Dead Secret (2 page)

Chapter 2

Diane drew a shallow breath, focused her light full on the figure and discovered that it was not crouching but slumping, its back against the wall, long dead. She walked carefully to it, examining the floor each step of the way, then dropped on her haunches next to the body. What lay before her were the mummified remains of a male, judging from the prominence of his brow ridge and jaw, clad in the rotted remnants of a plaid shirt and jeans turned almost the color of the surrounding rock. With the partial disintegration of his soft tissue, he had collapsed and reclined in a fearful repose, his head leaning back against the wall and turned slightly, his mouth gaping, his thin lips stretched open, showing yellowed teeth.

She saw glimpses of dry skin and bone through his shirt. One hand rested in his lap, and the other lay beside him on the floor. They were balled into fists. A helmet lay upside down beside him along with a canteen. She retrieved her digital camera from her backpack and snapped several pictures from different angles and distances.

“Damn, Doc. What was that I said about you knowing how to have a good time? You find the creepiest things.” Mike was standing beside her. Diane had been so engrossed in her find that she hadn’t heard him descend into the chamber. “Is that what it looks like—a mummy?”

“Yes,” she said. “Natural mummification. The tissues have been partially preserved by the dry air of the cave.”

Mike squatted beside her, looking at the crumpled remains. “Wonder what happened to him. Did he get lost? Lose his light? Fall? He probably didn’t come in the way we did. How did he get in here?”

“Don’t know.” Diane snapped a picture of his helmet. “What I need you to do is take our mapping notes to the surface and figure out what county we’re in and call the appropriate coroner.”

“Coroner?”

“The county coroner has to be notified when a body is found.”

“You going to work this as a crime scene?”

“That’s for the coroner to decide. Until then, I can’t touch him.”

“But you’re dying to look at him, aren’t you?”

Diane smiled. “I am looking at him.” She stood up. Mike rose with her, and Diane turned toward him, careful not to shine her headlamp in his eyes. “I appreciate your being quick with the rope.”

“Sure. I’ve had to hang from my hands before, and it’s dicey if you’re not used to it. You okay? You crashed pretty hard into the rock wall.” He looked up toward the hole in the roof.

From their vantage point she could see the thick walls of the hole surrounded by a thin lip that had at one time been a too-thin floor that had collapsed countless years ago.

She looked down at her hands. Faint abraded lines of blood etched her palms and fingers. “My hands are going to be sore for a while. I imagine my body’s going to ache too.”

Mike took one of her hands and examined the palm. “Now, how many caving trips has it been that I’ve told you, you need to put on your gloves?”

“I know, I know. I just like the tactile feel of the cave.”

“Yeah, well, you’re going to be feeling the tactile sensation for several days.”

Diane stretched her sore muscles and groaned. Damn, she was going to be in just great shape when she and Frank, her detective boyfriend, went on vacation tomorrow.
Better remember to pack the Ben-Gay and heating pad,
she thought.

“Is everybody okay?” Neva leaned over the edge of the hole in the ceiling. “We heard you on the walkie-talkie and came as quickly as we could.”

“We’re fine,” Diane yelled up at her. “Thanks to Mike’s quick rope-tying skills. Be careful of that hole; there might still be some weak spots up there. Where’s MacGregor?”

“He didn’t think he’d fit down that narrow tunnel. Frankly, I think he was right. It’s a tight squeeze.”

Dick MacGregor was a member of the caving club and, most important to Diane, he was a relative of the owner of the land where the entrance to the cave was located. That fact was enough for her to put up with his annoying personality traits and have him as one of her caving partners. He wasn’t fat, but he was stouter than Mike, Neva and Diane—and there were some close places he wouldn’t fit into without becoming stuck.

“Neva, would you climb down here with me? Mike’s going back to the surface with MacGregor.”

“So,” said Mike with a grin, “you
are
itching to have a go at the skeleton.”

“Mysteries, particularly cave mysteries, always interest me.”

“I thought so,” he said as he stepped through the rubble and made his way to the rope dangling from the hole in the ceiling.

Diane noted that he’d tied a series of loops on the rope to aid in climbing back up.

“How stable is the lip of that hole?”

He looked up. “It’ll do for now.”

“Can you bring more lights?” said Diane.

“Sure. Want me to contact someone at the crime lab for you?”

“Ask David or Jin to bring a kit, but tell them to wait outside. I think you had better bring it in.”

