Dark Target (28 page)

“Why would Theresa come here?” Sykes asked.

“I’m not sure,” Truitt said. “The bats’ collective body heat is what keeps it this warm, so sometimes people use bat caves
to weather snowstorms, but she could have stayed in the cabin if that was the problem.”

He called out, “Theresa!” but there was no reply.

“You think she’s still in here?” Sykes said, a steady stream of bats fluttering past him now.

“Maybe,” Truitt said. “Nobody can stay in here for more than a few hours. By the way, you hear those crickets?” He shone his
flashlight on a pair of monstrous crickets the size of tarantulas fixed to the place on the sidewall. “Those are the caver’s
best friend. Cave crickets live by the entries, so if you ever get lost and can’t find your way out, head for the sound. They’re
also the bat’s alarm clocks. They’re photoperiodic so they read the light dying outside the cave and start chirping at sundown,
and that lets the bats know it’s time to emerge. The next room is the vortex room.”

Where the slope bottomed out, Truitt shone his light in the air, where thousands, perhaps millions of bats swirled in a frantic
circle. The sound they made was something like fat raindrops falling on a canvas awning, the air stirred by a million pairs
of wings.

“I’m guessing this is maybe a tenth of what’s here,” he said. “They do this to get the juices flowing before they emerge.
I heard one estimate that there were probably eight million bats in this colony, but it fluctuates depending on the bug populations
outside—you can study the guano layers and extrapolate climate changes from what kinds of bugs the bats were eating over a
given period. These are all insectivorous Mexican brown shorttails. They have a slightly better sonar than fruit bats where
the prey doesn’t move, so that’s why nothing is hitting you.” He shone his light on the cave floor, a series of mounds and
swells. Sykes saw one, then two, then three pale white snakes, about the size and thickness of baseball bats, as well as cockroaches
two and three inches long, some in motion and others collected in mats. “The snakes mostly wait for something to die and hit
the cave floor, but they can also snatch a bat out of midair if the bat gets careless and flies too close. Needless to say,
anything that dies and hits the floor, like baby bats that can’t fly yet, either gets swallowed or taken apart pretty quickly.”

He shone his flashlight on one of the mounds, a rock covered by a thick coating of guano, and then he struck a gash in the
coating with the spike of his climbing axe. The coating was alive and moving, filled with cockroaches and coprophagic beetles,
worms, millipedes, and assorted larvae.

“This is why this stuff makes such unbelievable fertilizer,” Truitt said, shining his light 360 degrees, though there was
nothing unusual to be found. “As I said, it just gets better and better farther in.”

They passed through the narrowest part of the cave, an aperture the width of a garage door with a ceiling low enough that
Sykes had to stoop, a heavier stream of bats streaking past him, and occasionally he’d feel a feathery wing brush against
him. They’d been in the cave for ten minutes and Sykes was already soaked in sweat.

The hot dog room was perhaps fifty yards long, forty feet wide, and thirty feet high. To the side, Truitt shone his light
on a small skeleton, a set of ribs arching from the muck.

“Coyote,” he said. “Maybe came in here looking for a snack and got lost, I’m guessing.”

At the far end, he drove a piton into the wall, tied a rope to it, and threw the coil into the final chamber, explaining that
the descent was steep and slippery. Sykes stood at the crest of the precipice, shining his light below, then at the ceiling,
where millions of bats covered every square inch of the surface. The temperature was unbearable, the humidity even higher.
His face mask was too soaked with sweat to breathe through anymore, so he held his breath and replaced it with his second
mask. He noticed that Truitt had lowered his and asked him why.

“The mask is mainly to prevent histoplasmosis, which is a fungus that gets in your blood, but I’ve already got it. Chicken
farmers and people who keep pigeons get it, too. It’s sort of like mononucleosis, but you can carry it in your blood your
whole life and never become symptomatic. When you do, it’s mostly just fatigue and listlessness you feel. They call it ‘cave-sickness’
in South Africa.”

“This place makes me understand why we bury ourselves in solid wood coffins,” Sykes said. “Everything in here is what lives
underground and gives people the creeps—this is exactly what most people don’t want touching them.”

“I disagree,” Truitt said. “I’ve actually told people that when I die, I’d like my body left in a bat cave. It’s pretty much
a complete recycling. Sort of suits my Buddhist leanings.”

