I waved him to silence. We stood that way for what seemed like an hour but was probably only a minute or two. That hinky feeling was gone. I let my breath out and holstered my side arm, waving at Jax to do the same. “I thought I heard something in the left fork.”
Jax shot me a perplexed look. “What could be in there? We control the entrance to the cave.”
“Maybe there is more than one way into this cave.” I shrugged and laughed a little. “Or maybe Zombies?”
“World War Z, huh?”
“Okay, maybe it was my imagination.” My smile was sheepish, but something deep inside my mind was shouting that I hadn’t imagined anything.
“Just as well,” said Jax, “you are much too big to be played by Brad Pitt in the movie version. Lou Ferrigno, or maybe Arnold.” He pronounced the last name “Ahhhnahld,” as it should be.
“Jackass,” I said, smiling. “Did you remember the paint or what?”
Jax pulled a rattle can of bright orange paint out of his windbreaker’s left pocket. “There were these two young nuns tasked to paint a room in the convent, but the Mother Superior told them not to get a drop on their habits. The two nuns lock the door, see, and strip. They start painting. There’s a knock at the door, and they ask who’s there. A man said, “Blind man.” The nuns look at each other and shrug, then let him in. The man takes a long look and says ‘Nice tits. Where do you want these blinds?’”
I chuckled, feeling the tension drain out of me. “I bet the nuns at your parochial school loved that one.”
Jax shrugged. “Not a single one was younger than ninety. Worse yet, none of them had nice tits.”
Still smiling and shaking my head, I waved my hand toward the fork in the cave. “Which fork?”
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” said Jax. “The left one, of course.”
I took the spray can and stepped gingerly around the remains closest to the left-hand fork. I painted an arrow pointing toward the entrance. “We’ll do it like that. Each turn we take, we’ll mark like that. The side of the cave with the mark indicates which direction we took.”
“Okay.”
We started walking down the left fork, seeing more remains followed by more of the same. The body count was starting to seem infinite.
“It’s going to take forever to identify them all,” said Jax. “Aren’t you glad you are not an ME?”
“In more ways than one,” I said.
We walked in silence for another hundred yards or so and then came to an intersection of the tunnel we were in and a perpendicular tunnel. As we approached the intersection, Jax shone his flashlight on both walls on our side of the four-way. His light illuminated a roughly hewn wall sconce. The sconce held an unlit torch. The primitive torch was covered in thick white cobwebs, and the thought of being down there in the dark with spiders made my skin crawl, of course.
“Why would anyone use a torch like that in here?” Jax asked. “Why walk around with a smoky torch in a place like this?”
I shrugged and tried to keep my tone light. “Maybe his flashlight was out of batteries?”
“Either that or…”
“Or what, Jax?”
He shook his head slowly. “Either that or these bodies have been here longer than we think.”
I played my light across the remains near us. “Come on, Jax. Maybe the torch has been here for a while, but these remains could be in this state in as little as two months from the time of their deaths.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said. “But that doesn’t feel right to me. Does it to you?”
I didn’t want to answer that question, so I walked into the middle of the intersection and pointed my light down the left branch. The rough rock walls of the cave gave way to crudely worked stone about thirty yards from where I stood as if someone had cut a tunnel from the rock using nothing but a pick ax. “Look at this, Jax”
He came to my side and followed the flashlight beam with his eyes. “No way.”
I gestured at the tunnel as if to say: ‘there it is for all to see.’
“This is too weird for my beard,” muttered Jax.
“Yeah, well, you don’t have a beard.”
“I would if I could.” Jax took a deep breath. “What in the hell is this, Hank? I mean someone cut this side tunnel. Just to store more bodies? Why not just find another cave? Or hell, just stack them.”
“I wish I had any idea why serials do what they do,” I said. I shook my head and blew breath out my puffed cheeks. “But this can’t be the work of one man, can it? I mean this would take serious effort.”
“Years and years of work.” Jax nodded. “All of this is too much to be one person. If it was one man, this took a long time and that just doesn’t make sense for a serial killer to cut a new tunnel. There’s more cave ahead.”
“The scale is just too big. I thought that maybe this cave served to cure the killer’s meat, but these caves go on and on. There’s plenty of space for more bodies, right? There must be some other purpose for this labyrinth,”
Jax gave me a strange look. “What kind of purpose could there possibly be beyond those two?”
“Maybe he connected multiple caves? That could account for more than one entrance, right?” I sighed again. “The simple fact is that the cave is here and it’s up to us to catch the guy using it—whatever the twisted reason is. Let’s go look at the worked part of this mausoleum.” I marked the left wall, starting the arrow in the new corridor and painting it right around the corner so that it ended in the tunnel that led back to the surface.
“How much deeper do you think this can go?”
I shook my head. “I hate to keep saying this, but I have no idea. Maybe radar or sonar could map these tunnels?”
Jax was silent for a few moments, and I let him think. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “This has to be twenty years of victims. Or more.”
I sighed and brushed imaginary spiders out of my hair. “Just going by the count we know for sure, seventy-five, I’d guess we’ve seen at least that many on our little walk, right?”
