2
Manning took a deep breath. “So you’re not going to give me a chance?” he asked.
“You’re in the vehicle,” Ellery told him. “And I’m heading for Jackson’s last known to drop you off. Consider it a chance.”
Gerald Manning made a surprising sound then—almost a chuckle. “Fair,” he said, as though surprised. “I’ll try not to let you down.”
“THIS IS insane,” Cody muttered, and Jackson had to agree with him.
“Did you guys have any idea how far these mines went?” Jackson asked. The tunnels were narrow, shored up often with giant square creosote-saturated support arches, and after a good half hour, Jackson was starting to feel a little bit of the claustrophobia Cody had been valiantly trying not to complain about.
That last corner had shown nothing but more zig-zags ahead, and Jackson had suddenly thought of the hospital. It had taken him a few yoga breaths to figure out why, and then it had hit him.
After so many years—and so much time spent—in the places, being in the hospital always felt like an accretion rested on his chest. A gathering of years, of heartbeats, of breaths, of the concrete and rebar that made up the structure itself—all of that rested on Jackson’s diaphragm and his shoulders and his throat.
Here in the mines, with their exit so far behind them, he was feeling that accretion again. How many supports, how many feet of earth, of rock or granite, of trees and their roots gathered between him and his first deep breath in an hour?
And just like he’d done when he’d gone in to visit Henry and to talk to Toe-Tag, he breathed through it.
“You know,” Cody said, and Jackson didn’t mind him talking because Cody’s idle—and frequently amusing—chatter distracted him from his increasing accretion . “I keep thinking this dog is either batshit insane or absolutely amazing. Your verdict?”
Jackson grunted. “Has it occurred to you that if the dog is absolutely amazing, there’s a dead body at the end of this maze?”
“Oh Jesus. You can be a real fucking asshole sometimes, you know that?”
Jackson felt some of the accretion dissipate from his chest. “I do my best,” he said.
Ahead of them, he sensed two things.
One was fresh air—but that was a light, almost over-scent to the miasma of… not of decay, not yet, but of active infection. The sickly sweet, gangrenous smell of flesh that was rotting while it still had a blood supply.
Almost imperceptibly, the ambient light of their tunnel went up one or two shades of gray, and in the chamber around the corner, which Preston, Preacher, and Damien had disappeared into, Preston’s voice same sharply, “Preacher, sitzen .”
And Jackson heard a raspy female moan.
“YOU SURE you’ve got them?” Ellery asked, and Manning pointed to the tracking app on his phone.
“I promise you, Cramer, I’ll find them. Now are you set?”
Ellery’s Lexus, Galen’s Town Car, and two FBI SUVs all gathered in the parking lot of the picnic area near the abandoned mines, and if it wasn’t for the refurbished Bell 407 that sat in the biggest part of the lot, they’d look like overkill. Right now Ellery was adjusting the fit of his suit jacket, trying hard not to pat his pocket square.
He was wearing a bug in that little pocket, and apparently patting it made the FBI Agents in the SUV scream and cringe.
Galen was standing by the Town Car, getting the same pat down from his pet agent, and Manning was lacing up his boots and making sure he had enough water to hike.
He glanced up at Ellery with an expression of distaste on his face. “Must we take two vehicles in? I realize we were coming from two different parts of town to get here, but really, Ellery, ostentation has no place here.”
Ellery nodded. “If Jade doesn’t mind, she can drive the Town Car from here. We’ll leave the Lexus in the parking lot. Jackson has keys.”
Manning gave him a look. “You don’t mind leaving the fancy car here?”
“In a parking lot dominated by a search-and-rescue helicopter?” Ellery asked him, surprised. “No. Besides….” He gave his vehicle’s roof a fond pat. “This thing has survived some adventures. It’ll be fine.”
Manning grunted. “I don’t know. That ratty minivan we parked next to has to belong to somebody. Are you sure you trust another vehicle here?”
Galen and Jade’s eyes widened and Jade reached out and patted the minivan’s back quarter panel fondly. “It’s okay, girl, he didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Don’t pop him in the head. We need him.”
Manning stared at them. “Your entire firm is batshit insane,” he said.
