Killing Hour - Lisa Gardner [133]
Kimberly came over, removed one of the gallon jugs and stuck it in her own backpack. “Don’t be an idiot,” she told him, then hefted on her pack and clipped it around her hips.
“At least the trees are providing shade,” Mac said.
“Now if only they’d soak up the wet. How far?”
“Couple of miles. I think.”
Kimberly glanced at her watch again. “We’d better get moving.” She sneaked a peek at Nora Ray, and Mac could read her thoughts. How hard could the civilian push it? They’d soon find out.
It was a surreal hike, Mac thought later. Moving down a thickly shaded logging road in the middle of a blistering afternoon. The sun seemed to chase them, peeking in and out of the trees as it dodged their footsteps and seared them with unrelenting beams of light.
Bugs came out in force. Mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds. Some kind of obnoxious fly with a vicious little bite. They were batting at their faces before they’d gone fifteen feet. At thirty feet, they stopped and got out the cans of bug repellent. A quarter of a mile later, they stopped again and sprayed each other down as if the stuff were gallons of cheap perfume.
It didn’t make a difference. The flies swarmed, the sun burned and the humidity covered their bodies in never-ending rivulets of sweat. No one spoke. They just put one foot in front of the other and focused on walking.
Forty minutes later, Mac smelled it first. “What the hell is that?”
“Deet,” Kimberly said grimly. “Or sweat. Take your pick.”
“No, no, it’s worse than that.”
Nora Ray stopped. “It’s like something rotten,” she said. “Almost like . . . sewage.”
Mac suddenly got it. What Ray Lee Chee had been trying to tell him on the phone. Smell the fungus. He picked up the pace. “Come on,” he said. “We’re almost there.”
He started jogging now, Kimberly and Nora Ray hastily following suit. They crested the small rise of the hill, came down the other side, and then abruptly drew up short.
“Holy shit,” Mac said.
“B-grade horror movie,” Nora Ray murmured.
And Kimberly just shook her head.
Quincy was getting frustrated. He’d tried Kimberly’s cell phone three or four times without success. Now he turned back to Ennunzio and Rainie.
“Do you know where this cave is?” he asked Ennunzio.
“Absolutely. It’s in Lee County, a good three or four hours from here. But you can’t just crash into this cavern as if it’s one of the tourist hot spots from the Shenandoah Valley. To access Orndorff’s Cavern, you need serious gear.”
“Fine. Get the gear, then take us.”
Ennunzio was silent for a moment. “Perhaps it’s time to let the official case team know what’s going on.”
“Really? What do you think they’ll do first, Doctor? Rescue the victim? Or call you in for a three-hour interview to corroborate every last detail of your story?”
The linguist saw his point. “I’ll get my gear.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Hell if I know. Some kind of cavern entrance. Maybe amid a pile of rocks, or a sinkhole at the base of a tree. I’ve never done any spelunking. Then again, how hard can it be to find the entrance to a cave?”
Pretty hard, it turned out. Mac had already been running around the sawmill for a good fifteen minutes. So had Kimberly and Nora Ray. They were probably all being stupid. The smell was the first kicker. The foul odor rose so thick in the heavy, humid air it stung their eyes and burned their throats. Mac was now holding an old T-shirt over his mouth, but even that didn’t make much difference.
Next to the smell was the intense wall of heat rising from the same sky-high pile of sawdust. None of them had even recognized the wood residue at first. It had looked like a pile of white sand, or maybe dirt covered in snow. Ten minutes ago, Kimberly had gotten close enough to discern the truth. Fungus. The entire stinking, rotten pile was covered in some kind of fungus.
When Brian Knowles had guessed their water sample came from a site in crisis, he hadn’t been kidding.
Now Mac leapt belatedly over one abandoned blade saw. He wove in and out of long, shed-style