The next blow didn’t fall. Elliot could hear struggling, shuddering gulps for air, and somewhere overhead a cracked voice said, “Elliot?”
Elliot dropped his pistol and launched himself at the black mass looming over him. “Tucker?” His arms locked around Tucker, and even in the dark he could tell it was Tucker. He had lost weight. The outline of his body, the contours of his chest were subtly, worryingly different, but it was him. It was definitely, unmistakably him.
Tucker. Alive.
Until that blazing shock of relief, he hadn’t realized how close he’d been to losing hope. “Tucker. Christ.” He couldn’t seem to get past that word, that revelation. He tried to peer through the gloom to see Tucker’s features. He needed to see him.
“How are you—What are you—How did you—” The words were muffled, incoherent. Tucker was crushing him close—but also maybe hanging on to him for support because he was shaking, weaving a little.
They were talking over each other. “I thought you were dead.”
“How can you...”
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”
Elliot wasn’t completely sure he hadn’t fallen and cracked his head. Was this a dream? A hallucination? Had he finally snapped under the weight of so much grief and fear?
“Is this real?” That wasn’t a question for Elliot. Tucker seemed to be consulting some internal meter. He sounded wary, as though this was something he had had to ask himself again and again.
“It’s real,” Elliot said. “Unless it’s my dream. I was looking for—” He couldn’t even remember what he had been looking for. Why the hell had he hiked out here if not to find Tucker? “I decided to follow the dog. We found the entrance to this place. I couldn’t tell what it was.”
“Yeah. You have to see,” Tucker said. The words were thick, not quite clear. “It’s here. It’s all here. You have to know. You can’t protect yourself if you don’t know.”
He sounded, well, a little crazy as he pushed Elliot toward the wall.
“I can’t see anything,” Elliot said.
“You’ll see.”
“Hold on.” Elliot let go of Tucker and began to search for his phone and pistol. He found them and switched on the flashlight. He could see Tucker, looking oddly, terrifyingly shrunken in the rags of his clothing, stumbling toward the wall and then seeming to vanish.
“Tucker!”
A white grimy hand reached beckoningly out of the darkness. “Come here. You have to see it.”
Elliot followed that beckoning hand and saw that there was a smaller chamber leading off the pit. He couldn’t tell if it was natural or manmade, but what were certainly manmade were the torch holders built into the rock wall.
“What happened? How did you get in here?” Elliot asked. “We saw the van. Who grabbed you?” He was spilling questions, not even waiting for answers, all the bewilderment and fear of the past week pouring out even as he tried to assess and evaluate Tucker’s condition.
Dragging speech, unsteady movements, weird behavior. It was obvious Tucker was suffering from everything from shock to hypothermia. All Elliot wanted to do was get him out of here and back to safety and proper medical care. But could he climb?
The thought of leaving him here even for a couple of hours was unbearable.
The smell of the second chamber stopped him in his tracks, halted all words. If they hadn’t been so far underground that the cave was naturally refrigerated, he’d have realized the truth a lot faster.
He had to force himself to follow Tucker, who didn’t seem to notice at all, ducking down and disappearing from sight.
Elliot ducked down too and knocked over a pail of something that sloshed messily over the stone floor.
Inside the chamber he was able to straighten up. He turned his phone flashlight toward Tucker and sucked in a breath.
Tucker looked gaunt and filthy. His eyes were red-rimmed, his lips chapped and peeling, his face gray. There were contusions on his wrists, though the bruises on his face were already starting to fade.
Tucker put his hand up to block the light.
Elliot opened his mouth to say...well, probably more of the same. Who did this to you? Why were you taken? What was the plan? But his gaze finally focused on the wall of white stone behind Tucker.
His mouth went dry.
Not white rocks. Or not entirely. Some of those jutting rocks were skulls.
Hollow-eyed and grinning, the skulls stared back at him. They looked like skeletons about to step out of the wall.
“See?” Tucker said grimly. “You see?”
“Yes.”
But then Elliot realized Tucker wasn’t talking about the wall of skulls. He was looking at something that lay near their feet.
Elliot looked down and his stomach gave an alarming and completely unexpected heave.
Not like he hadn’t seen dead bodies before, but something about this one—though not unanticipated—was weirdly jarring, coming on the tail of the discovery that Corian had been building his own wilderness catacomb.
He recognized the blue parka and red plaid scarf—he’d seen Todd Rice wearing them in numerous photos on his Facebook page.
“I...know him.”
“He was here when I arrived,” Tucker said in an eerily conversational tone.
The bizarreness of the circumstances faded and Elliot remembered there were things that had to be done. Practical things. Starting with getting Tucker out of here. He’d let Pine know where he would be, but had he been specific enough? He had certainly not indicated he needed help or backup.
