Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  Faye felt the power of speech returning. “Yeah. But I like this one.”

  She remembered hitting the floor, then a timeless instant of nothing. She had opened her eyes while smoke was still rising and people were still pushing themselves up on all fours. Those who could run were still running, so the moment of blackness obscuring her memory couldn’t have lasted long. She was conscious before the sirens began to scream, with no thought in her head beyond, I have to get out of here before things get worse.

  When her head began to clear, the need for flight became even more obvious. Any fool could have seen that running was the smart thing to do. People were sprinting down the grand staircase and running for the huge, heavy doors of the lobby’s monumental entrance. Faye saw one of them literally hurdle an old man lying stunned on the floor.

  She remembered trying to work herself to an upright position, planning to run as far as her feet would take her. Unfortunately, those feet had turned out to be attached to legs made of jelly. Without Cully’s hands grasping her armpits and lifting her to her feet, Faye would still have been lying on the plush golden carpet, covered with ash. By the time he got her upright, she was clearheaded enough to realize that they couldn’t leave yet. They needed to check on the people still lying facedown in the debris.

  Together, she and Cully had staggered across the lobby to check on those people, one by one. Across the room, she saw a young woman doing the same and the gray-haired hotel clerk and a teenaged boy. Miraculously, the five of them had found that all of the wounded and stunned people still lying on the floor were alive. Even more miraculously, they’d all been more or less ambulatory. Working together, everybody had been able to get out of the building.

  All but one.

  Only when she found herself standing next to the only corpse in the room did Faye know for sure what had happened. The condition of the body, the pattern of the damage radiating outward from it, the remnants of a backpack still attached to the remnants of his torso, all of these things had told the story of a bomber. Presumably a suicide bomber. Looking up at the ceiling stretching two stories above the lobby, painted with the stars of a western sky, she saw the soot of a tremendous blast. Only a bomb could do that.

  Faye knew that she was literally shell-shocked. Looking at the bomber’s corpse had made her hope with all her heart that her memory would be affected by the blast. She would have happily sacrificed a few brain cells to ensure that she lost the memory of that one torn body. She wanted to hate the dead man for the thing he had just done, and she knew that she eventually would. At that moment, though, she’d just wanted to run hard from the scattered pieces of him.

  “Squeeze my hand,” the paramedic said, bringing her back to the sidewalk and chasing away, for a time, the memory of a body utterly destroyed. Faye looked around, nervous, until she remembered that a bomb squad had swept up and down this street, so she could be pretty sure that there wasn’t a second bomb waiting to annihilate the people who survived the first one.

  “He wants you to squeeze his hand,” Cully repeated.

  “I heard him,” Faye snapped.

  “Wonderful,” someone said. “She can still snarl. She’ll be herself again any minute now.”

  Faye looked toward the voice and saw a familiar face that she’d thought she might never see again. She had worked with FBI Agent Tom Bigbee to solve a very cold case in east Oklahoma—and by very cold, she meant twenty-nine years cold—just a few months before. Ordinarily, Bigbee had a face like a beige rock. It was the kind of face that made suspects talk because its very stillness freaked them out. Today, Bigbee was smiling, and that was just weird.

  He rushed toward her, right hand thrust forward to shake hers.

  “I’m so happy to see you sitting out here, safe. Are you all right?” He looked her up and down. “No bleeding. No broken bones.” He gave the paramedic a nervous glance. “Right?”

  The paramedic nodded, then gave him a dismissive hand gesture that said, “Would you get out of my way?”

  Bigbee stepped back and let the paramedic resume prodding Faye. “I saw your name on the triage list and on the list of witnesses to interview, so I volunteered to be the one who took your statement.”

  He let his face return to its rock-like normal state and turned it toward the paramedic. “You’ve done a full workup? A careful one? You’ll never meet a sharper mind than this one, so you might not notice if she were having neurological problems. If it weren’t for Dr. Faye, a murdered woman in Sylacauga would have never gotten justice.”

