by Doug Allyn
“Gloves?”
“The pants are wet,” she said briskly, placing the package on the seat beside me. “Apparently he soiled himself when he was shot. I have to get back. The doctor said he’ll call the station and brief you when we’ve finished. You can borrow a pair of gloves at the nurse’s station. You shouldn’t handle these without them.”
“Miss?” I said. But the door to the surgery was already closing behind her. She didn’t hear me.
I sat there a moment, eyeing the package of sodden clothing. And I realized she’d left it with me because I was wearing Charlie’s jacket. I unfolded the plastic wrapping.
Phew! I grimaced involuntarily at the stench. She was right, his jeans were sodden. But his pockets seemed to be dry, more or less. The hell with it. I went through them and retrieved his wallet, a pocketknife, and some loose change. I found what I was looking for in his shirt pocket. A plat map of the hill area, neatly divided into search grids with more than half of them X-ed out. At least we’d have some idea of where he’d been searching.
I started to close the sheet again, then hesitated. There was something wrong. His pants pockets were dry. But if he’d soiled himself... I picked up his jeans by the waistband and held them out. They were wet all right, but it couldn’t be urine. There was a neat waterline roughly halfway up the thighs. The waist area was bloodstained, but otherwise dry.
I raised the pants higher and sniffed the wet area. Definitely not urine. Similar though, and familiar. The rotten-egg stench the nurse had smelled was hydrogen sulfide, a mild chemical stew that sometimes seeps into groundwater near abandoned mines or quarries. It stinks, but it’s harmless. I’ve even dived in it a few times, exploring old mine shafts in the Upper Peninsula. Somewhere, Ray must have waded in water contaminated with sulfide.
But there aren’t any mines in the hills he’d been searching. I folded the jeans carefully and wrapped them up, then scanned the plat map again.
He’d been methodical, moving from the north, section by section. I’d been in those hills, of course, used to run in them when I was a girl. The section he’d apparently been working was in a valley, but he couldn’t have gotten in there. It was completely fenced off because of...
Sinkholes.
There were four or five of them back there, craters from sixty to a hundred and fifty yards across, roughly eighty feet deep, open pits carved out of the hills by an underground river. They’ve been fenced off for years because the footing’s dangerously unstable. It seemed an unlikely place to hide a body. If you threw it down, it’d be visible from the rim. And even if you risked your neck to climb down to bury it, the crater floor was mostly moss that’d show any disturbance.
Except for the largest of them. A branch of the river ran across the floor of the pit. And disappeared into the hillside.
Anything dropped into it would be swept underground for several miles until the river surfaced again south of the hills and emptied into Thunder Bay. Unless maybe it was weighted. In which case it might be carried underground. And would remain there.
That had to be it. The water was contaminated with sulfide. And Ray had said he might need my help. He’d intended to search the riverbed where it disappeared underground. He must have been wading around down there, scouting the area.
And someone had shot him.
But it hadn’t happened there. He was closer to town, Charlie said. Shot in the head at close range. But after Hannah’s warning, I doubted he would have stopped for a stranger who looked anything like Walter. Someone else then? Did Walter have help? A friend? Maybe a son? Or even... a cop? An old football buddy, say, or someone in his department?
I didn’t care for this last idea, but it would explain a lot. How Ray’s brother had disappeared so easily, and why the army hadn’t been able to find Walter. He could have been a step ahead of them all the way.
But if Walter was here, who was he now? I had no idea. Or perhaps too many. The only thing I was sure of was, he’d be off his guard now, thinking he’d solved his problem. And if I could find Jimmy Calderon’s body, it would flush Walter into the light like the cockroach he was.
The winds of autumn had been at work, covering the hills with a carpet of leaves, scarlet maples, and golden oak. Even the air up here was heady with the scent of fall, woodsmoke and wet pine. Hunting season.
I parked my dad’s old pickup truck at the end of the logging trail near the eight-foot chain-link fence that surrounded the sinkholes. The fence had been cut, years ago judging from the rusty ends of the severed wires. Kids, probably. You can’t fence off curiosity, and most adventurous local kids had been back here at least once. I’d explored the area myself when I was fifteen or so, with a gaggle of friends.
