Novels 11 Adam Read online

  The radio remained silent for a few seconds. “It’s gonna be hard to see with this fog.” No one outside the cars could possibly hear the radios, but Nate’s voice barely broke a whisper anyway. Big day for Officer Sinclair.

  “Kill the lights,” Daniel repeated. “Stop a hundred yards from the site. We go on foot. The tactical team can use their night vision, but they do not close until I say so. You have that?”

  “Copy.”

  “Roger.” The tactical unit behind them.

  The lights ahead blinked out. Daniel twisted a knob he thought controlled the lights, was rewarded with a swish of the wipers instead. He reversed the switch and tried another.

  Night smothered them.

  “You see them?” Lori asked.

  He slowed to a crawl until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The profile of the vehicle ahead broke the lines of the forest as it slipped around the next bend.

  “Slower,” Daniel ordered.

  “Copy.”

  Red brake lights glared ahead.

  “Okay, friends. It’s game time,” Brit said, speaking for the first time since they left Colorado Springs behind.

  “Remember, no one crosses my lead. That includes the tactical team. Keep them back, Brit. Way back. I want zero site contamination. Zero.”

  Daniel had made no secret of the fact that he didn’t think they should use a tactical team on this one, much less a team he didn’t know. Brit had agreed, but protocol won the day: armed suspect plus hostile scene equaled tactical purview.

  Brit chambered a round in his Glock. “Alpha team is taking half a squad up the flank. The rest will stay twenty yards to my rear unless otherwise directed.”

  “Just keep them out of my scene until I’m in,” Daniel said, glancing up at the rearview mirror. The hardened special agent who would officially be handed the case if Daniel went dark was nothing more than a ghostly figure by the amber light of the dashboard. Dark hair, strong chiseled jaw—a college receiver who’d graduated with honors before being recruited by the FBI.

  Daniel had trusted the man with his life on several occasions. Given a choice of partners, he’d choose Brit Holman over any other without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Outside it is,” Brit said. “To my rear. I’m going in behind you.”

  Daniel nodded. “Just keep them out of our way.”

  “And me?” Lori said. A simple question asked without any expectation. One Daniel hadn’t considered. In a case so dependent on information gathered from the victims, some would argue that she was more important to the investigation than he.

  “How many raids have you been on?”

  “Eight,” she said almost before he’d gotten the question out. There wasn’t a breath of hesitation in her.

  “You’re with me,” he said.

  She nodded. “They’re slowing.”

  Daniel stopped the vehicle just behind the lead, shrugged into a Kevlar vest, took an H&K MP5 from behind the seat, chambered a round, and flipped off the safety. Engaging weapons on approach was an easy way to an early grave. Clanking chambers carried to all ears.

  Lori had engaged her pistol already.

  She waited for him to slip out before easing out of her door. Daniel rounded the car, ignoring all except Nate Sinclair, who was crawling out of the cab.

  “Stay on the asphalt,” he whispered. “Don’t speak unless directed. How far?”

  Nate’s eyes were white in the night. “Around the next bend. To the left, fifty yards off the road. You do realize that I haven’t actually seen the van. We were told to stay back. Way back.”

  “The cave, not the van. I was told you can get us to the cave.”

  Nate pulled out a GPS unit and switched it on. “Assuming the coordinates the hikers gave me were right. Quick thinking on—”

  “Let’s go.” Daniel glanced at the team that had gathered behind him, waiting in tactical fatigues and helmets, armed for entry, ready for engagement. Ready to start a war.

  He nodded.

  The soles of their boots padded over the black asphalt. Crickets chirped, a song of life or death, Daniel didn’t know. But his mind was in the tomb already.

  Who are you, Eve? What drives you to take the lives of young women? Are you there in your hole, standing over another dead body?

  The trees parted on the left and Nate stopped. He looked at Daniel for approval and veered for the gap when Daniel fixed on it.

  The van sat in the clearing, dark and cold with a rusted white paint job. Windshield cracked. Balding tires. It was an old Dodge Caravan from the nineties. Serial numbers on the glass, the chassis, and the engine undoubtedly filed like the other vans he’d found. It would keep the evidence response team happy for a few hours.

