Redemption Road

22

Beckett slid through the small door, and it felt wrong somehow, the underside of a church. He felt the weight of it above him. A hundred and seventy years. That’s how long the building had stood.

“Okay.” He reached back. “Give me the light.”

Someone handed in the big flashlight, and he shone it around. The pillars were fieldstone, the timbers as thick as his waist. He saw spiders and termite mounds and bits of old debris. The space was immense and low and dark as pitch.

“Someone’s been here.”

The drag marks were obvious, as if a man had pulled himself through the dust, not once but many times. The track bent past the first stone pillar, then angled for the front of the nave. Beckett shifted his bulk in the tight space.

James Randolph was hunched in the open square, the sky beyond him dark purple. “You sure about this?”

“Why? You want to do it?”

“No, thanks. After fifty-four years I’m close enough to damnation as it is. Looking for bodies under a church might just push me over the edge.”

Beckett shone the light on the tracks. “Drag marks point that way.”

“The altar’s that way.”

“The thought occurred to me.” Beckett shone the light around some more. Clearance between the dirt and timbers was two feet or less. “I’m a little big for this. If I get stuck or call you, you come running.”

“Not a chance in hell.”

Beckett didn’t know if Randolph was serious or not. He twisted around again, got on his belly. “Just find Dyer,” he said. “Get him out here.”

After that, it was just Beckett and the dark space under the church. He stayed clear of the drag marks and after the first pillar, angled to the right, earth and stone gouging his elbows, ruining his shoes. None of that registered because fifty feet in he was feeling the same kind of religious dread as Randolph. How many people had been married or christened or mourned in the church above his head? Thousands over the years, and all the while this raw, rough place was beneath them, this musty, crude, dirt-strewn slit of an oven.

Beckett squeezed beneath another beam.

How far was he, now? Seventy feet? Eighty?

He stopped where a pillar had collapsed and the floor joist sagged. The clearance was barely a foot, so he worked his way around. Even then, wood scraped his shoulders, the top of his head. He choked on sifting dust, and when he cleared the other side, he saw the graves.

“Holy… God.”

He crossed himself again and felt the kind of chill that only comes once or twice in a lifetime. The graves were little more than mounded earth, but bones protruded from five of them. Finger bones, he thought. A dome of skull. The graves made a narrow arc around a depression large enough to hold a grown man curled on his side.

Yet, it wasn’t the bones alone that bothered him

Beckett closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to fight the sense of earth pressing up and church bearing down.

“Breathe, Charlie.”

Claustrophobia had never been a problem, but he was under the altar-directly beneath it. So were the graves.

Nine of them.

“Come on, come on.”

He rolled on his side and imagined all the people who’d moved through the church in the last 170 years. He felt them like ghosts above his head, the infants and the prayerful, the newlyweds and the newly dead. Lives had turned on the altar above him, and bodies here, in this place…

It was a desecration.

Beckett closed his eyes, then looked up at the massive joists. They were black with age, thick as a man’s waist.

He almost missed the bit of color.

It was small and faded, no larger than a quarter. He shone the light on it, thought it was the corner of a photograph wedged above the joist. He saw a bit of green, and what might have been stone. Pulling on latex gloves, he reached up and eased the photograph from the crack. It was old, washed out in the flashlight’s glare. It looked like a woman beside the church. He tilted it; saw how wrong he was.

Not a woman.

Not quite.

Twenty minutes later it was full dark outside, the air alive with mosquitoes. Floodlights stood around the crawl-space door, and moths the size of Beckett’s thumb flicked into and out of the light. Beckett and Randolph stood in the fluorescent hum. They were waiting for Dyer.

“They’re getting anxious,” Randolph said. He meant the medical examiner, CSU, the other cops.

Beckett didn’t care. “Nobody goes in until Dyer sees it.”

“You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine.” But he wasn’t. The discovery changed things, maybe everything.

“You say there’re nine?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to see them.”

“Just mind your own business.”

“This is my business.”

“It’s like I told you.” Beckett pinched a mosquito from his neck; rolled blood between a thumb and finger. “We wait for Francis.”

When Dyer showed up, he looked haggard, his shadow climbing the wall as he entered the ring of lights. He didn’t say anything at first, choosing instead to study the boarded windows, the small, square hole behind the ratty bush. “I told you by the book.”

“I know.”

“That means no cadaver dog without clearance from me.”

“I know that, too.”

“So what?” Dyer’s hands found his hips. “We didn’t have enough bodies for you? Not enough pressure?”

“What I’ve found…” Beckett shook his head. “I’m not sure Adrian’s our killer.”

“You button that right now.” Dyer studied all the faces watching, then led Beckett to a quieter place at the far edge of the lights. “What do you mean you’re not sure?”

“We don’t know how long these remains have been under the ground. What if they’re only five years old or ten? Adrian’s been locked up longer than that.”

“If he murdered one, he could murder another nine or another fifty. Maybe Julia Strange wasn’t the first.”

“Or maybe we have another killer on our hands.”

“They could just as easily be old,” Dyer said. “Maybe those bodies have been there for a hundred years or two hundred. Maybe the church was built above them for some reason we don’t understand.”

“The graves aren’t that old.”

“How can you know that?”

Beckett snapped his fingers and waited for a tech to bring a set of disposable coveralls. “Put these on,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

Under the church, Beckett pointed. “Stay clear of the drag marks.”

“There’re two sets.”

“One of them is mine.”

“The other looks fresh.”

“It was here before me.”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“That’s only part of it. This way.”

Beckett went in front. He looked back twice, but Dyer was sliding easily beneath the joists. When they reached the graves, Beckett stopped and let Dyer move up beside him. Shadows danced, and bones flashed gray. Dyer froze when he saw the graves.

“We’re directly beneath the altar. Here.” Beckett handed Dyer a pair of latex gloves and put on a pair himself. “I count nine graves, laid out in a two-hundred-degree arc.” Beckett pointed his flashlight at the bones, the bit of skull. “You see the hollow place in the center?”

“It looks fresh, too.”

“Recently disturbed.” Beckett shifted so he could see Dyer’s face. “Someone comes here.”

Dyer frowned. He slid a few more inches in the dry, red earth and put his light on each grave in turn. “They could still be old.”

“Look at this.” Beckett shone his light on the photograph wedged above the joist. “I found it twenty minutes ago.”

“What do you mean you found it? Like that?”

“I wanted you to see it the way it was, so I put it back.” Beckett snapped open an evidence bag and reached for the photo, gentling it out and sealing it in the bag. “Do you know who that is?”

Dyer took the photograph and studied it for long seconds, tilting it, smoothing a thumb across the slick plastic. He looked once more at the hollow place, the gray bones, and the mounded earth. “Liz can’t know about this,” he said. “Not yet.”