Diane was director of the RiverTrail Museum of Natural History in Rosewood, Georgia. The successful use of the museum’s forensic anthropology lab in the solution of a number of local homicides had caught the attention of Rosewood’s mayor and police chief. As a result of political manipulations by Rosewood city officials, a crime scene unit had been set up on the third floor of the west wing of the museum, with Diane as its director also. All in all, it was an interesting world she lived in. However disparate the combination of museum work and crime fighting might seem, she found it helpful for the crime lab to have access to the abundance of museum experts. The talents of the crime scene unit had even come in handy when the museum acquired an Egyptian mummy. A museum and a crime scene lab turned out, to everyone’s surprise, to be a good, if odd, fit.

David and Jin were members of Diane’s crime scene crew. Jin was in his twenties, half-Asian, and came from New York, where he’d been a criminalist. David had worked with her at World Accord International when the two of them were human rights investigators. Neva, a former police officer, came to her from the Rosewood Police Department. The three of them made up Diane’s crime scene unit. But David and Jin weren’t cavers, and Diane didn’t want them inside a rugged cave like this one.

Mike began his ascent, easily climbing the rope hand over hand. When he cleared the top, he and Neva exchanged a few quiet words, and then she started down the rope.

Diane had been surprised that Neva wanted to take up caving again after her true near-death experience in this very cave system. Being wedged in a crevasse between rocks, with gravity pulling her ever tighter into the squeeze, had been a frightening experience. But Neva showed a remarkable determination to get over the trauma. She was wide-eyed and pale the first few times back in a cave, but she stuck with it. Diane wondered if it was as much for Mike as for caves.

“What’s up?” Neva looked up at the opening until the light disappeared with Mike down the tunnel. She grinned, and Diane watched her face change as she turned her head and spotted the remains.

“My God, that’s not anyone we know . . . ?”

“No. This guy’s been here a very long time.”

“What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see enough of his bones to tell, but I’d bet he broke a limb, probably a leg. Looks like he was a caver. Has a helmet with a carbide lamp, a canteen, and I just noticed a backpack sticking out from under him. But I haven’t seen any rope. I don’t know of any caver who would venture this far into a cave without rope.”

“Novice?” Neva said, squatting to look at the mummy and his artifacts.

“Maybe, but novices usually bring rope—sometimes not enough of it, but they usually have it.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“We can’t touch the body until the coroner arrives, but we can do a grid search of the floor.”

“What about the breakdown?”

“We’ll get Mike to help with some of it.”

“You’re kidding. You’re going to look under the rocks?”

Diane surveyed the piles of rocks on the floor. “We’re not going to move them all, but I’d like to see if anything is under the rocks that just fell. You take that end; I’ll start at the wall with the opening.” She gestured toward the hole in the opposite wall. “We’ll meet in the middle.”

Diane and Neva made their way to opposite sides of the room, but instead of searching the floor, Diane looked up at the opening in the wall.

“I think he fell from here,” she said. Her words reverberated across the cavern. She doubted Neva could make out what she’d said. Diane waved her away when she saw Neva’s headlamp turn in her direction.

Diane rubbed a hand over the rough texture of the wall. It was about twenty feet to the opening, not a bad climb. She examined the wall, mentally noting hand- and footholds. Piece of cake, like climbing a ladder. She keyed her radio. “Neva, I’m going up top to the opening here. You can continue searching the floor, or wait for me, whichever you prefer.”

Diane pulled her chalk bag from her pants pocket, dusted her hands and felt for the first two holds—a crack in the rock face in which she slipped the fingers of her right hand, and a protrusion she grabbed with the other. She proceeded up the face of the cliff, making sure every handhold and foothold was stable before she moved to the next, always using her hands for balance and her legs to push upward.

Diane liked solo climbing. She enjoyed being free of the ropes, but she always brought a climbing harness just in case she came across something really deep and interesting in the cave.

When she reached the opening, she pulled herself over the bottom edge, stood up in the newfound tunnel and viewed the cavern from this new vantage point. The scene was beautiful. Illuminated by her headlamps, the varied hues of red, orange, ivory and silver rock had a golden glow. The icy-looking stalactites and stalagmites with their pointed peaks and knobby textures looked like spires from some Middle Earth kingdom. Diane found the unearthly appearance ironic—nothing was more of the earth than a cave.

