Maidens of the Cave

Book 2: Stone Maidens

by Lloyd Devereux Richards

Genres: Female Sleuths; Suspense

Synopsis

The sequel to the viral TikTok sensation Stone Maidens

From Lloyd Devereux Richards comes the next pulse-pounding thriller in which FBI agent Christine Prusik races to track down a serial killer who leaves a peculiar mark on his victims.

Forensic anthropologist Christine Prusik has a knack for solving the most unusual cases – and for bending the rules in the process.

When the bodies of young women start appearing in the caves of Indiana and Illinois, Christine immediately jumps into action. But her Chicago field office is undergoing a reorganization, and the boys’ club at the top seem more interested in getting all the paperwork in order than solving the murders.

Christine isn’t going to let a little red tape stop her, and when she discovers that all the bodies contain the same mysterious pin-sized bruise on the back of their necks, she realizes she’ll have to confront her own inner demons to find the killer.

‘Well plotted, tense, fast paced.’ NetGalley reviewer,⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘An absolutely marvellous contemporary crime suspense that had me glued and guessing from the start.’ NetGalley reviewer,⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'This has escalating urgency, suspense that just keeps ratcheting up, and some really recognizable characters. Fantastic.' NetGalley reviewer,⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Release date: August 1, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 368

Sample

Prologue

IN NAOMI WINCHESTER’S heart it didn’t feel wrong. It felt right—crazily, spectacularly right. Something inside her had changed and she knew with joyous clarity that anyone who made her feel this way was definitely Right. Maybe even forever.

Her close friends would all say that Naomi didn’t live by feelings or flights of fancy. She was a serious student whose feet were firmly planted on the ground and whose eyes were firmly glued to her textbooks. Pursuing a joint major in prelaw and business meant hitting the books seven days a week, which she did religiously. She excelled across the board academically, and her class standing in the topmost tier at Calhoun Seymour University—CSU—was a given. “She has a head on them shoulders,” her father would say of her proudly in a deliberately hokey accent, a nod to his humble farming roots.

And yet here she was, skipping an early bird Econ 302 study session, kicking stones in a deserted Applebee’s parking lot far from campus, caught up by a strong flood of the sublime that no A on a term paper could ever come close to delivering. She reached into her bag and pulled out the new lip gloss she’d splurged on, then applied it with care.

She glanced at the silver watch that her grandmother had given her for her high school graduation. It was a family heirloom, and it made her think of her gran, who had worn it for as long as Naomi could remember before giving it to her only granddaughter. Sweet Gran. She’d always encouraged Naomi to shoot for the stars, somehow making her believe that almost anything was possible.

Naomi sighed. Only five minutes until their agreed-upon rendezvous time, and the anticipation was almost too much.

He was so considerate of her, even in choosing their meeting spot. Initially he’d offered to pick her up outside her dorm, but then he must have realized that she might feel self-conscious about being seen with someone older, so he’d suggested the Applebee’s parking lot. She’d ridden the local bus from campus, an easy trip. And he was right; she hadn’t wanted to draw the attention of classmates or anybody else who may not approve of a female student dating someone older. And besides, they were only going out for a walk in the park, taking in some fresh air among the redbud trees and dogwood that were blossoming all over southern Indiana this month. Applebee’s was on the way to the park. It all made perfect sense.

Naomi checked her watch again and took a deep breath.

At the approaching crackle of tires over gravel, she whirled around. He pulled the car’s front bumper straight up to her shins as he said he would—8 a.m. sharp.

She hurried to the driver’s side.

The tinted window lowered. “Naomi, my dear,” he greeted her with a smile and slight nod of his head. “I’ve a Thermos full of coffee and two mugs. Hop in.” His smile widened in the first rays of sunlight over the treetops. “The view from the bluffs should be terrific.”

She beamed at him, then quickly circled to the passenger side of the black compact car and climbed aboard.

“It’s so good to see you . . .” She wanted to say his first name, but wasn’t sure how she should address him in her excitement.

He nodded. “Call me Trip. It’s an old nickname.”

As if anticipating her next question, he shook his head and said with self-deprecating humor, “Odd name though it may seem, please don’t ask where it comes from. Suffice it to say I was a very young lad at the time, a boy really. And somehow it just stuck.” He tossed up his hands self-mockingly.

