Angelis frowned. “I thought we all agreed on that. The P.R. people think it’s great.”
“We did agree and it is great,” Tom said. “But Whitney—oh, never mind.”
Angelis put his beefy paw on Tom’s shoulder. “She’s not coming up to see you off, then?”
Tom shook his head. “Says she can’t get near a cave. Never again.”
“I’m sorry.” Angelis studied Tom. “This isn’t going to affect your focus, is it?”
Tom looked up at the mission commander with a steely expression. “Not underground it won’t. I never give the cave a chance.”
“What I wanted to hear,” Angelis said. “Now get some sleep. This is all going to go like clockwork.”
Tom nodded, then picked up a pile of three-ring binders and left the tent. It was still hot and humid, even at this late hour. Cicadas buzzed in the night and there was a pepper scent to the air that made him think of Whitney. The buzzing of cicadas and the pepper air had been present the first time he’d kissed her, nearly fifteen years ago. Tom sighed again at the fact that here, at the peak of his professional career, his wife and research partner was nowhere to be seen.
He wove his way through a long line of canvas tents, stopping now and then to talk with NASA scientists involved in various aspects of the mission. By the time Tom reached his tent, he was jittery and wondered if he’d be able to sleep at all. He came through the flaps to find Cricket lying on her back on top of her cot, dressed in running shorts and T-shirt, a thin sheen of sweat on her brow, staring at the ceiling.
“Thought you’d be long gone by now,” he said.
Cricket shrugged, chewing on the inside of her cheek.
“Still nervous about the interview with Helen Greidel?” he asked.
“No,” she said, not looking at him. “Maybe.”
“Tell you a secret?” he said.
Cricket shrugged again.
“I’m nervous, too,” he said. “Biggest day of my life tomorrow. Besides meeting your mom and the day you were born.”
She shook her head. “You’ve never been nervous about anything, Dad. Everything goes just the way you planned it, always.”
Tom studied his daughter for a long moment, then went to the side of her cot. “What’s going on with you?” he asked.
Cricket looked away from him toward the wall of the tent. “Nothing.”
“I know you’re a young lady and all,” he said. “But I thought we were still friends. Friends talk, Crick.”
Cricket did not reply for several moments and her fingers worried the outer liner of her sleeping bag. “Wish Mom was with us.”
Tom forced a smile, sat down on the side of the cot, and took her hand away from the sleeping bag. “I do too, honey,” he said.
Cricket’s eyes filled with tears, “You two gonna get divorced?”
Tom was stunned by the question but remained cool. “ ’Course not. What would make you ever say anything like that?”
“I don’t know, doesn’t seem like you two like to be with each other much anymore,” Cricket said, tears rolling down her face. “I miss her, Dad. I mean, I miss the way she used to be. The way we all used to be.”
Despite his wanting to be strong for Cricket, emotion choked Tom’s voice when he answered, “I do too, honey. But the doctors say what she went through was as tough as being in a battle zone or witnessing a murder. That’s what her nightmares are all about, why she won’t go near caves anymore: shock amplified by guilt.”
“What’s she got to be guilty about!” she replied, grimacing furiously.
“Your mom was the one who wanted to go into the Terror Hole in the first place,” Tom said, stroking her hair. “She feels responsible. She’s just gotta work it all out.”
A long moment passed. “But she’s gonna get better?”
Tom closed his eyes. “I hope so. I can’t imagine life without her.”
“It’s like Grandpa used to say, right?” Cricket asked.
“Your grandpa used to say a lot of things.”
“Together we Burkes can get through anything?”
“Oh, that one.” Tom smiled wistfully. He leaned over, kissed his daughter on the cheek, and tucked her sheet up under her chin. “Go back to sleep now.”
Tom got up and crossed to his cot. He lay on his back, hands under his head, staring up at the roof of the tent for the longest time, wondering whether he and Whitney could get through this together or whether that kind of mutual support had been shattered forever.
9:35 P.M.
CAMPBELLSVILLE, KENTUCKY
“Nobody move a muscle,” Billy Lyons said. “We’re gonna watch awhile.”