  Daniel motioned Brit and each took one side of the van, peering inside the windows without luck. He waited for Brit’s cover, put his hand on the sliding door, and jerked it open, rolling right to give his partner a clean shot inside.

  The van was empty. No rear seats, no tools, no rope or restraints. No Eve.

  No girl.

  Lori stepped close, scanned the dark trees ahead, and spoke in a voice that no more disturbed the night than a moth’s wings. “He’s here.”

  With those words Lori stepped into his space. She felt the scene in the same way he did. “You’re right. Go easy.”

  A cliff rose to the sky at the end of a deer path, fifty yards farther. The cave opening was precisely where the GPS coordinates had placed it. A large pine and a boulder twice Daniel’s height protected a two-foot fissure in the cliff face.

  Daniel motioned Brit to send the tactical team along the length of the cliff in both directions, then cast one long look at Lori, who had her eyes locked on his.

  I hope you’re ready for this.

  Then he slipped inside.

  He pressed his left hand against the smooth stone surface along the southern wall and inched forward in the dark. Gun ready at his shoulder, muzzle low. Lori right behind, breathing steadily.

  Her leading hand touched his elbow. Released it. Touched it again.

  The sound of water dripping in a cavern was the first evidence that they’d entered more than a long, thin fissure. A musty odor of earthen mildew filled his nostrils. A scent that had permeated the root cellars Eve had used on two other occasions.

  The ground suddenly sloped down. And it was down there that he first saw the faint hint of light. Hardly more than a shift in the darkness, from the thickest black to a shade of dark brown.

  He instinctively reached back to stop Lori. His hand found her belly. He held her shirt and eased her close, heart in his throat.

  “He’s here,” he mouthed. “Watch your feet.”

  Then he let her go and picked his way down. To a wall, where the tunnel made a sharp right.

  The light glowed at the end of a long passageway, flickering orange on granite.

  Daniel fought the impulse to run around the corner to the source of that light. He waited until Lori and Brit were by his side. Rattling stones announced the presence of two men from the tacti- cal unit close behind. Daniel tried to wave them back, but even if they could see his hand, they were already down the slope.

  He opened a palm at Brit and mouthed for him to keep them back.

  Montova’s voice haunted his mind. What do you do best, Daniel?

  I work alone. I go into Eve’s mind alone.

  Why do you go into Eve’s mind alone, Daniel?

  Because I know him. I know how he was made, and I know how to unmake him.

  Daniel hurried down the long passageway. The ground was mostly clay, blown in by the wind over the centuries. He avoided loose stones, advancing in a crouch, weapon ready.

  Then he was at the next bend, facing a wall that flickered with light that could only come from flames. Daniel raised his weapon and took the corner low, cutting the pie in increments with the front sight of his MP5, breathing and scanning, high and low, left to right.

  The wide cav
ern ran fifty yards and ended at a flat wall. Two flaming torches hung from wire fixed to the ceiling at the far end.

  Stables, the kind you might see in a barn, ran along both sides. Marked off by two-by-fours that ran from ceiling to floor. No scent, sound, or indication of any animals.

  An image of a hermit flashed through Daniel’s mind. A whole tribe of them were reported to inhabit these canyons. This wasn’t Eve. The den was occupied by squatters. They kept their animals here.

  A hot vise of panic seized his shoulder blades. They’d been wrong?

  “A prison,” Lori whispered.

  His mind snapped at the words.

  Water dripped steadily on rock somewhere. He stepped forward, swung his muzzle to his right, into the first cell. The light on this side was dim at best. He pivoted, swept the cell.

  Stone floor. Empty.

  He spun and searched the cell along the opposite wall. Same.

  Daniel hurried down the cavern, peering into the cells on either side. Empty. All empty.