  The confident young man stammered in the face of Bigbee’s judgment. “I’m not a doctor, but—um—I don’t think she has a concussion and—um—I see no signs of internal injuries or broken bones.”

  Bigbee kept his blistering stare on him and said, “The FBI wants to know how this woman is.”

  The stammering resumed in earnest. “Um—I’m—I’m not a doctor, so I can’t render that kind of opinion but—” He caved under Bigbee’s glare. “She seems okay to me.”

  The federal agent waved the words away. “I don’t want to hear ‘seems okay.’ I want to hear your professional opinion. Is this woman physically and neurologically okay to work?”

  The paramedic gave up trying to play by the rules. “Yes. She is.”

  “I came looking for you for a reason, Faye,” Bigbee said. “Well, I wanted to make sure you were okay, but I also had a professional reason. The bomb uncovered something that’s historical for sure and, in a way, I think it’s archaeological. You’re already in the Bureau’s system as a consultant and I know personally that there are none better than you. I’ve recommended you to Assistant Special Agent in Charge Micah Ahua, and he agrees that we can use your skills. Can we hire you to consult on an extremely oddball situation?”

  “Oddball seems to be what I do best.”

  He beckoned and walked away without looking behind him. Faye shot a nervous glance at Cully and the paramedic, then she followed.

  * * *

  As Faye grew nearer to the site of the bombing, she got a closer look at the people investigating it and at their tools. She could see the FBI’s Mobile Command Center, a tricked-out gray semi that she imagined to be full of high-tech gadgets and serious-faced agents. Another truck, black and almost as big as the command center, boasted in big gold letters that it housed the FBI Bomb Squad. The Technical Hazard Response Unit had its own vehicle, and so did the Evidence Response Team. It comforted Faye to see how many resources the FBI could put on-scene and how fast they could do it.

  “The SWAT team and the Bomb Squad made fast work of clearing the hotel and the buildings in the vicinity,” Bigbee said. “Now the evidence response people are doing what they do and things will be moving a lot more slowly. It takes a long time to clear out a bombing site when the piece of evidence that will solve a crime might measure a centimeter across.”

  Faye thought of the way she excavated an archaeological site, sometimes removing soil a few grains at a time, if that’s what it took to do the job. Evidence retrieval was the same kind of destructive technology. When you’re doing the kind of work that can’t be undone, you do it slowly.

  The SWAT Team and the Bomb Squad hadn’t found any other bombs or any other bombers, so the FBI had cordoned off an area in the immediate vicinity of the Gershwin Hotel. Outside of that area, the rest of Oklahoma City was now free to get back to normal, or at least to try. She knew this because Cully had been streaming newscasts on his phone since they were detained in this no-man’s-land reserved for witnesses, away from the bomb site but not free to go.

  Faye hadn’t seen her own phone since the blast, so she guessed it was one more piece of evidence on the floor of the Gershwin Hotel’s bombed-out lobby. She could only watch the FBI agents at work. Years of training were obvious in the confident way they moved, like dancers who knew their choreography cold. You can’t fake competence, an
d these people were utterly competent.

  Cully and his phone were behind her as Bigbee led her toward the Mobile Command Center. Once there, she was greeted by an intimidating array of computers and other high-tech devices she didn’t recognize, all of them being operated by people who looked far too busy and competent to bother with her. As it turned out, the one person who didn’t consider himself too busy doing important things to give her the time of day was, in fact, pretty darn important.

  He was a thin, dark-skinned man in late middle age. His hair was trimmed so closely that the curl barely showed, and his expression was sober. Sitting in front of a computer display, he had the shiny shoes and close-to-the-vest poise that screamed FBI agent. As it turned out, he was an FBI agent plus some.

  He stood up, extended a hand to shake hers, then gestured toward an empty chair next to his. As Faye sank into it, her weary legs failed and she hit the seat with an uncomfortable thump.

