“I know you, Jack,” Ammara said. “I know what you want to do and I’m begging you not to do it, especially not in your condition. We’re going after them and we’ll find Wendy.”
My phone beeped with another call. It was Marty Grisnik. “I’ve got to go.”
“I just got a tip from one of my CIs,” he said. “It might be something. It might be nothing. We should check it out before we go see Tanja.”
I wasn’t ready to tell him about Tanja, uncertain how he would take it, wondering whether he would give her a head start, knowing that I’d be tempted to if I had the history with Tanja that Marty did.
“A tip about what?”
“I told you that I’d put the word out about your daughter. One of my guys calls me. Says he saw a man and a woman in Matney Park last night around midnight. Saw them go into a shed back in the woods. Says the man left and didn’t come back.”
“What about the woman?”
“Never saw her again. Says it was like she disappeared. That’s why I’m telling you it might be something and it might be nothing.”
“How reliable is this guy?”
“Like most of them. If they bat their weight they’re doing good.”
“What’s he doing hanging out in the park?”
“Getting high. You don’t want to check it out, we can let it ride and go have a drink with Tanja. You can ask her if she’s the drug kingpin of Strawberry Hill. If she says she is, you can arrest her. If she isn’t, you and I go get drunk. Your call.”
A tremor hit me in the gut and I bent over, one hand on my knee. It took me a moment to catch my breath.
“Hey, Jack! You there?”
“I’m here and I’m in. Tell me where and I’ll meet you.”
“You know how to get to Matney Park?”
“No clue.”
“Better I come to you. Where are you?”
“I’m just leaving the KU Hospital.”
“Wait for me in the circle drive. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
The entrance to the hospital is on the east side of the complex. It faces a five-story parking garage. My car was parked on the third level. I retrieved my gun, stowing it beneath my jacket against the small of my back.
Traffic to the hospital ?ows from Thirty-ninth Street onto Cambridge, which runs past the entrance, where there is a circle drive to drop off and pick people up. A steady stream of patients, visitors, doctors, nurses, and staff ?owed in and out as I paced along the curb. A moment later, Grisnik pulled up, his passenger window lowered. He leaned toward me as I opened the door.
“Hurry it up,” he said as I got in. “I don’t got all night.”
“Where the hell is Matney Park?”
“West and north, maybe thirty minutes from here.”
He took Thirty-ninth to Rainbow Boulevard, turning north and staying with it as it turned into Seventh Street. He took the ramp westbound onto I-70, chasing the last bit of daylight ahead of us. I leaned back against my seat as a wave of mild tremors swept across my body.
“Still got the shakes,” Grisnik said.
“Lets me know I’m alive.”
“Amen, brother. Another day on the green side is always a good day.”
Grisnik looked like hundreds of other cops and agents I’d known over the years. His eyes were lit up and there was a determined set to his jaw. It was how we all looked when we were on the hunt.
“You ever been wrong about people you think you know?” I asked him.
“Never,” he said, “unless you count my ex-wife, and half the people I work with, and I’m not too sure about everyone else.”
“If you’re wrong about Tanja, what then?”
“Look, Jack. I’m a cop. Just like you. Doesn’t mean we don’t have family and friends that fuck up. You and me, we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do.” He was as sincere as a parish priest. “But from what you’ve told me, all you’ve got on Tanja is smoke and guesses. What’s Troy Clark say?”
It was like I was playing Russian roulette, holding a gun to my head, pulling the trigger until I shot myself with a lie.
“He’s like you. He thinks it’s bullshit and that I should have collared Colby when I had the chance.”
Grisnik laughed. “That’s the kind of guy I want covering my back. He’d second-guess what you had for breakfast.”
We let it drop and fifteen minutes later we pulled into Matney Park. It was a small stretch of faded grass and hard-packed dirt with a ball field, picnic shelter, and swing set. Home plate had been stolen and the pitcher’s mound had eroded to a thin, scarred slab of rubber. The shelter was deserted; the last crumbs had long since been picked clean by squirrels. The bowed swing seats hung empty and still, no memory of a child’s soft hands tightly grasping the chains while slender legs pumped hard, reaching for the sky.