  But the fourth wasn’t. A dead goat lay in the center. He knew it was dead, not sleeping, because it was on its back, four legs jutting to the ceiling. The carcass was intact, but the thorax had been sawn and spread, and the internal organs appeared to have been removed in a macabre display of pathology—a classic Y incision. No blood on the floor. The beast had either been killed elsewhere and brought here, or killed here with exacting precision.

  He moved on, fixed on the cells to his left, walking laterally, nerves strung like bowstrings, palms now wet on his gun. More light here. The flames licked at the smoke they spewed.

  The cell next to the last on this side was empty.

  And the last cell, too, except for a gray blanket that hung from a wire stretched between the wood posts and the back wall.

  He jerked his head back and saw that Brit had already checked the cells on the other side. Brit mouthed the word at him: clear.

  Meaning what? Eve had taken this victim with him? Or that this wasn’t Eve?

  “Daniel?”

  He turned back and saw that Lori had advanced past him and was staring into the corner of the last cell. Where the gray blanket hung like a curtain. Not against the wall as he’d assumed, but several feet from the wall. He moved closer to see what had arrested her attention.

  Propelled by something close to panic, she ran in front of him, slapped up the crude wooden latch, and rushed inside the pen.

  He peered between the two-by-fours and saw the victim then. Seated on a metal chair between the blanket and the stone wall with Eve scrawled in red behind her. Dressed in the same dirty white hospital gown that all of Eve’s victims had been found in.

  Only this victim had a gunnysack over her head.

  And she was shivering.

  Alive.

  “Wait!” Daniel advanced, rotated into the cage, and moved past Lori.

  Heart hammering like a steam pump, he stepped up to the blanket, pulled it all the way back, and stared at the girl.

  “She’s in shock,” Lori whispered.

  Daniel spun to Brit, who’d entered behind them. “This is him. Set up a perimeter south to Pueblo, north to Monument. Lock down 24 in both directions, fifty miles out. Get that tactical team scouring these cliffs. I want them to find routes up or down, specifically toward the highway. Have them spot and flag any large footprints, anything similar to our profile.”

  Brit snapped orders at the two men who’d followed them down the tunnel.

  “He was here in the last thirty minutes,” Lori said, pointing toward a wet spot of blood on the floor. “We need to glove up. For that matter, she could be contagious. One sneeze, and she could turn this sickness into an aerosol.”

  “We don’t have time,” Daniel heard himself say. Eve had never left a victim like this; they couldn’t risk losing her. Lori made no objection, despite the break in protocol.

  Silence filled the cavern except for the dripping of water. And the faint rattle of the metal chair under Eve’s victim.

  She was thin—not an ounce over a hundred pounds. Pale. Blue veins traced the flesh beneath her arms’ translucent, blotchy skin, symptomatic of the meningitis variant that had killed the others. Dirty, trembling fingers hung loosely by her sides. Bare feet.

  No sign that she was aware of their presence.

  Lori broke the stillness. “She’s dying. We have to get her to a hospital, Daniel. We may already be too late!” She reached for the girl’s arm and gently touched the blotchy skin with a gloved hand. “It’s okay, honey. We’re here to help. Can you hear us?”

  Daniel eased forward, took the corner of the brown bag between his fingers, and pulled it up. They had to keep the girl alive—she was their only living link to Eve.

  The sack slid up, revealing her slender neck, then her chin. Quivering lips, glistening with spittle. Jaw clenched.

  Daniel pulled the bag free.

  The girl’s eyes were wide open but had rolled back into her head so that her irises were hidden. Her white eyeballs stared ahead, sightless.

  Mucus ran from both nostrils and mixed with foaming spittle that seeped from her mouth. Stringy blonde hair hung below her ears, trembling.

  The girl’s head moved. Turned slowly toward them. Her mouth parted and she began to suck air in short, tight gasps. Her nostrils flared with each inhalation.

  The sight of this victim tortured by such an abnormal condition rooted Daniel to the ground. A thousand discussions about cause of death in the Eve investigation hadn’t prepared Daniel for actually seeing a live victim being ravaged by the disease.

  Lori backed away.

  “Her eyes . . .” Daniel wasn’t sure how to express his concern over the severe rolling of her eyes.

