“Damn, Amos. The mark on the floor was from the door swinging open.”
“Hinges were placed about a foot in and mounted on a support structure so they wouldn’t be visible to anyone. But the hinges have sagged a bit over time, hence the scuffed floor.” He ran his finger along one set of hinges and his finger came away darkened.
“Recently oiled,” he said.
There was a small knob in the center of the back of the section.
“What do you think that was for?”
Decker thought for a few moments. “You’d use it to pull shut the wall section once you’re on that side of it.”
“Right. But why even have a door at all? If they wanted to seal it up, why not just seal it up?”
“I don’t know, Mary. It must have cost a lot of money to build. Maybe they wanted to have reasonably easy access to it if they ever decided to use it again.”
“I guess.”
“I don’t see any fingerprints, but let’s not take chances. They call them latent prints for a reason.”
He grabbed a knife from a box of them on one of the kitchen counters to ease open the door by pushing back on the ordinary lock that secured the two doors. The door opened silently, showing that its hinges had been recently oiled too.
There was a long set of steps down into inky darkness.
Decker grabbed an emergency flashlight from a holder on the wall next to the serving counter and came back over to the doorway. “You ready?”
“Shouldn’t we alert the others?” said Lancaster nervously.
“We will, after we see where this goes.”
“But the FBI?”
“Screw the FBI, Mary. This is our case, not theirs.” He stared at her. “You with me?”
She finally nodded and followed him down the steps.
They reached the bottom, and here Decker stopped and shone his light around.
“Look there.”
They saw that set against one wall were two large sections of painted plywood. Bent nails were sticking out of them.
Decker said, “That’s how they really sealed up the passage. I saw nail holes in the perimeter around the double doors. That plywood had been nailed in front of the doors. If anyone figured out the sign opened, all they’d see is a solid wall.”
“You think the shooter did that?”
Decker shone his light on the floor. “Had to be. The sawdust on the floor looks relatively fresh. If he pulled out the nails the dust would come out and fall to the floor. Same when he hauled the sections down the steps. And he might’ve used a saw to cut through the wood too.”
“Which means he had to have done this before. No way is he tearing out wood walls during the school day. Too much noise.”
“He could have done it the night before. He comes out of the freezer and gets to work. No one here to hear anything. He opens the wall with the sign on it, cuts through the wall, opens the doors, and puts everything down in the passageway.”
“If he did all that, Amos, maybe that’s why he hid in the freezer.”
“Could be,” said Decker.
Decker pointed to the floor once more. In the dust were clear sets of shoeprints heading in the direction they were going.
Two clear sets of footprints heading down the passage.
“Walk to the right, Mary, so we preserve them. And take shots of them with your phone camera as we go.”
“Okay, but why two sets? Are they two different people?”
Decker bent down and shone the light on them. “No. The prints look to be identical. And it’s not two people walking side by side. The spacing of the prints is too close. But two sets make sense.”
“Why?”
“Come on.”
They continued on, with her taking pictures as they went. They passed through a massive, foot-thick metal door that only opened easily because it was set on hydraulic hinges.
“Some sort of blast door,” said Decker.
Now the space opened up into a large room about forty feet across and twice as long. The floors were concrete, the walls and ceiling the same. On the walls were signs that told what to do in the event of an emergency. Several were imprinted with a skull-and-crossbones symbol, the universal sign for danger. Along the walls were old metal lockers on which were bolted signs. One read, GAS MASKS. Another said, FIRST AID. A third said, WATER AND FOOD. The dust and cobwebs were pervasive and the air stale and musty.
“They must have had an independent air supply,” said Decker. “If a nuke hit, you couldn’t have access to the outside air.”
“But it can’t be airtight down here. I can breathe okay.”
“Which means it might have been vented so workers down here replenishing supplies and the like could breathe, but they close them off when the alarm sounds.”
Following the sets of footprints, they traversed the bomb shelter space and passed through another blast door where there was another passageway matching the one on the other side. The darkness was lifted every few seconds by the flash on Lancaster’s phone as she took pictures of the sets of shoeprints that had continued on down this passage.
Decker was counting off the steps in his head. Then they ran into another set of steps. These headed up. Decker had been shining his light on the floor at various intervals. The shoeprints they had seen earlier had paralleled them the entire way. They headed up. At the top of the steps was a blank wall.
“Dead end?” said Lancaster.
“Can’t be.” Decker dug his fingernails around the edges of the wall, working his way up and down both sides. Then he gained a handhold, tugged. The wall started to give, and then it came loose.
“It’s balsa wood,” he said, hefting it easily and setting it aside. On the other side of the open wall was a small space that was stacked with junk. On the other side of that was a door.
“The government wouldn’t have sealed it with balsa wood,” observed Lancaster.
“I’m sure they didn’t. But unlike the cafeteria where the wall wasn’t visible, this wall would have been in case someone opened that door. The shooter must’ve replaced whatever wall was here with the balsa. It would look solid but would be easily movable.”
“You’re talking a lot of work, Amos. He couldn’t have done all of that in one night.”
“But if he could access the school at night, he might’ve been here a lot doing what he needed to do.”
“But how would he do that? He couldn’t count on school plays every night? And bringing in saws and other equipment?”
“I’m not sure how he did it.” Decker hit the floor with his light. “Check out the patch right in front of the wall. Not much dust. That pile of junk used to be right in front of the wall, but it’s been moved so it doesn’t block the way.”
Decker checked the doorknob for prints, and then used the knife he’d brought with him to try to force the latch open.
“It’s locked. Give me a sec.” He passed the flashlight to her and pulled from his pocket his lock-picking instruments.
“Standard PI equipment?” she said wryly.
“You never picked a lock as a cop?”
A minute later the door swung open about a foot or so and then hit something.
“What is it?” whispered Lancaster.
Decker noted that she had her gun out. And that her left hand was still trembling.
“Something blocking the door.” He poked his head through the opening and recognized where they were.
“This is the storage room off the shop class. I looked in here before. The door’s hitting a stack of old window AC units. That’s why I didn’t see the door before. The units completely hid it from where I was standing on the other side.”
“And I bet when we searched this area, no one noticed the door on the other side for the very same reason.”