Кей Хупер - Hiding in the Shadows

"Here." Kane had located a door into the warehouse, and his pencil flashlight examined it inch by inch. "As far as I can see, there's no security system."

"They think the dog's enough," Faith murmured with certainty.

"Could be," Daniels agreed.

Kane shrugged, muttered, "In for a penny," and knelt to work on the door's lock.

Faith watched his agile fingers using the fine tools. She wondered if there was anything he had tried his hand at only to fail, and doubted it.

Like Kane seldom failed. At anything.

"Got it." Kane rose to his feet, putting away the tools and securing the case in his pocket, then cautiously tried the door. If there was any alarm raised, it was a silent one.

They stood inside a cavernous space illuminated by a few scattered yellow security lights. The place was virtually empty.

Kane glanced at Daniels, who shrugged and said, "Explains the lack of any real security."

Faith was thinking of something else. "There are windows, and the walls don't look right. Is there something below this level? A basement of some kind?"

"Let's find out," Kane said.

Since it was easy to remain within sight of one another, they split up to search, and it was Kane who summoned the other two nearly ten minutes later. He had located a room, adjacent to the main warehouse, that was clearly meant to house an office but currently held only an old slate-top desk and a wooden chair.

And another door.

The door opened onto stairs, and the stairs led down. There was a light switch just inside the door, and Kane hesitated, glancing at Daniels.

"What do you think?"

"I think we're alone here."

"I know we are," Faith said, not even aware of her certainty until she spoke.

That was good enough for Kane, so he flipped the switch. Several naked bulbs awoke to provide enough light to see by.

As soon as the three of them started down, Faith felt the damp chill that was so familiar she stopped in her tracks.

"Faith?" Daniels, behind her, didn't touch her.

Three steps below her, Kane turned and looked back. "Is this it?" he asked softly.

She swallowed. "We're close."

He took her hand. "Come on."

Faith didn't know if she would have been able to continue down into that place without his grip. It was more commanding than comforting, but at least it was contact with something warm and alive.

I have to stay grounded, he said, connected to the here and now.

The water sounds were louder inside her head. She hung on to Kane's hand as if to a lifeline.

At the bottom of the long flight of stairs, they found themselves in a square concrete room hardly larger than the office above. There was no sign that it was intended for anything other than extra storage; open metal shelving units lined two of the walls, though all they contained now were a few dusty stacks of paper and other ancient office supplies.

Faith turned immediately toward the bare wall the farthest from the stairs, and realized she was silently counting only when she reached twelve steps — and that rear wall. Her free hand lifted to touch it gently.

"This shouldn't be here," she murmured. "It ... She was past this, beyond this point."

Daniels took out a penknife and dug into the mortar between two concrete blocks. It crumbled easily, still visibly damp. "This is a new wall. Only a few days old, if that."

It took them a while to find tools that would work — a dull ax and a heavy mallet from upstairs in the warehouse. Kane and Daniels were able to knock several blocks loose and open up the wall.

Standing several feet away, Faith stared at that gaping maw and told herself there was no reason to fear what lay within. Just the other half of this room, that was all. Bare concrete floor and block walls and ...Kane and Daniels went through the wall.

The chair wouldn't be in there, she thought. That would have been destroyed, maybe burned. But they must not have been able to get the bloodstains out of the concrete floor, and so they'd walled up the place, concealing all evidence. Everybody knew the police had all kinds of forensic tricks now, chemicals they could spray on surfaces to make bloodstains show up, even when they'd been scrubbed, even when they were invisible to the naked eye, perhaps painted over.

Closing off that part of the room was safest, that's what they would have thought. Move Dinah somewhere else, somewhere even darker and colder, where the sounds of water were loud and constant and maddening, and then build this wall to hide what had been done in this place.

Faith drew a deep breath and went through the hole in the wall to join Kane and Daniels inside.

The more powerful flashlights they had brought for this interior search helped to delineate the shape and size of the small basement, but there was almost nothing to be seen. Walls, ceiling, floor.

Stained floor.

"They tried to clean it up," Daniels said with detachment. "But concrete is porous and stains below the surface. They might have painted it, but the entire floor would have had to be done in order not to look suspicious, and who would bother painting a floor in a place like this? Easier and simpler to just make the space down here match up with the size of the office above by building a wall to hide this part. Without the original blueprints, it isn't likely that anyone looking down here would have guessed. The new wall would blend once the mortar cured, and their ... secret would have been safe."

Faith looked down at the rust-colored stains on the floor, then turned her gaze away with a shudder as she remembered blood dripping from mangled wrists.

Kane was staring down at the floor, unmoving.

She wanted so badly to reach out to him that her hand lifted instinctively. And then hung there between them, meaningless and impotent.

He didn't want to be touched. And most especially, she thought, he didn't want to be touched by her.

In that same steady, unemotional voice, Daniels said, "Kane, we have to get out of here. We have what we came here to get evidence to convince us that something happened here, that Dinah might have been held here."

"The police," Kane said in an odd, still tone.

"There are still no legal grounds for a warrant. We're in here illegally. If the police even listened to us and came in here, they couldn't use anything they found in court. Worse, storming in here openly before we know more could panic whoever's got Dinah, force them to... We have to find a way to uncover other evidence that will lead the police here logically. It will take time, but it has to be done. We won't help Dinah by rushing off to confront Cochrane before we know more. But we have a place to start now. We have somewhere to look."

Faith forced her hand to drop to her side and made herself speak calmly.

"Won't they know we were here?"

"Not if we're careful. And lucky. Kane, we have to go. Now. That dog won't be out much longer."

Faith thought it was a toss-up as to whether Kane would listen to the RI., but in the end he did. Or perhaps he simply had to get away from those terrible stains on the floor.

He and Daniels replaced the blocks they had removed, using the crumbling mortar for the joints.

The result would fool no one close-up, but when Daniels loosened the bare light-bulb hanging closest to the wall until it went Out, the dimness made their handiwork much less evident.

They were careful to replace the tools and to close and lock the doors they had found that way, but there was no time in getting out of the warehouse and back to the gate. The sleeping dog was just beginning to stir as they slipped past him.

Daniels didn't come in when they returned to Kane's apartment; he wanted to do his own checking on Jordan Cochrane and the warehouse, and said he'd return first thing the following morning to report in... sooner if he discovered anything even remotely likely to help them find Dinah.