He and the three escaped inmates were spread on their bellies in the weeds below the lip of a creek bank that ran behind the gravel parking lot of a low cinderblock building. A garish neon sign that read SOAPY SUDS LAUNDROMAT cast the twilight scene in a thin yellow light. An aging green Dodge sedan was parked closest to the deserted road. Deeper into the lot sat a tan panel van adorned with a magnetic sign advertising the laundry business. From their angle, the laundry appeared empty.
After escaping early that morning, Lyons and the inmates had driven an hour and a half east of Central City, keeping to the gravel roads. By mid-morning, the guard had become nervous that they’d be spotted if they kept driving, so they sank the transfer van in a remote pond outside of Jonesville.
They passed the next twelve hours dozing and keeping watch from a thicket beyond the pond. As the sun began to sink, they’d walked four miles across farm fields and through small woodlots to the creek bottom that had led them here, to the Soapy Suds. Gregor had labored hard coming across the last field. Even now the pale physicist’s eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow.
“You okay?” Lyons whispered.
“Just get me to that stone and I’ll be fine,” Gregor rasped.
For a moment Lyons paused, wondering if what Gregor said was true, whether any of it was true. He’d put his life on the line for this man. He’d done things for this man that made him question his own morality, his own sanity. It had to be true. If not, the past two years had all been a terrible waste. Then he nodded and once again took in the parking lot in a glance before turning to the others. “Here’s the plan: Everyone stays here but Gregor. We’re going to grab that Suburban, hot-wire it, and swing around to get you all.”
“Fuck you are,” Mann said. “You’re not cutting out on us.”
“Mann’s right,” Kelly said. “Gregor stays behind. I’ll go with you.”
“I murdered three men to get you all out,” Lyons said, thinking fast.
“Yeah, you did,” Kelly replied with a soulless expression. “Which is why I believe you’d ditch us if you got the chance.”
Lyons hesitated, then spat in disgust. “Fine, you and me, hotshot. Don’t fuck up.”
The two men jumped to their feet and ran in a crouch across the gravel parking lot, the neon sign throwing stretched green shadows behind them. Lyons went to the Suburban. Meanwhile, Kelly peered inside the panel van. “Key’s in the ignition!” he hissed. “And there are bags of clothes in here, too.”
Before Lyons could reply, a door squeaked open and closed, followed by scuffing footfalls. The guard and Kelly looked up to see a tired-looking woman in her midtwenties halfway between the Dodge and the front door of the Laundromat. She carried a yellow plastic basket piled high with the clothes of young children. Kelly immediately sauntered toward the woman. “Don’t you worry none, miss,” he said, laying on a thick southern drawl. “My driver done lost our keys.”
The woman backed up a foot, staring hard at the words stenciled across the chest of Kelly’s bright orange short-sleeved jumpsuit: KENTUCKY CORRECTIONS. INMATE TRANSFER.
Lyons offered an awkward smile. “I’m a guard. We broke down.”
The woman’s attention flickered between the men She focused on the badge on Lyons’s chest and relaxed. That so?” she said. “Y’all from Eddyvil
le, then?”
“That’s a fact,” Kelly said, smiling at her.
“Got a cousin did time in Eddyville,” she said.
“Poor bastard,” Kelly said. He continued to slip toward her. “I’m sick myself. Tuberculosis. They’re sending me to the prison hospital. Your cousin ever go there?”
“Can’t say … we, uh, wasn’t that close,” she said. “Well, I best be going now. Got to get some sleep. Five-thirty rain or shine my twins are up making a racket. Tony’s on a two-week haul and they’re down now, so I took the time to do the laundry while I had it.” She paused, as if realizing that didn’t sound quite right, then she shook her head. “I mean, they’re not alone, the twins, I mean. My sister Margie’s there.”
“Course she is, Mrs …?” Kelly said.
“Cox,” she replied. “LaValle Cox.”
“Go on home now, Ms. Cox,” Lyons called out, not liking where this was going.
Kelly stiffened, then made a slight bow in her direction. “That’s right. You get back to your kids and Margie.”
