Fatalis (16 page)

"A dog? Why?"

"Apparently, they found fur in the cab," Caroline said.

"Just fur? No paw prints in the blood?"

"Huh?" Caroline asked.

"I mean, a dog didn't come sniffing around after the accident?" Hannah asked.

"Oh, I don't know," Caroline said. "Listen, I'm getting motioned over by the deputy. I've got to deal with him and then talk to my insurance guy and also see if I can still get fish to my clients. If you need anything else, can we talk later in the day?"

"Sure," Hannah said. "Sorry to keep you and thanks again."

"You're welcome."

Caroline hung up. Hannah slipped her phone back in her pocket. The Wall shambled closer.

"Remember when we used to have to find a phone booth to do this?" the photographer asked.

"Yeah. But I'm not getting any more information than I used to."

"Technology. The great myth of our time."

"Not now, Wall," Hannah said She was looking back at the tent The other reporters were beginning to disperse. Then she looked back up at the mountains. "Something's not right here."

"What?"

"Something happened that they don't want us to know about."

"Maybe
they
don't know what happened," the Wall suggested. "Maybe that's what they don't want us to know."

"Possibly." Hannah glanced behind her, at the road and at the foothills. Helicopters from the search-and-rescue unit were visible in the distance. "But Sheriff Gearhart has to be thinking the same thing I am."

"Which is?"

"That this may be related to the disappearance of the engineers," Hannah said. "And if it is, there's something Gearhart may have missed."

Before the Wall could ask what that was, Hannah had her phone out again and was running to her Blazer.

It was seven o'clock in the morning when Jim Grand returned to the "volcano" cave. That's what he was calling it, since the volcano-the one with the serpent, not the dolphin-was the only image he could identify positively. He had a little more than six hours before his afternoon class and he wanted to use them productively.

The scientist had brought extra gear to explore the underground tunnels, including rubber boots and crampons for negotiating the sloping floors of the lower passageway. However, Grand knew when he got there that he probably wouldn't be needing any of it. The water runoff from the ledge was just a trickle now, not only because the rain had stopped but because the extensive drainage system built by the California Water Resources Department over the last twenty years was finally able to handle the overflow above ground. As a result, less of it was spilling into the caves.

After hammering a piton into the ledge, Grand tied a rope to the duffel bag and lowered the gear to the cave floor. Then he secured the other end of the rope to the piton and climbed down. Since he wasn't going to be studying the walls there was no reason to use the harness.

Grand spent nearly two hours exploring the fissure on the opposite side of the main cave. Before going back to the "white designs" tunnel and possibly descending deeper into the cave system, he wanted to see where the more accessible southern tunnels led. He also wanted to find out whether the Chumash had painted designs there. Driving up here he'd had a wild notion. If this complex of caves was as extensive as he thought, perhaps the Chumash had charted them and left the map on a wall. Though that would have been unprecedented for the Chumash, other ancient peoples had left similar designs on cave walls. It would be better to check before he went down rather than after.

There was nothing inside.

Unlike the tunnel on the north side, this section was extremely difficult to negotiate. Though it was dry in here- the slant of the ledge above sent the runoff to the north side-the runnel was also small, narrow, and unventilated. According to Grand's compass he was headed southwest. It didn't surprise him when, after nearly two hours, he came across chalk markings on the wall. Unfortunately, the designs weren't made by the Chumash. They were a pound sign and an arrow pointing away from that spot, a geologist's notation that the tunnel had been explored to that location from the direction in which the arrow was pointed. No doubt Dr. Thorpe had come this far from the other direction, from Painted Cave sinkhole-probably a good quarter-mile-looking for the two missing engineers. The geography would be right for her to have reached this spot. He could picture the world above. Behind him, in the northern tunnel, was where the ravine sinkhole had dumped the creek water into the lake.

Grand made a similar chalk notation pointing in the other direction. Then he returned to the main cave. He wondered, as he always did when he made markings on a cave wall, whether some future archeologist would find the chalk marks and wonder who made them and why.

