Surprisingly, I didn’t see any ORPD vehicles parked in front of the hotel or beside the swimming pool. Then, glancing behind the dilapidated structure, I spotted several police cars, a crime-lab van, and an armored truck labeled SWAT TEAM parked near the back of the property. As I rumbled across fissured asphalt toward the vehicles, my eyes beheld a ghastly sight: the head of Detective Jim Emert rested, neck down, on a platter on the ground.
That at least was how it looked for a moment. Drawing nearer, I saw that a slight rise in the ground had played a trick on my eyes: What appeared to be a platter was in fact the rim of a manhole, seen edge-on. As I parked and got out of the truck, Emert climbed from the opening and walked toward me. I reached out to shake the detective’s hand, but he shook his head instead. As he did, a yellow-and-black headlamp on his forehead swiveled back and forth. “You really don’t want to shake hands with me right now,” he said, holding up his palms for me to inspect. He was right, I didn’t: The purple gloves he wore were virtually black with sewer grime.
Half a dozen SWAT-team officers, in black fatigues and Kevlar vests, clustered near the armored vehicle. On the ground to one side lay helmets and what I took to be night-vision goggles. The men looked relaxed, though several of them held automatic rifles dangling from one hand, as casually as I might hold a hip bone or a laser pointer. With their combat-grade weaponry and uniforms, they resembled soldiers more than police officers. “Looks like you came loaded for bear,” I said to Emert,
“but it also looks like maybe you called off the hunt.”
“We got a call from the guy who lives up there on the hill.” He pointed. “He saw a woman climbing into the sewer, and he wondered if it might be our gal Isabella. I called our friends here for backup, and at the very moment these guys were pointing M16s at the manhole, out popped this skinny twelve-year-old boy with long hair. The kid let out a scream, which could’ve gotten him blown away. Lucky for him the guys with the guns don’t have the hair-trigger problem that I have.” Emert shook his head as he contemplated the near tragedy. “The kid peed his pants, but all things considered, he got off mighty lucky.”
“Sounds like it.”
“That’s when it started to get interesting. The kid was sure he was in big trouble—he didn’t know we were looking for someone else—and he started blubbering right away about how he wasn’t the one who did it.”
“Did what?”
“Exactly. ‘Tell me what you didn’t do, kid,’ I said. ‘Didn’t put all that stuff down there,’ he said. ‘All what stuff?’ I asked him, so he took me down there and showed me. Just like I’m about to show you.”
Emert sized up my khaki pants and button-down shirt. “You keep coveralls in the back of your truck, don’t you, Doc?”
I nodded.
“Why don’t you suit up, and let’s go take a look.”
I wormed into a jumpsuit and pulled on a pair of disposable gloves—mine were green, not purple—and joined Emert beside the mouth of the manhole. I’d brought a flashlight from the truck, but Emert frowned at it. “Here, try this instead,” he said, offering me the headlamp. “So you can use both hands going down the ladder.” I tucked the flashlight in the hip pocket of my jumpsuit, then tugged the lamp’s elastic headband into place. Through my hair I could feel that the fabric was damp with sweat, or storm-sewer water, or both.
“Thanks,” I said, wiggling the light to even out the tension in the headband. “How do I look?”
He studied me. “Very natty,” he pronounced in a dreadful British accent. “The yellow and black of the strap complement the olive drab jumpsuit splendidly.” He paused and made a face. “But…”
“But?”
“Well, you might consider accessorizing with an M16.”
“If I did, would I look as studly as those guys?”
“Oh, more studly,” he said. “Ever so much more studly.” He dropped the accent. “You ready to climb down?”
“Sure.” But as I swung a leg down into the opening and groped with my right foot for the first rung, I suddenly felt anything but sure. “You know, the last time I was in this position, things didn’t turn out so well for me.” The night I’d lost Isabella in the sewer system, I’d attempted to climb out of a manhole at a dead end in a tunnel, but when I reached the top rung of the ladder—a series of steel brackets set into the mortar of the sewer’s brickwork—it had snapped off in my hand. I’d fallen six or eight feet into icy water, cracking my head on the bottom of the pipe. “I hope this ladder’s stronger. Or the concrete’s softer than last time.”
From the darkness below me came a familiar voice. “Plenty of padding down here if you fall,” said Art Bohanan. Art’s fingerprint expertise had been requested in the Novak murder, so it wasn’t surprising he’d been called back to Oak Ridge to help collect whatever new forensic evidence Emert was about to show me.