“Did you ever talk to Theresa about that?”

“She had the idea before I did,” Truitt said. “When we did the shoot here, she thought it was the most remarkable place she’d
ever been. She came along as my assistant, mostly to hold my strobes. Veteran cavers don’t like bat caves, for obvious reasons.
She thought it was cool. Figuratively speaking.”

“Do night vision goggles work in caves?” Sykes said, momentarily sorry he had forgotten his.

“Turn your headlamp off for a second,” Truitt said. Sykes did, and then Josh Truitt did, too. Immediately the sussurant sound
of bats’ wings flapping increased, their prior efforts and energies suppressed by the photons produced by the flashlights
and headlamps. The utter darkness was very nearly disorienting. “This is a complete lack of light,” Truitt said. “NVGs amplify
minute amounts of available light, but in here you don’t even have minute amounts. So no, they don’t work.”

He lowered himself down the rope, hand over hand, more sliding than walking with his feet. Sykes followed him into the final,
hamburger bun chamber. At the bottom of the descent, he swept the cave floor with his flashlight and saw something white with
black lettering on it, the plastic sleeve from a Cyalume chemlite. He picked it up and placed it in one of the Ziploc bags
he’d brought to collect evidence.

“Light stick,” Truitt said, joining his flashlight beam to Sykes’s beam. “Some cavers use them to mark the way, like leaving
breadcrumbs on a path through the woods, because the way out of a cave never looks like the way in did. Though I don’t know
what kind of idiot could get lost in a cave this simple.”

“That’s not what this one was for,” Sykes said. “This one is military issue. It glows in the infrared range, so that it’s
invisible to anybody who’s not supposed to see it.”

“But you can see them with night vision goggles, right?” Truitt said.

“Yup,” Sykes said. “NVGs and one of these would have lit this place up like a ballroom.” He shone his flashlight back toward
the top of the slope they’d just descended. “I’m going to guess that whoever brought this here either dropped it accidentally
and didn’t know it or dropped the wrapper and knew it but didn’t have a rope to climb down to get it. Is there any way to
climb out of here without the rope?”

“One person?” Truitt said. “It wouldn’t be easy. Maybe not even possible. I’d hate to be forced to find out.”

“So suppose someone is running from somebody. Being chased…”

“Theresa?”

“Yeah,” Sykes said, working through the scenario as he spoke. “I’m just thinking out loud. She’s in the cabin but she sees
a car coming, or maybe someone on foot, so she runs. And there’s nowhere else to go but here, really. She comes in the first
chamber, the entry corridor, and waits, thinking maybe whoever it is isn’t going to follow, but he does. So she runs to the
star room. He follows. She moves to the hot dog room and hides. She sees his lights. Is she using lights? She has to turn
hers off or he’ll see her, but she can see him coming closer. Finally, she slides down the slope and comes here, desperate.
He stands up there, at the top. He puts his NVGs on and cracks an infrared chemlight. Now he can see the whole room, and he
can see her, but she can’t see him. He doesn’t come down because he doesn’t have a rope and he knows he can’t get up without
one.”

“But he knows she can’t get out either, so he leaves her here,” Truitt said.

“He doesn’t know that for certain,” Sykes said. “For all he knows, she can get out. He’s probably armed. I don’t know. I’m
just thinking.”

After ten minutes, the two men splitting up to search both sides of the cave’s final and lowest chamber, Sykes heard Truitt
call out and crossed over to him. Truitt shone his light on the sole of a hiking boot, a women’s size eight or nine, Sykes
guessed, sticking out of the muck.

“That looks like hers,” Truitt said.

“You might not want to see this,” Sykes said.

“I want to see it,” Truitt said.

Sykes moved closer and lifted the boot, until the skeletal remains of a foot fell out. The bones had been picked clean. Brushing
away the guano lightly with his fingers, he found the femur, the tibia, the hips, the rib cage, the spine, the bones cleaned
of flesh and integuments. He saw, draped over the vertebrae at the clavicle, a gold chain and pulled it free, a small diamond
crucifix, set in silver. He handed it to Josh Truitt.

“This was hers,” Truitt said.

