“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“You’re so predictable.”
“Yeah. So are you.”
“Well, then I’m in good company.”
He groaned. “Fine, but just stay with me, okay?”
Olivia bit back her annoyance. “If you’re scared of the dark, just say so.”
She waved goodbye to Emily, as the dogs led the way into the cold, craggy mine shaft. Noses fixed to the old steel tracks, where a set of carts had carried wares up from the depths below. Frayed electric wire that had once provided light hung loosely from the wall, affixed by nails. The old bulbs had all gone dark long ago.
“You’ve been in here before?” Deck asked her, while they followed the group down the long, shadowy tunnel.
Olivia directed her flashlight up ahead, where the mine shaft split into two passages. She stepped carefully, the rock damp beneath her feet. Wade was the first to call out for Thomas, his voice echoing eerily into the unknown.
“Not exactly.” She smiled at Deck’s back, knowing he couldn’t see her. No way she’d recount that story. He didn’t need to know how scared she’d been. “Too dangerous.”
“I have.” Nick appeared beside her, buzzing with energy, like a fly she couldn’t swat. “Remember that Halloween when it was the thing to do? The seniors dared all us juniors to spend the night inside Clawfoot. That was right before another section caved in, and they put up no trespassing signs. A buddy of mine and I got drunk and rode one of those mine carts until it fell off the track. If you go far enough in, there are pools of water down there.”
“So, you two knew each other in high school, huh?” Deck asked.
Olivia waved her hand dismissively, hoping Nick would stay focused on finding Thomas, not regaling Deck with tales of how awful she’d been to him.
“Olivia was far too cool for me.”
“Hardly.”
Nick smirked at her protestation. “Still is, it seems.”
“I just want to know what you’re doing with my sister. She means a lot to me.”
“It’s confidential. Private investigator privilege.”
As Deck went on ahead, Olivia pulled Nick aside and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I know about the black light and your tip from the Feds.”
Olivia registered the shock in Nick’s eyes, but he played it cooler than Em had, as they hurried to catch up to the others. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Olivia’s eyes grew accustomed to the never-ending darkness, but the sameness of the tunnel disoriented her. She understood how someone could get lost down here and disappear forever. After separating into two groups at the fork in the shaft, they’d been walking for at least fifteen minutes, surrounded by the same rough rock wall, the same ancient track beneath their feet. The same sound, too—silence. So when she spotted an aberration in the distance, she blinked and looked again, wondering if the shadows were playing tricks with her.
Lining the wall, a set of wooden shelves filled haphazard with empty buckets and rusted tools in coffee cans, the dust as thick as snow. An old conveyance cart sat on the trolley tracks ahead, showing its age. Its wheels rusted, its body sagging with rot. As Lucius whined and pulled at the leash, straining against it, a chill zipped up Olivia’s spine.
The officer jogged to keep up, jerking Lucius back when they reached the cart. He peered inside and cursed under his breath, sending ripples of a whisper reverberating down the tunnel. Olivia thought of Nora, waiting by her phone for any news, and said a silent prayer.
“Got something?” Deck asked, hurrying toward the car.
The officer nodded. “It’s not good.”
The nearer Olivia got, the stronger the scent. Metal and sweetness.
Olivia willed her legs to keep moving through the quicksand of her past. It always lingered in the shadows, ready to swallow her heart at a moment’s notice. Every bad thing that happened brought her right back to the bad thing. But she wasn’t eight years old and she wasn’t standing in the doorway of Apartment E and her father wasn’t there, hunched over the body of a dead woman, with blood on his hands.
She sucked in a breath, took a final step forward, and forced her eyes down into the mine cart.
Blood. Blood, everywhere.
Forty-Eight
Will breathed in through his nose to calm himself. His heart had taken off like a jackrabbit at the sight of the blood puddle in the mine cart. After he radioed to JB to get the crime scene techs down there ASAP, he shined the beam of his flashlight down the tunnel, along the walls.