We’d been disappointed. The sinks were really just giant holes in the ground, so large and obviously natural that they didn’t seem particularly wondrous. The vegetation in them was the same as on the hills around them. Jack pines and aspen ringed the rims like sentries, and in a few spots trees clung like climbers on rocky ledges. The crater floors were a camouflage blend of moss and swamp grass, ochre and autumn gold.
The largest of them was different. A finger of the Thunder River surged to the surface roughly a third of the way across the floor of the crater, glittering like mercury in the afternoon sun. I guessed it was twenty feet across. It bisected the pit for seventy yards or so, then disappeared into the southwest wall of the hole.
I stepped carefully to the crater rim directly above the river’s exit, wary of the footing. The soil was red clay covered with a slippery layer of pine needles. I’m no tracker, but someone had obviously been here recently. Ray? Possibly.
The drop to the river was sheer, a free fall of a hundred and fifty feet. You wouldn’t have to carry a body down, you could just push it over the rim and let the current do the rest.
I’d brought along a three-hundred-foot coil of nylon rope, thinking I’d have to lower my diving gear to the crater floor, but it wasn’t necessary. A section of the rim had collapsed since I was here last, forming a ramp to the bottom of the pit, steep but walkable.
I strapped on my air-tank backpack, slung the duffle bag with the rest of my gear over one shoulder, the coil of nylon line over the other, and worked my way down.
It was a rough go. The footing was steeper than it appeared from above, especially since I was loaded down with what felt like a ton of gear. I paced myself, pausing several times to catch my breath and scan the area. The view was heart-stopping, cloud-castles scudding across the open bowl of the moss-draped cliffs. But its beauty was diminished for me because Ray might never see it again. Or anything else. If he survived.
And then I noticed the footprints. Slight depressions were visible in moss and clay. I knelt and examined them. The edges were sharp, unsoftened by the rain earlier in the week. Someone had definitely been down here. Ray. This was the place then. It had to be. I felt it to the core of my soul.
At the hospital I’d been numb, shocked by what had happened to him. But as I worked my way down into the pit, I felt my spirit and my energy level rekindling, fueled by an icy anger I’ve only felt a few times in my life. A killing rage.
The river roiled and eddied when it met the cliff face, forming a pool. It didn’t look deep, eight to ten feet. I couldn’t be sure because the water was the color of café au lait, clouded with sulfide seepage. The foul reek of it was much stronger down here, held close by the walls. It was a rank stench of decay, as though the sinkhole was an open wound in the earth, and gangrene had set in.
The current looked steady, but not too fast; working in it would be no problem. My dive plan was simple; I’d anchor the nylon cable to one of the stunted jack pines near the pool’s edge, then let the river carry me underground. If I was right, I shouldn’t have to go very far. This current would move a weighted body only twenty or thirty yards at most. Still, the idea of actually being beneath the earth was sobering. It would be like swimming down into a bottomless grave.
As I grimly pulled on my dry suit, tanks, and weight belt, I must have come up with a dozen perfectly sound reasons to quit, to get help, to come back another day. But each time I countered it with an image of Ray Calderon, smiling as we talked, looking into my eyes. Something he would never do again. And I knew if his brother was down here, I had to find him. I just had to.
I waded slowly into the river, chest deep, then knelt and double-checked my regulator. Everything was A-okay. I was wearing a double tank, so I had plenty of reserve air. There was no reason to delay, and yet I hesitated. I took a long last look at the sky and the stunted tree I’d lashed the nylon cable to. And then I sank slowly into the water and let the current take me.
It was like swimming in a mist. The sunlight reflected off the hazy water and set it aglow with a milky fluorescence, limiting visibility to a meter or less. But the light held no warmth, the water was icy, and the chill, steady current seemed to suck life from me. Or maybe it was fear that made me shiver.
