by Sue Henry
The trail wound its way up and down and Tank disappeared around some brush that obscured part of it. When Alex called him, he didn’t come back, but barked from where he was. Catching up, they found him nosing into a deep hole in the side of the track. He whined and looked up at Alex.
“What is it, fella? You find something?”
With Knapp watching, Alex knelt in the dirt, reached down into the leaves that covered the bottom, and was surprised to touch fabric. The stained daypack he lifted out of the hole had weight, and opening it he found personal items that he recognized—Jessie’s.
As he swore, Tank barked in his ear, recognizing the scent of these things that belonged to his mistress.
Knowing that Jessie would not abandon her daypack, for the first time he felt a real sense of fear clinch its fist in his stomach.
“Okay,” he told Knapp. “Now we get very serious about this thing.”
Pushing on hurriedly, they reached the place where the trail made its right-hand turn.
“Someone’s been through there,” Knapp said, pointing to the grasses crushed by passing feet, and Tank all but leaped into the gap.
Coming out the other side they found themselves standing between rocky ridges where stones and sand sloped gradually down to the water. It was empty, very quiet and peaceful, with nothing but the cry of a gull as it rose from the rocks close to the tide line, startled at their sudden appearance.
Alex stepped up on a large rock and followed its flight over a short stone ridge that broke the shallow waves to the west. An eagle rested there, looking closely for an unsuspecting fish to swim close enough to snatch out of the water. As he watched, it shifted weight from one claw to the other and settled back to waiting stillness on its stone perch.
Carefully, he examined the space in front of him for any indication of human presence, but the tide had swept the sand between the rocks clean and level. Turning to the east, he could just see over another stone crest, beyond which a bit of blue too bright for nature caught his attention.
“Over here,” he told Knapp, clambering up and over the rocks that hid the rest of what he thought was a plastic tarp.
On the sand that was only slightly damp, and not smooth and level but churned like the sand of a beach volleyball court, there was a tarp that had been doubled and spread over something. That something raised it slightly in a shape Alex was afraid he recognized from past experience. Rocks had been laid around that shape to secure its covering from the curious fingers of the intermittent breeze that blew in over the cold waters of the sound. A corner of the end farthest from the water flapped a bit as a gust lifted it, for the rocks that had held it appeared to have tumbled off into the surrounding sand.
When the two men had climbed down and stood next to it, Alex, with a sinking feeling, reached and folded back that corner to expose the body of the man who lay faceup beneath. Taking a deep breath of relief, Alex knelt for a closer look. He was not recently dead for, when Alex reached to lift one of his hands, there was none of the resistance of rigor mortis in the arm that had been neatly laid at his side. Nor did his flesh hold even a hint of warmth. He was as cold as the sand on which he lay.
“Dead at least a day, probably more,” he told Knapp.
A smear of dark brown blood on the tarp led him to the shattered skull as cause of death.
“This is not where he died, so we can’t know what position he was found in. It’s possible that he fell and hit his head on one of these sharp rocks, so this could be an accidental death. Or someone could as easily have hit him with one. It will take some investigation to find out which. But it would definitely have taken more than one person to move him here and cover him so carefully. Time, I think, to use that radio in your plane to call in a forensics team along with the guys from Ketchikan.”
Knapp agreed. But as Alex examined the body, he had been intently examining the sand around the tarp.
“This is an odd set of marks,” he pointed out, when Alex sat back on his heels and tugged the tarp back over the unwelcome discovery. “It looks like someone slid out, then crawled away across the sand.”
As Alex stood up to join him, he lifted the edge of the tarp behind the head of the dead man, and then they were both looking at a space large enough for another person to have been under him. Coming away from it were what Knapp had identified as drag or scrape marks; then there were hand and knee prints in sand just damp enough to hold their impressions.
“Someone was under there? ” Knapp asked in repulsed astonishment.
“Looks like it. And not a bad hiding place for someone desperate enough,” Alex returned, having seen many stranger and more distasteful things in his career in law enforcement. “What concerns me is who it may have been, and what could have been enough of a threat to encourage this as a hiding place. But what alarms me most is that the people who are supposed to be here are not—including Jessie. Let’s get back to that radio.”
Though they could not know it, Karen had evidently either been stubborn enough to ignore Jessie’s instructions to stay in her hiding place, or she had been frightened or forced out by someone else.
Had Jessie known and been able to venture a guess, knowing what she did of Karen, it would probably have been the former.
In the dark of the tank, however, nobody was venturing guesses any longer as to what was going on, or who was responsible. Uncomfortable, hungry, thirsty, and growing more concerned and stressed by the hour, they had stopped moving around, even talking much, and simply sat together, mostly in silence, hoping for something to happen—anything to happen—but very much afraid that nothing would, or of what it would be if it did.
For a while they had periodically heard things or people moving overhead, but for at least two or three hours there had been no sound above them.
“I’m really worried about Whitney,” Laurie fretted more than once. “Where is she, if she’s not down here with us? And what’s going on? I hope they haven’t hurt her.”
