Authors: David DeBatto
He watched from beneath the car. He dared not move, holding his ground. The saucer scanned the area where the deer had been,
drawing closer. When it was directly overhead, a circle of light surrounded the car, melting the snow that had fallen on the
road. The ship lingered a moment longer, then, apparently satisfied, moved on, continuing to scan the road in brief bursts
of light.
Another hundred yards down the road, the saucer turned off its lights and lifted suddenly into the sky.
DeLuca waited a long time beneath the car. The temptation was to get into the car and drive away as quickly as possible, but
it was a temptation he couldn’t afford to give in to. Two hours was the approximate dwell window of the milsats that overflew
Iraq, but he couldn’t wait that long. His other problem was that if the car ran out of gas, he could find himself in trouble
of a different sort. He still had his encrypted phone, but he didn’t dare use it until he’d talked with Peggy Romano to make
sure it was still safe to do so. Finally, after perhaps thirty minutes, he crawled out.
He dusted himself off and stood motionless beside the car, sniffing the air, listening, watching the sky, the light snow still
falling. He grabbed a flashlight from the car and went to where he’d last seen the deer, but there was nothing, no deer, no
phone, and only the faintest smell of burned hair in the air. If the ground had been scorched, the falling snow had already
covered it up.
He shut off his flashlight and walked back to the car. He wasn’t sure what he’d seen. He knew what he was supposed to believe
he’d seen, but that and what had actually transpired were often two very different things.
DAN SYKES CALLED JOSH TRUITT AFTER THE Navaho Tribal Police office in Shiprock issued a report that a vehicle registered to
Theresa Davidova, a white 1984 Toyota pickup, had been found on the reservation, at the end of Rural Road 2634a in a place
called Sudano Canyon. When Sykes called Shiprock, an officer named Jim Chee told him the truck had been covered with a camouflage
tarp.
“Sometimes people do that when they don’t want anybody messing with their stuff,” Chee said. “Then snow covered the tarp.”
The truck had been found by a Navaho rancher who’d been tracking a mountain lion that had been killing his sheep. “We can’t
tell you how long the truck’s been there or where the driver might have gone,” Chee said. “We left things the way we found
them, for now. There’s a cabin farther up the canyon where people stay. If you want, I could come with you to check it out.”
“Just impound the vehicle until we can process it,” Sykes said. He thanked the officer and said he’d call him if it turned
out he needed assistance. DeLuca had asked him to take a different approach and see how far it went—he was to suppose that
General Koenig’s suspicions were correct. Davidova hadn’t met Escavedo via the bulletin board at a laundromat—assume it was
more intentional than that. Assume Cheryl Escavedo was gay, and that Davidova had used that to draw her in somehow. According
to several of the strippers Dan interviewed who’d danced with Theresa Davidova, she’d swung both ways upon occasion, something
Josh Truitt seemed unaware of. Suppose the circle connected in the other direction—Sergelin had told Leon Lev to find somebody
who worked at Cheyenne Mountain, somebody with access to Darkstar data. He’d found Escavedo and sent Davidova to make contact,
perhaps as a way of paying off the debt she owed him.
“Any idea why Theresa might have gone to Shiprock?” Sykes asked Truitt after he told them they’d found her car.
“A pretty good idea, actually,” Truitt said. “We were there together, last summer. I brought her along as an assistant on
a shoot.”
Truitt drove. They stopped at a general store called Eli’s Trading Post at the intersection of Sudano Canyon Road and 2634a,
a wooden structure in serious disrepair, with a gas pump out front and a handwritten note on the door that read
MEKING A DELIVRY—BACK LATER, MARY
but no indication when the note had been written. It was two o’clock in the afternoon.
They found Theresa’s truck half an hour later, parked well off the dirt road in an oak grove at the bottom of a hill where
the road narrowed and became impassable, though occasionally, Truitt said, 4WD off-road clubs went in farther with their H2s
and knob-tired winch-equipped Jeeps. Sykes examined the Toyota, but there was little information to be gained. She’d taken
the flashlight from the glove compartment, where Sykes found a deck of cards and a black lace bra, but Truitt said he’d seen
her take the bra off beneath her sweater and store it in the glove box after they’d come home from a party. There was a cell
phone recharger plugged into the cigarette lighter socket, and a felt tip pen with its cap off on the passenger seat. The
floors were clean, almost as if they’d been vacuumed, and the dashboard was free of dust, as if it had been wiped. Sykes had
a pretty good idea that whoever had cleaned the car had taken care not to leave fingerprints or DNA. They’d know more once
they ran the vehicle through the FBI lab in Denver.
