Diane stretched her sore muscles and groaned. Damn, she was going to be in just great shape when she and Frank, her detective boyfriend, went on vacation tomorrow.
“Is everybody okay?” Neva leaned over the edge of the hole in the ceiling. “We heard you on the walkie-talkie and came as quickly as we could.”
“We’re fine,” Diane yelled up at her. “Thanks to Mike’s quick rope-tying skills. Be careful of that hole; there might still be some weak spots up there. Where’s MacGregor?”
“He didn’t think he’d fit down that narrow tunnel. Frankly, I think he was right. It’s a tight squeeze.”
Dick MacGregor was a member of the caving club and, most important to Diane, he was a relative of the owner of the land where the entrance to the cave was located. That fact was enough for her to put up with his annoying personality traits and have him as one of her caving partners. He wasn’t fat, but he was stouter than Mike, Neva and Diane-and there were some close places he wouldn’t fit into without becoming stuck.
“Neva, would you climb down here with me? Mike’s going back to the surface with MacGregor.”
“So,” said Mike with a grin, “you
“Mysteries, particularly cave mysteries, always interest me.”
“I thought so,” he said as he stepped through the rubble and made his way to the rope dangling from the hole in the ceiling.
Diane noted that he’d tied a series of loops on the rope to aid in climbing back up.
“How stable is the lip of that hole?”
He looked up. “It’ll do for now.”
“Can you bring more lights?” said Diane.
“Sure. Want me to contact someone at the crime lab for you?”
“Ask David or Jin to bring a kit, but tell them to wait outside. I think you had better bring it in.”
Diane was director of the RiverTrail Museum of Natural History in Rosewood, Georgia. The successful use of the museum’s forensic anthropology lab in the solution of a number of local homicides had caught the attention of Rosewood’s mayor and police chief. As a result of political manipulations by Rosewood city officials, a crime scene unit had been set up on the third floor of the west wing of the museum, with Diane as its director also. All in all, it was an interesting world she lived in. However disparate the combination of museum work and crime fighting might seem, she found it helpful for the crime lab to have access to the abundance of museum experts. The talents of the crime scene unit had even come in handy when the museum acquired an Egyptian mummy. A museum and a crime scene lab turned out, to everyone’s surprise, to be a good, if odd, fit.
David and Jin were members of Diane’s crime scene crew. Jin was in his twenties, half-Asian, and came from New York, where he’d been a criminalist. David had worked with her at World Accord International when the two of them were human rights investigators. Neva, a former police officer, came to her from the Rosewood Police Department. The three of them made up Diane’s crime scene unit. But David and Jin weren’t cavers, and Diane didn’t want them inside a rugged cave like this one.
Mike began his ascent, easily climbing the rope hand over hand. When he cleared the top, he and Neva exchanged a few quiet words, and then she started down the rope.
Diane had been surprised that Neva wanted to take up caving again after her true near-death experience in this very cave system. Being wedged in a crevasse between rocks, with gravity pulling her ever tighter into the squeeze, had been a frightening experience. But Neva showed a remarkable determination to get over the trauma. She was wide-eyed and pale the first few times back in a cave, but she stuck with it. Diane wondered if it was as much for Mike as for caves.
“What’s up?” Neva looked up at the opening until the light disappeared with Mike down the tunnel. She grinned, and Diane watched her face change as she turned her head and spotted the remains.
“My God, that’s not anyone we know. .?”
“No. This guy’s been here a very long time.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see enough of his bones to tell, but I’d bet he broke a limb, probably a leg. Looks like he was a caver. Has a helmet with a carbide lamp, a canteen, and I just noticed a backpack sticking out from under him. But I haven’t seen any rope. I don’t know of any caver who would venture this far into a cave without rope.”
“Novice?” Neva said, squatting to look at the mummy and his artifacts.
“Maybe, but novices usually bring rope-sometimes not enough of it, but they usually have it.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“We can’t touch the body until the coroner arrives, but we can do a grid search of the floor.”
“What about the breakdown?”
“We’ll get Mike to help with some of it.”
“You’re kidding. You’re going to look under the rocks?”
Diane surveyed the piles of rocks on the floor. “We’re not going to move them all, but I’d like to see if anything is under the rocks that just fell. You take that end; I’ll start at the wall with the opening.” She gestured toward the hole in the opposite wall. “We’ll meet in the middle.”
Diane and Neva made their way to opposite sides of the room, but instead of searching the floor, Diane looked up at the opening in the wall.
“I think he fell from here,” she said. Her words reverberated across the cavern. She doubted Neva could make out what she’d said. Diane waved her away when she saw Neva’s headlamp turn in her direction.
Diane rubbed a hand over the rough texture of the wall. It was about twenty feet to the opening, not a bad climb. She examined the wall, mentally noting hand-and footholds. Piece of cake, like climbing a ladder. She keyed her radio. “Neva, I’m going up top to the opening here. You can continue searching the floor, or wait for me, whichever you prefer.”
Diane pulled her chalk bag from her pants pocket, dusted her hands and felt for the first two holds-a crack in the rock face in which she slipped the fingers of her right hand, and a protrusion she grabbed with the other. She proceeded up the face of the cliff, making sure every handhold and foothold was stable before she moved to the next, always using her hands for balance and her legs to push upward.
Diane liked solo climbing. She enjoyed being free of the ropes, but she always brought a climbing harness just in case she came across something really deep and interesting in the cave.
When she reached the opening, she pulled herself over the bottom edge, stood up in the newfound tunnel and viewed the cavern from this new vantage point. The scene was beautiful. Illuminated by her headlamps, the varied hues of red, orange, ivory and silver rock had a golden glow. The icy-looking stalactites and stalagmites with their pointed peaks and knobby textures looked like spires from some Middle Earth kingdom. Diane found the unearthly appearance ironic-nothing was more of the earth than a cave.
She turned her attention to details of the tunnel. Her first thought on examining the rock face she’d just climbed was that Caver Doe, as she dubbed him in her mind, had fallen the twenty feet from this tunnel to the cavern floor. The rock wall had a concave dip in it under the entrance, so that if he had been walking down this passage without paying attention, he would have run out of floor before he ran out of sides. From this vantage point at the top, that seemed a viable hypothesis.
There was little breakdown on the floor of the tunnel near the opening. Nothing to trip over. As she studied the walls, she saw something angular jutting from the rock near the bottom of the wall. It wasn’t rock. She knelt and examined the object-a railroad spike. Its presence puzzled her for a moment; then she realized that it might have been a crude anchor bolt, used to secure a rope. Caver Doe’s equipment was old, predating all the modern gear that she had.
Several inches above the spike she discovered a gash in the stone wall. She put a hand in the gouged-out place, poking around in the hole, feeling its shape. In the middle of the gash was a smaller hole.
A new hypothesis formed in her mind. Caver Doe had set his railroad spike in the top hole, tied his rope to it, and started over the edge. The spike had pulled out of the wall when he put his full weight on it-causing him to fall. If they found a railroad spike on the floor of the cavern, that would support her idea.
But what of the spike that was set-his caving partner? Surely he hadn’t been caving alone. Then. . why wasn’t he rescued?