We drove past the diamond and followed a gravel road that wound through a stand of trees before dead-ending in a small clearing. A redbrick building twelve feet square with a ?at roof, no windows, and a single door facing us stood against the back edge of the clearing, another stretch of woods behind it. Grisnik killed the engine.
“Let’s check this out and then I’ll take you to apologize to my godparents for saying bad things about their little girl.”
I followed him to the door to the brick building. “What is this place?”
“County built it years ago, probably used it for storage.”
The door was unlocked. A yellowed lightbulb split the empty room in to light and shadows. A manhole cover six feet in diameter was set in the center of the concrete ?oor, a tarp bundled in one corner.
“Marty, what the hell is this?”
“An empty room.”
“Except for that,” I said, pointing at the tarp.
It was blue, made of heavy-gauge plastic. I grabbed a handful and pulled it off the ?oor. A desktop CPU lay underneath. The side panel had been removed, exposing the motherboard and other components except for the hard drive, which was missing. I stared at it for a long minute, remembering that Wendy’s computer was missing when Troy had searched her apartment.
I lifted the CPU, exposing the metal plate where the manufacturer had embossed the serial number. Wendy’s name was etched below it in neat block letters, just as I had engraved it. The only surprise was that I didn’t start shaking.
“It’s Wendy’s computer. It was in her apartment when I was there on Thursday. Troy said it wasn’t there when he searched the apartment yesterday. The hard drive is gone.”
“Looks like my CI has earned his Christmas bonus,” Grisnik said. “If the woman he saw was your daughter, that’s why she never came out,” he said, pointing to the manhole cover. “Give me a hand.”
We knelt on the ?oor, inserting our fingers into slots around the edge and lifted the cover, dropping it on the ?oor. We stared down a pitch-black shaft that smelled dank and stale. Round, ridged climbing bars had been bolted into the wall of the shaft like a ladder without handrails.
“You know where this goes?” I asked him.
“Down.”
We went back to the car. He opened the driver’s door, grabbed two ?ashlights, tossed one to me, tested the beam on his, and waved it like a lightsaber. I held mine at my side, rooted to the ground by unspeakable fear, memories of Kevin shackling my legs.
“Jack,” Grisnik said softly, “we don’t have a choice. We’ve got to see what’s down there.”
Chapter Seventy
Grisnik took the lead. I put my light on him, and watched him descend, keeping a couple of body lengths between us. The ceiling light above the entry to the shaft faded quickly. Outside the beams of our ?ashlights, the darkness was absolute. Anyone observing our descent would have thought they were witnessing an invasion of mutant glowworms.
The shaft was too deep to be part of the sewer system. It had to be a remnant of an underground mine. I hoped that it was at the top of the list Troy and Ammara were assembling, though it was far removed from Latrell Kelly’s stomping grounds.
The climbing bars were made of cold steel and ridged for traction. Each one was a foot apart. I counted them as I climbed down, keeping track of how deeply belowground we were going.
The air got cooler the farther we went. The sides of the shaft were dry at first but began to show traces of moisture that gradually increased until the round walls were slick and wet. My count reached 120 when Grisnik shined his ?ashlight at me.
“I’m down,” he said. “There’s a ladder from the bottom of the shaft that ends about five feet above the ?oor.”
They were the first words either of us had spoken since we began our descent. I kept my light aimed at him, the ?oor quickly coming into view, looking like a ?attened moonscape. Grisnik pivoted in a tight circle, pointing his ?ashlight outward, then turned it off and vanished in the darkness.
I quickly covered the remaining ten feet inside the shaft, emerging into a large, rough-hewn, dome-shaped cavern. The ladder was anchored into the mouth of the shaft. The concrete securing the bolts had eroded and crumbled, causing the entire span to sway like a rope bridge.
“Marty! Where are you?”
He didn’t answer. I swept the cavern walls with my ?ashlight until I found the outer perimeter, and took my bearings. It was a wide-open space, big enough to park half a dozen cars.
I shined my light at the base of the ladder, tracing lines in four directions and hitting the stack of boxes and trash bags I’d last seen being loaded into Nick Andrija’s pickup. I continued my survey until the beam spread out like a fan, re?ecting off a mirror made of water instead of glass. An in?ated raft with a small outboard motor was beached at the edge of an underground lake.