“Wait.” Olivia grabbed his arm, pointed at a spot on the rock face, her voice high and breathy. “Is that…?”
Will redirected the light onto the wall, the horror of the whole scene taking shape. Characters written in blood that dripped like rainwater through the crags and crevices of the rock.
“What does it say?” the K-9 officer asked, pulling a frenetic Lucius to attention.
“That looks like the number ten.” Olivia gestured with her flashlight. “And an X.”
“Ten X?” Nick suggested.
“Or ten times,” Olivia said. “Whatever that means.”
Nick grimaced. “Hopefully not ten victims.”
Will snapped a photograph of the wall and the cart with his cell phone. Thank goodness he’d thought to charge it in the Crown Vic on the way over. “It’ll take a while for CSI to get down here. I’m going to see what’s at the end of the tunnel.”
Olivia jogged after him. “Do you think that’s Thomas’s blood?”
Will had no good answer, so he kept his mouth shut and his eyes focused on the sliver of faint light visible ahead. She didn’t ask again, which meant she’d probably assumed the worst, like Will, and had no desire to give voice to the awful possibility.
As they drew nearer to the light, Will made out its source: a thin opening between the ancient planks of wood crisscrossed over the exit, similar to those they’d cast off the front entrance. But these hadn’t been replaced in some time. The nails he could see had gone rusty.
“Whoever came into Clawfoot didn’t go out this way. Are there any other exits?”
The disheartened look on Olivia’s face spoke for her. “This place is a maze, with enough tunnels to get lost in. The miners made sure there were plenty of ventilation exits in case of a cave-in.”
After they wandered back to the cart, a heavy silence between them, Will forced himself to take another look inside it. The surface of the blood puddle had begun to congeal. Fat drops of it marked the tracks like breadcrumbs, leading to the garish message left behind.
While Lucius and his officer handler headed back down the tunnel to search for signs of Thomas, Olivia and Nick stationed themselves in front of the stony wall, scrutinizing the red letters.
“What’re you thinking?” Will asked.
“It’s strange,” she puzzled. “Why leave a message here? Now? Why not at Ocean’s Song? Or even near the car, if Peter was the primary target?”
“Maybe that horseshoe you found in the pool was the message.”
“Maybe.” Olivia sounded unconvinced. “But the mediums are so different. The horseshoe was subtle. But words written in blood, that’s blatant. That’s undeniable. That’s—”
“Brutal,” Nick finished. “The guy certainly knows how to make a statement. Albeit a cryptic one.”
When Olivia looked at Will, he could practically hear the gears turning behind her fiery eyes.
Just then, Will’s radio came alive, filling the tunnel with eerie static. The voice, when it came, echoed down and around them. “Kingsley for Decker. Come in.”
“Go for Decker.”
“We got one too. A bloody message. Looks like yours. Ten X. Or Ten times. Over.”
Will didn’t know why, but as soon as he heard it from Kingsley’s mouth, he felt the chill of the familiar. Something told him that message was meant for him.
Three hours later, the crime scene techs had pr
ocessed five bloody carts in five tunnels. Five scrawled messages, each one bearing the exact same letters—TEN X—but no sign of Thomas.
While the search carried on, past the mine and deeper into the redwood grove, Will and Olivia caught the last ATV ride back to the cabin with Steve Li.
“Anything you can tell us from the blood evidence?” Will asked, as they rumbled over the forest floor.
“Nothing definitive. I don’t like to speculate.”
“But?” Will prodded.
“But, we’ll have an answer for you as soon as possible. First, I want to rule out an animal as the source. Detective Benson already collected a DNA sample from Thomas’s aunt if it comes to that.”
Will felt sick and tired. Sick and tired of this case. Sick and tired of being wrong. Sick and tired of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Olivia squeezed his knee but it didn’t quiet his chattering nerves. Neither did her words, which she doled out carefully, reluctantly. Like teaspoons of unpleasant medicine. “Whoever has Thomas, I don’t think it’s the same person who killed his family.”