“That’s fine with me. This is so exciting. I really think it’s cool we’re getting out early like this!”

Her outburst of excitement made her suddenly self-conscious. In a more controlled tone, she added, “I mean, we’re both nature lovers, how cool is that? Trip.”

For the occasion she’d selected her handwoven scarf of blue and green raw

 silk, very chic, and something she thought his educated eye would take greater pleasure in than the thick-stitched and ubiquitous muffler in red and white panels—the school colors of CSU—worn by so many of the undergraduate women who dated jocks on campus.

“The gear’s all loaded in back.” Trip nodded over his right shoulder as he pulled out of the parking lot.

Naomi crooked her neck. A black nylon knapsack made with durable stitching rested on the back seat. A handsome coil of blue and gold braided rope was affixed across the top outer flap by a thick purple bungee cord. Beneath the rope, a cluster of metal pieces of different sizes hung on a metal rack attached to the pack.

She giggled, uncharacteristically. “Kind of overkill for a walk in the park, isn’t it?”

“It’s my little surprise.” He smiled. “You’ll see.”

The smell of honeysuckle wafted in through the air vent, and with it, another zany shot of excitement shivered her shoulders. No one would believe her. No one would believe that bookworm Naomi Winchester was out on a date with such a handsome and brilliant man. She tried not to stare at him, gazing instead out the window.

Southern Indiana forests were dimpled and pocked with steep-sided ravines and high bluffs; the road rolled like a rumpled ribbon up, over, and down the newly budding hillsides. Through breaks in the forest, outcroppings of cream-colored limestone rock gleamed in the morning light. Naomi knew that limestone was porous and under the sunlit landscape were vast underground caverns that tunneled through the hillsides for mile after mile.

The whine of the car’s motor rose higher as Trip downshifted. They exited the highway and soon were racing along a smaller paved road bordering a fallow field of brown soil on the driver’s side and a line of tall oaks and hemlocks out Naomi’s window. Old growth, she thought. Protected woods.

Ten minutes later he turned onto a well-graded dirt road. They passed a weathered wooden sign: Standish Bluffs National Forest was carved and painted white in large letters. Beneath it, Naomi read: The Bluffs Overlook Trail 7.4 Miles Ahead.

“You aren’t afraid of heights, are you?” he asked.

The out-of-the-blueness of the question startled her. Truthfully, she didn’t know if she was afraid or not. “Well, I . . . Not really.”

“Good then. There’s an exposed layer of fossils, Crinoids from the Devonian Period—whole unbroken columns of this ancient life form that are easily visible in situ from an overhanging limestone cliff face. It’s an undisturbed shelf—which is why I brought you

 here to see it. The level of detail is quite remarkable, and so is its state of preservation.”

“Okay,” she said, trying to sound calm. Mature.

He ducked his chin and motioned with his head for her to look over his right shoulder again. “You see that purple and yellow webbing that’s resting on the back shelf? That’s for you. It’s a safety harness.”

“Yes. I see it,” she said. “But . . .”

“I bought it online for you. You can’t find anything close to it in sporting goods shops around here,” he added. “After we park the car I’ll show you how it works. It’s the same kind that linemen wear to climb telephone poles. Completely secure.”

The car jounced over a rut in the road and made her bite her lower lip hard enough that she tasted blood.

“But I thought we were just going for a walk? In the park? Are these shoes okay for climbing?”

Trip gently patted her shoulder. “Please don’t worry, my dear. They’re more than adequate for our purposes. Wearing a harness is purely precautionary. I didn’t tell you because I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“Well, you certainly surprised me all right!”

She turned her head to look out the passenger window, hesitant to say more and risk losing all of the warm fuzzy feeling of this, their first official date. Her female intuition told her that sharing her fears too much now would risk spoiling his fun. Their fun. Still, the thought of dangling midair over a cliff to view a fossil bed in situ made her cringe, and the glowing excitement she’d first felt jumping into his car had taken a definite detour.

“I plan on sharing the find with the Geology Department next week. So, my dear, think of our little outing as the paleontological equivalent of a bouquet of flowers.”