  “Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth,” he said, “I’m Micah Ahua and I’m an Assistant Special Agent in Charge for the Oklahoma City field office of the FBI. I know you’ve been through a lot this morning, but we could use your help.”

  “I’ll do anything it takes to find out what happened today.”

  “I’m told you saw the bomber?”

  “Only for an instant when he was alive.” And in one piece.

  “That’s what all the witnesses are saying, but Bigbee says you’re the kind of person who will remember more detail.”

  “Maybe, I think I may remember seeing him just as the bomb went off, but he wasn’t anywhere near the rest of us. I think he was the man I saw across the room, wearing a cowboy hat. It’s hard to be sure, considering the difference between what he looked like before the bomb went off and what he looked like afterward.”

  “That’s good information. The other witnesses are too shaken up to remember even that much.”

  Faye tried to picture the hotel lobby, with its grand staircase and ostentatious bronze elevator doors. “If I’m remembering the right guy, he wasn’t near the desk where people were checking in. He wasn’t in the main lobby where there are lots of chairs and sofas. He wasn’t by the stairs. He wasn’t near the elevators. He was in an empty alcove where there was…well…nothing that I could see. Maybe some display cases, but nothing else. Nothing to do, nothing to see, and no place to hide. No reason to be there.”

  “Well, bombers don’t usually do their thing in the middle of a crowd.”

  “Yeah, but what was he going to do? Just put the bomb on the floor and walk away? Even the Boston Marathon guys hid their bombs in a trash can. Was he a suicide bomber? Even if he was, that alcove makes no sense as a place to blow yourself up on purpose. If you want to take somebody with you, doesn’t it make sense to go stand where the people are?”

  “I don’t know the answers to your questions. I do know that I wish all my witnesses had your powers of observation. And that they were half as logical.”

  Faye laughed. “When I’m stressed, I fall back on logic. And I’m pretty stressed. See me sitting here all calm and collected? This is what I look like when I’m having a nervous breakdown.”

  A disembodied voice emanated from behind a computer display. “Are we having nervous breakdowns? Is it time for mine?”

  Even Bigbee smiled, but he didn’t loosen up enough to admit that he might enjoy a small breakdown.

  “Not yet, Liu,” Ahua said. “And I hope you’ll put your breakdown on hold, Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth. I didn’t call you in here so I could ask you the same questions that people have been asking you all morning.”

  “All morning?? Has it been that long since the blast?”

  He gave a single nod. “Time is a weird thing during a catastrophe like this. The mind shuts down from time to time, just to try to make sense of things. At least, that’s the way I think of it. An expert might describe it differently. Sometimes, it can make it really hard to gather consistent testimony from a group of traumatized people. In any case, our evidence recovery team uncovered something really weird while they were conducting interviews and I’d like an archaeologist’s eyes on it.”

  Faye had been wondering why Ahua had called her into the FBI’s inner sanctum.

  Ahua used the computer keyboard in front of him to pull up a photo on a large computer display. On the screen was a photo of the damage done to the side wall of the Gershwin Hotel’s lobby.

  The bomb had taken out a chunk of the hotel’s stone wall, but the rest of the ninety-year-old wall looked sturdy and strong. On either side of the open hole, buttresses of hand-laid stones provided enough support to keep the wall vertical. They were helped along by more buttresses built at regular intervals down the entire length of the side wall.

  In the screen’s lower right-hand corner, Faye saw a tremendous cornerstone chiseled with the names of people who were probably very important in 1927. It had done its job of holding the corner level and square, supporting more stone blocks than Faye could count.

  Ahua pulled up another photo, shot through the open hole in the wall. Faye could see through it and into the hotel lobby, and this outside-in view was disorienting. The floor was heaped with chunks of metal, glass, charred wood, and stone, all of it twisted and blasted into bits.

  The camera had caught two crime scene technicians at work. One of them was squatting down to mark a barely visible clue with a cone. Another one crouched on all fours, his face close to the floor but not touching it. Faye couldn’t quite make out the evidence he was studying, but it looked like something that was mere millimeters in diameter.

