Blind Descent Read online

  Having secured one end of the orange tape to a sizable rock, Anna chimneyed down an enclosed staircase designed by a mad Cubist. Five minutes in, it leveled off, a sloping belly-crawl. She tied her pack to her ankle and shimmied along, mentally marking off each foot claimed to keep her mind off greater evils. At what would turn out to be the halfway point, she lost her bearings. The space was big enough for her to sit upright. Two channels led through the rock. One slanted up and back toward Tinker’s Hell, the other down and away. The faint breath of a living cave drifted through each; the stirring that cavers learn to wait for, moving air hinting at a going lead. With a nod to Alice’s white rabbit, Anna chose the crawl down and away.

  Perseverance was rewarded. After what seemed more time than her wristwatch assured her had elapsed, she was reborn in a chamber so vast that half a dozen rooms the size of Tinker’s Hell could have been stored within it. Hardened as her heart was against all wonders remotely stygian, she was swept up by the unearthly beauty. After so long in a black and mud-brown world the illusion of light took her breath away. Chandeliers of snow-white selenite covered the ceiling. Like great inverted winter trees glittering with hoarfrost, branches grew down fifteen and twenty feet. This fairy forest was thick and extended. Grandeur, Anna suspected, unequaled anywhere on earth. At least anywhere human eyes had been. The cavern walls were draped in curtains of liquid stone, frozen in place one molecule at a time over the history of the world. Sheets of gold, burnt umber, ocher, ivory, and white spilled down hundreds of feet, folding in on themselves, then crumpling on the floor as gracefully as the satin skirts of a fine lady. Throughout the enormous room were columns, some joined to form arches, stalagmites grown up and stalactites down to meet in fantastic pillars hundreds of feet high. Some, still growing, had windows yet to be filled with dripping limestone. Within the windows were tiny worlds, variations on the grand scheme. Openings not more than two feet high and half that in width were encrusted with ferns of iridescent crystal and delicate popcorn formations in shades of copper and bronze. Through the midst of this enchanted land meandered a shallow stream, a collection of seeps and drips from a square mile of desert. Water so clear it seemed to be only the eye’s distortion, flowed over rock looking no less liquid and mobile.

  A caricature of a wonder-struck child, Anna sat on the lip of the tunnel, eyes wide, mouth agape. Millions of reflective surfaces caught her little light and magnified it. Drinking in the color she’d so yearned for, she muttered an unconscious prayer: “Holy shit.”

  Cavers the world over dreamed of, lived for, risked their lives in search of a room such as this. And she, a dirt-detesting claustrophobe, had found it. The fates have a wicked sense of humor.

  Not the first, she reminded herself. This had to be what Frieda had discovered, what she was hurrying back to tell the others about. Anna had found the answer, and it made no sense. A room such as this was an incomparable good to all involved: a treasure for the park, a feather in the cap of every team member including Brent Roxbury. This miracle of miracles, located in the heart of protected public land, had no downside.

  If the answer made no sense, Anna had yet to probe deeply enough.

  Falling gracefully away, polished flowstone beckoned her to further exploration. At the first step onto the glassy walk, she heard Holden Tillman’s cowboy cursing in her head. Lug-soled boots, caked with mud, had no place in this ballroom of the damned. Rubbery socks, the kind made for playing on rough beaches and rocky lake shores, were part of the kit of every caver allowed into Lechuguilla. They wore them on the delicate flowstone around Lake Rapunzel and anywhere else boots would destroy nature’s artwork. The first cavers faced with this dilemma had doffed boots and traversed the fragile landscapes barefooted. Then it was noted that the oils from human skin disfigured pristine surfaces.

  Rubber shoes in place, Anna sat a little longer, studying the ground. Tracking, reading the record of men or beasts, was something she did almost without thinking aboveground. In this alien environment she’d overlooked this fundamental skill. With limited light, the task was hard, but in a world without wind, automobiles, or creatures bigger than a microbe, there was little confusion. In front of her, nearly between her feet, was a partial print: mud on stone, the corrugated pattern of a hiking boot, small in size. There was but the single print. Either Frieda had turned back or, like Anna, had changed footgear.