Shortly after 10:00 A.M., after taking a water and granola-bar break, Grand was ready to go back into the north-side tunnel that led to the underground lake. During the long night Grand had spent with the Chumash archives, he'd developed an adversarial relationship with the mysterious images. He was looking forward to spending more time with them, wrestling with them, trying to figure out whether they were eyes or something else.

The floor of the tunnel was dry and he reached the lake in less than twenty minutes. There was very little water running in from the creek and the lake had shrunk to nearly half the size it had been the day before. Crisp stalagmites split the softly rippling surface and the waterfall leading to the lower cavern was a smooth and gentle flow.

Grand made his way along the ledge to the tunnel where he set down his duffel bag. He put away his flashlight, donned his night-vision glasses, and stepped into the mouth of the tunnel. He'd brought along the video camera but decided not to take it with him until he'd reconnoitered. If the ground was solid and the footing secure, he'd come back for it.

Grand looked at the paintings, but only for a moment. Something else caught his attention.

The waters in the lower cavern had also subsided, leaving just a small, still pool in the center. There was detritus on the surrounding stone floor. Among the smooth pebbles, soggy pieces of tree bark, and leaves that had washed down from the creek, he saw a pair of batteries. They had probably fallen from the flashlight he found the previous day. Before he did anything else. Grand decided to retrieve them and see if there was anything else that might have washed down from the engineer's backpack.

Grand squatted and started down the tunnel. He didn't need his crampons to get down the passageway, though he moved slowly and was extremely careful not to place his hands on any of the images.

As he descended. Grand glanced at the paintings. Looking at them, he was less and less sure that the images were eyes. While they looked exactly like the shapes he'd seen in Fluffy's eyes, they were extremely fuzzy. Chumash work was typically sharp-edged.

Reaching the bottom of the passageway, Grand tested the ground with a foot and then stood. He had suspected that this cave was much smaller than the one above and that was confirmed. It was nearly one-third the size. The air was surprisingly musty and the cave was extremely cool and dry. He guessed that until the creek bed opened up there hadn't been any water down here for ages. The scientist stepped around a stalagmite, walked a few steps to the still, small pool, and took a quick look around. There were no paintings on the walls, so he removed his goggles and turned on the flashlight.

What he saw surprised him.

The walls were covered with a webwork of fine, jagged, superficial fractures. He'd never seen anything like them. His first impression was that they resembled the sutures of a human skull. The rock also had a strange, multicolored surface. Though the basic tone was steel-gray, almost like graphite, there were very pale reds, greens, whites, and blues swirled into the surface. The cave above had been entirely charcoal gray.

Grand began moving around and under the stalactites and stalagmites. The stalagmites rose about four feet from the floor and the stalactites descended five or six feet from a twelve-foot-high ceiling. Like the cave wall, they were stained with color and had wire-fine cracks up and down each one of them. Reaching up, he closed his gloved hand around the tip of one of the stalactites. The stone crumbled easily, like burned wood or charcoal.

"What the hell did this?" Grand murmured. He brushed off his glove on his pants and continued to look around. He couldn't figure out what had caused these cracks. He hadn't seen anything like them in the cave above and he had never seen two caves so close together that had experienced such obviously different geological stresses.

Then Grand noticed something on one of the stalagmites. He bent closer and shined the light on the stone. There were several long, straight hairs caught in one of the cracks. Grand removed his glove and carefully plucked the hairs out. He examined them carefully under the light. There were five of them, each one stiff and thick and approximately five inches long. The hairs weren't dark, though he couldn't tell precisely what color they were. Because they were bristly, one strong possibility was that they had been part of a Chumash paintbrush that had been left down here and torn apart by the swirling waters.

Grand placed the samples in a plastic bag, then looked closely at the other outcroppings. There were hairs caught in several other stalagmites as well. A dog or a coyote or a mountain lion could have been washed down here. They might have been caught in the sinkhole at the creek. But unless the water had been much higher down here, he couldn't imagine how the hair had gotten stuck three and four feet from the floor.

