Jonah nodded. “If he grew up around here, he could have heard about it. There are a few mine shafts scattered closer to the mountains, but the ranger service makes sure the barriers at the mouth of those shafts cannot be opened. Dangerous.
“I don’t remember any of my friends as kids wanting to explore any caves or shafts, and I haven’t had to chase any away in the years I’ve been chief, but everybody knew it was somewhere in the woods. If he’d been hiking in the woods, he could have found it. Vines had grown up all around there, but they wouldn’t have been too difficult to pull away. And it’s far enough out that he probably didn’t worry much about keeping it hidden while he came and went.”
Sam frowned. “Did Nessa say anything about pulling vines away when she was getting out?”
“No. But she was so intent on getting out, I doubt she would have even noticed them.”
“We’ll need to talk to her,” Sam said.
“I know. But right now, the doctors and her family are around her. And we know where to find the others without having to talk to her first. That’s our priority, finding the others.”
“Agreed,” Luke and Sam said in one voice.
Jonah frowned at Robbie. “Aren’t you supposed to be asleep?”
“We had a little disturbance.”
“Little?” Dante murmured.
Robbie shook her head. “Never mind that for now. I think it’s safe to say that both Dante and I are wide awake, believe me.”
“Okay.” Jonah straightened. “I’ve put Doc on alert at the clinic, and I have my people standing by. Sarah will meet us at the station.” When Lucas raised his brows, Jonah added, “My first priority is getting those people out of there. I mean to go in there in force, armed, and wearing vests.”
“Do you expect him to be there?” Sam asked neutrally.
“Honestly? No. I expect that by now he knows Nessa’s escaped—whether he deliberately let her go or not—and that he’ll be watching from a safe distance. My only real concern is whether he has the place booby-trapped. We’ve never needed a bomb squad.”
“I can help you there,” Sam said.
Jonah eyed her. “You’re sort of handy to have around.”
“I have my moments. Our vests are in the SUV. Let’s go.”
EIGHTEEN
Jonah hadn’t known what to expect at the bottom of that long, long shaft into the earth. Nessa had tried to tell him, haltingly, but it was clear there was just something she couldn’t manage to tell him, something that horrified her exhausted little soul.
It might have been only the terrors of a little girl lost, but whatever it was, just her expression had made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. So he’d exchanged his service weapon, a Glock .22, for the .44 Magnum he kept more as a showpiece—but also kept clean and oiled. And used at the shooting range whenever he used his service weapon.
The only one of the others to comment had been Samantha, who had said merely, “Looks like that cannon DeMarco carries.”
“It kicks like a mule,” was all Lucas said.
“I’ll say,” Sarah agreed, checking the load on her own Glock. “I fired the damned thing once at the range, and it knocked me on my ass. I don’t need anything that powerful.”
“Probably depends on what you’re aiming at,” Robbie murmured, envying the other woman her almost preternatural calm.
Sarah looked fairly rested, having logged, probably, a couple hours more sleep than Dante and Robbie, and she was most definitely ready to move, now that Nessa was safe and it seemed at least even odds they were going to find the others as well.
Safe and unharmed, they hoped.
They were all suited up in their body armor and armed, but they didn’t ride horses to meet the other two officers. Instead, Jonah’s Jeep was joined by four others from the police motor pool, and they loaded up and headed out in those.
Thunder rumbled about the time they turned off a paved road and onto a rutted track, and it was Samantha who asked, “Did anybody check the weather?”
Jonah, who was driving their Jeep in the lead, replied, “The worst of it’s supposed to hold off, except for the wind. But sometime after midnight, we’re gonna get slammed.”
There were still enough dead leaves from the winter past to be blowing across in front of them, and Jonah had the Jeep’s running lights on. Which helped more and more as the rutted road disappeared and he appeared to be following no more than a wide space between trees.
“I can see how you wouldn’t have to worry about kids coming out here,” Samantha said. “Spooky as hell. I know there’s a storm rumbling around, but . . . still.”
“This used to be fairly good riding on horseback,” he told her. “But the undergrowth got out of control and nobody wanted to keep up the trails. Land’s owned by a billionaire who also owns four or five mountains in the general area, and to his credit he wants to keep them wild. Hiking or riding is fine, but no lumber and no development.”
“Good for him,” Sam said.
“Yeah, I more or less agree with him. But a few hundred acres of this wilderness fall within my area of responsibility, so I’m really not keen on hikers or riders out this way.”
“Unless you send them,” Sam murmured as the headlights illuminated two clearly relieved uniformed police officers, who had their horses tied to trees just off the track. They were holding flashlights, and it was easy to see they’d been waving them around nervously until they saw the lights of vehicles approaching.
Jonah had gone over the plan with everyone, and everyone knew their part. There was no exit from this hole in the ground except the one they were going into.
They waited at the opening for just a couple of minutes, with Jonah and the other feds watching Sam. She swore under her breath, but said to Jonah, “No booby traps. No bombs.”
“Sam?”
She looked at her husband and partner briefly, then said to Jonah bleakly, “Go ahead and get EMS out here as quickly as you can. We’ll need five stretchers.”
“And five coffins?” Jonah asked steadily.
“No. No, they’re alive. Let’s go.”
He gave the order quickly, sending two officers back with one of the Jeeps to guide the EMS truck into the woods.
The first half-dozen people going in, which were Jonah, Sarah, and the agents, all had the big police spotlights that could be carried and gave off an amazing amount of light. They turned them on as soon as they started into the downward-slanting tunnel.
But within a very few steps, one by one they turned the lights off. Because there was light at the bottom of the tunnel.
Bright, bright light.
“It’s not a fire,” Lucas breathed. “Which means he wants us—you—to see his work.”
“Oh, Christ,” Jonah murmured.
“It isn’t what you think,” Sam said. “He didn’t physically torture them any more than he physically tortured Nessa.”
“Then—”
Jonah broke off as soon as he cleared the tunnel and stepped into the cavern. It wasn’t huge, maybe thirty feet from end to end, and about twenty feet across.
The lights had been placed with exquisite care, so that each of the missing people, watering eyes shut tight against the first light any of them had seen since they’d been brought here, weeks for some of them, were the inescapable focus.
Each of them sitting, unrestrained but unmoving, on upright wooden chairs. An IV pole beside each chair, the tubing from the bag snaking down and attached to the needles expertly placed in each victim’s arm. Unmoving. Unable to move.
Their pants and shorts, or panties, down around their ankles. And beneath them, fastened to the chairs they could not escape, were pots or bowls or buckets to catch their urine and feces.
“Oh, my God,” Jonah said, his voice hardly a whisper.
Lucas leaned over to say something to Sarah, and she immediately turned and began to herd the officers back up the tunnel. “We’ll need you later to help carry them,” she said, her voice breaking a little. “But not yet. Not just yet.”