Deep-Fried Homicide (The Laurel Falls Mysteries Book 1) (20 page)

Rachel pulled out her phone again and scrolled through the pictures, finally holding the screen toward Mrs. Knox and watching her face. “Was this one of the men?”

Mrs. Knox leaned in close and studied the picture with great intensity. “No, I’m sorry. He wasn’t one of the two.”

“Oh, well. Thank you very much for all your help, Mrs. Knox. Have a splendid day.”

Rachel shoved the phone into her purse and spun on her heel, nearly slamming face-first into Rick’s chest. Neither said a word as they retraced their steps through the library and back office and out onto the sidewalk.

The sun was behind a cloud when they stepped onto the sidewalk and as the door slowly closed behind them, the rays of the sun burst from the cloud and lit the scene with a bright orange light. Rick winced and turned his eyes downward. By the time his eyes had adjusted and he looked up, Rachel was already ten paces down the sidewalk.

She walked with long strides and determined steps, as though she wanted to punish the pavement for some wrongdoing. Rick trailed after, trying to catch up to her with his own long, quick strides. When he finally gained her position, she was gnawing on her thumbnail, her face a mask of concentration.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, hoping to draw her out, calm her down.

“The old drain tunnel is still there. And it runs by the cemetery. It goes all the way to the beach.”

“That’s what I heard.” He was mid-stride when Rachel abruptly spun and headed the other way, dodging him by only a hair’s breadth.

“The tunnels haven’t been used in years, so they’re empty and most likely dry…at least this far into town. Maybe not down by the beach, though.”

Rick had nearly caught up to her again, halfway down that same sidewalk, her face still scrunched. “Yea, but all the ways into the tunnel are in broad daylight in the middle of the street.”

She spun again, bounced off Rick on her way to the other corner. “Yes, but not the entrance from the beach.” She turned again, fast. Rick hadn’t yet caught up and she passed him going the other way. “And there’s no electricity within a mile of that cave.”

“Why would they need electricity?” Rick asked. He had grown tired and bored with trying to keep pace with Rachel. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk now, his arms folded over his chest, head turning to watch Rachel pace.

“Well…” She thought hard, drawing a deep crease down the middle of her forehead. “Well, they would need ventilation. Especially in the more distant parts of the pipe.” Another turn. “And light.”

“Okay…”

“They might even need to run pumps to keep the deeper parts of the pipe dry.” Again, she turned.

“So, what are they using the tunnel for?” Rick asked the thin air. Rachel was all the way down to the far corner.

“Hmm…” she began, turning again. “Maybe they’re using it to store things. Illegal things. Or maybe they’re using it to move things without being seen.” Rachel turned once more, snapping her fingers and stopping right in front of Rick. “And to do that, you need more than one entrance. Besides, it would be too risky to have just one entrance, wouldn’t it?”

“It would.” Rick nodded his agreement and watched as Rachel took off again. She was pacing shorter laps, quickening her pace. Whatever she had in her head was going to bust out soon.

She stopped, once more right in front of him. “The same truck was at the beach and the cemetery. It had dirt in it at the cemetery. And they’re not being very high-tech about it either. They had shovels and such. They were digging in. They were creating another entrance to that pipe right under everyone’s noses.”

“But you heard what Mrs. Knox said. Those pipes are old and probably made of lead or ceramic. They couldn’t cut through lead very easily and if they broke through the ceramic, it would collapse.”

Rachel stopped again, her hands on her hips, chewing her lower lip. “Well, they must have found a way. There were trucks parked at the cemetery and one of them was filled with dirt. They were digging. And they were going in and out of that old mausoleum. That’s where the second entrance is.”

“But you didn’t find anything.”

“But those men ran in there and disappeared.”

“How?” Rick thought he knew what would come next. He hoped he was wrong.

“I don’t know. But maybe if I take another look in there, I can figure it out.”

Rick scowled at her. “Dooley told you to stay out of it and you promised you would. In fact, you specifically promised that you wouldn’t go anywhere near the cemetery again.”

“And I won’t.”