  Assuming Frieda would have taken the path of least resistance, Anna followed suit and flowed down with the stone into the great room. For fifty or sixty feet she saw no other evidence that Frieda had been there. Time was slipping by. She had already used more than half the time she’d promised Curt she’d be gone. She’d seen nothing of the cavern but that first stunning survey and the rock immediately in front of her toes. Tracking was not conducive to sightseeing. Soon she must turn back. To date, all her sweat and fears had bought was a slightly used doctor’s wife and an even greater mystery.

  Squatting, she tried for a new perspective. In ribbons that ran through the yellow spectrum, rock spread out in three directions. One ended against a stalagmite older and more impressive than a giant redwood. To her right the flow slid under the water of the stream. On the left it ended in a mist of soil ground fine as flour. A minuscule imperfection cut through this internal desert. Closer inspection revealed a bootprint. Frieda had not changed boots for socks. But then where were the inevitable prints from the entrance tunnel? So untouched was the flowstone, the merest smear of mud would have been as obvious as a billboard on a stretch of virgin meadow.

  Anna removed her helmet and held it high, increasing the spread of light. Half a dozen prints materialized, prints larger than the one left by Frieda Dierkz. Moving slowly, eyes to the ground, she followed. Two sets, one coming, one going, led across the silted patch and between curves of silky stone growing out from the wall like the roots of an immense tree. Scrapes and streaks of mud showed where the booted individual slid down, then climbed back up. Twenty feet above the cavern floor, maybe fourteen yards from where she emerged, was an oval of black overhung with liquid limestone.

  Anna retraced her steps. Near the polished run of flowstone, at the base of a convenient chair-high rock, the silt was churned up. A logical place to slip off the offending boots to proceed on the more fragile surface in booties or stockinged feet.

  The “how” of the first attack on Frieda became clear.

  Brent Roxbury had been following a lead on the back wall of Tinker’s Hell. Curt was waiting for him, working on sketches for the survey. Brent was gone a considerable time but returned to say the lead had petered out. It hadn’t. The end wall of Tinker’s was honeycombed with back doors, at least two of which exited into this undiscovered room. Brent had come out in the cavern and seen Frieda.

  Anna would check on the return trip, but it was a good bet that the fork between here and Tinker’s, where she’d felt the drift of air, opened into a passage connected with the route Brent had taken. As he crawled back toward Tinker’s, he heard Frieda in the parallel passage and went through to meet her. He must have arrived before her in time and above her in elevation. He shoved the rock, then went back the way he had come to report nothing but a dead end.

  That was how. “Why” was still at large. Anna looked at her watch again. She was going to be late. Hopefully Curt wouldn’t panic, and Sondra wouldn’t become any crazier than she already was.

  Leaving the dead man’s tracks, she walked back to the flowstone, an honest-to-God yellow brick road through a subterranean Oz.

  Fatigue, awe, and fear combined to make the unreal surreal. Walking was upright, unhampered. It put to death the cavers’ theory that there was no unbroken ground in this great cave. Vision was limited to the stingy reach of her lamp, but such was the glitter, she felt as if she walked in a moonlit garden. Stone flowed beneath the creek, and she waded across. Ice-cold water soothed feet too long confined in heavy leather. Beyond, she climbed a low rise and circled a formation of white spheres, piled
one on another until the entirety of it resembled an elephant sitting on its haunches, forelegs raised the way she had seen them do in circus acts.

  Past the Impressionist pachyderm lay what she had been seeking. Expectation did little to soften the blow. As she leaned against the elephant’s cool flank, her eyes prickled with tears. The cavern extended another four or five hundred feet. Aragonite chandeliers had hung in defiant profusion from a ceiling of gold. The meandering stream had curved through formations looking more like cloud than solid earth. The end of the room had been cloaked in draperies of such delicacy it would have taken little imagination to see them moving in a nonexistent breeze. At their base, filled by a waterfall from the creek, was what had been the room’s crowning jewel, a clear blue lake, garnished with lily pads of ruby-colored stone.

  That was what had been. Before poison rained down from above, then was pumped back up in the form of double homicide. “Marble clouds, lily pads ruined,” Frieda said that first night in Tinker’s. She’d seen it. What remained was tragic, Philistines in the temple. Aragonite trees lay smashed on the cavern floor, their branches defiled with dirt and rock from a gout in the ceiling. The lake was full of mud, the lily pads broken. Half the lake and part of the waterfall were buried under cement and pea gravel. A pipe casing a foot in diameter cut through the ruined ceiling to plunge into the hideous pile and disappear.

