“Right. Now if you run your palm across it, you can feel how it’s elevated from the ice. Just a little bit. What happened is that since the blood was still warm, it began to melt into the ice before transferring all of its heat, creating a kind of dimple for the fluid to rest in, a miniature cup to hold the blood. Once it cooled enough it couldn’t continue to melt through the ice, it started to freeze. And now that it’s frozen solid, there’s an uneven bump over the rest of the ice around it. You can tell this happened a while ago based on the amount of ice that has since frozen over the top of it. That’s why you can hardly see it now, but it still leaves a palpable lump.”
“We already know someone bled here,” Kelsey said. His eyes narrowed with impatience. “The evidence is spattered all over those rocks. We’re wasting valuable time. Time we don’t have.”
“You’re missing the point.” Cavenaugh was growing frustrated as well. “All that blood over there. The smaller spatters here by the spring. They were killed over there.” It was the first time one of them had phrased it as such. The impact served to silence whatever objections Kelsey had opened his mouth to make. “And they were carried, not dragged, over here to the edge of the spring, where they were thrown into the water.”
“That doesn’t change anything,” Jess whispered.
“Of course it does,” Cavenaugh said. “Where are their bodies? Corpses tend to float, especially in a saline body like this. That’s why you always hear about murderers weighting down their victims with stones and concrete blocks.”
“So that’s what they must have done,” Kelsey said. “The water’s deep enough that we couldn’t reach the bottom, and with as cloudy and bacteria-riddled as it is, we can’t see very far down into it at all. For all we know, there could be a whole pile of bodies on the bottom.”
“It’s possible, however unlikely. Something would end up floating to the surface, especially considering the constant influx of water from the underground source of the spring. These things have to exchange hundreds of gallons of water a day to keep up with evaporation from the heat. No, I don’t think their corpses are in the spring at all.”
“But you just said that whoever attacked them threw their bodies into the spring,” Gabriel said.
“Exactly.”
There was that strange smile of excitement again. Coupled with the way he contradicted himself with every word, Gabriel suspected Cavenaugh teetered on the brink of a breakdown.
“You aren’t making sense,” Kelsey snapped.
“You’re missing the obvious,” Cavenaugh said. That smile was starting to grate on Gabriel’s frayed nerves. “Look back here, where we started. I showed you how the blood made the ice so that the surface wasn’t level. What do you think caused this?”
He gestured to several oblong stretches where the ice was thicker, almost like melted candle wax. There were dots where drops had fallen and other long lines of spatter, but in the center of each was a distinct shape that appeared the same to a large degree with each repeat occurrence.
“Don’t you see?” Cavenaugh asked. His smile faltered and he appeared exasperated. He turned to each of them in turn before finally shaking his head. “Watch.”
He raised his right foot and stepped down on the raised section of ice, then did the same with his left on the next instance. Then his right again on the third.
“Jesus,” Jess gasped. “They’re footprints.”
***
“So whoever dumped the bodies in the spring got in there with them, weighted them down, and then climbed back out,” Kelsey said. “That can only serve to help us. There’s no way they’re walking around out here with wet legs. They’d have frostbite long before they were able to either change out of their clothes or find shelter.”
“You’re right about that,” Cavenaugh said, “but you’re working under a faulty assumption. Look at the prints again. They’re narrowest here, on the end closest to the water, and wider on the leading edge. They were made by someone coming out of the water just like you said, but I believe they were made before the bloodstains.”
“What’s the difference? It doesn’t change the fact that we need to get off this mountain right now.”
“How do you think it’s possible that someone snuck up on Maura and Will without either of them noticing? You made the point yourself about Will being an experienced hunter. Once they found those bones, he would have been acutely alert and watching the forest like his life depended upon it. And we would have heard the report if he’d managed to fire the rifle,” Cavenaugh said. He unzipped his jacket and shed the hood.
“You’ve lost your mind,” Kelsey said.
“Give me the backpack.”
Kelsey pulled off the backpack and thrust it at Cavenaugh, who opened it and dumped the contents onto the ground at his feet. He removed his jacket and shoved it in, then followed with a light jacket, a sweater, and a flannel shirt, until he was down to a single undershirt.
“What are you doing?” Jess asked.
“We know there’s a cavern underneath this mountain,” he said as he slipped out of his boots, then his snow pants and jeans. “We also know that the geothermally-heated water flows into this spring from somewhere. The footprints are coming out of the water, and we know that no one could survive very long out here if they were sopping wet.”
Cavenaugh now stood before them in only his undershirt, long johns, and a single pair of socks. The rest of his clothes were stuffed into the zipped backpack.
“You’re going to freeze to death if you do this,” Gabriel said.
“Someone just did this exact thing before we got here. There has to be a way to warm up, or at least dry off, inside the cavern.” Cavenaugh shrugged. “Worst case scenario, I’ll have to sit in this spring until help arrives if I’m wrong.”
“Are you willing to take that chance?” Kelsey asked. “You know that could exacerbate your condition.”
Cavenaugh cast him a sharp look.
“What condition?” Jess asked.
“It’s no one’s business but my own.”
“The former Detective Cavenaugh here has esophageal cancer.”
“Former detective?” Gabriel asked.
“You didn’t really think any of this was sanctioned by the police, do you?” Kelsey asked. “The assault rifles, the communications system, the gear. Do you think the Denver Police Department just opened up the armory for Cavenaugh’s little shopping spree?”
“We don’t have time to do this now,” Cavenaugh said.
“That’s why you wouldn’t let me call the police,” Jess said. “You lied to us and jeopardized all of our lives —”
“Listen to me,” Cavenaugh snapped. He pulled off his long underwear and socks, and stood against the wind in nothing but a tee shirt and a pair of boxers, visibly shivering. “That doesn’t change anything. Run away if you want, but I, for one, intend to find out what happened to my sister before I die. Even if it kills me.”
He donned the backpack and snatched the rifle from Kelsey with a look that could have stopped a charging bull. A moment later he was sliding down the icy embankment into the spring. Two steps away from the edge, the ground fell away beneath him, and he plunged out of sight.
***
“Thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire,” Jess whispered.
They stood at the edge of the spring, watching the burbling surface of the pink water and the red rocks beneath through the swirling steam. Cavenaugh had been down there for at least three minutes, and all of them knew there was no way he could have held his breath that long. Gabriel pictured Cavenaugh with his feet snared in a tangle of bodies on the bottom, struggling to free himself before finally taking that fateful inhalation of fluid. Somewhere down there, Gabriel imagined the stocky man’s lifeless body swaying on the current like a leaf of kelp. Worse, if Cavenaugh’s theory had been correct, he just might have found an underwater entrance to the cavern where the killers waited for him. Will hadn’t been able to fire a single shot in defense. There were no guarantees that Cavenaugh would be any luckier. Gabriel envisioned Cavenaugh crawling out of a small pool into a dark chamber where a shadowed form leaned over him from behind, grabbed him by the hair, and yanked his head back to expose his throat. A flash of steel and twin arterial sprays painted the walls.
