Wrecked (Josie Gray Mysteries #3)(14)

“His computer tower is gone too.” She pointed behind the desk. “It sits here, on the floor.” She leaned over the desk and looked around for the small brown pottery bowl where he kept flash drives. She and Dillon had purchased the bowl together on a trip to Mexico several years before. Both the bowl and the storage devices were gone.

*

Dillon’s eyes ached from the strain of searching for a sliver of light or shadow in the black room. His sight was completely shut down, but his sense of touch had so intensified that the muscles in his body seized up, his bare skin alert to the lightest touch: the whisper-soft stroke of an insect across his ankle caused spasms up his legs, and he clenched his eyes shut in pain, brushing away what he couldn’t see.

When bats had come loose from their perch in the hole sometime in the night, the frenzied slap of wings had terrified him. He had imagined them becoming entangled in his hair. He had lain down on his stomach and pressed his side up against the wall, covering his head with his hands; each time he heard them somewhere up by the ceiling he flattened his body against the dirt floor, motionless. He thought he had distinguished at least three bats circling the room in endless laps, emitting high-pitched noises. He knew bats roosted in caves and would use an underground cistern with an opening for shelter, but with the hatch now shut, they had no exit, no way out for food, and he had no idea how that might affect their behavior.

Sitting up again, fearing unseen insects and small rodents on the floor around him, he brushed at his legs obsessively. He drew them up against his chest and wrapped his arms around them, attempting to fold his six-foot body into as small a shape as possible. Dillon had not been able to see beyond the rope ladder he had climbed down and thus had no idea how large the room was, nor what else was inside it. He was completely naked and vulnerable. He couldn’t remember a time when he had experienced such absolute darkness.

*

At some point during the night he jerked awake, but it was impossible to tell what time it was or how long he had dozed. He knew that Josie would be frantic by now. He forced himself to get up from the floor, even though the thought of waking the bats above made him cringe. He took deep breaths, slowing his bodily functions and thoughts. He tried to orient himself in the room and thought that he was directly under the hatch where the ladder had been removed. He began running through every detail he could remember.

He started with his trip down the ladder. He imagined that he took approximately fifteen steps down it and assumed the cistern was about ten feet deep. He turned and felt for the wall. Running his hands along the concrete he discovered rough seams that indicated mortar. He ran his fingertips along the grooves and distinguished individual cement blocks. Leading with his left foot, then his left hand, he inched around the room, counting blocks as he went. He found nothing on the floor or the perimeter of the room against the walls. No shelves or furniture.

He walked along the perimeter of the room, estimating it to be about eight feet in length and width. It was a square shape and he began to doubt that the room was a water cistern, but rather a cell used to hold victims out of sight. His stomach seized up and he felt along the wall to the opposite side of where he thought the ladder had been dropped, and dry heaved in the corner. Exhausted, he felt his way back around the room and pressed his back against the cold block wall where he thought he had originally positioned himself.

His body was slowly recovering from shock. His breathing was returning to normal, but he was cold. The muscles in his stomach and intestines ached and his body involuntarily shivered. He knew that caves were cold year-round, even in the desert. He was certain that his core temperature was dropping and he began to worry about hypothermia. More so, he worried that the confusion he would experience as a result of hypothermia, combined with his extreme anxiety, might cause a mental breakdown if he was kept underground. It was becoming increasingly difficult to focus on anything other than death.





FIVE


Coroner Mitchell Cowan walked the two blocks to the crime scene with his medical bag in one hand and his evidence kit in the other. City police and sheriff’s department cars, an EMT unit, and the Trauma Center ambulance were all massed around the crime-scene tape that held the local media and curiosity seekers at bay. It was only ten o’clock in the morning and he was already hot and imagining a cool shower at the end of the day. One of the deputies lifted the tape for Cowan to enter the crime scene and mercifully didn’t require him to struggle over the top of it in front of his colleagues.

One month away from his fiftieth birthday, he was feeling slow and weighed down by his considerable midsection. He’d conducted enough autopsies over the past ten years to know what fat did to a person’s innards. The inside of his body would not be pretty, and while that bothered him a great deal, his sugar cravings throttled his willpower every damned day.

Once inside the office he found a corner to drop his bags and catch his breath. He wore the same style of Haggar pants and button-down dress shirt that he’d been wearing for twenty years. He felt as if his life as a small-town coroner dawdled along comfortably while everyone else in the world seemed desperate for excitement. Cowan opened his bag and arranged his supplies, thinking to himself that his life may not be exciting, but it was fulfilling. He often made this small assessment before the encounter with the body of someone whose life was over. This case, however, would be especially troubling. Josie Gray was one of the finest officers he had ever worked with, and he could not imagine the stress she was enduring over the disappearance of a loved one and the death of a friend. When the dispatcher had called to tell him the news he could hardly believe it.