She spied a door and pulled it open. 'This way.”
They found themselves in a totally black room filled with the stench of ancient fires and burning and the smell of trash.
“It's some sort of incinerator room,” he told her as they waited in the dark. Outside, they heard footsteps go by, passing along the corridor.
“Do you have a light?” she asked.
He had come prepared, snatching out a small flashlight, shining the beam around the room. It was a large, dirty, smelly place with a huge incinerator at the center. It probably looked little different from the baking kilns mentioned by Father Aguilar at the time of their meeting. It was a solid, thick brick oven with a huge cast iron door in front. It sat there like a large animal, a pachyderm, against the center back wall, its mammoth face jutting toward them and the door.
“Let's get out of here,” she complained. 'This place is so damned rank, I can hardly breathe.”
“Hold on…” He went toward the kiln door, wondering at the odors that had been created here. Was it more than burning trash that annoyed his olfactory senses? His father had been in the white man's war to end all wars, World War II, and as with many American Indians, he was given shovel and broom duty. When the Allies arrived at Auschwitz, his father had been one of the many unfortunates ordered into the ovens used to exterminate a race, there to comb through the rubble and locate all the bones. His father had described the odor as one of scorched sweet-and-sour pork, a kind of sickly sweet odor that both horrified and fascinated at once, like the smell and sight of putrefaction. Lucas had had first-hand knowledge of the odor of burned flesh when he was trapped in the death car with Wallace Jackson, who had been burned beyond recognition beside him.
For a moment, he felt faint, fearing he would go into another blackout, but he steeled himself instead and determined to face his fear.
The smell of burned flesh and bone here had become part of the stonework.
He felt an overwhelming revulsion wash over him in a wave, and then he went to his knees, unfeeling, going softly into darkness. When he opened his eyes again, he was lying on his back, Meredyth fanning him with her hand and softly calling out his name and cursing him for doing this here, now.
“Oh, damn, sorry… I'm sorry,” he confessed. “How long've I been out?”
“Thirty, maybe forty seconds, not long, but damn, you gave me a fright. What happened?”
“Involuntary… probably triggered by that smell.”
“What is that smell?”
“Charred flesh.”
She shook her head. “Animal fat leavings from the kitchen scraps, maybe?”
“No, more than that. Much more…”
“How can you be sure?”
“You've seen my neck, my face.”
There was a moment of silence between them.
“I've got to open that oven door.”
She squeezed his hand Firmly. “I'm with you. Flash your light inside.”
Lucas got to his knees and then slowly to his feet. The odor was bad, causing dizziness. He grabbed on to the furnace handle and yanked down and out, and the heavy door creaked open, revealing a mountain of ash.
The oven needed cleaning badly.
Lucas's flash picked up nothing but gray-blue mounds of ash. He flashed the light about the greasy black room, saw a light switch, and he held the light on the naked, overhead bulb for a moment. Meredyth reached out, about to switch the light on, when noises again came from the hallway. Lucas yanked her hand away and shut off the flash.
The noise of the brothers outside subsided. Lucas again ran his flash about the room, and he located a long- handled ash shovel hanging alongside the kiln on the wall. He asked Meredyth to hold the flash while he quietly dug, sifted, and turned ash inside the kiln. After several attempts, the shovel twanged metallic, as if it had hit one of the incinerator walls.
“I've struck something,” he whispered to her.
She stared as Lucas worked the shovel under the object and lifted a hefty supply of ash, shaking it as he brought the long-handled shovel back toward them. Under the beam, they both saw the ash fall away from the glaring, empty eye sockets of what appeared to be a human skull.
“God bless us,” Lucas said, “we've hit pay dirt.”
“Oh, my God,” she moaned.
“Perhaps what's left of Charles Mootry or Little or-”
“Keep searching. There's got to be more.”
“More?”
“Bones, teeth, another skull,” she insisted.
“But we can't do a thing about this,” he informed her.
“What?”
“We haven't a warrant to search. It's fruit of the forbidden tree, inadmissible in a court of law, unless we can get a warrant to search, but it's a round robin-we can't get a warrant without probable cause, and this is the probable cause.”
“What about what Randy's uncovered, about the connections among the deceased and Aguilar?”
“It might be enough, but we have to put everything here back exactly as it was, and we can't ever tell anyone- anyone-about this discovery, you understand?”
“Yes, yes… I do. It's got to be the missing parts.”
“They dispose of the parts here, ritualistically, so the demons can't rise against them ever again, like Randy said, in the game, Helsinger's Pit, and this… this place is the pit, but it's not an Internet pit.”
“It's the real thing. So, what do we do now?
“I sure as hell would like to take that skull to a lab, see what dental records could show us, but it wouldn't be wise.”
“Meanwhile, if they discover we've been here, they could dispose of it all,” she countered. “We'd have absolutely nothing, no proof to take to Bryce, the FBI, or anyone in a position to help us.”
“Can we trust the FBI?” he asked.
“They've been working the case from their side for some time. Least, that's the impression Bullock and Price gave.”
“It wasn't long after Bullock and Price saw us that we were nearly skewered, and they were the only ones we told where we were staying, if you recall.”
“Jesus, but if that were the case, why'd they give us so much information about how the Net killers work and about the vampire files?”
“They may well have known that we already had that information, that Randy Oglesby hacked it off for us.”
“Good God, I don't know who to trust anymore.”
'Trust in me, and I'll trust in you.”
“And we'll both have to trust in God.”
“And our own instincts. Now, let's compromise. We'll take the single skull. Everything else we leave,” he suggested. “Who knows, maybe somewhere in this city, we can find a forensic magician who can tell us something about the bone structure, age, and nationality of Yorick here.”
“My grandfather,” she suggested.
He hefted the skull and cloaked it below his robes.
“Does anyone know you're here?”
“Conrad.”
“Great lot of help that'll do.”
“Quit picking on him.”
“Do you love him?”
“He's a wonderful man.”
“You didn't answer my question.”
