Still Life With Crows

Corrie tried not to look, but somehow not looking seemed even more terrible than the real thing. And yet, every time she looked, it was worse.

The site was simple: a clearing carved in the corn, with the body and paraphernalia carefully arranged. The earth around the body had been painstakingly smoothed and patted down, and a many-spoked wheel had been drawn in the dirt around the corpse. Gusts of wind rattled the corn and raised a mantle of dust that stung her eyes. Angry-looking dark clouds gathered overhead.

Chauncy lay on his back at the center of the wheel, naked, arms carefully folded across his chest, legs arranged. His eyes were wide open, filmed over, pointed at unnervingly different angles toward the sky. His skin was the color of a rotten banana. A ragged incision ran from his chest to the base of his gut, and his stomach bulged obscenely where it had been crudely sewn up again with heavy twine. Something, it seemed, had been stuffed inside.

Why the huge wheel? Corrie stared at the body, unable to take her eyes off it. And was it her imagination, or was something actuallymoving inside the sewn-up belly, causing the skin to bulge and subside slightly? There was something alive inside him.

Sheriff Hazen had gotten there first, and was bending over Chauncy’s body with the medical examiner, who’d arrived by helicopter. It was odd: Hazen had actually smiled at Corrie when they arrived and had greeted Pendergast with a hearty hello. He seemed a lot surer of himself all of a sudden. She glanced at him sidelong, chatting confidentially with the M.E. and the SOC crew, who were combing the dirt for clues. There were the usual bare footprints, but when they were pointed out to the sheriff he’d only chuckled knowingly. An SOC guy was bent over one of them now, making a plastic mold from an imprint.

Pendergast, on the other hand, hardly seemed to be there at all. He had barely spoken a word since she’d picked him up, and now he was gazing off into the distance, toward the Mounds, as if his thoughts were far away. As she stared, he seemed at last to rouse himself. He stepped closer.

“Come, come,” said the sheriff in a hearty voice. “Have a look, Special Agent Pendergast, if you’re interested. You too, Corrie.”

Pendergast stepped closer, Corrie trailing behind.

“The M.E.’s about to open him up.”

“I would advise waiting until the laboratory.”

“Nonsense.”

The photographer took some photos, the flashes blinding in the dim light of dawn, and then stepped back.

“Go ahead,” Hazen said to the M.E.

The M.E. removed a pair of scissors and carefully worked one point under the twine.Snip. The belly bulged, and the twine began to unravel from the pressure.

“If you’re not careful,” Pendergast cautioned, “some of the evidence might, ah,abscond. ”

“What’s inside,” said the sheriff cheerfully, “is irrelevant.”

“I should say it’s most relevant.”

“You can say it all you like,” said the sheriff, his good humor adding insolence to the comment. “Cut the other end.”

Snip.

The whole belly flopped open, and a collection of things came tumbling out, spilling across the ground. A foul stink rose up. Corrie gasped and backed away, holding her hand over her mouth. It took her a moment to take in what it was that had slid steaming into the dirt: a crazy-quilt assortment of leaves, twigs, slugs, salamanders, frogs, mice, stones. And there, among the offal, a slimy circlet that appeared to be a dog’s collar. A wounded but still living snake uncoiled from the mass and sidewinded painfully into the grass.

“Son of abitch, ” said Hazen, backing up, his face slack with disgust.

“Sheriff?”

“What?”

“There’s your tail.”

Pendergast was pointing at something protruding from the mess.

“Tail? What are you talking about?”

“The tail ripped from the dog.”

“Oh,that tail. We’ll be sure to bag and analyze that one.” Hazen had recovered quickly and Corrie caught him winking at the M.E.

“And the dog collar.”

“Yup,” Hazen said.

“May I point out,” Pendergast continued, “that it appears the abdomen was cut open with the same crude implement previously used for the Swegg amputations, the cutting off of the dog’s tail, and the scalping of Gasparilla.”

“Right, right,” said the sheriff, not listening.

“And if I am not mistaken,” Pendergast said, “there is the crude implement itself. Broken and tossed aside.” He indicated something in the dirt to one side.

The sheriff glanced over, frowned, and nodded to the SOC man, who photographed it in situ, then picked the two pieces up with rubber tweezers and put them in evidence bags. It was a flint Indian knife, lashed to a wooden handle.

“From here I’d say it was a Southern Cheyenne protohistoric knife, hafted with rawhide to a willow-wood handle. Genuine, I might add, and in perfect condition until it was broken by clumsy use. A find of particular importance.”

Hazen grinned. “Yeah, important. As another prop in this whole bullshit drama.”

“I beg your pardon?”

There was a rustle behind them, and Corrie turned. A pair of glossy-booted state troopers were pushing their way out of the corn and into the clearing. One was carrying a fax. The sheriff turned toward the newcomers with a big smile. “Ah. Just what I’ve been waiting for.” He held out his hand, snatched the fax, and glanced at it, his smile broadening. Then he handed it to Pendergast.

“It’s a cease-and-desist, Pendergast, straight from the FBI’s Midwestern Divisional Office. You’re off the case.”

“Indeed?” Pendergast read the document carefully. Then he looked up. “May I keep this, Sheriff?”

“By all means,” Hazen said. “Keep it, frame it, hang it in your den.” All of a sudden, his voice grew less affable. “And now, Mr. Pendergast, with all due respect, this is a crime scene and unauthorized personnel are not allowed.” His red eyes swiveled toward Corrie. “That means you and your sidekick.”

Corrie stared back at him.

Pendergast folded the sheet carefully and slipped it into his suit coat. He turned to Corrie. “Shall we?”

She stared at him in outrage. “Agent Pendergast,” she began, “you aren’t just going to let him get away with that—?”

“Now is not the time, Corrie,” he said softly.

“But you justcan’t —!”

Pendergast took her arm and steered her gently but firmly away, and before she could recover they were out of the corn and on the narrow dirt service road beside her Gremlin. Wordlessly, she slid behind the wheel, Pendergast settling in beside her as she started up the engine. She was almost blind with rage as she maneuvered through the thicket of parked official vehicles. Pendergast had let the sheriff walk all over him, insult her—and he’d done nothing. She felt like crying.

“Miss Swanson, I must say the tapwater in Medicine Creek is exceptionally good. As you know, I am a drinker of green tea, and I don’t believe I’ve ever found better water for making the perfect cup.”

There was no answer she could make to this non sequitur. She merely braked the Gremlin at the paved road and stared at him. “Where are we going?”

“You are going to drop me at the Kraus place. And then I’d suggest you return to your trailer and seal all the windows. I understand that a dust storm is coming.”

Corrie snorted. “I’ve seen dust storms before.”

“Not one of this magnitude. Dust storms can be among the most frightful of meteorological events. In Central Asia, they are so severe the natives have given names to the winds that bear them. Even here, during the dust bowl, they were known as ‘black blizzards.’ People caught outside were known to suffocate.”

Corrie accelerated onto the paved road with a screech of rubber. The whole scene had begun to take on a sense of unreality. Here Pendergast had just been humiliated, ordered peremptorily off a case he’d come all the way from New York to investigate . . . and all he could do was talk about tea and the weather?

A minute ticked away, then two. At last, she couldn’t take the silence any longer. “Look,” she blurted indignantly, “I can’t believe you just let that sack-of-shit sheriffdo that to you!”

“Do what?”

“What? Treat you that way! Kick you off the site!”

Pendergast smiled. “Nisi paret imperat.‘If he does not obey, he commands.’ ”

“You mean you’re not going to obey the order?”

“Miss Swanson, I do not habitually talk about my future intentions, even with a trusted assistant.”

She blushed despite her anger. “So we’re just going to blow him off? Continue our investigation? To hell with the runty bastard?”

“What I do with regard to, as you so colorfully put it, ‘the runty bastard’ can no longer be your concern. The important thing is, I cannot have you defying the sheriff on my account. Ah, here we are. Pull up to the garages behind the house, if you please.”

Corrie pulled behind the Kraus mansion, where a rickety row of old wooden garages stood. Pendergast went to one that sported a fresh padlock and chain, unlocked it, and flung open the doors. Inside Corrie could see the gleam of a car—a big car. Pendergast disappeared into the gloom and she soon heard the roar of an engine, followed by a low purring. Slowly, the car nosed out of the garage. Corrie could hardly believe her eyes as a gleaming, polished vision of elegance emerged into the gray dust of Medicine Creek. She had never seen a car like it before, except maybe in the movies. It came to an idling stop and Pendergast got out.

“Where’d this come from?”

“I always knew there was a chance I might lose your services, and so I had my own car brought out.”

“This isyours? What is it?”

“A ’59 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith.”

It was only then that the full meaning of his prior sentence sunk in. “What do you mean, lose my services?”

Pendergast handed her an envelope. “Inside is your pay up to the end of the week.”

“What’s this for? Aren’t I going to stay on as your assistant?”

“Not after the cease-and-desist. I can’t protect you from it, and I could not ask you to put yourself in legal jeopardy. Regrettably, as of this moment, you are discharged. I would suggest you go home and resume your normal life.”

“What normal life? My normal lifesucks. There must besomething I can do!” She felt a rising tide of fury and helplessness: now that she was finally interested in the case, fascinated even; now that she felt she had finally met a person she could respect and trust—now that she finally had a reason to wake up in the morning—he was firing her. Despite her best efforts, she felt a tear escape. She angrily wiped it away.

Pendergast bowed. “You could help me one last time by satisfying my curiosity on the source of Medicine Creek’s excellent water.”

She stared in disbelief. He really was impossible.

“It comes from wells that supposedly tap into some underground river,” she said, trying to make her voice as stony as possible.

“Underground river,” Pendergast repeated, his eyes blank, as if his gaze had turned inward with a sudden revelation. He smiled, bowed, took her hand, raised it to within an inch of his lips. And then he got into his car and glided off, leaving her standing in the parking lot beside her own junk heap, in a swirl of dust, consumed by a mixture of wrath, astonishment, and misery.

Forty-Two

The cruiser whipped past the rows of corn on the airline road at a nice, easy 110 miles per hour. The AC might not work, thought Hazen, and the upholstery might look like shit, but the 5.0 Mustang police package still had what it took under the hood. The heavy chassis rocked from side to side, and in the rearview mirror Hazen could see two rows of corn whipsawing in his wake.

Hazen felt better than he had all week. Pendergast was out of the picture. He had a firm handle on the case, and it was getting firmer all the time. He glanced over at Chester Raskovich, sitting next to him. The security honcho looked a little gray around the gills, and beads of sweat had popped out on his temple. The speed of the cruiser didn’t seem to agree with him. Hazen had much rather it had been Tad sitting in the passenger seat than this campus grunt; the confrontation that was about to take place would have been good experience for him. For the thousandth time, Hazen found himself wishing that his own boy Brad had grown up more like his deputy: respectful, ambitious, less of a wise-ass. Hazen sighed. Wishful thinking wasn’t important right now. Whatwas important was keeping Raskovich in the loop, and by extension, Dr. Fisk. If he played this right, he was certain Medicine Creek would get the experimental field.

The first outlying farmhouses of Deeper flashed past, and Hazen slowed quickly to the speed limit. It wouldn’t be too swift to flatten some Deeper kid just as the case was breaking and things were going his way.

“What’s the plan, Sheriff?” Raskovich managed to say. He had begun to breathe again.

“We’re going to pay a visit to Mr. Norris Lavender, Esquire.”

“Who’s that?”

“He owns half of the town plus a lot of these fields out here. Leases ’em out. His family owned the first ranch in these parts.”

“You think he’s involved?”

“Lavender’s got his finger in every pie around here. Like I asked Hank Larssen: who’s got the most to lose? Well, no mystery there.”

Raskovich nodded.

Now the commercial district of Deeper hove into view. There was a Hardee’s at one end of town and an A&W at the other; in between, a bunch of shabby or shuttered storefronts; a sporting goods store; a grocery; a gas station; a used car lot (all AMC shitboxes); a coin-op laundromat; and the Deeper Sleep Motel. Everything dated from the fifties.Could be a movie set, thought Hazen.

He turned into the parking lot behind the Grand Theater (long abandoned) and the Hair Apparent salon. In the rear sat a low, one-story building of orange brick, completely surrounded by a shimmering expanse of heaved asphalt. Hazen drove to the glass-doored entrance and parked his car across the fire lane, illegally, in your face. Hank’s cruiser was parked neatly nearby. Hazen shook his head. Hank just didn’t know how to do things in a way that commanded respect. He left the cruiser with its pinball flasher going like mad, so everyone would know he was there on official business.

Hazen pushed through the double doors and strode into the chilly air of the Lavender Building, Raskovich at his heels. He glanced around the reception area. A rather ugly secretary, with a voice of such efficiency that it bordered on unfriendliness, said, “You may go straight through, Sheriff. They’ve been waiting.”

He touched the brim of his hat and strode down the hall, right, and through some more glass doors. Another secretary, even dumpier than the first, waved them past.

They grow ’em ugly up here in Deeper,he thought.Probably marry their cousins.

Hazen paused at the threshold of the rear office and looked around with narrowed eye. It was pretty snazzy, with a slick cosmopolitan look: bits of metal and glass in various shades of gray and black, oversized desk, thick carpeting, potted figs. A couple of cheesy Darlin’ Dolls prints, however, betrayed Lavender’s white trash origins. Lavender himself sat, smiling, behind the giant desk, and when Hazen’s eye fell on him the man rose easily to his feet. He was wearing a jogging suit with racing stripes, and a diamond ring in a platinum setting winked on one pinky. He was slender and rather tall, and he invested all his movements with what he no doubt assumed looked like aristocratic languor. His head, however, was overly large for his body and shaped like a pyramid, a very wide mouth smiling under two gimlet eyes set close together, tapering to a narrow forehead as smooth and white as a slab of sliced suet. It was the head of a fat man on a thin body.

Sheriff Larssen, who’d been sitting in a chair to one side, rose also.

Lavender said nothing, merely extending an arm with a very small white hand at the end of it, indicating a seat. It was a challenge: would Hazen obey, or choose a seat himself?

Hazen smiled, guided Raskovich into the seat, and then took his own.

Lavender remained standing. He placed his childlike hands on the desk and leaned forward slowly, still smiling.

“Welcome to Deeper, Sheriff Hazen. And this is, I believe, Mr. Raskovich of Kansas State University?” His voice was smooth, unctuous.

Hazen nodded quickly. “I figure you know why I’m here, Norris.”

“Do I need to call my lawyer?” Lavender made it sound like a joke.

“That’s up to you. You’re not a suspect.”

Lavender raised his eyebrows. “Indeed?”

Indeed. And here his grandfather was a damn bootlegger.

“Indeed,” Hazen repeated.

“Well then, Sheriff. Shall we proceed? Seeing as how this is a voluntary interview, I reserve the right to end questioning at any moment.”

“Then I’ll get to the point. Who owns the Deeper land chosen as a possible site for KSU’s experimental field?”

“You know very well that’s my land. It’s leased to Buswell Agricon, KSU’s partner in the project.”

“Did you know Dr. Stanton Chauncy?”

“Of course. The sheriff and I showed him around town.”

“What’d you think of him?”

“Probably much the same as you.” Lavender gave a little smile that told Sheriff Hazen all he needed to know about Lavender’s opinion of Chauncy.

“Did you know in advance that Chauncy had chosen Medicine Creek for his site?”

“I did not. The man played his cards close.”

“Did you negotiate a new lease with KSU for the experimental land?”

Lavender shifted his body languidly and leaned his heavy head to one side. “No. I didn’t want to queer the deal. I said if they chose to go with Deeper, they could have it at the same rate as Buswell Agricon.”

“But you were planning to increase the leasing fee?”

Lavender smiled. “My dear fellow, Iam a businessman. I was hoping for higher fees for their future fields.”

My dear fellow.“So you expected the operation would expand.”

“Naturally.”

“You own the Deeper Sleep Motel, am I right?”

“You know very well I do.”

“And you own the Hardee’s franchise?”

“It’s one of my best businesses here.”

“You own all the buildings from Bob’s Sporting Goods to the Hair Apparent, right?”

“This is a matter of public record, Sheriff.”

“And you own the Grand Theater building—currently empty—and you’re the landlord of the Steak Joint and the Cry County Mini-Mall.”

“More common knowledge.”

“In the past five years, how many of your tenants have broken their leases and gone out of business?”

Lavender’s wide face remained smiling, but Hazen noticed that the man had begun winding the diamond ring around his pinky.

“My financial affairs are my own business, thank you very much.”

“Let me guess then. Fifty percent? The Rookery closed down, the Book Nook’s long gone. Jimmy’s Round Up went out of business last year. The Mini-Mall is about two-thirds empty now.”

“I might point out, Sheriff, that the Deeper Sleep Motel is currently running at one hundred percent occupancy.”

“Yes, because it’s filled with media folks. What happens when the big story ends? It’ll go back to being about as popular as the Bates Motel.”

Lavender was still smiling, but there was no mirth now in those wet lips that stretched across the lower half of his face.

“How many tenants are behind on their rents? Trouble is, you’re not really in much of a position to get tough and kick ’em out for missing a payment, are you? I mean, who’s going to take their place? Better to lower the rents, stretch things out, write a note or two.”

More silence. Hazen eased up, let the silence build, taking a moment to give the office another once-over. His eyes fell on a wall of photographs of Norris Lavender with various big shots—Billy Carter, brother of the president; a couple of football players; a rodeo star; a country-and-western singer. In several of them, Hazen could see a third figure: hulking, dark-complected, muscle-bound, unsmiling: Lewis McFelty, Lavender’s sidekick. He hadn’t seen him when he came in, although he’d been looking out for him. More evidence to back up his theory. Hazen took his eyes off the creepy-looking man and turned back to Lavender with a smile. “You and your family have owned this town for almost a hundred years, but it looks like the sun might be setting on the Lavender empire, eh, Norris?”

Sheriff Larssen spoke. “Look here, Dent, this is sheer bullying. I fail to see how any of this could possibly connect with the killings.”

Lavender stayed him with a gesture. “I thank you, Hank, but I’ve known what Hazen’s game has been from the beginning. This dog is all bark.”

“Is that a fact?” Hazen shot back.

“It is. This isn’t about the killings in Medicine Creek. This is about my grandfather supposedly shooting your poor old granddaddy in the leg.” He turned toward the KSU security man. “Mr. Raskovich, the Lavenders and Hazens go back quite a ways here in Cry County—and certain people just can’t get over it.” He smiled back at Hazen. “Well, sir, it just isn’t going to warsh. My grandfather never shot your grandfather, and I’m no serial killer. Look at me. Can you imagine me in a cornfield carving someone up like one of those turkeys you people turn out over there in Medicine Creek?” He looked around smugly.

Warsh.There it was, rising to the surface like fat in a stew. Norris Lavender might sprinkle his speech with all the “indeeds” and “my dear fellows” in the world and it still wouldn’t cover up the smell of white trash.

“You’re just like your grandfather, Norris,” Hazen replied. “You get other people to do the dirty work for you.”

Lavender’s eyebrows shot up. “That sounded remarkably like an accusation.”

Hazen smiled. “You know, Norris, I kind of missed your pal Lewis McFelty when I came in just now. How’s he doing?”

“My assistant, poor boy, has a sick mother in Kansas City. I gave him the week off.”

Hazen’s smile broadened. “I certainly hope it’s nothing serious.”

Another silence.

Hazen coughed and continued. “You had a lot to lose with this experimental field going to Medicine Creek.”

Lavender opened a wooden box full of cigars and pushed it across the table to Hazen. “I know you’re a committed smoker, Sheriff. Help yourself.”

Hazen stared at the box. Cubans, wouldn’t you know it. He shook his head.

“Mr. Raskovich? Cigar?”

Raskovich also shook his head.

Hazen leaned back. “You hadeverything to lose, didn’t you?”

