What I hadn’t expected to see came in the next slide, which I’d taken by leaning far to the left, beyond the corpse’s head, still shooting low. The image that flashed onto the screen made me gasp. A veritable stampede of footprints approached the body from the opposite direction—a shadowy nook in the grotto, as I recalled, which I had taken to be a dead-end crevice. The tracks—
lots of them, a dozen or more—departed the same way they’d come. I was dumbfounded. “Jesus,” I said out loud, “how many people were in on this damn thing?” Then another thought struck me: could they be morbid sightseers, who had somehow gotten wind of the grisly spectacle in the grotto? But it took only a few seconds to decide that what appeared to be many people’s footprints were actually many prints from a single person: layer upon layer of tracks from what appeared to be the same pair of boots. Judging by the soles, the boots were old and worn—work boots, maybe, rather than hiking or combat boots. But here and there along the edge, some of the earlier tracks—ones that were only partially obliterated by later imprints—looked sharper, as if the boots were newer. I felt my mind ratcheting back and forth, like the projector’s lens, struggling to focus. Finally I got it: someone had visited the grotto repeatedly, over a long period of time. I’d ask Art to take a look and give me his read on it, but that seemed the only explanation that made sense. The only other possibility was that a crowd of people had trooped in, wearing identically made but differently aged boots. Either scenario was disturbing.
But not as disturbing as what I saw next. It was the final image of the cave’s floor, similar to the previous one, but following the tracks even farther toward what was clearly the room’s other entrance. At the edge of the mass of identical tracks was one additional set of prints—uppermost, and therefore most recent. Unlike the layers of increasingly worn work boot tracks, these prints showed crisp, practically new soles. Lugged soles. They looked a lot like the soles on the feet of Sheriff Tom Kitchings.
I switched off the lamp and sat in darkness, quiet except for the low hum of the projector’s fan. The machine’s heat warmed the room, but the picture I had just seen gave me a chill. I was working a case for a sheriff whom I did not know and did not trust. I was in contact with a self-described outlaw—a potential suspect—whom I likewise did not know but, oddly, did trust. The solid footing I normally felt underfoot seemed to be falling away on either side, leaving me teetering along a knife-edge ridge, defined only by dark and dizzying drops on either side. For the first time in my career, I began to consider withdrawing from a case. Every internal alarm I possessed was ringing like crazy; the stakes seemed too high, the truth too tainted by secrets that lurked deep within the mountains or the hearts of the clannish people who dwelled there. I drew a deep breath. Flicking the lamp back on, I clicked to the next slide. She—Leena, as I now knew to call her—lay on the stone shelf, immobile forever now. I was startled anew at the freshness of her waxy death mask, at the remarkable preservation the cave’s climate and the body’s chemistry had effected. It was odd to think that after years of near-perfect preservation, she existed no more: in examining her, I had destroyed her. It was necessary, but it was sad—all the more so in hindsight, in light of the small life she was nurturing when she died.
I flashed up the other images of Leena, pausing briefly on the best side view of the abdomen. Now it seemed obvious that she was pregnant, but I knew that was only because my mind’s eye was superimposing the shape of the tiny skeleton I had extricated from her abdomen. Finally I stopped on a full-frame close-up of her face. For long minutes I studied it, trying to decipher whatever secrets it held. Had her expression held any faint clue that hinted at her pregnancy—some inner smile or worried tension? If so, it had been replaced by a more gruesome expression. Was it terror, or accusation, or just the mechanical distortion of mummification?
“What’s your story, Leena Bonds,” I murmured, “and who killed you and your baby, and why?”
As soon as I said it, I knew that, come what may, I would not withdraw from this case.
CHAPTER 18
I GOT NO ANSWER AT the first number Jim O’Conner had given me, so I tried the second number. “Howdy, Doc,” rumbled a deep voice after the second ring.
“Hello? Is this… Waylon?”
“Shore is.”
I was taken aback to get the mountain man instead of O’Conner. “Sorry to bother you on a Sunday morning, Waylon. I was trying to call Jim. How’d you know it was me?”
“You city folks ain’t the only ones got Caller ID,” he said. “We’re gettin’ kindly high-tech our own selves, Doc. Hell, I got me a cable modem and high-speed Internet, too.” I tried to picture what sort of web sites Waylon might be inclined to surf—hunting equipment? survivalist how-to sites? backwoods personal ads (“broad-minded moonshiner seeks adventurous black sheep for loving relationship”)?—then shuddered and strove to banish the images from my mind.