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It was a credit card. Eve Bowers’s credit card.
She took out her phone and snapped several photos of it. She radioed the rest of the team and then returned to the trail, picking up her pace as it meandered through a couple of grassy areas with benches and one knoll with a small fountain that had been turned off for winter. Two walkers and a runner passed her, giving her curious glances. Trees began to close in on either side of the trail. They were barren, giving her a relatively unobstructed view into the forested areas around her. A quarter of a mile from where she’d found the credit card, deep in the brush, Josie found a woman’s purse. It lay on its side, its contents spilled out of its open top. Josie snapped a few more photos and then used the edge of a stick to poke around inside it until she found a wallet with more credit cards belonging to Eve Bowers.
No car keys or fob. No phone.
She searched the surrounding area for any sign of Eve or evidence of a struggle but found none. Leaving the purse as it was, she returned to the trail, radioing the team once more. As she continued on, her mind worked through a possible scenario. Eve Bowers had left her apartment alone, driving off in her Nissan. She had stopped or somehow been stopped at the main entrance to the city park. She had to have known the killer if she had stopped for him. Unless he had called her ahead of time and arranged to meet her there. Clearly, she’d gotten out of her car. She had either chosen to follow him deeper into the park, likely not seeing him as a threat, or he’d forced or coerced her. But she must have realized very quickly that she was in trouble because she’d tossed her license onto the ground very close to the park entrance.
Then she had attempted to leave a trail.
Josie was impressed by Eve’s quick thinking and ingenuity. Unfortunately, the clues ended with the purse. The killer must have realized what she was trying to do. Had he dragged Eve back out of the park at that point? To her car?
Her radio squawked. All units were heading in her direction.
She kept going. Her calves burned as rolling green areas turned to a wooded hill. Near the top was an opening in the trees. A sign next to it announced: Lovers’ Cave. Below the name was a short summary of the lore that had grown up around the cave.In the late 1800s, two skeletons were found inside Lovers’ Cave, lying side by side, holding hands. Their identities remain a mystery to this day.
Josie peered down the dirt path that led to the cave. It was covered in decaying leaves, tamped down by foot traffic. A few years earlier, the city council had taken pains to make the Lovers’ Cave area a proper tourist attraction rather than just a creepy spot in the park that drew the interest of teenagers looking for a place to get drunk. They cleaned the area up and installed several picnic tables outside of the cave. In fact, before a case they were working on went sideways, Noah had planned to bring Josie here for a picnic to propose. She texted Noah once more and turned onto the path. Sunlight streamed through the branches overhead. In spite of that, and the fact that she was sweating from exertion, Josie felt a chill seep into her bones.
The tables were empty. The only sounds in the clearing were the angry caws of a couple of crows perched in the treetops. At the mouth of the cave, a waist-level plexiglass turnstile door had been installed along with a sign that read: DO NOT ENTER. It seemed like the least effective deterrent possible. When Josie was a teenager, her classmates had dared one another to go inside Lovers’ Cave. She had never gone in. She didn’t do well in dark, enclosed spaces. Smudged fingerprints and even some handprints covered the plexiglass. Josie nudged it with her hip, and it swung in toward the opening of the cave.
The entrance was short and misshapen, although wide enough for the average person to pass through if they ducked their head. Josie stared into the blackness, feeling the blood rush to her head. As an infant, Josie had been abducted by a woman she could only conclude was Satan incarnate. From the age of six until she was fourteen, Josie had been solely in her abductor’s custody. That time had been marked by trauma, including hours spent locked inside a small, dark closet. No amount of therapy or forcing herself to go into dark enclosed spaces as an adult with a gun had mitigated the physical terror that overcame her whenever she faced something like this. The infinite darkness of caves was particularly harrowing.
She could wait for back-up, she decided. Send in a couple of the uniformed officers. She didn’t even know if Eve Bowers was inside the cave.
She took a step back. The plexiglass door followed, its bottom brushing the dead leaves on the ground. A tiny speck of pink emerged, a pinpoint of warm color in a vast landscape of brown. With growing dread, Josie knelt to have a better look at it. The roar in her head got worse.
