“This way,” Drake said, taking a left turn.
“No,” their guide said, grabbing his arm. “That’s a dead end.”
She walked straight ahead, and for a heartbeat Drake thought she would collide with the wall. Only when she passed through it did he see the opening; an optical illusion had made it seem like an unbroken surface. Dr. Cheney had outdone himself in creating his labyrinth exhibit, but the time to appreciate it had passed.
Drake, Sully, and Jada followed her through the opening and around a sharp turn that brought them to a fork.
“Which way?” Jada asked.
The graduate student seemed about to go right, but then there came a crash of glass and the thump of a heavy impact against the walls. Drake darted past the woman, down the corridor to the left. The sound had been close, and with the thud on the wall, there was no question about direction now.
Drake darted around a floor display, brushed the fake stone wall, and took a jag to the right. It felt like he’d reversed direction; for a second he thought the maze had misled him, but then it split into two narrow passages, one in either direction, and he turned left again, rushing in the direction of the crash. He heard Sully, Jada, and their guide pursuing him but didn’t slow. That scream had been one not of fear but of pain. And more than pain. He had heard men scream like that only in the worst of circumstances, when blood had been shed and life was fleeting.
“Nate, watch your ass!” Sully shouted.
Drake slowed, taking heed of the warning. They’d heard no gunshots, but he had no way of knowing what waited for them ahead. He dashed past a yawning darkness to his right and wondered if that was where the Minotaur’s roar eventually would be heard. Then he reached a turn where the ceiling sloped downward to an arched entryway. He ducked through and nearly tripped over a man sprawled on the floor.
“Damn it,” he muttered, regaining his footing.
A quick glance at the man’s dull, vacant eyes-and the stab wounds in his chest and the blood staining his clothes and pooling under him-was enough to tell Drake he wasn’t going to make it.
4
Blood bubbled from Dr. Cheney’s lips as he tried to breathe, and his whole body shook.
Drake surveyed the scene in an instant. A display case had been shattered in the man’s struggle with the murderer. Blood smeared on the wall showed where the dying man had crashed into it, trying to keep himself from falling.
Sully, Jada, and their guide ducked through the low passage, and when the graduate student saw the dying man, she screamed his name.
“Maynard!” she cried, and rushed to kneel at his side, murmuring denials and prayers in a torrent of heartbreak.
“Don’t touch him,” Sully warned as she went to try to lift his head.
The woman glanced up in confusion, but Drake saw in her eyes that she understood Sully’s caution. The police would not want the crime scene disturbed. She wanted to help the curator, but anyone could see there was nothing she could do.
Drake turned away from her anguish. He ran to the next bend in the corridor and peered around the corner, listening for retreating footfalls. They were no more than thirty seconds behind the killer, but that could be an eternity if the bastard knew where he was going. He was about to give chase anyway but hesitated.
“Hey,” he said, rushing back to the others, realizing he didn’t know the graduate student’s name. “Which way is the staff entrance you were talking about?”
She blinked, lifted her gaze from the dying Dr. Cheney, and looked at him. “Back there,” she said, glancing the way they’d come. “Through the Minotaur’s alcove. It’s the dark area on the left as you-”
But Drake had stopped listening. He remembered. They had just passed it, probably only a second or two before the killer had gone into that darkness. He might even have been hiding there in the shadows, waiting as they went by so as not to make any noise.
“Stay with her,” he told Sully.
Sully nodded, though he didn’t look happy about it.
Drake ran through the passage in a crouch, standing as he emerged in the corridor. He heard Jada following, wished she would wait with Sully, but didn’t take the time to argue with her. A couple of hours with the adult Jada Hzujak and he knew she wasn’t the sort of woman who was going to sit idly by when it came time for action.
They raced through two turns of the labyrinth, retracing their steps, and came to the Minotaur’s alcove. Drake didn’t slow, plunging into the darkness, hands in front of him. He stumbled over loose cables on the floor but caught himself on the wall at the rear of the alcove.
“Watch your step, Jada,” he said, his eyes adjusting as he found a doorknob and twisted it, bursting through into a narrow, dimly lit corridor that looked nothing like the interior of the labyrinth.
Sound equipment and a workbench blocked the way to the right, so they went left, hurtling down the narrow hall created by the hollow backs of the labyrinth’s walls. Plywood and two-by-fours and bare bulbs made him think of being backstage in a theater.
What the hell am I doing? Drake thought. Luka had been murdered, and now Dr. Cheney, who apparently had helped him in his labyrinth research, was dying. Whatever Luka had discovered, someone didn’t want anybody talking about it. If the killers thought that Jada’s father might have shared his secrets with her, she would be a target as well, just as she had feared, and yet here they were chasing after one of the very people who would want her dead.
The corridor cut diagonally to the right, and he followed it. It zigzagged in between turns in the labyrinth, a hidden space, a maze within the maze. He could hear Jada’s footfalls right behind him, her breathing so close that he practically could feel it, and he knew they were being foolish taking this risk. But he also knew that she wanted answers and would never stop just to save herself.
The maze ended abruptly. The walls on either side cut away, the halls of the labyrinth turning, but their narrow corridor arrived at a pair of double metal doors with an exit sign glowing above them and a warning placard stating the door was for the use of staff only.
Drake slammed through the door and found himself on a stairwell landing. Jada skidded to a halt beside him, looking first up and then down.
“Which way?” she asked, her hazel eyes alight with fierce determination, her magenta bangs framing her face.
“No way to tell,” Drake said. “And we’d be fools to try guessing. We’ve gotta get back to Sully and get out of here.”
“What?” Jada snapped, turning on him. “Dr. Cheney’s our one lead, and he’s back there dying. If we catch this guy, we could make him tell us-”
Drake shook his head. “We’re not gonna catch him. He’s got a head start, and we don’t know where he is or what he looks like. Whether he went up or down, by now he’s mixed in with employees or with visitors and is on his way out of this place. Best thing to do right now is get you the hell out of here.”
Jada’s eyes narrowed. “You think I’m in danger?”
“You were hiding out in a friend’s apartment because you thought you were in danger,” Drake reminded her. “It’s just that now I believe you.”
“Nice,” Jada said. “Didn’t you used to be charming?”
“Yeah. Strangely, I’m not in the mood today.”
Jada’s flinty exterior gave way, and for a moment he saw the pain and vulnerability beneath.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s move.”
She ran back down the sawdust-smelling corridor. Drake followed, wondering where it would all lead. He and Sully weren’t bodyguards or private detectives, and they sure as hell weren’t cops. This wasn’t a job for them, but Sully would never see it that way, and Drake had the feeling that he himself was already in too deep to walk away.
Jada had left the door to the Minotaur’s alcove partway open, but when they went back through it, Drake closed it tightly and wiped the knobs on both sides, his mind racing ahead. The police would be there any minute, and then all their options would be taken away from them. Whatever happened after that would be decided by the detectives running the case.