He couldn’t secure or protect this crime scene. He wasn’t even 100 percent sure of finding it again, although Sheba could probably be relied on for that. All he could do was snap a photo of Todd’s remains and then a couple of photos of the wall studded with skulls.
“Enough. That’s enough. We’ve got to go,” Tucker told him. “Elliot.”
“Yes.” Elliot took another photo.
“Before they come back.”
Elliot’s heart froze. He looked at the shadow that was Tucker. “They? What do you mean they’re coming back?”
“They’ve come back twice. They’ll come back.”
“You saw who grabbed you?”
“Yes.” Tucker was leaning against the wall, eyes shut against the hard bright flashlight beam, as though he no longer had the strength to stand.
“Tucker, listen.” Elliot went to him. Put his hands on Tucker’s shoulders. “It’s about a hundred feet up to the top. Can you—I don’t know if you should risk it. I can get help. I can leave my pistol with you—”
Tucker’s eyes flew open. “The hell!” he roared. “I’m not staying in this goddamned hole one minute longer.”
He turned—it was more of a controlled roll off the wall—and staggered out of the side chamber and into the tall chamber. He went straight to the wall and began to climb.
“Tucker, for Christ’s sake. At least let me go first,” Elliot said, following.
Tucker ignored him. He was breathing in pained grunts, as he reached for the next rung, but he was climbing.
Elliot swore quietly. But maybe it was safer this way. If Tucker’s captors returned before Elliot could get back, gun or no, Tucker would be in trouble. But if he fell?
Elliot broke into a sweat just thinking about it.
But it was probably easier going up than it had been climbing down. And if Tucker got into trouble maybe Elliot could keep him from falling.
Or maybe not, but it didn’t look like he had a choice. He climbed after him.
“Tell me if you think you can’t make it.”
Tucker muttered something inarticulate. He was moving with an almost desperate speed.
“You’re going to need my sunglasses before you get to the top,” Elliot called.
“It’s raining,” Tucker called back. He sounded breathless but happy. “Feel that?”
After the angry energy of his start, Tucker’s ascent slowed to a painful and terrifying crawl. He had to stop many times to catch his breath or just steady himself, and each time Elliot would crowd up close, trying to find a way to brace him.
He could feel Tucker’s muscles shaking and Elliot was convinced the only thing keeping him moving was that ferocious willpower.
He wanted to ask Tucker if he knew his attackers or if he could describe them—with anyone else he would not have allowed them to climb without getting that information first—but it wasn’t in him to push Tucker. Or to confront the reason for demanding that information up front. Having let Tucker begin to climb, he could not afford to distract him now. Tucker did not have extra breath or energy to waste.
Their slow progress grew even slower as they reached the halfway mark.
“You okay up there?” Elliot called.
Tucker didn’t answer, but he kept reaching for the next rung, stepping up.
Three quarters of the way, they had slowed to a creep, and Elliot’s heart was in his mouth.
“Not even another twenty feet,” he called. “We’re just about there.”
Tucker stopped.
“What do you need?” Elliot called. “What can I do?” He could hear the sharp note of fear in his voice. And Tucker probably could too.
The answer was a surprisingly calm “Your shades.”
“Coming.” Elliot leaned into the wall, breathing cold earth and wet stone as he felt around for his sunglasses and then stretched up, pushing them into Tucker’s icy hand.
“You okay?” Tucker asked, sounding so much like his ordinary overprotective self that the back of Elliot’s eyes stung with untimely emotion.
“Yep. Great. Let’s do this.”
After another moment or two, Tucker began to move again.
At last they reached the top and the final monumental effort of hauling themselves over the edge of the entrance.
Tucker landed facedown, back heaving, as Sheba sniffed them over stem to stern.
“Hey.” Elliot hugged her briefly as she snuffled his face. “Good girl, Sheba. Smart dog.” Had it not been for Sheba—had he not come back here last Saturday and found Sheba—
“When did we get a dog?” Tucker asked, interrupting these grim thoughts.
“Long story.” Elliot pushed up to his knees and listened. Was that a rifle shot in the distance?
“I think we should get moving,” he said.
He helped Tucker to his feet, wrapping an arm around his waist. Yeah, Tucker had definitely lost weight. But he was still a big man. Elliot wouldn’t be able to carry him, not with his bum knee.
He called to Sheba. She ignored him.
“Shit. Hang on.” Elliot propped Tucker against a tree and went back for her, snapping the leash on. “Come on, Sheba.”
She didn’t fight him, but he had to tow her along as well as support Tucker.
It was another long and nerve-racking journey, but at least this time there was no fear of anyone plummeting to their death. Those slowly nearing rifle shots worried him though. He kept his mouth shut about his concern; Tucker was already doing everything he could to keep on his feet.
Behind the sunglasses, his eyes were shut and he seemed to be almost sleepwalking as Elliot half guided, half dragged him down the trail.