Forty-Nine
When she returned home mid-morning, Olivia found Emily passed out on the sofa, a cheesy reality show marathon playing on the television. She slumped down beside her sister, wishing she could close her eyes. But Deck had emailed her Peter Fox’s client files, and her buzzing curiosity kept her awake.
Freshly showered and armed with a steaming cup of black coffee and a heaping bowl of oatmeal, Olivia returned to the sofa and her sleeping sister and propped her laptop on her knees. She opened a new document and typed TEN X in bold red letters, alongside a list of their mostly exonerated suspects—Jonah, Elvis, and Pedro—and the word horseshoe. After a moment’s pause, she added a name: Graham.
Then, she started scrolling through Fox’s old clients, beginning with his work as a public defender, when he’d had to take what he’d been given, guilty or not. Gangbangers, conmen, small-time criminals. The occasional murderer. The accused, too poor to afford representation from an attorney who didn’t have a caseload as long as his arm. Fox had kept fastidious handwritten notes, even on the cases he’d turned down, that had been scanned and filed alongside the legal briefs and filings typed on his fancy letterhead. Peter Fox’s handwriting had a distinctive neutrality. Simple script with neat block letters. He cut loose a lot of cases. Mostly, the ones he couldn’t win.
A few years after Peter hung up his shingle, he’d won a big case—the acquittal of a pretty boy with a hefty inheritance who’d murdered his college sweetheart—and business started booming. A year or so later, Hannah began interviewing clients on Peter’s behalf. Olivia could tell because of the handwriting, his nuanced strokes replaced by her bold loops and cutting dashes that conveyed a subtle bias. Notes like looks guilty and creepy eyes and reminds me of Bundy told the reader she’d clearly made up her mind. But under Hannah’s supervision, Peter’s acquittal percentage went up. Way up. She obviously knew how to pick a winner.
With Emily nestled next to her, Olivia read file after file until her eyelids grew heavy and her vision started to blur. Just when she’d decided to allow herself a break, possibly even a catnap, a case caught her attention. Made her sit up straight, her skin pricking.
Ten years prior, Peter had defended Tim Overton, a ranch hand who’d claimed he’d been possessed by demons when he executed four members of the Holt family with a single shot to the head, before setting the family ranch house on fire. Peter had been able to convince the jury that, due to his chronic schizophrenia, Overton was not criminally responsible for the murders and should instead be committed to Napa State Hospital. He’d been released only two years later.
Olivia took a screenshot of the summary page and sent it in an email to Deck, typing For Follow-Up? in the subject line. The similarities couldn’t be ignored, nor the injustice. Getting murderers off scot-free had propelled Peter straight up the ladder of Santa Barbara society, leaving a mob of angry victims in his wake. Maybe one of them had decided to mete out justice the old-fashioned way.
As Olivia pondered the Holts’ fate, Emily began dreaming aloud. Her voice, haunted and childlike, she spoke a single word.
“Daddy?”
Restless, she turned away from Olivia, resettling with her head on the couch cushion. Olivia watched the rise and fall of her sister’s chest until she felt certain sleep had pulled her back under. Careful not to disturb Em, she stood up, tiptoeing across the living room and down the hall toward her sister’s room.
Olivia took one last glance back, before she cracked the door and prepared to snoop again like a textbook big sister. When Emily had enrolled in the art institute, she’d shipped most of her belongings to her studio apartment in downtown San Francisco, leaving her room a shell of its former girly self. But Olivia knew all of her hiding places. Under the mattress. Atop the closet’s highest shelf. Stuffed in the toe of her rain boots.
She struck gold pressed between the pages of the first Harry Potter. A well-worn envelope addressed to Emily Rockwell at 222 Golden Gate View Avenue, Apartment 3 in San Francisco. The return address, Valley View State Prison, where their father had spent the last ten years of his incarceration.
