Until Dark (22 page)

“You never give up, son,” the priest agreed. “Peter, how’s your mother? She any better this week?”

“She’s hanging in there, Father,” Peter told him from the doorway. “I appreciate that you let me use a car whenever she has one of her spells. I appreciate it a lot.”

Father Tim had picked up his plate. He had a meeting in five minutes with someone who was willing to donate a couple of televisions to the Mission. They weren’t new, but they were still televisions. The priest was a big “Survivor” fan himself.

“Well, Peter,” Father Tim said, moving toward the doorway where the young man stood, “I know how hard it is to watch a parent go downhill like that. I remember all too well what it was like to watch my own father in the last stages of his illness. You need to be there when she needs you. Anything I can do to lend a hand, I’m happy to do it.” Father Tim gave Peter a reassuring slap on the back as he passed him. Peter flinched.

“Something wrong?” Father Tim turned to ask.

“Oh, I . . . I tripped over one of those loose flagstones out by the walk this morning. Fell and hit my back on the gate. I guess I bruised it.”

“I’ll bet that hurts like the blazes. Why don’t you skip the gardening this afternoon and go on upstairs and take a hot bath, then maybe lay down for a while.”

“Thank you, Father. Thank you. I think I’ll do that.” Peter, always soft spoken and humble, nodded.

“Good, good. Nothing like a hot bath. Now, I’ll be in my office,” Father Tim’s voice trailed away as he walked down the hall. “Send Mr. O’Banyon in when he gets here, please. . . .”

Peter made himself a sandwich and ate it standing up, then put away the bread and washed off his knife. Everyone was expected to clean up after themselves here. It was only right, after all. Father Tim was so good to them all.

The car pulled into the drive just as he reached the second floor landing. He glanced out the window as he passed, then stopped, and watched.

Kendra Smith was parking out near the garage. Henry, one of the older men who lived in the Mission and the acknowledged number one gardener, stopped to chat with her. She got out of the car, followed by a tall man who had FBI written all over him. Both of them walked with Henry to the garden.

Peter stood on the landing, debating, his heart beating wildly.

So close. So close.

He couldn’t touch her here. Not anywhere on Father Tim’s grounds. It would be disrespectful to his benefactor, and without Father Tim’s generosity, he reminded himself, where would he have been these past few weeks? Besides, she seemed to have acquired a companion. He pulled the curtain aside and looked out again.

The bodyguard looked like he might know a thing or two about taking care of his charge.

He went up to his room and closed the door, pacing, trying to decide what to do. The time was right, he told himself, but the place was all wrong. And there was that man.

How to get rid of him?

He looked out the window again, in time to see Kendra’s friend remove a cell phone from his pocket. He continued to stare, watching as the man first stood, then walked away from the garden. He strolled along the fence, coming closer to the back of the house.

A quiet lift of the windowpane permitted a bit of eavesdropping by those who were so inclined.

“. . . probably not much more than another hour or so,” the man was saying. “She’s found a way to pass the time while we wait, so I’m just hanging loose until my replacement arrives. As soon as he does, I’ll head back to the hospital.”

The agent turned slightly so that he could see his charge in the garden, then turned back.

“Yeah, concussion. I’ll give you a call back after I check in with her doctors.” He stood at the edge of the path, the phone in one hand, the other in his pocket. “No, Kendra’s just waiting to get in touch with the friend she’s planning on staying with.”

The agent turned and walked back down the path, and the rest was lost.

The window closed as silently as it had opened.

The eavesdropper walked back down the steps calmly, let himself out by the side door. From there he could see Kendra in the garden, working side by side with old Henry, making rows to plant the corn in. Looked like she’d be there a while. The man who’d arrived with her sat on one of the benches, just watching.

He slipped off into the woods, taking the path away from the Mission.

Peter was on a mission of his own.

“You’re up awfully early, Sheriff,” Adam said after the call from Cole Gamble was put through.

“Well, I wanted to make sure I caught you first thing. I told you I’d get back to you after I went through those files again.”