LaValle Cox dropped her head and made as if to hurry past. But when she came abreast of Kelly, he took a step in time with hers, then hooked his bearlike forearm across her throat and arched her over backward. The basket crashed, spilling little T-shirts and patched overalls across the cement “No,” she whimpered. “Please. My boys.”
“No, Kelly!” Lyons cried. “Don’t do it!” Kelly’s eyes flickered to the guard, then he smiled and reached under the flat of her neck with his free hand, as if he were about to set her free. Lyons, however, read Kelly’s true intent and rushed him. Before he took two steps, Kelly’s arms embraced each other. He thrust her head up sharply and to the right. The still, humid night was broken by the sound of bone snapping below the flange of her skull. The young mother’s body collapsed like a marionette severed from its strings.
10:30 P.M.
MADISONVILLE, KENTUCKY
Ninety-four miles to the west, in the hallway outside the intensive care unit of the Madisonville Memorial Hospital, U.S. Marshal Damian Finnerty stared incredulously at a buff Latino man in his early thirties with a shaved head and a single weird eyebrow that reached from one side of his face to the other. Then he reached out and snatched a set of folders from the younger man, demanding, “What do you mean, sealed?”
“Sealed, as in no-looky,” replied Deputy Marshal Amador Sanchez in an annoyed tone.
Deputy Lydia Two-Elk, a short, powerfully built Native American, glared at Sanchez, then stepped in front of him to speak directly to Finnerty. “A good chunk of the testimony at Gregor’s murder trial, specifically the details of the research he and his supervisor, MacPherson, were doing was heard in closed chambers and then zipped up tight at the request of the U.S. attorney general.”
Finnerty rocked back on his heels and ground his fingers against his temples. He felt like he’d been spinning his wheels since he’d left the escape scene. The operation to repair Pate’s gunshot wounds had taken nearly six hours and he had not yet regained consciousness. During all that time, the marshal had made no headway whatsoever on the FBI’s interest in the case. Agents in Louisville said none of their men had picked up the bodies, and when Finnerty tried FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., he’d been given the bureaucratic brush-off. Since the escape there’d been no sightings of the inmates or their hostage. His wife was not returning his phone calls. And now there was this sealed testimony.
“That’s not the worst of it,” Two-Elk said. “This guard, Lyons, is a mystery man. Beyond a certain point, he doesn’t exist.”
“What are you talking about?” the marshal demanded.
Two-Elk said that the warden at Eddyville told her that up until five years ago Lyons had been a guard with an excellent record working in Mississippi’s maximum-security prisons. Then he developed a prodigious gambling habit. His wife and two kids left him over the problem. And when prison officials discovered he was in debt for fifty thousand to a Gulf Coast bookie, they fired him. Lyons drifted awhile, then started attending Gamblers Anonymous meetings before applying for work in Kentucky. The state, stretched thin for experienced ranking supervisors, took a chance on Lyons and hired him to work the segregation unit at Eddyville two years ago.
“Warden said he figures Lyons must have started gambling again. The convicts found out, used it as leverage to get him to help them escape,” Two-Elk said.
“Gambling debts?” Finnerty said, flipping through the folders. “Is that enough of a threat to make a guard kill three fellow officers and help four inmates escape?”
“That’s where the story begins to fall apart,” Two-Elk said, nodding. “We spent most of last night trying to track down where Lyons lived in Mississippi. No luck. Can’t find a record of him at the department of corrections there. We even e-mailed a photograph of him to every medium-and maximum-security prison in Mississippi.”
“And?” Boulter asked.
“No marriage certificate,” Two-Elk replied. “No kids’ birth records. No school records. No nothing.”
“The department of corrections never checked?” he cried.
“Guess not,” Sanchez said. “And now they’re faced with the biggest prison break in years.”
Before Finnerty could react to that news, a bearded doctor emerged from the ICU. “Pate’s awake, but weak,” he said. “You can have five minutes.”
Finnerty and Boulter went through the double doors and into a room where Pate lay back in a raised bed. He was naked from the waist up, his chest wrapped in bandages. Bags of intravenous fluids ran into his arms. A nurse checked a monitor attached to the wounded arsonist. A sheriff’s deputy sat in a chair next to the bed.