He’d called her “my dear” again. She laughed, suddenly feeling almost giddy. “How could a girl refuse a paleontological bouquet!”

He turned into a parking indent by the roadside and stepped out of the car, quickly pulling on his blue climbing harness, adjusting the straps positioned around his waist and upper thighs. He raised the back hatch and placed the purple nylon webbing beneath her passenger door on a bed of cedar needles.

“It’s pretty simple,” he said pointing down at the climbing harness. “Stand your feet inside each loop and I’ll help you shimmy it into the correct position and show you how it attaches.”

It annoyed her, his wanting to get down to business so quickly. They’d been driving for nearly half an hour. It wasn’t just someplace near campus like he’d said yesterday. She wouldn’t be hurried into climbing gear to be roped down a cliff.

“You mind if I stretch my legs a little?” She studied his face for any sign of disapproval and found none.

“Ah! I should have suggested it myself, Naomi,” he said, looking a little embarrassed.

 “Shall we take a walk to the overlook then?”

“Yes, I’d like that very much, if you don’t mind.”

“Mind? Of course not.” He sprung up from a squat with an encouraging nod. “It’s a grand idea.”

The trail between the trees was narrow going so he led the way and she followed behind.

Naomi relaxed. His always being considerate of her feelings was one of the things she found so appealing about his manner, and the way he listened to her ideas had a way of bridging their age difference; he treated her as an equal, not a child. Not like her parents, who never seemed able to realize that she was much more than just their precious little girl; she was a grown woman with full command of her intellect. When she spoke her mind, they’d frequently eye each other—a parental code she had first noticed in junior high when she challenged them after a school debate that she’d won on the country’s slow acceptance of equal rights for women. As if parenthood came imbued with a prerogative of overarching wisdom that trumped whatever insight she may bring to their kitchen table, even as recently as this past winter break when she pressed them on a woman’s right to choose.

During the months she and Trip had met in his office after class, he’d never flinched once or rolled his eyes when listening to her perspective. He treated her as an intellectual equal. He’d solicited her opinions on all manner of things, listening quietly as she fleshed out her thoughts, and she came to realize that she had never before expressed her beliefs in such depth or with such clarity. It was exhilarating.

The ground slanted upward as if taking flight. They walked clear of the trees. A breeze freshened across her face and it swayed the long grasses growing in dense pockets between huge broken chunks of the yellowish-white limestone that jutted through the turf.

The small path whitened into a fine gravel of the same limestone color. Ahead, only the sky was visible through the rusted metal pipe railing that guarded viewers from plunging over the high promontory.

She caught up to him at the railing and feasted on the view. The drop-off was an exhilarating several hundred feet and offered a spectacular sweep of the pea-green woodland that stretched for miles around. A meandering creek threaded through the wilderness far below them. Trip cinched his blue nylon waist-belt tighter, and Naomi stepped back from the railing. The idea of being lowered by her waist like a circus acrobat brought her sharply to her senses.

“Look, Trip. I’ve never used climbing gear before. I never even climbed trees when I was a kid for that matter. I mean, wouldn’t it be better if I took an instructional course first, or started somewhere easy, for beginners?”

Trip’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “You didn’t think I was going to rope you down from this railing?” He shook his head and smiled. “You needn’t worry, my dear. I realize now that I should have said something to you yesterday. I’m just a nut about safety and insist on using proper gear whenever I venture outdoors.”

He faced her now and placed his hands firmly on her shoulders. “There’s absolutely no reason for you to be afraid. I’m not suggesting we rappel over anything approaching this high a drop-off. Good Heavens, I wouldn’t dare be that foolish!”

Naomi nodded cautiously.

“I’m sorry if I scared you. Where I’m taking you is just a beginner’s pitch. In fact, we will be descending the trail quite a ways farther down before reaching the ledge where the fossils are.”

They retraced their steps back to the car, where he helped her into the harness, adjusting her thigh and waist straps. Then he led the way down a side trail that wound in switchbacks beneath the high bluff.

She lost herself in the beauty of the newly leafing forest. The redbuds and dogwood were in full bloom. Pink and white flower petals dotted the forest floor. Chartreuse shoots of yellowwood, beech, and oaks were unfurling their waxen leaves to the joyous chirps of songbirds.

