Gripping the metal rim of the opening, I tested the rung with my weight—it felt solid enough—and then eased my left foot onto the second rung. Ten rungs later I was standing beside Art Bohanan at the bottom of a small, conical room, roughly six feet across. “Fancy seeing you here,” I said to Art. “Good of KPD to let you spend so much quality time in another jurisdiction.”
Art shrugged, his headlamp bobbing slightly as he did. “They agreed to let me help with the Novak case. This is still the Novak case. And who could pass up a chance to spend a day in such a beautiful setting?”
He played his light over the bricks and tendrils of cobwebs, drawing a laugh from me.
“Coming down,” Emert called from above. Art and I backed away from the base of the ladder to give him room, and my shoulders brushed against the grime of the arched vault. Once Emert was down, the room felt crowded. He turned to me. “How’s your back?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Not for long.” He chuckled. “Walk this way,” he added, bending over and half crouching. Two pipes, each just big enough for me to wriggle into and get stuck inside, fed into the sewer junction on the uphill side; a larger pipe led out the downhill side, and Emert duck-walked into this one and disappeared.
“Age before beauty,” said Art, motioning me ahead. Copying Emert’s awkward posture, I hunched forward and ducked into the tunnel. With my face angled down, the headlamp illuminated only a small oval of pipe just in front of my feet, and I couldn’t tell how much clearance I had between my head and the top of the pipe. Fumbling in the hip pocket of my jumpsuit, I wrestled the flashlight free and switched it on. I didn’t much like what I saw. The pipe, roughly four feet in diameter, was corrugated steel—a series of concentric rings sloping downward. In the distance the pipe appeared to narrow and constrict. I realized that was just an illusion, since I saw Emert waddling onward, but the effect was disconcerting, as if we were voluntarily entering the descending colon of some immense metallic organism. Strings of dirty cobwebs dangled from the top and sides of the tunnel, though most of the ones hanging from above had been sheared off, doubtless by Emert and Art. Here and there, stray brackets and bolts projected from the roof, and I wished for a hard hat. Structurally, the pipe seemed to be in remarkably good condition, considering it had been laid in the early 1940s, when the U.S. Army had hastily built the top-secret atomic-bomb complex in Oak Ridge. As I took my first steps forward, though, I realized that it was only the upper parts of the pipe that remained strong; the metal underfoot felt thin and spongy, and I’d gone only a few feet before the metal gave way and my boot plunged downward several inches, scraping through a jagged fringe of rust.
“Duck!” Art called. I dropped my head just in time to avoid whacking it on an angle bracket jutting from the top of the pipe. “So is this the size pipe you chased Isabella into that night?”
“Lord, no,” I said. “That one was twice this big. I could stand up straight in that one—hell, I could have jumped up and down. I probably wouldn’t have followed her into something like this. Over by the library, where she went in, it’s newer, concrete pipe, probably only ten or twenty years old. This stuff here ought to be on the National Register of Historic Sewers. I wouldn’t be surprised to find shards of Roman pottery somewhere along here.” My ear snagged a cobweb that Art and Emert had somehow missed.
“Yo, guys,” Emert called from somewhere ahead. He’d disappeared around a bend or a drop in the tunnel—that, or he’d been digested by the beast we were inside. “We’re burning daylight. Are y’all sightseeing back there?” Rather than echoing, as I’d have expected, the detective’s voice sounded muffled, as if smothered by the weight of the earth above us.
“Coming!” yelled Art. “We just stopped to check out some dinosaur bones.”
The slope of the tunnel increased sharply, and I wondered how difficult it would be to retrace our steps back uphill. Art and Emert had already done it, so clearly it was possible, but if the pipe had been wet and slippery rather than dry, the footing would have been perilous. After thirty or forty steep yards, the gradient flattened out, and not far beyond that the tunnel seemed to dead-end at a brick wall. Emert was nowhere to be seen. As I neared the brick wall, I saw why: The tunnel fed into a vertical shaft, easily twice the height of the manhole we’d entered. “Crap,” I called down to Emert, who awaited us at the bottom. “You didn’t tell me we were going spelunking.”
“I wasn’t sure you’d come if I did. Art said the two of you got trapped in a cave once.”