You ever go caving?":'Not really," she said.
'Not really or not at all?"
"Not at all."
"You ever want to try, you let me know. I'll take. you down personally."
The day I go down in a dark hole with you, old man, she thought. "I'll remember the offer if I ever get the urge," she said, straining for politeness.,"That's right, you get the urge, you think of me," Browne said, winking at Becker.
The old son of a bitch thinks I'm blind as well as stupid, Pegeen thought. She watched Becker absorb Browne's attempts at male conspiracy with just the faintest hint of a smile He wasn't going along with the joke-not that it was really a joke; men always had some faint dream of success, she knew, no matter how pathetically delusional it was; they stoked themselves on fantasies of women overwhelmed by their magnetism and leaping over all bounds of decency, age, decorum, and common revulsion just to get at them-but Becker wasn't telling him to mind his manners, either.
Browne had a sheaf of charts on the side of his desk and he tapped it proudly, as if it were a codex of the classics.
"You tell me what you're looking for, and if it exists, 'I've got it here."
Becker thought a moment. "It should be somewhere remote, somewhere you could enter and exit unseen. It has to have a sizable chamber in it somewhere, big enough for a man to stand and move around."
"Easy access or difficult?"
"Access to the cave?"
"That's one. Some of these entrances are halfway up a mountain. You got to climb up before you climb down."
"Not too difficult. He's carrying, or dragging, a hundred-pound weight in addition to his gear."
"Okay, that lets out some. How about access to the chamber, you want that easy or hard?"
"He doesn't expect to be found in there," Becker said, "so I guess it's got to be hard. He won't be anyplace where some random caver is going to walk in on him."
"But he's still hauling the hundred-pound weight?"
"Oh, yeah. He'll have that with him-going in."
"Going in?"
"He won't have to bring it back out."
"Well, okay, I won't ask what he's dumping in there, but if I found out he's left his shit in any cave I'll kick his ass for him." Browne turned to Pegeen. "Sorry about that.
"What?" Pegeen asked.
"Language," he said.
"Oh, shit. You can't say anything I haven't heard before. Look, if he's got this-weight-with him, that means he can go down easier than he can go up-on the way there. Coming back, I suppose he could go up all right."
Browne lifted his eyebrows at Becker before continuing. "Okay, so we eliminate anything that goes up after entry."
He shuffled through the charts with practiced ease.
"We have them graded according to difficulty," Browne said, "but we don't have any code for taking something down that you don't bring back up. That's just not done, at all, period." He muttered to himself for a moment, riffling and shuffling the charts.
"Here's one," he said, marking the plastic coating of the map with a grease pen. "And here, and here. You could probably do it here, but it's a pisser. On the other hand, no one's going to be wandering in by accident. This one's very tough, very difficult. Is this guy an expert?"
"We don't really know," said Becker. "He might be.
We have to assume he's good."
"He'd have to be-at least he'd have to know what he was doing to get into any of these. You do want them tough, right? I mean, no tourists being led in there by a guide.
Unless there's some chamber that no one's going to go to, but no, not with guides, I don't think so. Too much of a chance of being seen coming or going."
"Well, here's ten, twelve, fourteen of them. They're all remote. They all have a big chamber, and the chamber is down or at least level when you're going to it. No one's going to be trying these things on the weekend, or if they do, you could hear them coming a long way away once you're in the chamber. Of course, we don't know if your man even knows they exist-half of these are pretty obscure. Some of them don't show any more on the surface than a breathing hole.":'A breathing hole?" 'Sure. A cave breathes, you know. If you go down very far you get a constant temperature, year 'round; it's colder than the air above ground in summer, warmer in the winter. When it's hot, you get this shaft of air sucking down through the hole like a vacuum cleaner. When it's cold aboveground, you get just the opposite, a steady breeze of warmer air.
It's damned mysterious if you don't know what you're seeing, but if you find a breathing hole, you've got yourself a major cave at the other end of it."
"Are they marked in any way or can someone just fall in?" Pegeen asked.
"Most of them are marked, or boarded over, the ones on public land, anyway. On private land there's usually a damned billboard out by the nearest road so the owner can charge you a few bucks if they're what you call user friendly. But if they aren't big enough to walk into, you're not going to get any tourists, so some of them on private property are pretty much the way God made 'em. They may have had signs or markers once, but if they're out in the woods somewhere, the owner doesn't go there himself, the sign falls over, you know. Out of sight, out of mind. If your man doesn't know where they are, he's not going to find some of these."
"We have to assume he knows about them," Becker said.
"How come?"
"He has an affinity for them. He likes them dark and tight.
Browne laughed. "Lots of us like them that way. Sorry, Miss."
"Some of us like them long and hard and pointing up" said Pegeen.
'Hub?"
"Caves, Mr. Browne. We all have our preferences."
Browne looked to Becker uncertainly.
"I'll need copies of these maps," Becker said.
"You're a born diplomat, Haddad," Becker said when they were once more in the car. "You should have gone for the foreign service."
"He's an asshole."
"Probably only because you're around," Becker said.
"Thanks a lot."
"It's not your fault, it's his, but people are going to have a reaction to you, you might as well get used to it."
"Do you find that it works the other way? Do women have a reaction to you?"
Becker grinned. "That would be for you to say."
She turned to him.
"I'll speak for the male point of view," he continued.
"You deal with the female."
You know, you bastard, she thought. You know exactly how women react to you. Her ears were blazing.
"There are no mines on that list," she said.
"I don't think he'll try a mine again," Becker said.
"Why not?"
"He got caught. Five years late, but he still got caught.
Those were early attempts. He's smart, he'll learn from his mistakes, he'll refine his methods. They always do, they keep adjusting until they- find what works best for them."
"Then what?"
"Then they speed up," he said. "When they think they're safe they just keep taking victim after victim."
"What makes you think he's going into caves? Why not anyplace private?
An old warehouse, a house in the country…"
"For one thing, he told me where he was going."
"He told you?"
"in a manner of speaking. He goes where gravity takes him. Down. And he knows the use of ropes. He told me that, too. In some ways going into a cave is just like going down a mountain-plus you need rope work to get back up, if it's steep enough. He'll go for a cave, it's what he needs.
Emotionally."
"He's got an emotional need for caves?"
"They have fantasies, that's their problem. They have fantasies so strong that they are compelled to enact them.
And fantasies.have a context, an ambience, if I can say that-they don't take place on Main Street at noon, they exist in a specific environment which is nearly as important as what he does. Your fantasies take place somewhere, don't they?"