“Does anyone mind if I indulge?” Lavender reached into the box and removed a cigar, holding it up like a question between two thick fingers.

“Go ahead,” said Hank, casting Hazen a malevolent glance. “A man has a right to smoke in his own office.”

Hazen waited while Lavender slid a little silver clipper off his desk, trimmed and clipped the end of the cigar, admired his handiwork, picked up a gold lighter and heated the end of the cigar, then licked the other end, placed it in his wide mouth, and lit it. The process took several minutes. Then Lavender rose and strolled to the window, folded his tiny hands behind him, and stared out across the parking lot, puffing languidly, from time to time removing the cigar to stare at its tip. Beyond his slender figure, Hazen could see a horizon as black as night. The storm was coming, and it was going to be a big one.

The silence stretched on until Lavender finally turned. “Oh,” he said to Hazen, feigning surprise. “Are you still here?”

“I’m waiting for an answer to my question.”

Lavender smiled. “Didn’t I mention five minutes ago that this interview was over? How careless of me.” He turned back toward the window, puffing on the cigar.

“Take care not to get caught in the storm, gentlemen,” he said over his shoulder.

Hazen peeled out of the parking lot, leaving precisely the right amount of rubber behind. Once they were on the main drag, Raskovich looked over at him. “What was that story about your grandfather and his?”

“Just a smokescreen.”

There was a silence and he realized, with irritation, that Raskovich was still waiting for an answer. He pushed the irritation aside with an effort. He needed to keep KSU on his side, and Raskovich was the key to that.

“The Lavenders started as ranchers, then made a lot of money in the twenties from bootlegging,” he explained. “They controlled all the moonshine production in the county, buying the stuff from the moonshiners and distributing it. My grandfather was the sheriff of Medicine Creek back then, and one night he and a couple of revenuers caught King Lavender down near the Kraus place, loading a jack mule with clearwater moonshine—old man Kraus had a still in the back of his tourist cave in those days. There was a scuffle and my grandfather took a bullet. They put King Lavender on trial, but he fixed the jury and went scot free.”

“Do you really think Lavender’s behind the killings?”

“Mr. Raskovich, in policework you look for motive, means, and opportunity. Lavender’s got the motive, and he’s a goddamned son of a bitch who’d do anything for a buck. What we need to find out now is the means and opportunity.”

“Frankly, I can’t see him committing murder.”

This Raskovich was a real moron. Hazen chose his words carefully. “I meant what I said in his office. I don’t think hedid the killings himself: that’s not the Lavender style. He would’ve hired some hitman to do his scut work.” He thought for a moment. “I’d like to have a chat with Lewis McFelty. A sick mother in Kansas City, my ass.”

“Where’re we going now?”

“We’re going to find out just howhurting Norris Lavender is. First, we’re going to take a look at his tax records down at the town hall. Then we’re going to talk to some of his creditors and enemies. We’re going to learn just how deep in the shit he was with this experimental field business. This was his last chance, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he bet the farm on this field coming through.”

He paused. A little public relations never hurt. “What do you think, Chester? I value your opinion.”

“It’s a viable theory.”

Hazen smiled and aimed the car in the direction of the Deeper town hall. It sure as hell was a viable theory.

Forty-Three

At two-thirty that afternoon, Corrie lounged restlessly on her bed, listening to Tool on her CD player. It had to be at least a hundred degrees in her room, but after the events of the other night she didn’t have the guts to open her window. It still seemed impossible to believe that guy from Kansas State had been killed just down the street. But then, the entire last week was beyond belief.

Her eyes strayed to the window. Outside, huge thunderheads were spreading their anvil-shaped tops across the sky and a premature darkness was falling. But the approaching storm only seemed to make everything muggier.

She heard her mother’s voice through the bedroom wall and cranked up the volume in response. There were a few muffled thumps as her mother tried to get her attention by knocking on the wall. Jesus. Of all days for her mother to call in sick, when Pendergast no longer needed her and she was stuck at home with nothing to do and too freaked out for her usual retreat on the powerline road. She almost longed for Labor Day and the start of school.

The door to her room opened and there was her mother, standing in her nightgown, too-skinny arms draped over a too-fat stomach. Smoking a cigarette.

Corrie slipped off her earphones.

“Corrie, I’ve been yelling myself hoarse. One of these days I’m going to take away those earphones.”

“Youtold me to wear them.”

“Not when I’m trying to talk to you.”

Corrie stared at her mother, at her smudged mascara and the remains of last night’s lipstick still staining the cracks of her lip. She’d been drinking, but not, it seemed, enough to keep her in bed. How could this alien be her mother?

“Why aren’t you outworking? Did that man get tired of you?”

Corrie didn’t answer. It really didn’t matter. Her mother was going to have her say regardless.

“As I figure it, you got paid for two weeks. That’s fifteen hundred dollars. Is that right?”

Corrie stared.

“As long as you’re living here, you’re going to contribute. I’ve told you this before. I’ve had expenses up the wazoo lately. Taxes, food, car payments, you name it. And now I’m losing a day’s tips because of this nasty cold.”

Nasty hangover, you mean.Corrie waited.

“A fifty-fifty split is theleast I can expect.”

“It’s my money.”

“And whose money do you think’s been supporting you these past ten years? Certainly not that shitbag father of yours. Me. I’ve been the one working my fingers to the bone supporting you, and by God, young lady, you’re going to give something back.”

Corrie had taped the money to the bottom of her dresser drawer and she wasn’t about to let her mother see where it was. Why, oh why, had she ever told her mother how much she was making? She was going to need that money to pay for a fucking lawyer when her trial came up. Otherwise she was going to end up with some crappy public defender and find herself going to jail. That would make a terrific impression, mailing her college applications from jail.

“I told you I’ll leave some money on the kitchen table.”

“You’ll leave seven hundred and fifty dollars on the kitchen table.”

“That’s way too much.”

“For supporting you all these years, it’s hardly enough.”

“If you didn’t want to support me you shouldn’t have gotten pregnant.”

“Accidents happen, unfortunately.”

Corrie could smell the acrid scent of burning filter as the cigarette was inhaled right down to the butt. Her mother looked around, stubbed it out in Corrie’s incense burner. “If you don’t want to contribute, you can go find yourself another place to live.”

Corrie turned roughly away and replaced her earphones, cranking up the music so loud her ears hurt. She faced the smudged wall, stone-faced. She could just barely hear her mother shouting at her.If she so much as touches me, Corrie thought,I’ll scream. But she knew her mother wouldn’t. She’d hit her once and Corrie had screamed so loud the sheriff came. Of course, the little bulldog did nothing—he actually threatenedher with disturbing the peace—but it had the effect of keeping her mother’s hands off her for good.

There was nothing her mother could do. She just had to wait her out.

Long after her mother had gone back to her room in a fury, Corrie continued lying there, thinking. She forced her mind away from her mother, from the trailer, from the depressing empty meaningless hell that was her life. She found her thoughts drifting toward Pendergast. She thought about his cool black suit, his pale eyes, his tall narrow frame. She wondered if Pendergast was married or had children. It wasn’t fair, the way he’d just dumped her like that and driven off in his fancy car. But maybe, like everybody else, he was disappointed in her. Maybe in the end she just hadn’t done a good enough job for him. She burned with resentment at the way the sheriff had come in and just laid those papers on Pendergast. But he wasn’t the kind to roll over and play dead. And hadn’t he hinted he was going to continue working on the case? Hehad to take her off the case, she told herself. It wasn’t anything she’d done. He’d said it himself:I cannot have you defying the sheriff on my account.

Her mind drifted toward the case itself. It was still so weird to think of someone in Medicine Creek doing those killings. If it really was someone local, it meant it was someone she knew. But she knew everyone in Shit Creek, and she couldn’t imagine any of them being a serial killer. She shuddered, thinking back over the crime scenes she’d witnessed firsthand: the dog, its tail hacked off . . . Chauncy, sewn up like some overdone turkey . . .

The weirdest of all was Stott, boiled like that. Why had the killer done that? And how did you boil someone whole, anyway? He’d have to have lit a fire, put on a big pot . . . It seemed impossible. Where could you get a pot like that? Maisie’s? No, of course not: the biggest pot she had was the one she used for Wednesday night chili, and you couldn’t even fit an arm in that. The Castle Club also had a kitchen—could it have happened there?

Corrie snorted to herself. The idea was nuts. Even the Castle Club couldn’t have a pot big enough to boil an entire person; for that you’d need an industrial kitchen. Or maybe he’d used a bathtub? Could someone have winched a bathtub onto a stove, cooked the body that way? Or set up a bathtub in some cornfield? But the spotter planes would have seen it. And the smoke from the fire would have been visible from all over. Someone would’ve smelled it cooking; smelled thesmoke, at least.

No, there was nowhere in Medicine Creek the body could’ve been cooked . . .

Abruptly, she sat up.

Kraus’s Kaverns.

It was crazy. But then again, maybe it wasn’t. Everyone knew that, during Prohibition, old man Kraus had run a moonshine operation in the back of that cave of his.

She felt a crawling sensation along her back: a mixture of excitement, curiosity, fear. Maybe the old still was still in there. Stills had big pots, didn’t they? And would that pot be big enough to boil a person? Maybe, just maybe.

She lay back in bed, her heart beating fast. As she did so, the ridiculousness of it came over her again. Prohibition had ended seventy years ago and the old still would be long gone. You just didn’t leave something that valuable rotting in a cave. And how would the killer sneak in and out of the cave? That prying old woman, Winifred Kraus, kept it locked up tight and watched over it like a hawk.

She tossed restlessly. Locks could be picked. She herself had downloadedThe MIT Guide to Lock Picking while surfing the Web on the school computers, and she’d even made a small pick of her own and experimented on the padlocks of school lockers.

If the killer was local he’d know about old man Kraus’s moonshine operation and the still. The killer might have brought the body in some night, boiled it, and been gone by morning. Old Winifred would never have been the wiser. Fact is, she hardly ever gave tours anymore.

Corrie wondered if she should call Pendergast. Did he know about the still? She doubted it—the bootlegging was just some ancient bit of Medicine Creek lore nobody would have thought to tell him about. That was why he’d hired her, to tell him just this kind of stuff. She should call him now and let him know. She felt in her pocket for the cell phone he’d given her, pulled it out, started dialing.

Then she stopped. The whole idea was absurd. Stupid. It was just a wild guess. Pendergast would laugh at her. He might even be angry. She wasn’t supposed to be on the case at all.

She dropped the phone and turned toward the wall again. Maybe she should check it out first—just in case. Just to see if the still was there. If it was, then she’d tell Pendergast. If it wasn’t, she wouldn’t make a fool of herself.

She sat up, put her feet on the floor. Everybody knew the cave only had one or two small caverns beyond the tourist area. The still would be in one of those. It wouldn’t be hard to find. She would duck in there, check it out, leave. And it would get her out of the house.Anything to get out of this hellhole.

She turned down the music and listened. Her mother had fallen silent.

She slipped off the earphones, paused to listen again. Then, ever so carefully, she got out of bed, pulled on some clothes, and slowly opened the door. All remained quiet. Shoes in hand, she began sneaking down the corridor. Just as she reached its end, she heard her mother’s door bang open and her voice ring out.

“Corrie! Where in hell do you think you’re going?”

She hopped through the kitchen and ran out the door, letting it bang behind her. She jumped into her car, threw her shoes onto the seat next to her, and turned the key, praying the thing would start. It thumped, choked, died.

“Corrie!” Her mother was coming out the door now, moving awfully fast for someone with a nasty cold.

Corrie cranked the key again, pumping the pedal desperately.

“Corrie—!!”

This time the engine caught and she screeched down the gravel lane of Wyndham Parke Estates, laying a spume of smoke, dust, and dancing pebbles in her wake.

Forty-Four

Marjorie Lane, executive receptionist for the ABX Corporation, was becoming increasingly agitated by the man in the black suit sitting in her waiting room.

He had been there ninety minutes. That in itself wasn’t unusual, but during that time he had not picked up any of the magazines conveniently laid about; he had not used his cell phone; he had not opened a laptop or done any of the things people usually did while waiting to see Kenneth Boot, the company CEO. In fact, it seemed as if he hadn’t moved at all. His eyes, so strange and silvery, always seemed to be looking out the glass wall of the waiting room across downtown Topeka, toward the green geometry of farms beyond the city’s edge.

Marjorie had been with the company through a host of recent changes. First, it had jettisoned its old name, the Anadarko Basin Exploratory Company, in favor of the sleek new acronym and logo. Then it had begun buying new businesses that went far beyond oil exploration: energy trading, fiber optics, broadband (whatever that was), and a million other things she didn’t understand and, when she asked around, nobody else seemed to, either. Mr. Boot was a very busy man, but even when he was not busy he liked to keep people waiting. Sometimes he kept people waiting all day, as he had done recently with some mutual fund managers who had come to ask questions about something or other.

She longed for the old days: when she understood what the company did, when people weren’t kept waiting. It was unpleasant for her when people had to wait. They complained, they talked loudly on their cell phones, they banged away on their laptops, and they paced about furiously. Sometimes they used profane language and she had to call security.

But this—this was worse. This man gave her the creeps. She had no idea if Mr. Boot would see him soon, or in fact see him at all. She knew he was an FBI agent—he had shown her his shield—but Mr. Boot had kept important people waiting before.

Marjorie Lane busied herself with work, answering phones, typing, responding to e-mails, but always out of the corner of her eye she could see the black figure, as immobile as a Civil War statue. He didn’t even seem to blink.

Finally, when she couldn’t stand it any longer, Marjorie did something she knew she wasn’t supposed to do: she buzzed Mr. Boot’s personal secretary.

“Kathy,” she said in an undertone, “this FBI agent’s been here almost two hours and I really think Mr. Boot should see him.”

“Mr. Boot is very busy.”

“Iknow, Kathy, but I really think he shouldsee this man. I’m getting a bad feeling here. Do me a favor, please.”

“Just a moment.”

Marjorie was put on hold. A moment later the secretary came back. “Mr. Boot has five minutes.”

Marjorie hung up. “Agent Pendergast?”

His pale eyes slowly connected with her own.

“Mr. Boot will see you now.”

Pendergast rose, bowed slightly, and without a word passed through the inner door.

Marjorie heaved a sigh of relief.

Kenneth Boot stood over the drafting table that served as his desk—he worked standing up—and only gradually became aware that the FBI agent had entered his office and seated himself. He finished typing a memo on his laptop, transmitted it to his secretary, and turned to face the man.

He was startled. This FBI agent didn’t look at all like Efrem Zimbalist Jr., one of his boyhood heroes. In fact, he couldn’t have been more different. Beautifully cut black suit, handmade English shoes, custom shirt—not to mention the white skin and slender hands. Five, six thousand dollars’ worth of clothes on the man, not counting his underwear. Kenneth Boot knew good clothes when he saw them, just as he made it a point to know fine wine, cigars, and women—as every male CEO in America had to do if he wanted to get ahead in business. Boot didn’t like the way the agent had made himself so very comfortable. The man’s eyes were roaming around in a way that offended Boot—it was almost as if he were undressing the office.

“Mr. Pendergast?”

The man did not look at him or answer. His eyes continued to roam, examine, scrutinize. Who was he to act so casual around the chief executive officer of ABX, seventeenth largest corporation listed on the New York Stock Exchange?

“You’ve got five minutes and one has passed,” said Boot quietly, going back to his drawing table and rapping out another memo on his computer. He waited for the man to speak, but no words were forthcoming. Boot finished the document, checked his watch. Three minutes left.

Really, this was quite annoying: this man sitting in his office, more comfortable than ever, looking at the paneling on the far wall. Staring, in fact, at the far wall. What was he looking at?

“Mr. Pendergast, you’ve got two minutes left,” he murmured.

The man waved his hand and spoke at last. “Don’t mind me. When you’ve finished your work and can offer me yourundivided attention, we’ll chat.”

Boot glanced over his shoulder. “You’d better say what you have to say, Agent Pendergast,” he said as unconcernedly as possible. “Because you’ve got exactly one minute left.”

Suddenly the man looked at him, and the look was so intense Boot almost jumped.

“The vault lies behind that wall, correct?” Pendergast said.

With a huge effort of will, Boot remained motionless. The man knew where the corporate vault was—something only three officers and the chairman of the board knew. Was there some sign of it on the paneling? But in ten years no one had ever suspected. Was he under FBI surveillance? This was outrageous. All these thoughts occurred deep within Boot’s mind and did not surface on his face.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Pendergast smiled, but it was a faintly supercilious smile, that of an adult humoring a child. “You’re in a business, Mr. Boot, in which certain documents must be kept highly confidential. These documents would be the crown jewels of your company. I am referring, of course, to your seismic survey maps of the Anadarko formation. These maps show the location of oil and gas deposits, compiled by you at great cost. Therefore, your having a vault is a given. Since you are a person who trusts nobody, it makes sense the vault would be in your office, where you could keep an eye on it. Now, on three walls of your office you have expensive Old Master paintings. On that portion of the fourth wall, there, you have inexpensive prints. Prints that can be moved, taken down, without fear of a ding or scratch. It is therefore behind the paneling of that wall that your vault lies.”

Boot began to laugh. “You fancy yourself a real Sherlock Holmes, don’t you?”

Pendergast joined in the laughter. “I would respectfully ask you, Mr. Boot—and, of course, this is strictly a voluntary request—to open that vault and give me your seismic exploration survey of Cry County, Kansas. The last one, completed in 1999.”

Boot found he had to make an effort to control himself. As usual, he was successful. Boot had learned a long time ago that a quiet voice was menacing, and the tone he now spoke in was barely audible. “Mr. Pendergast, as you yourself said, those surveys—wherever their location may be—are the crown jewels of ABX. That geological information alone represents thirty years of seismic exploration and wildcatting, at a cost of perhaps half a billion dollars. And you want me to justgive it to you?” He smiled coldly.

“As I said, the request was strictly voluntary. I could never obtain a warrant for information like that.”

The man had nothing to go on, no cards to play, as he himself openly admitted. It was a joke—or a trick. There was something about the entire business that made Kenneth Boot distinctly uncomfortable. He managed a pleasant smile. “I’m sorry I can’t satisfy you, Mr. Pendergast. If there is nothing else, I wish you good day.”

He went back to working on his memo. But the black figure in the corner of his eye did not move.

Boot spoke without looking up from his work. “Mr. Pendergast, in ten seconds you will become a trespasser in this office, at which point I will call security.”

He paused, waited the ten seconds, then pressed the intercom to his secretary. “Kathy, get a security detail up here to show Mr. Pendergast out ASAP.” Boot resumed his work, typing a memo to his VP for finance. But he couldn’t help but notice that the son of a bitch was still sitting, one finger tapping the arm of the chair, looking around in that same breezy way as if he were in a doctor’s waiting room. Insolent bastard.

The intercom buzzed. “Security is here, Mr. Boot.”

Before Boot could respond, the man rose with an elegant swiftness and glided toward the drafting table. Boot stared at him, retort dying in his throat as he noticed the expression on the agent’s pale face.

Pendergast leaned over and murmured a number into his ear:

“2300576700.”

For a moment Boot was confused, but the number rang familiar, and as it dawned on him just what it was he felt his scalp begin to tingle. A knock came at the door and then three security guards entered. They paused, hands on their weapons. “Mr. Boot, is this the man?”

Boot looked at them, his mind blank with panic.

Pendergast smiled and waved dismissively at them. “Mr. Boot won’t be needing your help, gentlemen. He wishes to apologize for the inconvenience.”

They looked at Boot. After a pause the CEO nodded stiffly. “Right. Won’t be needing you.”

“If you would be so kind as to lock the door on your way out,” said Pendergast, “and please tell the secretary to hold all calls and visitors for the next ten minutes. We need a little privacy here.”

Again the guards looked toward Boot for confirmation.

“Yes,” said Boot. “We need a little privacy here.”

