CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Faith could see the compassion in Michael's eyes. It stung her terribly and brought none of the relief she expected such an emotion to bring.

Because she would hurt him again. She would hurt all of them again. Because to her, nothing mattered more right now than bringing West to justice. She hoped that Michael would join her when they returned home, but if he didn't, she would still go after him.

She had to.

Turk opened his eyes and blinked slowly. Faith looked down at him and noticed a healthy sprinkling of gray in his muzzle. Had that been there before?

She reached down and scratched him behind his ears. He closed his eyes and made a sound that reminded Faith a lot of a cat's purr, though she would never tell him that.

She smiled and said, "I'm so glad you came back to me, boy. I'm so glad you're all right."

He made another purring sound, and Faith chuckled. She dropped to her knees and hugged him tight for a moment. He leaned against her chest and looked up at her with the most beautiful brown eyes she'd ever seen. "I love you, boy."

She held him and watched the sunrise through the window until the glare became too bright. Then she stood and poured herself another cup of coffee. She hadn't slept in over two days, and she wasn't sure how much longer she could manage this pace.

As long as she had to. That was the answer. That was always the answer.

She looked at Turk and saw true compassion in his eyes, compassion not tainted with pity, which was really just contempt in disguise. "I just lost it up there, Turk," she admitted quietly. "He was trying to hurt me, and I saw West and…" Even with Turk she hesitated before admitting the next part, "and I saw Trammell. I saw the Donkey Killer, and I just lost it. I can say that it was justified, and it was. He was going to kill me. But I can also say that it was an excessive use of force because the reality was I had him controlled after the first few blows. I could have just cuffed him then. But I didn't want to. I wanted to hurt him first."

Turk didn't say anything, of course, but the love in his eyes was enough for Faith. "I don't know what I'm gonna do, boy," she said. "What happens after we get West? I'm afraid…" she hesitated again. "I'm afraid that I've made stopping West so important to me that when I finally do stop him, I'll have nothing left."

She fell silent then and stared pensively out the window.

Turk stared at her. Faith didn't meet his gaze, but she could feel his love. People had called dog's humankind's best friend for thousands of years, and they were right to do that. Turk had recovered completely from West's torture because all Turk needed was Faith. He had her, so all was right with the world, and it didn't matter to him that a man who had beaten and nearly killed him before kidnapping him and doing God knows what else to him was still out there somewhere. He was with Faith, and that was all that mattered.

Faith wished it was so simple for her.

The door to the breakroom opened, and Michael rushed in. "We got a call from the search party," he said. "They're waiting for us at the cave. They found Tyler Stone's body."

***

Tyler Stone's days of slacking off and disappointing his parents were over. He lay on the floor of a small cavern a half-mile or so into the cave network. He looked like a horror movie. One side of his face was missing the skin, and most of his left arm, along with part of his torso, had been picked to the bone. Faith would have believed that he died of dehydration or from falling down one of the shafts or tunnels if not for several deep wounds in his chest and abdomen that could only have come from a sharp object being thrust repeatedly into his body.

"Rats must have got him," Jones opined. "They're all over these caves."

"How long has he been here?" Faith asked.

"Looks like he was left here last night," Jones said. "CSIs followed a trail of blood down about a mile before they reached a dead end."

"So where did he come from?" Michael asked.

"They think he was dropped down one of the old ventilation shafts the miners dug."

"Are we in the mine?"

"No, but the mines apparently do connect to the cave network. The miners made these shafts every few hundred years ago to circulate air. The dead end is just past one of the shafts."

"So something or someone dropped him down a shaft, then what, followed him down and dragged him up here?"

"We think so," Jones said. "Nothing's official yet. We found the body three minutes before we called you."

"Well, we know for sure that Tooley didn't do it," Faith said. "He was busy trying to murder me when this body was moved."

"If I were being pedantic, I would say that only proves Tooley didn't move the body here, not that he didn't kill Stone," Jones said, "But yeah, it's probably not him."

"So who?" Faith asked.

"That's the million-dollar question," Jones replied.

They fell silent for a second, staring at the young man's mutilated corpse. "Is there a way to identify him without the parents having to see him like this?"

Jones shook his head. "Not legally."

She sighed. "Well, try to get him cleaned up a little after the autopsy before you bring the parents to see him."

"I don't think there's a soap in the world strong enough to clean that, agent," Jones replied, "but I'll tell Doctor Kleine to do his best."

"Any word on Clara?" Michael asked.

Jones shook his head. "No, but I won't pretend I'm expecting a happier word than this."

They fell silent again. After a moment, Michael said, "I'll call Kinzel and tell him Tooley's off the hook for the murders."

