Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  As far as Faye was concerned, jurisdictional matters were something for the police and the federal agents to work out. She was more interested in seeing her friend come back safe, so to hell with jurisdiction. She wanted to talk to Ahua. Her fingers were dialing his number into her primitive loaner phone before that thought had fully formed in her mind. She trusted his calm intellect, and she was deeply worried about the welfare of Dr. Stacy Wong.

  * * *

  Faye sat in Ahua’s command center and waited for him to say something to make her feel better about Stacy. If not that, she hoped he’d say something about the bombing investigation that would distract her from her fears for her friend. He did not.

  Ahua’s silence was unnerving. He was a quiet, deliberate, thoughtful man. But he was also a warm person who could communicate that warmth without a lot of words. Faye was not feeling that warmth this morning, and on this day when a woman seemed to have evaporated, she felt the lack deeply.

  She also felt an undercurrent of fear stemming from the fact that Ahua was sitting across from her at all. He was a very high-ranking agent to be spending this much time with Faye. Faye suspected that this meant he had reason to believe that Stacy was in deep trouble. Either that, or something else terrible was prompting all of this face time. The last time Ahua had made a point to spend time with Faye, it was because his agents had discovered the dead bodies of three little children.

  As Faye waited for Ahua to speak, Liu entered silently, sat down at a computer with her back to them, and began to type.

  “You said to come as soon as I could,” Faye said to Ahua. “Is it about Stacy?”

  “No, I have no news on Dr. Wong. I wanted to talk to you about the last chamber.”

  “The painted one? I think I’ve done all I can do with the pictures. Are you ready for me to go down there and look at it?” Despite everything, she felt a thrill at the thought of exploring the old underground system of rooms.

  “Yes, it’s about the chamber and, no, I’m not ready for you to look at it. Not in person. I want you to look at this.”

  Ahua walked over to a computer with a large high-definition display, the same one he had used to show Faye the maps he’d made of the catacombs below Oklahoma City. He motioned for her to sit. With a few keystrokes, he called up the six thumbnail images that Faye recognized, one after another. They were the composite images of the four walls, ceiling, and floor, showing all of the room’s colorfully painted scenes.

  He expanded each of them to full size, clicking through them quickly—one, two, three, four, five, six—then surprised Faye by continuing to click. More photos clicked past—five, six, seven, eight—and she rose slowly to her feet and leaned close to the screen as if that would help her understand what she saw.

  The walls in these photos were splashed with white paint, obscuring almost all the colors. Here and there, smears in the painted scenes showed through the white paint. The damage was extensive. Very few of the family scenes were still distinguishable. After Faye had studied the photos for a while, she sat down heavily.

  “Vandalism? In a room that nobody has seen but us?”

  “Yes. Vandalism. In a room that nobody has seen but FBI agents, a city engineer, and you. Please believe me when I say that Patricia Kura is now undergoing the interrogation of her life.”

  “Do you think she did this?”

  “My people tell me that she doesn’t have white paint under her fingernails. Other than that? I have no idea. Maybe she did.”

  “Surely you don’t think I did this.”

  “You don’t have white paint under your fingernails, but yeah. It could have been you, but I can’t imagine you destroying something old—old-ish—and irreplaceable. But it could have been somebody you told about the paintings. Could have been Goldsby or any one of the agents on the Evidence Response Team. Could have been somebody they told. Could have been Liu. Could have been me, for that matter.”

  Faye was stuck on the “Could have been you” part of his little speech. She couldn’t think of anything much to say in response, other than “Wasn’t it guarded?” and she bit her tongue on that one. The agency had surely placed a guard at the top of the stairs leading down to the painted chamber. Placing one at the bottom of the stairs would have risked contaminating the crime scene, but there was no reason that someone couldn’t have been stationed in the storm sewer outside the metal door.

  Ahua’s failure to send someone to guard the storm sewer had allowed this to happen. It would naturally more piss him off if she pointed out how much that oversight had cost the investigation, and pissing him off was not in her best interests. She held her tongue.

  “Tell me the truth,” he said. “Did you tell anybody what you saw?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “Not even your husband?”

  “Not even my husband. You told me not to say anything to anybody, and I didn’t.”

  Ahua’s eyes held hers for an uncomfortable moment. “I don’t think you did it. I think you’d put yourself between a bullet and something you thought was historically valuable. And I think you can keep a secret, probably better than any of my agents. There’s something wary about you, Faye.”

  He turned back to the computer and pulled up one more photo, taken of the room’s floor. It was decorated with multicolored dust and random splashes of white paint. “I’m pretty sure the vandal used three things—paint remover to wipe away as much of the paintings as possible, sandpaper to sand away what the paint remover didn’t get, and white paint to obscure anything that was left.”

  Faye considered the white blotches and the smears. “Somebody really didn’t want us to get a good look at those paintings.”

  “Seems obvious.”

  “We have Goldsby’s photos. Anything else?”

  “Nope. And they’re not the high-quality work he would have done with the right light and enough time. But he got what he got, and it’s all we’ll ever have. The person who went to all of this trouble probably thinks we don’t even have that much.”