I stayed down near the bottom, circling the pool a few feet above the riverbed, scanning the rocks, stumps, forest debris. No algae or reeds grew here, no fish swam. The sulfide made this stretch of river as dead as... the boy I was looking for.
But he wasn’t there. At least not in the hazy pool. If he was here, he must be farther on, in the darkness of the underworld beneath the hills. I could almost feel the weight of all that soil and stone crouched above the river, ready to collapse again, to form a larger sinkhole. With me beneath it. And I knew if I paused for even a moment now, I’d turn tail and swim for the light.
I didn’t. I couldn’t. Instead, cursing my luck and my own damned stubbornness, I switched on my helmet lamp and thrust forward into the shadowy mouth of the cave. Into the darkness. And then the earth fell away.
I’d been quartering back and forth across the riverbed, scanning literally almost every inch of it, seeing nothing but debris, stones, and a few river crabs skittering about. The sudden downward slope shouldn’t have surprised me; this river had already wreaked major havoc on the land about it. But the development did make me stop to reconsider my situation.
I’d assumed the river flowed beneath the hills more or less in a direct line to the lake, that my search would be restricted to a relatively narrow area. But the riverbed was dropping rapidly now, angling downward and widening out into a huge subterranean pool. A new sinkhole in the making.
My grip tightened involuntarily on my nylon lifeline. In a cavern this large I could no longer trust the current for my sense of direction. If I lost the line I could easily become disoriented and... and then I saw James Calderon’s corpse.
I should have guessed he was near. I’d been seeing the little river crabs scuttling below me without realizing what it meant. There was no prey for them to hunt down here. Nothing lived here. They could only be eating carrion.
Jimmy’d come to rest on his side in a wide depression in the riverbed, a natural trap. His body was moving, or seemed to be. It was seething with small river crabs, dozens of them, crawling over him and each other. Feeding.
I turned away, my mouth tasting a sudden surge of bile. I forced it down, composing myself, letting the current swing me away from him a little.
I checked my watch, trying to calculate how far I’d come from the cavern mouth. I’d been down eighteen minutes, but I’d been quartering back and forth rather than swimming in a straight line. I wasn’t sure how far I’d actually traveled. Thirty to forty yards, maybe more. Too far for me to haul the corpse against the current alone. I’d need help.
Or at least that’s what I decided. But even if I couldn’t recover the body, I would still have to examine it carefully where it lay to learn what I could about what had happened to him.
Sweet Jesus. I just couldn’t. But I had to. There was no one else.
I bit down hard on my mouthpiece, using the pain to focus my concentration. Then I kicked gently and floated slowly back to Jimmy’s corpse. The crabs were the worst part, crawling over him like submarine maggots. I couldn’t even brush them off without roiling the silt and reducing the little visibility I had. I’d have to look past them.
There was almost nothing left of the boy I’d met. His leather jacket protected his torso, but most of the skin of his hands and face had been chewed away. A few patches of his long dark hair were still attached, waving gently in the current. The rest of his skull was cleaned nearly to the bone, with only odd bits of tendon and gristle still adhering. His eye sockets were empty save for tiny crabs scrabbling over each other to get inside.
The cause of death was clear enough. His skull was crushed, fractured front and back by a series of powerful blows. So much for the auto accident theory. The body’d been wrapped in a covering of some sort, dark heavy cloth that trailed off behind it in the current. And there was something familiar about his shroud. The pattern? I couldn’t be sure. Something, though.
A single cinder block had been lashed to his legs with thin nylon cord to serve as an anchor...
Sash cord. The kind used to draw drapes. That’s what Jimmy’s shroud was, a section of curtain. In the milky murk, I couldn’t be positive, but I was fairly sure I’d seen the pattern before. In the McClain house.
But he couldn’t have been killed there. Both Megan and Audrey had seen him leave. But whoever’d killed him obviously had access to the house. And for a split second I heard Hannah saying she’d been surprised when Audrey said Ross was out. He’s always sucking around...
Ross. With his dyed hair and sculptured, weightlifter’s build.