“Did you find anything?”

“I think so,” Gamble told him. “I’m going to have it checked out today, but here it is. After the Smith kids were discovered to be missing, search parties were arranged to fan out in a twenty-mile radius of the ranch to look for them.”

“Right, we talked about that.”

“And every one of those search parties was led by a member of one law enforcement agency or another. We had the feds, we had state and county, we had the police from nearby Chaco, since the ranch was located within its jurisdiction. Every one of those officers made a report of his search, where they went, who was in their party, that sort of thing. The sheriff who handled the case before me was real careful to dot every
i
and cross every
t
. He wanted to make sure there was a record of every square inch.”

“Smart of him.”

“Very smart. Now, the report from the deputy who led the party that went southwest of the ranch indicated that they went fourteen point three miles.”

“I thought you said they were supposed to go twenty in every direction?”

“They were, in every other direction. But fourteen miles southwest of the ranch, you run into some hills. You follow the path into the hills, you run into a series of caves.”

“Weren’t the caves searched?”

“Not all of them. Some of these caves have been taken over by swarms of killer bees that migrated up from Mexico and South America some years ago. Apparently they tried to check a few of the caves, but they weren’t successful. The bees swarmed and attacked, scattering the search team. No one ever goes near those caves, Adam. Entomologists who studied several of the hives a few years ago said that, depending on how far back the caves go, there could be millions of bees in any one of those caves.”

“Killer bees?” Gamble could almost hear Adam’s frown through the wires. “African bees brought over to mate with South American bees as an experiment?”

“Yeah, yeah, everyone knows the story of how the bees escaped and have been moving north, terrorizing everything that threatens their hives.”

“What’s the point, Cole?” Adam glanced at his watch. He was due in Mancini’s office in less than three minutes.

“The point is, the locals refer to these caves as the bee caves.” He paused for effect. “Take a piece of paper and write it out. Bee caves.”

“Cole, I’m late for a . . .”

“Just write it out. BEE CAVES.”

“Okay. Done.”

“Now erase the second
e
in bee, and the
e
in caves. And change the
v
to a
u
. . .” The sheriff paused again. “What’s that look like to you?”

“BE CAUS . . . Jesus, bee caves. You think that’s what Christopher was trying to say? Not
because
, but
bee caves
?”

“I’m betting on it. As a matter of fact, I’m trying to find one of those suits that beekeepers wear, you know, the ones with the hood and the gloves. I’ll be checking out the caves myself. The investigators could have missed something, you know? I’m thinking that maybe, after they aroused the ire of the first hive or two, they figured that no one could have gotten into one of those caves to dump a body and gotten out alive. I think they just bagged searching the rest of the caves.”

“Can you wait for me?”

“You want to be in on this?”

“I can be there in a few hours. And I’ll bring the suits.”

It was one hundred five degrees in Tucson when Adam stepped off the plane that had been authorized to transport him to Arizona. By the time he’d driven to Bisbee where he met up with the sheriff, the temperature had climbed to one hundred eleven. It was even hotter when they finally arrived in the hills outside of Chaco.

“It’ll start to drop soon, as the sun starts to set,” Gamble said of the temperature as he pulled on the specially insulated beekeepers garb. “Of course, by then, we’ll be running out of daylight.”

“Then we’ll set up lights,” Adam replied and pointed to the first of the caves that lay ahead of them off the path. “Might as well start with this one.”

“The original search team went into that one,” Gamble told him. “That one and the next two. They were numbered in the file. I think we should start with the next two, up the ridge. How ’bout if we split up, each take one?”

“Fine, lead on.” Adam shoved his gloves under his arms and turned to check on the long breathing tube that trailed behind him like a long, thin, transparent tail.

“You know for a fact, don’t you, that this thing is going to be a sure pain in the ass?” Gamble grumbled.

“Yeah, but our experts said that if the bees don’t hear us breathing and if they don’t smell our breath, they won’t bother us, and we’ll be able to get through the caves more quickly and with little or no agitation to the bees.”