  She clicked through the photos slowly. After her second pass through the post-vandalism photos, she felt regret and sadness shift into despair. “The bodies. They’re gone. The vandal took the children’s bodies.”

  “No. After we came up out of the sewer yesterday, I gave the Evidence Response Team orders to get those bodies, one way or another. They were only a few feet to the right of the door. Somebody my size could almost have leaned in and reached them, but it would have been too risky. One slip while you’re that off-balance, and you go splat on the floor, obliterating who knows how much evidence. I told them to find the tallest agent that they could, with the longest arms, and get those babies.”

  Faye was glad the children weren’t still lying there underground, alone.

  “Somebody was already doing an autopsy on what’s left of the bomber, but I told him to bring in more people, or work all night, or do whatever it took to find out what happened to those children.”

  “Any results?”

  “We know they’re all three boys, and we know that they were older than they looked. Toddlers rather than babies. Which isn’t a single bit less sad.”

  “No kidding. When will you know more?”

  “Soon. It has to be soon. We cannot have a long-term unsolved bombing with an unidentified bomber, not here in Oklahoma City and not with three dead children. People here remember McVeigh and that bombed-out day-care center. They will lose their minds over this, and I don’t blame them.”

  Faye wondered whether there was a brutal streak running through humanity that was beyond help from anyone, even the Almighty. Her mamaw would have made her tell God she was sorry for thinking such a thing, so she did.

  “There are too many people walking the Earth with scars from that day,” Ahua said. “They are not going to rest until we solve this thing.”

&
nbsp; “I’ll do all I can to help,” Faye said, “and it looks like my best chance of doing that is to find something important in these pictures.”

  He gave a short nod. “Study those photos. Don’t look at what the vandal left behind. Look at what’s missing and tell me why it’s gone.”

  “Certainly. But we haven’t talked about the reason I called you.”

  “Dr. Wong?”

  “Yes. Do you have any idea what might have happened to her?”

  “I haven’t got a clue, but I do have a hunch.” He paused like a man waiting to see what she was going to say.

  Before she had time to think, Faye’s eyes turned toward the computer display showing the vandalized paintings. “Do you think she had something to do with that?”

  “I do, but I’m not sure how.”

  “Stacy would never have done something like that,” Faye said, surprised that she felt so certain about someone she knew mostly by email. “She’s been dreaming of finding the Chinese underground community for years. It isn’t possible that she would set out to destroy anything about it, no more than I would.”

  “Yet she’s missing. She made it clear yesterday that she would do anything to explore those chambers. Don’t you think that maybe that’s just what she did?”

  Faye couldn’t say that this hadn’t occurred to her, because it had. “Trying to sneak down there is one thing. Destroying something that may have had historical value and definitely was important evidence is another.”

  “But what if she wasn’t the vandal? What if she found a way down there and crossed paths with someone who obviously has something to hide?”

  Faye heard a soft noise behind her, like someone’s breath catching. She turned to see Agent Liu’s shoulders shaking. Ahua was at her side instantly.

  “Cathy, what is it?”

  Faye had never seen an FBI agent weep before, and she hoped to never see it again. She didn’t think that FBI agents knew how to weep, but Liu did. Her mouth was screwed tight, trying to shut in the sobs. When Ahua put his hand on her shoulder, she broke down completely.

  “It’s my fault. I’m the one who always says, ‘We have regulations for a reason,’ but I failed the first time I was tested.”

  “How did you fail?” Ahua asked.

  She shook her head, lips still pressed tight.

  “Cathy, what did you do?”

  “I told Stacy about the room. I told her about the room where we found the children.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Faye was pretty sure that civilians weren’t supposed to stand around and watch FBI agents have breakdowns that could involve spilling the bureau’s secrets. She rose to leave.

  Ahua was so upset that he kept talking like she wasn’t even there. A command center full of agents bent over their computers and pretended to be deaf.

  “I don’t understand why you’d tell Stacy anything, Liu. You just met her.”

  Soft-spoken Ahua had turned up the volume a few decibels. Now Faye really needed to get out of there, except the two arguing agents stood between her and the door. The command center was impressively outfitted with state-of-the art technological doodads, and it was filled with a formidable staff of bureau personnel who all looked like they wished they could be anywhere else. Nevertheless, the command center was still nothing more than a gloriously repurposed semi, and it was crowded.

  Faye was hemmed in on all sides by equipment and by people who didn’t want to be where they were. Her only option was to lean over a random computer display and stare at it as if it were utterly fascinating.

  “No, that’s not true,” Liu said. “I didn’t just meet Stacy. I’ve known her for a long time. I didn’t say so, because I didn’t think it was pertinent to the investigation. Remember how I told you that the Chinese community in Oklahoma City is really small? Well, it’s really tight, too. Our parents know each other. We go to the same churches. We shop at the same stores. Our mothers send us to the supermarket to buy oxtail, because they think maybe we might want to marry the nice-looking butcher.”