Rick put his own hands on his hips and tightened his jaw. His tone was challenging, warning, both at the same time. “Rachel…..”

“You will.” She smiled.

Rick felt the breath and the hope leave his body. “Ah, no.” It was almost a prayer.

Rachel smiled broadly and nodded slowly.

It was the beginning of the end for Rick.

Chapter 10

R
ick stood before the mausoleum, his shoulders slumped and his head tilted slightly to one side. He felt Rachel’s presence behind him and though he couldn’t see her, he knew she was smiling. In one hand, Rick held his cell phone and in the other was a flashlight. Just then, he could think of a hundred horrid things he would rather do than walk into that mausoleum.

“Are you in yet?” Rachel asked over the cell phone.

“Not yet. Give me a sec, okay?” He pulled the phone away from his ear and sighed softly so that she wouldn’t hear it. She was sitting in the truck a block away, on one of the side streets where they had hoped Dooley wouldn’t drive by and see her.

“Well, hurry it up already. You don’t want to be in there after dark, do you?”

Rick sighed again and let his arm go limp. “No, I surely don’t,” he mumbled. Again, he hoped she hadn’t heard him.

He reached out and disengaged the latch on the mausoleum door. The door itself was a lot heavier than he had anticipated and so he put more effort into his second attempt at opening it than he had his first. It grated and dragged but yielded to his less than gentle persuasions. A small cloud of dust escaped on a breath of wind and Rick could have sworn he smelled cologne of some sort.

“What are you doing now?” chirped Rachel’s voice over the cell phone.

Rick put the phone back to his ear and spoke softly, so as not to disturb the dead, he supposed. “I just went in. Switching on my flashlight now. I’m taking one step toward the coffin. Now another…”

“Okay, okay! I get it. Sheesh!”

Rick smiled at his small victory and pressed deeper into the large room. “So, let me get this straight. You moved all these urns.”

“Yep.”

“And you tested all the walls for levers?”

“Yep.”

He fingered a few dead blossoms in a vase next to one of the urns and watched as they crumbled. “Spun the vases?”

There was a long moment of silence and Rick’s smiled widened. “No. I didn’t.”

“Ah ha!” proclaimed Rick. He spun the one vase, which was bolted into the stone holding the urn. It turned both ways easily, but produced no results. He moved on to the next and the next until he once more heard Rachel’s voice in his ear.

“What are you doing now? Did you find something?”

“Nope. I turned all the vases but nothing happened.”

“Oh.” Clearly, she was disappointed.

Rick let his flashlight beam play over the walls, floor and ceiling, finally letting it come to rest on the coffin at the center of the room. “I assume you opened the coffin?”

“Of course not. Ew!”

“You’re not a very good investigator, then, if you’d let a little thing like a two-hundred-year-old rotting corpse keep you from the answer.” Rick was quiet then, as he set the phone and the flashlight down on the nearest shelf and put his back into opening the coffin lid.

It was heavy and dusty and his hands slipped off the grips twice before he got a good hold on it. He had seen dead bodies before, of course, in all kinds of states. He figured that any body which had been interred for that amount of time would certainly have turned to dust. He was wrong.

Biceps bulging, he pushed the lid to its limit, testing its stability before he let go of the thing. Then he bent down to retrieve his flashlight and phone. As he shone the light into the coffin, his eyes grew wide and his jaw first dropped, then curled his mouth into a grin.

“Oh my God!” he exclaimed.

“What is it, Rick? What did you find? Rick? Are you all right? Rick? Rick!”

He wanted to let her go on that way, just to rattle her cage. It would serve her right. But if he knew his wife – and after all this time, he surely did – it would be mere seconds before she bolted from the truck, terrified, and ran to check on him.

“You won’t believe what I found,” he said at last. “Here, let me show you.”

He turned on the video chat. Her face blurred into existence and Rick felt gratified at the amount of curiosity and fear he found there.

“There you are,” she giggled. “So, show me already.”

“Okay, I opened the coffin and aimed the flashlight into it and….this is what I saw.” He turned the phone so that the camera was facing down into the coffin.

