Robert Walker - Blind Instinct

“There's said to be a series of catacombs and vaults, old cellars left over from Roman times down there below the bazaar. No one goes there of course, rat-infested, perhaps a few homeless living down there, but Martin somehow disappeared there.”

“Shall we go have a look?” she asked.

“By all means, but shouldn't we call for what is it? Backup? As they say in police parlance?”

“If we find something, we'll call for backup. Come on. Lead me to where he disappeared.”

“First, I want to settie your mind about St. Albans.”

She looked queerly back at him.

“Don't deny it. I know you've come to suspect me in all this hideous affair. Rampant suspicion. Isn't it all part and parcel of what you do for a living, my dear?” She sighed heavily, nodding. “Yes, I'm guilty.”

He took her gently by the arm. “Now come along to our dungeons here in the cathedral, so you will put your mind at ease about Father Luc Sante.”

At midday, Richard Sharpe pulled up to the York Hotel in search of Jessica, time seeping away from him like water through a sieve. He'd been unable all morning to locate her to even inquire if she would consider wearing a wire. He inquired with the crime lab, Schuller and Raehael. No one had seen her this morning.

She had left word with no one.

He then tried telephoning her at her room, but he'd been unable to reach her at the York, either.

He had a mad notion she might actually be in her room, sound asleep with earplugs in her ears, or in the shower when the phone had continued to blare. He kept telling himself that she could not be so foolish as to go into Luc Sante's lair again, alone.

He banged uselessly on the door even as he listened for the shower within, but no report of any noise whatsoever on the interior returned to him. Finally, he went back downstairs and demanded a key, flashing his badge, fearful she might be incapacitated inside her hotel room.

When he and the chief of hotel security, a friend of longstanding, entered the room, they found it immaculate, the bed even neatly arranged, he supposed so that the maids needn't work so hard where she might be concerned.

Richard searched the premises for any clue, any sign of where she might have gotten off to when his eyes fell on Luc Sante's book on the nightstand. “Can we trace her last call from here, time and destination?” he asked the security head. “Absolutely. I'll just have to make a call,” Harlan Nelson replied.

The wait felt longer than it was, Sharpe nervously pacing the empty room. Finally, Nelson read the phone number, saying, “The call was put in at 10:40 p.m.”

“That's the Yard, CID, no help.”

“Anything else I can do for you, Richard?”

“No, Harlan, but thank you. Will you lock up here? I must hurry.”

“Certainly, Richard, and my best to your girls.”

But Sharpe had disappeared through the doorway. In the lobby, he ran into Erin Culbertson who slowed him, saying, “Aren't you spending a lot of dme here these days!”

“Out of my way, Erin.”

“Cheeky of you, Richard, not returning my calls!” she called out after him. She then located her assistant who drove the van with all the equipment, and they tried to follow Richard Sharpe through the noonday traffic.

Driving as fast as he dared, Richard imagined all sorts of horrors for Jessica. He suspected that she had indeed gone back to St. Albans, knowing what she now knew, in an attempt to confront Luc Sante with the facts.

Sharpe feared such an act both brash and deadly. He rushed toward St. Albans, but he found himself hopelessly snarled in traffic, some accident ahead. He radioed for Copperwaite to join him at St. Albans, to stake the place out as Stuart had suggested, explaining that Jessica Coran had already returned there before he could get to her to discuss the wire device. “Can you meet me there?”

“Where are you now?” asked Copperwaite. “In traffic at a streetlight. Some accident has gridlocked me in. I'm abandoning the car for a few blocks' walk, and from there I'll catch a cab.”

“See you a block south of St. Albans, then? On Exeter, maybe?”

“Fine, yes, do that.” Richard was off and running.

Using a flashlight, Luc Sante led Jessica to and through. “All the known secret chambers of the cathedral,” as he put it, explaining that the crypt they stood in, at the very bottom-bottom of the church had, in the Middle Ages, become the burial crypt of the early priests who had lived their lives behind the walls of St. Albans.

Her penlight in hand, Jessica felt the breathing, staring walls closing in on her. They'd left the warmth and sweet-smelling incense of rosewood in the cathedral, left its familiar corridors. This place formed a dungeon mired in dme, sodden with dampness. It recalled the mine shaft she and Richard and Tatham had traversed.

“You have a cemetery below the church. How… interesting,” she managed. “I'm something of a cemetery enthusiast, and I've seen crypts and cemeteries in every place that I've ever visited, but nothing like this.” The room opened on a secret chamber where headstones lay in rows on the dirt floor; beneath each a former priest lay at eternal rest.

“In ancient times, it was thought the only way the graves of the holy fathers would remain undisturbed,” explained Luc Sante.

“They were robbed in those days by grave robbers, body snatchers, I know,” she said.

“Actually, the holy men had their bodies hacked up and pieces sold to the superstitious who-”

“My God, why?”

“Oh, but a holy man's finger or even more so his penis could bring joyful bounty to a family who blessed it each night!” Luc Sante laughed. “Human idiocy, but there you have it. Imagine how much people paid out in funds for the purported bones of Christ over the years. His body has been sold over and over for countless generations like some of your swampland in Florida.” Again, his laugh bounced about the silent sepulcher. He then pointed to the slabs with inscriptions. “My predecessors. Their remains still considered as holy as ever.”

Luc Sante next opened another room, using a huge jailhouse key on a large ring, and there he displayed a small crypt. Jessica saw the crypt here as an ancient, sealed stone coffin, like something out of a Robert Bloch gothic novel, where a timeless vampire might reside within.

Here, too, stood walls lined with torches that burned centuries before, now sitting silent under Luc Sante's modem, battery powered, handheld torch, the flashlight sluicing through cobwebs, creating a patina of flying dust particles everywhere. The walls were festooned with dust-laden cobwebs, appeared crumbling as did the stairwell leading to this place.

“I think I've seen enough,” she confessed.

“Not at all. There are corridors on either side of this room. A regular mausoleum. What we hide here is fairly banal, of no interest, and certainly out of use.”

“You've made your point well, sir.”

“We may just as well take this path,” he countered. “It leads full circle to where we entered, and it is no further, and along the way, you can decide for yourself if St. Albans has any other skeletons in her closet.”

They continued along ancient corridors, the odor of earth and mineral-rich water, seeping through the rock face here, filled her nostrils. They passed several dungeonlike rooms, each of which Luc Sante insisted on opening, each sending forth a vile, stale breath like that of cadavers. Cobwebs and filth which appeared to have gone undisturbed for centuries met them at every turn. “Nothing whatever here,” he assured her again. “Still, I can well understand both your suspicion and curiosity.”

“How did you know I was suspicious and curious?”