She turned her attention to details of the tunnel. Her first thought on examining the rock face she’d just climbed was that Caver Doe, as she dubbed him in her mind, had fallen the twenty feet from this tunnel to the cavern floor. The rock wall had a concave dip in it under the entrance, so that if he had been walking down this passage without paying attention, he would have run out of floor before he ran out of sides. From this vantage point at the top, that seemed a viable hypothesis.

There was little breakdown on the floor of the tunnel near the opening. Nothing to trip over. As she studied the walls, she saw something angular jutting from the rock near the bottom of the wall. It wasn’t rock. She knelt and examined the object—a railroad spike. Its presence puzzled her for a moment; then she realized that it might have been a crude anchor bolt, used to secure a rope. Caver Doe’s equipment was old, predating all the modern gear that she had.

Several inches above the spike she discovered a gash in the stone wall. She put a hand in the gouged-out place, poking around in the hole, feeling its shape. In the middle of the gash was a smaller hole.
Interesting.

A new hypothesis formed in her mind. Caver Doe had set his railroad spike in the top hole, tied his rope to it, and started over the edge. The spike had pulled out of the wall when he put his full weight on it—causing him to fall. If they found a railroad spike on the floor of the cavern, that would support her idea.

But what of the spike that was set—his caving partner? Surely he hadn’t been caving alone. Then . . . why wasn’t he rescued?

Chapter 3

Diane pondered various hypotheses of how Caver Doe might have come to his end, turning the ideas over in her mind, trying them out in various scenarios. She knew it was pointless at the moment, since she had not examined the remains, but she couldn’t help herself.

She turned away from the chamber and faced the other end of the tunnel. The terminal height of the passage at the point it opened into the cavern measured fifteen feet, and the width was about twenty-five feet. The walls, a light tan streaked with many hues of brown, were patterned with large scallops, some nearly a foot in length, and dug into the stone with such repetition and consistency they looked almost man-made.

The limestone rock made of calcium derived from skeleta, shells, and the secretions of a host of marine life was literally the bones of the earth. She rubbed her fingers over the rock surface—a surface seemingly too hard to have dissolved in a little acidic groundwater. But it had, and that was the wonder of it. Slow-moving, slightly acidic water long ago in the time before man had dissolved this sinuous passage through the limestone. Diane raised a bare hand above her head and paused. There was no air movement.

She decided to follow the tunnel, even though she was without a caving companion for the moment. If she stayed on the main path, taking no detours, entering no mazes, it would be all right.

Adrenaline still electrified her body from her near fall. She was hyperalert as she walked, stepping over the rubble that littered the silt floor, examining the pathway, the ceiling.

At the first gentle curve in the tunnel she stopped and looked back, viewing where she had just traversed. It was a habit she’d developed so she could always recognize passages from any direction—a safeguard against becoming hopelessly lost and having to be rescued.

Diane knew she probably should go back while she could still see the glow from the chamber dimly illuminated by Neva’s light. When she rounded the bend the chamber would be out of sight. Was she going to be cautious or adventurous? She compromised and called Neva on the walkie-talkie.

“I’m going to follow this tunnel.”

“Should you be doing that alone?” said Neva.

Diane had drilled into Neva never to cave alone or go off alone, at least not for any great distance.

“I’m only going to the end of the tunnel. Not any farther. You stay in the chamber. Don’t go anywhere until Mike and MacGregor get back. And keep in touch.”

“Will do.”

She shined her light on the curve of another bend just ahead. She pointed her distometer and measured the distance—16.3 feet. It was indeed promising to be a long, sinuous tunnel.

On the floor of the winding passage she found no objects that might have been dropped by Caver Doe. Nothing. Not even footprints. That seemed odd. Even with the years of dust settling in the cave, there should be some ghost of a footprint left. Perhaps all traces of his passing had been covered by the breakdown. In many spots it was like gravel. She looked back where she had just come. Her footprints on the silt were actually very light, and in some places where the bedrock showed through the silt floor, there were none. Okay, maybe the absence of evidence of his passing was not odd, but interesting.

What was it Mike had told her about meanders? Flowing water left a greater amount of silt on the inside of bends where it slowed down. She squatted down at the turn in the bend and examined the heavy layer of silt. No footprints, but there were wavy smears and striations, as if someone had dragged or wiped something over the surface. The markings in the silt were so slight that they might have simply been products of her imagination—seeing evidence where there was none. She took her camera from a pocket on her pack and snapped a picture of it anyway.