But instead of a dead body and a solid bottom, Rachel saw a gaping hole. It was the full width and breadth of the coffin and it dropped away into ever-deepening darkness. There was a ladder descending into the hole from one end and, though you couldn’t see any further down than about twenty feet, Rachel knew that it must go down a long way.

“Holy cow!” she exclaimed. “You found it! You really found it.”

“I sure did.” He felt pleased with himself for only a few second before panic began to well up inside him. “And now I’m getting out of here. I can hear those machines running, whatever they are. And somebody might show up at any second.”

“Okay, darling. Be careful.”

“Don’t worry. I will. ETA three minutes.”

He turned off the phone and stuck it in his pocket, then eased the lid of the coffin back into place. Once he had grabbed his flashlight and made it out the door, he did the same with the large entrance door. Then it was a long sprint through the cemetery gate and along the fence until he reached the truck.

Rachel threw her arms around his neck as he slid onto the seat. Her reaction was strange and a bit dramatic, even for her. Rick held her for a second, realizing that she was trembling.

“You’re amazing,” she said, pulling back at last. Her eyes were sparkling, her face bright. She was never happier than when she had come to the end of a mystery.

“That’s what I keep telling you,” he chuckled. “Now, let’s head for home.”

She put one hand softly on his ignition hand and cocked her head to one side. “Not quite yet. Please? I want to run something by you.”

“Uh oh!” He sat back, resigned and more than a little scared.

“No, now, just listen.” She stared off through the windshield, her eyes focused on something that wasn’t actually there. She had worked her way into the penultimate thinking face and her blinks seemed to be timed with every tenth word. “You said the machines were running down there again, right?”

“Yes.”

“So, we know for sure that they have electricity.”

“They could be using generators.” Rick shrugged and leaned back into the corner formed by the seat back and the door.

Rachel’s head whipped around and she glared at him. “Generators?”

“Yea. So, they wouldn’t need electric lines.”

“That’s not possible.”

Her tone was accusatory. It raised Rick’s hackles. “Oh really? And why not?”

“Because generators create exhaust from the gas burning. It would kill them all.”

“Maybe they have ventilation of some sort. Fans. Filters.” If he sounded at all like a petulant child, it was not without warrant.

“They could only use fans at each end of the pipe. A pipe that stretches for miles in either direction. Besides, a fan that big would be heard for miles. We didn’t hear any noise at all while we were at the beach. And the noise coming from the mausoleum wasn’t that loud.”

“Maybe when they open the crypt up, the wind is enough to push the exhaust out of there.”

“Again, not possible. The prevailing winds are from the west and blow out to sea. The mausoleum has its door shut most of the time and the wind wouldn’t blow in that way.”

Rick threw up his hands and deflated. “Okay, you got me. So they use electricity. Where’s it coming from?”

“Well, let’s see…there is no electricity in the old part of the cemetery, so they’d have to draw it from across the street.” She pointed first down and then up. “And as you can see, there are no wires, so they’re not doing that.”

“The other end, then.”

“Nope. The closest pole is at the ranger’s station nearly two miles away.”

Again Rick shrugged. “So, maybe one of the intakes then.”

“Easy enough to check. Drive on, MacDuff.”

He stared at her. “You mean, drive all over town and look at each of the storm drains?”

“Well, yea. I mean, there’s not that many. All of them are confined to the six-block downtown area.”

He wasn’t in the mood to fight it. He would lose anyway. With a long sigh and his eyes cast to the heavens, Rick started the truck and eased away from the curb.

The daylight was beginning to dwindle but they would have a few hours of good visibility left to them. They eyed each of the drains in turn, stopping briefly and checking for cords and such that might be running into the drains. Before they were done, they drew more than a few horn honks and one old lady actually shook her fist at Rick.

When they had checked them all, Rick pulled up to the curb in front of the pizza parlor and put the truck in park. Any normal person would be defeated, ready to give up and call it a day. But not Rachel. She would want to think out loud, to spout theories and possibilities until she was blue in the face and he was suicidal from irritation. He hung one arm out of the truck, felt a cool breeze stand his hairs up. There would be rain soon. Oh, how he wanted to be home just then.