"I am covered," she said angrily.
"Warmer," he said. He rolled- away from her and closed his eyes again.
Fuck you, too, she thought, storming back into the house. She reemerged with a flannel shirt buttoned at the wrists.
"Good," he said. "It's going to be cold. We're going underground."
"The tank top was less conspicuous for going undercover than this is. I look like a lumberjack."
"Not undercover, Haddad. Underground."
Becker handed her a slip of paper with an address in downtown Nashville written on it.
"Wake me when we get there," he said.
"Is this how it's going to work? You give me orders, then go to sleep?
If you'd let me in on what the plan is, I could do a little thinking on my own. My brain does work, you know."
"I thought we got past all this defensive shit the last time around," he said.
"There seems to be some difference of opinion as to what exactly happened last time."
He opened both eyes and studied her.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"I'll wake you when we get there," she said, throwing the car into gear too abruptly.
"Something wrong, Haddad?"
"What could be wrong?"
"The address is for the headquarters of the speleological society. The guys who crawl around in caves."
"I know what speleology is. They're spelunkers."
"They call themselves cavers these days," he said.
"You ever done any caving?"
"No. Have you?"
"Hell no," he said. "I'm scared of places like that."
Once more he turned away from her and seemed to sleep.
Erskine Browne was built along the lines of a stiff rope.
When he stood behind his desk to greet his visitors, it was easy for Becker to see why he had been nicknamed Weasel by his colleagues. Before arthritis had debilitated his flexibility, Browne had been legendary within caving circles for his ability to squeeze himself into any hole and wriggle through it like a ferret after its dinner. Even now, with his bent and frozen joints, his hands shaped into claws by the arthritis, he looked to Becker as if he could slip through an s-curve if he had to, and his lively eyes seemed to indicate that he wouldn't mind it at all.
"Becker, isn't it?" Browne asked.
"John Becker, that's right. And this is Special Agent Haddad."
Browne offered his gnarled hand to Pegeen.
'Agent Haddad. A pleasure. I didn't realize they made agents so pretty."
He winked at Becker.
Pegeen decided that Browne's age allowed him a certain dispensation in the sexism category. Any man over sixty was to be excused for the occasional inappropriate remark because of a deficient early education.
"Only the good ones," Becker said soberly.
Browne winked again and offered such a knowing grin to Pegeen that she changed her mind about dispensation.
"I did the research you were asking for on the phone," Browne was saying. "You wanted me to look for a name in the enrollment roster of the SOA… " He turned again to Pegeen. "That's Speleologists of America."
Pegeen did not return the smile.
"I have that," she said.
"Name of Swann, right? The national search was easy, that's all computerized, has been for seven years."
"Any luck?"
"Nope. Of course that doesn't mean too much. There are a lot of amateur cavers-some of them pretty good, too-who aren't members. We only have maybe ten percent of the active cavers in the country, which is a shame because we have a good deal to offer them. The newsletter alone is worth the price of membership."
"I didn't really expect to find him on your list," Becker said. "It was a long shot. People like Swann are not great joiners."
"Well, now, let's not get ahead of ourselves," said Browne. "That wasn't all I did. The FBI calls me, I'm going to put myself out a little bit, right? What did he do, exactly?"
"Exactly, it's hard to say," said Becker. "He may not have done anything at all. He may just be a figment of my imagination."
"Yeah, sure, which is why you go to the trouble of trying to find him in our lists. I figured, it wasn't important, you wouldn't ask. Like I said, the national is all computerized, but it doesn't go back very far.
Now regionally, we're about halfway through getting all the names into the machine. It takes time, and with these fingers I'm practically worthless myself. But they Work when I really need them." He waggled his fingers suggestively in front of Pegeen. She had an urge to take one of the swollen knuckles and bend it backwards.
Browne returned his attention to Becker. "So I looked in the regional records. Now those go back to before wereally even organized, just names and telephone numbers on the backs of envelopes in the beginning, people you might call if you were going to be in their area and wanted to go down. You'd call it a network these days, but you go back far enough, and hell it was just a friend giving a name of somebody a friend told him about who might know somebody else who was interested. You know what I'm saying. All of that is in that file cabinet over there."
"A lot of work," Becker said.
Browne shrugged. "What else have I got to do these days? Anyway, you were right, your friend Swann isn't a joiner. He never did belong to the society."
"Well, I knew it was a long shot…"
"I said he didn't join-that don't mean he wasn't in the file. I got his name on a paper napkin, along with the name of Herm Jennings, who suggested I call him."
Browne pulled a pale-green paper napkin from his desk drawer. "The check mark after his name means I called the man to see if he was interested in joining. He wasn't, or I would have put a circle around the check.
That's my system. I don't remember ever talking to him; it must have been twenty years ago or more, so I called Henn Jennings this morning.
Herm can just barely recall him as somebody who went down with him and a couple of others one time. That's how he knew he was interested in caving. But that's all he remembers; it's not like he ever really knew the man."
"Twenty years ago? That would make him about fifteen at the time."
"That's right-that's usually when you get started, when you're in your teens and don't know any better."
"Did Jennings remember where they went, by any chance?"
"No, I asked him that. But you can be sure of one thing, if he went with Herm, he went someplace good, someplace tough. That's the only kind of hole Herm visits. And if Herm passed his name along, the kid could carry his own weight, fifteen or not."
"Bingo," said Becker.
"That's a bingo? Don't sound like much to me."
"It shows he knows caves in this region," Becker said.
"It shows he's been at it a long time. And that he's good.
That tells me all I need to know."
"Well, then, good, glad I can help."
"You've just started helping, Mr. Browne. What I really need are your maps."
Browne turned to Pegeen. "I've got the most thorough maps of all the known caves in my region. They're better than the government maps, better than the geologists' maps, better than anybody's."
"I'm sure they are," said Pegeen.
"No question. I can tell you every hole in West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky that's wide enough to squeeze your shoulders through-and I been in most of them myself I drew more than half the maps personally. You didn't think there was any goddamn surveyors crawling down there, did you?"
"I would think not."
Browne nodded emphatically.
"You got that right. Some of them ain't much bigger than a rabbit run; some of them got more room than a hotel. This whole region is honeycombed with tunnels and caves and caverns and mines-hell, it's a wonder it don't all collapse. It's the limestone substrata, you know.
Water just carves that rock like butter. You get any kind of trickle going and pretty soon-a million years or so-the water's cut its way through that limestone like a jigsaw.