The Crooked Staircase, Page 39

  While Jergen debates jurisdiction with Foursquare, Dubose goes into the parking lot, supposedly to make a list of the vehicles that might belong to the deaders and to record the license-plate numbers, but in fact to try Washington’s car key in each of the Hondas.

  No sooner does Foursquare stop grumbling about needing to know who the decedents are than he takes aside Oren Luckman, the store manager, and is recording a statement from him. One of the deputies is searching for expended shell casings, and another escorts a tall, somber civilian to Jergen and introduces him as a town mortician who also serves as the coroner.

  Dubose returns and takes Jergen aside to inform him that the key fits the green sedan. The car contains a trunkful of groceries in bags from the town’s other major market. Evidently, they were stocking up for several weeks of hibernation. There is nothing else in the Honda to identify its owner, no registration paper and no insurance-company card in the glove box, as there should be.

  While Captain Foursquare records Luckman’s fevered reimagining of the shoot-out, Dubose goes to the manager’s office. He intends to use the market’s computer to back-door the California DMV and run the Honda’s license plate to find the registered owner.

  Jergen is left with the swarm of uniformed busybodies. If there’s one thing he despises the most about local cops, no matter what locale they hail from, it’s that too damn many of them think they have a sacred duty to enforce the law, as though the law isn’t just what a bunch of money-grubbing power-crazed politicians cobble together, as if instead it’s handed down by God on stone tablets. And here in Borrego Springs, he seems to be dealing with a nest of their kind.

  He counsels himself to be patient with these sworn-to-serve-and-protect types. All will be well. If Dubose can identify to whom the Honda is registered, they will most likely have the address at which the Washingtons took shelter.

  That’s where the boy will be.

  3

  The tightly gathered trees took most of the snowfall upon their boughs, admitting but a fraction to the ground between them. No wind had yet arisen. Snow sought the earth in silence, mounding for the most part beneath the barren limbs of the deciduous hardwoods. The undergrowth was sparse. Carrying her leather tote bag, Jane had no trouble following Hendrickson, although the day was cold enough to make her eyes water. Her breath plumed from her.

  How he knew, she couldn’t tell, for the woods seemed too uniform to provide easily recognizable landmarks, but he glanced over his shoulder to say, “We’ve just stepped onto the estate. Not much farther now.”

  Anabel owned nine acres here, wrested from Booth’s father in their divorce settlement. Only the lower three acres, on which the house was situated, were walled, the upper six left for some future purpose.

  The stairhead building stood under pines, the lower limbs of which had been cut off to accommodate the structure, and therefore it was canopied by higher growth. Windowless, crafted from native stone, perhaps twelve feet in diameter, the structure had a domed roof of the same stone, so that it suggested an oversized, ancient kiln. The steel door stood in a steel frame.

  She put down the tote and examined the Schlage deadbolt. The cylinder was rimless, preventing anyone from pulling it out of the escutcheon. The two spanner screws that fixed the escutcheon to the door had been soldered so they could not be removed. If anyone had been curious enough to want to break in to the building, they would have required a couple hours and would have made so much noise that even the caretakers of the house five hundred feet below would have been aware of the effort.

  As Jane took the lock-release gun from the tote, Hendrickson let out a thin sound of distress and turned from the building and stood trembling more violently than could be accounted to the cold.

  “You can do this,” she told him. Then, remembering the power she had over him, she said, “You will do this.”

  He harked back to his childhood, as he had done before, his brow furrowing and his eyes narrowing and his voice turning hard. The rant came from him in a rush: “Finding your way with a light is nothing, boy. But when you can go through it top to bottom in the bitter dark, as blind as some dung beetle living on bat shit in a cavern, then you’ll be something. These stairs are life, boy, the truth of this life, of this dark world, the truth of humanity in all its cruelty and viciousness. If you want to survive, you pathetic little shit, you better learn to be strong like me. Go down the hole and learn, boy. Down the hole.”

  His recital of his mother’s tirade ended with a shudder and a series of frantic gasps for breath, as if he were drowning, though great exhalations smoked from him.

  The storm-faded light grew dimmer at just that moment, the winter sun more an idea than a reality. The tree-roofed clearing seemed to be a borderland between the material world and a realm of spirits. A breeze arose at last and swept some snow off the boughs overhead, and shapen clouds of flakes moved through the clearing like half-formed figures of people lost and seeking.

  “Don’t make me go down in the dark,” Hendrickson pleaded.

  From the tote, Jane retrieved a flashlight and gave it to him.

  She had one for herself.

  “We won’t be in the dark. We’ll have our lights. You’ll show me the way. You will show me the way. You understand, Booth?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll be all right.”

  “I will. I know I will,” he agreed, though he didn’t sound convinced.

  If his mother was a twisted work, his father must have been one, too, in his own way. After all, it was the father who had found the crooked staircase; instead of reporting it to the state or to university archaeologists and anthropologists who would have thought it a treasure beyond valuation, he had kept it to himself as an amusement, a rare curiosity. He had used his longtime employees to construct this stairhead building.