The trail veered closer to a series of smaller ledges where second-growth spindly trees shivered in the breeze, perhaps stunted by the rocky soil, she thought. The rock outcropping from which they’d taken in the panoramic vista now towered overhead.

Trip disappeared around a sharp bend in the trail beside an eroded ravine where the footing was uneven. Carefully she sidestepped down the crumbling scree. Her sneaker slipped and she grabbed hold of a thin sapling, bending it to the ground.

“Trip?” She waited for him to come lend her a hand. “Trip?” Sighing, she pulled herself to her feet awkwardly and made her way over the broken limestone that had sheered from the cliffs over the eons.

A minute later she rounded a corner and saw him seated on a limestone boulder, an open water bottle raised to his lips. She tugged at her harness where it pinched her thighs too tightly.

“It will feel better when your weight is suspended on the rope,” he said, offering her the water bottle. “The trick is to let the rope do all the work.”

She sat down next to him and stared up the cliff face, sheltering her eyes with her hand.

“I’m not climbing up or down that, whatever you say!” The declaration came out sounding sharper than she would have liked.

He peered at her for a moment longer, then nodded in agreement. “Okay, then we won’t,” he said. “That settles that.”

Naomi raised her face to the warming sun and her heartbeats slowed to their normal rhythm. “Thank you for being so understanding, Trip. I’m still kind of a big baby in some ways, you know.”

She turned her head away from him, embarrassed for giving voice to her cowardice. Gazing farther down the trail, she noticed a dark cleft in a rock wall. Next to it there was a small peg with pink ribbon tied around the end.

“What’s that?” She pointed to the ribbon.

Trip sat with his back to her. He was fiddling with the climbing pack at his feet. He turned and announced, “I’ve another surprise, a special one, Naomi.”

He dipped his chin playfully. “Now if you would be so kind as to close your eyes for

me.”

She leaned back, placing her palms flat against the warming rock. The sun shone orange against her closed eyelids.

“I’m ready,” she said softly.

She heard him whisper, “Good,” and wondered what he would present to her. She’d seen the gleam of gold in the sunlight before closing her eyes. A ring? No, he couldn’t be offering her a ring already, even a friendship ring. Could he?

The touch of his hand against the back of her neck sent shivers down her spine. Goose bumps raced over the backs of her arms. He was lifting her shoulder-length brown hair gently—the first time he’d ever touched her skin. Her heart sped up. He was going to kiss her.

A sharp pinprick sent her springing forward on her Reeboks. Her eyes shot wide open. Then a sudden jolt stiffened her body, as if she’d touched an exposed electric wire and she couldn’t let go.

“Hey . . . that . . . hurts . . .”

She slid off the boulder and crumpled to the ground. As if her head was an errantly placed video camera, she now viewed the world cock-eyed with her cheek plastered flat against the grit and dust. Her chest heaved uncontrollably.

“T . . . rip,” she gasped between choppy shallow breaths—breaths that she could hardly take in. It was as if there was a great weight pressing down on her chest. Her hands felt leaden, knuckles thudding uselessly at the ends of her stiffening arms. She was losing sensation all over her body.

Suddenly her left hand, on its own, twitched upward into view. She watched its fingers—hers—silently spasm open and shut; she was powerless to control the simplest movements, or even to lower her hand to the ground.

A strange sucking sound grew louder in her ears, and Naomi realized the rasping noise was coming from her own throat, starved for more air. Black dots swirled in her vision, as if she was going to pass out at any moment. Her muscles were contracting and releasing erratically, and the spasms came faster and faster. Her legs and arms lost feeling.

But her hearing was strangely unaffected. She heard birds singing from somewhere close by. Their singing grew louder and louder while she desperately rolled her eyes, searching for some sign of Trip.

Where was he? Why had he disappeared? Maybe he had panicked and was going to get help?

In her periphery she caught movement—his iridescent blue climbing boots came into view, the toes pointing at her face from just a few feet away. They remained together, quiet, at a stand.

She could even hear him breathing over the zany cries of the birds. Why didn’t he kneel down closer so she could see his face? Why wasn’t he talking to a 9–1–1 operator on his cell phone? Why didn’t he comfort her in his arms?

