He stepped over it and moved ahead.
For a while he did not need to attempt any tracking or even consider it because there was only one path. Then, in a spot where the water channel opened up into a wide pool, he saw the looming blackness of a tunnel on the left and another one on the right, and for the first time there was a decision to be made.
He dropped to one knee, removed Ridley’s decade-old map from his pocket, and got his bearings. He’d been walking along the Greenglass River and now he had the choice of scrambling toward the tunnel on the left or bending toward the one on the right. According to the map, the tunnel on the left emptied out into a circular room named Solitude. There was no indication that there was a way out of Solitude, but of course Ridley had stopped recording the passages at some point and it was entirely possible that there were numerous ways ahead from the supposed dead end. All the same, Mark found himself guessing that Ridley had gone right, toward the Chapel Room and then the Funnel Room, where Mark had been told they’d begun the search for him, Ridley traveling up when everyone else was looking down.
His turn was the right choice — Cecil’s blood was visible again, meaning that he, at least, had come this way. Whether he’d had visual contact with Ridley at the time was another question. Inside the cave, Ridley held all the advantages — knowledge of terrain, technical expertise, every level of comfort one could have on his home turf — but he’d hindered himself by bringing Julianne along. The things that Ridley could do down here alone using his ropes and wetsuits and challenging high walls and narrow tunnels, he would not be able to do with Julianne, or at least not with any speed. That meant if Mark kept up a good pace, he stood a chance of finding them fast, but moving quickly would be a struggle because he was beginning to feel the return of the unease with the cave now. As he entered the tunnel that led to the Chapel Room, he was positive he heard a sound behind him, and he whirled and banged the rifle barrel off the stone walls. The flashlight illuminated nothing that could have moved or made a sound. It was only in his head.
Mark knew he had to hurry to catch them, but he wanted to go slowly. No, that wasn’t even the truth. He wanted to get out. There was a bad feel to the place once the walls of the tunnel narrowed around him and the ceiling angled down and he saw that he was going to have to crawl.
You may only be making this worse, he thought. An amateur chasing a pro in a place like this, it could be a disaster for everyone.
True, but that was not enough to make him leave. It would take them a long time to get caving experts in here, and who knew what the police would want to do at that point? Caving experts were still civilians. The police might decide to enter themselves, and they’d be just as slow as Mark. Maybe slower.
Cecil was out there ahead, and Mark wanted to catch up to him, at least. Together they would have a better chance. Mark understood the adrenaline, the desire for immediate pursuit, but Cecil had scarcely entered the cave when Mark arrived. He should have seen Mark’s car pulling in and known that someone was here, someone who maybe could help. If nothing else, Cecil should have asked Mark to call for reinforcements while he went after them.
Decisions made in battle often lacked clarity and logic, though, and Cecil had certainly been under fire. His home had been ransacked, his employer brutally murdered, and Ridley had a hostage. Mark hadn’t even thought to check the phone in Cecil’s apartment and see if it worked. He’d called the police from his own cell. Perhaps Ridley had taken away Cecil’s ability to call out. The only chance for Cecil then would have seemed the hero’s play, trying to stop Ridley alone. After seeing what Ridley had done to Danielle, that took real courage.
Mark stopped crawling and rested his bruised knuckles on the stone, the .22 in his left hand, the flashlight in his right. He leaned against the tunnel wall as sweat dripped from his forehead and his heart thundered. Adrenaline coursing, the same thing he was busy ascribing to Cecil. He’d been telling himself he couldn’t pause, couldn’t slow, that it was all about speed now, and Ridley had had a head start.
Speeding in the wrong direction wasn’t worth a damn, though. Speeding in the wrong direction was a good way to die.
Did you see things right, Markus? Did you see the truth back there?
He’d seen brutality, a murder victim awash in blood, and he’d identified her killer without pause. Ridley was the threat, and Ridley was on the property, ergo...
But why hadn’t Ridley killed Cecil, then? If Mark’s perception was right, it meant Ridley had been armed with a shotgun in Cecil’s apartment and had used it on Danielle. Why Danielle? And why let Cecil live?
Maybe Cecil fought back. He resisted; he escaped.
Fought back well enough to avoid death, but not well enough to kill Ridley? Cecil was a large and powerful man. He had no shortage of firepower in that gun cabinet. If he’d been able to gain the upper hand even for a moment, why had it ended with Ridley and Julianne already out of sight in the cave, and Cecil limping after them?
Something was wrong in there. Something didn’t make sense in there.
Danielle’s body had occupied Mark’s focus. Her body and the blood. So much blood. It had been hard to consider much else. But there had been other things. Paracord, the kind that lay in neat coils all around Ridley’s house. Duct tape, more of which Mark had seen in the cave. The tape had been different, though. The tape on the floor in Cecil’s home had been pulled off and lay in a tangled clump. The tape in the cave had been sliced perfectly in two. The latter made sense. Ridley was a knife man. Ridley and that ever-present Benchmade. His reflex weapon, the one he’d drawn on Mark.
Far more important, though — Ridley was also a rope man. He cared for them, worried over them. Ridley was a knot master. He’d have untied the paracord, not cut it. Rope men did not cut their ropes if they could possibly avoid it. And even if for some reason he had decided to cut it, Ridley would never have needed to find a pair of kitchen scissors for the task. He’d have used the knife, just as he had on the tape in the cave.
That wasn’t his work. Someone else cut Julianne loose.
Or they hadn’t cut Julianne loose at all. There was tape left behind in the cave but no rope. Why would there be? Ridley would have untied it and kept it. Rope was valuable to him. So who had been cut loose in Cecil’s apartment? The work had been awkward — all the lengths of cord hacked into pieces. That was the product of someone who didn’t understand the knots at all, who simply kept cutting until all the cord was loose. Had Ridley bound Danielle up, leaving her to be hastily freed by Cecil?
Not Danielle. There wasn’t enough time for her to go through all of that. I’d just spoken to her. So that leaves...
Cecil.
Which meant that Danielle had freed him.
So who had pulled the trigger on her?
I’ll send for Cecil. It’s his baby now, she had told him just before she hung up the phone. He’d thought that meant that she was going to ask Cecil to block him from the property. That the trouble Mark represented was about to be Cecil’s baby. It had seemed obvious. She was calling her caretaker in to do his job. But maybe she wasn’t calling him in for the obvious reason. Maybe she was calling in Cecil for another reason entirely — to answer for himself.