door, where she leaned on the long metal bar that served as a latching mechanism. The fresh air that rushed in as that door opened cleansed her lungs and lifted her spirits. Stepping outside she found herself facing a secluded section of the parking lot, lined on two sides with woods, and on a third by the front part of the storage building. From where she stood she couldn’t see the main hospital or any of the other satellite structures.
Finding all she had seen extremely interesting, she set out across the parking lot to her car, which she reached about three minutes later. Even though it was a rental, she didn’t want to climb in with her shoes and clothes so filthy.
Only one thing to do . . .
She went to the trunk and opened it. After a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching, she took off her shoes. She did the same with her blouse, wrapped her shoes in it, and tossed the package in the trunk. She then hurried to the front seat and climbed in, knowing that if she got a flat tire on the short drive home, she was just going to keep going.
Nightfall was still about forty minutes away, so the driver of the eighteen-wheeler who passed Marti on the highway got a good enough look at her in her bra that he leaned heavily on the truck’s air horn in a show of approval. Fortunately, though Clay was home when she passed, he was in the house, so she didn’t have to explain her unusual driving attire to him.
When she reached her cottage, she went right inside and climbed into the shower, already wondering if Sheriff Banks would be in his office this late.
Chapter 21
The Memory Thief Page 17