The men retreated, the lock turned, and the office fell silent. Pendergast turned to the chief executive officer of ABX and said cheerily, “And now, my dear Mr. Boot, shall we return to our discussion of the crown jewels?”

Pendergast strolled out to his Rolls-Royce, the long mailing tube under one arm. He unlocked the door, placed the tube on the passenger seat, and slid into the hot interior. Starting the engine, he let the compartment cool off while he slipped the survey out of the tube and gave it a quick overview, just to make sure it was what he needed.

It was all that and more. This tied everything together: the Mounds, the legend of the Ghost Warriors, the massacre of the Forty-Fives—and the inexplicable movements of the serial killer. It even explained Medicine Creek’s excellent water, which had proven to be the connection he had needed. As he’d hoped, it was all here on the oil exploration survey, printed in crisp blue and white.

First things first. He picked up the phone, pressed the scrambler option, punched in a number with the area code of Cleveland, Ohio. The ring was answered immediately, but it was several seconds before a voice of exceeding thinness spoke.

“And?”

“I thank you, Mime. The Cayman Islands number did the trick. I expect the target to experience more than a few sleepless nights.”

“Happy to be of assistance.” There was a click.

Pendergast replaced the receiver and examined the map again, looking more closely at the complex subterranean labyrinths it exposed.

“Excellent,” he murmured.

The memory crossing hadnot failed. Instead, as the map confirmed, it had succeeded beyond his highest expectations. He had merely failed to interpret it properly. He rolled up the survey and inserted it back into the tube, capping it with a deft tap.

Now he knew exactly where the Ghost Warriors had come from—and where they had gone.

Forty-Five

In New York City, it was a warm, brilliant late afternoon. But in the strangely perfumed vaults that lay deep underneath the mansion at Riverside Drive, it was always midnight.

The man named Wren walked through the basement chambers, thin and spectral as a wraith. The yellow light of his miner’s helmet pierced the velvety gloom, illuminating a wooden display case here, a tall metal filing cabinet there. From all corners came the faint sheen of copper and bronze, the dull winking of leaded glass.

For the first time in many days, he did not carry the clipboard beneath his arm. It sat beside his laptop, half a dozen vaults back, ready to be taken upstairs. Because Wren, after eight weeks of exhausting, fascinating work, had at last completed the cataloguing of the cabinet of curiosities that Pendergast had charged him with.

It had proved a remarkable collection indeed, even more remarkable than Pendergast had intimated it would be. It was full of wildly diverse objects, the finest of everything: gemstones, fossils, precious metals, butterflies, botanicals, poisons, extinct animals, coins, weapons, meteorites. Every room, every new drawer and shelf, had revealed fresh discoveries, some wondrous, others deeply unsettling. It was, without question, the greatest cabinet of curiosities ever assembled.

What a shame, then, that the chances of the public ever setting eyes upon it were vanishingly small. At least, not in this century. He felt a pang of jealousy that it should belong to Pendergast, all of it, and nothing for him.

Wren walked slowly through the dim chambers, one following upon the next, looking this way and that, making sure that all was in order, that he had overlooked nothing, left nothing behind.

Now, at last, he reached his final destination. He stopped, the beam of his light falling over a forest of glass: beakers, retorts, titration setups, and test tubes, all returning his light from long dark rectangles of a dozen laboratory tables. His beam stopped at last on a door set into the far wall of the lab. Beyond lay the final chambers, into which Pendergast had expressly forbidden him entrance.

Wren turned back, gazing down the dim, tapestried chambers through which he had just passed. The long journey reminded him, somehow, of Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which Prince Prospero had arranged for his masked ball a series of chambers, each one more fantastic, bizarre, and macabre than the one before it. The final chamber—the chamber of Death—had been black, with blood-colored windows.

Wren looked back into the laboratory, shining his light toward that little closed door in the far wall. He had often wondered, during his cataloguing, what lay beyond it. But perhaps, in retrospect, it was best that he not know. And he did so want to get back to the remarkable ledger book that awaited him at the library. Working on it was a way to put these strange and disturbing collections behind him, at least for a while.

. . . There it was again: the rustle of fabric, the echo of stealthy tread.

Wren had lived most of his working life in dim, silent vaults, and his sense of hearing was preternaturally acute. Time and again, as he had labored in these chambers, he’d heard that same rustle, heard that furtive step. Time and again he’d had the sense of being watched as he pored over open drawers or jotted notes. It had happened far too often to be mere imagination.

As he turned and began moving back through the shadowy rooms, Wren’s hand reached into his lab coat and closed over a narrow-bladed book knife. The blade was fresh and very sharp.

The faint tread paced his own.

Wren let his gaze move casually in the direction of the sound. It seemed to be coming from behind a large set of oaken display cases along the right wall.

The basement chambers were vast and complex, but Wren had come to know them well in his two months of work. And he knew that particular set of display cases ended against a transverse wall. It was a cul-de-sac.

He continued walking until he was almost at the end of the chamber. A rich brocaded tapestry lay ahead, covering the passage into the next vault. Then, with sudden, ferretlike speed, he darted to the right, placing himself between the set of display cases and the wall. Pulling the scalpel from his pocket and thrusting it forward, he shone his light into the blackness behind the cases.

Nothing. It was empty.

But as he slipped the book knife back into his pocket and moved away from the display case, Wren heard, with utter distinctness and clarity, a retreating patter of steps that were too light, and too swift, to belong to anybody but a child.

Forty-Six

Corrie drove past the Kraus place slowly, giving the ugly old house a good once-over. A real Addams Family pile if ever there was one. That meddlesome old woman was nowhere to be seen, probably taken to bed sick again. Pendergast’s Rolls was still gone and the place looked abandoned, sitting all by its shabby self in the stifling heat, surrounded by yellowing corn. Overhead, the great anvil-shaped wedge of the storm was creeping farther across the sun. There were now tornado warnings on the radio from Dodge City to the Colorado border. When she looked to the west, the sky was so black and solid it seemed to be made of slate.

No matter. She’d be in and out of the cave in fifteen minutes. A quick check, that was all.

About a quarter mile beyond the Kraus place, she pulled onto a dirt track heading into the nearby fields. She parked her car in a turnaround where it couldn’t be seen from the road. Over the tops of the corn to the east, she could just make out the widow’s walk of the Kraus place; if she took a shortcut through the corn, nobody would see her.

She wondered briefly if it was such a good idea to be out in the corn like this. But then she remembered Pendergast being quite positive the killer worked only at night.

Pocketing her flashlight, she got out of the car and closed the door. Then she pushed into the corn and walked down the rows in the direction of the cave.

The heat of the corn pressed down on her almost to the point of suffocation. The ears were drying out—gasohol corn was harvested dry—and Corrie wondered mildly what would happen if the corn caught fire. She enjoyed that thought until she reached the broken-down picket fence that separated the Kraus place from the surrounding fields.

She followed the line of the fence until she was behind the house. She glanced back quickly, just in case the old lady had appeared in one of the windows, but they all remained dark and empty, like missing teeth. The house gave her the creeps, frankly: standing against the cruel-looking sky, rundown and alone, a couple of gnarled, dead trees at its back. The weak rays of the sun still illuminated its mansard roofs and ocular windows. But even as she watched, the shadow of the approaching front crept across the corn like a blanket and the house darkened against the background sky. She could smell ozone on the air, and the mugginess grew even more suffocating. The storm was worse than it had seemed from inside the trailer—far worse. She’d better hurry before all hell broke loose.

She turned and skirted the path to the cave, keeping low in case old lady Kraus glanced out an upper window. In a moment she was descending the cut in the earth and had arrived at the iron door.

She looked carefully at the ground before the door, but the dust was undisturbed. Nobody had been through here in at least a couple of days. She felt both relief and disappointment: the killer, if he’d been here at all, was obviously long gone, but the lack of prints made it all the more likely that her theory was just so much bullshit. Still, she’d come this far; might as well check the place out.

She glanced over her shoulder again, then leaned forward to inspect the padlock on the iron door. Perfect: an old pin tumbler lock, the kind they’d been making for over a hundred years, still basically unchanged. This was the same kind of lock as on the front door of her trailer, the lock she’d first practiced on; it was the same kind as in the padlocks on the school lockers. She smiled, remembering the gift-wrapped box of horseshit she had once deposited into Brad Hazen’s locker with a card and a single rose. He never had a clue.

First, she tugged on the padlock hard, to make sure it was actually locked. That was the first rule of lock-picking: don’t try any keyway tools until you’re sure you need them.

It was locked, all right.Here we go, she thought.

She pulled an envelope of green felt out of her pocket and unfolded it carefully. Inside was her small set of tension wrenches and the lifter picks she’d surreptitiously made in shop class. She selected the wrench that seemed the right size and inserted it in the keyway, applying tension in the unlocking direction. Lock picking, she knew, was basically a job of finding the mechanical defects of a particular lock: the individual pins were never machined to precisely the same size, there were always slight variations between them that could be exploited. Next, she inserted a pick and gingerly tested the wards, looking for the tightest fit, which would signify the thickest pin. Since the thickest pin of a lock binds first when a turning force is applied, it was important to pick the pins in order of fattest to thinnest. There it was: the pin that bound the most. Carefully, using the pick, she raised it until she felt it set at the shear line. Then she moved to the next thinnest pin and repeated the process, and then once again, careful always to maintain tension. At last, the driver pin set with an audible click; she gave a yank and the lock popped open.

Corrie stood back, unable to suppress a small smile of pride. She wasn’t particularly fast at picking locks—and there were lots of other techniques, like “scrubbing” and “raking,” that she hadn’t mastered—but she was competent. Too bad it was a skill Pendergast would disapprove of. Or would he?

Putting the lock-picking tools back in her pocket, she removed the padlock and placed it to one side. The door squeaked open on rusty hinges; she moved through the entrance, then hesitated. She stood in the darkness a moment, wondering if she should turn on the lights or use her flashlight. If Winifred Kraus showed up, the lights would be a dead giveaway. But then she recollected herself. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, past time for the last tour of the day according to the sign; and besides, Corrie was positive there hadn’t been any tours at all since Pendergast had been forced to take one. The old busybody wasn’t going to stir out of her house in a rising storm. Also, the watchful darkness was getting on her nerves. Better to save her batteries.

She felt along the damp stone wall, found the light switch, flicked it on.

It had been years since she’d been in the cave. Her father had taken her there once, when she was six or seven, not long before he’d run off. For another moment she remained still, looking down into the yawning tunnel. Then she began to descend the limestone steps, her waffle-stompers echoing against the stone.

After a long descent, the staircase gave onto a wooden boardwalk that disappeared between stalagmites and stalactites. Corrie had forgotten just how strange the place was. As a kid going there, she’d been surrounded by adults. Now she was alone in the silence. She walked forward hesitantly, wishing her shoes didn’t make such a hollow sound against the walkway. Bare bulbs, hanging from the uneven ceiling far overhead, threw spectral shadows against the walls. A forest of stalagmites, like jagged, giant spears, rose on both sides. There was no sound in the vast empty space but her footsteps and the distant drip of water.

Maybe coming here hadn’t been such a good idea.

She shook off the feeling of dread. There was no one here. The puddles on the wooden walkway had a skimming of silt that registered her footprints. It was clear—just as it had been outside the iron door—that no one had walked through in days. The last person in here was most likely Pendergast himself being dragged through the tour.

Corrie hastened through the first cavern, ducked under a narrow opening, and entered the second cavern. Immediately, she remembered what it was called: the Giant’s Library. She remembered that, as a kid, she’d thought the place reallywas a giant’s library. Even now, she had to admit that the rock formations looked amazingly real.

But always, the silence felt watchful, somehow, and the dim light oppressive, and she hurried on. She passed the Bottomless Pit and reached the Infinity Pool, which glowed a strange green in the light. This was the farthest point of the tour; here the walkway looped back toward the Krystal Kathedral. Beyond lay only darkness.

Corrie turned on her flashlight and probed the darkness beyond the boardwalk, but could see nothing.

She climbed over the wooden rail and stood at the edge of the pool. The walls of the caverns she’d passed through had been devoid of any passageway or portal. If anything lay beyond, she’d have to go through the pool to find it.

Corrie sat on the rail and unlaced her shoes, took them off, pulled off the socks and stuffed them into her shoes, and tied the laces together. Holding the shoes in one hand, she stuck a toe in the pool. The water was shockingly cold and deeper than it looked. She waded across as quickly as she could and pulled herself out the other side. Now her legs were wet, damn it. Barefooted, she clambered down the far side of the pool and shone her light into the darkness at its base. Here she could see a low tunnel going off to the right. The ground was soft limestone, well worn down by old comings and goings. She was on the right track.

She sat on a hump of limestone and pulled her socks over her wet feet, then laced up the heavy waffle-stompers. She should’ve thought to wear old sneakers.

She stood up and approached the tunnel. She had to duck—it was about five feet high—and as she progressed the ceiling got lower. Water trickled along the bottom. Then the ceiling rose again and the tunnel bent sharply to the right.

Her light shone on an iron door, padlocked just like the one at the front of the cave.

This is it, then. This must lead to the old still.

Once again, she took out her lock-picking tools and went to work. For some reason—perhaps because of the poor light, perhaps because her fingers felt unaccountably thick and uncoordinated—this lock took much longer. But after several minutes, she felt the unmistakable give as the driver pin set. Silently, she placed the lock to one side and swung the door open.

She paused in the entranceway, shining her light around cautiously. Ahead, a dark passageway cored through the living rock of the cave, its walls smooth and faintly phosphorescent. She started forward, following it for perhaps a hundred feet, flashlight playing around the walls, until it suddenly widened into a chamber. But this space had none of the vastness or majesty of the earlier caverns, just a few stubbly stalagmites rising from the rough uneven floor. The air was chill and close, and there was a smell, an unusual smell: smoke. Old smoke, and something else. Something foul. She could feel the cool flow of air coming from the open door, stirring the hairs on the nape of her neck.

This had to be it: the old moonshine still.

She advanced into the gloom, and as she did so her flashlight picked up something at the far end—a dull gleam of metal. She took another step, then another. There it was: an old pot still, an almost cartoonlike relic from a vanished era, with an enormous copper cauldron sitting on a tripod stand and the ashes of an old fire underneath. Stacked on a shelf above the floor were some split logs. The top of the cauldron, with its long coil of copper tubing, had been removed and now lay on the floor, partially crushed. There were several smaller pots and cauldrons scattered about.

She paused to sweep the room with her light. Off to one side was a table with a couple of glasses on it, one broken. Pieces of a chair lay on the floor beside a rotting playing card; an ace, Corrie noticed. In one corner stood a pile of broken bottles and jugs of all kinds: wine bottles, mason jars, clay jugs, amidst moldy trash. She could just imagine the men tending the fire, playing cards, drinking, smoking.

Now she shone her light upward. At first she could see nothing, the ceiling was so black. But then she was able to make out some broken stalactites and a honeycomb of cracks that, apparently, had drawn off the smoke. Even so, they couldn’t have drawn it off very fast: her breath was condensing in the air, surrounding her with a fog that the flashlight set aglow.

She approached the cauldron set upon its iron tripod. It was certainly big enough to boil a human being. It was hard to tell, with all the dampness, if it had been used recently. Would the place still smell of smoke from the long-ago days of the still? She wasn’t sure. And then there was that other smell: the bad one. Not rotten, exactly; it was even worse than rot. It was that same smell of spoiled ham as at the crime scene.

Corrie stopped, feeling suddenly frightened. She’d come to see if the still was there. Well, itwas there. She should turn around and get out. In fact, coming here at all now seemed like a really, really bad idea.

She swallowed. Once again, she reminded herself that she’d already come this far. Might as well take five more seconds to finish the reconnoiter.

She tiptoed up and looked inside the cauldron. A smell of rancid grease hit her as she shone her light inside.

At the bottom was something pale, almost transparent, like a pearly seashell. A human ear.

She gagged and staggered back, dropping her flashlight. It struck the hard limestone floor and rolled away toward a dark corner, beam revolving lazily across the floor and ceiling, finally coming to rest against a far wall with a heavy thud.

A second later, it went out, and the cavern was thrown into utter blackness.

Shit,Corrie thought.Shit, shit.

Carefully, she got down on her hands and knees and, moving slowly, feeling along the ground with her hands, crawled in the direction it had rolled. Within a minute her hands brushed the rock wall of the cave. She began to feel along it, looking for the flashlight.

It wasn’t there.

She swallowed again, sitting up on her haunches. For a minute, she thought about trying to find her way out in absolute darkness. But the way back down was so long, it would be easy to get disoriented. She fought down a feeling of panic. She would find the flashlight. It must have gone off in the collision with the wall. She’d find it, shake the light back into it, and get the hell out of there.

She moved along the wall, first to the left, then to the right, feeling with her hands.

No flashlight.

Maybe she’d taken the wrong tack. Carefully, she crawled back to where she thought she’d started, and then tried again, crawling in the direction she remembered the light had rolled. Still, no matter how far she went along the wall, sweeping the ground with her hands, she could not find the flashlight.

Her breath began to come faster as she returned to the middle of the room. At least, she thought it was the middle of the room: she was quickly becoming disoriented in the utter blackness.

Okay,she thought.Stop moving, breathe a little slower, get a grip. Okay, so it was really stupid to come in here with one flashlight and no matches. But the cavern she was in was small and there was only one opening—wasn’t there? She hadn’t remembered any passageways going off, but then again, she hadn’t really checked.

Her heart was beating so fast that she could barely breathe.Just slow down, she thought. Time to forget about the flashlight. It was probably busted, anyway. The important thing now was to get out, to keep moving; otherwise, she’d freeze up. She’d left the door unlocked, thank God, and the lights were still on back in the Kaverns. All she had to do was get out of this back room and down the passageway.

Stupid, stupid, stupid . . .

Carefully, she oriented herself toward where she thought the exit would be. Then, just as carefully, she began crawling forward. The floor of the cave was cold, rough, uneven, covered with greasy pebbles and puddles of water. It was absolutely terrifying, the pitch blackness. Corrie wasn’t sure she’d ever been in a place completely without light. Even on the darkest night, there was some trace of starshine or moonlight . . . She felt her heart begin to beat even faster than before.

Then her head bumped painfully into something. She reached up, felt: the iron cauldron. She had crawled right into the dead coals.

Okay, so she’d gone in precisely the opposite direction. But at least now she had her bearings. She’d crawl along the wall until she reached the passage out. Once in the passage, she’d keep crawling, one hand on the wall, until she reached the iron door. From there, she could reach the pool, she felt sure—even in utter darkness. And in any case, on the far side of the pool lay light and the boardwalk.It’s not so far, she repeated,not so far at all . . .

Forcing herself to relax, she began crawling forward, sliding her left hand along the wall:slide, stop, slide, stop again, three, four, five. Her heart began to slow. She bumped into a stalagmite, tried to visualize its orientation in the room. With relief she realized the exit should be straight ahead.

She kept on crawling, one hand on the floor, the other on the wall.

Six, seven, eight . . .

In the dark, her hand touched something warm.

She instinctively snatched back her hand. The rush of fear and surprise came a moment later. Was it some cave-dwelling creature—a rat or a bat, perhaps? Her imagination, working overtime in the blackness?

She waited. There was no sound or movement. Then she carefully reached out, felt again.

It was warm, naked, hairless, and wet.

She shrank back, a sob rising involuntarily to her throat. The smell of something dirty, something indescribably foul, seemed to rise and envelop her. Was that noise she heard really the sound of her own breathing? It was: she was gasping with fear.

She gritted her teeth, blinked her eyes against the darkness, tried to regain control of her wildly beating heart.

The thing she had touched hadn’t moved. It was probably just another bump or ridge in the floor. If she stopped in horror at every little thing she touched, she’d never make it out of the cave.

