A damp, heavy air surged through the open crack. It smelled like a swamp in there.
Reaching for a pair of latex gloves, Boldt said, "You're going to have to close the southbound tunnel. Make an excuse."
"Like hell!"
"In about ten minutes, this place is going to be crawling with lab personnel." Boldt checked his cell phone service. No signal. "I've got to get to the surface," he said anxiously. "In the meantime, we lock this up. You and I go out together. No one touches anything. And if anyone asks, you tell them it flooded again. Whatever you want, I don't care. But I want no mention of police, no mention of my visit, no mention of the lab guys. You screw it up, I'll not only have your job, I'll have you in for obstruction. Are we clear on that?"
"I got it," Iberson said. He glanced back at the partially open wall panel and shook his head. "If I hadn't seen it with-"
"You didn't see it," Boldt said.
"Yeah, yeah."
"You didn't see it," Boldt repeated sternly.
"The hell I didn't," Iberson said. "I gotta put my boss into the loop. You want, I can put you two in touch directly. Closing down a tunnel, that's serious business."
More serious than you think, Boldt nearly said. "I saw pay phones on that upper level."
Iberson checked his pants pockets as he shut the EER behind them. "You got any quarters?" he asked.
Running Blind
Four out of the six available patrol cars were stationed around the section of downtown defined by Second and Third Avenues and Columbia and James, respectively. The officers on duty in these cars had been issued a Be On Lookout for any individual, most likely male, fleeing any door or trapdoor that could be construed to be a part of any building in that block or adjacent to that block. Basically, if anyone or anything looked or moved suspiciously, he was to be taken into custody immediately and brought to Public Safety's central booking.
The remaining two cars cruised the immediate area. These two "rovers" also monitored the city bus dispatch radio channel on handheld walkie-talkies, in case a bus driver reported anything unusual.
The pieces in place, and with Boldt turning over the underground hallway to SID, he and Detective Second Class Bobbie Gaynes, a member of LaMoia's CAP squad and the department's first female homicide detective, lowered themselves through the space created by the removal of the steel panel in HER 19 and slipped into the darkness of a section of Underground that had likely seen few living people in well over a hundred years.
Boldt might have preferred three or four specially trained urban warriors from the Emergency Response Team-ERT-as backup, but such a request would have required a formal appeal to Special Ops and would have wasted too much time. Boldt's
impatience had worn thin as it was, it having taken nearly an hour to do what he'd been ready to do the moment he'd pulled that panel off.
The air, extremely cool and smelling dank and musty, hit Boldt in the lungs and he nearly coughed. He and the detective both carried flashlights with theatrical red gel taped over the light, casting a dull, reddish purple light that carried only about eight feet, helping to protect their approach.
They ducked and crawled through infrastructure-gas pipe and a tangle of wires. Boldt shone his light behind them, illuminating an imposing stone and mortar wall that rose beyond the abilities of his flashlight. They climbed over a small mound of chipped and broken brick. Boldt thought he heard rats scurrying but didn't want to think about it. Not his favorite household pet.
He and Gaynes emerged onto what had once been a city sidewalk on what had once been a different level of Third Avenue or whatever they'd called the street in the late 1800s. The sidewalk consisted of short, heavy redwood planking, some of it now rotten, most amazingly strong and intact. To Boldt's right, he saw the old storefronts, ghostly and disturbing. Overhead, more of the clumsy network of pipes and cables braided into an unforgiving mess. LaMoia had described some of this in his report on the arrest made at the church. There really was another city down here, Boldt realized, and the student in him found it somewhat fascinating.
Overhead, steel I-beams shouldered a huge pipe that he assumed to be the water main. After another ten or fifteen yards, the sidewalk gave way to several inches of imposing mud-an area that proved to be the edge of the flood wash from the broken main. He trained his flashlight's red glare down onto the mud, where he saw a series of tracks-shoe or boot prints. A disadvantage of the red light was that it blurred edges. With his heart fluttering in his chest, Boldt leaned closer. Recent tracks, without a doubt. Chen? he wondered. The EMTs? Or did these belong to someone else, the very person Boldt now pursued?
As they waded into the ankle-high muck, the sucking sound proved noisy and concerned him. Boldt led the way, careful not to disturb the existing prints that he wanted preserved for collection by SID. He was not one to believe in prescience or supernatural gifts; it was true that he, at times, possessed an uncanny ability to place himself inside the head of the victim, to experience the crime from this point of view in a visceral, almost tangible way, but he attributed this to the database of experience he had collected in his head, not to an otherworldly spell. It was also to this experience that he attributed his and others' ability to sense when the trail was hot, a skin-prickling rush of adrenaline that forewarned the hunter of the proximity of the prey. He had this feeling now-a keen sense of foreboding, as if a hand might strike from the shadows at any moment.
Ahead of them, the narrow tongue of mud-covered sidewalk opened up, where, to their right, a section of the hundred-year old brick wall had collapsed. Here they could see through and into the subterranean complex, viewing a cross-section of its history. Over the course of decades past, walls had been torn down, concrete poured, steel beams installed. Sandra Babcock and her archaeology team would celebrate a find like this for years to come. But for now Boldt signaled Gaynes ahead, leaving the deep mud behind as they continued to follow the busy path of shoe prints. He stopped and listened every few yards, his hearing more sensitive than most. He heard a hissing that he couldn't put a direction onto. Overhead? Behind them in the bus tunnel?
The dull red glow from his flashlight caught the delicate lacework of cobwebs both to his left and right, and he realized there were no such obstacles in his path-someone had been through here recently enough to clear out the spiderwebs. With no more shoe prints to follow, the mud now well behind him, Boldt followed scratch marks on the concrete, directing Gaynes with hand signals through an open door to the left, down a hall, and then through another door to the right. Without a doubt the hissing sound grew louder. Closer. Boldt touched his ear and Gaynes nodded agreement-she heard it, too.
He caught himself not breathing, the tension in the air suddenly palpable. He took a long controlled breath, and Gaynes followed suit. She reached for, and armed herself with, her Beretta, though she did not chamber a round for the noise it would cause. Every hair, every nerve ending, told Boldt that something, or someone, lurked nearby.
Having paused long enough for his eyes to fully adjust, Boldt experimented by turning off his flashlight. Gaynes did the same. His instinct had been correct: Enough ambient light existed for him to vaguely see a gray patchwork of the door and wall beyond.
This patchwork was barely anything more than absolute darkness, and yet it was not absolute darkness, and this held considerable significance for Boldt, for it implied the existence of a source of light, and that, in turn, suggested something, someone, human.