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“It’s like a drain catch in a kitchen sink, right?” she asked. “But in this trashed place, except for a few leaves, it’s clean.”
Burkhart thought about that, and then said, “Well, maybe it is a catch, which means there’s something underneath it. Let’s take a look.”
He squatted down, got his fingers entwined in the sewer grate, and with a grunt lifted.
Mattie had expected to see the grate come free of the floor.
But to her astonishment, the grate and the steel tube welded beneath it came up, leaving a gaping hole that gave off a horrible stench.
CHAPTER 25
THE HOLE IN the slaughterhouse floor stank of urine and something fouler.
As Burkhart set the false well aside, Mattie held her arm across her nose and shined her light into a metal-walled shaft that dropped eight feet before giving way to four feet of space and then a gravel floor.
“Probably a secondary drain field system,” said Dietrich, who’d come over, and looked somewhat rattled by their discovery.
“Someone needs to go down, but it’s too tight for me,” Burkhart said.
“Me too,” the high commissar said.
Inspector Weigel peered down the shaft and shook her head. “There are rats down there. I can smell them. I hate rats. My brother had one. Used to taunt me with it. I hate them.”
“Then I guess it’s me,” Mattie said.
“You know I can’t let you—” Dietrich began.
Mattie cut him off. “If I find anything, Hauptkommissar, I’ll back out. Besides, you’ll see what I see. I’ll be wearing a camera.”
After hearing what Mattie proposed, Gabriel went out to his equipment van and returned with a white disposable coverall, a hard hat, goggles, knee pads, and a headlamp attached to a fiber-optic camera, as well as a radio headset with a supersensitive mic that he taped to the side of her neck, and a respirator to keep her lungs protected from any diseases that might be airborne because of all the rat feces.
They put her in a climbing harness and attached her to a rope.
“Sure you want to do this?” Burkhart asked.
“No,” Mattie said before kneeling and backing slowly into the shaft.
Burkhart and Dietrich lowered her while Gabriel watched a laptop receiving the signal from Mattie’s camera.
The shaft was barely bigger than Mattie’s shoulders. For a moment she felt a growing claustrophobia, but then the shaft gave way to open space and her feet touched ground.
She released the rope from her harness. Crouching down and swinging her headlamp, she saw that the gravel surface went out in all directions in a black space that swallowed her beam.
“It’s like a huge drain field or something,” she said.
“We can’t see very well,” Gabriel said in her ear. “Use your SureFire, too.”
Mattie got out her flashlight and flicked it on, instantly hap
py for the powerful beam that shot through the space.
She spotted something dull white about ten yards ahead behind a load-bearing steel column. Then she heard chattering to her left. She swung the beam and spotted dozens of rats watching her, and sniffing her presence, some of them scolding her angrily while others worked their chops.
It was creepy, and she heard Niklas’s voice telling her to get out of there.
Instead, Mattie crouched and duckwalked toward that white object behind the column. Three feet from it, she saw what it was, and froze.
A bone stuck up out of the gravel.