She reached out to move forward, and brushed against it again. Itwas warm, there was no imagining that: but it must be some freakish thing, volcanic or something. She felt it again, lightly, letting her hand brush here, there . . .

She realized she was touching a naked foot, with long broken toenails.

Ever so slowly, she withdrew her hand. It was shaking uncontrollably and her breath came as a rasp, completely beyond her control to silence it. She tried to swallow but her mouth had gone dry.

And then a coarse, singsong voice, a caricature lisping of human speech, came from the darkness.

“Wanna pway wif me?”

Forty-Seven

Hazen sat back in the well-upholstered chair, fingertips pressed lightly against the polished wood of the conference table. He wondered yet again why Medicine Creek couldn’t afford a sheriff’s office with nice comfortable chairs, or a table like this one; but then it occurred to him that the Deeper sheriff’s office, like everything else in Deeper, was running on borrowed money. At least his department ran in the black, every year. Medicine Creek’s time would come, thanks in no small part to him.

The voice of Hank Larssen droned on in the background, but Hazen was barely listening. Better to let the Deeper sheriff talk himself out. He glanced surreptitiously at his watch. Seven o’clock. They’d come a long way today, made some great progress. He’d done a great deal of thinking, and in his mind the case was now almost complete. There was only one detail that still bothered him.

Larssen, it seemed, was winding down. “It’s just way too premature, Dent. I haven’t heard any hard evidence, just a lot of conjecture and supposition.”

Conjecture and supposition.Christ, Hank had been reading too many Grisham novels.

Larssen drew himself up with an air of finality. “I’m not going to cast a cloud of suspicion on one of Deeper’s leading citizens without firm evidence. I’m not going to do it, and I’m not going to allow anyone else to do it. Not in my jurisdiction.”

Hazen let the silence ripen, then turned to Raskovich.

“Chester? What do you think?”

Raskovich glanced at Seymour Fisk, the KSU dean, who had been listening intently in silence, a crease furrowed across his bald pate. “Well,” Raskovich said, “I think that what Sheriff Hazen and I found is enough to justify continuing the investigation.”

“All you’ve found out,” Larssen replied, “is that Lavender’s in financial trouble. A lot of people are in financial trouble these days.”

Again Hazen withheld comment. Let Chester do the talking.

“Well,” said Raskovich, “we found more than just financial trouble. He hasn’t paid real estate taxes on some properties in years. Why there haven’t been any tax seizures is something I’d be interested in knowing. And Lavender went around assuring everyone that the experimental field was coming to Deeper. He told everyone he had a plan. As if he knew something that nobody else knew. This ‘plan’ sounds pretty suspicious to me.”

“For heaven’s sake, it was justtalk to appease his creditors,” said Larssen, practically rising out of the comfortable Naugahyde to make his point.

This is great,thought Hazen.Now Hank’s arguing with the KSU guys. Larssen always had been a few beers short of a six-pack.

“It’s pretty clear,” Raskovich went on, “that if Dr. Chauncy had announced on Monday that the field was going to Medicine Creek, Lavender’s creditors would have moved in and he’d have been forced into bankruptcy. That’s a powerful motive.”

There was a silence. Larssen was shaking his head.

And now Fisk spoke at last, his reedy ivory-tower voice filling the office. “Sheriff, the intention is not to make accusations. The intention is merely to continue the investigation, looking into Mr. Lavender’s affairs along with whatever other leads develop.”

Hazen waited. It was politically important to “consult” with Larssen. Old Hank just didn’t seem to get the fact that it was all pro forma, that nothing he said would stop the investigation into Lavender.

“Mr. Fisk,” Larssen said, “all I’m saying is, don’t focus on a suspect too early. There are plenty of other avenues that should be explored. Look, Dent, we all know Lavender’s no saint, but he’s no killer either, especially notthat kind of killer. Even if he hired someone, how in hell did that person get from Deeper to Medicine Creek without being observed? Where’d he hide out? Where’s his car? Where’d he spend the night? That whole area’s been searched by air and on the ground, and you know it!”

Hazen exhaled quietly. This was precisely the point that still bothered him. It was the one weakness in his theory.

“It seems to me,” he went on, “that it’s more likely the killer’s a resident of Medicine Creek, a Jekyll and Hyde type. If it was an outsider, somebody would’ve seen something. You can’t come and go from Medicine Creek, time and again, unnoticed.”

“Someone could be hiding in the corn,” said Raskovich.

“You can see into the corn from above,” said Larssen. “They’ve been flying spotter planes for days now. They’ve searched the creek for twenty miles, they’ve searched the Mounds, they’ve searched everywhere. There’s no sign of anyone hiding, and nobody’s been coming or going. I mean, where’s this killer supposed to be hiding? In a hole in the ground?”

Listening, Hazen suddenly went rigid. He felt his limbs stiffening as the sudden, brilliant insight burned its way through his consciousness.Of course, he told himself.Of course. It was the elusive answer he’d been searching for, the missing link in his theory.

He breathed deeply, glanced around to make sure nobody had noticed his reaction. It was critical that it not seem like Hank had given it to him.

And then he delivered his revelation in an almost bored tone of voice. “That’s right, Hank. He’s been hiding in a hole in the ground.”

There was a silence.

“How’s that?” Raskovich asked.

Hazen looked at him. “Kraus’s Kaverns,” he said.

“Kraus’s Kaverns?” Fisk repeated.

“On the Cry Road, that big old house with the gift shop. There’s a tourist cave out back of it. Been there forever. Run now by old Winifred Kraus.”

It was incredible how fast the pieces were coming together in his mind. It had been under his nose all along, and he just hadn’t seen it. Kraus’s Kaverns.Of course.

Fisk was nodding, and so was Raskovich. “I remember seeing that place,” said Raskovich.

Larssen had turned white. He knew Hazen had nailed it. That’s how perfect it was, how well it fit together.

Hazen spoke again. “The killer’s been hiding in that cave.” He looked at Larssen and couldn’t help but smile. “As you know, Hank, that’s the same cave where old man Kraus had his moonshine operation. Making corn whiskey forKing Lavender. ”

“Now that’svery interesting,” Fisk said, turning an admiring look on Hazen.

“Isn’t it? There’s a room back there, behind the tourist loop, where they boiled up their sour mash. In a bigpot still. ” He emphasized the last two words carefully.

He saw Raskovich’s eyes suddenly widen. “In a pot still big enough to boil a human body?”

“Bingo,” said Hazen.

The atmosphere became electric. Larssen had begun to sweat now, and Hazen knew it was because even he believed.

“So you see, Mr. Fisk,” Hazen continued, “Lavender’s man has been holed up in that cave, coming out at night with his bare feet and his other shenanigans, killing people and making it look like the fulfillment of the Ghost Mounds curse. During Prohibition, King Lavender financed that pot still for old man Kraus, got him set up in the business. It’s what he did all over Cry County. He bankrolled all the moonshiners in these parts.”

Hank Larssen removed a handkerchief and dabbed at the line of sweat that had formed on his brow.

“Lavender claimed his assistant, McFelty, went to visit his sick mother in Kansas City. It’s one of the things Raskovich and I checked out today. We tried to get in touch with McFelty’s mother. And we found out all about McFelty’s mother.”

He paused.

“She died twenty years ago.”

He let that sink in, then continued. “And this man McFelty’s been in trouble with the law before. Small stuff, mostly, but a lot of it violent: petty assault, aggravated assault, drunk driving.”

The revelations had been coming fast, one almost piling up upon the other. And now Hazen added the kicker: “McFelty disappeared two days before the Swegg killing. I think he went underground. As Hank just pointed out, you can’t come and go from Medicine Creek without being noticed: without neighbors noticing, withoutme noticing. He’s been holed up in Kraus’s Kaverns all this time, coming out at night to do his dirty work.”

There was a long pause in which nobody spoke. Then Fisk cleared his throat. “This is first-rate work, Sheriff. What’s the next move?”

Hazen stood up, his face set. “The town’s been crawling with law officers and press. You can be sure McFelty’s still laying low in those caves, waiting for a lull so’s he can escape. Now that he’s completed his job.”

“And?”

“And so we go in there and get the son of a bitch.”

“When?”

“Now.” He turned to Larssen. “Conference us into state police HQ in Dodge. I want Commander Ernie Wayes on the horn himself. We need a well-armed team and we need it now. We need dogs, good dogs this time. I’ll head over to the courthouse, get a bench warrant from Judge Anderson.”

“Are you sure McFelty’s still there, in the caves?” Fisk asked.

“No,” said Hazen. “I’m not sure. But there’s going to be physical evidence in there at the very least. I’m not taking any chances. This guy’s dangerous. He may be doing a job for Lavender, but he’s been enjoying himself just a little too much—and that scares the piss out of me. Let’s not make the mistake of underestimating him.”

He looked out the window at the blackening horizon, the rising wind.

“We’ve got to move. Our man may use the cover of the storm to make his exit.” He glanced at his watch, then looked once again around the room.

“We’re going in tonight at ten, and we’re going in big.”

Forty-Eight

The darkness was total, absolute. Corrie lay on the wet rock, soaked to the bone, her whole body shivering from terror and cold. Not far away, she could hearit moving around, talking to itself in a singsong undertone, making horrible little bubbling sounds with its lips, sometimes cooing, sometimes laughing softly as if at some private joke.

Her mind had passed through disbelief and stark terror, and come out on the other side cold and numb. The killer had her.It —she supposed it was ahe —had tied her up and thrown her over his shoulder, roughly, like a sack of meat, and carried her through a labyrinth of passageways, sometimes climbing, sometimes descending, sometimes splashing across underground streams, for what seemed like an eternity.

And through darkness—always, through darkness. He seemed to move by feel or by memory.

His arms had felt slippery and clammy, yet strong as steel cables that threatened always to crush her. She had screamed, begged, pleaded, but her protests had met with obliviousness. And then, at last, they got tothis place —this place with its unutterable stink—and he had dropped her sprawling onto the stone floor. Then the horny foot had kicked her roughly into a corner, where she now lay, dazed, aching, bleeding. The stench—the stench that before had been faint and unidentifiable—was here appalling, omnipresent, enveloping.

She had lain, numb and unthinking, for an unguessable period of time. But now her senses were beginning to return. The initial paralysis of terror was wearing off, if only slightly. She lay still, forcing herself to think. She was far back in the cave—a cave much bigger than anyone imagined. Nobody was going to find their way back here to save her. . .

She struggled with the panic that rose at this thought. If nobody was going to save her, then she’d have to save herself.

She shut her eyes tight against the darkness, listening.He was busying himself in the blackness somewhere nearby, gargling and singsonging unintelligibly to himself.

Was he even human . . . ?

Hehad to be human. He had a human foot—though as callused as a piece of rawhide. And he spoke, or at least vocalized, in a high, babylike voice.

And yet, if he was human, he was like none other that had ever walked the earth.

Suddenly she felt him near. There was a grunt. She froze in fear, waiting. A hand seized her roughly, dragged her to her feet, shook her.

“Muh?”

She sobbed. “Leave me alone.”

Another shake, more violent this time. “Hoooo!” went the voice, high and babyish. She tried to wrench free, and with a grunt he flung her down.

“Stop . . . stop . . .”

A hand seized her ankle and gave a sharp jerk. Corrie screamed, feeling pain lance through her hip. And then she felt his arms around her, grabbing her by the shoulders, lifting her bodily. “Please, please stop—”

“Plisss,” squeaked the voice. “Plisss. Hruhn.”

She feebly tried to push him away, but he was holding her close to him, his foul breath washing over her.

“No—let me go—”

“Heeee!”

She was flung down again, and then she heard him shuffle off with a low, murmuring sound. She struggled wildly, tried to sit up. The ropes burned her wrists and she felt her hands tingling from lack of blood. He was going to kill her, she knew that. She had to get away.

With a great effort, she managed to flop herself upward into a sitting position. If only she knew who he was, or what he was doing, or why he was there in the cave . . . If only she understood, she might have a chance. She swallowed, shivered, tried to speak.

“Who . . . who are you?” she said. It came out as a bare whisper.

There was a momentary silence. This was followed by a shuffling sound. He was coming over.

“Please don’t touch me.”

Corrie could hear him breathing. She realized that maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to attract his attention again. And yet her only hope was to engage him somehow. She swallowed again, repeated the question.

“Who are you?”

She felt him leaning over her. A wet hand touched her face, broken nails scratching her skin, the huge fingers callused and warm. She turned away with a stifled cry.

Then she felt a hand on her shoulder. She tried to lie still, to ignore it. It squeezed her shoulder, then moved down her arm, stopping to feel here and there as it went, then sliding further: horny and rough, the broken nails like splintered ends of wood.

The hand withdrew, then came back, sliding and slipping up the ridge of her backbone. She tried to twist away but the hand suddenly gripped her shoulder blade with a horrible strength. Involuntarily, she cried out. The hand resumed its crawl. It grasped the nape of her neck, squeezed. She felt paralyzed with terror. The squeezing grew harder.

“What do you want?” she choked out.

The hand slowly relaxed. She could hear breathing, and then some humming, and an undertone of rapid, singsong words. He was speaking to himself again. The hand caressed the back of her neck and reached up and rubbed her head.

She wanted to twist away but she forced herself not to. The hand kept rubbing, sliding down now over her forehead. It rubbed her face, stroked her cheek, pulled at her lips, tried to open her mouth, stinking horny fingers like a golem’s claw. She turned, but the hand followed the movements of her head, poking, always poking, as if inspecting a cut of meat.

“Please stop it!” she sobbed.

The hand stopped, and there was a grunt. Then the fingers slipped around her neck, from the front this time, and squeezed, first lightly, then a little harder. And then harder still.

Corrie tried to scream, but the squeezing had already closed off her windpipe. She thrashed, struggled, saw stars begin to flash in front of her eyes.

And still he squeezed. And as consciousness flickered and her limbs began to relax involuntarily, Corrie desperately tried to reach out, to claw the darkness, to push him away . . .

His hand gradually relaxed and released her. She fell, gasping, drawing in air, her head pounding. His hand went back to her hair, petting it.

Then he suddenly stopped. His hand withdrew, and he stepped back.

Corrie lay there, terrified, silent. She heard a sniffing noise, then another, and another. He seemed to be snuffling the air. She noticed then that the faintest of breezes was moving through this section of the cave. She could smell the outside world: the ozone and moisture from the storm, the earth, the cool nocturnal smells, pushed aside—if only a little—the stench of this nightmarish place. The smell seemed to beckon him, call him away.

And he was gone.

Forty-Nine

It was 8:11P.M. : normally the hour of sunset. Except that to western Kansas sunset had already come, four hours early.

Since early afternoon, a front of cool air one thousand miles long, pushing down from Canada, had been forcing itself across a region of the Great Plains that for several weeks had remained parched and dry. As the front moved, rising air before it began to pick up fine particles of dust. Soon this manifested itself in the form of dust devils: spiraling vortexes of dirt that rose sharply into the dark air. As the front moved on, it grew in intensity, raising the dry topsoil, feeding off itself until it had formed a massive wall of whistling, roiling dust. Quickly, it mounted to a height of ten thousand feet. On the surface, visibility was decreased to less than a quarter of a mile.

As the front moved from west to east across Kansas, dust storm warnings preceded it. The dark brown wall bore down on town after town, engulfing one after the other. As it went, the cold front, laden with dust, drove itself like a wedge into the hot, dry, dead air that had been suffocating the Great Plains. As they collided, the air masses of differing density and temperature struggled for supremacy. This disturbance caused a massive low-pressure system to form, wheeling counterclockwise over almost a hundred thousand square miles of the High Plains. Ultimately, the warm air rising from the ground penetrated the cooler mass above, boiling into towering cumulonimbus clouds that rose taller and taller, until they appeared as dark angry mountains against the sky, larger than the Himalayas. The great mountain chain of clouds flattened against the tropopause, spreading out into a series of massive, anvil-shaped thunderheads.

As the storm matured, it broke into several cells that moved together as a disorganized yet single unit: mature cells forming at the storm’s center, with newer ones developing on the periphery. In the cells that approached Cry County, the anvil-shaped top of a cell began to bulge upward. This “overshoot” indicated that the rising torrent of air at the storm’s center was so powerful it had broken through the tropopause into the stratosphere. On the underside of the storm, ugly, bulging mammatus pouches appeared: bellwethers for heavy rainfall, hail, windbursts, and tornadoes.

The National Weather Service had been tracking the system with radar, satellites, and the reports of pilots and civilian “spotters.” The dust storm and thunderstorm bulletins were upgraded to include tornado watches. Regional offices of the National Weather Service began advising local authorities of the need for emergency action. And always it remained vigilant for that rarest, yet worst type of storm: the supercell thunderstorm. In this far more organized event, the main updraft—known as a mesocyclone—reaches speeds of close to two hundred miles per hour. Such storms could create three-inch hail, eighty-mile-per-hour downbursts of wind, and tornadoes.

And already, virgas of rain were hovering over the landscape, evaporating as quickly as they fell, blasting the ground with localized microbursts that uprooted trees, flattened fields, and peeled the roofs off trailers. Hailstones spilled from the sky, stripping corn ears from their stems and ripping up fields, tearing the dry stalks to tattered sticks.

Many thousands of feet below this cell, almost lost in the approaching storm front, a lone Rolls-Royce hurtled along at one hundred miles an hour, two and a half tons of precision-engineered steel cutting the darkness of a long and lonely ribbon of tar.

Inside, the driver kept one hand on the wheel while glancing at the laptop open on the seat beside him. The laptop showed the real-time progress of the storm, a composite downloaded by a mosaic of weather satellites orbiting high above.

Coming from Topeka, he had exited Interstate 70 just past Salina, and was now passing the outskirts of Great Bend. From here on, the road to Medicine Creek would become far more local. That—and the approaching storm itself—would force him to slow dramatically.

And yet time was of the essence. The killer would soon kill again. In all likelihood he would be attracted to the storm, the violence and darkness of it, and he was almost certain to kill again that night.

He picked up his cell phone and dialed. Once again a recorded voice told him that the party he was trying to reach was out of range.

Out of range. He pondered that phrase: out of range.

And he pushed the Rolls ahead even faster.

Fifty

Ever since he’d seen The Wizard of Oz as a child, Tad Franklin had been fascinated by tornadoes. It was a source of secret embarrassment that, living all his life in western Kansas, the very center of “tornado alley,” he had never managed to see one. He’d seen the aftereffects more often than he’d liked—twisted trailer parks, trees blasted into toothpicks, cars lifted and thrown across the road—but somehow he’d never seen an actual funnel cloud with his own eyes.

Tonight he felt sure that was going to change. All day long there had been weather advisories. Every hour, it seemed, the weather service alerts had grown in intensity: thunderstorm watch; severe thunderstorm warning; tornado watch. A brutal dust storm had come screaming through an hour before that had torn away placards and shingles, sandblasted cars and houses, knocked down trees, and reduced visibility to a few hundred yards. And then at 8:11 that evening, with Tad alone in the sheriff’s office, the news came: the whole of Cry County had just been placed under a tornado warning until midnight. F-scale tornadoes of magnitude 2 or even 3, with two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds and devastating force, were possible.

Ten seconds later, Sheriff Hazen was on the radio.

“Tad,” he was saying, “I’m in Deeper, about to head back.”

“Sheriff—”

“I don’t have a lot of time. Listen to me. We’ve made a lot of progress on the case. We believe the killer is hiding in Kraus’s Kaverns.”

“The killer—?”

“For chrissakes, let me finish. It’s most likely McFelty, Norris Lavender’s henchman. He’s been holed up in that moonshine room back of Kraus’s Kaverns. But we’ve got to move fast in case he decides to pull out under cover of the storm. We’re putting together a team to go in at ten o’clock. But we also just got word from the NWS about a tornado warning for all of Cry County—”

“I just got the call.”

“—and I’ve got to put you on the tornado side of things. You know the drill?”

“Sure do.”

