I should have guessed he was near. I’d been seeing the little river crabs scuttling below me without realizing what it meant. There was no prey for them to hunt down here. Nothing lived here. They could only be eating carrion.
Jimmy’d come to rest on his side in a wide depression in the riverbed, a natural trap. His body was moving, or seemed to be. It was seething with small river crabs, dozens of them, crawling over him and each other. Feeding.
I turned away, my mouth tasting a sudden surge of bile. I forced it down, composing myself, letting the current swing me away from him a little.
I checked my watch, trying to calculate how far I’d come from the cavern mouth. I’d been down eighteen minutes, but I’d been quartering back and forth rather than swimming in a straight line. I wasn’t sure how far I’d actually traveled. Thirty to forty yards, maybe more. Too far for me to haul the corpse against the current alone. I’d need help.
Or at least that’s what I decided. But even if I couldn’t recover the body, I would still have to examine it carefully where it lay to learn what I could about what had happened to him.
Sweet Jesus. I just couldn’t. But I had to. There was no one else.
I bit down hard on my mouthpiece, using the pain to focus my concentration. Then I kicked gently and floated slowly back to Jimmy’s corpse. The crabs were the worst part, crawling over him like submarine maggots. I couldn’t even brush them off without roiling the silt and reducing the little visibility I had. I’d have to look past them.
There was almost nothing left of the boy I’d met. His leather jacket protected his torso, but most of the skin of his hands and face had been chewed away. A few patches of his long dark hair were still attached, waving gently in the current. The rest of his skull was cleaned nearly to the bone, with only odd bits of tendon and gristle still adhering. His eye sockets were empty save for tiny crabs scrabbling over each other to get inside.
The cause of death was clear enough. His skull was crushed, fractured front and back by a series of powerful blows. So much for the auto accident theory. The body’d been wrapped in a covering of some sort, dark heavy cloth that trailed off behind it in the current. And there was something familiar about his shroud. The pattern? I couldn’t be sure. Something, though.
A single cinder block had been lashed to his legs with thin nylon cord to serve as an anchor...
Sash cord. The kind used to draw drapes. That’s what Jimmy’s shroud was, a section of curtain. In the milky murk, I couldn’t be positive, but I was fairly sure I’d seen the pattern before. In the McClain house.
But he couldn’t have been killed there. Both Megan and Audrey had seen him leave. But whoever’d killed him obviously had access to the house. And for a split second I heard Hannah saying she’d been surprised when Audrey said Ross was out. He’s always sucking around...
Ross. With his dyed hair and sculptured, weightlifter’s build.
I needed that curtain. At the very least it would connect Jimmy’s murder to the house. Fortunately, the river had already done much of the work for me. The current had tugged most of the material free, trailing it out along the floor of the trench. Only a corner of it was still connected to the body, trapped under the cord. I had my diving knife of course, but I couldn’t sever the cord that held the drape without cutting the body loose as well. Damn.
There was no other way. I’d have to pull it free. I hooked the lifeline to my belt, then grasped the tom remains of Jimmy’s calf with my left hand and tried to tug the drape from beneath the cord. Instantly the world closed in as the silt roiled up around me. I felt crabs scrabbling across my hands, but the damned drape wouldn’t move.
I jerked harder and everything disappeared. Black water. I couldn’t see anything at all.
I yanked furiously at the drape, tugging at it like a terrier. And suddenly I felt it give. I inched it from beneath the cord until finally it slipped free. Got it! I released Jimmy’s leg, took a firm grasp of my lifeline, and waited for the current to carry away enough of the silt so I could see again.
I was panting, shaking with exhaustion, more from the tension and fear than the effort involved. But gradually I got my breathing under control and the hazy silt slowly cleared away. And I was sorry it did.
My struggle with the drape had rolled Jimmy’s body over, and he faced me now, in all his ghastly horror. Lord of the crabs. Beast of black water.
Hell would be like this. I had to get out of here. I wrapped the end of the drape firmly around my wrist and yanked it free of the river bottom. And a second body exploded up at me out of the muck!
I ran! Or tried to. I scrambled frantically across the riverbed, banging off stumps, roiling the silt into a swirling tornado of black water. I forgot to swim, forgot everything in blind panic, fleeing like the hounds of hell were after me, trying to get away, trying to—
I slammed into something in the dark. A boulder? The cavern wall? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t see anything but the swirling murk in front of my mask. And I was too afraid to grope, to reach out into the blackness, terrified I might be...
Might be what?
Grabbed? Clutched in the rotting arms of a corpse? No, not a corpse. It hadn’t been a corpse. It was a... skeleton. Bones. Not a ghost or a monster. Just bones.
So it couldn’t have lunged at me. I must’ve pulled it out of the silt with the damned drape. The drape. In my panic, I’d lost it. But it couldn’t have gone far. It would be near the... bodies. My God. The horror...
I closed my eyes, willing myself to calm down, to slow my breathing. Get a grip, girl, get a grip. Settle down.
All right, okay. First of all, where was I? I made myself feel tentatively around the rock I’d banged into. There seemed to be no wall beyond it. So I was still in the riverbed. And if I just sat tight a few minutes the current would carry the silt away and I’d be able to see.
I still had my lifeline. And twenty minutes of air. I was all right for now. No call for a coronary. I’d come down here looking for Jimmy Calderon. And I’d found someone else as well, that’s all. A second body. The question was, whose?
Enough of the silt I’d roiled up in my flight had cleared to let me see the river bottom again. So I sucked up every shred of determination I had left and worked my way back across to the bodies.
There wasn’t much left of the second corpse. It had fallen to pieces when I’d pulled it up. Many of the smaller bones had simply vanished into the ooze at the bottom of the trench. The skull seemed to be that of an adult, but beyond that I really couldn’t tell much, whether it was a man or a woman, how old, or even how tall. Perhaps it could be identified with dental records... If I brought the skull out with me.
I didn’t like the idea much, but I didn’t see any alternative. I felt gently around the base of the skull to see if it was still attached. And something icy crawled over my wrist. I recoiled, gasping. Then made myself try again. And then I saw it.
A strand of chain was tangled in the bones of the rib cage. Instantly recognizable. The older corpse was wearing a dog-tag chain. I traced the narrow wire into the silt with my fingertips and found the tabs in the mud. They were black in the pale glow of my headlamp, too corroded to be legible, pitted and discolored by the sulfide. An electrochemical bath might restore them. But it really didn’t matter. They’d obviously been down here a long time. And I was fairly sure I knew whose they were.
I took a last look at the trench where Jimmy Calderon and the other had come to rest. The drape lay just beyond them, tangled in some debris. Stable for now. The water was still too roiled to see much. I could search it more carefully when we came back to recover the bodies. It was time to go. But I didn’t.