“Do you expect him to be there?” Sam asked neutrally.

“Honestly? No. I expect that by now he knows Nessa’s escaped—whether he deliberately let her go or not—and that he’ll be watching from a safe distance. My only real concern is whether he has the place booby-trapped. We’ve never needed a bomb squad.”

“I can help you there,” Sam said.

Jonah eyed her. “You’re sort of handy to have around.”

“I have my moments. Our vests are in the SUV. Let’s go.”

EIGHTEEN

Jonah hadn’t known what to expect at the bottom of that long, long shaft into the earth. Nessa had tried to tell him, haltingly, but it was clear there was just something she couldn’t manage to tell him, something that horrified her exhausted little soul.

It might have been only the terrors of a little girl lost, but whatever it was, just her expression had made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. So he’d exchanged his service weapon, a Glock .22, for the .44 Magnum he kept more as a showpiece—but also kept clean and oiled. And used at the shooting range whenever he used his service weapon.

The only one of the others to comment had been Samantha, who had said merely, “Looks like that cannon DeMarco carries.”

“It kicks like a mule,” was all Lucas said.

“I’ll say,” Sarah agreed, checking the load on her own Glock. “I fired the damned thing once at the range, and it knocked me on my ass. I don’t need anything that powerful.”

“Probably depends on what you’re aiming at,” Robbie murmured, envying the other woman her almost preternatural calm.

Sarah looked fairly rested, having logged, probably, a couple hours more sleep than Dante and Robbie, and she was most definitely ready to move, now that Nessa was safe and it seemed at least even odds they were going to find the others as well.

Safe and unharmed, they hoped.

They were all suited up in their body armor and armed, but they didn’t ride horses to meet the other two officers. Instead, Jonah’s Jeep was joined by four others from the police motor pool, and they loaded up and headed out in those.

Thunder rumbled about the time they turned off a paved road and onto a rutted track, and it was Samantha who asked, “Did anybody check the weather?”

Jonah, who was driving their Jeep in the lead, replied, “The worst of it’s supposed to hold off, except for the wind. But sometime after midnight, we’re gonna get slammed.”

There were still enough dead leaves from the winter past to be blowing across in front of them, and Jonah had the Jeep’s running lights on. Which helped more and more as the rutted road disappeared and he appeared to be following no more than a wide space between trees.

“I can see how you wouldn’t have to worry about kids coming out here,” Samantha said. “Spooky as hell. I know there’s a storm rumbling around, but . . . still.”

“This used to be fairly good riding on horseback,” he told her. “But the undergrowth got out of control and nobody wanted to keep up the trails. Land’s owned by a billionaire who also owns four or five mountains in the general area, and to his credit he wants to keep them wild. Hiking or riding is fine, but no lumber and no development.”

“Good for him,” Sam said.

“Yeah, I more or less agree with him. But a few hundred acres of this wilderness fall within my area of responsibility, so I’m really not keen on hikers or riders out this way.”

“Unless you send them,” Sam murmured as the headlights illuminated two clearly relieved uniformed police officers, who had their horses tied to trees just off the track. They were holding flashlights, and it was easy to see they’d been waving them around nervously until they saw the lights of vehicles approaching.

Jonah had gone over the plan with everyone, and everyone knew their part. There was no exit from this hole in the ground except the one they were going into.

They waited at the opening for just a couple of minutes, with Jonah and the other feds watching Sam. She swore under her breath, but said to Jonah, “No booby traps. No bombs.”

“Sam?”

She looked at her husband and partner briefly, then said to Jonah bleakly, “Go ahead and get EMS out here as quickly as you can. We’ll need five stretchers.”

“And five coffins?” Jonah asked steadily.

“No. No, they’re alive. Let’s go.”

He gave the order quickly, sending two officers back with one of the Jeeps to guide the EMS truck into the woods.

The first half-dozen people going in, which were Jonah, Sarah, and the agents, all had the big police spotlights that could be carried and gave off an amazing amount of light. They turned them on as soon as they started into the downward-slanting tunnel.

But within a very few steps, one by one they turned the lights off. Because there was light at the bottom of the tunnel.

Bright, bright light.

“It’s not a fire,” Lucas breathed. “Which means he wants us—you—to see his work.”

“Oh, Christ,” Jonah murmured.

“It isn’t what you think,” Sam said. “He didn’t physically torture them any more than he physically tortured Nessa.”

“Then—”

Jonah broke off as soon as he cleared the tunnel and stepped into the cavern. It wasn’t huge, maybe thirty feet from end to end, and about twenty feet across.

The lights had been placed with exquisite care, so that each of the missing people, watering eyes shut tight against the first light any of them had seen since they’d been brought here, weeks for some of them, were the inescapable focus.

Each of them sitting, unrestrained but unmoving, on upright wooden chairs. An IV pole beside each chair, the tubing from the bag snaking down and attached to the needles expertly placed in each victim’s arm. Unmoving. Unable to move.

Their pants and shorts, or panties, down around their ankles. And beneath them, fastened to the chairs they could not escape, were pots or bowls or buckets to catch their urine and feces.

“Oh, my God,” Jonah said, his voice hardly a whisper.

Lucas leaned over to say something to Sarah, and she immediately turned and began to herd the officers back up the tunnel. “We’ll need you later to help carry them,” she said, her voice breaking a little. “But not yet. Not just yet.”

“People always find new ways to torture each other,” Sam said. “Physically is the easy part. But mentally? Emotionally? How do you get over being abandoned in the darkness? Unable to move or speak even to call for help? How do you get over being so helpless that someone else has to empty— How do you get over that humiliation, that loss of dignity. How do you get over being so alone, and so untouched. For so long. Alone. In the dark.”

There was a moment of utter silence, and then they could all hear Amy Grimes mumbling to herself nothing that made sense. Nothing that would ever make sense.

“Let’s get some of these lights out,” Lucas suggested quietly. “Leave just enough for the medics to work by. And don’t break them. All these—all these people have bare feet.”

Jonah did his best not to look at them directly, as the level of light gradually diminished, but he eventually realized that none of them were going to open their eyes willingly. Not even Sean Messina, who had been taken barely a week before Nessa had.

None of them wanted to open their eyes even if they could. None of them wanted to believe in the voices they probably thought were imagined. None of them had it in them any longer to believe there could be anything else for them, ever, but the darkness.

—

WITH BOTH HANDS holding the hot coffee cup on the conference table in front of him, Dante said, “Nessa’s the only real survivor.” His voice was dull. “She wasn’t down there long enough. And she found her way out of the dark, on her own. That will count. That will mean something to her, some day in the future if not now.”