Carved in Bone

the case’s handle and hitched the other to one ankle. Then I climbed back up, put my flashlight in my pocket, and took hold of the dangling belt again. “Heave-ho,” I said, and he did.
    Much grunting and scrambling later, I felt one of Art’s hands grasp first one wrist, then the other. He hauled me through the opening and landed me like some giant fish, thrashing and gasping. I undid the loop of belt from my now-purplish hand, fished out my light, and set it beside me, pointing upward. As I reeled in the evidence kit, I surveyed my new surroundings. We were in a disappointingly small chamber, narrow and low-ceilinged. I looked at Art. “You sure this is progress?”
    He was wearing his poker face, but I thought I saw a trace of a smile at the edges of his mouth. “Let’s take a look around, see what we see.”
    It didn’t take long to spot what he was smiling about. “Okay, I see footprints going around that bend in the wall. But do they go anywhere besides a dead end?”
    “What do you think? Study the tracks, Sherlock.”
    I did. “Okay, I see prints going in both directions. But the last ones are leading away from here.”
    “Which means…?”
    “This must go somewhere.”
    “Bingo. Unless, of course, we find Injun Joe’s shriveled corpse wedged in a cul-de-sac up ahead.”
    “Or Lester Ballard’s lying in wait to have his way with us.”
    “Lester? I thought Lester only had a thing for the female body.”
    “These days,” I said, “you never know. Forensics makes for strange bedfellows.”

CHAPTER 25
    WE DIDN’T FIND INJUN JOE or Lester, but it wasn’t long before we came to a cul-de-sac, or at least a crevice we couldn’t fit through. The tracks we’d been following led straight through it, so it wasn’t as if we’d missed a turn or side passage. There were none to miss in any case—we’d kept one pair of eyes on the tracks and another on the walls and roof of the passage. From the opening in the top of the quartz grotto, it led here and only here. It had seemed to be sloping upward, too, which had given us hope that we were slanting toward the surface. For all we knew, at this moment we might be standing within a hundred yards of an exit—but it might as well have been a hundred miles.
    “Well, one thing’s for sure,” said Art glumly. “We know these aren’t the sheriff’s tracks. At least, not unless he passed through here about eighty pounds ago.”
    “So now what? Do we go back down and try to dig our way out to the church, or do we dig for the back door, or just stay here till we get skinny enough to squeeze through?”
    “I don’t know anymore, Bill. I’m out of ideas.”
    I studied the crevice more closely. The problem wasn’t actually that we were too fat, although it wouldn’t have hurt either of us to lose twenty pounds. But fat could be squeezed through almost any opening, given enough effort, as Sheriff Kitchings and his ample belly had demonstrated the day we recovered the body from the grotto. Our problem wasn’t flesh, it was bone—the unyielding dimensions of our skeletal structures. If there wasn’t room, there wasn’t room.
    I studied the geometry of the crevice. Its widest point—located about waist-high—was roughly ten inches across. The slot tapered gradually above and below that point; down by my knees and up by my chest, it narrowed to barely six inches across. Maybe, just maybe, if we went at it sideways, we could worm our way through in the center.
    I bent from the waist until my chest was parallel to the floor, then rotated my trunk until my shoulders were aligned vertically, like the slit. Easing forward, slowly and awkwardly, I inserted my head in the slot. It would clear, though by an uncomfortably small margin. I tend toward claustrophobia, so the idea of wedging my body into the narrow crack—which led into unknown darkness—was only slightly more appealing than remaining trapped where we were. Think, man, think, I told myself.
    I knew my cranial dimensions—I’d measured my head countless times in undergraduate classes, demonstrating how to use a pair of calipers. From the center of my eyebrow ridge to the back of my skull, my head measured 187 millimeters, or seven and a quarter inches. The width, on the other hand, was only 165 millimeters, or six and a half inches. Either way, there was no risk of getting my head stuck, I knew. The real problem would come lower down, with my chest. I’d have to rotate my shoulders to