“You’ll be all right.”
“I will. I know I will,” he agreed, though he didn’t sound convinced.
If his mother was a twisted work, his father must have been one, too, in his own way. After all, it was the father who had found the crooked staircase; instead of reporting it to the state or to university archaeologists and anthropologists who would have thought it a treasure beyond valuation, he had kept it to himself as an amusement, a rare curiosity. He had used his longtime employees to construct this stairhead building.
Jane lightly kicked the wall to knock the snow from her shoes. They were wet all the way through, and her feet were cold.
She opened the door with the lock-release gun, reached inside, flipped a switch. Light bloomed in the round stone room. She ushered Hendrickson ahead of her and crossed the threshold after him.
The lock was a deadbolt that could only be engaged with a key. But before she let the door close behind her, she confirmed that a keyway existed on the inner face of the escutcheon. In case someone should lock the door from the outside, she would still be able to use the lock-release gun to get out of the building.
Directly ahead, the floor shelved away through a hole that Booth regarded with dread.
She went to it and directed the beam of her flashlight into it and saw steep stairs, perhaps of limestone, that had been shaped out of the natural rock flue with primitive tools. The way was narrow, the ceiling low ahead, and the walls of nature’s making were mostly worn smooth by millennia of water’s patient labor.
“You won’t be afraid,” she told Hendrickson. “You will show me the way, and you won’t be afraid.”
Although breath still paled from between his parted lips, he looked as dead as the man on the mortuary table in the basement of Gilberto’s funeral home.
After a hesitation, he switched on his flashlight and took the lead into the crooked staircase.
4
Two cooling deaders on the market floor, a container of melting ice cream dripping through the contents of the shopping cart, blood here, brains there, Oren Luckman fluttering anxiously just beyond the scene of the shootings, the ugly light of overhead fluorescent tubes, the tedium…
The situation with Captain Foursquare and his contingent of diligent deputies becomes so untenable that Carter Jergen uses his smartphone to call an Arcadian who is deputy director of the NSA. The man is also a former United States senator who, as an elected official, always managed to wheedle an abundance of face time on TV. He has styled himself as a champion of public-employee unions, so there is little doubt that Foursquare will know his name.
The senator’s voice is distinct and easily recognized, and when Jergen hands the phone to Foursquare, the captain is impressed, then charmed, then won over by whatever the great man tells him. Their conversation lasts at most four minutes, but Foursquare is smiling when he returns the phone to Jergen.
“You should have told me you work under him,” the captain chides Jergen.
“Well, sir, I always feel it’s wrong to drop his name unless I have to. I don’t think I’ve done enough for the country to trade on the accomplishments of a man like him.”
“That speaks well for you,” says Foursquare. “We can’t stand down entirely, but we’ll stand aside until your incoming contingent gets here and we all agree there’s nothing more we can do. He says they’re airborne and sure to be here in half an hour.”
“Thank you, Captain. I’m most grateful,” Jergen says with as much fake sincerity as he can muster. In fact, he’s no more grateful than he would be to a disease-bearing mosquito that keeps trying to take a bite of him.
And here comes Dubose, looking not like a man who has solved a mystery, but like a man who needs to take a leak and is on a quest to find the ideal person on whom to empty his bladder.
5
Decades after his cruel formation, Hendrickson going down the hole again, Jane following him but not so close that he might turn and strike her in a moment of unlikely rebellion…
The descending passage seemed to construct itself only as the beams of light flowed across it, as though such eerie architecture must be a work of the imagination, dreamed into being. Smooth, pale walls of stone sloped down in velvety folds shaped by unknowable millennia of moving water, no doubt including the melting of the miles-thick sheet formed during at least one ice age.
Millions of years earlier, long before a human being walked the earth, nature had begun to form the crooked staircase, perhaps when violent vertical faulting formed the Sierra Nevada mountains on the west and the Carson Range on the east, leaving the Tahoe Basin between.
The staircase was actually a series of small caverns, each partly atop the one below it, the entire formation of galleries angling down toward the lake, through more than five hundred feet of mountain, like a chambered hive. There were also narrow corridors of stone snaking off to other rooms that weren’t among those vertically aligned; according to Hendrickson, some of those passages looped like entrails and returned to the main descent, creating a maze; others were dead ends, some a hundred feet long, some continuing for half a mile or farther before dwindling to such a restricted width that not even a child could crawl farther through them.
Jane’s tote bag was slung from her left shoulder, and in her left hand she held a can of spray paint that Gilberto had given her. At each bewildering junction of stone passages, she marked the way back to the stairhead with an arrow.
Although the world itself, in its eternal remaking, had done the basic work through millions of years, human beings had taken nature’s random art and carved it to a purpose. Where the floor sloped at a negotiable angle, it was left natural, but when it became precarious, especially when any steepness led to a fissure into which someone might fall, crude steps had been shaped in the stone. Each crevasse—as narrow as two feet, as wide as seven—was bridged by a plank seated in notches cut into the lips of the fissures. When Booth’s father discovered the staircase, the bridge planks had long before rotted and fallen into the clefts they once spanned. The secondary passages had also been stepped and bridged where necessary, some climbing and some trending down into perpetual night.
Early in the descent, they arrived at a larger chamber before which Hendrickson halted. He bent forward, clutching his stomach as though plagued by abdominal pain. But he didn’t look back at Jane or plead to retreat.
After a minute, rising to full height again, he continued into a room in which a fault line bisected the ceiling, matched by a parallel fault in the floor. The medieval atmosphere weighed on the heart, and the air carried the faint fungal smell of things that thrived only in the dark. The right half of the chamber was a foot higher than the left. Although the right portion lay dry and pale, the ceiling to the left bared a row of huge teeth like the staves of a castle portcullis that might drop to bar entry, from which brown water dripped onto a mud floor; the stone was wet, dark, glistening as if lacquered. On both sides of the room, on every ledge and on the floor were severed hands gone to bone in centuries past.