“More,” said Jax. “Maybe three times as much.”
“Okay, so going with two hundred bodies, and assuming this guy kills regularly, that would be a victim every month. I can’t imagine it’s gone on for even ten years, let alone twenty. Not at a victim a month. Someone would have noticed a pattern like that, right?”
“And that only accounts for the bodies we’ve already seen. I have a terrible feeling this is just the tip of the iceberg.” Jax waved his hand toward the darkness in front of us.
“I hate to even think it, but I do believe you are right on that score. Just think of the passages we’ve seen but not explored. Then think of what might be left in the rest of the cave.”
“I don’t like this, Hank.”
“Heh. Me neither.”
We went on, always sticking to the left-hand branch and painting our little arrows on the walls. After a while the cadavers seemed to fade from our notice—there were just too many of them to process. We walked through natural corridors and caverns, and man-made corridors and rooms walled in worked stone. We saw plenty of sconces, but the torch we discovered at the first four-way intersection was the only one we saw. The different areas of the cave all had one thing in common, though. No matter if the walls were natural, rough cut, or lined with worked stone, the center of the floor was always worn smooth as if thousands of footsteps had polished them.
When we finally gave up and made our way back up into the crisp air at the cave entrance, I estimated that the body count had to be over six hundred. More than a little dejected, we walked back toward our cruisers parked up on Gulick Road. My mind sluggish and torpid—too numb to think. Part of that was fatigue, but most of it was a deep desire to avoid thinking about the sheer number of murder victims.
“Hank, I…” Jax’s voice trailed away, and he made a helpless gesture with his hands.
“We have to get back into the minutiae. Stop yourself from thinking about the
…” I made a very similar gesture to the one Jax had just made. “The enormity of this…”
“This nightmare,” Jax finished.
“That’s as good a description as any, I suppose.”
We walked the rest of the way to our cars in silence, each lost in his thoughts. I was walking with my head down, my thumbs hooked into the front pockets of my dirt smeared jeans.
Jax stopped and gasped. “What in the hell?”
I glanced at him. His face was a canonical picture of shock. He was breathing fast as he turned to look at me. His eyes were open wide—as wide as I’d ever seen anyone’s eyes get. He lifted his arm and made another helpless little gesture up ahead of us.
I looked toward the cars. On the side of Jax’s car was a bright, DayGlo orange arrow, pointing straight down at the ground. My mind was trying to reject the reality of what that arrow meant, trying to construct a scenario where that arrow was some kind of joke played on us by another trooper or the crime scene guys.
All of that was nonsense, though, and I knew it. The arrow meant that the killer had been in the cave with us. He had seen the arrows we painted on his walls, and he wanted us to know it. He wanted to say hello. He was reckless, perhaps wanting to be caught.
“That sound you heard…” said Jax in a small, quiet voice.
I nodded.
“If I hadn’t come back when I did—”
“No use playing what if; you did come back. We better get some forensics technicians out here to dust your car.”
Jax nodded, but neither of us moved. “Of course, there won’t be any prints. He would have made sure of that.”
I nodded and ran my hand over my hair. “We have to at least tell Gruber.”
“Should I leave the car where it is?”
“Yeah, you know Gruber will want a full forensic workup of the car, so let’s do that.” I pointed to my car, but neither one of us moved toward my cruiser for a long time.
Eleven
“If I understand the implications of your story,” said Meuhlnir, “the person responsible for all those bodies was in the grotto with you?”
“Yes. Hatton let it slip later.”
Meuhlnir shook his head. “This Hatton sounds quite brazen.”
I nodded. “You don’t know the half of it. Alone, he was a terror, but when he was with or under the influence of Tutor, things got really bad.”
Meuhlnir sniffed but nodded. “This folie a deux?”
I sighed, long and loud. “She was like gasoline to his flame. She… I don’t know, maybe he was trying to impress her with how ferocious and bloodthirsty he could be. Maybe he just couldn’t stand for her to be upset.”
Meuhlnir turned at looked me in the face; his eyes narrowed, and his lips pursed several times before he spoke. “Tell me of this.”
I cleared my throat. “Could I have some water?”
Meuhlnir sprang to his feet like a man who was much younger than he looked and walked out of the room. He returned with two mugs and a steaming pitcher. “This is much better for you than water!” He poured me a mug of the translucent amber liquid and pressed it into my hands.
It smelled of spices and nature. The warmth of the stoneware mug felt delicious in my hands. I took a sip and was pleased with the crisp, dry taste of spring honey. “What is this made from? It smells like honey.”
Meuhlnir smiled. “It is made from water, yeast, honey and a secret blend of spices. My wife, Sif, makes the best mead in the Snyowrlant.”
“It’s good,” I said. “Very good. But I probably shouldn’t have this. The medications I take put me at risk for liver damage.”
Meuhlnir scoffed. “Don’t worry about such things. Sif is a healer.”
It was home brewed but didn’t smell like a high alcohol content. I shrugged and gave in to the aroma and wonderful taste lingering on my tongue.
“Now,” said Meuhlnir, “tell me about the woman.”