The tip of a fingernail, covered in pale pink chipped nail polish, lay in the dirt.
Eve Bowers had scraped this very same color nail polish off her fingernails in the interview room the evening before. Josie did not think this was a coincidence.
She stood and straightened her spine. Without thought, her hands found her radio and her mouth spoke into it, giving brief details of her location; what she’d found; and advising that she was going to look inside the cave. Voices burst back at her, urging her to wait. She turned the radio down and then she flicked on her phone’s flashlight app. Her right hand unsnapped the gun holster at her side and slid her service weapon out. Holding her phone’s flashlight outward with her left hand and her gun pointed in the same direction with the other, Josie stepped past the plexiglass door.
And stopped.
The nine-year-old inside her wailed. Her own heartbeat thundered in her ears like a thousand horses galloping. She could wait. Should wait. Every other time she’d gone into spaces like Lovers’ Cave, Noah had been with her, his presence keeping her demons at bay, just barely. Surely even a uniformed officer going in with her would be preferable to going in alone. Her arms began to lower but then, somehow, a noise broke through the panic building inside her. A rustling from within the cave.
Josie had always promised herself that she would never let her own trauma keep her from doing her job. She would not let her abductor win. She would never put innocent civilians at risk because of her personal issues. Her arms lifted again, straight out in front of her, the flashlight barely piercing the darkness ahead.
Ducking her head, she stepped into the blackness. Her frenzied mind tried to do one of the breathing exercises her therapist had taught her. It was no use. Her chest heaved with each breath, making the light and her pistol unsteady. She barely registered the cold which was deeper and more penetrating in the bowels of the cave, or the smell, foul and earthy. The flashlight illuminated stone walls with dark things growing along them. Dirt and rocks underfoot. Josie stayed crouched until she realized the ceiling had raised. Panning upward with the flashlight, she saw dozens of bats hanging like sacs suspended from above. Her stomach pitched, sending a wave of nauseated panic through her body.
Her feet hurried her beyond the chamber to where the ceiling lowered again about a foot above her head. She tried to listen for the rustling noise she had heard earlier, but the sound of her heartbeat was far too loud. The walls closed in. The hands of fear squeezed her rib cage until each step forward became physically painful. Josie opened her mouth to identify herself and call out for Eve, but the only sound that came from her throat was a strangled wheeze.
She tried to find the rational part of herself, the adult inside her mind, who understood that her fear was based on something that had happened long ago.
The rustling came again. Josie swept the flashlight from side to side. Her entire body froze when two glowing eyes peered at her from the darkness. Her lips twitched, trying to form words, to make any sound. Nothing happened. The hands crushed her ribs. Breathing was impossible.
The eyes blinked and then they were gone. Josie willed her arms to move, to follow with the flashlight, but her body rebelled, stuck in place. There was a louder rustling now, only feet away.
Then came a moan that loosened Josie’s bowels. It was definitely human. Close.
She tried to say “Eve”, to sayanything, but she was still paralyzed.
The eyes reappeared, now in triplicate. Three sets of glowing eyes at various heights but close to the ground. It wasn’t until they all rushed toward her that a scream broke free from her throat, filling up the cave, and reverberating off the stone so hard, it felt as though her teeth were rattling. Heavy creatures, about the size of her dog, scuttled over her feet and through her legs, knocking her off balance. She managed to hold onto her pistol, but her phone flew through the air. As she fell onto her rear end, the light from her phone tumbled, illuminating the fat, furry tail of a raccoon hauling ass in the direction Josie had come from.
There was no time for relief. The moan she’d heard echoed through her head. On her knees, she scrambled across the dirt floor and snatched her phone up, whipping around, searching for the source of the unholy noise. The beam landed on a foot, clad in a stylish gray boot, its bottom streaked with mud.
Now came words. “Eve!” Josie cried.
She stood and sprinted toward the foot, closing the distance quickly. Her trembling hand passed the flashlight over the body until it landed briefly on Eve’s face. Josie holstered her pistol and tried to find a pulse but there was nothing. Eve’s skin was ice-cold.