Aaron had grown more restless and irritable. As the hours passed he gave up sleep and found an open space clear enough so he could pace back and forth. Jessie imagined him glowering as, periodically, she heard him muttering numbers in counting his steps so he wouldn’t run into a wall, and uncharacteristically swearing under his breath when he tripped once. Finally he gave it up and sat down again, but she could hear him moving nervously in the dark.
“It’ll be all right, Aaron,” she told him. “Somehow, it will.”
He didn’t answer.
Jim and Don struggled one more time in a feckless effort to shift the manhole cover that sealed them in, but it was as immovable as if it had been welded shut.
“God damned thing. What the hell have they put up there to hold it down?” Don asked.
“Could be any of a bunch of heavy things from the basement shop,” Jim told him. “They could even have managed to move Curt’s precious generator out onto the platform. It’s on skids. But it wouldn’t take much weight to hold that lid down, considering how little force we can apply upward with only two of us able to try at once and it almost beyond our reach.”
“But we didn’t hear anything that big, did we? Wouldn’t we have heard them move something really heavy?”
“With our lack of leverage it wouldn’t take much.”
“Doesn’t really matter, does it.” Sandra’s flat, discouraged voice came from out of a corner where she waited for Don to come back. “Whatever it is, it’s doing a great job.”
They had no idea what time it was, no one having a watch with an illuminated dial. But they knew it was still daylight from the hint of it through the bent pipe and the holes in the lid on the manhole.
Jessie had fallen asleep for a few minutes at one point, but jerked awake when she unconsciously turned her head and the bump on it came in contact with the cold cement wall. She sat up and yawned, then stood up and stretched to relieve the ache in her back, Aaron’s impatient fidgeting making her restive as well.
Sandra had spent most of the time half curled up in Don’s lap and Jessie had heard him murmuring encouragement to her once or twice.
No one had spoken again about Karen—or Whitney.
“You know,” Jim said suddenly from his reclining position on the footing beyond Jessie’s feet, “I wish I knew how Curt’s involved in this. I would never have believed this of him. I trusted him.”
“I’ve been wondering that myself,” Don said slowly. “The thought of that handgun makes me uneasy. He’s a tough old guy, but . . .”
“You don’t think . . .”
Laurie’s tentative question trailed off. Then she took a deep breath and tried again.
“Well . . . Oh hell, I might as well say what we’re all thinking. We haven’t heard anything from up there for a long, long time. They may have decided to just leave us in here. Leave and not let us out, I mean.”
There was a kind of gasping sob from Sandra at the brittle tone of Laurie’s voice and the dreadfulness of what she was suggesting.
Even Jessie swallowed hard hearing it.
“We might as well say it,” Laurie insisted, with a frightening sharp-as-glass edge to her voice. “And, if it’s true, then in a few days, without food or, especially, water, none of us will be in any kind of shape to make a sound that could be heard, even if anyone does come looking for us, will we?”
The concept effectively silenced them all, no matter that it had undoubtedly crossed the mind of each independently and been refused consideration as unthinkable.
For several interminable minutes no one said a word.
Then Jessie heard Aaron suddenly sit up in the dark. There was a scrambling sound as he moved across to stand under the manhole through which they had all been forced into the tank.
In the tiny traces of daylight coming through the holes in the heavy lid, she could just make out the worried and angry expression on the face he had raised longingly toward it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
ON THEIR WAY BACK OVER THE TRAIL FROM THE SOUTH end of the island, Alex stopped so suddenly that Bill Knapp almost ran into him.
“Look,” Alex directed, indicating a point on the rocky eastern shore that was visible through a space in the trees. “Where did that come from? It wasn’t there earlier.”
A powerboat was gently rocking in the waves, a line tethering it to one of the huge boulders, two white fenders strategically placed to keep the side from contact with the large stone.
“It wasn’t there when we flew in,” Knapp agreed. “We’d have seen it from the air.”
“Funny place to tie up.” Alex frowned. “As if whoever was in it didn’t want to be seen from the lighthouse.”
“Well, the plane may have left no space at the cove. You want to take a look?”
The trooper shook his head and started on along the trail at a jog. “Not now. Maybe after I call and get our guys on their way here from Ketchikan. Besides, whoever’s driving that boat may be at the lighthouse when we get there.”
“Right.”
When they, and Tank, came trotting out of the trees and across the grassy area overlooking the platform, there was a man on it engaged in shoving at the cement mixer they had passed in their earlier search. At Alex’s call he looked up to see them coming down the steps, moved behind it, and stopped them with a suspicious demand. “Who the hell are you? ”
“Who are you, would be a better question,” Alex told him, walking forward. “And where are the people who own this place, and the restoration crew that’s supposed to be working here this week?”
“You first,” Cooper told him, keeping the mixer between them defensively. “And make it quick.”
Taking out his identification, Alex tossed it over. Cooper caught it one-handed and the gold shield inside the leather case shone in the sun as he flipped it open.
“This for real? A State Trooper—detective sergeant?”