“Good. You get the word out, make sure everything’s battened down in Medicine Creek and the outlying areas. We’ll be arriving around nine, and then all hell’s going to break loose—and I don’t mean the weather. Just be sure to have a couple strong pots of fresh coffee. You’re not going in with us, so don’t worry. Somebody’s got to hold down the fort.”

It was only when Tad felt himself relax that he realized hehad begun to get a little nervous. He didn’t mind handling a tornado alert—he’d done that often enough before—but the idea of going after a killer in a dark cave was something else.

“Right, Sheriff,” he said.

“Okay, Tad. I’m relying on you.”

“Yes, sir.”

Tad hung up the radio. He knew the drill, all right. First thing, warn the citizenry. If there were any outside, get them indoors or into shelters.

He pushed out the back, careful to face away from the wind. The gusts, full of sand and grit, felt as if they had teeth. He opened the door to his squad car, slipped in, shook the dust from his hair and face, started the engine, and ran the wipers a few times. Then he started the siren and turned on his flashers. He slid out onto Main Street and cruised along, slowly, speaking into the horn. Of course, most of them would already have heard it over the radio, but it was important to go through the motions.

“This is the sheriff’s office. A tornado warning has been declared for all of Cry County. Repeat, a tornado warning has been declared for all of Cry County. All citizens should take shelter immediately, below ground or in concrete-reinforced buildings. Stay away from windows and doors. I repeat, a tornado warning has been declared for Cry County . . .”

He hit the edge of town, drove past the last houses, stopped, and looked down the dust-covered road. The few farms he could make out were already shuttered up tight, no activity anywhere. The farmers would have had their ears glued to the radio for hours already, and they knew what to do better than anyone: move livestock, especially the young, to sheltered areas; haul extra feed; make sure they were well stocked with provisions in case of a power loss.

The farmers knew what to do. It was the damn-fool townies one had to worry about.

Tad ran his eye down the road until it reached the level of the horizon. Above, the sky was black, intensely black; the sun must have set already, and what little light was left was completely blocked by the storm. The wind was gusting fitfully, pushing shreds of corn shucks and dust-covered stalks past his windows. To the southwest he could see a deep reddish flickering that looked more like the front of a war than lightning. In Cry County, tornadoes almost always moved from southwest to northeast. It was so dark that if a tornado were coming they couldn’t even see it. They wouldn’t know it was on them until theyheard it.

He turned around quickly and headed back into town.

The windows of Maisie’s were twin rectangles of cheerful yellow standing against the murk. Tad pulled up in front and got out, holding his collar against the wind. The air smelled of dry earth and tree roots. Fragments of corn sheaves peppered his jacket.

He pushed through the door and looked around. The place fell silent as they realized he wasn’t there for a cup of coffee.

Tad cleared his throat. “Excuse me, folks, but we’ve got a tornado warning in effect for all of Cry County. Force 2, even force 3, tornadoes possible. Time to head home.”

The reporters and camera crews had already fled the coming storm, and he found himself looking upon a roomful of the usual. Melton Rasmussen; Swede Cahill and his wife, Gladys; Art Ridder. Smit Ludwig was absent, which was a little odd. He was the one person you’d most expect to find. Maybe he was out on some storm-related story. If so, he’d better get his rear end to shelter.

Rasmussen was the first to react. “Any news on the killings?” he asked.

The question hung in the air and Tad faced a roomful of expectant faces. He was taken aback: here, even with the threat of tornadoes, the killings were still the first thing on everyone’s mind. This was why Maisie’s was full: Tad had seen cows do it, bunching up when they got scared.

“Well, we’ve—” Tad stopped himself. The sheriff would definitely have his ass on a platter if he mentioned the upcoming operation.

“We’re following up some excellent leads,” he finished up with the usual line, knowing how lame it must sound.

“That’s just what you’ve been saying for a goddamned week,” said Mel, standing up, his face red.

“Easy, Mel,” said Swede Cahill.

“Well, we’ve got a better lead now,” Tad said defensively.

“Abetter lead. Did you hear that, Art?”

Art Ridder was sitting at the bar nursing a cup of coffee. His look was definitely not friendly. He eased his butt around on the chrome seat and faced Tad. “The sheriff said he had a plan, some way of catching the murderer and getting the experimental field back to Medicine Creek. Tad, I want to know what the hell this plan of his is, or whether he was just blowing smoke.”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss his plans,” said Tad. “And anyway, the important thing is that there’s a tornado warning in effect for—”

“The hell with the warning,” said Ridder. “I want to see some action on these killings.”

“Sheriff Hazen’s making progress.”

“Progress? Where’s he been? I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him all day.”

“He’s been in Deeper, pursuing a lead—”

Suddenly the swinging doors to the kitchen burst open and Maisie appeared behind the counter. “Art Ridder, you shut your trap,” she barked. “Lay off Tad here. He’s just doing his job.”

“Now look here, Maisie—”

“Don’t ‘look here, Maisie’ me, Art Ridder. I’m wise to your bullying ways and you won’t do it in here. And you, Mel, you know better. Lay off.”

The room fell into a guilty silence.

“There’s a tornado warning out,” continued Maisie. “You all know what that means. You got five minutes to clear out. You can settle up later. I’m shuttering my windows and heading down to the basement. The rest of you’d better do the same if you don’t want to find yourselves over the rainbow before the night is out.”

She turned and went back into the kitchen, smacking the swinging doors together and causing everyone to jump.

“Get to a safe place of shelter,” Tad said, looking around at the assembly, remembering the list in his manual. “Get in the basement, under a worktable or concrete washtub or staircase. Avoid windows. Bring a flashlight, potable water, and a portable radio with batteries. The warning’s in effect until midnight, but they may extend it, you never know. This is one heck of a storm.”

As the place cleared out, Tad went into the back, looking for Maisie.

“Thanks,” he said.

Maisie waved her hand dismissively. She looked more haggard than he remembered ever seeing her. “Tad, I don’t know if I should mention this, but Smit’s missing.”

“I kinda wondered about that.”

“There was a reporter who waited for him until closing last night. Smit wasn’t here for breakfast or lunch. It’s not like him to stay away like that, not without saying something. I called his home and the paper, but there’s no answer.”

“I’ll look into it,” Tad said.

Maisie nodded. “Probably nothing.”

“Yeah. Probably nothing.” Tad went back out into the restaurant, shuttered the windows, then made for the door. Hand on the knob, he turned back. “You get in that basement now, Maisie, okay?”

“On my way,” Maisie’s voice came drifting back from down the stairs.

Just as Tad returned to the sheriff’s office, the call came from the county dispatcher. Mrs. Fernald Higgs had called. Her boy had seen a monster in his room. When he screamed and turned on the light, the monster ran away. The boy was hysterical and so was Mrs. Higgs.

Tad listened incredulously until the dispatcher had finished.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.

“She wants the sheriff out there,” the dispatcher ended lamely.

Tad could hardly believe it. “We’ve got a serial killer loose and a frontful of tornadoes on their way, and you want me to check out amonster? ”

There was a silence. “Hey,” said the dispatcher, “I’m just doing my job. You know I have to report everything. Mrs. Higgs says the monster left a footprint.”

Tad lowered the radio momentarily.Jesus Christ.

He looked at his watch. Eight-thirty. He could be out to the Higgs place and back in twenty minutes.

With a sigh, he raised the radio once again. “All right,” he said. “I’ll check it out.”

Fifty-One

By the time Tad arrived at the Higgs residence, old man Higgs had returned home and whaled his boy, and the kid was sitting angrily in the corner, eyes dry, little fists clenched. Mrs. Higgs was flitting about in the background, worried, wringing her hands, her mouth compressed. Higgs himself sat at the kitchen table, face set, eating a potato.

“I’m here about the, ah, report,” Tad said as he came in, taking his hat off.

“Forget the report,” said the old man. “I’m sorry you were bothered.”

Tad went over to the boy and knelt down. “You okay?”

The boy nodded, his face flaming red. He had blond hair and very blue eyes.

“Hillis, I don’t want any more talk of monsters, hear?” the farmer said.

Mrs. Higgs sat down, got up. “I’m sorry, Deputy Tad, do you want a cup of coffee?”

“No thanks, ma’am.”

He looked at the kid again and spoke softly. “What’d you see?”

The kid said nothing.

“Don’t be talking about any monsters,” growled the farmer.

Tad leaned closer.

“Isaw it,” said the boy defiantly.

“What’d you say?” the farmer roared.

Tad turned to Mrs. Higgs. “Show me the footprint, if you will, ma’am.”

Mrs. Higgs rose nervously.

The farmer said, “He ain’t talking about monsters still, is he? By jingo, I’ll whale him a second time. Calling the police about a monster!”

Mrs. Higgs brought Tad through the small parlor to the back of the house and scuttled into the boy’s room. She pointed at the window. “Iknow I shut the window before I put Hill to bed, but when he screamed and I came in I saw it was open. And when I went to shut it I saw a footprint in the flowerbed.”

Tad could hear Higgs’s voice raised in the kitchen. “It’s goddamned embarrassing, having the sheriff come calling over a bad dream.”

Tad raised the window. The moment he did so, the wind came shrieking in, grabbing the curtains and tossing them wildly around. Tad put his head out the window and looked down.

In the faint light from the room he could see a bed of carefully tended zinnias. Several of them had been roughly flattened by a large, elongated mark. It might be a footprint, but then again, it might not be.

He went back through the parlor, exited the side door, and walked around the edge of the house, leaning toward the clapboards for cover, until he’d reached the boy’s window. Snapping on his flashlight, he knelt by the flowerbed.

The impression was smudged and had been eroded by the storm, but it did, in fact, strongly resemble a footprint.

He straightened up, angling his flashlight away from the house. There was another mark, then another and another. With his flashlight, he followed their direction. About a quarter mile distant—beyond the frenzied, tossing sea of corn—were the faint lights of the Gro-Bain plant. The storm warnings had shut the plant down early and it now lay empty.

As he watched, the lights abruptly winked out.

He turned. The lights in the Higgs house were out, too. But the glow of light from Medicine Creek was still visible.

Blackout.

He trudged around the side of the farmhouse again and went in the door.

“It appears there may, in fact, have been an intruder,” he said.

The farmer muttered angrily but didn’t say anything. Mrs. Higgs was already lighting candles.

“We’re also under a tornado warning. I’m going to ask you to shut and lock your doors and windows. Head for the basement the moment the wind gets any worse. If you have a battery-powered radio, keep it tuned to the emergency channel.”

The farmer grunted acknowledgment. He didn’t need anybody telling him what to do in case of a twister.

Tad got back in his car and sat for a moment, thinking. The big cruiser rocked back and forth to the gusting of the wind. It was nine o’clock. Hazen and his team would be in town by now. He unhooked the radio and called in.

“That you, Tad?”

“Yeah. You back at the station, Sheriff?”

“Not yet. Storm blew down a tree on the Deeper Road and knocked out a couple of repeater stations.”

Tad quickly explained the situation.

“Monsters, huh?” Hazen chuckled. There was an awful lot of noise in the background.

“You know 911, they have to report everything. I’m sorry if I—”

“Don’t apologize. You did right. What’s the upshot?”

“It appears there may have been an intruder. The kid’s scream might have startled him. He seems to have headed away in the direction of the Gro-Bain plant. Which, by the way, just lost power.”

“Probably that Cahill kid and his friends again. Remember that egging last month? We don’t want those boys out on a night like this. They take advantage of a blackout to go helling around, they could end up getting skulled by a flying tree. As long as you’re out there, why don’t you check out the plant? There’s still time. Keep in touch.”

“Right.”

“And Tad?”

“Yes?”

“You haven’t seen that man Pendergast, have you?”

“No.”

“Good. Looks like he blew town after I served him with that C-and-D.”

“No doubt.”

“We’re going to hit the cave at ten. Get back by then to cover the office.”

“Got it.”

Tad signed off and started up the car. He felt a certain relief. Now he had an even better reason not to go into the cave after the killer. As for Gro-Bain, they hadn’t had a night guard since the last one started working days. He would just check the entrances: as long as they were all locked, and there was no sign of activity, his job would be done.

He pointed the car south, toward the dark, low outline of the plant.

Fifty-Two

Tad eased his squad car into the plant’s parking lot. Heavy gusts blasted across the empty asphalt, carrying with them bits of straw and ruined husks of corn. Ribbons of rain cascaded here and there, coming and going in sudden sheets. A line of fat raindrops passed over the cruiser, from front to back, with a machine-gun cadence. Beyond the parking lot, he could hear waves of wind ripping through the cornfields surrounding the plant. He peered out at the blackness over the corn, half hoping for, half dreading, the sight of a daggerlike funnel cloud. But he could see nothing.

The sheriff had said he suspected Andy Cahill and his friends of terrorizing the Higgs homestead. Privately, Tad thought Hazen’s own son Brad and his gang were the more likely suspects. Scaring little kids, egging buildings, was more their style. The son would never be the man his father was. Tad wondered what he’d do if he ran into the sheriff’s son outside the plant. Now, that could prove to be more than a little awkward.

He eased the car up to the low outline of the plant and stopped, engine idling. Even through the closed windows, the wind screeched and moaned like a beast in pain. The plant was dim against the murk, sunken in the corn, dark and deserted.

Looking at the low, sinister building, what had seemed like a routine check was beginning to seem less appealing to Tad. Why the heck hadn’t Gro-Bain hired another night watchman? It wasn’t fair that the burden of private security fell on the sheriff’s department.

Tad passed a hand through his closely cropped hair. No help for it now. He’d just do a quick check to make sure none of the doors had been forced, then he’d check Smit Ludwig’s place and head on back to the station.

He cracked the cruiser door open, and the wind pushed it back at him with an angry howl. Pulling his hat down and raising his collar, he pushed harder at the door, then ducked out, face against the storm, making for the loading docks. As he ran, he could hear something banging in the wind. Reaching the shelter of the building, he pushed his hat back on his head and switched on his flashlight, then made his way along the cinderblock wall. The banging got louder.

It was when he reached the top of the loading dock stairs that his light revealed an open door, swinging and banging on broken hinges.

Shit.

Tad stood there, the beam of the flashlight playing over the shattered lock and mangled hinges. Somebody had really done a number on it. Normally, he would call for backup. But where was he going to get backup on a night like this? Any law enforcement officers that weren’t going into the cave after the killer would be out working the tornado watch. Maybe he should just forget about it, come back in the morning.

He imagined explaining that decision to the darkening face of Sheriff Hazen and decided it was not an acceptable option. Hazen was constantly harping on him that he needed more pluck, more initiative.

This was nothing, really, to be concerned about. The killer was safely bottled up in the cave. Kids like Brad Hazen were always breaking into the plant for fun, even when the night watchman was there. It had happened several times before, most notably last Halloween—half a dozen hoodlums from Deeper who thought it would be fun to T.P. their rival town’s major employer.

Tad felt a wash of irritation. It was a hell of a night to pull crap like that. He pushed through the broken door, making as much noise as possible, and shone his light around the receiving area.

“This is the police,” he called out in his sternest voice. “Please identify yourselves.”

The only answer was the echo of his own voice coming back at him from the blackness.

Moving forward carefully, letting his light drift from left to right, he exited the loading bay and walked along the catwalk leading into the plant proper. It was very dark and smelled strongly of chlorine, and as he walked beneath a partition he felt, rather than saw, the ceiling suddenly rise to a great height. He paused to run the beam of his light along the conveyor belt that snaked through the plant like an endless metal road, back and forth, up and down, on at least three different levels. Emerging first from a small, tiled room attached to the stunning area, the “line” ran through several freestanding structures within the plant, buildings within buildings: the Scalder, the Plucker, the Box Washer. Tad remembered their names from his previous visits. It was the kind of thing you didn’t forget too quickly.

He shone his light back toward the tiled room. This small structure, the first within the plant, was the Blood Room. Its door was ajar.

“This is the police,” he rapped out a second time, advancing a few more steps. Outside, the shriek of the wind answered faintly.

Transferring his flashlight to his left hand, Tad unsnapped the leather guard on his service holster, let his palm rest lightly on the handle of his piece. Not that there would be any call for it, of course. But it felt reassuring, just the same.

He turned and shone his light around again, licking the beam off the gleaming assembly line, off the tubes and pressure hoses that snaked up the gray-painted walls. The plant was vast, cavernous, and his light penetrated less than a third of it. But the place was silent, and what he could see looked decidedly empty.

Tad felt a certain relief. The kids had probably run for it at the first sign of his cruiser.

He glanced at his watch: almost quarter after nine. Hazen would be at the sheriff’s office by now, preparing for the ten-o’clock raid. He’d followed through, and found nothing. Any further time here would be wasted. He’d check out Smit Ludwig’s place, then get back.

It was as he turned to leave that he heard the noise.

He paused, listening. There it was again: a kind of giggle, or wet snicker. It seemed to come from the Blood Room, queerly distorted by the stainless steel floor and tiled walls.

Christ, the kids were hiding in there.

He shone his flashlight at the open door of the Blood Room. The conveyor belt emerged from a wide porthole above the door, dangling hooks winking in his beam, throwing cruel misshapen shadows over the entrance.

“All right,” he said, “come out of there. All of you.”

Another snort.

“I’m going to count to three, and if you don’t come out you’ll be in serious trouble, and that’s a promise.”

This was ridiculous, wasting his time like this in the middle of a tornado warning. He was going to throw the book at those kids. Deeper scum, he was sure of it now.

“One.”

No response.

“Two.”

He waited, but there was nothing but silence from the half-open door.

“Three.” Tad moved swiftly and purposefully toward the door, his boots echoing on the slick tile floor. He kicked the door wide with a hollow boom that echoed crazily around the vast interior of the plant.

Feet set apart, he swept the Blood Room with his light, the beam shining off the polished steel, the circular drain in the middle of the floor, the gleaming tile walls.

Empty. He walked into the middle of the room and stood there, the smell of bleach washing over him.

There was a rattle overhead, and Tad quickly angled his light upward. A sudden furious sound, a clashing of metal. The hooks dangling from the conveyor line began to bounce and swing wildly, and his light just caught a dark shape scuttling along the line, disappearing out the porthole above the door.

“Hey! You!” Tad ran back to the door, stopped. Flashed his light. Nothing but the swinging and creaking of the line as it moved away into blackness.

No leniency, no soft touch, this time: Tad was going to lock these kids up, teach them a lesson.

He let the beam of his light linger on the line. It was still swinging and creaking, and it looked as if the kids had climbed along it through a curtain of plastic flaps into the next structure, an oversized stainless steel box. The Scalder.

Tad moved forward as silently as he could. The plastic flaps covering the entrance to the Scalder were still swinging slightly.

Bingo.

Tad circled around to the other end of the Scalder. The thin black shape of the line emerged here, but the plastic flaps on this end weren’t swinging.

He had trapped the kids inside.

Tad stepped back, bobbing his light back and forth between the Scalder’s entrance and exit points. He spoke, not loudly, but firmly. “Listen: you’re already in big trouble for breaking and entering. But if you don’t come out of there right now, you’re going to be charged with resisting arrest and a lot more besides. No probation or community service, you’ll do time. You understand?”

For a moment, silence. And then, a low murmur came from inside the Scalder.

Tad leaned forward to listen. “What’s that?”

More murmuring, turning into a kind of singsong sound. There was a strange wet lisping to it all, as if of a tongue being razzed against protruding lips.

The kids were mocking him.

In a burst of anger and humiliation, Tad kicked the side of the Scalder. The steel wall let out a hollow boom that rolled and echoed back into the unseen vastness of the plant.

“Get out here!”

Tad took one breath, then another. And then, quickly, he ducked through the plastic flaps covering the entrance to the Scalder, careful not to bang his skull on the hooks that dangled from the line overhead. As he licked his flashlight around the insides of the metal box, he got a peripheral glimpse of a figure scrambling along the conveyor belt and out the slot in the far wall. It looked surprisingly big and ungainly: probably the overlapping image of two running boys. But there was nothing ungainly about the speed at which the image scurried away from him. In the blackness just beyond vision, the shape leapt from the line; there was a thump, then the quick patter of feet running toward the rear of the plant.

