“Left it is,” I said, and we soon found ourselves walking up a moderate incline for about three hundred feet until we encountered another hard left turn and some crude wooden steps nailed to a plank going up to a small hole at the top. There was a fine trickle of water seeping down the side of the steps. When we pushed our way through the hole we found ourselves standing under that lone pine tree at the entrance to the Creigh-side crack in the backbone ridge. We left the lanterns down in the tunnel and climbed out.
We stood next to the tree and instinctively looked around for attacking dogs. I put my fingers in my mouth and whistled for my shepherds, who came at the gallop across that big open space between the crack and the cabin. It felt good to have them nearby. I saw Carrie massaging her injured hand, remembering.
“Okay, so now we know how they got out,” she said. “But not where they went.”
“I’m having a problem visualizing Grinny Creigh getting through that first tunnel,” I said. “Nathan, maybe, the kids, no problem. But Grinny?”
“What’re you saying? She’s still down there somewhere?”
“Yeah, I think that’s a real possibility. They’ve had a hundred years to dig out all sorts of tunnels and chambers down there-just look at this tunnel. It had to have taken months to cut this thing by hand.”
“There was that one stone wall, at the junction,” she said. “Maybe we-”
“Hold up, there’s a vehicle coming,” I said, pointing down toward the cabin. We watched the Big brothers join up to see who was arriving. We could only see headlights until it stopped in front of the cabin, so we started down the hill. It turned out to be the Big Chief himself, Mose Walsh, driving a pickup truck with a cap on the back.
He was apparently on good speaking terms with the Bigs, who were talking to him when we made it back down to the cabin. He gave me a sideways look as we walked up, but greeted Carrie with a big grin.
“The glass hole,” he said. “I found out where that is.”
“Great,” Carrie said. “But what is it?”
“Well, actually, I’ve never seen it,” Mose replied. “Guy I know, likes to do cave diving? He says it’s the one vestige of volcanism in the Great Smokies on our side of the Tennessee line. According to him it’s on the edge of the park, right inside the boundary with your favorite county. The scientists who’ve seen it say it’s an ancient collapsed lava bubble.”
“Can you take us there?” I asked.
He hesitated. “I’ve got directions, so I can take you there. I don’t want to, because this involves the Creighs, but you said there are kids at risk. So…”
“How long would it take to get there?”
“Actually, we can drive most of the way, then it’s a five-, six-mile hike in and mostly up.”
“Is it someplace you could hide six kids?” Carrie asked.
“I wouldn’t think so,” he said. “According to my guy, it’s under water.”
20
We left in two vehicles early the next morning, Carrie and I in the Suburban, and Mose in his pickup truck. We’d shown the Bigs the escape route out of Grinny’s place, and they promised to pass that on to any further investigators, assuming there was going to be any further investigation.
Luke took Honey Dee’s bereft mother back to Rocky Falls. He promised to get a statement from her before the county social services system swallowed her up. We let them know where we were headed and why, which they duly noted. Neither of them seemed very encouraging. We told them that Grinny might be lurking in one of the abandoned mine tunnels, and all John could say was that meant we had her where we wanted her-underground. Carrie had wanted to explore that walled-off tunnel, but the kids were a more pressing issue.
I’d apologized to Mose for harassing him in the restaurant the previous night, but he waved me off. “When you mentioned the glass hole and captive kids, I knew I was screwed,” he’d said.
“You really think you never made a difference during your career?”
“I worked homicide,” he’d replied, with that wry grin. “By definition, my ‘clients’ always died.”
“How many killers did you put away?”
“Killers? Real killers? Maybe a half dozen. Mostly it was husbands who lost their tempers, druggies, gangster kids, like that.” He shook his head sadly. “Endless supply.”
“Well, this clan falls into the ‘real killers’ category. They might as well be killing these kids, considering what happens to them.”
He nodded. “I’ll take you up there,” he said. “But I’m not going to fight the Creigh clan for you. I really am too old for that shit.”
And by implication, so was I. We followed Mose out of Marionburg and into Robbins County. It felt strange not having to be on the lookout for cop cars and black hats now that Mingo was gone. I still couldn’t get his final words out of my mind, though. Wrong. Better. Had he been just babbling as his brain shut down? Or did those words mean something? And where the hell was Grinny Creigh?
Carrie had spent an hour on the phone with Sam King earlier, and it sounded as if her predictions of a Bureau-managed shutdown had been correct. The escape of Grinny and Nathan Creigh had been shunted off to the Bureau’s fugitive program, so there would be the standard manhunt-sometime real soon. The fact that there might be children being exploited had been passed to the federal PROTECT task force, and the SBI had been left to dig through the wreckage of Hayes’s and Mingo’s administrations. In other words, the law enforcement bureaucracy had portioned out all the interesting bits to its various constituencies and settled on a PR strategy, so all was right in the world. Grinny Creigh had been designated a “person of interest,” but that was about it.
King had also offered Carrie her job back, but she’d been reluctant to make any decisions about that until she’d exhausted every lead we had or thought we had. She was still convinced that we were the only ones who truly believed there were six little girls out there in the woods somewhere. Personally, I figured they were out there, all right, but not necessarily alive and well. I think she sensed that was how I felt, but she was determined to press on. Having left her behind once and injured twice, I felt obligated to go with her. Besides, underneath all that hard-core internal-affairs armor, she was a sweet, intelligent woman who was valuable in her own right. That was reason enough.
About three miles into Robbins County, Mose pulled over onto a dirt road and stopped. He came back to the Suburban when I pulled in behind him.
“We’ll take this dirt track for about five more miles and then we’ll come to a Forestry Service fire lane. This thing got four-wheel drive?”
I told him it did, and he said okay. “We’ll end up around four thousand feet,” he told us. “The weather’s supposed to be okay today, but there’s a cold front coming in tonight, which might produce a little snow up high. I don’t think it’ll amount to much at this time of year.”
“Where are we actually going?” Carrie asked.
“To a mountain pass. Then we’ll park and hump it the rest of the way up to a small lake with no name. We’ll camp above that tonight, and see what we see the next morning.”
“Do you think the Creighs are out there?” I asked.
“If they went to the glass hole, they could be. Nothing to say they haven’t been here and gone.”
That comment produced a sudden chill in the Suburban. If they’d left, the chances that the kids would be found alive were small and shrinking with every hour.
We reached the ridge overlooking the no-name lake at just before sundown. It hadn’t been a bad climb, other than it had been relentlessly up for two huffing and puffing hours. The scenery was spectacular in all directions, but Mose had been right about a cold front. The northwestern sky was darkening, and the wind had backed around ninety degrees as the front gathered to assault the western mountains.
I’d suggested that we spread out on the hike up to prevent concentrating a target in case the Creighs had left sentinels on their trail. Mose was unhappy with that thought, but agreed. He led the way, then Carrie, and I took up tailend Charlie with the shepherds, who ranged between Mose and me for most of the trek. We kept each other in sight but generally maintained a hundred yards or so of separation. An hour before we reached the campsite, both dogs had gone to investigate something on the edge of the fire lane. The something had turned out to be a pile of dog manure. There were some boot prints in soft ground a few feet away, headed up. This occurred twice more as we made our way up the slopes.