Read Waking the Dead for Free Online

yawning blackness ahead, and she slowed, inching forward now. She could hear Sharper behind her. “The chamber is coming up. Be careful. I’m going to be mighty pissed off if you fall in and break a leg.”
    The thought of having to depend on Sharper to rescue her elicited a burst of renewed caution. Cait stretched out on her belly again, sweeping the darkness ahead with the beam of her flashlight as she crawled.
    There was little to herald the fact that the floor of the cave was about to give way. Just a few rocks jutting up from the floor, then nothing. There was a quiver in her stomach when her free hand met that emptiness ahead of her. She moved back a few cautionary inches before turning the beams of both lights downward. Wonder filled her.
    The chamber was approximately seven feet down, eleven feet by nine feet in diameter. Cait played her lights over the area. The walls were mostly smooth, with occasional rougher patches jutting out that would serve as toe and finger holds. But once down it would be chancy climbing out without someone waiting above with a rope.
    She drew back on her haunches and shrugged out of her backpack. Another light speared the darkness. Sharper had made the turn into the branch.
    “What are you doing?”
    Turning off her flashlight, she slipped it back into the pack. “I’m going in. Position yourself so you can shine your lights down into the chamber to give me more illumination.”
    “What’s the point?” His voice might be pitched low, but it was easy enough to hear the impatience lacing it. “You wanted to see where I found the bones, you can see it from up here. The police were all over the area. You aren’t likely to find anything they missed.”
    “I need to go down myself.” She didn’t expect him to understand. But this cave was the closest link they had to the UNSUB other than the bones themselves. Given the nature of Cait’s job, she was almost never called first to the preliminary crime scene, even a secondary scene such as this one. She always insisted on visiting the scene in person. It was the best way to get a feel for a case.
    She turned, preparing to scale down the wall into the chamber.
    “Jesus. Wait a minute.” A couple seconds passed, then Sharper loomed before her. “You’ll want to keep your hands on those stones sticking up right here. See?”
    She nodded. She’d already noted the handholds.
    “Once you’re over the edge, you can reach to the right and find another hand hold. Move your left hand to this stone here.” He leaned forward, his figure shadowy in the near darkness as he pointed. “If you angle your body that way, you’ll find a couple footholds on the way down.”
    “You went down there?” She knew he had. It was in the report. But she wanted to hear his explanation for herself.
    “Why else would I have called the cops in?” His tone might have sounded reasonable without that note of insolence in it. “Couldn’t see what the hell was down there for sure, other than some trash bags. If it’d been garbage, I’d have figured a way to haul it out. It would have made for a pretty impressive cave to show the client I was planning for. But I doubted it was garbage.”
    She nodded her understanding. No one would make this climb to dump some illicit litter.
    “Figured it was a burglary stash or drugs.” The dim light offered from their hard hats left his face shadowed, turning it to all lean angles and hard edges. “We’ve got our share of both problems in the area. But once I got down there, I saw a few bones scattered around the area. Knew I’d stumbled onto something far different.”
    For the first time she really considered what it’d been like for him to be standing down there in that deep dark hole. Surrounded by bags filled with bones. “Had to be pretty creepy.”
    There was a note of finality in his voice. “I’ve seen worse.”
    Because it was obvious he wasn’t going to say more, Cait turned her attention to the