“Yes, we are,” Ellery told him. “And we also need to get a move on. Arthur was able to get us an appointment with Gannett Hoover in half an hour. With any luck, you’ll be caught up with Jackson by then, and you all can scope out the back entry onto the property to see if there are any other kids there or anything suspicious. The rest of us will take a look from the big house in the middle, and Jade will stay out with the car and do her own, uhm, assessment.”
“Snooping,” Jade said, a rather smug smile on her face. “You can be honest.”
“I don’t want to use that word with Hoover and Dwayne,” Ellery said primly. “Remember, our entire strategy is that they won’t notice you.”
Jade smiled contentedly. “Because I am a Black woman,” she said, tapping her temple. “Why you get paid the big bucks.”
Ellery snorted and shook his head. “For the last time,” he began, embarrassed in front of Manning.
“I don’t want to be a lawyer because I couldn’t do what you do,” she finished, and he narrowed his eyes at her. Oh dear Lord, so much bullshit. Times like this, and he could see the family resemblance between Jade and Jackson and nobody could tell him different.
“Well, this time we can’t do what you’re going to do,” he said. “But be careful. If they do notice you, they’ll be more likely to shoot you, and Jackson would never forgive me.”
“Neither would Henry,” Galen intoned dryly. “Do stay safe.”
Jade grinned up at Galen and patted his cheek. “Now from you, it sounds like you care.”
“But… wait… I’m not saying—” Ellery sputtered, and then she patted his cheek and turned to the FBI agent still fussing over his pocket square.
“Are you about done?” she asked, and the young agent, dressed in the traditional black suit, held his hands up and backed off. “I thought so. Let’s drop this dude off and motor.”
And with that, Manning did one last check-in with the two follow cars before he and his partner lit out across the field toward the little flashing dot that represented Jackson on his phone, while Ellery and his mother gathered their briefcases and loaded into the Town Car, Ellery’s mother in the front.
“Don’t be nervous,” Galen reassured next to him as Jade took the car smoothly through the rolls and turns that this part of the country seemed to require from its roadways.
“I’m not,” Ellery retorted, trying not to think about why they hadn’t heard from Jackson during the drop-off.
“Then don’t be pissed off,” Galen said.
“These fuckers shot Henry,” Ellery told him, uncompromising. “I am pissed off.”
Galen blinked. “Well, then, so I shall be too. Because you’re right. These people aren’t here to play.”
“And neither are we,” Ellery said. And something about that consensus seemed to drive all the nerves out of his belly.
AS THEY turned into the next chamber, the reek of infection threatened to take Jackson and Cody out at the knees.
Then Preacher gave a happy little woof, and Preston praised him, and as Jackson and Cody entered the area—blessedly lighted from another path that appeared to creep up toward the surface—Damien said, “Guys, c’mere. He’s not hitting on a cadaver.”
And then they heard a small, faint moan.
Jackson’s eyes, which had become accustomed to the dark and the artificial beams of their flashlights, were now adjusting to the half light filtering in from the rise upward, and he could make out two crumpled heaps in the corner of the chamber, almost obscured by some stubborn granite boulders which probably hadn’t been shifted during the original mining.
Jackson sank next to the one that was moving, and he fought hard not to gag with the smell. As he pulled the mass of graying frizzy hair from the woman’s face, he could see the green pus seeping from the wound on her arm, and that alone would have confirmed her identity.
Retty had indeed become the package—and odds weren’t great that she’d make it out of here to be anything else.
“Retty?” Jackson murmured as Cody and Damien moved to the other body crumpled in the cave. Damien grunted in distaste, and Cody shook his head. Whoever it was—and from Jackson’s angle he could still see a slight feminine form in slacks and a green cardigan. He had no idea who this was, but nobody deserved to be dumped in a cave to die.
Preston was telling Preacher what a great dog he was, and Jackson wanted to second that, but at the moment, he needed some answers.
“Retty?” he said again.
“Loretta Jane,” she muttered. “Betty. My mom called me Betty.”
