Your name!
He said your name!
He knows your name!
Though the acoustics of the echo made it impossible to tell if it was the same man who’d brought her here, who else would it be? Who else could it be? Who else knew she was down here?
Her heart went wild with fear.
It’s him. He’s back.
Step forward. End this.
But no.
If you do, he wins. You can’t let him win.
But he’ll kill you!
Not if you can stop him. Not if you kill him first.
The thought shocked her. The fact that she would even consider that.
You have to do it. You have to kill him.
You couldn’t do that, even if you—
How?
What? Push him down the shaft?
No. If you try to fight him here, you’ll lose. He’s too strong. Look how easily he overpowered you in your bedroom.
But you have to fight him—you have to!
No. Someone else will come. Someone will follow him.
She backed away from the edge.
For some reason she thought of her clothes, of leaving her jeans at the far end of the tunnel by the water where she’d used them to dry off. At least she’d put her shirt back on for warmth.
Find a rock. Fight him off. Don’t let him win.
You can do it. You have to.
+ + + +
I pressed the door open and angled my Mini Maglite’s beam into the dim warehouse. “Mr. Everhart?”
No reply.
Dismal, muted light oozed through the dirt-covered windows that flanked me. My flashlight’s beam sliced through the dreariness of the abandoned factory, but the inside of this place didn’t look like simply an empty warehouse. It looked more like a construction zone.
With a rope leading down into one of the holes.
The Rudisill Mine?
Evaluate, don’t assume.
As I considered that, I couldn’t help but think of the time in Denver when the serial killer who liked to be known as Giovanni had tried to bury me alive in an abandoned gold mine in the mountains west of Denver.
Height. Weight. They’re similar to Everhart’s driver’s license.
Giovanni?
The age on the DMV records was close.
The face was different, but plastic surgery could have taken care of that.
It would explain the bruises, the swelling.
Giovanni had escaped from prison a few months ago. I knew that, but—
Is it him again? Resurrected now as Danny Everhart?
The message: I am back.
Giovanni’s free. He tells elaborate stories of tragedy and death. He taunts law enforcement.
The dates of his employment at NVDS fit in with the timeline.
It could work.
A coincidence?
No. I don’t believe in them.
Giovanni’s real name was Kurt Mason and he’d been a police lieutenant in Denver. A good one too. He’d hidden who he was incredibly well. Truthfully, it was scary how normal he’d acted in his everyday life, how well he fit in. He was a killer without a conscience, a psychopath as twisted as they come.
The pit that lay nearest to me was about three meters wide and just about that deep.
He knows explosives. He used C-4 in Colorado. He could have set that Semtex up in Virginia on Monday morning.
The more I thought of Mason, the more likely it seemed that that’s who Everhart really was.
I walked to the hole that yawned open just a little wider than the others, the one that dropped out of sight. The climbing rope that disappeared into it had been tied off with a figure-eight follow-through, the end tucked back into the knot in what rock climbers call a Yosemite backup.
Whoever had attached it knew his knots.
Mason does.
I’d gone climbing with him twice.
I scanned the warehouse. Still no movement. This was the only hole that had a rope leading into it. The stillness, the jagged slabs of unearthed concrete, the smear of filthy light coming through the windows, gave the place an eerie, unearthly feel, almost like something from the set of a horror movie.
When I peered into the shaft I saw the flick of someone’s flashlight or headlamp far below me.
An array of rock-climbing equipment sat piled on a table nearby.
Wait for backup or go in after him?
I was trying to decide when I heard the scream echo up from somewhere deep in the earth.