He dialed the number, and Faith looked down the tunnel. Lights were strung up every few dozen yards up to the dead end a quarter mile or so distant.

"There's someone here," she said.

Jones instantly grew alert. He placed his hand on the butt of his service weapon and asked, "Where?"

"No, not right here," she said, "in the caves."

"You think our killer is still here?"

"Yes," she said. "I think he's here, and I think Clara's still here."

"You think she's alive?" Jones asked.

"No," Faith admitted, "but I think he's not finished with her yet."

"Feeding her to the rats too?"

"I'm not sure," she said, "I could be wrong. I don't have much more to go on than a hunch. I just feel that our killer would have to know that the ventilation shaft led to this tunnel, which led to this cave, in order to know to bring the body here and stage it for us."

"You think he staged it for us?"

"I think he wants us out," she said. "Your teams, have they gone into the tunnels at all?"

"Not very far," he said, "A few yards here and there. We've been focusing on the surface stuff so far. Getting deeper into the network is a challenge."

"But one you would have taken if the surface search yielded nothing," she said.

"Yes," he agreed.

"Well, I think our killer is deeper in the network, and I think he's trying to keep us from following him."

"What, like he lives here?"

"I doubt that," she said, "Stranger things have happened, I suppose, but most likely, he's just hiding out here until the heat goes away. He's probably a local, and he's probably waiting until eyes are off of the caves before he gets out of town."

"So he's what, giving us our bodies, hoping we'll just decide that's enough and not try to find out how they got here in the first place?"

"I'm not sure," Faith said, "the hypothesis definitely needs to be developed, but I think it would be worthwhile for us to get some search teams deeper into the tunnels."

"Good luck with that," Jones said.

Before she could ask him what he meant, Michael returned. "Kinsey's on a bus back to Boise. He regrets that he can't help us, but his job was to apprehend Tooley, and now he needs to make sure Tooley gets where he's going for real this time. For what it's worth, I think it's his superiors pressing him."

"That's fine," Faith said, "I didn't expect him to stick around."

"What do we think about searching deeper in the tunnels?" Michael asked. "Trying to see where our killer might have come from?"

"Your partner just got finished saying that," Jones told him. "Great minds, right? Anyway, what I think is that it's a perfectly sensible idea. The problem with sensible ideas is that people need to be sensible to understand them."

"What do you mean?" Faith asked.

"You'll see," he said.

***

Faith looked at Jones in annoyance, but Jones only sat where he had the entire meeting with his arms folded across his chest and a resigned expression on his face.

She sighed and tried again. "I'm not suggesting that we run blindly into a cave system without preparing for it," she said. "I'm suggesting a professional and well-organized search party."

"It's too dangerous," one officer, a woman around Faith's age with a weathered appearance that made her appear significantly older, said, "Those tunnels—especially the old mineshafts—are unstable. Cave-ins happen all the time."

"When was the last cave-in?" Faith challenged.

The woman crossed her arms and frowned, jutting her chin out in defiance. "All the time," she repeated.

"Very well," Faith said, "We'll work slowly and have supplies to shore up the tunnels if we feel any of them are unsafe.

"Can't know for sure if a tunnel's gonna collapse until it does," another officer, a reed-thin man with an Adam's apple the size of a golf ball opined.

There were murmurs of agreement, and Faith said with more than a touch of irritation, "Well, I guess we'll just have to be big boys and girls and take a risk."

"They've only mapped a third of those tunnels anyway," a third officer added, ignoring Faith. There were more murmurs of agreement, and he continued, "And we don't have enough lights to supply an entire search party."

"Really?" Faith said, "Flashlights? You really think we won't be able to find enough flashlights to extend the search?"

The third officer frowned, crossed his arms and jutted his jaw defiantly forward in an almost exact repeat of the first officer's behavior.

"I promise you," Faith said, her voice dripping with sarcasm, "We can find you enough flashlights. We're going in that cave."

"We're not helping anyone getting lost down there ourselves," The first officer said again. "I say we just keep looking through the surface caves. We found the Stone Boy near the surface. We'll probably find Clara there too."

"And if we don't?" Faith challenged.

"Then we wait."

Faith's eyes narrowed. "Wait for what, officer?"

The officer frowned. "Agent, she's dead, all right? Can we just admit that to each other? She's dead. We don't have to pretend. Either we'll find her or we won't, but she's not going to get any less dead either way."

Faith shook her head incredulously. "I don't believe this," she said, "This woman was your neighbor. You all knew her for most of her life. You're really fine with just leaving her as a missing persons case for the rest of eternity?"

"Like Jillian said," the second officer replied, "we can't help anyone if we're lost ourselves."