His shoes remained still, together. As if he were a disinterested observer. Hoarse rasping sounds from her throat were broken by a violent shockwave. The prolonged convulsion stopped her gasping for air, as if a switch were thrown on and then off again one last time. The convulsion went on and on as if it would never end, blurring her vision, and when the shaking finally stopped, all went dark.

 

Chapter One

IT WAS MONDAY, March 26, and Christine was running late as usual. She pulled open the heavy door to the large function room on the mezzanine level of the Chicago Marriott and entered as quietly as she could. The room was dimly lit and filled with agents seated in front of a podium and overhead screen.

The door closed behind Christine with a pronounced thump. Patricia Gaston, the new director of the FBI’s Chicago branch, glanced up from the podium, squinting in Christine’s direction, then proceeded with her comments. With the aid of a laser pointer, Gaston was reviewing a new reorg chart displayed on the screen.

Christine searched for her name on the labyrinthine roster of names clustered beneath boxes representing each divisional unit of the branch office. There it was—Christine Prusik, Forensics—near the bottom of the screen, directly under the name Ned Miranda. Who the hell is he? Based on the screen diagram, the revamped structure pushed her further down the hierarchical chain. Not what she’d imagined after fourteen successful years at the Bureau. Maybe Roger Thorne, the former Chicago branch director who this past winter had taken a higher-up Bureau position in Washington, had alerted the new branch director to Christine’s habit of bending—and yes, she admitted, occasionally breaking—the rules. She did have a tendency to go solo without keeping her superiors punctually informed, but it was only because time was of the essence in a criminal investigation. That was a truth that never changed.

Christine caught a sideways glimpse of Gaston’s flashy red suit when the new branch director stepped away from the podium. The director’s voice found its cadence in a confident monotone as she flashed through a series of PowerPoint slides, illustrating a slew of new administrative forms. The laser pointer zigzagged in accompaniment with each new graphic, underscoring the refrain that all personnel were expected to complete these forms and deliver them in a timely fashion to the various unit heads—including Christine, head of the Forensics Unit—who were required to sign off promptly. Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual report forms.

Christine shook her head in consternation. Daily reports? What about police work? But a change in management meant putting her best foot forward, and she would give it her best shot. “First impressions last longest,” she could hear her mother telling her on her first day of eighth grade at St. Agnes’s in Detroit. Yortza Prusik had ironed the pleated pale blue blouse of Christine’s uniform early that same morning so she’d look her best. “Say ‘yes ma’am’ when spoken to and be sure to always smile. Button your lip unless asked to speak by one of the nuns. Do you hear me, Christine?”

So Christine had learned the drill: say yes, smile, and answer politely when asked a question. Unfortunately, she was never very good at that particular drill.

Christine scrolled through her phone messages and emails as Gaston droned on. Her phone vibrated. It was the incoming call that she’d been expecting from Dr. Ernie Hansen, the Carbondale, Illinois, medical examiner.

Local Illinois police had earlier reported that a missing Lincoln Technical College student’s dead body had been found on an embankment of the Little Muddy River in a remote quadrant of the Shawnee National Forest in the wilds of southern Illinois. Hansen’s call to Christine had come at the recommendation of Dr. Walter Henegar from Crosshaven, Indiana, who’d said good things about Christine’s crime-solving abilities based on his work with her on a particularly brutal series of murders during the preceding year.

Christine exited the meeting hall to take the call in the lounge. She confirmed her arrangements to meet with the medical examiner the next day at his office in Carbondale, a smallish city of 26,000 located near the bottom of the state, not far from the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. She thought it unusual that Hansen would call in the FBI so early; over the phone

she discerned obvious distress in the doctor’s voice, an uneasy bewilderment. Whatever had caused the young victim’s death, this local ME clearly wanted her assistance right now.

Finishing her call with Hansen, Christine reentered the meeting room. The overhead lights were now on and Patricia Gaston was shaking hands and greeting agents up front.

A tall, thin man with closely cropped dark hair approached Christine. He cleared his throat. “You must be Christine Prusik,” he said tentatively, as if he’d just double-checked her Bureau profile picture on the computer system.