“Like I said, because of the fight in the street, we knew the make and model of their car. DMV records gave us their names and address, but other than the battery from the street fight, we couldn’t charge Hatton with anything, and we had nothing we could charge Tutor with. So, we went to see Tutor. The idea was to get her to tell us something we could use to get a search warrant, which we hoped would give us some evidence that would tie them to the murder of Aten Kennedy for a start.”
“It didn’t work out that way, I take it?” asked Meuhlnir.
“No, it didn’t. Jax and I got in the car and drove.”
Twelve
After talking to Gruber and getting things started on Jax’s cruiser, we piled into mine and headed toward the address the DMV had for Elizabeth Tutor.
Neither of us had much to say, and when his phone buzzed at him, Jax jumped a bit. He grunted at the screen and clicked away like a teenager. His phone buzzed at him in rapid succession, and he just stared at it for a moment before sliding the phone into his breast pocket.
“Text from the missus?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
Jax was tight-lipped about his personal life, and normally I wouldn’t press him, but something in his demeanor told me he wanted to be pressed in this instance. “Okay. Is she doing okay?”
“You could say that, boss.” His tone was bright, and when I glanced over at him, his face was blazing with happiness.
“Well, don’t just sit there, man. Spill.”
Jax chuckled. “We are finally pregnant. She just got home from the doctor, and everything looks good.”
I knew they had been trying for a while, and I knew the only other success had ended in a miscarriage. “That’s great news!”
“She still has to take it real easy, given the… Well, you know.”
I nodded. “It’s your job to make that easy for her.”
“I was just telling her to quit her job.”
I looked at him sideways and arched an eyebrow at him. “You told her to do that, did you?”
He grinned and glanced at me with a sheepish expression. “Yep. She was just correcting my misconceptions about our relationship.”
I laughed. “Yeah, the sooner you get with the program, the better it will be for you. Happy wife, happy life. Just memorize that.”
“She’s still going to quit that job. I just have to figure out how to make it her idea.”
“Now you’re catching on. By the way, if you tell Jane I said any of this, I will have to kill you. It will have to be quick, though, because she will be coming for me with an axe or something.”
He sat there, grinning, with a kind of shell-shocked expression on his face.
“Congratulations to both of you. Oh, and you’d better make sure your wife hears about them this time.”
“Ten-four, boss. I’m so happy I could split down the middle.” His sunny smile clouded over a tad bit. “At the same time, I’m a little scared.”
“Understandable,” I said. “Kids change everything.”
“So people tell me. We’ve been trying for a while now, though, and I don’t want Aud to go through what she had to last time.” His smile disappeared altogether. “I don’t want to go through that either,” he murmured and stared at his hands in his lap.
“I can’t even imagine,” I said. “But no more of that thinking. Positive thoughts from here on, Jaxon.”
He nodded without looking up.
“It is scary to try to bring a child into the world. There is so much hope and anticipation.”
Jax nodded. “Yeah, we are trying not to get our hopes up, just in case.”
“That’s probably smart, but at the same time, you both should try to enjoy this. Jane and I had a lot of fun—there was so much material to tease her about. And vice versa.
“After Sig was born, and they both were still in the hospital, I went shopping for bottles and diapers and stuff. I told Jane we were all set, that I’d taken care of it.
“Who knew you needed more than twelve diapers and six big bottles.” I laughe
d. “Who even knew there was such a thing as a small bottle or a medium bottle. They never have those in the movies.”
Jax chuckled.
“I thought I was over-buying to make sure we had enough. Six,” I said with a laugh. “Can you even imagine the look Jane gave me?”
Jax looked up, and his smile was back, which was what I wanted after all.
“Anyway, I ended up back at the store every day for the next week, buying more bottles. It didn’t help that the store only put four or five bottles out at a time.”
“Yeah, I’m glad you told me that story. I’ve got to leave myself a note.”
“Boy howdy.”
“Boy howdy?” he laughed. “Where do you get this stuff.”
I arched an eyebrow at him and put a lofty lilt in my voice. “I grew up in a diversified environment, Mr. Local-yokel.”
He smirked in my direction. “You ‘might could’ say that. You grew up in Redneckville, and you know it.”
“Pshhh!” I said. “You wouldn’t know a redneck if the sun burned him right in front of you. Anyway, quit distracting me with your orneriness.” We were driving north on County Road 37—which was long and straight and boring. “Keep an eye out for two barns built close together in an L-shape on the left. The house we want is across the street.”
“You mean like those two barns coming up?”
I squinted and could make out a blob of red but nothing more. “Damn whipper-snapper,” I said. “Quit lording your youthful eyesight over me.”
“Someone has to keep your ego in check.”
“That’s exactly what Jane says.”
Jax grinned. “Well, great minds and all that.”
We approached a sea-foam-green house sitting across the road from the two barns. A pristine white picket fence surrounded a lot with old-growth yellow birch trees mixed with red maples. There were two breaks in the white picket fence, each servicing one leg of a crescent shaped driveway. I pulled the cruiser into the drive and turned off the engine. The yard was well-maintained with nice flower beds up near the house and more trees out back.
“How should we handle this?”
I shook my head. “We don’t know anything. Polite and friendly.”
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