Redemption Road(91)

But Preston was slow to understand and slow with the gun. He didn’t see the rage or hate, so Adrian opened his throat and let it out. He howled as he charged, and though Preston managed two shots, they both flew wide. Then Adrian was on him, driving hard enough to lift him from his feet and move him through six feet of empty air. The gun spun away when he hit dirt, then there was only the fight and the fighter, the spray of blood and teeth as Adrian gave and gave, then went after Olivet and gave some more.





22

Beckett slid through the small door, and it felt wrong somehow, the underside of a church. He felt the weight of it above him. A hundred and seventy years. That’s how long the building had stood.

“Okay.” He reached back. “Give me the light.”

Someone handed in the big flashlight, and he shone it around. The pillars were fieldstone, the timbers as thick as his waist. He saw spiders and termite mounds and bits of old debris. The space was immense and low and dark as pitch.

“Someone’s been here.”

The drag marks were obvious, as if a man had pulled himself through the dust, not once but many times. The track bent past the first stone pillar, then angled for the front of the nave. Beckett shifted his bulk in the tight space.

James Randolph was hunched in the open square, the sky beyond him dark purple. “You sure about this?”

“Why? You want to do it?”

“No, thanks. After fifty-four years I’m close enough to damnation as it is. Looking for bodies under a church might just push me over the edge.”

Beckett shone the light on the tracks. “Drag marks point that way.”

“The altar’s that way.”

“The thought occurred to me.” Beckett shone the light around some more. Clearance between the dirt and timbers was two feet or less. “I’m a little big for this. If I get stuck or call you, you come running.”

“Not a chance in hell.”

Beckett didn’t know if Randolph was serious or not. He twisted around again, got on his belly. “Just find Dyer,” he said. “Get him out here.”

After that, it was just Beckett and the dark space under the church. He stayed clear of the drag marks and after the first pillar, angled to the right, earth and stone gouging his elbows, ruining his shoes. None of that registered because fifty feet in he was feeling the same kind of religious dread as Randolph. How many people had been married or christened or mourned in the church above his head? Thousands over the years, and all the while this raw, rough place was beneath them, this musty, crude, dirt-strewn slit of an oven.

Beckett squeezed beneath another beam.

How far was he, now? Seventy feet? Eighty?

He stopped where a pillar had collapsed and the floor joist sagged. The clearance was barely a foot, so he worked his way around. Even then, wood scraped his shoulders, the top of his head. He choked on sifting dust, and when he cleared the other side, he saw the graves.

“Holy … God.”

He crossed himself again and felt the kind of chill that only comes once or twice in a lifetime. The graves were little more than mounded earth, but bones protruded from five of them. Finger bones, he thought. A dome of skull. The graves made a narrow arc around a depression large enough to hold a grown man curled on his side.

Yet, it wasn’t the bones alone that bothered him Beckett closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to fight the sense of earth pressing up and church bearing down.

“Breathe, Charlie.”

Claustrophobia had never been a problem, but he was under the altar—directly beneath it. So were the graves.

Nine of them.

“Come on, come on.”

He rolled on his side and imagined all the people who’d moved through the church in the last 170 years. He felt them like ghosts above his head, the infants and the prayerful, the newlyweds and the newly dead. Lives had turned on the altar above him, and bodies here, in this place …

It was a desecration.

Beckett closed his eyes, then looked up at the massive joists. They were black with age, thick as a man’s waist.

He almost missed the bit of color.

It was small and faded, no larger than a quarter. He shone the light on it, thought it was the corner of a photograph wedged above the joist. He saw a bit of green, and what might have been stone. Pulling on latex gloves, he reached up and eased the photograph from the crack. It was old, washed out in the flashlight’s glare. It looked like a woman beside the church. He tilted it; saw how wrong he was.

Not a woman.

Not quite.

*

Twenty minutes later it was full dark outside, the air alive with mosquitoes. Floodlights stood around the crawl-space door, and moths the size of Beckett’s thumb flicked into and out of the light. Beckett and Randolph stood in the fluorescent hum. They were waiting for Dyer.

“They’re getting anxious,” Randolph said. He meant the medical examiner, CSU, the other cops.

Beckett didn’t care. “Nobody goes in until Dyer sees it.”

“You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine.” But he wasn’t. The discovery changed things, maybe everything.

“You say there’re nine?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to see them.”

“Just mind your own business.”