“The cabin is a couple miles in,” Truitt said, opening the tailgate of his truck and handing Sykes a pair of snowshoes. He
donned a pair as well, throwing a large backpack over his shoulders.
“You want me to carry anything?” Sykes asked as Truitt handed him a pair of ski poles to assist the hike.
“I carry my own stuff,” Truitt said. “For the record, I hate bellboys, too.”
“What’s in the bag?” Sykes asked as Truitt headed off.
“Things we might need,” Truitt replied over his shoulder.
Sykes had a hard time seeing how any Jeeps or 4WD vehicles would ever make it up some of the steep declivities they traversed.
They hiked in silence for about half an hour, traveling perhaps three kilometers until Josh Truitt pointed to a cabin backed
up against a limestone cliff. There was no smoke coming from the smokestack, a bad sign, Dan guessed.
The cabin was empty, but someone had been there. A jar of blue Berry Blast-flavored Gatorade sat on the table, frozen solid.
The bed had been slept in, and under it, Truitt found a paperback copy of the latest Harry Potter book, which he said Theresa
had been reading. A kerosene lamp sat on the table, half full of fuel. Sykes found three power bar wrappers in the wastebasket.
“There was a deck of cards in the glove compartment,” he said. “Were they Theresa’s?”
“She was teaching herself to play Texas Hold ’Em,” Truitt said. “She wanted me to take her to Las Vegas. Apparently Cheryl’s
uncle lived there.”
“If you were going to spend some time in a cabin in the mountains,” Sykes asked, “wouldn’t you bring a deck of cards? Why
leave it behind? It’s not like it takes up that much room.”
“Maybe she forgot.”
“Maybe.”
Sykes moved to the door and peered at the sky. There was no point trying to look for tracks. He saw prints in the snow where
a chipmunk or possibly a squirrel had scrambled across the porch, but beyond the overhang, the newfallen snow would have covered
over any signs indicating what direction Theresa might have taken.
“You said you were here on a shoot?” Dan asked Truitt.
“That’s the next place I was going to suggest we look,” Truitt replied.
Dan Sykes strapped on his snowshoes and followed the photographer up the canyon, struggling to keep pace, and Sykes was in
excellent physical condition, a triple black belt in karate and something of a workout fanatic. He figured Truitt had to be
one of those guys they simply called “genetic” back at CI school at Fort Huachuca, physical freaks with mutations that gave
them oversized lungs or massive hearts or extra red blood cells. The path was simpler to find as the canyon walls began to
converge, the trail climbing through drifts that were ten feet deep, giving way to windblown areas of bare rock.
“This is New Mexico karst,” Truitt explained. “If we had time, I’d chip you off a piece of wall and show you the seashells
and marine fossils in it. Two hundred fifty million years ago this area was the bottom of the sea. The whole Chihuahuan Desert,
actually. It’s basically a limestone uplift, and whenever you get that, you get a lot of caves, where the eons of rain percolate
through the rock and form underground rivers and aquifers.”
“Like Carlsbad?”
“Carlsbad is a little different. And Lechugilla, which is a whole lot different.”
“What’s Lechugilla?”
“It’s a cave near Carlsbad,” Truitt said. “But unlike precipitate caves formed by ground water percolating down, Lechugilla
was formed over millions of years by sulfuric acids bubbling up from below. It’s probably the most fantastic cave in the world.
Not to mention the most complex.”
“You shot the coffee table book for that one, right? The book you gave to Sergeant Escavedo.”
“I shot it, but somewhat reluctantly,” Truitt said. “Half the time I photograph a cave, I come back a few years later and
it’s been ruined by amateur cavers leaving their footprints all over the place or breaking off crystals for souvenirs, and
all because I gave the place a little publicity. Fortunately they put a sealed vault door on the only entrance to Lechugilla
and a permit system and they actually police the place to make sure nobody’s been in there without a license. It’s probably
the most beautiful place on the planet. Also one of the most dangerous. Do you like caves, Agent Sykes?”