"And how would you end up lost if we use professional lighting, mapping tools and no one leaves unless they're in groups of four or more?"

"People get lost down there," the third officer answered. "Sometimes, there's no reason why."

Faith couldn't believe what she heard. "So what, you guys are afraid the ghosts are gonna get you?"

"I don't blame you for doubting," the first woman said, "and I don't blame you for being rude. But I've lived here my entire life, and I've seen and heard things that shouldn't be real. I don't know if those caves are haunted, but I do know that when people go into those caves, they never come out."

Faith and Michael started. "Wait," Michael said, "this has happened before?"

Jones shifted in his seat uncomfortably, his earlier smug look gone. He must have just realized the importance of that information.

"When you say happened before," Faith said, "you mean that's exactly what happened, right? Not an urban legend, an actual missing persons case?"

Jones answered, "People go missing from time to time since the mines closed. Not a lot, but one or two a year."

"One or two a year?" Faith said. "Are you kidding me? And what do you guys do about it? Throw your hands in the air and say, ‘Cave bad. Me no looky?'"

Jones shrugged glumly. "We look through the surface caves and the forest and everywhere we might expect them to be, but no, we don't go spelunking every time someone goes missing. A lot of times it's kids anyway, not actual kids, but college kids, you know. We just assume they run away and try to find a better life."

Faith needed to leave the room before she did something stupid. Michael followed her outside, and when the door closed behind them, she said, "What the hell did I just listen to?"

"Superstition and cowardice," he said, "alive and well in the twenty-first century."

"But one or two a year? Going back decades?"

"Superstition is powerful, Faith. All of history shows that."

"How can you be sanguine about this?" she nearly shouted. "People are being left to die!"

"I'm not happy about it, Faith," he said, "I just accept that I can't fix every problem the world has. I do what I can, and I don't allow what I can't do to destroy me."

He looked pointedly at her as he said this, and she knew he wasn't talking about this case. She flushed with anger and pressed her lips together but didn't respond.

The conference room door opened, and Jones tentatively approached the two agents. "We're going to call in some S&R guys from Aspen to come help out. They handle all of the rescues around the ski resort. They're ex-Coast Guard, and they're supposed to be very good."

"Will they be willing to go into the scary dark cave?" Faith asked contemptuously.

Jones chuckled sadly. "Yeah, they'll be fine. For what it's worth—which I know isn't much—these guys mean well. They're just… well, I don't know. Superstitious, foolish, stupid, all three and a bag of potato chips?"

"Do you think we shouldn't go into the mine?" Faith asked.

He chuckled again, this time with bitterness rather than sadness. "I think that it doesn't matter what I think. I've overseen twenty-nine missing persons cases, Special Agent. Each one ends the same. Sometimes we find the body like we did with Tyler Stone. Most of the time, we don't. I'm sure you two can handle yourselves if you go looking through the tunnels, but I don't think you're going to find anything."

Faith looked at this sad, bitter excuse for a detective and wondered if she was looking into her own future. If she couldn't stop West, was this where she would end up? She'd always imagined that West would kill her once he was done playing with her, but maybe he wouldn't. Maybe he would just let her continue, spending the rest of her life forced to face her failures.

"Is there anyone in town who might be able to provide us with a more complete map of the cave network?" she asked, "Hopefully including the mines?"

"You can probably find a map of the mine tunnels from the state government," Jones replied. "But that will be the mines as they were before the collapse. After the collapse… well, that was twenty-two years ago, so I doubt like hell anything looks the same as it did before. And you should consider any mine tunnels or shafts still open as unsafe."

"Well, our killer clearly doesn't see it the same way," Faith pointed out, "considering he used one of them to transport Stone's body."

"Well, the theory right now is that he just dumped the body down the ventilation shaft, then used the natural cave system to navigate back to…" his voice trailed off when he saw Faith's expression. "Look, there was a guy who was trying to map the mines a few years back, before the second collapse sealed the entrance."

"This guy has a name?" Michael asked.

"Tom Martle. He lives in Brightwater, about twenty minutes up the highway. He was doing some sort of project trying to map the entire tunnel system around Granger, and he started with the mines because no one had gone in to determine if any of the tunnels were safe, so he wanted to find out and make that information available to the public."

"Nice guy," Faith said.

"He was. Then he went into the mines, came back out after one day, and moved out of town the next day. Never said a word about what he found or why he stopped. The locals believe he heard the voices of the trapped miners' ghosts. They also believe the ghosts are responsible for the collapse that buried the entrance to the mine the following week."

"Of course they do," Faith said, unable to keep the contempt from her voice.

Jones met her eyes. "Like you said, Agent Bold. Superstition is often rooted in fact."