  Jane lightly kicked the wall to knock the snow from her shoes. They were wet all the way through, and her feet were cold.

  She opened the door with the lock-release gun, reached inside, flipped a switch. Light bloomed in the round stone room. She ushered Hendrickson ahead of her and crossed the threshold after him.

  The lock was a deadbolt that could only be engaged with a key. But before she let the door close behind her, she confirmed that a keyway existed on the inner face of the escutcheon. In case someone should lock the door from the outside, she would still be able to use the lock-release gun to get out of the building.

  Directly ahead, the floor shelved away through a hole that Booth regarded with dread.

  She went to it and directed the beam of her flashlight into it and saw steep stairs, perhaps of limestone, that had been shaped out of the natural rock flue with primitive tools. The way was narrow, the ceiling low ahead, and the walls of nature’s making were mostly worn smooth by millennia of water’s patient labor.

  “You won’t be afraid,” she told Hendrickson. “You will show me the way, and you won’t be afraid.”

  Although breath still paled from between his parted lips, he looked as dead as the man on the mortuary table in the basement of Gilberto’s funeral home.

  After a hesitation, he switched on his flashlight and took the lead into the crooked staircase.

  4

  Two cooling deaders on the market floor, a container of melting ice cream dripping through the contents of the shopping cart, blood here, brains there, Oren Luckman fluttering anxiously just beyond the scene of the shootings, the ugly light of overhead fluorescent tubes, the tedium…

  The situation with Captain Foursquare and his contingent of diligent deputies becomes so untenable that Carter Jergen uses his smartphone to call an Arcadian who is deputy director of the NSA. The man is also a former United States senator who, as an elected official, always managed to wheedle an abundance of face time on TV. He has styled himself as a champion of public-employee unions, so ther
e is little doubt that Foursquare will know his name.

  The senator’s voice is distinct and easily recognized, and when Jergen hands the phone to Foursquare, the captain is impressed, then charmed, then won over by whatever the great man tells him. Their conversation lasts at most four minutes, but Foursquare is smiling when he returns the phone to Jergen.

  “You should have told me you work under him,” the captain chides Jergen.

  “Well, sir, I always feel it’s wrong to drop his name unless I have to. I don’t think I’ve done enough for the country to trade on the accomplishments of a man like him.”

  “That speaks well for you,” says Foursquare. “We can’t stand down entirely, but we’ll stand aside until your incoming contingent gets here and we all agree there’s nothing more we can do. He says they’re airborne and sure to be here in half an hour.”

  “Thank you, Captain. I’m most grateful,” Jergen says with as much fake sincerity as he can muster. In fact, he’s no more grateful than he would be to a disease-bearing mosquito that keeps trying to take a bite of him.

  And here comes Dubose, looking not like a man who has solved a mystery, but like a man who needs to take a leak and is on a quest to find the ideal person on whom to empty his bladder.

  5

  Decades after his cruel formation, Hendrickson going down the hole again, Jane following him but not so close that he might turn and strike her in a moment of unlikely rebellion…

  The descending passage seemed to construct itself only as the beams of light flowed across it, as though such eerie architecture must be a work of the imagination, dreamed into being. Smooth, pale walls of stone sloped down in velvety folds shaped by unknowable millennia of moving water, no doubt including the melting of the miles-thick sheet formed during at least one ice age.

  Millions of years earlier, long before a human being walked the earth, nature had begun to form the crooked staircase, perhaps when violent vertical faulting formed the Sierra Nevada mountains on the west and the Carson Range on the east, leaving the Tahoe Basin between.

  The staircase was actually a series of small caverns, each partly atop the one below it, the entire formation of galleries angling down toward the lake, through more than five hundred feet of mountain, like a chambered hive. There were also narrow corridors of stone snaking off to other rooms that weren’t among those vertically aligned; according to Hendrickson, some of those passages looped like entrails and returned to the main descent, creating a maze; others were dead ends, some a hundred feet long, some continuing for half a mile or farther before dwindling to such a restricted width that not even a child could crawl farther through them.

  Jane’s tote bag was slung from her left shoulder, and in her left hand she held a can of spray paint that Gilberto had given her. At each bewildering junction of stone passages, she marked the way back to the stairhead with an arrow.

  Although the world itself, in its eternal remaking, had done the basic work through millions of years, human beings had taken nature’s random art and carved it to a purpose. Where the floor sloped at a negotiable angle, it was left natural, but when it became precarious, especially when any steepness led to a fissure into which someone might fall, crude steps had been shaped in the stone. Each crevasse—as narrow as two feet, as wide as seven—was bridged by a plank seated in notches cut into the lips of the fissures. When Booth’s father discovered the staircase, the bridge planks had long before rotted and fallen into the clefts they once spanned. The secondary passages had also been stepped and bridged where necessary, some climbing and some trending down into perpetual night.

  Early in the descent, they arrived at a larger chamber before which Hendrickson halted. He bent forward, clutching his stomach as though plagued by abdominal pain. But he didn’t look back at Jane or plead to retreat.

