His phone dinged and he pulled it out to see that Wy had texted him.

Taking off. Jo’s coming with. Penis Extender parked at the tie-down, keys behind the visor.

He replied with a heart emoji and didn’t care who saw it.

The lamps improved the view immeasurably, and for the first time Liam realized how big the cave was, the stygian darkness having swallowed so much of it before. Interested in spite of herself, Chief Rafferty joined him in his search, and even then the two of them working together, scrutinizing the rock surface with minute attention, almost missed it. It wasn’t really a crack so much as a vertical separation of the cave’s surface, one piece on top of another with a very narrow space between. “Kind of like a slip fault,” Chief Rafferty said.

Liam didn’t speak geology and was willing to take her word for it. He could well believe that Erik had never found the crack in spite of the time he’d spent on the dig and was even more astonished that Kevin and Logan had. Never underestimate the curiosity and determination of a ten-year-old kid. He could understand why they hadn’t noticed Erik’s body, too. They’d stumbled through the cave and fetched up against the back wall.

He hoped with all his heart that Brillo would find that Erik had died before they entered the cave.

They wrangled one of the lights over to the crack and leaned it against the rock wall, angling it as best they could to shine in between the two layers of rock. The separation wasn’t even four inches in places, and try as he might he couldn’t press his face flat enough against the rock to see to the other side. He stepped back, frustrated. “How did that kid get his head in that crack?”

“Wait,” Rafferty said, and pulled out what looked like a dental mirror on a telescoping rod. She saw his look and shrugged and assumed a very bad British accent. “Rafferty. Jane Rafferty.”

He laughed. He liked Chief Rafferty.

“Bought it off my dental hygienist. Useful for checking tight spaces.” She got down on her knees and pressed her bulk up against the rock wall. She extended the mirror’s handle out to its full length and poked it very slowly and very carefully through the crack. “Don’t want to break it off.”

“Don’t want it to get stuck, either.” Or her, he thought.

The cave seemed to be getting colder and the passing seconds stretched into minutes and maybe hours as Rafferty poked around with the mirror, working it like a surgeon doing a sextuple bypass, giving up only the occasional grunt.

Finally she sat back on her heels, collapsing the mirror. She stared at the crack, although without her hand actually inside it it faded again almost into invisibility. “Huh.”

“Is there a skeleton?” Liam said. His toes were numb.

“Yes.” She got to her feet.

“Could you tell if it was human or animal?”