Mike was off to the side of the trail. "Something's been dragged through here."
"I'm sorry to say we've made it tougher on ourselves-and for you," Bart said, following him. "Our crime scene guys brought their equipment in this way. Probably obliterated whatever marks the killer made getting the Wade girl from water's edge to where he left her." Indoor sites-the neat confines of a residential apartment or an office building-presented far fewer challenges to investigators. There were usually obvious perimeters to the start of the violence and the exit of the perpetrator. Here, nature and the elements seized control of the setting.
"Should we come with you?" I asked Mike.
Mercer had started off in the opposite direction.
Mike waved me on. "Gotta keep her close, Bart. You could give Coop two canteens and a compass and it still might take her a week to find her way out of Central Park."
They were twenty feet ahead of me and I traipsed off to catch up.
To the left, my peripheral vision picked up something moving quickly out of my way in the brush. I froze in my tracks.
"Hurry up," Mike said.
I couldn't move.
"What is it?" Mike asked, as Bart Hinson came back to escort me. "Probably a black rat snake," he said, offering his arm. "They eat blonds?"
"Bullfrogs, mostly. That's why they like it here. They're diurnal.
Great daylight hunters, and very fast."
"And extremely long," I said, still frightened by the appearance of the satiny black reptile slithering away.
"Poisonous?" Mike asked.
"No. But you'll see lots of them around. They'll come out to bask on the rocks if the sun gets stronger."
Mike turned away and I grasped Bart's arm as I forced myself to keep moving. Birds circled overhead-harmless, I was sure, but now I imagined they were vultures. Everything on the island looked ominous.
From the river, I could hear the noise of motorboats and jet skis. It was the only sign that we were anywhere near civilization. For more than an hour, the caretaker and several of the troopers stayed close to Mike, who was going over every foot of the trail from the old wooden dock back toward the castle. From time to time, he would bend to point out debris-pieces of candy wrapper impaled on the tip of a branch or an empty soda can that was wedged between rocks. He insisted that every item be picked up, tagged, vouchered, and sent to the lab. Odds were that none of this related to Wade's killer, but that was a chance Mike Chapman never took.
The clouds thickened, the humidity rose, and the mosquitoes proved themselves pros at getting underneath my clothing. When Mike was convinced that the painstaking work was being done to his standards by the troopers, he led us in search of Mercer.
I stood beside Mike in the doorway of the main entrance. The roof had long ago caved in, so although daylight revealed the baronial hall, the collapsed boulders and beams made it impossible to walk very far inside.
From the distance, I heard a sharp yell-and then Mercer calling Mike's name.
"Over there," Bart said, as we went back. "They're in the powder house."
Beyond the six-story castle and the arsenal was one of the smaller structures. It appeared as though fire had ravaged it years earlier, and as we ran to the entrance, I could see what was left of the rear wall, blackened and charred at its fringes.
One of the young troopers had slipped through a piece of flooring.
With a panicked expression on his face, he was struggling to keep a grip on Mercer's powerful arm and stop himself from plunging into whatever basement was below.
Mike and Bart rushed to the edge of the broken planks and helped lift the officer back up onto solid footing.
"You okay?" Mike asked.
"I'll be fine, but it's all rotted out," the trooper said.
Bart stooped to examine the wood. "This place was gutted ages ago. A whole load of ammo blew up inside. But I'm thinking these boards don't match the rest of the old planks in here."
"Give us some light," Mike said to the caretaker, who had run in at the sound of the commotion.
Mercer leaned over and peered in. "Well, well. I think we've found ourselves a little bunker here."
He held on to the surrounding planks and dangled one of his feet into the open space.
"Where the hell are you going?" Mike shouted.
"Some kind of makeshift steps," Mercer said, counting them off for us as he moved slowly down. "One, two, three, four of them. Now I'm standing on dirt. I'm in."
Mike handed the flashlight to him and Mercer ducked down to examine the space. Seconds later, his head reappeared.
"All the comforts of home," Mercer said. "If you like living in a black hole.
TWENTY-ONE
Mike handed me a pair of latex gloves and I stifled my intense claustrophobic fears to lower myself into the dungeonlike space
Don't touch anything, Coop. Bart's getting a team in here to tear it apart. Just look around and tell me if you get any brainstorms. I couldn't stand up all the way. Hunched over, I shined the light around the four-foot-square room. A ladder had been cobbled together from large tree branches, while smaller limbs-strung with strips of canvas-were hung as shelves, above an old army cot resting on rusted springs
Looks like he's moved out," I said. "No clothes, no fresh food. Not even water."
"There's no potable drinking water on the island," Bart said. "You'd need to bring that along to live here."
There were several cans of food and fruit stacked under the cot, and packages of MREs, the meals ready-to-eat used by our military. A large shovel lay beneath the rungs of the ladder, and next to the spade was the translucent skin of one of the island snakes.
Weapons of every variety were ranged on the floor and propped against the walls. Ropes of varying lengths and widths were stuck into the dirt walls with large nails. Hunting knives and revolvers, hand grenades and bayonets from another era, fierce-looking metal objects large enough to trap a bear-Bannerman's arsenal had inspired some modern-day madman to collect his own assortment of deadly toys.
"You see anything to suggest Connie Wade was down there?" Mike asked from above.
If the same man had killed all three victims, the impersonality of the crime scenes was the most solid link we had. He had left no signature at any of them, dumping women in remote locales without depositing a hint of his genetic profile-despite the obvious sexual overtones to the attacks.
"No."
"Put yourself in her place."
"I wouldn't have lasted an hour," I said, my gloved hand on the ladder, ready to pull myself out. It was dark and dank, and the daddy longlegs that was scampering across the narrow cot seemed as anxious for me to leave his home as I was.
"Everything goes," Mike said to Bart as I climbed out. "Don't let anybody touch the handle of the shovel. Maybe we'll get his DNA on that or on the trigger of one of the guns."
Bart nodded in agreement.
"Who's got the handcuffs?" I asked.
"They're already in Albany, at the state lab."
Mike was writing Bart's phone number in his pad. "If this killer was as organized as I think, he was wearing gloves. There won't be anything on the cuffs."
"I'm talking about swabbing the inside of the cuffs," I said.
Mike raised an eyebrow at me.
"In addition to Connie Wade's DNA, you might find Amber Bristol's. Link your cases to each other through the victims, even if you can't find any trace of the perp yet."
"Every now and then you are useful, Coop."
Mercer extended his hand and pulled me out of the hole. "You've got to think that maybe our man never got Wade this far," Mercer said. 142 LINDA FAIRSTEIN "Maybe he was on his way to this spot with her when something interrupted him. "Could be," Bart said. "Hard as we try to keep people away from the island, it's impossible to stop them."