Page 42 of So Insane

“Is that supposed to comfort me?” she asked.

“It’s supposed to get you to think rationally,” he replied.

“So now I’m being irrational?”

“If you can convince me you aren’t, I’ll take everything back,” he replied.

She sighed and once more couldn’t think of a response. She definitely wasn’t helping anything by being angry. Still, someone needed to take charge here, and the two of them had been acting like the support cast for long enough. "I will work on controlling my emotions," she said, "but I don't regret taking over back there. Jones clearly isn't going to help, and Kinzel was all too happy to take his prisoner and leave the dirty work to us."

“To be fair, he was ordered back to Boise.”

“To be fair,” Faith said with a sneer, “that’s not the goddamned point.”

Michael’s lips thinned, and Faith felt a stab of guilt. “Look, I’m sorry,” she said, “Why don’t you take over in there? Maybe you’ll be more ‘cool’ than I am. Just make it clear that we’re in charge, and what we say is an instruction, not a request.”

“You got it,” he replied, “Don’t worry, Faith. We’ll get this guy.”

He went back inside to talk to Jones. Faith waited outside and gathered her thoughts.

Martle had heard voices in the mine. Not moans, voices that spoke words. It was very possible he had simply hallucinated, but Faith doubted it. It made too much sense to think that someone had spoken and Martle had heard him.

Then again, that was three years ago. Was someone visiting the mines every day? If so, how had no one seen him before? Was he living in the deep part of the mine?

The thought didn’t feel as ridiculous as it sounded. People had lived in caves before. Hell, the catacombs in Paris held the remains of several underground dwellings along with the chapels and the infamous mausoleums. It didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that someone had been living in the mines for years, probably using the cave network to venture to the surface when necessary. It made even more sense now that they had confirmed that at least one ventilation shaft led back to the mines. If a ventilation shaft connected the man-made network of tunnels with the natural one, it stood to reason that there were other intersections between the two. Considering how reluctant everyone was to visit the caves, it was also quite plausible that he had never been seen before now.

But who? And why wait until now to start killing?

And Faith believed it was only now that the killer had started murdering people. There were plenty of missing persons cases, but when she dived more deeply into the history, she found no cases where bodies were recovered showing stab wounds or any sign of murder.

It was the mine. It all came back to that. Tyler and Clara had visited the mines, not the caves. She believed the killer had some sort of connection to the mines and when the entrance was reopened, he would kill people who wandered inside. Why, she wasn’t entirely sure, but if she could find the answer to that question, she would be able to find the killer.

Michael returned to the front of the cave and reported, “Okay, so CSI’s gonna do their thing. They’ll take fingerprints like last time and probably find some. Ditto DNA. Once more, it probably won’t show up as anyone in the database. I’ve convinced him to send a drone up the ventilation shaft so we can hopefully follow the killer’s trail. We might even get lucky enough to see him. Who knows? In the meantime, Jones is calling off the S&R team from Colorado.”

“No,” Faith said, “Don’t let him do that.”

“There’s no one to rescue, Faith,” he said softly.

“And no one else brave enough to go into the mines,” she said, “We need them so that we don’t end up going into the mines alone and get lost.”

“I understand that, but how do we convince them to stay?”

“We’re FBI agents,” Faith said, “we’re going to talk to them with authority, and if anyone wants to give us trouble, we’ll make more trouble for them.”

“You mean more trouble for us.”

"I mean, we're going to do something, Michael, not just wait for something to happen.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

“I want to look into the mine collapse,” she said. “I want the names of the victims and the survivors and their families. I think our killer is connected somehow.”

“I think you’re right,” Michael said. “I’m pretty sure the voices Martle heard were real voices, or at least one person’s real voice.”

After being at odds in so many ways for so long, it was like a breath of fresh air to find that she and Michael were on the same page about this. “Go tell Jones that we’re heading back to town. I’ll call Turk.”

***

The nearest library was over an hour away in Lewiston, but they were able to find the Brightwater Courier—the regional newspaper—online.

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