“I’m guessing my back and butt will be sore for weeks from walking in this bent-over crouch,” Emert groused. “But we’re almost there.” He stooped and ducked into the tunnel that continued downhill from the base of the shaft. I followed, and after a short distance I saw him straighten up. Moments later I emerged from the tunnel into a square chamber. “Damn,” I said as I took in my surroundings. Unlike the sounds in the tunnels, the word reverberated and hung in the musty air.
I was standing in a space nearly the size of the living room in my house, where half a dozen four-foot pipes converged and a pair of larger pipes, each five or six feet in diameter, exited on the far side. The ceiling must have been six feet high, for it allowed the three of us to stand upright, though I noticed that Emert — the tallest of us — had to spread his feet widely in order to keep from bumping his head. The room was lit by portable, battery-powered work lights, whose clusters of LED bulbs cast a cool, bluish-white light on the grimy concrete surfaces. The floor of the room was covered with layers of sand and mud, laid down and then scoured out and laid down again, sculpted and channeled by sediment-laden storm water.
The room’s size was what initially startled me, but its contents were what truly astonished me. A folding camp cot was nestled against one wall of the room; a puffy down sleeping bag lay crumpled on top, the bag’s red vivid against the blue of the cot’s taut nylon mesh. At the head of the cot, on a plastic milk crate, stood a kerosene lamp and a box of matches; at the foot was a wire-mesh wastebasket, half filled with empty cans and bottles and food wrappers. “My God,” I said, “someone’s been living here.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” Emert chuckled, obviously pleased that he’d managed to surprise and impress me.
“Isabella?”
“Don’t know,” said Art. “Looks like plenty of prints on bottles and cans in the trash — the lamp, too, thanks to the kerosene and the soot — but it’s better to bag everything and take it back to the lab, instead of trying to fume it here.”
Emert caught my eye and pointed to the opposite wall — the one where we’d entered. Midway along the wall, between our pipe and another, a pair of plastic milk crates supported an unfinished pine plank, and on this plank stood an elaborately carved wooden artifact. “Get a load of the pagoda,” he said.
“It’s not exactly a pagoda,” I corrected, “but close. I saw a presentation about these a few years ago by a cultural anthropologist from Asia. It’s called a kamidana, if I remember right, and it’s a Shinto shrine to the gods of the ancestors. You find them in a lot of Japanese homes.”
Arranged on the plank in front of the shrine was a cluster of small glass bottles. I knelt and shone my flashlight into them and saw that they contained rice, salt, wheat, and what I guessed to be dried tea berries — traditional Shinto offerings to the gods. Emert played the beam of his light on the wall above the kamidana, where a Japanese symbol reached nearly to the ceiling. The black paint was fresh and bold; the concrete had obviously been cleaned shortly before the paint had been brushed on.
The room suddenly exploded with light. “Jesus H.,” snapped Emert in the general direction of Art, whom I could no longer see. “Couldn’t you have warned us before using the flash?”
“Sorry,” said Art. “I didn’t mean to take the picture yet. I was just trying to check the focus, but I guess I pushed the shutter all the way down.”
“Man,” grumped Emert. “I thought for a second there that Oak Ridge had just been vaporized.”
“Really sorry,” Art repeated. “But now that you’re already blinded, let me take a couple more, just to be sure. We can send it to a translator and find out what it means.”
“I know what it means,” I said as I covered my eyes to shield them from the flash. “I’ve seen that symbol once before, on a pendant, and the woman wearing it told me what it meant. It’s the Japanese symbol for ‘remembrance.’ Isabella wore it around her neck.”
CHAPTER 12
I stopped by KPD the next morning to see Art Bohanan. A trash can appeared to have exploded there in the forensic lab. Empty cans and scraps of food wrappers covered every table and countertop in the room. The lab room smelled like an untidy teenager’s room, one where pizza crusts and apple cores have accumulated under the bed for a week or two.
Art was bent over the red sleeping bag we’d hauled from the underground room. The bag was spread flat on a large piece of white paper, and Art was methodically coating the bag’s entire surface with overlapping strips of clear evidence tape. He laid the last strip in place just as I entered, then began peeling the tape off the bag as a single patchwork sheet. Holding a section of the tape up to a lamp on the table, he studied the fuzz and fibers stuck to the adhesive. “Looks like some black hairs,” he said. “We’ll compare them to the ones we found in her house, but I’m betting they match. If we’ve got follicles on any of these and any of those, we can do a DNA comparison.” Loosely wadding the tape, he dropped it into a plastic five-gallon bucket filled with water. The water-soluble tape quickly softened; once it had dissolved entirely, Art would strain the water to collect all the hairs and fibers.
On one corner of a table, clumped on a tray, I noticed several wads of dirty cotton gauze. Beneath the grime were crusted, reddish brown stains. “That looks like blood to me,” I said.
“Looks like blood to the black light, too,” Art observed. “Take a gander — the light’s on the counter there.” I held the portable ultraviolet lamp over the gauze, and the stains darkened; if not for the ambient light in the room, I knew, they’d appear completely black. I couldn’t help wincing as I thought of Isabella’s fingers, seared into open wounds — not as bad as Garcia’s, but still serious — by the radiation source she’d handled before feeding it to Novak.
I surveyed the assortment of empty bottles, cans, and food wrappers. “Anything that indicates when she bought any of these items or when she consumed them?”
“Not that I’ve found so far,” he said. “None of this stuff was perishable — bottled water, canned tuna fish, dried fruit — so there’s no pull date, the way there’d be on a jug of milk or a pound of ground beef. Some of this stuff has a shelf life that’s measured in decades. Look at this unopened pack of trail mix—‘Best when consumed by July 2017.’ California might have slid into the ocean by then, but these nuts and raisins will still be lip-smacking good.” He laughed. “The most interesting thing is that, though.” He pointed to a small, wandlike object of white plastic, half hidden beneath a Hershey bar wrapper.
At first glance I thought it was a digital fever thermometer, but looking closer I realized the shape wasn’t quite right; it was about as long and wide as a tongue depressor, but considerably thicker. “What is it?”
“Look but don’t touch,” he said. “Here’s some tweezers.”
With the tip of the tweezers, I slid the candy-bar wrapper aside for an unobstructed look, but I still couldn’t tell what I was seeing. “Accu-Clear,” read a word in small blue letters. To the left of the word was an oval-shaped indentation in the plastic, and within the indentation were two small cutout windows. One of the windows, an oval, was bisected by a crisp magenta line on a white background. The other opening, a small rectangle, also showed a line, a fuzzier, paler pink. “I still don’t know what it is.”