Sykes dug a bit further until he found the skull and lifted it from the muck, brushing it clean with his fingers. Quite unintentionally,
he held it so that the light from his flashlight shone inside the skull and then out again, illuminating both the entry hole
and the exit hole where some sort of projectile had pierced the skull.

“Oh, God,” Truitt said.

“I’m sorry,” Sykes said. “Are you all right?”

“Uh-uh,” Truitt said, his voice shaking. “Not even a little.”

“Any idea how long she might have been here?” Sykes asked. “How long it would take the… cave life to do this?”

“In a cave this active, I’ve read where the cryptozoa can strip a cow carcass clear in twenty-four hours,” Truitt said. “Some
labs still use a similar technique to clear skeletons.”

“I’m going to have to bring this in and send it to the lab,” Sykes said. “We can send someone later for the rest of the remains
…”

“No,” Truitt said, handing Sykes his backpack. “Just give me the skull when you’re done and I’ll bring it back here and put
it with the rest. This is where she’d want her bones to stay.”

Once outside the cave, they changed into the dry clothes Truitt had brought and donned their winter gear again, showshoeing
back to the cabin in the darkness, using the headlamps to show the way. The night sky was clear and full of stars.

They stopped at Eli’s Trading Post for gas, coffee, and sandwiches. Eli had died years ago, and the place was now run by his
wife, Mary, a pleasant Navaho woman with a long gray braided ponytail and weathered skin, dressed in jeans and a denim shirt.
Sykes asked her if she’d mind answering a few questions concerning the truck the tribal police had found up canyon.

“I’ll tell you what I told them,” she said. “I heard it pass by, four days ago, in the afternoon. But I didn’t see who was
driving it. They said it was a girl. If it was, she didn’t stop to buy anything.”

“How about afterward?” Sykes said. “Did anyone come by afterward? Somebody who might have been following her?”

“I told Jim Chee there was a man,” she said. “But I had never seen him before.”

“Do you mind if I show you some pictures?” Sykes asked. When she said she didn’t mind, he called Peggy Romano and asked her
to download the photographs to his SATphone. The first picture he showed the old woman was of Leon Lev. She shook her head.
She shook her head again when he showed her the picture of Dushko Lorkovic. He asked Peggy to run any other photographs she
had in the Escavedo file past the old woman, who shook her head each time, no to Brother Antonionus, no to Hilton Jaynes,
no to Cipriano Cabrera, until she suddenly put her finger on the phone and said, “That one—that one was here.”

She’d put her finger on a picture of Major Brent Huston.

“You’re certain?” Sykes asked.

She nodded slowly.

“Do you remember what he said, or what he bought?”

“He didn’t say very much,” Mary said. “I usually try to have a conversation with whoever comes through here. Sometimes I get
so lonely I think maybe I’m imagining them. But I remember what he bought.”

“What?” Sykes asked.

The old woman moved from around the counter and went to where the shelves held cleaning supplies, turning and holding up a
bottle of Windex antibacterial glass cleaner.

“And a roll of paper towels.”

PEGGY ROMANO HAD NO INFORMATION ON MARvin Yutahay. He hadn’t used his phone, visited an ATM machine, or charged anything on
his credit cards in the last forty-eight hours.

“Anything else you want me to do?” she asked.

“Not right now,” DeLuca said.

“Why are you calling me on a pay phone?” Romano asked.

“Having trouble with my mobile,” he told her.

“How was your night last night?” she asked.

“Interesting,” he said. “Tell you when I get back to camp.”

DeLuca found the Circle K convenience store on County Road 007, the road that led from Chloride into the Gila Wilderness,
next to an abandoned tourist trap that had at one time been dubiously called PochahontasVille, and still had a fading painting
of an Indian maiden on the façade (bearing a strong but probably coincidental resemblance to Janet Jackson), with the words
FEED THE BEARS
in red and blue letters three feet high. He saw a series of pits, cinderblock cells sunk into the earth, with a system of
chutes and pulleys that apparently visitors could use to drop or lower whatever it was they’d feed to the poor animals held
in the cells. There was a shuttered-up gift shop, a teepee constructed of plywood next to it, and a circle of bleachers in
the back forming a ring, maybe forty feet across, and beside that a large cage, twenty feet high and thirty feet square at
the base with trees and perches inside where evidently someone had kept and displayed something large, eagles, perhaps, or
apes or monkeys, though there was no tire swing.