“Come on in, the water’s fine,” Colby Hudson said.
The echoes in the chamber made it impossible to pinpoint his location and I had no better luck chasing the sound with my ?ashlight.
A red dot materialized on my shoulder, tracing a path to my heart, where it stopped.
“I’ve got a clear shot at you, Jack, so unload your gun and drop it. If I don’t like the way you do it, I’ll shoot you. And that would be a shame because there’s someone down here who’s dying to see you.”
Colby had used Grisnik to lure me into a trap. “Marty! Where are you?”
“Do as he says, Jack,” Grisnik answered. “He’s holding all the cards.”
“Wendy!” I shouted, “It’s okay, honey. I’m here!”
She didn’t answer. I was suspended in midair, too far from the shaft to climb back into it and too far above the ground to drop and roll. I emptied my Glock and let it go.
“Now,” Colby said, “throw the ammo into the water. It’s right in front of you, maybe ten feet from the ladder. Then turn off your ?ashlight and slowly come down the rest of the way.”
He tracked me with the laser, using it to hold me in place when I stepped off onto the ?oor.
“You don’t need Wendy,” I said. “You’ve got her computer. You’ve got Grisnik and me. You can let her go.”
“I wish I could,” Colby said.
Pale orange light from a lantern, the kind you’d hang in a tent, this one dangling from a hook buried in the cavern wall, spilled into the darkness. Marty Grisnik stood next to the lantern, a pair of night-vision goggles dangling from a strap around his neck. Colby was next to him on bended knees, Grisnik’s gun aimed at his head.
Grisnik said, “Now don’t get all crazy on me and start shaking like a mental patient. Come into the light, but take it real easy.” I closed to within five feet. “Hold it right there. When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a ventriloquist. Looks like I finally got my wish. How’d you like my act?”
I thought of how I had been deceived by Frank Tyler’s act, silently apologizing to Kevin again. I heard Kate’s voice assuring me that I couldn’t have known, not believing her then or now, the props Grisnik had used suddenly becoming clear. He had hidden in plain sight, not disguising his feelings for Tanja, playing me to stay close to an investigation he’d been shut out of, taking advantage of every break I gave him. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a good review.
“I’ve seen better.”
“Well, I admit that doing it in the dark with a gun pointed at this dummy’s head gives me an unfair advantage, but they don’t give style points in a game like this.”
“So you never got over Tanja, after all.”
“She does have a way about her, I’ll give you that.”
“Too bad you can’t ask her late husband. She killed him and brought his coke business back home, probably did you behind the bar for old times’ sake her first night home and never looked back. Had to gripe your ass to see her and Colby bumping and grinding.”
Grisnik smiled. “Say what you want, Jack, he’s the one on his knees.”
Colby stared up at me, his arms handcuffed behind him, his face a bloody mess.
I looked at him without pity. He had betrayed Wendy, me, the people he worked with, and those he was sworn to serve. Colby had treated all of us as chips to be played in a game he had lost. Grisnik was no better, his loyalty belonging to a woman who’d had him by the short hairs since he had his first wet dream.
“Where’s my daughter?”
“Ask him,” Grisnik said. “Go ahead. I asked him plenty of times. He wouldn’t tell me, but he said he’d tell you. I guess that’s what family is all about.”
Colby may have convinced Grisnik to bring me here, hoping that the cavalry wouldn’t be far behind, but I ignored him. Wendy may have escaped or never been captured. If Grisnik didn’t know where she was, I wouldn’t help him find out. That information would only buy both Colby and me a bullet.
“Wendy can’t hurt you. Colby used her to launder his cut, but he wasn’t stupid enough to tell her about you or Tanja,” I said.
“Colby was stupid enough to tell Wendy everything and she was probably stupid enough to demand her cut. She and Colby, and now you, are the last of the loose ends. Then Tanja and I are out. Retired, fat, and happy,” said Grisnik.
I shined my ?ashlight on Colby. One of his front teeth was gone and the corners of his mouth were crusted with dried blood, his lips swollen and cracked.