Olivia opened the flap with care and removed the letter dated March 1st, just days before her father had supposedly hanged himself from a pipe that seemed too far to reach on his own.
Dear Em,
I enjoyed our recent visit more than you know. This place gets real lonely, and it feels good to have you in my corner. Liv will come around too. I just have to prove it to her. As hard as it was admitting to you the mistakes I made in the past, it was freeing to get that boulder off my chest. Please be patient with your sister. Let her tell you about that day at the Double Rock in her own time. Whatever happens at my parole hearing, just know I love you and believe in you. Keep making art. Art speaks when words can’t.
Love,
Dad
Tucked inside the envelope, their father had enclosed one of his own original drawings. As Olivia unfolded the thick paper, the sight knocked the wind from her, and she had to sit down. He’d drawn her and Emily as they were now—though he hadn’t been face to face with Olivia in years. Olivia immediately recognized the inspiration from a photo she and Emily had taken at the beach near Little Gull. But their father had drawn them facing the water and added himself between, his arms around them both. He’d titled the drawing Love.
Moving quickly, Olivia padded out of Em’s room toward her own, in search of the black light she’d purchased from Big Ed’s Hardware months ago.
Turning the lights off, she sucked in a breath and held it up to the margin, the same as she’d done with the other drawing. The one that revealed her father had been close to determining the General’s identity.
“What are you doing?” Emily demanded.
Olivia dropped the black light and cursed as it tumbled toward the hardwood, landing with a clatter at the bedside.
“There’s nothing there. Nick and I already looked.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
Olivia ignored the implications of her sister’s answer, focusing instead on proving her wrong. She retrieved the black light and scanned the drawing, front to back, finding nothing.
“Told you.” But there was no joy in Emily’s gloating. She dropped to the bed beside her sister, her eyes filling with tears. “I didn’t want to be right. I wanted one last message from Dad. Nick thought there would be.”
“Why did you get Nick involved in the first place? I thought you believed the whole suicide story.” Emily had been the one to encourage Olivia to move on, to accuse her of trying to distract herself with her silly conspiracy theories and ignoring the real issue. That she hadn’t made peace with their dad before he died. “And don’t say it’s private investigator privilege.”
“Well, technically, it is. But I know you, and you’ll never give up.”
“You’re right about that.”
/> Emily tucked her feet under the covers and propped a pillow behind her. It reminded Olivia of the old days, when she’d read bedtime stories to her little sister while their mother had drowned her sorrows at the Hickory Pit bar.
“The FBI showed up at my apartment in April, wanting to know if I’d been in contact with Dad before he died. Or if you’d given me any of his drawings. They told me you’d turned over the sketchbook from his property. You know, the one you said you couldn’t find.”
Olivia cringed. Sorry, she mouthed.
“Anyway, it freaked me out how pushy they were, so I just blurted out a lie. I told them I was angry with Dad for killing himself, and I’d destroyed everything he sent me.”
“Did they believe you?”
“I think so. For a second, I thought they were gonna search the place anyway. The one guy stared me down like he was trying to intimidate me. I’ve always had my doubts about what happened to Dad, but that’s when I knew for sure you were right. He didn’t kill himself.”
Olivia didn’t know how to feel. But it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to have her sister on her side.
“They were so interested in his drawings, I figured there must be something there. But I wasn’t sure what to do about it. When I came back home for summer break, I found Nick online, and he told me he could help me. He knows a guy with an in at the FBI. His contact told him that the black light messages are used a lot with prison informants. So, I figured it was worth a shot.”
Placing the drawing on the bed between them, Olivia examined it more closely. Beyond the pencil-shaded lighthouse, the gray strokes of the water broke the horizon. Their father had drawn three naval ships in the distance. On each hull, he’d penciled in the tiny ship numbers, three per vessel and barely visible.
One Child Alive: An absolutely gripping crime thriller packed with nail-biting suspense (Rockwell and Decker Book 3) Page 20