Shattered (24 page)

The shock of being outside made Maura blink for a moment. The sky overhead was a pandemonium of stars, the breeze like ice shavings on her face. The crickets droned. She inhaled the cool air and tried to concentrate amid Aaron's bawling and coughing. The baby's constant wriggling had increased a bit with the change in atmosphere, his cry raising an octave. “Almost home free, sweetie, hang in there, almost there…”

Holding the squalling baby on her hip, peering over the top of the manhole shaft at the darkness, Maura breathed in the pungent aroma of corn silk, earth, and manure, but she couldn't quite make out any objects yet. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the moonlit night. Perched on the top rung of that greasy steel ladder, she felt her fingers twinging, her arms throbbing with pain from the weight of the baby, her mouth sticky with blood.

“Sshhh, sshhh, sshhh…it's okay, honey…sshhh, it's almost over.”

Maura realized she was in a small clearing in a cornfield, and she was staring at a wall of corn. Early corn. Feed corn. In the moonlight, it looked like a beautiful dense burlap forest, the stalks reaching up nearly six feet, some of them higher. So tall. Most important, the crop seemed to stretch off into infinity—a vast ocean of papery sepia shoots lazily swaying in the night breeze.

“C'mon, sweetie, Mommy's gonna get you outta here right now,” Maura babbled as she struggled out of the manhole and quickly levered herself to her feet with her baby in her arms. She stood on spongy humus, a crackly woven carpet of tassels and shuck. Aaron's crying had finally dissipated, and now he trembled silently in the chill, his eyes huge and filled with terror. Relief flowed through Maura like an elixir, like painkiller.

Something about the night sky and the cool, clean rural air made her hopeful.

There was one problem. Apparently the designers of the escape tunnel had neglected to provide egress at this opposite end. Evidently if one was lucky enough to escape the tunnel, one was on their own out here. Maura turned a slow three-sixty with the baby pressed against her damp bosom, the gun still stuck in the front of her jeans.

That's when she heard the noise.

It was a deadfall stalk, most likely, or maybe a dry cob, crunching under the pressure of a footstep, and it was way off in the distance, maybe hundreds of feet away, but something about it made Maura tense up and chill all over with goose bumps. It was the
furtive
nature of it. Like somebody or something sneaking up on her.

Of course, it was possible that her ears were playing tricks again. They were still ringing from the blasts echoing off the tunnel walls and Aaron's ceaseless crying, but something
beyond
her senses told her to get out of there. Madness was coming. Better get moving.

“Sshhh, it's okay, sssshhhhh…”

She turned and hastily looked for a spot to penetrate. There wasn't much of a choice. It was as though she were cordoned off by brown curtains, the corn so thick and pithy it was almost opaque. In the spaces between the rows, the pitch-black shadows looked like inkblots. At last Maura chose the side
opposite
the direction from which the crackling sound had come.

She took a quick breath, then plunged headlong into the corn with Aaron on her hip.

At first she was blind, feeling her way down the narrow row with her free arm waving in front of her, the milky stench of corn and fertilizer flooding her senses. Aaron started mewling and whining again. Maura's arms were about to give way. She murmured soft, comforting words to him, as silently as possible, while edging her way through the black sea of corn.

She had no sense of direction other than
away-from-the-sound
. Which worked for a minute or two, right up until the moment she heard another stalk snapping.

It came from her immediate right. Maybe fifty yards away. It straightened her spine, and made her abruptly halt and reach for her gun.

A tense moment passed. Maura put her hand over Aaron's little chapped lips, and stood there as still as possible, listening, hearing other sounds, unidentifiable sounds, coming from her left. Whoever it was,
whatever
it was—they were moving.

Maura slipped through a densely packed wall of corn into another row of tilled, spongy earth, then she hurried in the opposite direction.

Another clearing materialized ahead of her, she could see the moonlight shining down on bare earth, a small sheltered area of maybe two hundred square feet. She lunged toward it, Aaron bouncing on her hip, the gun stuck out in front of her, the barrel shaking.

She reached the clearing, bursting out of the corn with a gasp. Aaron convulsed in her grasp. He had pissed himself again, and Maura smelled baby vomit, as she turned and assessed the boundaries of the clearing. She noticed a tall object sticking out of the corn and whirled toward it. A thin, leathery-faced man was standing there, waiting for her.

He was grinning at her. His eyes shone like luminous yellow marbles.

Maura jerked back, reacting purely out of instinct, shielding her baby from the assailant. Her heel caught on an exposed root, and she tripped and tumbled. Aaron slipped out of her arms and landed in a cluster of stalks, flailing his plump little arms.

Dust and tassels plumed up into the air, filling the darkness with a cloud of motes. In the confusion, Maura scrambled for her gun, forgetting her baby for just an instant. She found the Ruger on the ground and snatched it up. The dust burned in her eyes as she raised the gun at the figure and quickly squeezed off three shots.

