MASS MURDER (62 page)

Giorgio arrived first
,
but the door was securely locked
.
He pounded on the worn, wooden door calling out the monk’s name
.
When no one answered, he pulled his weapon, stepped back and splintered the old door with a well-placed kick
.
Giorgio burst into the room just as a doorway across the hall opened to reveal the grizzled face of one of the older monks
.

“Police
.
Go back inside!” Rocky barked at the surprised man.

The door slammed shut
,
and Rocky joined Giorgio in an empty room
.
They made a quick search
. F
rances was nowhere to be found
.
Both men looked around bewildered as if the rabbit had just disappeared out of the hat
.

“Shit!  Here we go again,” Giorgio ex
claimed, holstering his weapon.

At his feet
was a brown robe.
Giorgio spied it suspiciously.

“There must be another secret door in here,” he snarled, kicking at the robe
.

“Shouldn’t we wait for a search warrant?”

Giorgio glared at him
.
“We had permission to speak with Father
Frances
and he ran
.
I’ll deal with any fallout later
.
Check the rooms on either side
.
Make sure
he didn’t sneak through to one of those
.
I’ll search in here.”

Rocky hurried out
and banged
on the door around the corner
.
Giorgio scanned the room he was in
.
It was larger than other rooms, reminding
him this one had once been the room Father Wingate had been murdered in
.
It held a single bed, a small desk, and a built-in closet along the back wall
.
T
he closet
presented the
only possible place for a secret door
.
H
e approached it and threw both doors wide
.
Two dark pullover sweaters were folded neatly on an upper shelf, while two black shirts and a pair of black pants lay on the floor as if
they’d fallen off their hangers
.
There was nothing else in the closet except a pair of work boots and a set of faint scratches across the closet floor
.
There was only one reason for those scratches
. H
e began looking for the mechanism that would release the secret door
.

The closet was divided from top to bottom by stained-to-match molding that ran along
the
interior walls
.
There were no hooks, knobs
,
or other embellishments
,
and the wood had a stringy grain which meant there were no visible knots to push
.
Frustrated, Giorgio studied the clothes bar which extended the entire width of the closet
.
The closet was about two and a half feet deep, making it impossible for the back wall to open without hitting the bar
.
The bar also made it impossible for either of the side walls to open since it was braced against them
.
Yet the scratches didn’t lie
.

He eyed the molding that extended like a chair railing around the interior
. It gave him an idea
.
Why would a closet have decorative molding?  Perhaps only the lower half of the wall moved
.
He reached in and knocked in several places on the back wall and then along the inside right wall
where the scratches were
.
The hollow thud that greeted him along the right wall prompted him to glance at the shirts lying on the floor
.
He r
eached for the clothes bar
and wrapped
his hands around it
, twisting
it towards the back wall
.
Nothing happened.

“I’ve checked both rooms,” Rocky said behind him
.
“A Father Emanuel lives in the one around the corner
.
He heard the door slam but that was all
.
A Father Cannon lives on the other side
.
He was praying, but also heard the door slam
.
What are you doing?”

“He went through here,” Giorgio said, staring into the closet
.
“I’d bet my life on it.”

He grabbed the clothes bar again, this time twisting it towards him
.
The lower half of the right interior wall popped opened.

“Whoa!  You’re getting good at that,” Rocky whistled.

Giorgio pulled the panel open as far as it would go allowing the two brothers to peer into what looked like an old, dark elevator shaft with the top of a wooden staircase barely visible
.
Around the corner was a shelf where Giorgio found a wooden box filled with some stage makeup and a grayish-brown goatee. Next to the box was a pair of brown pants, shirt and shoes.

“Damn! I saw him.”

“What d’you mean?”

“In the gift shop. In disguise. This guy has balls.
Let’s go,” Giorgio commanded
.

He took out his weapon and squatted down to climb through the small opening
.
The rickety wooden staircase swayed under his weight but made little noise as he began to carefully descend
.

“Leave the door open to give us some light,” he called back to Rocky.

Rocky followed, bumping his head as he bent his lanky frame into a pretzel to squeeze through
.
They
emer
ged into a dark, musty alcove.

“Where the hell are we?” Rocky whispered, producing a small LED flashlight attached to his key ring.

Giorgio pulled out his own pen light and squinted into the inky blackness that crowded around them
.

“I don’t know,” he replied
,
stepping away from the stairs
.

H
is eyes strained to
find identifying landmarks
.
The pervading damp, stale air gave rise to a brief catch of claustrophobia
,
and Giorgio had to cough to relieve the anxiety building in his chest
.
Rocky
moved in front of his brother, his
light reveal
ing
the tomblike quality of an ancient
mud-caked
hallway
with a
low-beamed ceiling that angled upwards to the right
.
While the walls appeared to be made from an adobe mixture of clay, straw and pebbles, everything was reinforced by a matrix of wooden supports
.

“
I think we’re below the other tunnel,” Giorgio said with the back of his hand pressed to his mouth.

“You mean we’re underneath the other tunnel?” 

“Not directly underneath, but further underground
.
The air is heavier and it’s colder.” 

He
followed Rocky
into the passageway and felt along the walls with the flat of his hand, grimacing at how the clammy surface of the clay
-
dirt mixture clung to his skin
.

“There used to be a Spanish Rancho located here in the seventeen hundreds, back when Mexico passed out land grants to its military and nobility
.
This one was built too close to the foothills and a massive mudslide buried the entire thing
.
From what I read, the monastery was built directly over the site a hundred years later
.
I’d guess we’re standing in an interior hallway of that old Spanish Rancho
.
Look how the ceiling slants upwards to the right
.
That’s a roof line
.
And from the look of these reinforcements, the good fathers found it and wanted to
maintain it
for some reason.”

Rocky
moved forward
, bending over to avoid bumping his head on a crossbeam
.
“Didn’t someone say the monks built tunnels during t
he war as a means of escape?”

“Be careful,” Giorgio warned
.
“Frances could be anywhere
,
and we’re sitting ducks with the flashlights down here.”

They crept along
broken
adobe tiles covered with dirt and debris, their lungs filling quickly with the stench of rotting water, rat droppings
,
and foul air
.
Occasionally, Giorgio’s hand sought the wall for support, recoiling from the touch of water seeping through the clay
.
Rocky cursed every so often when he became entangled in a cobweb, and Giorgio couldn’t help wondering about the boy
.
After all, this seemed the idyllic environment for a ghost
.
Would the boy make himself known?  Would they see other dead souls?

“Look here,” Rocky whispered, interrupting Giorgio’s thoughts.

Rocky had paused at the doorway to a small room
.
A broken wooden door lay splintered on the floor with its wrought iron hinges flattened and bent, probably the result of a large
rock
now propped up by a series of steel girders on the upper corner of the doorframe, forcing the whole corner to sag under its weight
.
A quick search of the room revealed nothing but rotting sack cloth, pottery shards
,
and broken shelving
.

The brothers exited the room quickly
.
Giorgio fel
t
haunted by the prospect of everything caving in around them
.
They passed another room where the door was still attached, but where the far wall had been obliterated by the mud slide
.
The room still held a small shattered wooden table and three spindly wooden chairs, broken and lying on their sides
.
In one corner were several tanned animal skins, a couple of wine barrels
,
and a stack of empty, frayed cloth sacks that probably once held grain, long ago eaten by the rats
.
As the pen lights followed the edge of the intruding mudslide, Rocky paused when the light reflected off the long slender bones of a hand, reaching out from under the mud.