“Stop!” Tad cried.

He ran around the Scalder and took up the pursuit, the yellow pool of his flashlight bobbing ahead of him. The dark form bypassed the Plucker and went shooting up an emergency ladder toward the Evisceration Area, running along the elevated platform and disappearing behind a thick cluster of hydraulic hoses.

“Stop, damn you!” Tad yelled into the darkness. He climbed the ladder, gun now drawn, and charged down the metal catwalk.

As he passed the cluster of hoses something flashed in his field of vision and he felt a terrific blow to his forearm. He yelled out in surprise and pain. The flashlight flew out of his hand and went crashing to the floor, skidding and rolling off the elevated platform. There was a loud clunk as it hit the concrete floor, a rattle of glass, and then darkness.

From outside came the wail of wind, the patter of hailstones against the roof.

Tad crouched, service piece pointed into the darkness, a pain shooting up and down his left forearm. Christ, his arm hurt. He couldn’t clench his fist or move his fingers, and the pain just seemed to grow and grow, until his whole arm felt like it was on fire.

The son of a bitch had broken his arm. Broken it badly. With a single blow. Tad stifled a sob, clenched his jaw.

He listened intently, but there was no sound except the storm raging beyond the cinderblock walls.

This is no fucking kid.

The anger he’d felt, the humiliation, was gone. The pain and the sudden darkness had taken care of that. Now all Tad wanted to do was get out.

He strained to see in the blackness, tried to remember which way to go. The plant was huge, and without light it would be very difficult to find the exit. Maybe he should stay here, silent and unmoving, until the power returned?

No. He couldn’t stay here. He had to move, to run, somewhere. Anywhere.

Get away. Just get away.

He rose to his feet and, gun drawn, his broken arm dangling, tried to feel his way with his feet back to the ladder, scarcely daring to breathe, terrified that at any moment another blow might come out of the darkness. One step, three, five . . .

In the blackness, his elbow bumped into something.

With his gun hand, he reached out gingerly, touched a surface that felt rough and scaly. Was it the high-pressure hoses? But it didn’t feel like a hose. It felt like something else.

But there was nothing else that should feel like that; not up here in the Evisceration Area.

He bit his lip, suppressed a sob of terror.

It was the blackness that was making him act this way. He wasn’t used to utter blackness. If he fired his gun, maybe he could see long enough to orient himself. One shot toward the roof wouldn’t hurt anything.

He raised his piece and fired upward.

The brief flash revealed a figure, standing next to him, looking at him, smiling. The image was so unexpected, so strange and horrifying, that Tad could not even scream.

But the figure screamed for him: a hoarse, guttural ululation of surprise and anger at the gunshot.

Tad ran. He found the ladder and half fell, half scrambled down it, banging his knees cruelly against the metal rungs. He got tangled near the bottom and fell crashing to the floor, on top of his broken arm. And now he found he could scream, in both pain and terror. But at least he was back on the main floor of the plant. He scrambled to his feet, nauseous from pain and sobbing with terror, ran, tripped again, scrambled back to his feet. And that was when he realized his piece was still clutched desperately in his hand. He could use it, and hewould use it. He reached back and fired, once, twice, blindly—and each time, the muzzle flashes revealing that thething was scuttling toward him, pink mouth yawning wide, arms outstretched.

Muh!

He had to aim the gun,aim it, not just fire wildly. Two more rounds, and each flash showed it coming closer, closer. Tad scrambled backwards, still screaming, and fired twice more, his hand shaking wildly.

Muh! Muh!

It was almost on him. He couldn’t miss now. He aimed point-blank, pulled.

The hammer fell on an empty cylinder. He fumbled for his extra clip, but a second terrible blow struck him in the gut and he fell, unable to breathe, the gun skittering away across the floor. A third blow, this one to his gun arm. He found his wind, thrashing desperately, screaming and kicking, trying to slide himself backwards, but it was impossible with both his arms unusable.

Muh! Muh! Muh!

Tad shrieked again and twisted wildly away, sliding on his back, kicking in the direction of the sound.

And then the thing caught his flailing leg. Tad felt a terrible pressure on his ankle, then a sudden give, accompanied by the snap of bone.His bone.

A moment later, a huge weight pressed down on his chest and something rough and hard gripped his face. There was a smell of earth, and mold, and something fainter but far worse. For a moment it seemed as if the grasp would be gentle, comforting, reassuring.

But then it tightened with a terrible, unforgiving pressure. And then, with ferocious speed, his entire face was twisted in the direction of the floor.

There was a grinding click; a burst of fire at the base of his neck; and then the terrible darkness became bright, so very, very bright . . .

Fifty-Three

Corrie lay in the putrid dark. In this terrible and disorienting blackness, it was impossible to tell how much time had passed sincehe had left. An hour? A day? It seemed like forever. Her whole body ached, and her neck was sore from where he had squeezed it.

And yet he had not killed her. No: he’d meant to torture her instead. And yet torture didn’t seem to be quite the right word. It was almost as if he was toying with her,playing with her, in some horrible, inexplicable way . . .

But guessing about the killer was pointless. There was no way she could understand something so alien, so broken, so foreign to her own experience. She reminded herself that nobody was going to rescue her way back in this cave system. Nobody knew she was there. If she were to live, she had to do something herself. She had to do it before he came back.

She struggled once again to loosen the cords, succeeding only in chafing and tearing her wrists. The ropes had been tied wet and the knots were as hard as walnuts.

. . . When wouldhe come back? The thought sent a wave of panic through her.

Corrie, get a grip.

She lay still a moment, focusing on her breathing. Then, slowly, with her hands tied behind her, she half crawled, half rolled over the sloping floor of the cave, exploring. The floor was relatively smooth here, but now and then she noticed rough rocks projecting in clusters from the floor of the cave. She stopped to feel one formation more closely with her fingers. Crystals, maybe.

She positioned herself and kicked hard at them with her feet. There was a sharp snapping sound as they broke away.

Now she explored with numb fingers until she found a fresh, sharp edge. Positioning herself laboriously over it, she placed her hands against the edge and began rubbing the ropes, back and forth, back and forth.

God, it hurt. Her wrists were raw circles of flesh where the ropes bound her, and she could feel the blood trickling down the insides of her palms as she worked. There was barely any feeling left in her fingers.

But she kept rubbing, pressing harder. The wet rope slipped, the sharp stone cut her hands.

She stifled a cry and kept rubbing. Better to lose her hands than her life. At least the rope was beginning to fray. If she could only get it off, she could . . .

She could what?

. . . When wouldhe come back?

Corrie shivered; a shiver that threatened to become uncontrollable. She had never been so cold and numb and wet in her life. The stench seemed to permeate everything, and she could taste it on her tongue, in her nose.

Focus on the rope.

She rubbed, slipped, cut herself again, and, sobbing aloud, kept scraping and chafing, harder and harder. There was no longer any feeling at all in her fingers, but this just made her rub the harder.

Even if she got free, what would she do without light? She didn’t have a match or a lighter. Even if she had a light,he had taken her so far back into the cave that she wondered if she could ever find her way out.

Sobbing, she jammed the rope against the sharp rock again and again. Perversely, the very hopelessness of her situation brought new strength to her limbs.

Suddenly her hands were free.

She lay back, gasping, sucking in air. Pain rushed in like a thousand needles pricking at her palms and fingers. She could feel blood flowing more freely now along her skin.

She tried to move her fingers, without success. With a groan, she leaned to one side, gently rubbing her palms together. She tried moving her fingers a second time and got a little response. They were coming back to life.

Slowly, painfully, she sat up. Propping her legs behind her, she reached down and felt the cords around her ankles. They seemed to be tied in the craziest way, wrapped around and around, with half a dozen crude but effective knots. She tried to pick at them, gasped at the pain, and let her hands drop away. Maybe she could saw them off on the sharp rock she’d used for her hands. She felt around for the edge—

A sound interrupted her. She paused, dread clutching at her.

He was coming back.

She could hear grunting, huffing noises echoing off the cavern walls not far away. It sounded like he was lugging something. Something heavy.

Hnuff!

Quickly she hid her hands behind her back, lay down on the cold floor, and fell still. Even though it was pitch black, she wasn’t going to take the chance that he could see she was no longer tied.

The shuffle of footsteps grew near. New smells, sour smells, were suddenly introduced into the darkness: fresh blood, bile, vomit.

She lay perfectly still. It was so dark, maybe he had forgotten about her.

There was a dragging sound, then the jangling of what sounded like keys. And then something heavy hit the floor of the cave next to her. The stench abruptly grew worse.

She stifled the scream that rose in her throat.

Nowhe began humming and talking to himself once again. There was a rattle of metal, the scratch of a match, and suddenly there was light: almost indiscernibly faint, but light just the same. For a moment, Corrie forgot everything—her pain, her desperate condition—as she felt her soul rise toward the dim yellow glow. It seemed to be coming from between the chinks of a strange-looking lantern, very old, with sliding sides of rusted metal. The light was placed in a way that lefthim in shadow—just a dark shape moving, gray against black. He disappeared around a corner, doing something in an alcove, humming and talking to himself.

So he did need light, after all, if only a little bit.

But if he’d managed to do so much in utter darkness—bring her here, tie her up—what kind of work would he need light for?

Corrie did not want to follow this train of thought. It was easy to let it go: the instinctual relief of the light made her feel sluggish, torpid. Part of her just wanted to give up, resign herself. She looked around. Dim as it was, the light seemed to reflect back at her in a million crystallike points, coming from everywhere and nowhere.

She waited, motionless, her eyes adjusting to the gloom.

She was in a smallish cavern. Its walls were covered with feathery white crystals that gleamed in the faint glow of the dark-lantern, and countless stalactites hung from the ceiling. From each stalactite hung a bizarre little ornament of sticks and bones, lashed together with twine. For a long time, her eyes traveled back and forth across them, uncomprehending. Eventually her eyes moved to the walls, scanned slowly across them, and then at last fell to the surrounding floor.

A body lay beside her.

She stifled a cry. Horror and fear surged through her again. How could the mere relief of vision, of the lack of blackness, have allowed her to forget, even for a moment . . . ?

She shut her eyes. But the renewed dark was even worse. Shehad to know.

At first, there was so much blood on the face that she couldn’t make it out. And then, slowly, the outlines seemed to resolve themselves. It was the ruined face of Tad Franklin: staring back at her, open-mouthed.

She turned her head violently away; heard herself scream, then scream again.

There was a grunt and she now sawhim for the first time, coming around the corner and advancing toward her, a long, bloody knife in one hand, something wet and red in the other.

He was smiling and singing to himself.

The scream died as her throat closed involuntarily at the sight.

That face—!

Fifty-Four

Hazen stood before the assembled law enforcement officers. What he had to say wouldn’t take long: it was a good crew, and they had a good plan. McFelty wouldn’t stand a chance.

There was only one problem. Tad hadn’t yet returned from the plant, and radio communications were down. Hazen would have preferred to hand off control directly before leaving, but he could wait no longer. Medicine Creek was well secured and properly hunkered down: Tad had clearly seen to that already. It was already a few minutes to ten. He didn’t want McFelty slipping away under cover of the storm. They had to go. Tad would know what to do.

“Where’s the dogs?” he asked.

Hank Larssen spoke up. “They’re bringing them straight to the Kraus place. Meeting us there.”

“I hope to hell they got us some real dogs this time. Did you ask for that special breed they’ve been training up in Dodge, those Spanish dogs, what are they called?”

“Presa canarios,” Larssen said. “I did. They said their training wasn’t complete, but I insisted.”

“Good. I’m through playing around with lap dogs. Who’s the handler?”

“Same as last time. Lefty Weeks. He’s their best.”

Hazen scowled, shucked out a cigarette, lit it.

Now he raked the group with his gaze. “You all know the drill, so I’ll be brief. The dogs go first, then the handler—Lefty—then me and Raskovich.” He pointed at the KSU security chief with his cigarette.

Raskovich nodded, his jaw tightening with the gravity of the situation.

“Raskovich, you know how to use a twelve-gauge?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I’ll issue you one. Behind us, as backup, there’ll be Cole, Brast, and Sheriff Larssen.” He nodded to two state troopers dressed in full raid wear: black BDU pants bloused over Hi-Tec boots, blacked-out bulletproof vests. No more Boy Scout hats—this was going to be the real thing. Then he turned back to Larssen. “That okay with you, Hank?”

The Deeper sheriff nodded.

Hazen knew it was important to play the political game, keep Hank in the loop, make sure he was part of the team. Hank clearly wasn’t happy about it, but there wasn’t much he could do: this was Hazen’s turf, and until the operation was finished and outside communication was restored, it was completely his show. In the end Hazen would make sure Larssen looked good. They’d all share credit—Raskovich, too—and there wouldn’t be any backstabbing when it came to trial.

“The rules of engagement are simple. You’ve all got riot guns, but don’t use them unless your life isdirectly threatened. Is that absolutely crystal clear?”

Everyone nodded.

“We’re taking our man outalive andunhurt. We’re going in nice and easy, disarm the guy, bring him out shackled and cuffed, but with kid gloves. He’s our star witness. If he panics and starts shooting, youstay back and let the dogs take care of him. And dogs like these can take a major round or two and still work.”

Silence, nods.

“If any of you’s thinking of coming out a hero, forget it. I’ll arrest you myself. We work together.”

He glared at each one in turn. It was Raskovich he was most worried about, but so far the man had been cool. It was worth taking the chance. Hell, he was willing to let Raskovich take all the damn credit if it meant the experimental field came to Medicine Creek.

“Shurte and Williams, you two will stake out the cave entrance. I want you to give yourself a good field of action, which means no lounging in the entrance where you could be surprised. If we flush McFelty and he tries to take off, you need to be ready to take him. You, Rheinbeck, you’re going into the Kraus mansion to serve the warrant and drink tea with Winifred. Be prepared to back up Shurte and Williams if they need it.”

Rheinbeck’s face betrayed nothing, just a faint twitching along the jawline.

“I know, Rheinbeck, it’s a tough assignment, but the old lady’s bound to be upset. We don’t want any heart attacks, right?”

Rheinbeck nodded.

“Remember, we’ll have no communication to the outside world down there. And if we get separated, there won’t be any communication between us, either. So we stay together. Got it?”

He looked around. They got it.

“All right, Cole’s going to tell us about the night-vision goggles.”

Cole stepped forward. He was Mr. State Police himself, tall, muscular, crew-cut, deadpan face. Funny how the Staties were never fat. Maybe it was a rule. He was carrying a gray helmet with a large set of goggles fastened beneath it.

“In a cave,” he said, “there’s no light at all. None. For that reason normal NVGs won’t work. So we’re going in with infrared illumination. The infrared light works just like a flashlight. This is the bulb, right here, on the front of the helmet. Here’s the switch. It’s got to be turned on to work, just like a regular flashlight. You can’t see the light with the naked eye, but when you put the NVGs on you’ll see a reddish illumination. If your infrared headlamp goes off, your goggles go black. Understand?”

Everyone nodded.

“The purpose of the NVGs is so we don’t make ourselves targets by carrying flashlights. He can’t see us. We’ll keep the overhead lights off and go in silent, and he won’t know how many we are.”

“Is there a map of the cave or something?” It was Raskovich.

“Good question,” said Hazen. “No, there isn’t. A wooden walkway’s been erected through most of it. There are a few rooms in the back, two or three at most, beyond. One of these rooms has the old still in it, and that’s probably where we’ll find our man. This isn’t Carlsbad Caverns we’re talking about. Just exercise common sense, stay close, and you’ll be all right.”

The security chief nodded.

Hazen went to the weapons locker, removed a shotgun, broke it open, loaded it, slapped it closed with a flick of his wrist, and handed it to Raskovich. “You’ve all checked your weapons?”

There was a general shuffling, a murmur of assent. Hazen did a final check of his service belt, counterclockwise: extra magazines, asp baton, cuffs, pepper spray, sidearm all in place. He took a breath, snugged his armored vest up tight beneath his chin.

At that moment the lights in the office flickered, brightened, and went out. A chorus of groans and murmurs went up.

Hazen glanced out the window. No lights on the main drag, or anywhere else for that matter. Medicine Creek was blacked out from front to back. No surprise, really.

“This doesn’t change a thing,” he said. “Let’s go.”

He opened the door and they stepped out into the howling night.

Fifty-Five

As he pulled into Medicine Creek, Special Agent Pendergast slowed the big Rolls, then plucked his cell phone from his pocket and made another attempt to call Corrie Swanson.

The only reply was a steady beeping, no longer even a recorded message. The relay stations were down.

He replaced the phone. The police radio was also down and the lights of the town were out. Medicine Creek was effectively cut off from the outside world.

He drove along Main Street. The trees were lashing back and forth in a frenzy under the angry wind. Sheets of rain swept across the streets, forming muddy whirlpools in drains that a few hours before had been choked with dust. The town was locked down tight: shades drawn, shutters closed. The only activity seemed to be at the sheriff’s office. Several state police cars were parked outside, and the sheriff and state police were moving around outside, loading equipment into a state police van and getting into squad cars. It looked like some operation was afoot, something more than the usual storm detail.

He continued on, turning into the gates of Wyndham Parke Estates. Within, the windows of the mobile homes were heavily taped, and large rocks had been placed on many of the roofs. Everything was dark, except for the occasional glimmer of a candle or flashlight beam glimpsed through a taped window. The wind tore through the narrow dirt lanes, rocking the trailers, pulling pebbles from the ground and throwing them against the aluminum sidings. In a nearby yard the swings of a child’s playset were whipping crazily, as if propelled by manic ghosts.

Pendergast pulled into the Swanson driveway. Corrie’s car was gone. He got out of his car, moved quickly to the door, and knocked.

No answer. The house was dark.

He knocked again, louder.

There was a thump from inside, and the movement of a flashlight beam. A voice called out: “Corrie? Is that you? You’re in trouble, young lady.”

Pendergast pushed at the door; it opened two inches and was stopped by the chain.

“Corrie?” the voice shrieked. A woman’s face appeared.

“FBI,” Pendergast said, flashing his badge.

The woman peered out at him from beneath slitted lids. A half-smoked cigarette dangled from rouge-smeared lips. She poked the flashlight out the crack and shone it directly into his eyes.

“I’m looking for Miss Swanson,” said Pendergast.

The ravaged face continued to look out, and now a cloud of cigarette smoke issued from the chained crack.

“She’s out,” said the woman.

“I’m Special Agent Pendergast.”

“I know who you are,” the woman said. “You’re the FBI creep who needed anassistant. ” She snorted more smoke. “I’m wise to you, mister, so don’t bullshit me. Even if I knew where Corrie was, I wouldn’t tell you. Assistant, yeah,right. ”

“Do you know when Miss Swanson went out?”

“No idea.”

“Thank you.”

Pendergast turned and walked briskly back toward his car. As he did so, the door to the trailer opened wide and the woman stepped out onto the sagging stoop.

“She probably went out looking foryou. Don’t think you can hide the truth from me, Mr. Slick-ass in your fancy black suit.”

Pendergast got into his car.

“Oh, and looky what we have here, a, what is that, a Rolls-Royce? Sheee-it.Some FBI agent.”

He shut the door and started the engine. The woman advanced across the little patch of lawn, into the lashing rain, clutching her nightgown, the storm tearing her shouted words and flinging them away.

“You make me sick, mister, you know that? I know your type and you make mesick —”

Pendergast swung out of the driveway, headed back toward Main Street.

Within five minutes, he pulled into the parking lot of the Kraus mansion. Again, Corrie’s car was nowhere to be seen.