Grand had intended to spend time in and around this passageway measuring the icons, taking a few low-light video images, trying to see the designs fresh by looking at them from different perspectives: from the middle and bottom of the passageway, from the far end of both caves, and lying flat on his back in the center of the tunnel. He had planned to explore the extremely steep, narrow, twisting tunnel that led from the small cave to who-knew-what below. He had wanted to run the video camera around the lower chamber so he could study the site later, maybe share it with Dr. Thorpe.

But now he had another mystery and he had to get this one into the lab. For the one truism of science was never to let too many mysteries collect. Knowledge can't be built on leaps of faith.

The scientist took a moment to scrape mineral samples from the cavern walls. He used the edge of a small blade from his Swiss Army knife. Then he carefully brushed the rock fragments into a plastic bag. He would also bring those back to the university for analysis, see what had caused the discoloration and how long the non-native minerals had been present in the rock.

Grand exited the cave, then checked his watch before he began packing his gear. He would have just enough time to get the samples to the various university laboratories before teaching his class. He was looking forward to getting back in front of students. It was an enforced break, a time to clear his head. It was also a place to get a new perspective. Going back to basics always helped him to see things fresh.

With his finds safely stored, Grand left the cavern.

Behind him, the darkness was still, silent, and absolute.

Hannah loathed and detested the bullshit article she wrote about the truck crash. The reporter didn't usually react that strongly to her work, not only because the topics weren't particularly controversial but because the stories tended to have a resolution by the time she wrote about them. An election. A race. A fire. But the mystery of the missing engineers and the dead driver was still ongoing.

What bothered her most was that she felt that she was misleading the public. It was probably like writing for
Pravda
under the Communists, but it was her own damn newspaper. Journalistic integrity kept her from saying what she really thought, that Sheriff Gearhart and Andrea Danza were hiding something and that the situation at Painted Cave and on the beach might be related.

Hannah was also frustrated that she hadn't been able to reach Jim Grand. She had left a voice-mail message at the office and at his home. When he didn't call back and her deadline neared, she rang the anthropology department at the university and asked if he had a cell-phone number. She was told that he didn't have a mobile phone.

"The signals don't reach the caves he explores," said an assistant.

She had wanted to talk to him for that day's edition. The sheriff and his people were busy searching the hills. But Hannah wanted to know if any of the mountain caverns might reach from the Painted Cave sinkhole to the beach where the Bennett's Surf truck was found.

Having no cell phone wasn't going to help her do that. Hannah thought of asking Dr. Thorpe, but she didn't want Caltrans and Sheriff Gearhart to know what she was thinking. She had a feeling Gearhart's supply of crime-scene tape could cover most of the Santa Ynez Mountains. She also considered asking her friend Allen Daab, a traffic reporter for Los Angeles's number-one radio station, to take his chopper on a pass over the mountains and try to spot Jim Grand's SUV. But even if Daab agreed to do it, Hannah wouldn't have had time to drive up there and search the caves for the scientist.

All of which left her in a very pissy mood. Even the sun finally coming through the big cathedral window of her brick-walled office didn't cheer her. It warmed the room, lit up the wall-framed photographs of her family, gleamed off the plaques she'd won for college journalism and community service and editorial contributions she'd made to local business leagues. Even the plants on the shelves seemed happier. But not her.

She sat at her desk and glared at her computer monitor and reread the article she had written on the Caltrans engineers. It wasn't so much a story as an update: how many people were involved in the search and how it had expanded. The families had refused to talk to her and Caltrans had nothing to add to their upbeat bullshit statement that they were still hoping for a successful resolution to the situation. She reread the article she had written about the fish truck accident. It told where the crash had occurred and what kind of truck was involved, but not
who
was driving,
why
the accident might have happened, and
where the goddamned body was
. What kind of newspaper was she running if she couldn't get basic information like that? A shitty one, obviously.