Trish merely nodded, her gaze faraway.
Ally moved on, Trish following. The stream’s babble diminished to a static hiss that blended with the distant clanging in her ears.
Overhead, the gallery’s roof whitened with old deposits of guano. Bats had roosted here once but appeared to be long gone. She wondered if there was an egress nearby. Bats usually-
“We played together all the time.”
Trish’s voice was a whisper, but coming unexpectedly it seemed explosively loud in the settled stillness. Ally jumped a little.
Then she found a context for the remark. Trish and Marta. Two nine-year-old girls.”Did you” she asked as she caught her breath.
“Explored vacant lots, chased butterflies, got ourselves ice cream on the way home from school. Small-town stuff.”
“What town”
“Called Barnslow. Up in central California, in the mountains. Fifteen hundred people. Band concerts in the summer. A safe place, nobody was afraid-until Marta … until she …”
Trish took a breath and said it.
“She was murdered.”
Ally pursed her lips. The news ought to have been shocking, but she’d grown up in the ‘90s, when the violent death of children was taken for granted, as much a part of everyday life as headaches and traffic jams and inconvenient weather.
“I’m sorry,” she said pointlessly.
Trish didn’t seem to hear. “It was a stranger who did it. They never caught him. Just someone passing through. He …”
Her brief pause spoke of censorship, some hurtful fact suppressed.
“He must have picked her up while she was walking home from school. She had a jump rope with her, and I …”
Another glitch, another edit.
“They found her in the weeds, with the jump rope around her neck.”
“She was strangled,” Ally said, then winced. Brilliant deduction.
“Strangled, yeah.” Trish coughed. “And left in the weeds behind the farmhouse where we used to go, the farmhouse where we would sit on the porch and talk about boys and make up futures for ourselves. She was there in the weeds, sprawled in the weeds.”
That phrase, in the weeds, seemed to hold some significance for Trish, but Ally couldn’t fathom it and was afraid to pursue the issue.
“Is that why you became a cop” she asked instead.
Trish made a noise like a chuckle. “You guessed that too Yeah. I knew it was too late to save Marta. But there are other girls, and other strangers passing through, and … and bad things do happen-even in small towns.”
Ally knew there was more to the story, but Trish didn’t want to tell it. Maybe the memories were too hard to face.
New silence, deeper than before, trailed after them as they proceeded down the passage. Clutching limestone fingers snagged the ragged hem of Ally’s dress. She pulled free again and again.
Abruptly she realized the snags and scrapes were becoming more numerous, the groping fingers emboldened.
The passage was narrowing. The walls were closing in.
She looked over her shoulder, caught the same awareness in Trish’s eyes.
“Another dead end” Ally whispered.
Trish didn’t answer.
Swallowing fear, Ally crept forward, hunching lower as the ceiling kissed her hair. Hardly any room to maneuver now. Ahead, a still narrower space terminating in darkness.
Desperately she probed the shadows with her flash. The pale fan of light found a small round hole at the end of the passage, looming like a hungry mouth.
“I think there’s a tunnel,” she breathed, her throat tight.
“Big enough for us”
“Don’t know.”
On hands and knees now. Crawling to the tunnel’s mouth, if that was what it was.
She played the flashlight inside. The beam illuminated a gun-barrel tube winding into the dark.
The passage was barely wider than a doggie door, but probably navigable.
“Does it go in the right direction” Trish asked.
Ally checked the compass. “Maybe. We’re heading due north now, but the tunnel looks like it bends west.”
“We’ll have to take it.”
As if we’ve got a choice. Ally thought.
She eased herself horizontal and wriggled inside.
“Hope you don’t have claustrophobia,” she said, tasting dust from the crawlway’s chalky floor.
“Speaking in public-that’s my only phobia.”
“Funny,” Ally grunted, worming forward. “Mine too.”
Or it had been, anyway. After tonight she expected to face a dazzling profusion of new fears, unhealed psychic wounds that would bleed into her dreams and make them nightmares.
Was Marta Palmer a wound in Trish’s mind, her dreams Ally thought so.
There were some things you could never escape from, it appeared. Even adulthood wouldn’t rescue you. Even college wouldn’t take you far enough away.
She crawled on, deeper into the dark.
45
Activating his flash, Tyler followed Gage into the cellar.
The concrete staircase, though cracked and chipped, was intact. Ragged stumps were all that was left of the banister. The wall bristled with bundled spikes of wood splinters, sharp as porcupine quills-bits of the railing driven into the hairline fissures between the cinder blocks by the sheer force of the blast.
Below lay hell in miniature.
Flashlight beams played over a waste of rubble, the funneled light fanning through a sooty mist. Spot fires glimmered in dark corners. At the rear of the cellar, water sheeted down from a broken plumbing pipe.
Cain and Lilith combed the wreckage, shadow figures amid the smoke.
Ghosts, Tyler thought with an irrational chill. Demons.
“Hey, boss,” he called, feeling a sudden need for noise in this silenced place. “Next time you kill somebody, could you make a more serious effort”
Cain glanced up at him. His eyes glinted through slits in the ski mask. “They did go out with a bang, didn’t they”
Tyler nodded. “Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.”
Eyes burning, he reached the bottom of the stairs. Lilith’s extinguisher hissed, the hose a lashing snake, as she smothered a smoldering pile of debris.
With his flash Tyler found the blast crater in the center of the room. At the deepest point, a great slab of the concrete foundation had been blown free, exposing raw bedrock like an open wound.
So much for percussion. As for fragmentation …
He read that story in the shrapnel glittering around him, the thousand shards of cutlery strewn on the floor and studding the wreckage.
The destruction was total. Those two charming ladies must have been killed a hundred times over.
So where were they
Panning the cellar with his flash, he saw no splash of maroon, no body parts, not even a forlorn shoe or a scrap of the cop’s uniform.
He beamed his flashlight at the crater again. Maybe the two of them had been standing right over the bomb when it blew. Maybe they’d been atomized-nothing left but dust.
Was that possible He didn’t think so.
The beam wavered, searching the floor, and found a second hole, this one at the lip of the blast crater.
But this hole hadn’t been made by an explosion.
It was round, perfectly round.
“Cain.”
The way Tyler said it, low and tense, made the older man turn instantly in his direction.
Cain’s gaze followed the beam of Tyler’s flash. He saw the hole, made a noise. A slow shuddering exhalation like a death rattle.
“Christ …”
Then he was crossing the room, circling the crater, peering into the smaller hole. Tyler joined him.
It was a well. A dry well, the drain uncovered, a sinkhole dropping into subterranean darkness.
“They got away.” Cain stripped off his mask, heedless of smoke and dust. Fury purpled his face. “Robinson and the kid-they got away.”