Inside, Winifred sat in her usual chair, doing a cross-stitch by candlelight. She looked up as he came in and a wan smile creased her papery face. “I was worried about you, Mr. Pendergast, out in that storm. It’s a doozy, it really is. I’m glad you’re back safely.”

“Has Miss Swanson been by today?”

Winifred lowered her cross-stitch. “Why no, I don’t believe she has.”

“Thank you.” Pendergast bowed and turned back to the door.

“Don’t tell me you’re going out again!”

“I’m afraid so.”

Pendergast walked back across the parking lot, his face grave. If he was aware of the storm that lashed and tore the landscape on all sides, he gave no sign. He reached his car, grabbed the door handle. Then he stopped and turned, thinking. Beyond the house with its dimly lit windows, the dark sea of corn swayed violently. The signboard advertising Kraus’s Kaverns banged repeatedly in the wind.

Pendergast released the handle and walked quickly past the house, along the road. Within a hundred yards he came to a dirt road leading into the corn.

Two minutes later he was standing beside Corrie’s car.

Now he turned and strode briskly back toward the road. But even as he did so, a row of headlights appeared in the distance, approaching through the murk at high speed. As the cars blasted past and their brake lights went on as they turned into the Kaverns parking lot, growing concern became conviction, and he realized that the unthinkable had happened.

By a terrible, ironic twist of fate, it seemed that all of them—first he, then Corrie, and now Hazen—had come to the same conclusion: that the killer was hiding in the cave.

Pendergast quickly cut back through the corn, making directly for the opening to the cave. If he could manage to get inside before . . .

He was one minute too late. As he emerged from the corn, Hazen, standing before the cut leading down into the cave, saw him and turned back, a dark expression on his face.

“Well, well, if it isn’t Special Agent Pendergast. And here I thought you’d left town.”

Fifty-Six

Sheriff Hazen stared at Pendergast. There was a moment of confused silence in which Hazen felt himself swell with rage. The guy had an amazing knack for appearing out of nowhere at exactly the wrong moment. Well, he was going to face down this son of a bitch, once and for all. This FBI prick wasn’t going to waste any more of his time.

He advanced toward the thin figure, managing a smile. “Pendergast, what a surprise.”

The agent halted. His black suit was almost invisible in the stormy half-light, and his face seemed to float, pale and ghostlike. “What are you doing here, Sheriff?” He spoke quietly, but his voice carried an edge that Hazen hadn’t heard before.

“It’s my recollection you were served with a C-and-D this morning. You are in violation. I could have you arrested.”

“You’re going in after the killer,” said Pendergast. “You’ve deduced he’s in the cave.”

Hazen shifted uneasily. Pendergast must be guessing. There’s no way he could have heard; not yet.

The agent went on. “You have absolutely no idea of what you’re getting into, Sheriff—neither in terms of the adversary you’re facing, nor the setting.”

This was too much. “Pendergast, that’s it.”

“You’re at the edge of the abyss, Sheriff.”

“You’re the one on the edge.”

“The killer’s got a hostage.”

“Pendergast, you’re just blowing smoke out your ass.”

“If you blunder in there, Sheriff, you’re going to cause the death of that hostage.”

Despite himself, Hazen felt a chill. It was every cop’s nightmare. “Yeah? And just who is this hostage?”

“Corrie Swanson.”

“How do you know?”

“She’s been missing all day. And I just found her car, hidden in the corn a hundred yards to the west.”

There was a moment of uneasy silence, and then Hazen shook his head in disgust. “Right from the beginning, Pendergast, you’ve done nothing but throw the investigation off track with your theories. We would already have this man in the bag if it weren’t for you. So Swanson’s car is parked in the corn. She’s probably out in the cornfield with some guy.”

“She went into the cave.”

“Now there’s a brilliant deduction for you. The cave door is solid iron. How did she get in? Pick the lock?”

“Take a look for yourself.”

Hazen looked in the direction Pendergast was indicating, down along the cut in the ground. The iron door wasn’t locked after all: a padlock lay at the bottom of the doorframe, half concealed in the dust and leaves.

“If you think Corrie Swanson sprung that lock, Pendergast, you’re an even bigger fool than I thought. That’s not the work of a kid; it’s the work of a hardened felon. The man we’re after, in fact. And that’s more than you need to know about it.”

“As I recall, Sheriff, you were the one to accuse Miss Swanson of—”

Hazen shook his head. “I’ve listened enough. Pendergast, turn over your piece. You’re under arrest. Cole, cuff him.”

Cole stepped forward. “Sheriff?”

“He’s willfully disobeyed a standing cease-and-desist. He’s hindering a police investigation. He’s trespassing on private property. I’ll take full responsibility. Just get him the hellout of myface. ”

Cole advanced toward Pendergast. In the next instant, Cole was lying on the ground, desperately trying to breathe, and Pendergast had vanished.

Hazen stared.

“Uff,”Cole said, rolling into a sitting position and cradling his gut. “The son of a bitch sucker-punched me.”

“Christ,” Hazen muttered, shining his light around. But Pendergast was gone. Moments later he heard the roar of a big engine, the sound of tires pulling rapidly away from gravel.

Cole got up, his face red, and dusted himself off. “We’ll tag him for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.”

“Forget it, Cole. We’ve got bigger fish to fry. Let’s take care of business here and deal with that tomorrow.”

“The son of a bitch,” Cole muttered again.

Hazen slapped him on the back and grinned. “Next time you make an arrest, keep your eyes on the perp, hey, Cole?”

There was the distant slamming of a door and Hazen could hear a shrill voice rising and falling on the wind. A moment later, the pallid form of Winifred Kraus came running down the path from the old mansion. The fierce gusts whipped and tugged at her white nightgown, and to Hazen it almost seemed as if a ghost was flying through the night. Rheinbeck was following in her tracks, protesting loudly.

“What are you doing?” shrieked the old woman as she came up, her hair haggard in the rain, drops running down her face. “What’s this? What are you doing on my property?”

Hazen turned to Rheinbeck. “For chrissakes, you were supposed to—”

“I’ve been trying to explain to her, Sheriff. She’s hysterical.”

Winifred was looking around at the troopers, her eyes rolling wildly. “Sheriff Hazen! I demand an explanation!”

“Rheinbeck, get her out of—”

“This is arespectable tourist attraction!”

Hazen heaved a sigh and turned to her. “Look. Winifred, we believe the killer’s holed up in your cave.”

“Impossible!” the woman shrieked. “I check it twice a week!”

“We’re going in there to bring him out. I want you to stay in your house with Officer Rheinbeck here, nice and peaceable. He’ll take care of you—”

“I willnot. Don’t youdare go into my cave! You have no right. There’s no killer in there!”

“Miss Kraus, I’m sorry. We’ve got a warrant. Rheinbeck?”

“I already showed her the warrant, Sheriff—”

“Show it to her again and get her the hell out of here.”

“But she won’t listen—”

“Pick herup if you have to. Can’t you see we’re wasting time?”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, ma’am—”

“Don’t youdare touch me!” Winifred took a swipe at Rheinbeck, who fell back.

She turned and advanced on Hazen, her fists balled up. “You get off my property! You’ve always been a bully! Get out of here!”

He grabbed her wrists and she writhed and spat at him. Hazen was amazed at the old lady’s strength and ferocity.

“Miss Kraus,” he began again, trying to be patient, to make his voice more soothing. “Just calm down, please. This is important law enforcement business.”

“Get off my land!”

Hazen struggled to hold her, and felt a sharp kick to his shin. The others were all standing around, gawking like civilian spectators. “How about a little help here?” he roared.

Rheinbeck grabbed her by the waist while Cole waded in and managed to snag one of her flailing arms.

“Easy now,” Hazen said. “Easy. She’s still a little old lady.”

Her shrieks became hysterical. The three men held her immobile for a moment, struggling, and then Hazen finally extricated himself. Rheinbeck, with Cole’s help, picked her up off the ground. Her legs kicked and flailed.

“Devils!” she shrieked. “You have no right!”

Her shrieks died as Rheinbeck disappeared into the storm, carrying his thrashing burden.

“Jesus, what’s with her?” Cole asked, panting.

Hazen dusted off his pants. “She’s always been a loopy old bitch, but I never expectedthis. ” He gave one final slap. She had kicked him pretty good in the shin and it still smarted. He straightened up. “Let’s get into the cave before someone else pops up to spoil our party.” He turned to Shurte and Williams. “If that son of a bitch Pendergast comes back, you’re authorized to use all means to keep him out of the cave.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hazen leading, the others moved down the dark slot in the ground. As they descended, the sounds of the storm became muffled, far away. They opened the unlocked door, switched on their infrared lights and night-vision goggles, and began descending the stairs. Within moments the silence became complete, broken only by the sound of dripping water. They were entering another world.

Fifty-Seven

The Rolls scraped and bumped up the dirt track, the headlights barely penetrating the screaming murk, hail hammering on the metal. When the vehicle could go no farther, Pendergast stopped, turned off the engine, tucked the rolled map inside his suit jacket, and stepped out into the storm.

Here, at the highest point of land in Cry County, the mesocyclone had reached its highest pitch of intensity. The ground looked like a battlefield, littered with jetsam scattered by the ruinous winds: twigs, plant debris, clods of dirt picked up from fields many miles away. Up ahead, the still-invisible trees fringing the Mounds thrashed and groaned, leaves and limbs tearing at each other with a sound like the crashing of surf on rocks. The world of the Ghost Mounds had been reduced to sound and fury.

Turning his head and leaning into the wind, Pendergast made his way along the track toward the Mounds. As he approached, the roar of the storm became more intense, occasionally punctuated by the earsplitting sound of cracking wood and the crash of a branch hitting the ground.

Once in the relative shelter of the trees, Pendergast was able to see a little more clearly. Wind and rain boiled through, scouring everything with pebbles and fat pelting drops. The great cottonwoods around him groaned and creaked. The greatest danger now, Pendergast knew, came not from rain and hail, but from the possibility of high-F-scale tornadoes that could form at any time along the flanks of the storm.

And yet there was no time for caution. This was neither the time, nor the manner, in which he’d intended to confront the killer. But there was no longer any choice.

Pendergast switched on his flashlight and arrowed it into the gloom beyond the copse of trees. As he did so, there came a terrific splitting noise; he leapt to one side as a giant cottonwood came tumbling out of the darkness, hurtling down with a grinding crash that shook the ground and sent up a maelstrom of leaves, splintered branches, and wet dirt.

Pendergast left the trees and stepped back into the teeth of the storm. He moved forward as quickly as he could, eyes averted, until he reached the base of the first mound. Placing his back to the wind, he played his light carefully around its flanks until he had fully established a point of reference. And then—in the pitch of night, in the howling storm—he straightened, folded his arms across his chest, and paused. Sound and sensation alike faded from his consciousness as, from a marbled vault within the Gothic mansion of his memory, he took up the image of the Ghost Warriors. Once, twice, three times he ran through the reconstructed sequence from his memory crossing—where they had first emerged from the dust, where once again they had vanished—carefully superimposing this pattern upon the actual landscape around him.

Then he opened his eyes, let his hands fall to his sides. Now—walking slowly, taking precise steps—he moved across the central clearing to the far side of the second mound. Soon he stopped before a large limestone outcrop. He moved slowly around it, back to the storm, oblivious to the wind and pelting rain, inspecting rocks with great care, touching first one, then another, until he found what he was looking for: a half dozen small, loose boulders, casually lying caught in a crack of the rock. After examining them for a moment, Pendergast rolled the smaller boulders aside, one by one, exposing an opening. He rapidly shifted more rocks. The ragged opening exhaled cool, damp air.

The route through which the Ghost Warriors had first appeared, then vanished. And—unless he was sadly mistaken—the back door to Kraus’s Kaverns.

Pendergast slipped through the hole, flicking his beam back around to the inside face of rockfall, behind and above him. It was as he suspected: the smaller opening was inside what had once been a much larger natural opening.

He turned away, raking his light into the passageway that sloped downward. Pebbles rattled away into the listening dark. As he started descending, the appalling fury of the storm faded away with remarkable quickness. Soon it was nothing more than a memory. Time, the storm, and the outside world all ceased to exist in the changeless environment of the cave. He had to reach Corrie before the sheriff and his impromptu little SWAT team did.

The passageway broadened as it descended, leveled out, then turned abruptly. Pendergast moved carefully up to the turn and waited, listening, gun drawn. Total silence. Quick as a ferret, he spun around the corner, illuminating the space ahead with his powerful flashlight.

It was a giant cavern at least a hundred feet across. An astonishing but not unexpected sight met his view. The only moving things in the cavern were his pale eyes and the beam of his flashlight, passing back and forth over the bizarre spectacle that lay before him.

Thirty dead horses, in full Indian battle dress, were arranged in a kneeling position in a ring at the center of the cavern. They had shriveled and mummified in the air of the cave: their bones stuck out of their hides, their dried lips were drawn back from their yellow teeth. Each was decorated in the Southern Cheyenne style, with streaks of brilliant red ochre on their faces, white and red handprints along their necks and withers, and eagle feathers tied into their manes and tails. Some carried beaded, high-cantled Cheyenne rawhide saddles on their backs; others had a blanket merely, or nothing at all. Most had been sacrificed by a massive blow to the head with a studded club, leaving a neat hole punched directly between each pair of eyes.

Arranged in a second circle, inside the first, were thirty Cheyenne braves.

The Ghost Warriors.

They had laid themselves out like the spokes of a wheel—the sacred wheel of the sun—each one touching his dead horse with his left hand, weapon in his right. They were all there: those who were killed in the raid as well as those who had survived. These latter had been sacrificed like the horses: a single blow to the forehead with a spiked club. The last one to die—the one who had sacrificed the rest—lay on his back, one mummified hand still clutching the stone knife that stuck from his heart. The knife was identical to the broken knife found with Chauncy’s body. And each brave had a quiver of arrows exactly like the arrows found near the body of Sheila Swegg.

They had been here, bearing witness beneath the earth of Medicine Creek, since the evening of August 14, 1865. Those warriors who survived the raid had sacrificed themselves and their horses here, in the darkness of the cave, choosing to die with dignity on their own land. Never would the white men herd them off to a reservation. Never would they be forced to sign a treaty, board railroad cars, send their children to distant schools to be beaten for speaking their own language, to be robbed of their dignity and culture.

These Ghost Warriors had seen the inexorable roll of the white men across their land. They knew what the future looked like.

Here, in this great cavern, was where they had hid in ambush. From here they had issued forth during the dust storm, as if out of nowhere, to wreak havoc and destruction on the Forty-Fives. And here was where they had returned to seek eternal peace and honor.

In both his oral recollections, and at far greater detail in his private journal, Brushy Jim’s great-grandfather had said the Ghost Warriors seemed to rise up out of the ground. He had been exactly right. And—though in 1865 the mounds would have been covered in dense brush—Harry Beaumont, in the moments before his death, must have realized where the warriors came from. He had cursed the ground for a very specific reason.

Pendergast paused only long enough to examine his map. Then he hurried past the silent tableau toward the dark tunnel that led deeper into the cave system.

There was very little time left—if there was any time at all.

Fifty-Eight

Hazen followed Lefty and the dogs as they proceeded along the wooden walkway of Kraus’s Kaverns. Unlike the last pair, these beasts were hot on the trail. They seemed a little too eager: pulling on their leashes, straining forward, issuing growls from deep within their chests. Lefty barely had them under control, being jerked this way and that as he whined and cajoled. They were big dogs, ugly as shit, with enormous puckered assholes and giant balls that hung low like a bull’s. Presa canarios, dogs bred to kill dogs. Or anything else on two or four legs, for that matter. Hazen wouldn’t want to face them, not even with a brace of Winchesters loaded with double-ought buck. He noticed that the troopers seemed to be hanging back, too. If he had any sense, McFelty would fall to his knees and pray for mercy the moment these ugly mutts turned the corner.

“Sturm! Drang!” Lefty shouted.

“What kind of dog names are those?” Hazen asked.

“No idea. The breeder names them.”

“Well, slow ’em down, Lefty. This isn’t the Indy 500.”

“Sturm! Drang! Easy now!”

The dogs paid only the scantest of attention.

“Lefty—”

“I’mtaking them asslowly as I can,” Weeks answered, his voice pitched high. “I’m not exactly dealing with a couple of Pomeranians here, in case you didn’t notice.”

With the overhead lights off, the night-vision goggles illuminated the cave in a flat red wash. Hazen had never worn the goggles before and he didn’t like the way they reduced the world to a monochromatic, creepy landscape. It was like watching an old TV. The wooden boardwalk ahead swam in the crimson light, like the pathway to hell.

They passed by the Krystal Kathedral, the Giant’s Library, the Krystal Chimes. Hazen hadn’t been in the cave since he was a kid on a school outing, but they used to come every year and he was surprised how much he remembered of it. Winifred had always done the tour. She hadn’t been such a bad-looking woman back then. He remembered his friend Tony making vulgar gestures behind her back as she hammered out some tune on the stalactites. She’d turned into a queer old hag, though.

They reached the far end of the tourist loop, and Lefty, with a great deal of trouble, reined in the dogs. Hazen stopped well short, keeping a good ten feet between himself and the animals. The dogs were looking intently into the darkness past the Infinity Pool, growling, their tongues like big red diapers hanging out of their mouths. Dripping saliva showed red in the goggles, like blood.

Hazen waited for the troopers to assemble behind him, then he spoke in a low tone.

“I’ve never been beyond this point. From now on, silence. And Lefty, do you think you can get the dogs to tone it down?”

“No, Ican’t, okay? Growling’s instinctual for them.”

Hazen shook his head and signaled Lefty forward. He followed with Raskovich; Cole and Brast came next; Larssen brought up the rear.

They splashed through the pool, climbed down the far end, and then followed Lefty along a tunnel that narrowed, then rose again and took a sharp turn to the right. On the far side of the bend was a second iron door.

It was ajar, the iron padlock lying nearby on the ground.

Hazen gave them a thumbs-up, signaled Lefty on.

The dogs were growling even more insistently now, deep throaty snarls that prickled the hair on the back of Hazen’s neck. There would be no taking McFelty by complete surprise, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. The growling was enough to inspire even Rambo to throw down his weapons.

On the far side of the door, the tunnel widened into a cavern. The dogs snuffled ahead eagerly, dragging Lefty along. Hazen gestured for the group behind him to wait. Then he and Raskovich fanned out to the left and right, shotguns at the ready, scanning the room in infrared.

Bingo: the bootleggers’ nest. Hazen panned his goggles slowly across the large space. An old table; candle stubs; battered lanterns; broken crockery and bottles. At the far end, the still itself rose out of the reddish murk, a cauldron big enough to boil a horse. So big that it must’ve been brought into the cave in pieces and soldered in place—no wonder it never left.

When Hazen had satisfied himself that the room was empty, he waved the rest forward and approached the still. The smell of smoke still hung faintly in the air, mixed with other, less pleasant odors. He leaned over the cauldron and looked inside. There was something in the bottom, small and vague in the night-vision goggles.

It was a human ear.

He turned, feeling a thrill of vindication mingling with disgust. “Don’t anybody touch anything.”

The others nodded.

Hazen continued examining the cavern. For a moment, he thought this was the end of the line—that the cave was empty and that McFelty had already escaped. But then he made out a low archway in the side wall, a mere patch of gray leading to deeper darkness. “It looks like there’s another room that way,” he said, pointing. “Let’s go. Lefty, lead with the dogs.”

They passed through the low archway into the next cavern. This had once been the garbage dump for the moonshiners, and it was still filled with rotting trash, broken bottles, scraps of paper and tin cans and refuse of every kind, all pushed up against one wall. He paused. The room was cold, and in an especially chill series of niches along one wall he could see a stock of recent food supplies. A larder of sorts. He shined his light in to reveal sacks of sugar, cereal, beans, bags of potato chips and other snacks, loaves of bread, packages of beef jerky, tubs of butter. There was also a stack of candles, boxes of kitchen matches, a broken lantern. At the far end, a trash heap of discarded sacks and butter wrappings and cans and candlebutts showed that McFelty had been down here a surprisingly long time.