Christine held out her hand and they shook. “And you must be Ned Miranda,” she said, recalling the name directly above hers on the overhead screen.

He nodded and forced a quick smile, glancing back at Patricia Gaston, who was making her way toward them.

Watching the slight, well-tanned woman now in charge of Chicago’s Bureau branch shake hands as she walked down the aisle, Christine felt a sudden apprehension. Regardless of how well-intentioned and conscientious Miranda may be in performing his duties, this younger agent was now her new boss and she, Christine, was now twice removed from the branch office’s topmost command. Whatever else this meant, it couldn’t be good news.

Miranda made the introductions and the forensic anthropologist offered her hand to Gaston, whose thin fingers barely pressed the ends of Christine’s. It was an awkward shake that felt, more than anything else, like a queen obliging her subject.

“Ned’s told me so much about you, Christine. You’ve quite a storied history. So many unusual cases that you’ve worked on.”

“Why thank you, Director Gaston,” Christine said politely, unable to tell whether she’d just been complimented or mocked.

“I asked Ned to mark out some time for us all, perhaps later this week, when we could discuss the direction of the forensics unit.”

Christine nodded in what she hoped was a cheerful manner. Gaston’s choice of the word direction sounded like ominous code for “It’s time to dismantle and retrofit the forensics team.”

“Look,” Christine said, setting aside departmental worries, “I have an important matter to bring to your attention, Patricia. It really can’t wait. I’ve received two calls from downstate, a Carbondale ME who’s got a body, a young college student who’d been missing for a number of days. They found her body today under bizarre circumstances. He’s requested our help.”

“Ned, I have to run.” Gaston pressed her hand on Miranda’s forearm and lifted her shiny leather briefcase from the floor. “It was so nice meeting you, Christine.” She left the room.

“Give me a sec, Christine,” Ned said, gesturing for her to wait as he

followed the branch director out the door.

Christine couldn’t believe her eyes and ears. Gaston hadn’t shown the least bit of interest in the news of a young woman’s death that fell squarely within her lawful jurisdiction. Prusik had a sinking feeling that she and her forensics team were headed for darker days.

Technically speaking, Christine’s field of expertise—forensic anthropology—was largely limited to the study of skeletal remains in order to decipher how a particular death may have resulted: naturally, by suicide, or homicide. She was a duly certified member of the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, though she’d never felt it necessary to add the acronym ABFA to her stationery or business cards for purposes of getting her job done. If it was determined that a death had been caused by a third person or persons, it was the forensic anthropologist’s job to pick up any clues that could be gleaned from the bone evidence in order to identify the cause of death and the circumstances, if possible.

With any luck—and a thorough examination of the site where remains are found—a good forensic anthropologist might gain some sense of the Who, When, Why, and How. Christine relied heavily upon the technical and scientific colleagues who composed her forensics team, and they, in turn, relied on sophisticated lab testing and software analysis to enhance any clues recovered. On those occasions involving multiple crimes of a similar nature, her team had access to the vast universe of the federal and state interlinked crime databases.

Steady budgetary cutbacks—except in the case of a few departments that were the recipients of colossal fiscal increases for the War on Terror—had put pressure on all regional Bureau laboratory teams to commingle resources and participate with other departments in the handling and examining of major crime scene evidence. Increasingly, therefore, Christine and her forensic team were expected to investigate all major crimes assigned to them, including the examination of dead bodies in various states of decomposition, not just skeletal remains.

Christine had taken several years of post-doctoral training and become quite adept at postmortem exams. She generally welcomed the added responsibility, finding fieldwork and postmortems a challenge and an opportunity to escape the daily drudgery of desk work and the insidious torment of office politics that went with it.

A minute later Miranda came striding back into the meeting room, grooves deepening across his forehead. “What’s wrong?” he said. “You look upset.”

“Me, upset? That the new branch director has zero interest in a murder case in her jurisdiction?” Christine forced a chuckle, shaking her head in disapproval. “This is a significant matter, Ned, and it will most likely require our resources straightaway.”

“Listen, Christine.” Miranda stood closer to her so not to be overheard by hotel staff busily at work cleaning the carpet. ...