I needed that curtain. At the very least it would connect Jimmy’s murder to the house. Fortunately, the river had already done much of the work for me. The current had tugged most of the material free, trailing it out along the floor of the trench. Only a corner of it was still connected to the body, trapped under the cord. I had my diving knife of course, but I couldn’t sever the cord that held the drape without cutting the body loose as well. Damn.
There was no other way. I’d have to pull it free. I hooked the lifeline to my belt, then grasped the tom remains of Jimmy’s calf with my left hand and tried to tug the drape from beneath the cord. Instantly the world closed in as the silt roiled up around me. I felt crabs scrabbling across my hands, but the damned drape wouldn’t move.
I jerked harder and everything disappeared. Black water. I couldn’t see anything at all.
I yanked furiously at the drape, tugging at it like a terrier. And suddenly I felt it give. I inched it from beneath the cord until finally it slipped free. Got it! I released Jimmy’s leg, took a firm grasp of my lifeline, and waited for the current to carry away enough of the silt so I could see again.
I was panting, shaking with exhaustion, more from the tension and fear than the effort involved. But gradually I got my breathing under control and the hazy silt slowly cleared away. And I was sorry it did.
My struggle with the drape had rolled Jimmy’s body over, and he faced me now, in all his ghastly horror. Lord of the crabs. Beast of black water.
Hell would be like this. I had to get out of here. I wrapped the end of the drape firmly around my wrist and yanked it free of the river bottom. And a second body exploded up at me out of the muck!
I ran! Or tried to. I scrambled frantically across the riverbed, banging off stumps, roiling the silt into a swirling tornado of black water. I forgot to swim, forgot everything in blind panic, fleeing like the hounds of hell were after me, trying to get away, trying to—
I slammed into something in the dark. A boulder? The cavern wall? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t see anything but the swirling murk in front of my mask. And I was too afraid to grope, to reach out into the blackness, terrified I might be...
Might be what?
Grabbed? Clutched in the rotting arms of a corpse? No, not a corpse. It hadn’t been a corpse. It was a... skeleton. Bones. Not a ghost or a monster. Just bones.
So it couldn’t have lunged at me. I must’ve pulled it out of t
he silt with the damned drape. The drape. In my panic, I’d lost it. But it couldn’t have gone far. It would be near the... bodies. My God. The horror...
I closed my eyes, willing myself to calm down, to slow my breathing. Get a grip, girl, get a grip. Settle down.
All right, okay. First of all, where was I? I made myself feel tentatively around the rock I’d banged into. There seemed to be no wall beyond it. So I was still in the riverbed. And if I just sat tight a few minutes the current would carry the silt away and I’d be able to see.
I still had my lifeline. And twenty minutes of air. I was all right for now. No call for a coronary. I’d come down here looking for Jimmy Calderon. And I’d found someone else as well, that’s all. A second body. The question was, whose?
Enough of the silt I’d roiled up in my flight had cleared to let me see the river bottom again. So I sucked up every shred of determination I had left and worked my way back across to the bodies.
There wasn’t much left of the second corpse. It had fallen to pieces when I’d pulled it up. Many of the smaller bones had simply vanished into the ooze at the bottom of the trench. The skull seemed to be that of an adult, but beyond that I really couldn’t tell much, whether it was a man or a woman, how old, or even how tall. Perhaps it could be identified with dental records... If I brought the skull out with me.
I didn’t like the idea much, but I didn’t see any alternative. I felt gently around the base of the skull to see if it was still attached. And something icy crawled over my wrist. I recoiled, gasping. Then made myself try again. And then I saw it.
A strand of chain was tangled in the bones of the rib cage. Instantly recognizable. The older corpse was wearing a dog-tag chain. I traced the narrow wire into the silt with my fingertips and found the tabs in the mud. They were black in the pale glow of my headlamp, too corroded to be legible, pitted and discolored by the sulfide. An electrochemical bath might restore them. But it really didn’t matter. They’d obviously been down here a long time. And I was fairly sure I knew whose they were.