'The second van's already on its way. Call Lang, coordinate everything through him. He's got you on his GPS so he won't lose you.'
Watts started the car.
'Move inside the hospital,' Bryson said to Jordan. 'Pull Darby out of there.'
51
The heating vent was narrow and smelled of rust and decay. Darby crawled forward on her stomach. She reached the flashlight and rolled it ahead of her, feeling like the John McClane character Bruce Willis had played in the first Die Hard movie.
When she reached the statue, she placed it into an evidence bag and tucked it into her coat pocket. She picked up the flashlight.
The vent curved to the left. The second part was only ten feet long and led out to a floor covered in dust and rubble.
Turning onto her side, Darby edged her way around the corner, boots banging against the metal, and got stuck. Panic gripped her as she imagined being trapped here. Why in the name of God am I doing this?
Darby took in deep breaths, forcing herself to relax. She got her footing and pushed herself into the second vent, hearing her coat rip. Turning back onto her stomach, she crawled forward and pushed herself onto a floor covered with rubble.
A hole was in the ceiling and, beyond it, walls stretching up into the darkness. Sections of the floors above her were missing. She wondered what had caused such a massive amount of damage.
The door to the room was closed. Moving the beam of her light around the wooden shelves, most of which were still intact, she saw clear plastic vials full of water and cardboard boxes full of rosary beads and stacks of books. Darby wiped away the dust from the spines; bibles and hymn books.
Darby gripped the door, surprised to find it opened without effort.
She didn't know what she had expected to find but she hadn't expected this – an old chapel holding a dozen wooden pews covered in dust and debris. Some of the pews had been crushed from where the ceiling had caved in, and she saw a steel beam resting through what was probably a confessional.
To her left, dozens of footprints led down an aisle. At the end, inside an alcove, was a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary sitting on a bench, her son, Jesus, sprawled across her lap. The Blessed Mother was dressed in flowing white and blue robes, her facial expression frozen in eternal sorrow as she looked down at bloody holes in her dead son's feet and palms from the nails that had pinned him to the crucifix.
The Virgin Mary was clean – no dust, no grime.
Moving the beam of her light around the statue, Darby spotted rags and a bucket of water holding a sponge.
She carefully made her way to the centre aisle, not wanting to disturb the footprints. They appeared to be recent. The marks belonged to a boot or sneaker.
When she reached the centre aisle, Darby saw another set of footprints which were distinctly different. These shoeprints bore a strong resemblance to the one she had found on the floor inside Emma Hale's spare bedroom.
A woman cried out for help.
Heart leaping high in her chest, Darby swung around and in the beam of light saw an altar covered in debris. The wooden pulpit was crushed. A large statue of Jesus hanging on the cross lay on the floor in pieces.
There was no one here. She hadn't imagined the sound, she was sure of it.
Darby made her way to the aisle on the far right. No footprints. She moved down the aisle and heard a woman screaming, the sound faint, coming from the altar.
Darby ducked under the beam. Jesus' head, crowned in bloody thorns, lay on the floor, his sorrowful eyes staring at her as she moved up the altar steps. The woman's painful cries grew louder.
A broken door was behind the altar. Darby slipped inside as a man moaned, the sound mixed with the woman's pleading, begging for the pain to stop.
The adjoining room was not much bigger than the maintenance closet and held dusty shelves stacked with the same bibles and hymn books. The ceiling was intact.
On the floor was a cardboard box full of small plastic statues of the Virgin Mary – the same statues she had found sewn inside Emma Hale and Judith Chen's pockets. The same statue Malcolm Fletcher had left inside the vent and on the windowsill of the room.
Shoeprints stopped in front of a brick wall. At the bottom was a large, wide hole. The dust and dirt on the floor had been disturbed, as though someone had recently stood here.
A man laughed. Darby knelt on the floor, away from the footprints, and shined the beam of her flashlight inside another room. Lying against the debris was a skeletal set of remains.
52
Jonathan Hale stared at his daughter's pictures, searing Emma's face into his mind's eye, wanting to preserve every angle to keep her from fading.
But she would fade. The mind, he knew, was the most cunning prison, a ruthless warden. It would take these memories of Emma and, like Susan, blur them over time while torturing him with this singular, inescapable fact: he had taken each of these moments for granted.
His girls, the two most important people in what he had come to realize was a completely insignificant, hollow life, smiled at him. Husband and father. Now he was a widower, the father to a dead child.
Daddy.
Hale, drunk and numb, looked up and saw Emma sitting in the leather armchair. Her hair wasn't wet and mangled with twigs; it was neatly combed, thick and beautiful. Her face was alive, full of colour.
'Hey, baby. How are you doing?'
Mom and I are fine now.
'What are you doing here?'
We're worried about you.
Hale's eyes were hot and wet. 'I miss you so much.'
We miss you too.
'I'm sorry, baby. I'm so, so sorry.'
You didn't do anything wrong, Dad.
Hale buried his face in his hands and cried. 'I don't know what to do.'
You already know what to do.
'I can't.'
God answered your prayers. He sent someone to help you.
Yes, he had prayed to God for the truth, and the messenger was like a creature spawned from the Catechism books from his childhood – a man with strange black eyes holding terrible secrets, a man who had killed two federal agents and God only knew who else; a man who had given him the name and face of his daughter's killer.
Now that he knew the truth, he wished God would take it away. He didn't want to know. He didn't want to know.
It's not just about me any more, Daddy. You know about what happened to the others.
Hale checked his watch. He could still make the call. He still had time.
They can't speak for themselves. They need you to speak for them.
Hale stumbled across the room and scooped the cell phone from his desk.
You can't let them suffer in silence.