  After a minute, rising to full height again, he continued into a room in which a fault line bisected the ceiling, matched by a parallel fault in the floor. The medieval atmosphere weighed on the heart, and the air carried the faint fungal smell of things that thrived only in the dark. The right half of the chamber was a foot higher than the left. Although the right portion lay dry and pale, the ceiling to the left bared a row of huge teeth like the staves of a castle portcullis that might drop to bar entry, from which brown water dripped onto a mud floor; the stone was wet, dark, glistening as if lacquered. On both sides of the room, on every ledge and on the floor were severed hands gone to bone in centuries past.

  Hundreds of fleshless hands seemed to twitch in the sweeping beams of light, skeletal fingers extended as though in supplication or clutched as if in rage. Those in the dry space were mostly white and well preserved, but those in the moist area were more yellow than not, mottled brown, sometimes serving as matrixes on which mold grew like rodent hair.

  Jane was prepared to find this—and worse—on their journey, because Hendrickson had spoken of it, but the tableau was a grislier spectacle than expected. She didn’t know what to make of it, except that this was no sacred catacomb where peaceful people placed the dead with reverence. To her, trained in homicide investigation, these appeared to be trophies. The wrist bones were crushed and splintered where hands had been hacked from arms, perhaps sometimes from the arms of the living. The cavern told a story of violence and brutality, of ancient war and subjugation. Carved in the walls were strange runes, each sharp character like a cry of hatred.

  “See this, you little coward. Look!” Hendrickson whispered. “If a man intends you harm, cut off his hands before he can act.”

  Whoever had shaped the steps and adapted the cavern to their purpose must have been those who murdered these hundreds and made the crooked staircase into an ossuary.

  Evidence existed of Paleo-Indian tribes living in this area more than fourteen thousand years ago, but little was known of them other than they were hunters of large game, including mastodons. Their tools were thought to have been such as flint or obsidian spearheads and hammerstones, primitive and insufficient for the stone shaping done here. Their cultures were said to be largely peaceable, but in fact so little had they left behind that they were ghosts in the fog of ancient history.

  Only carbon dating and other tests would help to determine who created this place and furnished it with bones. Perhaps some paleo culture had possessed more advanced tools than were thought. Or as Hendrickson suggested when she questioned him at Gilberto’s place: It was known that, thousands of years nearer our time, the Northern Paiute had brutally oppressed the Washoe Indians; perhaps an even more militant faction of Paiutes had done part of this.

  The Martis Indians had also lived in this general area for 2,500 years before disappearing without a trace around 500 B.C., which happened to be about the same time that other tribes invented the bow and arrow. These caverns might hold the remains of the long-vanished Martis people.

  Hendrickson channeled his mother, and his words were like the susurrus of centipedes crawling the walls. “See, boy, see this. Did they eat these people after slaughtering them? We’re not far from Donner Pass, where stranded pioneers ate their dead to survive. Dog eat dog, so they say. More true is man eat man.”

  Jane thought of Hendrickson, five years and younger, sleeping in a locked boy-size box, coffined in darkness as punishment, and by the age of six sent into this maze alone, at the top as they had entered this time, told that he would be let out only at the bottom. The first few times, he’d been given a flashlight, but on occasions beyond his counting, he’d been denied a light and had felt his way through damp stone corridors, down disconnected sets of zigzagging stairs, across fissure-bridging planks, through crypts appointed with trophies of genocide, like a lost spirit haunting the haunted dark, hearing noises he didn’t make and wondering at their origin, feeling presences where none should be, with no food, with nothing to drink but the cold water that formed shallow pools in certain chambers and sometimes tasted like
iron, sometimes like nothing he wanted to name, on the worst occasions lost for two or three days.

  As pitiable as he was, he nevertheless deserved some admiration for having endured without being driven entirely insane. But if he had remained functional, he had nonetheless been mentally deformed, twisted and knotted into a creature that, though pitiable, had no slightest measure of pity for others. During his many ordeals in darkness, he at some point ceased to be just a boy and became a boy who was a monster, the minotaur of this labyrinth. He didn’t eat human flesh as did the Minotaur of Crete, but other people had no value for him except to be used in whatever way the use of them might satisfy him.

  For all her pity, Jane kept in mind, cavern by cavern, step by step, that what she had here on a leash was a monster who passed for human. In the long history of monsters, they sooner or later slipped their leashes.

  6

  Some of the sheriff’s deputies have returned to their regular patrols. Foursquare and two of his men are standing together in the produce department, admiring the fruit, waiting to see if they might be needed—which they won’t be—when the additional NSA contingent arrives.

  Upon his return from the manager’s office, Dubose draws Jergen aside to the relative privacy of pallets stacked with large bags of charcoal being offered at a special price now that the barbecuing season is about to start in earnest. “This damn well better not be another freakin’ banana peel we have to take a fall on before we can get our hands on that little bastard. The plates on that Honda expired four years ago, and the registration was never renewed. It shouldn’t be on the road.”

  “You’ve got the name and address of who last registered it?”