  Above the technicians, Faye could see that a section of the bronze gallery railing encircling the lobby was warped and twisted. Blackened carpet showed that there had been a fire at ground level, but it must have been quickly contained, because only the portion of the cavernous room nearest the blast was scorched. Farther away, heavy tables lay on their sides where they had been heaved. A fallen chandelier had sprayed crystal prisms everywhere.

  Now Ahua pulled up another photo, taken at the epicenter of the destruction, just inside the hole in the wall. Faye could see that the bomb had blasted away several of the floor’s marble tiles. This was no surprise, given the strength of the blast. The surprise came when he pulled up yet another photo, taken by a camera pointing straight down into the hole. The crime scene photographer had done a great job of using flash for illumination, but she couldn’t see the bottom, because the hole just kept going.

  It extended into a darkness almost deep enough to hide a staircase that the missing floor tiles had covered. Faye, too excited to craft actual words, flapped a hand at the screen.

  Ahua used the computer keyboard to enlarge the high-definition photo to show details of brickwork so intricate that it was surely built when labor was really cheap. Judging by the age of much of downtown Oklahoma City, Faye would have guessed that the staircase was built after World War I and before the Great Depression.

  Ahua flipped to another photo, an extreme closeup of a single brick’s orange-red and crumbling clay. As Faye had suspected, the brick itself was obviously made by hand. She said, “Would you look at that?”

  “So it’s old?” Ahua said. “As old as the hotel?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Faye said. “It’s not even out of the question that those bricks and that staircase are older than the hotel. Can you show me where the stairs are in relation to the rest of the lobby?”

  Ahua picked up a felt-tip marker and moved to a whiteboard. With a few deft strokes, he drew the square lobby and sketched the monumental entryway at the bottom of the whiteboard. He drew the staircase near the middle of the left wall and looked up expectantly.

  “Wait,” Faye said. “I need to fill in some details. The front desk is here, right?” she said, pointing to a spot near the top of the whiteboard. “The elevators and fire escapes are behind it. The grand staircase is here,”
she said, pointing to a spot near the center of the square room. “Or it was. Is the staircase still standing?”

  Ahua nodded and drew in those details. “The building didn’t sustain much structural damage. Buttressed stone walls are pretty sturdy and the bomb wasn’t built to take down a building. It was a people-killer.”

  The word made Faye shiver.

  “The Technical Hazardous Response Unit was able to clear us for entry fairly quickly,” Ahua continued, “because they judged that the building wasn’t in any danger of collapse. When they sent me these photos, I knew I wanted to get some expert eyes on them. Bigbee told me that somebody who did this kind of work was sitting right outside and…well. Here you are.”

  Faye was studying his sketch. “The alcove? The one that was on top of the old staircase?”

  “Some of those walls are gone, but they weren’t load-bearing.” He roughed in some walls, marking the destroyed sections with dotted lines. Faye was relieved to see that her memory of the lobby’s layout was reliable, despite the fact that the bomb had given her brain a big jolt.

  “Can we go look at the underground staircase? I really want to see it in person.” Faye asked, knowing that the realities of crime scenes and evidence protection meant that the answer would be no. Still, she burned to see those stairs.

  “I’m sorry,” Ahua said, confirming what she already knew, “but we have to protect the integrity of our data collection efforts. All I can do is show you these pictures, but that staircase is in a very significant spot, and it’s obviously very old. What can you as an archaeologist tell me about it?”

  Faye kept silent and thought for a minute. Ordinarily, she would have guessed that the staircase’s purpose was to access the hotel’s basement, except for the fact that it led away from the center of the room, extending under the plane of the exterior wall. From there, it kept going, heading toward the hotel next door. It didn’t make sense for there to be a basement running outside the Gershwin Hotel’s footprint, underneath the narrow sidewalk between the two buildings. Nevertheless, there the staircase was. It had to go somewhere. And Faye had a pretty good idea where.