  The Blacktail, as Holden said, was drilling legally on a legal lease. But concrete trucks had run night and day, pulverizing the desert and causing the one neighbor in forty miles to complain of noise. Roxbury had ordered too much pipe. Inspired by the image of Peter angling his drinking straw into Zeddie’s milkshake, Anna and Holden had pieced it together. The Blacktail drilled not straight down as required by the lease, but at an angle, pushing their pipe deep into the protected land of the park in search of gas.

  When they’d hit open space, the cavern where Anna stood, and ceased to get any return—no mud or rock cuttings circulating back up—they didn’t report it. When there was such an indication of underground spaces, regulations demanded a cease in drilling so the possibility of a cavern could be explored. The Blacktail couldn’t afford to report it. They couldn’t bear the scrutiny. In order to fill the hole so they could go on drilling, they pumped concrete and gravel into the earth day after day, night after night till they’d laid a new bed for their pipe. And destroyed a natural cavern that beggared man’s proudest cathedrals.

  Unanswered questions abounded. Why had Brent been part of it when he didn’t have the courage—or the lack of morality—to go through with it? He’d ordered the extra pipe, the additional concrete and gravel, and had made a feeble attempt to falsify the data. So feeble, he must have wanted to get caught. Brent had pushed the stone to kill Frieda and might have been the one who started the slide that finished the job. Had he done it for money? From the way he lived, he hadn’t gotten enough to make it worth killing over.

  Anna took a thirty-five-millimeter camera from her pack. The camera was designed to capture Kodak moments: babies and birthdays. The flash would be lost in a room this size, but for her purposes it would suffice. She sought proof, not art. Armed with photos and an eyewitness, Holden could close down the Blacktail. With luck and hard work he could bring the owners or operators to task. They would not be sufficiently punished; drawing, quartering, and disemboweling were outlawed in New Mexico. They would be fined, the modern equivalent of the pound of flesh. Anna couldn’t remember what Exxon paid for the Valdez incident, but she would keep her fingers crossed that this settlement would make the other look like pin money.

  The soullessness of the business of business saddened her. One roll of film finished, she loaded a second. Crimes of passion committed by passionless men for money.

  The Park Service would deal more harshly with participants within its own ranks. Jobs would be lost, reputations destroyed. Charges of conspiracy and racketeering might buy prison time for the perpetrator. For Oscar Iverson. He’d spoken with Brent in the Pigtail. He’d known Brent was meeting Anna at Big Manhole. As cliché dictated, he’d returned to the scene of the crime and taken away the one shred of evidence, the rifle shell. The shell had been carefully wiped clean of prints by the time the sheriff’s department got their hands on it.

  “Anna Pigeon.”

  So wrapped was she in her thoughts and belief in her solitude, she screeched like an owl and stumbled back. As she fell, her lamp was knocked askew. Light from an alien helmet struck her night-adjusted eyes with the force of an oncoming locomotive. Less than two yards away a man stood blanketed in darkness.

  “You are in a great deal of trouble, Anna. A very great deal of trouble.”

  22

  SHIELDING HER EYES, Anna took a guess. “George Laymon?” The intrusion had goosed her adrenal glands. Fatigue was gone. She was on her feet before the words were out.

  “The same.”

  “Get the light out of my eyes.”

  He acted as if he didn’t hear. Adjusting her headlamp to illuminate him, she joined the pissing contest.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “The best defense is a good offense. I’m here to find you. Curt said you’d gone on alone, adding stupidity to your considerable list of transgressions. Lord! What a travesty.”

  His light had slipped beyond her and touched on the desecration of pipe and cement. “What an unholy mess.” Trained on his face, Anna’s lamp revealed shock and sadness in the slump of muscles. “Drilling,” he said. “One leak in that gas pipe and not only is this room gone but all of Lechuguilla. The atmosphere poisoned.”

  Anna was losing her adrenaline high. Enough of an edge remained to sharpen her voice if not her wits. “What made you come?”