Continuing to pan with his night-vision goggles, Hazen saw that the passageway continued, leading to another cavern beyond. McFelty, if he was in here at all, would have heard them by now and would be in that room, maybe with a gun drawn, waiting to surprise them.

He put a hand on Lefty’s shoulder and spoke low into his ear. “Unleash the dogs and tell ’em to flush out the next room. Can they do that?”

“Of course.”

Sheriff Hazen positioned his men around the mouth of the passage, ready to collar anyone who came out. Then he nodded to Lefty.

Lefty unhooked the bullsnaps from the collars and stepped back. “Sturm, Drang.Clear. ”

The animals took off instantly, disappearing into the darkness. Hazen crouched by the opening, shotgun at the ready. He could hear the dogs in the next room, growling, snuffling, licking their wet chops. A few moments passed. The sounds grew fainter.

“Call ’em back,” said Hazen.

Lefty gave a low whistle. “Sturm, Drang.Return. ”

More snuffling and slobbering.

“Sturm! Drang!Return! ”

The dogs came back, reluctantly. In the glow of the goggles they looked like the hounds of hell.

Hazen was now convinced McFelty had gotten out. And yet it wasn’t a complete loss; quite the contrary, in fact. They’d find plenty of physical evidence to prove he’d been in the cave and to connect him to the crimes: fingerprints, DNA. And what was no doubt Stott’s ear was a terrific find as well, itself worth the trip down. With this kind of evidence against McFelty it would be a piece of cake to plea-bargain the guy and nail Lavender.

Hazen straightened up. “All right, let’s go see what’s in there.”

They entered the third cavern. It was smaller than the others. Hazen stopped in surprise. It looked like it had been used as some kind of living quarters, but as his eye traveled around the room he wondered just who it was who’d been living there. There was a bed against the wall, rotting and broken, the mattress ticking spilling out, but it was very small: a kid’s bed. Above the bed was a broken picture of an apple tree, and another of a clown. A few broken wooden toys, rotting and furred with mold, sat in a corner. There was a wooden bureau, once painted fire-engine red, buckling and listing to one side, the drawers sprung. Some rotten clothing could be seen inside. At the far end, the cavern narrowed to a tiny crack.

Jesus, what a place.Hazen hiked up his pants, fished in his pocket for a Camel. “Looks like our bird flew. We probably just missed him.”

“What’s all this about?” Raskovich asked, shining his light around the room.

Hazen lit the cigarette, put the match in his pocket. “Something left over from moonshine days, I’d say.”

There was a long silence. Everyone stood around, looking disappointed.

Hazen sucked in a lungful, exhaled. “Back there, in the pot, is Stott’s ear,” he announced quietly.

As expected, this perked them up.

“That’s right. We’ve done well, men. We’ve got proof the killer was down here, proof this is where he boiled Stott. Proof this was his base of operations. This is a major break in the case.”

Everyone nodded. There were some excited murmurs.

The dogs began to growl.

“We’ll get the SOC team and forensic guys down here tomorrow to work the place over. I think our work’s done for the night.” Hazen took another deep drag on his Camel, then pinched off the glowing ash and dropped it into his pocket. “Let’s go home.”

As he turned, he noticed that Lefty was trying to pull the dogs away from the crack in the far wall. The dogs would have none of it: they were straining toward the crack, deep growls rumbling in their chests.

“What’s with them?”

Lefty gave their leashes another savage jerk. “Sturm! Drang!Heel! ”

“For chrissakes, let ’em check it out,” said Hazen.

Lefty walked them over. With a yelp the dogs suddenly piled into the crack, jerking the protesting Lefty along behind them. In another moment they were gone.

Hazen stepped over and peered in. He saw the crack made a ninety-degree turn and ran sharply downhill for a few feet before coming to what looked like a dead end.

And yet it went on. Ithad to. He could hear Lefty’s voice echoing back from the unknown darkness beyond, strangely distorted, calling uselessly for the dogs to heel.

“The dogs have a trail,” Hazen said over his shoulder. “And it looks like a hot one!”

Fifty-Nine

Corrie lay still, her hands behind her back. He had laughed when she screamed: a horrible, high-pitched laugh that sounded like the squeal of a guinea pig. Now he was doing something to the corpse of Tad. She kept her head turned, eyes closed. She could hear the sound of rending cloth, then a horrible wet tearing sound. She scrunched her eyes tight shut and tried to mentally block out the sound.He was only a few feet from her, humming and talking nonsensically to himself in a singsong while he worked. Every time he moved, a terrible reek washed toward her: sweat, mold, rot, other things even worse.

The horror, the sheer unreality, was so intense that she found herself shutting down.

Corrie, just hold on.

But she couldn’t hold on. Not anymore. The instinct for self-preservation that had prompted her to free her hands had faded with the reappearance of thatthing, lugging the dead Tad Franklin.

Her mind began to wander, curiously numb. Fragmented memories drifted across her consciousness: playing catch as a young child with her father; her mother, wearing curlers and laughing into the telephone; a fat kid who was nice to her once in third grade.

She was going to die and her life seemed so empty, a wasteland stretching back as far as she could remember.

Her hands were untied, but what did it matter now? Even if she got away, where would she go? How would she find her way out of the cave?

A sob escaped her lips, but still the horrible thing paid no attention. He had his back turned. Thank God, thank God.

She opened one eye and let it fall on the lantern. He had placed it in an angle of rock, where its glow was almost completely obscured. Its ancient metal shutters were closed, letting out only the barest slivers of light. He didn’t like light, it seemed. God, he was sowhite, so pasty white he was almost gray. And that face, the sight of that face, the wispy little beard . . .

A wave of terror washed over her, disordering her mind. He was truly a monster. If she didn’t get out, what had happened to Tad Franklin was going to happen to her.

She felt her breath coming faster as the desperate need to take action returned. Her hands were already free. There was a lantern here: she had light. And at the far end of the little cavern, she could see a well-worn trail leading into the darkness. It might, it just might lead out of the cave.

Another memory came back to her with an almost piercing clarity. She was out in the grassy softball field behind the trailer park, learning how to ride the two-wheeler her father had just bought for her seventh birthday. She’d tipped and fallen into the sweet grass, again and again. She remembered how her father had wiped away her tears of frustration, had talked to her in the soothing voice that never seemed to grow angry or upset: Don’t give up, Cor. Don’t give up. Try again.

All right,she said to the darkness.I won’t give up.

By inches, she began shifting her body around, searching for the sharp outcropping of rock, careful to keep her hands behind her back. Locating it, she raised her tied ankles and began rubbing them slowly back and forth across the edge, trying to be as quiet and inconspicuous as possible. But he was so engrossed in his work that he didn’t seem to notice what she was doing. She watched his back through slitted eyes while she chafed the fraying rope against the sharp edge of calcite. He had temporarily left Tad’s corpse and was now hunched over what appeared to be three small burlap bags, stuffing them full with . . . She turned away, deciding she’d rather not know any more.

She scraped and scraped, and at last felt the rope give. She twisted her feet back and forth, loosening it further. One foot slipped free, then the other.

She lay back again, thinking. She was free. What now?

Grab the lantern and make a run for it. She’d follow the trail. It had to go somewhere.

Yes: she’d grab the lantern and run like hell. He’d pursue her, of course, but she was fast, the second fastest girl in her class. Maybe she could outrun him.

She lay there, breathing deeply, her heart pounding with fear at what she was about to do. Now that she was about to take action, she began to think of a dozen reasons why it would be so much easier just to lie there quietly. He had something else to keep him busy. Maybe he’d just forget about her, and . . .

No.One way or another, she had to get out.

She glanced around once more, orienting herself. She took a deep breath, let it out, took another, held it.

And then she counted to three, leapt up, grabbed the lantern, and ran. A loud, inarticulate bellow sounded behind her.

She skidded on the wet stone; almost fell; found her feet again; and ran headlong into the dark vertical maw at the far end of the cavern. The slot led to a long crack that opened into a strange gallery of thin, dripping cave straws and evil-looking ribbons of hanging limestone. Beyond was a shallow pool where the ceiling dropped precipitously; she splashed across the water and scrambled through the low place, holding the lantern high. Then she emerged into a larger cavern, filled from floor to ceiling with thickly-tiered stalagmites, many joined with the stalactites overhead to form strange yellow and white pillars.

Washe following? Was he right behind, about to clutch at her again . . . ?

She caromed between the pale, glistening pillars, gasping with terror and exertion, light flashing off the great trunks of stone. The lantern banged and the candle flickered, and Corrie was seized with a new fear: if the candle went out, it would all be over.

Slow down. Slow down.

She scrambled around another pillar and collided with a crumpled block of calcite that had fallen from the ceiling, badly scraping one knee. She paused a minute and looked around, fighting for breath. She had reached the far end of the cavern. Here, a rubble-strewn trail led upward. As she glanced back and forth, she became aware that there were crude marks etched into the walls, as if with a stone: weird concentric ribbons, sticklike figures, great clouds of frantic scribbles. But this was no time for sightseeing, and she scrambled up the slope, slipping and falling as the loose rocks gave way. Her raw wrists were bleeding afresh. The trail grew steeper, and as she again lifted the lantern over her head she could make out a sill of rock at what appeared to be its upper edge. She grabbed it with her free hand, hoisted herself up.

Ahead ran a long glossy tunnel of limestone as blue as ice, feathery crystals sprouting from the ceiling. She ran on.

The tunnel was completely flat, and it snaked gently back and forth. A thin flow of water ran along a rill at its center. Once again, the blue walls were incised with strange, crude, disturbing images. Corrie dashed forward, her feet splashing through the water, her footfalls echoing strangely in the long tunnel. But there were no corresponding sounds of following footsteps.

She could hardly believe it, but she’d escaped.She’d outrun him!

She kept going, pushing herself as hard as she dared. Now she entered a large cavern, its floor covered in a blizzard of shattered and broken stalactites. She scrambled over and under this cyclopean masonry, following whenever possible the wear marks indicating a trail. And there it continued, almost vertically, at the far end of the cavern.

She gripped the lantern handle in her teeth and began to climb. The foot- and handholds were slippery and worn. But fear spurred her on, helped her forget the pain in her wrists and ankles. The farther she went, the farther she would get from him. And the trail had to lead somewhere, she was bound to find a way out sooner or later. At last, with a gasp of relief, she reached the top, hoisted herself up—

And there he was. Waiting for her. His monstrous body covered with flecks of blood and flesh, the nightmarish impossible face fixed in a broken smile.

She screamed and the pallid features broke out into a high-pitched, squeal-like laugh. A laugh of childlike delight.

Corrie tried to wriggle past, but a great hand swept down and clubbed her to the ground. She fell on her back, stunned. His laughter echoed hysterically. The dark-lantern went rolling across the floor, candle guttering. He stood above her, clapping his hands and laughing, face distorted with merriment.

“Get away from me!” she screamed, pedaling herself backwards.

He reached down, grabbed her shoulders, jerked her to her feet. The breath steamed from his rotten mouth like an abattoir. Corrie screamed and he squealed again. She twisted, trying to break out of his grip, but he held her with steel arms, laughing, squeezing.

“Don’t hurt me!” she cried. “You’re hurting me!”

“Hooo!” he said, his strange high voice sending out a spray of fetid-smelling spittle. He suddenly dropped her, scurried away, disappeared.

She tried to get up, picked up the lantern, looking around wildly. She was surrounded by a forest of stalactites. Where was he? Why had he run away? She started down the trail—and suddenly with a huge bellow he leapt from behind a stalagmite and swung at her, knocking her down, his laughter filling the cave. And then he was gone again.

She rose to her knees, panting hard, feeling stupid with terror and incomprehension, waiting for the pain to clear from her head. All was quiet and dark. The light had gone out.

“Heee!” came the voice from the darkness, and the sound of clapping.

She crouched in the black, cringing, desperate, afraid to move. A scratching sound, the flare of a match, and the lantern was relit. And there the monster was, standing over her, leering, drooling, exposing the stumps of his rotten teeth, the lantern casting a dull glow. He cackled, ducked behind a pillar.

And that’s when Corrie finally understood.He was playing hide-and-seek.

She swallowed, trembling, tried to find her voice. “You want to play with me?”

He paused, then squealed a laugh, his wispy beard waggling, his thick lips wet and red, the two-inch nails flashing as his hands alternately opened and clenched. “Pway!” he cried, advancing toward her.

“No!” she screamed. “Wait! Not that way—!”

“Pway!” he roared, spittle flying, as he drew back a massive hand.“Pway!” Corrie shrank back, waiting for the inevitable.

And then, suddenly, the thing turned his head. His grotesque eyes swiveled wetly in their orbits, long brown lashes blinking. His hand hovered in the air as he looked off into the darkness.

He seemed to be listening.

Then he picked her up, slung her over his shoulder, and once again began moving with fearsome speed. Corrie was only dimly aware of the confusing procession of galleries and chambers. She closed her eyes.

And then she felt him stop. She opened her eyes to a small hole, a mere black tube at the base of a limestone wall. She felt herself sliding off his shoulder, felt him pushing her feet into the hole.

“Please, don’t—” She tried to grab on to the sides, clutching and scratching, nails tearing against the stone. He placed his hands on her shoulders, gave a brutal thrust, and she slid downward, falling the last few feet and landing hard on the stone floor.

She sat up, dazed and bruised. He leaned in from above, holding the lantern, and for an instant she had a glimpse of the smooth glassy sides of the pit that surrounded her.

“Hooo!” he called down, and puckered his lips grotesquely at her.

Then his head vanished with the light, and Corrie was left at the bottom of the pit, in utter darkness, alone in the wet, cold silence of the cave.

Sixty

Pendergast slipped silently through the dark galleries of stone, moving as quickly as possible, following the faint worn marks of a trail.

The cave system was enormous and his map showed only a sketchy outline of its true complexity. The map was wrong in many particulars, and there were entire levels of the cave not shown on it at all. The cave system was folded in over itself in exceedingly complex ways, making it possible for someone familiar with its secrets—the killer—to move in mere minutes between locations that on the map appeared to be a thousand linear yards apart. Still, despite its drawbacks, the map was a remarkable piece of work, proving what even the U.S. Geological Survey maps didn’t show: that Kraus’s Kaverns was the mere tip of a subterranean iceberg, a vast cave system that honeycombed the depths beneath Medicine Creek and the surrounding countryside—of which one node connected with the Ghost Mounds.

Ahead, Pendergast could hear the sound of water. Another minute brought him to the spot. Here, a phreatic passage, formed ages before by water under great pressure, cut laterally through the limestone cavern he was following. Along its floor ran a swift-moving underground stream, the lone remaining vestige of the forces that had originally sculpted these strange, deep corridors.

Pendergast paused at the water, knelt, scooped up a handful, and tasted it.

It was the same water he’d drunk at the Kraus mansion—the water the town tapped into. He tasted again. It was, as he’d expected, the very water Lu Yu’sCh’a Ching, the Book of Tea, considered perfect for brewing green tea: oxygenated, mineral-laden water from a free-flowing underground limestone stream. It was that tea, and the water, that had triggered the revelation that Kraus’s Kaverns must be more extensive than the small portion open to the public. The trip to Topeka had proven him right, had armed him with the map he now held. But the knowledge had come at a cost. He had not anticipated Corrie acting on her own, and coming so far in her own deductions—although, in hindsight, it was all too clear that he should have.

He rose from the stream, then paused again. Something lay on the far side at the faintest perimeter of his flashlight beam, a canvas knapsack, torn apart roughly at the seams. He crossed the stream and knelt, taking a gold pen from his pocket and using it to pull apart the edges of the cloth. Inside was a road map, a couple of trowels, and several spare D batteries, the kind used in heavy flashlights and metal detectors.

Pendergast let his light play around the bag. Arrowheads and potsherds were scattered on the ground beside it. An old parfleche was decorated in the same Southern Cheyenne style he’d seen in the burial chamber beneath the mound . . .

. . . And then, a few feet away, his light stopped at a ragged clump of hair, bleached-blonde with black roots.

Sheila Swegg. Digging in the Mounds, she had accidentally come across the rear entrance to the cave. It was well hidden, but easy enough to access if one knew which rocks to move. She must have been astounded at the burial chamber where the Ghost Warriors were entombed, and she’d then gone deeper into the cave, looking for even more treasures.

She found something else instead. She foundhim . . .

There was no time for additional examination. Taking one final look at the pathetic remnants, Pendergast turned and followed the small river along the smooth curves of the phreatic passage.

Within a few hundred yards, the river dropped away into a deep hole, filling the cave with a wash of mist. Here, Pendergast went upward, through narrower tubes and pipes. Now the faint marks made by the long-term passage of feet were becoming stronger: he was approaching the inhabited region of the cave.

Pendergast had believed from the beginning that the killer was local. His mistake had been in assuming the killer was acitizen. But no, he was not somebody to be found on Margery Tealander’s tax rolls: he livedwith them yet notamong them.

From this realization, it was a relatively simple matter to determine the identity of the killer. But along with that determination came an understanding—or the beginnings of an understanding—of just how malformed and amoral a creature they were dealing with. He was a killer of extraordinary dangerousness, whose actions even Pendergast, with his long study of the criminal mind, could not predict.

He arrived at another narrow corridor. Along the floor, the calcite flow had recrystallized, forming a shimmering, glowing, frozen river. In the center, the soft flow had been worn down several inches by the passage of feet over a great many years.

At the end of the corridor the tunnel began to branch repeatedly, each branch showing signs of having been traversed many times. Narrow crawlspaces and vertical cracks also showed signs of passage: a delicate crystal crushed here, a smear on an otherwise snowy white dripstone there—the variety of ways a human could betray his movements through a cave were almost infinite. In the labyrinth of passages Pendergast lost his way—once, twice—each time managing to guide himself back with the aid of the map. As he rejoined the central trail the second time, his flashlight caught a glimpse of color: there, on a high shelf of dripstone, was a collection of Indian fetishes, left hundreds of years before.

Added to the fetishes were others of more recent vintage, made of bits of string and bark, gum, and Band-Aids.

Pendergast paused just a moment to examine them. They were strange, crude, and yet made with loving care.

Pendergast forced himself to hurry on, trying always to follow the most traveled route. Infrequently he would stop to jot something on the map or simply to fix in his mind the growing three-dimensional layout of the cave system. It was a stupendous maze of stone, with passageways twisting in every imaginable direction: splitting, joining, splitting again. There were shortcuts here, secret passageways, tunnels, stopes, and drifts that would take many years to explore and learn. Many years indeed.

The fetishes began to grow in number, supplemented by bizarre, complicated designs and images scratched into the rock walls. Ahead, how near or far he did not yet know, was the killer’s living space. There, he felt sure, was where he would find Corrie. Dead or alive.

In all previous investigations, Pendergast had taken pains to understand, anticipate, the thoughts and actions of his adversary. In this case, the killer’s psychology was so far outside the bell curve—for even serial killers had a bell curve—that such anticipation would be impossible. Here, in this cave, he would confront the most profound forensic mystery of his career.

It was a disagreeable feeling indeed.

Sixty-One

Hazen jogged down the broadening slope of the tunnel, trying to catch up to Lefty and the dogs. He could hear Raskovich huffing behind him and, farther back, the thudding footsteps and jangling equipment of the others. And up ahead, the awful bellowing of the dogs. Any pretense to stealth was long since shot: that barking could probably be heard miles away. The cave was a hell of a lot bigger than anyone had imagined. They’d left the still at least a quarter mile behind—it was hard to believe the dogs had dragged Lefty this far.

A moment later, as if in response to the thought, Lefty came into sight up ahead at last, leashes taut in his glove, speaking angrily. He had finally gotten the animals to heel.