  Ahua’s voice was gentle. “How did your mother feel about you choosing to be an FBI agent instead of marrying the butcher?”

  “She got over it. But she would never have gotten over it if I’d married Stacy Wong.” She turned away from him and covered her face with her hands. Faye took the opportunity to slip past her and get a few steps closer to the door. At least now her back was to the FBI agent who was decompensating in full sight of her colleagues.

  “Are you and Stacy dating, Liu?”

  “Oh, no. No. I’ve had a crush on her since we were in high school, but she has no idea. Oh, hell. I should just say what I mean. I’ve loved Stacy since we were fifteen, but she has no idea. She says hello when she sees me. She asks about my family. I ask about hers. We say, ‘Gee, it’s been a long time since high school.’ That’s the extent of our relationship.”

  “You said more than that to her yesterday.”

  Liu squared her shoulders, took her hands away from her face, and turned to face Ahua. “I did. She asked me to have a cup of coffee after I got off work and I said yes. I knew what she wanted and I knew it would be hard not to give it to her. I went anyway. No, I didn’t just go. I went home, showered, and put on a pretty red blouse. Put in some earrings. Put on some perfume. It wasn’t a date for Stacy, but it was for me.”

  “She wanted you to tell her what you knew about the underground chambers.”

  A woman swiveled her chair away from the argument, opening an exit route between Faye and the door.

  “Stacy sure did ask me what I saw underground. And I told her everything I knew. I had planned to tell her just a few harmless tidbits, like maybe about the religious paintings, but I just couldn’t make myself stop talking. As long as I’ve been an agent, I’ve never been tempted to reveal that kind of information. Now? Boom. I make up for years of excellent behavior with a blunder that may tank the investigation. Not to mention that the woman I love is missing and it’s all my fault. Go ahead and say what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m not going to say it, Cathy.”

  She gave a brittle laugh. “I’ll do the honors. It’s my line, isn’t it? I’ve said it a hundred times over the years. ‘We have regulations for a reason.’”

  Faye got past the woman sitting in her swivel chair, and the door was in sight.

  “Tell me everything. Do you know where Stacy is?”

  “Promise me that she won’t be in any trouble when we find her.”

  And now Faye learned exactly how far one had to push Ahua to get him to raise his voice. His deafening response would have been audible even if she’d made it through the door.

  “I’M NOT PROMISING ANYTHING. Answer the question. Do you know that Stacy Wong was in the painted room last night?”

  “I don’t know it in the way that you know something you’ve seen with your own eyes. It’s not like I ushered her to the hotel lobby and escorted her down the stairs. But I know Stacy and I know what she did with the information I gave her. She walked from the hotel to the river, and she walked into that storm sewer. I absolutely told her enough that she could find her way to the door we found yesterday.”

  “You what?”

  “I think she went very, very early this morning. She would have wanted to be back by seven or so, when the city starts to wake up. She’d have had to leave by about five to make the twenty-minute walk to the river, not to mention the hour it would take to get through the sewer to the painted room and back, plus some time there looking at it, plus the twenty minute-walk back to the hotel. Also, getting back at seven would give her plenty of time to get cleaned up for her presentation.”

  “Just when did you do this, Cathy?”

  “Last night, maybe eight or nine. After that, I was up all night, worrying over what I’d done. It came home to me how much dang
er I might have put Stacy in, so I started texting and calling her before dawn. After an hour with no answer, on a day when I knew that she’d be up to rehearse her presentation, I got worried. I knocked on her door. I looked in the hotel garage for her car, and it’s still there. I walked to the river, looking for Stacy. And then I went into the storm drains to see if I could find her.”

  Ahua had failed to regain his temper and now he had lost the ability to speak. Faye gave up on trying to get out of the command center and tried to help him. “Have you been down there looking for her all this time?” she asked.

  Liu nodded. “I even went down some of those lateral pipes as far as I could go before they got too narrow. Stacy is smaller than I am, so she might have been able to go a little further, but I really don’t think that’s what she did. She had no reason to care about exploring those.”

  “Unless she thought there might be another entrance into what’s left of the Chinese underground community,” Faye said.

  Liu’s face crumpled. “I hadn’t thought of that. What if she found one? She could be lost down there somewhere. In the sewer pipes. In a room dug out of the ground a hundred years ago. I have no idea where to start looking for her.”

  Ahua had found some words. From what Faye knew of him, he wasn’t being intentionally cruel, but those words must have cut straight through to Liu’s soul, nonetheless. “This is why we have regulations.”

  For the first time since Liu had made her startling confession, Faye really looked at her. Her pants were slightly damp all the way to the hips, and there was a smear of dirt on the back of her hand. Faye also noticed that Liu’s hair was different. She had combed it back into a pretty barrette on top of her head, but now hair that had slipped out of the barrette hung lank around her face.

  Liu had left the house that morning looking for the woman she loved, and she had made herself pretty before she went. The hours since she clipped that barrette in her hair had been hard ones.

  “I’m sure Stacy is okay,” Faye said, even though she wasn’t sure.