  “Photophobia is a classic symptom of meningitis,” Lori said. “She’s reacting to the light.”

  The girl’s mouth opened wider and she growled at them. Foamy bubbles popped in the corner of her mouth.

  And then her jaws clamped shut and she began to whimper. A desperate cry for help from a wrinkled face. Her eyes righted themselves for a moment, irises grayed by whatever disease was killing her, then rolled back into her skull again.

  Daniel felt his heart rise into his throat. His own fingers were quivering, perhaps more than hers.

  Lori walked behind the girl, eyes wide. “We have to help her.” She tentatively placed a hand on each of the girl’s shoulders.

  No response. Just the grimacing hyperventilation.

  “Daniel!”

  “How?” His voice sounded like a gravel mixer.

  “We have to get her to the hospital.”

  He’d never seen a condition that presented in such a disturbing way, and he didn’t know what the girl was capable of, but they didn’t have time for caution—they’d wasted enough time assessing her condition already.

  He stepped in, slid one of his arms under her legs and the other behind her back. She didn’t resist. Neither did she calm.

  He lifted her trembling form and stood awkwardly. Her jaw stretched in a silent scream; her body shook with such force that for a moment Daniel thought he might drop her.

  Lori had both her hands on the girl’s cheeks. “Sh, sh . . . it’s okay, honey. It’s going to be okay.” But tears brimmed in Lori’s eyes. Dealing with the dead was one thing. Seeing a living human so tormented was another, even for a pathologist.

  “Her axial muscles are completely relaxed,” she said. “She’s not seizing, she’s not convulsing.” He didn’t know the significance of her assessment. Her eyes met his, clouded with concern.

  Then they were moving, running through the gate. Back down the chamber. Up the dark passage by the light of Lori’s torch. The girl shook in his arms like a blender.

  Eve was killing his victims with an exotic disease related to meningitis—they’d established that much over a year ago. Murder one, which included intentionally exposing another person to any life-threatening substance.

  They burst from th
e cliff wall to find Brit Holman in an urgent discussion about Highway 24 with Nate Sinclair. Nate was trying to get the Colorado State Patrol to close the pass.

  “Call FBI–Denver,” Daniel snapped. “Tell them to lock down this location and perimeter.”

  To Nate: “How far to the closest hospital?”

  Nate’s eyes were on the shaking body in Daniel’s arms. “Twenty minutes.”

  “You’re with us. Lock it down, Brit, I don’t care what it takes. He’s close.”

  “What about you?”

  “She’s an eyewitness. I have to keep her alive.”

  FOUR

  INEED THE FASTEST route,” Daniel snapped.

  “It depends on—”

  “The fastest, now! Back the same way?”

  “Yes, back.”

  Nate sat in the passenger’s seat next to Daniel, still in shock over the girl’s condition. Behind Nate, Lori cradled the girl’s head in her lap as she prepared an intravenous syringe with the cephalosporinampicillin antibiotic cocktail they brought for precisely this reason. They would soon know if the meningitis was viral, bacterial, or even existent at all. If Lori was disturbed by the girl’s grunting, her white eyes, the foaming mouth, she showed none of it. Her medical training had kicked in.

  Daniel squealed through a tight turn and floored the accelerator. They had to reach the hospital before the girl’s internal organs hemorrhaged. High doses of antibiotics could stave off bacterial assault, but only if administered before irreversible damage had taken its toll, and only if it was, in fact, a bacterial infection. This was only a fraction of what Daniel had learned about meningitis over the past year.

  Lori slapped the girl’s arm to distend a vein. “Light, I need light!”

  Daniel reached back and switched on the dome light.

  “Hold on, honey. Stay with us. It’s going to be okay.” She pressed the needle into a peripheral vein and administered the full dose. Hopefully enough to slow the infection.

  At this point he didn’t care what they tried, as long as it increased the girl’s chance of survival. He might even try a priest, if one could administer psychiatric therapy. Despite his disdain for religion, Daniel was all too aware of the soothing effects it afforded the mind. And the mind needed soothing at times.