I moved down to the next corner and stuck my head around, more careful now that I was some distance from Lavoie. I’d come to a junction of sorts. The hallway narrowed and became a ramp heading right, while opposite me, a short set of stairs led up to a closed door. It was darker here, beginning to resemble the basement it was.
Keeping my eyes glued to the far end of the ramp, I sidled over to the steps, and climbed up to try the doorknob. It was locked, as I’d hoped.
Relieved, I proceeded up the ramp and risked a quick look around yet another corner. The passageway here was low-ceilinged, dimly lit, cement-floored, and lined by an almost endless row of narrow, closed doors. At its peak, the Retreat had housed some six hundred patients and an appropriately large staff. It was a notorious rabbit warren of hallways, rooms, connector tunnels, attics, and utility crawl spaces, many of them isolated behind locked doors, and many not.
Normally, I would have stopped there, not knowing which of the doors along the corridor might be hiding my frightened quarry. But a splash of light coming off the wall along which I was positioned, and a glitter of broken glass splayed out across the floor, drew me farther along.
My back against the wall, I sidestepped to the source of the light.
What I found was typical of the whole building. Beyond a heavy door, its glass now shattered, lay another hallway, but in contrast to where I stood, it was as opulent as my surroundings were utilitarian. The walls were hardwood paneled, the floor thickly carpeted, antique furniture was placed along its length, and the ceiling was made entirely of lovingly maintained tin bas-relief.
I felt like a fish peering through the porthole of a luxury liner.
I gently turned the doorknob just beneath the gaping hole in the glass. It opened without a sound, but I stayed where I was. I’d been too reckless already and wasn’t about to join Lavoie in a trip to the hospital.
I keyed the radio and told the others where to find me.
The next quarter hour was organized bedlam. Officers from the State Police, the Sheriff’s Department, and one each from the surrounding towns of Hinsdale, Vernon, and Chesterfield, all joined us to close off the exits of the Retreat buildings. Sammie Martens, the detective on call and my second-in command, arrived in full black battle dress, complete with body armor and Kevlar helmet, leading seven other similarly outfitted members of the Special Reaction Team, or Tac Team. Finally, to help us make some sense of the facility’s labyrinthine layout, the Retreat’s plant manager, Ben Coven, was asked to join us with a complete set of blueprints.
The approach, unlike my wandering down the hallway, was to be run by the book. The Tac Team would conduct the search in two squads of four, each covering a separate segment of the complex. As they cleared an assigned area, a uniformed officer or two would be left behind to insure Morgan couldn’t slip into their wake and hide. Communications would be over a restricted tactical channel, and geographic updates would be continuous, to ensure one team wouldn’t wind up in a potential crossfire with the other. Coven and I were to roam between the two teams, depending on where we were needed. As the plant manager ruefully pointed out from the start, the blueprints-especially where they covered the oldest buildings-were approximations only. He had more in his head than we would ever find on paper, especially where it came to the fine details.
The process, once begun, reminded me of those World War Two Navy movies, where the brass stands around a darkened communications center and listens to a battle taking place over the loudspeakers, tracking its developments by moving small symbols around a transparent Plexiglas panel. In our case, that center was the cafeteria, now empty of its first crowd, with Coven and me and a couple of runners playing the brass, surrounded by several radios, a phone, and three tables covered with blueprints. Listening to Sammie and the others exchanging terse phrases in a clipped monotone, I longed to be anywhere but where I was, standing around, fully expecting to hear gunshots at any moment.
The search was mercifully restricted to the basements, the lower floors, and the utility tunnels that ran in a tangled maze between every building on campus. Tracking Morgan by the damage he’d left behind, we discovered that while he’d tried for higher ground, he’d soon returned to where the traveling wasn’t so confined by locked doors.
Corridor by corridor, section by section, we followed the progress of both Tac Teams until Sammie’s group arrived under the main reception area.
“Lieutenant?”
“Go ahead, Sam.”
“We’ve got a complication here. Looks like a low, broad cement-floor tunnel with some really old rooms off to both sides. They’re all connected, like catacombs, and we can’t tell how many passageways might be leading off them.”
“Hold on.” I looked inquiringly at Ben Coven.
He tapped his finger on the blueprint before us. “Oldest part of the complex, or near enough. It’s a rat’s nest.”
I glanced at another map, to where the second Tac Team was searching. So far, there was no telling which one was hotter on Morgan’s trail. I decided against combining forces.
“Sammie? We’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
Coven grabbed the relevant blueprints and led the way out of the cafeteria and along several passageways that had already been cleared. He reached a narrow steel door at the foot of a twisting flight of stairs and pulled a jangling key ring from his pocket. Swinging open the door, he took us down into a hot, humid, dark environment filled with the restless echoes of Sammie’s team muttering among themselves in a short cul-de-sac just off the bottom of the staircase.
Her face looking unnaturally pale, floating between a black helmet and vest, Sammie appeared out of the gloom. She was dripping with sweat. “Any ideas?” she asked.
I took the map from Coven and spread it out on the rough cement floor. Several flashlight beams suddenly appeared to help us see. I pointed to our location. “This is the official version. How’s it compare to what you’ve seen?”
Sammie crouched next to Coven and me. The plant manager began moving the tip of his finger along the paper. “This is the main tunnel you described.” He glanced up quickly, “Right around that corner. It’s basically north-south and runs from the underground passage between Tyler Building and here to a sealed bulkhead that gives onto the service road overlooking the Meadows. The catacombs, as you called them, are on both sides-basically a series of small, dirt-floored rooms that interconnect to each other and to the central tunnel.”
Sammie straightened from peering at the blueprint. “That’s not so bad. I thought there might be rooms off the rooms, or maybe more tunnels we couldn’t see.”
Ben Coven sighed slightly, the obvious bearer of bad news. “Well, there are a few outlets that don’t show up here. I wouldn’t call them tunnels, exactly, but they are big enough for someone who’s desperate.”
“I think this qualifies,” I said.
“I don’t know what they’re for or where they lead,” Coven continued. “Maybe they’re old drainage pipes. Some of them seem to be dug into the dirt, right under the cement floor, and others look like old, abandoned culverts. I always thought they were mostly dead ends, but I never bothered finding out.”
“Where are they?” Sammie asked, jutting her chin toward the blueprint.
Coven sketched them out. “For sure, there’re three of them, and I think that’s it, but to me they’re just something to step around so I don’t break my neck. I can’t swear there aren’t more.”
Sammie looked up at me. “You want to lead it?”
Her deferral was technically in order, since I was the ranking officer, and with her military background Sammie took whatever she was given from the top down, no questions asked. But I knew her better than that.