“Leonard Pate?” Finnerty said.
Pate opened his bleary eyes. “Who’s asking?”
“Damian Finnerty, U.S. marshal for—”
“Fuck you. I ain’t talking without a lawyer.”
Finnerty’s eyes narrowed. He put a hand on the nurse’s shoulder and looked at the deputy. “Would you excuse us a minute?”
The nurse hesitated, then went out. The deputy followed and Boulter pulled shut the curtains. Finnerty said nothing but made a show of pulling on latex gloves. He smiled, leaned over Pate, then grabbed a piece of tape holding the convict’s dressings in place. He tugged hard on it. The inmate howled.
Finnerty grabbed Pate by the chin. “Listen, shit-for-brains,” he said. “I have three dead corrections officers and one suspect in custody: you. From where I’m standing, you’re looking at an extreme change in your miserable circumstances—from twenty years’ hard time for arson to a death sentence on three counts of premeditated murder.”
At that, Pate stopped howling. “Didn’t kill no one.”
Finnerty started to peel off another piece of tape.
“Lyons did it!” Pate gasped.
‘The guard?” Boulter asked.
“Shot ’em all point-blank.”
“Why would Lyons do that?” Finnerty asked.
“I’m in pain here. Chest feels like it’s burning,” Pate groaned. “I need meds.”
“Answer my questions. Then you get your drugs.”
“That’s brutality,” Pate protested.
“One of my specialties,” Finnerty said, reaching for the tape again. “Why?”
Pate scowled at him, fought for breath. “The moon man.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Gregor,” Pate said. “Killed his supervisor at the U of T, carried the body around in the trunk of his car for weeks. Real fucking whacko.”
Finnerty glanced at Boulter, then back at Pate. “Keep talking.”
Pate grimaced, then went on, his voice hoarse with effort. “Gregor got Lyons and the others believing in this bullshit story that he killed that guy—his supervisor—because he got onto Gregor’s big scientific discovery about this moon rock and the supervisor was going to steal credit for it. Says he hid the moon rock where no one would ever find it. Greg
or convinced Lyons to help him escape so they could go get the moon rock. Lyons bought into the story and faked the results of a TB test to get us all in the transfer wagon to the hospital at Louisville. I didn’t know he was gonna kill ’em.”
“What’s so important about the moon rock?” the marshal demanded.
Pate snorted and closed his eyes. “It’s horseshit.”
“What did Gregor say about the rock?” Boulter pressed.
Pate shrugged. “Said he figured out that it could, you know, do special stuff.”
Finnerty squinted down at Pate. “Keep going.”
“Most of it was mumbo jumbo to me,” Pate said, swallowing hard. “But from what I could understand of it, Gregor says the rock’s like a magnifying glass for energy. Says it can change things.”
“The hell do you mean, change things?” Boulter asked.
Pate chortled and coughed. “Change things,” he said. “Like one molecule into another. Lead into gold or rock into diamonds or whatever else you want. Total horseshit, but Gregor’s got them convinced that—”
Sanchez stormed into the hospital room. “They’ve surfaced.”
Finnerty spun. “Where?”
“Little town called Campbellsville, about forty miles from here,” the deputy said. “Killed a woman at a laundry and stole a vehicle no more than an hour ago.”
“We’re out of here,” Finnerty cried. The three men rushed for the ICU doors.
“Hey,” Pate called after them. “What about my meds?”
A minute later, Finnerty and his team were jumping into the helicopter on the roof of the hospital. Boulter revved the chopper’s engine.
“I want the blockades pushed east,” said Finnerty as they lifted off. “Somerset. Lancaster. Danville. Frankfort in case they go north.”
“I’m on it,” Boulter barked into his headset.
Finnerty looked over his shoulder at Sanchez and Two-Elk sitting in the backseat of the chopper.
“What was Gregor working on when he killed his supervisor?” Finnerty demanded.
“We don’t know,” said Sanchez. “Case was sealed, remember?”
The marshal rubbed his hand over his face. “What kind of researcher was he?”
Labyrinth Page 7