He was starting to feel his own aches and pains from the pummeling Tucker had delivered when he’d landed at the bottom of the pit cave. His eye was swollen and his face throbbed where Tucker had punched him.
That was okay. He would happily absorb a few punches for the miracle of having Tucker back.
Another two hours to reach the car, but at last they made it. Elliot dumped Tucker into the passenger seat, where he slumped back, his face ashen and sheened in perspiration. But he was conscious. His mouth moved in a flickery smile. “Did you save me any of that prime rib?”
“Sorry. The dog ate it.”
Elliot buckled him in and then moved around to secure Sheba. Finally, he started the engine and raced down the country lane back to civilization and safety.
That was how it felt, anyway. In the end, proof of how genuinely uneasy he was, he opted for Seattle because of its proximity to the FBI field office. Not that he really thought anyone would try to snatch Tucker out of the hospital, but he was taking no chances.
He phoned Montgomery and Pine and Yamiguchi and the hospital, but afterward could remember very little of any of those phone calls.
They reached the emergency room and Tucker insisted on walking back to the assigned cubicle, where he crashed down on the bed and appeared to lose consciousness.
“No, no. It’s okay,” one of the medical team reassured Elliot. “He seems to be sleeping.”
Things moved fast from that point. In a matter of minutes Tucker was taped up to a bunch of machines and an IV was pumping fluids and antibiotics into him while Elliot filled out the paperwork and permissions.
“What about you? You look like you could use some medical attention,” a sympathetic nurse asked, and Elliot was so focused on Tucker, it took a few seconds to realize she was talking to him.
He shook his head. “I’m fine.”
And he was—provided Tucker was.
Within the hour Tucker’s cubicle was full of cops and FBI agents, most of whom who were ushered right back out again by the hospital staff.
Detective Fallis, who had been in charge of Tucker’s kidnapping case, managed to slip back in again long enough to question Tucker about the morning he had been grabbed.
“I bought coffee from a food truck,” Tucker said. He already seemed stronger and more alert, though his face was colorless and the shadows under his eyes looked like purple bruises. “I was walking back to my car and a van pulled up next to me. The passenger—female—asked if I knew where the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium was. She wanted me to show her on a map.”
“Did you recognize her? Can you describe her?”
“I recognized her,” Tucker said. “She had a wig on, but I knew her.”
“Who was it?”
“The neighbor. Foster.”
“Connie Foster?” Yamiguchi demanded.
Tucker nodded dreamily. “While I was talking to her, the driver got out and came up behind me. I punched him, but she jabbed me with something. It knocked me out.”
Montgomery said to Pine, “The Foster woman—”
Pine was already on his way out of the room. “On it,” he threw over his shoulder.
“What about the man?” Fallis asked. “Did you get a good look at him?”
“White, midtwenties, brown eyes. He was wearing a hoodie.” Tucker’s gaze moved to Elliot. “When I came to, I was in that pit. They’d taken my wallet, piece, phone.” He closed his eyes.
Yamiguchi and Montgomery were looking at Elliot. Elliot nodded. He thought that description sounded a lot like Torin Barro.
“Did either of them say anything?” Fallis asked. “Did they tell you why they were holding you prisoner?”
“It was part of a plan.”
“What plan?”
“I’m not sure they knew...”
“What does that mean?” Montgomery asked.
Tucker’s eyelids drifted shut and then fluttered open.
“He needs to rest,” the doctor said.
“I want to get this over with,” Tucker said to the obvious relief of the agents and police crowded into the cubicle.
“Just a few questions more. What was the plan?” Montgomery pressed.
“Don’t know...”
Elliot listened stoically. Tried, anyway. The more details Tucker could give them, the better the chances of picking Foster up fast. If it was anyone else, Elliot would have said it was tough, but had to be faced. The fact that this was Tucker...well, he couldn’t allow himself to dwell on what Tucker had endured. The horror of waking up in complete darkness, the discovery of Todd Rice’s body, the slow realization of where he was and what had happened. Elliot couldn’t think about it without going a little crazy, and that was not helpful to anyone, least of all Tucker.
He leaned against the wall of Tucker’s cubicle, out of the way of hovering medical personnel and the law enforcement members who had been allowed to stay, never taking his gaze from Tucker’s weary, bruised face.
“They wanted me alive...for a while anyway. There was a bucket of water and a loaf of sourdough bread... My hands were tied, but I finally got free yesterday. Couldn’t see anything though...”
The questioning went on for some time although there was really not much more that Tucker could tell them.
After an hour of it, Elliot slipped out and went to the parking lot to walk Sheba. He met Pine coming back into the hospital.
“Did you get her?” Elliot asked.
Pine’s expression was grim. “Nope,” he said. “It looks like Foster’s cleared out.”