Page 35 of So Insane

The officer frowned. “Agent, she’s dead, all right? Can we just admit that to each other? She’s dead. We don’t have to pretend. Either we’ll find her or we won’t, but she’s not going to get any less dead either way.”

Faith shook her head incredulously. “I don’t believe this,” she said, “This woman was your neighbor. You all knew her for most of her life. You’re really fine with just leaving her as a missing persons case for the rest of eternity?”

“Like Jillian said,” the second officer replied, “we can’t help anyone if we’re lost ourselves.”

“And how would you end up lost if we use professional lighting, mapping tools and no one leaves unless they’re in groups of four or more?”

“People get lost down there,” the third officer answered. “Sometimes, there’s no reason why.”

Faith couldn’t believe what she heard. “So what, you guys are afraid the ghosts are gonna get you?”

“I don’t blame you for doubting,” the first woman said, “and I don’t blame you for being rude. But I’ve lived here my entire life, and I’ve seen and heard things that shouldn’t be real. I don’t know if those caves are haunted, but I do know that when people go into those caves, they never come out.”

Faith and Michael started. “Wait,” Michael said, “this has happened before?”

Jones shifted in his seat uncomfortably, his earlier smug look gone. He must have just realized the importance of that information.

“When you say happened before,” Faith said, “you mean that’s exactly what happened, right? Not an urban legend, an actual missing persons case?”

Jones answered, “People go missing from time to time since the mines closed. Not a lot, but one or two a year.”

“One or two a year?” Faith said. “Are you kidding me? And what do you guys do about it? Throw your hands in the air and say, ‘Cave bad. Me no looky?’”

Jones shrugged glumly. “We look through the surface caves and the forest and everywhere we might expect them to be, but no, we don’t go spelunking every time someone goes missing. A lot of times it’s kids anyway, not actual kids, but college kids, you know. We just assume they run away and try to find a better life.”

Faith needed to leave the room before she did something stupid. Michael followed her outside, and when the door closed behind them, she said, “What the hell did I just listen to?”

“Superstition and cowardice,” he said, “alive and well in the twenty-first century.”

“But one or two a year? Going back decades?”

“Superstition is powerful, Faith. All of history shows that.”

“How can you be sanguine about this?” she nearly shouted. “People are being left to die!”

“I’m not happy about it, Faith,” he said, “I just accept that I can’t fix every problem the world has. I do what I can, and I don’t allow what I can’t do to destroy me.”

He looked pointedly at her as he said this, and she knew he wasn’t talking about this case. She flushed with anger and pressed her lips together but didn’t respond.

The conference room door opened, and Jones tentatively approached the two agents. “We’re going to call in some S&R guys from Aspen to come help out. They handle all of the rescues around the ski resort. They’re ex-Coast Guard, and they’re supposed to be very good.”

“Will they be willing to go into the scary dark cave?” Faith asked contemptuously.

Jones chuckled sadly. “Yeah, they’ll be fine. For what it’s worth—which I know isn’t much—these guys mean well. They’re just… well, I don’t know. Superstitious, foolish, stupid, all three and a bag of potato chips?”

“Do you think we shouldn’t go into the mine?” Faith asked.

He chuckled again, this time with bitterness rather than sadness. "I think that it doesn't matter what I think. I've overseen twenty-nine missing persons cases, Special Agent. Each one ends the same. Sometimes we find the body like we did with Tyler Stone. Most of the time, we don't. I'm sure you two can handle yourselves if you go looking through the tunnels, but I don't think you're going to find anything."

Faith looked at this sad, bitter excuse for a detective and wondered if she was looking into her own future. If she couldn’t stop West, was this where she would end up? She’d always imagined that West would kill her once he was done playing with her, but maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would just let her continue, spending the rest of her life forced to face her failures.

“Is there anyone in town who might be able to provide us with a more complete map of the cave network?” she asked, “Hopefully including the mines?”

“You can probably find a map of the mine tunnels from the state government,” Jones replied. “But that will be the mines as they were before the collapse. After the collapse… well, that was twenty-two years ago, so I doubt like hell anything looks the same as it did before. And you should consider any mine tunnels or shafts still open as unsafe.”

“Well, our killer clearly doesn’t see it the same way,” Faith pointed out, “considering he used one of them to transport Stone’s body.”

“Well, the theory right now is that he just dumped the body down the ventilation shaft, then used the natural cave system to navigate back to…” his voice trailed off when he saw Faith’s expression. “Look, there was a guy who was trying to map the mines a few years back, before the second collapse sealed the entrance.”

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