  Laymon turned his back on the mountain of cement and pea gravel. “My secretary went to Oscar’s office. The key was missing from the board. You were gone. Mr. Schatz was gone. A quick check and we found the padlock cut on the gate to Lechuguilla’s access road. So we put together what we hoped wasn’t going to turn out to be a rescue team.”

  “We?”

  “Oscar and the others stayed back with Curt and the woman. Finding Mrs. McCarty won’t get you off the hook. The superintendent is not pleased. If there’s a regulation in NPS-9 you failed to break, I’ve yet to find it.”

  After the words “Oscar’s with Curt and the woman,” Anna quit listening. Altruism—the safety of Curt and Sondra—sparked, then was lost in a blinding flash of self-interest. Oscar was between Anna and the culvert leading out of the cave.

  “Oscar’s involved,” she said. “We’ve got to get back.”

  Laymon looked at her, then at the ruin behind her. “Surely not Oscar,” he said, but she could see the idea was not completely foreign to him.

  “I think Brent made a halfhearted attempt to silence Frieda, then backed off,” Anna told him. “By the time we got to Katie’s Pigtail, something had changed. Oscar talked to Brent. Pressured him somehow to try again.”

  Laymon looked weary, and every day of his sixty years showed. “All you have is a theory, Anna. I admit it sounds plausible, but without proof I wouldn’t dare dignify it with any kind of formal accusation.”

  “Oscar’s the cave resource manager. Oscar closed this wing of Lechuguilla.”

  “For the safety of the cave and the cavers. I concurred with the closure.”

  “Oscar stomped the scene of Brent’s shooting and carried away the shell.”

  Laymon said nothing. He sat on a finger of dead gray concrete that spilled out from the mass trashing the lake. Shoulders stooped, he flicked at the mud on his boot tops with one glove. “I sent a law-enforcement ranger. Oscar stopped him and went himself. I wrote it off as overzealous-ness. Everybody wants to play cop.” He raised his head. “Present company not excluded. By your Wonder Woman act you endangered yourself, Curt Schatz, the resource, and those of us who’ve had to come after you. Since you didn’t see fit to report any of your suspicions to the superin
tendent and myself, who did you work with? Or are you foolish enough to be working solo?”

  “I told you I thought Frieda had been murdered,” Anna said lamely.

  “Laymon waved that away with an annoyed flick of his hand. “That’s ancient history. Most of what you’ve told me is new. Did you work this out by yourself?”

  The implied insult stung. The momentary sting of the lash covered up something else, a mild but gnawing sense of unease. Anna chose to ignore the question. “We’ve got to get back,” she said bluntly.

  “We do,” he agreed, but he didn’t move. He smiled. “Give an old man a chance to catch his breath. I’m an army brat, used to moving around, but I’ve done way too much of it these past few hours. I’m pooped.”

  Uneasiness grew. Half-formed ideas fluttered batwings in Anna’s skull. Army brat. A fragment of casual conversation clicked in memory. During one of their meetings, Laymon said he was from the “Show Me” state. Missouri. George Laymon was from a military background in Missouri. He could easily have known of Brent’s army career. Blackmail. That would account for why Roxbury, a known conservationist, might have covered up illicit drilling. One word about Brent’s arrest for indecent exposure and he’d lose his little girls.

  On the heels of these ugly thoughts came others: Laymon knew Oscar was heavy-footed; Holden had joked about it. Oscar might not have gone to Big Manhole on his own, but at Laymon’s order. The “chewing out” Jewel reported wasn’t something she’d witnessed but something she’d been told—by George Laymon. The rifle shell had been turned over to Laymon for delivery to the sheriff’s office. Even the order closing the cave had come down from Laymon. Prior to the rock slide in Katie’s Pigtail, Brent had spoken to someone outside the core group. Brent had placed a call on the landline. To Laymon? And Laymon had told him to finish what he started or lose his girls to Amy and her dentist?

  The rapid-fire thought ended. Tired unto stupidity, Anna knew her revelations had trotted across her face for anyone to read. One look at Laymon ratified her fears. His face had changed. Charm was gone. Muscles bunched to lift him from the sitting position. There would be no playing the innocent and stringing him along until an opening for escape presented itself.