Lisa Gardner - The killing hour

“We made the left turn,” Mac said into the phone. “What do we do next?” This time he couldn’t make out Ray’s reply at all. Something about “smell the fungus.” Mac looked around sourly. They were in the middle of soaring woods, deep into the heart of nowhere. Since turning off Interstate 81 forty minutes ago, they’d drifted into the westernmost part of the state, a thin peninsula wedged between Kentucky and North Carolina. Nothing around here but trees, fields, and double-wides. Last building they’d seen was a decrepit gas station fifteen miles back. It looked like it hadn’t pumped a drop since 1968. Before that had been half a dozen mobile homes and one tiny Baptist church. Lloyd Armitage hadn’t been kidding. Whatever better days had come to this part of the state had departed a long time ago.

Now it was strictly backwoods country, and Mac’s cell phone reception would not be getting better anytime soon.

“I’ll try you again at the scene,” Mac said. Ray made some kind of reply, but Mac still couldn’t hear him and finally snapped his phone shut.

“What do we do?” Nora Ray asked him.

“Now, we walk.”

Actually, first they assembled gear. True to her word, Nora Ray had come prepared. From her travel bag, she pulled out a modest daypack, complete with dried food, first-aid kit, compass, Swiss army knife, and water filtration system. She also had waterproof matches and a small flashlight. She loaded up her gear; Kimberly and Mac attended to their own.

They had three gallons of water left. Mac thought of the condition the girl would probably be in, unglued his shirt from his torso for the fourth time in the last five minutes, and stuck all three gallons in his backpack. The weight was considerable, the nylon pack feeling like a son of a bitch as it dragged against his shoulders and pressed his shirt against his overheated skin.

Kimberly came over, removed one of the gallon jugs and stuck it in her own backpack. “Don’t be an idiot,” she told him, then hefted on her pack and clipped it around her hips.

“At least the trees are providing shade,” Mac said.

“Now if only they’d soak up the wet. How far?”

“Couple of miles. I think.”

Kimberly glanced at her watch again. “We’d better get moving.” She sneaked a peek at Nora Ray, and Mac could read her thoughts. How hard could the civilian push it? They’d soon find out.

It was a surreal hike, Mac thought later. Moving down a thickly shaded logging road in the middle of a blistering afternoon. The sun seemed to chase them, peeking in and out of the trees as it dodged their footsteps and seared them with unrelenting beams of light.

Bugs came out in force. Mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds. Some kind of obnoxious fly with a vicious little bite. They were batting at their faces before they’d gone fifteen feet. At thirty feet, they stopped and got out the cans of bug repellent. A quarter of a mile later, they stopped again and sprayed each other down as if the stuff were gallons of cheap perfume.

It didn’t make a difference. The flies swarmed, the sun burned and the humidity covered their bodies in never-ending rivulets of sweat. No one spoke. They just put one foot in front of the other and focused on walking.

Forty minutes later, Mac smelled it first. “What the hell is that?”

“Deet,” Kimberly said grimly. “Or sweat. Take your pick.”

“No, no, it’s worse than that.”

Nora Ray stopped. “It’s like something rotten,” she said. “Almost like… sewage.”

Mac suddenly got it. What Ray Lee Chee had been trying to tell him on the phone. Smell the fungus. He picked up the pace. “Come on,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

He started jogging now, Kimberly and Nora Ray hastily following suit. They crested the small rise of the hill, came down the other side, and then abruptly drew up short.

“Holy shit,” Mac said.

“B-grade horror movie,” Nora Ray murmured.

And Kimberly just shook her head.

Quincy was getting frustrated. He’d tried Kimberly’s cell phone three or four times without success. Now he turned back to Ennunzio and Rainie.

“Do you know where this cave is?” he asked Ennunzio.

“Absolutely. It’s in Lee County, a good three or four hours from here. But you can’t just crash into this cavern as if it’s one of the tourist hot spots from the Shenandoah Valley. To access Orndorff’s Cavern, you need serious gear.”

“Fine. Get the gear, then take us.”

Ennunzio was silent for a moment. “Perhaps it’s time to let the official case team know what’s going on.”

“Really? What do you think they’ll do first, Doctor? Rescue the victim? Or call you in for a three-hour interview to corroborate every last detail of your story?”

The linguist saw his point. “I’ll get my gear.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Hell if I know. Some kind of cavern entrance. Maybe amid a pile of rocks, or a sinkhole at the base of a tree. I’ve never done any spelunking. Then again, how hard can it be to find the entrance to a cave?”

Pretty hard, it turned out. Mac had already been running around the sawmill for a good fifteen minutes. So had Kimberly and Nora Ray. They were probably all being stupid. The smell was the first kicker. The foul odor rose so thick in the heavy, humid air it stung their eyes and burned their throats. Mac was now holding an old T-shirt over his mouth, but even that didn’t make much difference.

Next to the smell was the intense wall of heat rising from the same sky-high pile of sawdust. None of them had even recognized the wood residue at first. It had looked like a pile of white sand, or maybe dirt covered in snow. Ten minutes ago, Kimberly had gotten close enough to discern the truth. Fungus. The entire stinking, rotten pile was covered in some kind of fungus.

When Brian Knowles had guessed their water sample came from a site in crisis, he hadn’t been kidding.

Now Mac leapt belatedly over one abandoned blade saw. He wove in and out of long, shed-style buildings with busted-out windows and sagging roof beams. The old conveyors still gleamed darkly in the shadows, complete with nasty-looking pikes used for skewering the wood as it was brought before the blade.

Litter covered the ground. Crumpled-up soda cans, discarded Styrofoam cups. Mac found a pile of old gasoline containers, probably used to fill up the handheld chain saws. He found another pile of old fluorescent lights. A faint popping sound was emitted from the debris field as some of the glass exploded from the heat of the sun.

He’d never seen anything like it. Strings of rusted barbed wire clawed at his legs. Abandoned saw blades lay hidden in the overgrown weeds, waiting to do far, far worse. This place was straight out of an environmentalist’s nightmare. He was 100 percent sure their third girl had to be around here somewhere.

Kimberly came staggering around one of the broken-down sheds. She had tears streaming down her face from the stench. “Any luck?”

Mac shook his head.

She nodded and went careening on by, still looking for some hint of an underground cavern.

He came upon Nora Ray soon afterward. She’d stopped running around and was now standing in one place, her eyes closed, her hands spread by her sides.

“See anything?” he asked brusquely.

“No.” She opened her eyes and seemed embarrassed to find him there. “I don’t know… It’s not like I’m a psychic or anything. I just have these dreams so I thought maybe if I closed my eyes…”

“Anything that works.”

“But it’s not working. Nothing’s working. And that’s so unbelievably frustrating. I mean, if she’s in a cavern, well then, aren’t we literally walking on top of her right now?”