Marshall turned on his flashlight.
“Let's have a little light on the subject,” he muttered. Then, he bellowed, “Bingo fucking Jesus!”
There it was, all right. A big sinkhole in the middle of the dirt floor. A dark blue van parked next to the hole. “Son-of-a-B, Artie!”
Chester Dils pulled out his service revolver. Suddenly, he was having trouble getting his breath. He was having trouble just standing there. In all honesty, he did not want to go up to the big hole in the ground. He did not want to be inside the old barn anymore. Maybe he wasn't ready for the troopers after all.
“Who's here?” Artie Marshall called out in a loud, clear voice. “Come out, right now. We're the police! This is the Crisfield police.”
Christ, Artie was doing better than he was, Dils thought. The man was rising to the occasion. That got Chester Dils's feet and legs moving, anyway. He was heading farther inside the bam-to see if this was what he prayed to Almighty God it wasn't.
“Point that lamp right down in there,” he said to his partner in cfime-solving. They had come up fight alongside the hole in the ground. He could barely breathe now. His chest felt as if it were constricted by a tourniquet. His knees were knocking against each other. “You okay, Artie?” he asked his partner.
Marshall beamed the flashlight down into the dark, deep hole. They saw what the hunters had already seen.
There was a small box... almost a casket., in the sinkhole. The wooden case, or casket, was wide open. And it was empty. “What the hell is that thing?” Dils heard himself asking.
Artie Marshall bent down closer. He aimed the flashlight beam directly into the hole. Instinctively, he looked around. He checked his back. Then his attention went to the black hole again.
Something was down at the bottom of the hole. Something that looked bright pink, or red.
Marshall's mind was raeing. It's a shoe... Christ, it must be the little girl's. This must be where they kept Maggie Rose Dunne.
“This is where they kept those two kids,” he finally spoke to his partner. 'We found it, Chesty.
And they had.
Along with one of Maggie Rose's pretty-in-pink sneakers. The old trusty-dusty Reebok sneakers that were supposed to help her blend in with the other kids at Washington Day School. The really weird part was that the sneaker looked as if it had been left there to be found.
Part Two
The Son of L'indbergh
Along Came A Spider
CHAPTER 26
UPSET, he retreated into his, s and powerful fantasies.. His master plan seemed to be racing out of control. He didn't even want to think about it.
Speaking in a whisper, he repeated the magical words from memory: “The Lindbergh farmhouse glowed with bright orangish lights. It looked like a fiery castle.... But now, the taking of Maggie Rose is the Crime of the Century. It simply is!”
He'd had a fantasy about committing the Lindbergh kidnapping as a boy. Gary. had even committed it to memory.
That was the beginning of everything: a story he had made up when he was twelve years old. A story he told himself over and over to keep from going insane. A daydream about a crime committed twenty-five years before he was born.
It was pitch-black in the basement of his house now.
He had gotten used to the dark. It was livable. It could even be great.
It was 6:15 P.m., a Wednesday, January 6, in Wilmington, Delaware.
Gary was letting his mind wander now, letting his mind fly. He was able to visualize every intimate detail of Lucky Lindy and Anne Moffow Lindbergh's farmhouse in Hopewell. He'd been obsessed with the worldfamous kidnapping for so long. Ever since his stepmother had arrived with her two spoiled bastard kids. Ever since he was first sent down to the cellar. “Where bad boys go to think about what they did wrong.”
He knew more than anyone alive about the thirties kidnapping. Baby Lindbergh had eventually been dredged up from a shallow grave only four miles from the New Jersey estate. Ah, but was it really Baby Lindbergh? The corpse they'd found had been too tallthirty-three inches, to only twenty-nine for Charles Jr.
No one understood the sensational, unsolved kidnapping. To this day. And that was the way it would be with Maggie Rose Dunne and Michael Goldberg.
No one was ever going to figure it out. That was a definite promise.
No one had figured out any of the other murders he'd done, had they? They got John Wayne Gacy, Jr., after over thirty murders in Chitown. Jeffrey Dahmer went down after seventeen in Milwaukee. Gary had murdered more than both of them put together. But no one knew who he was, or where he was, or what he planned to do next. it was dark down in his cellar, but Gary was used to it. “The cellar is an acquired taste,” he'd once told his stepmother to make her angry. The cellar was like your mind would be after you died. It could be exquisite, if you had a really great mind. Which he certainly did.
Gary was thinking about his plan of action, and the thought was simple: they hadn't really seen anything