“Believe it. And this is the pilot who brought me.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody’s heard anything from anyone here for the last couple of days and one of them’s a very good friend of mine. Now—who are you and where are they?”
“Okay. I’ll explain and we’ll straighten that out, but first, come and help me move this thing. The people you’re looking for have been under here in a tank for a long time without food or water and we need to get them out—now.”
It was enough to bring Alex and Knapp to his aid, though they were both watching him closely as together they shoved aside the heavy cement mixer and lifted the manhole cover beneath it.
The grimy faces of several people blinked up at them from below, almost as blind in the sudden brilliance of the late afternoon sun as they had been in the dark.
“Alex Jensen, as I live and breathe, thank God. Are we glad to see you!” said Jim Beal, with a grin to accompany his squint, as he recognized one of his benefactors. “Welcome to Five Finger Lighthouse.”
“Where’s Curt—and the other guy?” Don Sawyer asked the minute he reached the platform above ground. “Have you found Whitney?”
“We’ve found no one but you—and a dead man on the other end of the island, if that’s who you mean,” Alex told him. “You know anything about that?”
“We found him yesterday, but it’s not Curt. Curt’s one of them. We’ll tell you about it, but we need to find Whitney. He put us down there and he had a gun, but Whitney hasn’t been with us.”
“Two people took off in a boat that showed up just over an hour ago,” Cooper told them. “They were too far away to identify, but I saw them go.”
“Where were you?” Alex asked, turning to look him in the eye for an answer.
“Watching from the edge of the trees. I heard the boat engine on its way in and came from the south end to see what was going on. One of them was on board and another came out of the basement carrying something in a cardboard box and joined him in a hurry. When they left, I took my boat and followed. They were headed toward Petersburg—fast.”
“Where was your boat?”
“Off the rocks on the east side, where it is now.”
Alex nodded, satisfied with that answer. “Can you identify the other boat?”
“Yes.”
“But you came back.”
“Yeah—of course. There were people here who needed help.”
“We’ll talk,” Alex said shortly, turning back to help Sandra out of the tank.
“We need to find Karen too,” she reminded him. “She’s the other person who’s missing besides Whitney.”
Alex, who was helping Cooper to lift her up through the manhole in the pavement, noticed that at Sandra’s mention of the woman’s name, Cooper froze for a second or two and gave Sandra a questioning glance before leaning to help Laurie up into the daylight. He made a mental note to find out why the man had reacted as he did. Who was he anyway? Evidently not part of the work crew. So why and how had he managed to show up and be in the right place to rescue the work crew from their prison? Someone had killed the man at the other end of the island and Cooper was as good a candidate as any until he knew more.
Tank trotted in anxious circles around the group that grew larger as person after person came up from their dark underground prison, until he was finally rewarded when the one person he wanted to see was next to last in being lifted out. The affectionate greeting he received was brief, however, as Jessie was swept aside by Alex into an enormous hug of affection that was accompanied by murmurs of relief and assurances. Finally he held her away to grin and say, “Figured I’d better find out why you hadn’t called. Are you really okay?”
“I knew you’d be worried, but I’m fine. Just a bump on the head that may need a stitch or two, but a cleaning and some tape will probably take care of it.”
“Let me see.”
“It’s stopped bleeding and will keep for now. Let’s go up where there’s water and food. Then I want to wash at least my hands and face in the worst way. But
there are still questions to be answered, and a couple of people are missing who were not down there with us.”
“Let’s take care of these folks first, you mean?”
“Yes. Water first, please, and some Tylenol.”
But, when asked her preference, it was a Killian’s she selected to go with the sandwich Alex threw together for her from whatever supplies eager hands snatched from the refrigerator and spread out on the table of the common room.
When she was provided for and the rest were busy with their own lunches, he went with Knapp, made his call to Ketchikan, and was assured they would come as soon as possible and forward to the Coast Guard, the information he gave them on the boat Cooper had seen but it would take time for anyone to arrive at Five Finger Light.
Understandably, none of those rescued from the dark wanted to eat within the confinement of four walls. Instead, they took their food to the helipad, where they washed it down with plenty of liquids, while soaking up the heat and light they had feared they might not see again. Between bites, in no particular order, they gave their rescuers a brief and rather disjointed account of their abduction and subsequent captivity, the finding of Tim Christiansen’s body, their problems with communications, and the discovery of the sunken Seawolf the day before.
While they talked Cooper listened in silence, saying nothing. He paid close attention, however, to the notice of Alex, who was quietly watching him—with growing interest and curiosity. No one, he thought to himself, had yet answered to his satisfaction the question of why they had been imprisoned between the tanks, and none of them seemed to know, or be willing to say.
They were a grimy group, coated with mud and the dirt that had covered the walls and floor of the maintenance space between the tanks. Some had scrapes and bruises collected on their way in, or in falls or collisions with the rough cement walls during their internment. But soon, in twos and threes, everyone, including Alex, Knapp, and Cooper, spread out to mount a concerted search for the two members of the crew who were still missing.