She stood up and was about to continue on when her light caught the reflection of something in a slit between two large rocks. She squatted to examine the sparkle. It was silver, tiny, and had the smooth, rounded, shiny look of something man-made. She moved some of the silt from around it, revealing a thick wire loop-looking object. She grasped it between her thumb and index finger. It shifted slightly, but was stuck.
Must be attached to something bigger and held in place by the rocks,
she thought.

Diane dug between the rocks with her finger and felt a rounded edge. A button? Caught between the rocks when someone was wiping footprints from the surface of the silt? Or was her imagination making a mystery out of a simple caving accident?

Her digging had partially freed it. If she could just turn the object sideways she could get it out. Her fingernail caught it and swiveled it around on its edge. Diane grasped it and pulled it out, trying not to touch anything but the edges.

It was a button. Metallic—silver with the letters A.S.C. over an eagle with spread wings. Military button? On the reverse side was a thick wire shank—the part that Diane had first caught sight of. She laid the button on top of a rock near its original location, photographed it, made notations in her notebook of the spot where she had found it, and stuffed the camera and notebook back in her pack.

Diane searched her pockets for something suitable to put the button in and came up with a Ziploc bag. She sealed it so that enough air remained inside to reduce contact with the button, though it probably wouldn’t matter anyway. The passage of time and the conditions had most likely resulted in the destruction of anything that might have been clinging to the surface of the button. But you never knew. She put it in the backpack and proceeded down the tunnel.

She stopped at the next bend and examined the silt and found no other marks in the dirt.

“Dr. Fallon.” The radio squawked a string of static syllables.

“Neva?”

“Just checking in. I found a railroad spike.” Even with the static, Diane could hear the puzzlement in Neva’s voice.

“That’s great. Mark the place where you found it.”

“Sure thing. Out.”

Diane followed the tunnel, watching the floor, the walls, the ceiling. It was like a gently waving avenue, not too cluttered, big enough to drive a car through with room to spare. The light shining off the uneven, rippling walls, and the distant outline of the oval cross-section, made the passage look like a vortex funneling her to some mysterious destination. It was a close call, but at this moment the mysteries of the cave held more allure to her than the remains back in the chamber. She wished that her caving partners were here so she wouldn’t have to stop when the tunnel ended.

Just ahead a pile of breakdown with rocks the size of boulders littered the way. Beside the pile she found another passage, a side branch. The entrance was small; she would have to duck to get through it. From her vantage she could see that it sloped steeply upward and the passageway was strewn with large boulders—negotiable, but they didn’t look stable. She scanned the walls around the entryway. Above the opening, almost at eye level, she saw a smudge. It was so faint she almost missed it, but it was definitely an X.

Smiling to herself, she grabbed her camera from the pack and snapped a picture. This was confirmation of her expectation that previous explorers, perhaps Caver Doe, had marked their path. In her notepad she made sketches and drew an X to mark the spot. This would definitely go on their caving itinerary. She was willing to bet this new tunnel led to another entrance aboveground. She didn’t remember Mike or any members of her caving club mentioning other caves or entrances in the area. She grinned. New discoveries were what cavers lived for. Returning her notebook and camera to their backpack pockets, she squatted to examine the floor around the opening for artifacts.

Other than the mark on the wall, it looked as if no one had ever been there. She stood up and continued down the main passage. It was an easy traverse, and she wasn’t taking any detours, so she decided to see where the tunnel ended. She picked her way around the jumble of rocks at the side tunnel’s entrance and then walked down the path toward the next bend in this ghost river. She tried to imagine the water flowing through here aeons ago. The image in her mind would make a good visual display for the museum, she thought. She wondered if she could get footage of an underwater river for the video terminals at the museum geology exhibit.

Around the curve the tunnel forked. Diane felt a vague disappointment that her solo exploration was ended, but she’d already decided that she would stop when she got to the end of the main tunnel. She wished that caves weren’t so dangerous, because she loved to explore them alone.

She examined the walls around the irregular entrances of the fork. No marks. Nothing. The larger of the two passages slanted upward. She shined her headlamps just inside. The walls were close together and, like the first offshoot passage, it was littered with large boulders.

