Nick continued to the front of the school, where a large sinkhole marked a section of the building that had burned down. He hauled himself up on the jagged edge of a low concrete wall. Minding his balance, he grabbed the edge of the roof and pulled himself up far enough to swing his leg on to the tar surface. He completed the climb and found himself on the roof of one of the lower wings of the building, abutting the brick wall where the plywood hung loose from the window.
He ripped off the plywood so easily that he almost fell. Half of the frosted panels on the window had long since been broken in. He leaned through the open space and examined the interior with his flashlight. The beam illuminated steel braces and the backdrop of what had once been a basketball frame. He was breaking into the school auditorium.
'Here we go,' Nick said.
He removed a coil of rope from his backpack and secured it to a steel pipe on the exterior wall of the auditorium, then threw the rest of the rope through the window where it dropped to the floor below. Hanging on to the rope with gloved hands, he pushed himself through the gap, bracing his legs against the inside wall. Inch by inch, he worked his way down the wall until his feet splashed into a puddle of cold water at the floor. He let go.
'I'm inside the ruins,' he said.
With the windows covered over, the interior of the school was darker than the night outside. He listened to the dripping of water and felt it spatter on his face. Somewhere in the great space, he heard a familiar squeal. Rats. He couldn't see them, but he knew they were there, scrabbling through the stagnant water.
Then there was the smell.
Now that he was inside, it was ferocious, like rotting meat in the hot sun, so strong and nauseating that he had to pinch his nose shut with his fingers. He wanted to gag, and even when he breathed open-mouthed, the stench rose up anyway through his nasal passages.
'Something's dead in here,' Nick said.
He waved the beam of his flashlight ahead of him. The floor was a mess of ventilation pipes, wire netting, and steel I-frames. The interior walls had gaping, jagged holes where bricks had caved in like missing teeth. He took fragile steps toward a doorway on the far side of the auditorium. Dark shapes scurried in and out of the puddles and hid inside the pipes as he came closer. He saw red eyes in the tunnel of light.
The doorway led to a narrow hall, where the line of dark, boarded-up windows stretched along the wall. Glass littered the floor. He shivered from the cold and dampness. The smell, as he moved down the hallway, got even worse. So did the gathering of rats.
Nick stopped.
It was impossible to move silently through the debris, and for a moment he was certain he had heard the clatter of someone else's footsteps on the far side of the school. He waited to see if the noise would recur, but a minute passed, and it didn't. He told himself he was letting the place get the best of his imagination. He was alone. No one else would dare to be inside.
When two more minutes of silence passed, he kept going.
He reached a doorway leading to a smaller room, where a broken wall of cinder blocks rose to the ceiling like a honeycomb. His flashlight shone on a row of concrete beams. Green algae bloomed on the floor. In this room, the smell soared, feeding rancid decay into the air. He covered the whole lower half of his face with his gloved hand, but he couldn't extinguish the stink. The rats were bolder here, running back and forth in front of him. Urgent. Excited. Hungry.
Four feet away, where the light made an arc on the floor, he saw them.
Six bare feet.
Nick lifted the flashlight and then dropped it and shouted. The flashlight fell and broke, bathing the room in darkness, but it couldn't erase the awful image from his brain. Three women, naked, were tied to old-fashioned school chairs. Their skin was bloodless and white, where they still had skin. Most of it had been eaten away, exposing muscle, organs, and bone. Rats scampered on the desks and in their laps and across their shoulders and breasts. 'FUCK FUCK FUCK!'
Nick backed up and staggered like a blind man, hands outstretched, colliding with the concrete pillars as he hunted for an escape. His feet tripped on debris, and he fell, cutting his hands and arms on sharp metal. His skin grew slippery with his own blood. He pushed himself up and felt along the wall until it ended, and he spilled into another hallway, tunneling through a house of horrors.
'Help!'
He reached out with his spread fingers, and his hand found the bat-shaped remnants of broken glass in one of the windows. He hammered his bloody palm on the plywood nailed to the outer wall, but the stiff wood refused to yield to his panicked blows. He wailed for someone to hear him in the lonely land outside.
'Help! Oh my God, help me!'
Behind him, out of the darkness, a human hand clapped on his shoulder. Nick screamed and spun. A flashlight dazzled his eyes. He saw the shadow of someone tall and large looming over him like a bear, and he thought for an instant he'd been rescued.
'Oh, thank God,' Nick cried.
His relief was short-lived. A fist as hard and strong as a brick hit his face and snapped his head against the peaks of glass. The light in his eyes went black. Nick tasted pistachios again and realized his mouth was filled with bile. His knees buckled, but as he fell, a powerful forearm locked around his neck, choking him and jerking him off the ground.
His chest roared, bellowing for air.
His legs kicked and flailed.
As he struggled, the cold and the stench slowly disappeared and left him in a vacuum of perfect silence. He floated away from the pain and, eventually, he floated so far that he felt nothing at all. He was somewhere else entirely, listening to water drip like the ticking of seconds on a clock. He was in a cave that he had all to himself. He was exploring.
PART TWO
FRAGILE SOULS
Chapter Sixteen
On Sunday morning, the third day after Callie Glenn disappeared, frustration began to seep into the police war room in downtown Grand Rapids. Stride had seen it before. The first forty-eight hours were an adrenaline rush of urgency and determination. The phones rang incessantly. Emails flew back and forth among agencies throughout the state. Leads overwhelmed the system the way a sudden downpour overflows the sewer drains. No one complained because every contact in those precious early hours was an opportunity to break the case open.
Find a baby girl. Bring her home.
By Sunday, however, the lack of progress began to suck oxygen out of the investigation. Everyone knew that time was an enemy, and the enemy was winning. Two hours after a kidnapping, you can draw a small circle on a map and estimate the maximum area in which a missing person is likely to be found. You can set up road blocks. Canvass the region. Ten hours later, the diameter of the circle grows by hundreds of miles, bulging past the resources of the police to enclose and investigate it. Two days later, the universe of hiding places is essentially limitless.
Stride hoped that Callie Glenn was still alive somewhere within northern Minnesota, but the reality was that she could be anywhere by now.
He pored over hundreds of contact reports, hunting for a needle in a haystack. The tiny office on the third floor of the county headquarters was knee-deep in paper and littered with empty coffee cups and food wrappers. He knew that the dimensions of the search forced them to rely on a simple philosophy: do the right things, and hope they got lucky. If they were going to find Callie, someone had to remember the girl's face. Someone had to see her and make the call, and the police — wherever they were — had to make the right follow-through. He could manage the process, but Stride and the small team inside the Sheriff's Department couldn't have eyes and ears everywhere.