“Well, God knows we don’t want the bees agitated.”

Adam laughed and headed up the path to the entry to the cave, then lowered his visor and stepped inside. The walls of the inner cave were lined with bees clinging to each other in long, slowly undulating shafts. Careful to keep the light focused on the ground, Adam walked slowly, conscious of the steady hum that filled the air around him. After shining the light low into every corner, and convinced there was nothing to be found, he backed slowly toward the entrance to the cave, ducking slightly as he exited.

“Well, that was different,” Gamble greeted him when he stepped outside.

“Nothing in this one,” Adam said.

“Here either. On to the next two.”

And to the next two after that, but there was no trace of anyone having gone into the caves before them.

“Maybe we should check the lower caves after all,” Adam remarked as he removed the hood and took several deep breaths of cooling air. “Maybe something was missed.”

“Well, that’s not a bad idea.” Gamble, too, had removed his hood for the sheer relief of having fresh air—even hot air—on his face. “Since those early search teams didn’t have the benefit of these nifty space-age suits, maybe they didn’t venture all that far into the caves. Then again, there could be another reason why we’re not finding anything.”

“What’s that?” Adam asked as they headed back down to the lower caves.

“Maybe there’s nothing here.”

There was nothing in the first cave, but in the second, a ten-year search came to an end.

Here, too, bees were everywhere, and the hum from so many pairs of softly beating wings was incessant. Off to the right of the entrance to the cave, in a slight alcove in the rocks, lay what Adam would later describe as an indeterminate shape. At first glance it appeared to be no more than a pile of rags. But when Adam leaned closer for a better look, he found the rags covered with the remains of thousands of bees. Using a gloved hand to gently clear away the insect carcasses, he uncovered what appeared to be remains of a different sort. As he turned to leave the cave to find Cole Gamble, he tripped over something on the floor. He bent over to investigate, and found a backpack.

“Gamble!” Adam called as he emerged from the cave and stripped off the hood.

“You found something?” the sheriff called back.

“I did. Call in your investigators. We have some remains.”

“Think it could be the Smith boys?”

“One of them, maybe.”

“Only one?”

“Appears to be. One body. And one backpack.”

Gamble called his office to request that the CSI be dispatched immediately, then went into the cave to view the scene for himself.

“There’s only one, all right. And it could be one of those boys you’re looking for. The body’s obviously been there for a long time, and I don’t recall that we’ve ever had reports of anyone else lost out this way.” Gamble paused and bit the inside of his cheek. “Wonder which one it is?”

“And if it is one of the Smiths, where,” Adam added, “is the other body?”

The crime scene investigators, dressed in the suits previously worn by Adam and Cole, ventured into the cave. The increased activity agitated the hive, and the two investigators were forced to leave until the bees settled down again, and then reentered, one at a time, lest the occupants be overly disturbed.

“I doubt they’ll swarm,” offered an entomologist they’d called in from a nearby college, “but with a hive that large, I wouldn’t want to risk it. I’d hate to anger a colony that large. There’s no telling what they’d do. Killer bees are unpredictable as it is, and I’ve never even read about a situation like this. I think the smartest thing to do at this point is to irritate them as little as possible, do your investigation around them, as surreptitiously as it can be done, and leave as quietly as you came.”

“Works for me,” one of the investigators had nodded, and flipped a coin to see who would be the first into the cave.

Several hours later, the remains were finally removed to a waiting ambulance, and the backpack carefully opened. Inside was a wallet. With the utmost care, Adam opened the wallet and withdrew a small white cardboard identification card. He turned it over and read the name aloud.

“Zachary Smith.”

“That’s him, then.” Gamble nodded slowly. “Zachary Smith.”

“Well, that’s Zachary’s backpack. We’ll see what the tests come up with as far as the positive ID is concerned.”

“You really expect that body to belong to anyone else?”

“Can’t think of any reason why it should,” Adam admitted, wondering how he was going to tell Kendra that they’d found what could well be her cousin, but no sign of her brother—and just what that could mean.