The other tunnel was even smaller, almost a squeeze. She would fit, but she would have to go sideways. Diane leaned inside just enough to see around a rock that partially blocked the way. The passage slanted downward at a steep angle. She had the impression it was twisted around like a corkscrew. She stopped for a moment, holding her breath. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard a sound, like white noise or flowing water. The sound was just at the edge of her hearing, like a whisper she wasn’t sure she even heard.

The temptation to follow was almost more than she could resist—just a little way down the tunnel, she could always turn back and still find her way—but Diane ducked out of the entrance before the siren call became too tempting.

She took another look around the two branch tunnels and snapped a picture before she started back toward the chamber.

Returning to the chamber through the tunnel was faster, since she knew the route and the lay of the rocks. As she rounded the last bend back, she saw a light from a helmet. For a moment she thought Neva had climbed up the wall, and Diane was about to chastise her—Neva was new to caving and Diane had warned her never to go it alone. But here Diane herself was—alone. She smiled inwardly.

When the figure grew closer she saw it was Mike. He had a deep crease between his brows, and with the light and shadows on his face, it was hard to read his expression.

“Are you all right?” His words sounded tight. “I was surprised to find you had gone off by yourself.”

Diane was a little startled at his level of concern. “No farther than we’ve strayed many times. I stuck to this main tunnel.”

She started to say something more, but realized that he was worried. It was disturbing to witness an accident, and though her fall had turned out all right, she could have been seriously injured. Mike was as shaken by it as she.

“I’m fine, really.”

His face split into a smile. “Yeah, I would’ve done the same thing.”

“Did you find the coroner?”

He nodded. “The entrance to the cave is in Hall County, but according to the mapping we’ve done so far, it turns out the chamber containing the body is across the county line in Lumpkin County. The Lumpkin County coroner is a man named Brewster Pilgrim. Great name, huh? He said that he ‘would not dream of interfering with a cosmos that allowed a forensic anthropologist caver to discover human bones in a cave’ and that you should ‘have at it.’ Just send him the paperwork.”

Diane laughed and realized just how tense she still was from the mishap. She’d forced it out of her mind, made light of the seriousness of it, but her muscles remembered, and the relief of laughing brought a dull ache to her head. She absently rubbed her temple.

“I’ve got some aspirin,” said Mike.

“I’m fine, really.”

“The coroner’s sending a deputy to make it official. I got hold of Jin,” said Mike. “He’s bringing what you need from the crime lab. MacGregor’s waiting outside the cave for him. I’ll go back up and get your equipment when it arrives.”

“Good job. I’ll have to start paying you out of the crime lab budget before long.” They stood looking at each other, their headlamps making a pool of light surrounding them. “How is Neva doing?” asked Diane after a pause.

“She’s happily searching a grid pattern of the chamber floor. She showed me the railroad spike she found. Said you seemed happy about it, but she wasn’t sure why. When I climbed up I saw the spike in the wall and the place where it looked like one was pulled out. You thinking that’s what caused his fall?”

“It’s likely. At first, however, I thought he might not have been paying attention to the floor and walked out into thin air.”

“There is a drop there that could be a hell of a first step. Find anything else up here?”

Diane fished the bag with the button out of her pack. “I found this wedged between two rocks.”

Mike looked at the button, then down at the rock-strewn floor of the tunnel and back at Diane, his eyes wide. “I thought Neva was a detail freak. There’s thousands of rocks here. How could you possibly find that little thing between two of them?” He took the plastic bag from her and peered at the button. “I think you pulled it off your shirt.” Diane was wearing an open plaid flannel shirt and a white tee underneath. Mike handed her back the plastic bag and tugged the button side of her flannel shirt. “Nope, they’re all here. . . . Hey, this is a guy’s shirt.”

“You don’t recognize it?”

He looked closer. “Yes, it’s my shirt. The one I gave you last month when you got yours all mucked up. So you’re wearing my clothes. This means I’m making progress.” He grinned broadly.

Diane suddenly felt self-conscious and wished she hadn’t brought the shirt’s history to his attention. “You said it was too small for you and that I could keep it. Besides, I understand you and Neva are dating.”

“You interested in my love life, Doc?”

“Just making conversation.”

“We’ve gone out a few times. We’re good friends and I like that.” He let go of her shirt.

“It’s a good caving shirt. Don’t take it as a proposition—or wishful thinking.”

He put his hand on his chest. “Doc, you’re always cutting out my heart.” He gave her a crooked smile.

“You look all broken up,” she said with her best poker face, cuffing him lightly on his chest and starting back to the cavern.