Page 47 of The Vampire and the Case of the Malevolent Mermaid

No one commented that they could hear my heartbeat or accused me of being a hybrid, so everything was going swimmingly so far. ‘What did you discover, gentlemen?’ I asked.

The captain pointed at the ground about six feet away. ‘After we saw the four-wheeler tracks at Mr Robertson’s home, we’ve looked for corresponding ones. It’s taken a while – there are a lot in use in this area – but not all tires are the same. We’ve found the same tracks and they’re fresh. It looks like someone dropped a trailer here and took off on the machine. The tracks brought us to this.’

His eyes glittered with satisfaction, and there was a hint of the braggart about him:look what I found and you didn’t.If he wanted a pissing match, he’d be disappointed because I didn’t give a fuck who found what. He could keep the glory; all I cared about was finding the girls alive and unharmed.

Reams moved to the side and I saw the hidden door of a bunker. My heart leapt. ‘Have you gone inside?’

Reams grimaced. ‘No. We called Mr MacKenzie, as he’d told us to if we made a significant find.’ And I bet that chafed. They had to walk the line of not pissing Connor off and, by extension, his father.

‘Good.’ I tried to sound calm. Beneath the charm, my heart gave a kerthunk but no one batted an eyelid. It was holding. ‘If thisisrelated to the case and not just a local hunter’s set up, we don’t want any evidence disturbed. Don’t touch anything.’ I wasn’t stupid enough to try and prevent them from going down into the bunker but I could try and minimise their impact.

Reams looked annoyed but didn’t object.

I started taking photos of the area. Brush had been removed from in front of the door and a metal cover was set into a concrete block that poked up above the ground three feet. It looked well maintained and oiled – this place was definitely being used. I photographed the opening.

When I was done, Reams had one of the men break off the chain and padlock with a crowbar. Connor opened the cover and I peered in. My heart leapt again: right behind the door was a black and grey backpack just like Essie’s mum had described. Bingo!

Excitement gripped me and I looked wide-eyed at Connor. I dug out some fresh gloves from my trusty black bag – but before I could move forward, there was a mrrow and Shadow ran past me into the darkness.

‘For fuck’s sake, Shadow!’ I yelled after my lynx. ‘I told you to stay in the damned car.’ Well, the cat was out of the bag now – or more accurately, the SUV. No point in freaking out. Hopefully the other vamps just thought I was a weird cat lady who couldn’t bear to be separated from her feline fur baby.

Ignoring Shadow’s shenanigans for the moment, I opened the backpack. It was definitely a school bag – it had the school’s address inside and a number to call if it were lost. There was a laptop, some books, though no clothes or snacks like Essie’s mother had guessed she’d packed. It wasn’t very full, so some items might already have been removed. I opened a notebook and saw ‘Essie Kaleak’ inscribed on the top of a math assignment. Yes!

I looked at Connor excitedly and he smiled back. ‘This bag belongs to Essie Kaleak,’ I said to the other men then, in case they weretoo focused on Kate to recognise the name I added, ‘The shifter who was kidnapped with Kate Robertson.’

Their faces gave away nothing: no relief, no excitement. Nothing. Tough crowd. Maybe they should play poker with Liv.

I opened a large plastic bag and deposited the backpack inside it then took my heavy-duty Maglite and pointed it into the bunker. Metal stairs descended into the dark. They were steep – but at the bottom they opened up into a room.

There was a bunk bed on one wall and metal shelves bolted to the opposite one. There was a bucket for waste and one of those large, orange water coolers for water. The smell from the waste bucket was pretty overwhelming and I had to concentrate on breathing shallowly through my mouth rather than my nose.

Though the girls had clearly been here, they were long gone. I took yet more photographs. This was the bunker in which Darcy Clark had been held in; her initials had been scrawled on the wall with a black pen with ‘woz here’ after them. I wondered if she’d done it in a fit of teenage boredom or if she’d been trying to leave a clue for the police.

The shelves held packaged rations. I looked around for something in which to keep blood for Kate but I couldn’t see a cooler box or a fridge; either the kidnappers brought it to her or they expected her to drink from her friend.

I shuddered at the thought.

‘They’ve moved them or the girls escaped,’ I mused aloud. The beds were rumpled as if they’d been slept in and the girls' pyjamas were scattered around as though they’d dressed in a hurry.

I looked for Shadow; he had to be here somewhere, but I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him since he’d run past me. I checked under the beds, behind us, under the stairs … no cat.

Connor must have seen the panic in my eyes because he started to search, too. When we couldn’t find him, logic dictated what had happened. ‘There has to be another exit. Shadow can’t pass through solid concrete,’ I said, though in truth, I wasn’t positive that was the case. I’d seen Shadow do a lot of weird shit.

Finally the vamps joined in the search and it was Clements who found the hidden passage. He pulled the bunk beds forward and beneath them was a metal plate bolted to the concrete. The metal had been pulled back from one corner and a tuft of silver lynx fur was caught on the sharp edge.

I bent closer. The gap was just wide enough for a slight woman to slip through, but what caught my attention was a shimmering scale, purple and blue like oil on water. I carefully sealed it into an evidence bag. Was Essie’s sea-serpent form purple and blue? Had she assumed that form to slither through, or to get the strength to pull up the metal plate? Maybe they hadn’t been moved … maybe theyhadescaped. If so, the girl who’d called Donovan’s phone really could have been Kate or Essie.

‘Looks like the girls found a way out of this room,’ I said. Nobody said anything but the men pulled the beds across the room so we could stand in front of the metal plate. I could fit through the hole but there was no way any of the men could.

‘Help me enlarge this hole,’ Connor ordered the men.

I hastily took some more photographs before they altered the scene then stepped back as far as I could in the small room. The four men pulled the plate hard enough to pop a second bolt and bent the metal far enough back so we could all fit through the hole.

I shone my Maglite down into the darkness and saw another staircase going downwards.

We started downwards with me in the lead. The first thing that struck me was the stench: it had been disgusting in the other room but it gradually increased in intensity as we descended. At the bottom, although everything was made of concrete, water had seeped in and we were standing in about an inch of putrid water. If Shadow was down here, he’d be having a kitty hissy fit about his wet paws.

The cement changed to a corrugated metal tube; the sort used for underground drainage. I glanced back: Connor was on my heels, the men just behind him. We ducked and moved forward. We seemed to move forward a long distance and I grew increasingly nervous, though concern for the girls rather than Shadow was driving me. Shadow could look after himself.

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