The Ruger just clicked and clicked and clicked.

Out of ammo.

But Maura kept the gun raised at that shadowy figure with the shiny eyes, trembling and gazing dumbly at it, so many things bombarding Maura's mind at that point that she hadn't even realized that the figure was not alive, or that the Ruger's magazine had been emptied in the tunnel.

Behind her, the baby had crawled deeper into the corn, vanishing in the dark, sending warning alarms off in Maura's maternal brain. But for one horrible, surreal moment, she could not tear her eyes (or her gun barrel) away from that tattered figure with the secondhand overcoat and straw hat rising out of the corn.

He stood at least seven feet tall and was affixed to a cross of old worm-ridden lumber. His face was made out of a gunnysack, and his hands were florets of old straw. Maura kept staring at the scarecrow's eyes, which were dirty old cats-eye marbles.

Right then Aaron's bawling pierced her daze. She whipped around and heard his squalling but didn't see him, her chest turning to ice with panic. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”

Tossing the gun, dropping down on her hands and knees, she frantically crawled into the cornfield in the general direction of his voice, but the dust and silk in the air blinded her. “Aaron! AARON!”

Emotion and pain and rage erupted in her, filling her eyes, blinding her. She shrieked his name again and again and again as she crabbed through the black jungle of stalks, the ringing in her ears making it impossible to latch on to his crying, which swirled in the air, indistinguishable from the rest of the white noise in Maura's skull.

A foreign object—a small stain on the shadows—appeared in the middle distance.

“Aaron! Aaron! Aaron!”

Maura furiously clawed her way across the thick under-carpet toward the ghostly shape on the ground between two massive cornstalks. She wailed in great heaving gasps of inarticulate rage. She burst through the last impediment of corn and reached the object, which was actually a pair of objects.

Rearing back with a start, Maura let out an involuntary grunt as she looked down at the shoes.

They were ugly, scuffed work boots, caked with mud and fragments of husks. They had come a long way. These things registered in Maura's brain almost instantaneously as she realized there were
human feet
in these shoes, a
person
connected to these feet.

Her gaze rose up and fixed on the deeply lined face of the man who once was called Henry Splet.

She started to scream right before the grimy hand came down and covered her mouth…cutting off her cry for help.

There was a reason the SWAT team had not yet reached the tunnel's exit point, trying as they were to machete their way through the vast forest of corn, moving with night vision goggles and laser sighting devices toward the distant sounds of human voices warbling on the wind. Twenty-two months earlier—long before Grove had even heard of the Mississippi Ripper—the Fox Run safe house had suffered through a management change. The supervising marshal in charge of long-term monitoring of Central Midwest properties finally retired. His replacement inherited a desk full of unfinished business, and one of the minor little items way down the priority list was the care and upkeep of the acreage surrounding the Black River Drive house.

In the midst of a decade-long recession, local farmers had been jockeying for this prime farmland for years, which had inexplicably remained fallow at the behest of the federal government. Now, with the new administration in place, word spread that the land was up for grabs. Nobody at the marshal service noticed the subsequent changes in planting patterns. By the spring of '05, the carefully manicured pathways leading from the escape tunnel exit to the access road north of the county line were long gone, buried under five thousand square acres of new feed corn and soybeans.

Which was why, at the precise moment Splet was dragging Maura like a sack of laundry toward a quiet place in the dark, a half-dozen tactical officers were engaged in one great, frenzied farce of a search.

Two of the officers had come from the north in a jeep, slamming through the barbed-wire fence off Route 18, and then plunging into the cornfield like marines landing at Normandy. The only problem was, nobody had a fix on the exit hatch. Everyone was working off a classified land plan from the early 1980s when the house was built, so it was Keystone Kops time with the blades and the yelling into radio mikes and the red laser dots bobbing across the endless waves of grain.

The other four officers had come from the neighborhood borderlands, the sewer gully to the east of Black River Drive, and the vacant lots flanking Sherwood Forest. They made feeble attempts to be smart about the reconnaissance, dashing along the fence lines of the cornfield, tracking the faint and distant cries with their scopes and goggles engaged, their miners' lights piercing the night in wildly crisscrossing beams. But the boundless billowing fields of corn stretched beyond the black horizon.

The targets might as well have been in the middle of the Atlantic.

The only rescuer who had any kind of a shot at success was now emerging from the greasy maw of the escape hatch, nearly a half mile due north of the Black River property. Less than two minutes had elapsed since the moment Grove had heard the first faint echoes of his baby's cry bouncing around the end of the tunnel, coming from somewhere aboveground and far away. At that point Grove hurtled down the remaining length of tunnel to the dead-end wall, found the breached doorway, and clambered up the iron treads.

Now he peered out of the opening at the gelid night. The sound of Aaron's cries rose over the roaring crickets, fluttering on the breeze, much clearer now.

