Free Vermilion Drift by William Kent Krueger

was with Cork.”
    “Where is he now?”
    “At the mine office. We can bring him back if you want him.”
    “Not necessary at the moment.” Rutledge glanced around the perimeter of the sink. “Did you go over the area up here?”
    “Yeah. Nothing.”
    “Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
    They gathered at the edge of the sink. It was a five-foot drop to the opening in the rubble where the passage began. Although there were natural hand- and footholds in the side of the pit that could have been used to climb in and out, the firemen had placed an aluminum ladder against the wall. Dross went first, Rutledge next, Upchurch after him, and finally Larson. Cork brought up the rear. He wasn’t eager to return to the hardness and the darkness of the Vermilion Drift, but the tunnel was full of questions, horrifying questions, and he was a man trained his whole life in mining answers. He hesitated in the evening light, watched Larson disappear into the narrow throat of the opening in the rubble, took a good, deep breath of pine-scented air, and descended.
    The passage was a snaking affair, lit by daylight that slipped through gaps in the blasted rock. It was big enough throughout its length to accommodate the body of even a large person, but theragged rock edges and the constant twisting made the journey a slow one. Those who reached the bottom first waited for the others to arrive. In the passage itself, the air was fine, but in the tunnel where the cool mine air pooled, the nauseating smell of rotting flesh was overwhelming.
    Lights supplied by the fire department illuminated the drift. Cork and the others walked a path cleared and marked with yellow tape by the crime scene team. The nearer they came to the room, the stronger became the putrid odor of decomposition. Mingled with the foulness of the air was the aroma of eucalyptus, which some of the deputies and firemen had applied to the area below their noses to deal with the stench.
    The place where the wall had been dismantled was guarded by a couple of deputies. The crosscut tunnel that had been revealed was not at all deep, less than ten feet. The striations from the drill bits made the walls look like rust-colored corduroy.
    There were six bodies in all. Five were nothing more than skeletal remains with a few rotted, parchment-like remnants of clothing still clinging to the bones. Four of the skeletons were arranged in a sitting position against the walls, placed in a way that put their backs to each of the four points of a compass—north, south, east, and west. A fifth skeleton lay in the center, and next to it the sixth body had been placed. That body was fully clothed. It hadn’t been there long enough to be skeletal, but it had been there long enough so that the bloat of the gases from decomposition had distended the abdominal cavity, and the thin material of the black cocktail dress the corpse wore had been stretched and ripped along the seams. The neck and face were swollen like those of an overfilled blow-up doll. The corpse’s tongue had turned black and grown huge, and it protruded between puffed lips. The skin was a sickly yellow-orange and translucent so that the vessels that ran beneath were visible. Cork had seen all this earlier with Dross and Larson, and they stood back while Rutledge and Upchurch both knelt and studied the scene.
    “How long you figure the skeletons have been here?” Rutledge asked his colleague.
    “I won’t have any idea until I examine the remains,” she replied.
    “Well, this one,” Rutledge said, pointing toward the corpse prostrate in the center, “hasn’t been here more than a week.” Over his shoulder, he said, “Has anyone reported a missing woman, Marsha?”
    “No,” she answered.
    “Yes,” Cork said.
    Dross shot him a puzzled look. Rutledge turned and eyed him as well.
    “I think the corpse might be Lauren Cavanaugh,” Cork said. “She’s been missing since last Sunday.”
    “How do you know that?”