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He’d eaten two English muffins for breakfast and later a ham sandwich He was in a calorie deficit, and shaky

The store offered vacuued sandwiches and a microwave in which to heat theht of ht six Hershey’s bars for sugar, six Planters Peanut Bars for protein, and a bottle of Pepsi to wash down the No-Doz

Referring to all the candy, the cashier said, "Is it Valentine’s Day in July or so in the SUV, he took the Anacin and the No-Doz

On the passenger’s seat lay the newspaper he’d bought in Napa He’d not yet found time to read the story about the Winslow murder With the newspaper were a few Denver Post articles downloaded fro forever

As he ate a Hershey’s bar, a Planters, he read the printouts University, public, and police officials were quoted Everyone except the police expressed confidence that Judith would be found safe

The cops were guarded in their statements Unlike the academics, bureaucrats, and politicians, they avoided bullshit They were the only ones who sounded as if they truly cared about the young woation was Detective Raard had been forty-four at the time of the disappearance At that point in his career, he’d received three citations for bravery

At fifty, he was probably still on the force, a likelihood supported by the only other personal inforht, Ra He had been approved for permanent disability He had turned it down He did not liard To do so, however, he could not use his real naan to lubricate the flywheels of his mind, Billy drove to Lanny Olsen’s place

He did not park at the church and walk from there, as he’d done before When he arrived at the isolated house at the end of the lane, he drove across the ascending backyard, past the pistol range with the hay-bale-and-hillside backstop

Lawn gave way to wild grass, to brarew stony and furrowed

He stopped two-thirds of the way up the slope, put the Explorer in park, and engaged the ehts This high on the hillside, however, they could be seen from the residences down near the county road Worried about attracting attention and inspiring curiosity, he switched off the lights He killed the engine

On foot, using a flashlight, he quickly found the vent hole, twenty feet from the SUV

Before vineyards, before the arrival of Europeans, before the ancestors of Ae from Asia, volcanoes shaped this valley They had defined its future

The old Rossi winery, now the aging cellars for Heitz, and other buildings in the valley were built of rhyolite, the volcanic forranite, quarried locally The knoll on which the Olsen house stood was largely basalt, another volcanic stone, dark and dense

When an eruption is exhausted, it so stone Billy didn’t know enough volcanology to conclude whether the dormant vent on this knoll was such a pipe or was a fuases

He kneever, that the vent was four feet wide at the mouth--and immeasurably deep

This property was intimately familiar to Billy, because when he had been fourteen and alone, Pearl Olsen had given him a home She never feared hiood heart opened to hi cancer, she raised him as if he were her son The twelve-year difference in Billy’s age and Lanny’s h they lived in the same house Besides, Lanny had always been self-contained and when not on duty with the sheriff’s depart

The two of theh And occasionally Lanny could be an engaging honorary uncle

On one such day, Lanny had involved Billy in an atte children played on the brainary tykes Years earlier, she’d had a redwood frame bolted to the stone rim of the vent A redwood lid was screwed to the fraan their research with a handheld police spotlight powered off a pickup-truck engine The beam illuminated the walls to about three hundred feet but could not find the bottoht and ten feet The walls were undulant, whorled, and strange

They tied one pound of brass washers to the end of a length of binder twine and lowered the for the distinctive ring of the discsthe vent floor They only had a thousand feet of twine, which proved inadequate

Finally they dropped steel ball bearings into the abyss, ti textbook for ever hit short of fourteen hundred feet

The botto vertical drop, the vent apparently descended further at an angle, perhapsdirection, too

After the hard clack of the initial strike, each bearing ricocheted fro to a stop but always fading, fading until it dwindled into silence

Billy guessed that the lava pipe wasand descended at least a few thousand feet under the floor of the valley

Now, by the glow of the flashlight, he used a battery-powered screwdriver to extract the twelve Phillips-head steel screws that held the redwood lid--a o He slid the lid aside

No draft rose out of the hole Billy could suest hint of salt, a whiff of li with the effort, he hauled the dead ed him to the vent

He wasn’t concerned about the trail he left through the brush or about the trail the Explorer had left Nature was resilient In a few days, the disturbance would not be obvious

Although the dead iven his status as a former member of the Society of Skeptics, Billyhis body into the hole

Ralph Cottledown than had any of the ball bearings The first few i

Then the slippery tarp produced an eerie whistling sound as the tunnel angled from the vertical and the plastic-wrappedvelocity into the depths, perhaps spiraling around the walls of the lava tube as a bullet spirals along the grooved barrel of a gun

Chapter 48

Billy parked the explorer on the lawn behind the garage, where it could not be seen by any ht use the dead end of the lane as a turnaround He worked his hands into latex gloves

With the spare key that he had taken from the hole in the oak stump little more than nineteen hours earlier, he let hih the back door

He had with hi tape, the rope And of course the

38 revolver

As Billy hts Wednesday and Thursday were Lanny’s days off, so hefor another thirty-six hours If a friend dropped by unannounced for a visit, however, saw lights in the house, but could not get an answer to the doorbell, trouble would follow

Billy intended to do what needed to be done as quickly as possible and get out, turning the lights off after hi the way to the corpse, were still taped to the walls He would remove them later, as part of the cleanup If Lanny’s body had been salted with evidence pointing to Billy, as Cottle said that Giselle Winslow’s had been, none of it could be used in a court of law if Lanny lay forever at rest a mile or more under the earth Billy realized, as he eli hi any evidence of the killer’s guilt that the freakcleanup for both of thened and the early choices that Billy had made as the performance unfolded had virtually ensured that he would come to this juncture and would have to proceed as he was proceeding now

He didn’t care Nothing mattered but Barbara He had to stay free to protect her, because no one else would

If Billy came under suspicion in a hoht The sheriff would seek vindication in the conviction of Billy for ot that conviction, he would use it to try to rewrite history, as well