rock. He threaded the rope through and secured it while Diane and Neva put on gloves.
“I don’t think we’ll need harnesses,” said Neva. “We can just use the rope.”
“It shouldn’t be a hard descent,” said Mike. “I’ll send your equipment and bags down after you.” Mike placed a pad under the rope to give it protection from being frayed by the rock on the edge of the drop-off.
Neva climbed down first, landing beside the bodies. Diane climbed down after her. Mike lowered the body bags and crime scene kit next. Diane and Neva stood looking at the bodies for a moment.
The visible tissue was only partially decomposed. It appeared the bodies were drying out, rather than putrefying the way they would if they were lying exposed in the woods. The air of the cave was drier than outside and the biota was different, which made the decaying process different. The body on top was lying facedown over the other one. The long honey blond hair made it appear to be female, but you never knew. She or he was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. The body on bottom lay faceup and appeared to be male.
Diane and Neva shined their lights around the floor, looking for anything that might have fallen with the bodies. Nothing showed itself on a preliminary search. They split up and started a grid-pattern search of the cave floor.
It wasn’t a large cavern, not much bigger than the entrance room. There was breakdown littering the floor, and the walls and roof were much the same as they’d seen so far. Diane noted with dismay that the room at one time had a few stalactites and stalagmites. Most had been broken off and carried away, probably as souvenirs. A few were still lying broken on the floor of the cave, along with several vintage beer and soda cans. Diane and Neva collected and bagged every item they came across that was not native to the cave.
“Someone tried to build a fire,” said Neva. “I wonder how that worked out for them? Where did they expect the smoke to go?” She poked around in the burned charcoal and wood. “Nothing obvious here. I’ll bag it.”
Neva continued around the room and found an old piece of rope about three feet long that looked as if it had been down there for years. Diane found several candy wrappers that also looked old.
She shined the light around the walls and saw what she expected—graffiti. This wasn’t a difficult cave to traverse to this point, and over the years people had visited it who didn’t have the respect for caves that Diane and her fellow cavers had.
Mostly, the graffiti consisted of names and dates. Some of it dated from the 1930s. Someone announced that they lost their virginity here in 1978. From her current vantage point Diane could see three graduation announcements: 1946, 1958, and 1978. She and Neva photographed the walls and the graffiti.
“Look at this,” said Neva. “I wonder if it’s the same person we know.”
Diane walked over and looked at Neva’s find.
L. Conrad was here, 1974, it read.
“Well, how about that? Interesting,” said Diane. “The date would be about right for his high school graduation.”
After finishing with the walls, they turned their attention to the bodies. Before anything was touched, Neva photographed them from several angles.
Diane and Neva slipped off their caving gloves, put on latex gloves, and turned the first body over. It wasn’t the dried flesh of their faces that was so startling about the two bodies. What Diane and Neva noticed first was that their throats had been cut from ear to ear.
Chapter 47
“Wow. What do you make of that?” asked Neva, squatting to have a closer look at the wounds.
“Wow is right,” said Diane, crouching opposite her. “I didn’t expect this.”
The wounds in both victims were similar in length and depth and they looked exactly like the long, deep wounds to the Barres and Watsons.
Neva looked over at the handwriting on the wall. “He knew about this cave,” she said.
“He did, didn’t he? If it’s the same L. Conrad that we know,” she added.
“We could match the handwriting,” Neva said. “It would have changed over time, but we could find early samples, like in an old yearbook, maybe, or from some old legal documents from his early days as sheriff.”
Diane nodded as she studied the wounds. “We could,” said Diane.
She was looking at the neck wounds. Evidence of flies was still in the wounds. “These