“That’s sweet,” he said, because as awful as she’d been to the kids, he’d gotten the sense from the investigation that shit truly had rolled downhill. She thought that’s how subordinates were treated because that’s how she had been treated, probably her whole life.
“Melanie called me Retty,” she said, almost dreamily. “When our folks got together. So I was Retty. Everybody called me Retty.” She let out a little sigh. “Melanie said we were sisters.”
“That’s why you did what she asked,” he said. “Isn’t it, Retty?”
“Yeah,” she sighed. “Melanie…? Mel? I’m sickly. My arm hurts like fire, and I’m so dizzy. Schmitty said I’d be put out of the way, but can I get out of the cave? I… I think Schmitty shot poor Ginny Hoover. I don’t know why.”
“Probably so she couldn’t tell Valerie Trainor what happened to her sister,” Cody said softly in Jackson’s ear, and Jackson nodded. It looked as though Conway Schmitt had been trying to get rid of his ex-sister-in-law for once and for all. Loose ends? A recognizable person of interest? Whatever the reasoning, it was clear that everybody’s favorite shitting hill had suddenly become very expendable.
It was also clear that there was a rift between Conway Schmitt and Valerie Trainor that only Schmitt was aware of.
Jackson took a deep breath and tried to factor in the implications of the two women, one dead and the other dying, in what was apparently being used as an alternate dump site after the other site had been found. Conway Schmitt and Gannett Hoover hadn’t factored in Retty’s death—or Ginny Hoover’s for that matter. Cowboy’s escape from Retty’s clutches, Retty’s shooting—and Henry’s—had obviously mobilized law enforcement, and the escape of the “students” the night before must have Hoover and Schmitt and even Trainor on the run. Jackson couldn’t even imagine the atmosphere in the house right now, particularly since Ellery’s mother was well known to have DOJ ties. It occurred to Jackson that the state’s AG should be the one asking the questions today, not Ellery. Perhaps Taylor Cramer would be invited along for the ride, but why? Why would Ellery and Galen and Jade be needed to—as Jackson put it—dangle his entire family in a basket off a cliff?
“The AG’s connected to the same money people,” Jackson muttered, remembering that. Well, shit. On the one hand, sending other representatives into the lion’s den kept the investigation from being tainted with Super PAC money.
On the other hand….
Holy God. What were his people walking into?
“What do we do?” Damien asked.
Jackson unzipped his pack and pulled out a foil blanket, a bottle of water, and a couple of tablets of ibuprofen, pleased when his hands didn’t shake. “Let’s try to get this into her,” he said softly, “and then cover her up. I take it you have a backboard and some first aid equipment in the copter?”
“Yeah,” Damien said. “Preston can stay here and look after them if you want to continue your search. I get that you’re searching for other people in danger, right?”
Jackson and Cody met eyes and nodded. “We are,” Jackson murmured. “Although at some point, we’re going to need to check out that third site and see if it’s connected through any other tunnels. Finding Retty is enough to get a search warrant to this place, but something tells me that if they’re ready to dispose of her now, they’re not done housecleaning.”
“Oh, I do not like the sound of that,” Cody said, casting an unhappy glance over Jackson’s shoulder at the two victims already found.
“Me neither,” Jackson muttered. “Damien, is there any way you can land the copter closer? It took us forty-five minutes to get here. I know there was a field right before we hit the mine shaft—would that help get her to treatment faster?”
“On it,” Damien said. “Although I wouldn’t want to bring the copter too much closer or it might bring the mines down on everybody’s head.”
“And God, that would be bad,” Cody muttered.
Damien nodded at him in appreciation. “Get her set up with what you got, let’s leave Preston and Preacher with the girl, and you two take off. Don’t worry about us. We’re pros.”
ELLERY AND Galen both “helped” Ellery’s mother alight from the vehicle like the gentlemen they’d been born to be. For her part Taylor Cramer smiled charmingly, taking her son’s arm as though they were on their way to visit a friend instead of a deadly enemy.
“How’d you convince the state’s AG to let you do this again?” Galen asked as they crossed under the shade of the drive-up carport. Behind them, Jade circled the car around an honest to God fountain, planning to park on a paved section obviously saved for visitors.