“Not particularly,” he said.
“Well then you’re really going to hate this one,” Truitt said.
After a steep rise, they came to a clearing where the ground leveled off. The canyon wall opposite rose vertically for five
hundred feet, but at the base of it, there appeared to be an area where the snow hadn’t fallen. Closer examination revealed
that the snow had in fact fallen but it had melted, the air as they approached getting warmer and mustier smelling. Surmounting
a small ridge, Sykes glanced down at what appeared to be a dark grimace in the earth, a crescent-shaped gash at the base of
the wall from which, he saw, a small bat flew out, and then another.
“Probably another hour before the emergence,” Truitt said, looking at the sky and taking his snowshoes off where the ground
was free of snow. Sykes did the same as Truitt dug into his backpack, extracting a pair of LED headlamps. He handed one to
Sykes, then handed him a pair of gauntlet-style rubber gloves and a roll of silver duct tape.
“Tape your pants to your boots and your sleeve cuffs to your wrists. Don’t tape the gloves on because you might need to take
them off. Take off your coat and your fleece but wear this on your head, college boy style,” he said, passing Sykes an Arizona
Diamondbacks cap, then a pair of paper surgical masks. “One of these should last you half an hour, maybe an hour. When it
gets too wet to breathe through, you can switch to the new one. It’s not that big a cave, but it’s damn nasty. It goes down
three chambers and there are no major drops or constrictions, but it gets slippery, so that’s why I’ve brought these,” he
explained, taking a pair of climbing ropes from his pack and strapping on a belt of climbing gear. “We’re not belaying or
anything—all I’m doing is setting guylines, pretty much. The first chamber, not counting the entry corridor, is approximately
star-shaped. The one after that is sort of like a hot dog and the final one is like a hamburger bun. The snakes are active
year round inside but they’re Mexican boas so they’re not going to hurt you.” Finally he handed Sykes a pair of goggles, something
like a diving mask. “This is just because I got a wicked eye infection once. I don’t know if it was from the cave or what,
but I’d prefer that it not happen again. There’s all sorts of microscopic stuff in the air. You ready?”
Bats were emerging from the mouth of the cave at a rate of two or three a second, the sun still above the horizon but below
the canyon walls.
“Leave my coat here?” Sykes said.
“You’re not going to need it,” Truitt said, testing his large hand-held flashlight and handing a second one to Sykes. “The
thing about cave environments is that unless they’re challenged, they’re incredibly stable. This one hasn’t changed much inside
for maybe a million years, so unless something happened that I don’t know about, the temperature in the star chamber is going
to be ninety-three or ninety-four degrees, and hot dog is about a hundred and hamburger is a hundred and ten, hundred percent
humidity and not a breeze, so it’s basically like a pitch-black sauna, full of shit. And snakes. And bugs. The Indian name
for it translates as ‘Home of the Dark Spirit.’ The Spanish name was
‘Lugar de las Matanzas.’
”
“‘Place of the Killings,’” Sykes translated.
“‘Slaughters.’ I’ve got dry clothes to change into when we come out. Ready?”
“Can’t wait,” Sykes said.
Truitt led the way. The gash in the earth sloped down about thirty feet while the ceiling rose to where the two men could
stand as they descended the portal slope, Sykes placing his feet as precisely as he could in the footholds Truitt chose. The
heat and humidity struck him immediately, an overwhelming wall of oppressive dankness, though the smell was tolerable, something
like mushrooms, perhaps. The floor here was a mixture of mud and guano, perhaps eight inches thick. Truitt said it would get
thicker the farther in they went. There were blurry footprints in the muck. Sykes asked Truitt to stop while he examined one.
“The thing is,” Truitt said, “because of how stable it is in here, those could be from yesterday or a year ago or ten years
ago. You could probably measure the amount of bat shit that’s fallen into them and get an approximation, but it’s hard to
tell. See that over there?” He shone his flashlight on a set of pictographs on the wall, two human figures fighting what appeared
to be a bear. “That’s Anasazi. Maybe eight thousand years old, and it looks like somebody painted it yesterday. This place
is still relatively unknown. I only heard about it from a caver I met who was part Navaho. The Indians were generally not
big on caves. They considered them places where evil dwells.”