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Candace passed him a heavy-duty flashlight. Hank’s upper body disappeared as he angled the light beam down the narrow passage.
“See anything?” Candace asked, a knot in her stomach. If they couldn’t find the problem here, she wasn’t sure where else to look.
Hank didn’t respond right away. He shifted, craning his neck to see deeper into the hole. Candace held her breath.
After an agonizing moment, Hank hauled himself back up. “Shit,” he muttered under his breath, rubbing at his flank.
“What?” she said.
“Too fat,” he muttered, providing a chuckle. He winked at her. “Looks like you gotta go down there, rook.”
She stared at him.
“I ain’t joking. Come on now. We pay you the big bucks for this.”
Candace didn’t think they were paying herthatbig of bucks.
Still, she couldn’t look like a coward on the first day of the job.
And so, summoning her nerve, she nodded, accepting a headlamp from Hank and slipping past him as he pulled his girth from the hatch.
Then, with a deep swallow, peering into the dark and trying to hide the way her hands trembled against the ladder, she descended into the murk.
Candace dropped into the claustrophobic darkness with a single goal in mind: find the problem and fix it. She clung tightly to the ladder rungs, her headlamp illuminating the narrow walls of the passage. The air was thick with the smell of oil and metal.
The passage seemed to go on forever, twisting and turning at odd angles. Candace’s heart pounded in her chest as she imagined getting stuck down here, trapped in the dark. She shook her head, banishing the thought. She had a job to do.
At last, the passage opened up into a small chamber. Candace shone her headlamp around, and there, in the dark, against a stone wall, she spotted something.
She hesitated, staring, a frown creasing her features.
She took a couple of shuffling steps forward.
“See anything?” Hank’s voice called from above.
She didn’t reply. Didn’t want to open her mouth and swallow the fumes.
Candace steeled herself and leaned over, peering past a rail into an opening in the ground.
She clicked on the flashlight’s second, brighter setting and directed the beam down into the shadows.
There, about twenty feet down, a pale shape lay crumpled on the metal floor. As her eyes adjusted, details emerged from the gloom. A ruffled dress soaked with dark fluids. Lank hair obscuring the face. Arms and legs splayed at unnatural angles.
Candace recoiled, bile rising in her throat.
“See anything?” Hank called again.
Candace held back the tremor in her voice. She yelled up the hatch, “Call the cops! We have a corpse.”
CHAPTER ONE
The thicket snapped behind Rachel Blackwood as she plunged into the forest, her boots sinking into the spongy earth with every stride.
On the mossy branch of a toppled tree, her white Stetson sat on a folded leather jacket. A girl had to protect her hat.
Her night-black hair caressed her features as she sprinted. The small aquamarine beads woven into her fringe tapped against her ear as she ran, a constant, rhythmic reminder of the pounding in her chest.
Her feet were surefooted on the rough terrain, thanks to decades of tracking, sprinting through rough terrain, and navigating the wilderness and forgotten places of Texas.