Grove struggled out of the hole. His pistol came up, instantly ready. He found himself encased in corn. Rich aromas of farmland wreathed his head and sinuses. Eyes dilating and adjusting to the moonlight, he saw several potential entry points in the wall of stalks. To the right the corn was broken, flattened by the weight of footfalls.

Aaron's strangled wails drifted across the sky. Grove spun and plummeted into the dark jungle.

Razors of husks and leaves like hacksaws tore at him as he plowed his way through the rows. He kept the barrel of the Bulldog up and out like the prow of a ship, and he locked on to the shrill noises trilling in the middle distance. Grove's brain had fragmented again into compartments. He followed the sound like a bloodhound with one part of his brain, and saw flashes of his visions with the other part—
a baby vanishing into the pitch-black shadows on the edge of a desert, a blind beggar in a prehistoric village, an ancient stone gate at the threshold of the underworld
.

Something moved up ahead in the darkness. Grove could see the tassels trembling, and very faint blossoms of dust puffs above the corn.

“Oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-God-oh-my-GOD!” He wasn't even aware of his own voice as he barreled tanklike through the last rows of unyielding corn, the husks clawing at his face, scratching him. He batted away the stalks with his gun barrel, approaching a little round shadow in the undergrowth, accompanied by the rising wail of a child.

He saw the tender little body in the dirt. “My baby boy, my baby boy…”

Grove reached the child and scooped him out of the weeds. The baby let out a choked, strangled cry at the touch of another human being. Grove dropped his gun in the humus. He embraced the boy hard enough to elicit a little groan. “My baby boy, my baby boy, my baby boy,” he murmured, his face wet, his body whirling around and around in the coffinlike cocoon of cornstalks.

The baby was soaked with urine and sweat and vomit, burning up with fever. But the sudden hug of familiar arms—perhaps the familiar smell and sound of his father—finally quieted the squalls.

“Thank God, thank God, thank God.” Grove was transported by the smells.

“
P-puhh.
”

The baby's first word in hours—Grove
felt
it on his cheek more than heard it—was barely audible, but it seeped into Grove like a denatured chemical causing a reaction in his brain. That simple “Puh”—baby talk for papa—suddenly triggered something profound and elemental in Grove, galvanizing him, rearranging his atoms.

“That's right, Puh's here.” Grove hugged the child's face to his and breathed in the pungent baby aromas, the damp stink of wet diapers, spit-up, and talcum powder.

Grove felt something in the very core of his soul shifting like digits on a puzzle. Something about that word “Puh”—that delirious sound in Grove's ears—cast a spell more powerful than any Kenyan juju or Bureau science. It was a key to some great mystery that had been festering in Grove's unconscious his entire life, but he still couldn't quite place it, couldn't quite figure out the proper
lock
in to which he should insert this key.

“C'mon, Slick, let's get you outta here.” Grove clutched the baby to his ribs, leaned down, and picked up his gun. Then he swam his way back through the corn toward the clearing, toward the escape hatch.

By the time he reached the clearing, another figure was poking his head out of the escape hatch.

“Is he all right?”

The square-jawed man peering out the lip of the tunnel shaft looked almost comical in the moonlight, visible only from the waist up, still dressed in his Brooks Brothers suit, but soaked in his own sweat and panting fiercely. His craggy face beaded with perspiration from the half-mile charge down the tunnel, Tom Geisel still had his .38 snub-nose gripped tightly in his gnarled right hand.

“Yeah, thank God, just a little scared,” Grove said as he carried the baby over to the opening. He discreetly wiped his eyes with his sleeve, not wanting Geisel to see his tears. “A little damp, too. Take him, Tom.” Grove knelt and handed the child over to the section chief.

“You bet.” Geisel wrestled his gun back in to its sheath as he took the baby. The child wriggled and whined. Geisel stroked the boy and cooed comforting sounds. He looked up at Grove. “You got a fix on Maura?”

“Not yet. She's gotta be close. They couldn't have gotten far.” Grove was checking the Bulldog's cylinder, making sure the loads were seated and ready to rock. “I know she's alive, Tom, don't ask me how. I'm going to find her. Have the baby checked out by the medics.”

“Of course.” Geisel nodded, stroking the child's head. “Got backup on its way. Blackhawks'll light up this place like an operating room.”

“Too little too late, boss—sorry.”

“Wait for them, Ulysses.”

Grove rose and thumbed the hammer, shaking his head. “Sorry but—”

“That's an order.”

A strange pause here as Grove met Geisel's stare, their gazes locking for just an instant. It wasn't exactly sadness or resignation or regret, although all those emotions were present in Geisel's eyes. There was even a hint of fondness there, a father's forlorn realization that it was his son's turn to fight the war. But for just an instant, before he broke the spell by speaking, Grove saw something else in Geisel's downtrodden gaze as the baby wriggled in the older man's arms. Geisel was keeping something from him.

At last Grove offered a quick, tense, humorless nod. “You can fire my ass on Monday.”

Then he turned and lurched back into the black sea of corn.