I had been in the Bart room for all of twenty seconds, and I wished I brought earplugs. Every cop, state trooper, FBI agent and caver was shouting over each other. The acoustics of the room bounced the sound around and made it worse than a Kiss concert I went to when I was 19. If there were any bats in this room, they'd be deaf. And blind, too, I guess.
All of the cops kept their lights on, which made Bart lit like a commercial cave. Most of the cavers had clicked everything electric off, to save batteries.
And this was just the north group. The south group was still topside. They were giving us half an hour to get deeper into the cave before they came through and checked the other side of the cave for the body. I'm sure body searches are different when it's not in a cave, but this one seemed disorganized.
The closest thing that this group had to a leader stood up on a rock, his light already half covered by mud. His track suit, torn at the front pocket, indicated he was one of the cops. "Attention! Everyone shut the hell up!"
A few cops chuckled. "This is worse than at briefings," one of them said to another. The talking died down in a minute, though. The man in the track suit, who I still hadn't heard any identification from, resumed.
"OK, we are the north group. We're slated to cover all of the cave from this line", he waved a map that no one could see, "up. North is that direction, by the way," he pointed.
One cop and one caver would pair up to do the searching. That way someone who knew the area and knew what the should be searching for were together at all times.
"We spent a lot of time working on the routes to cover. Everyone stick to the territory they've been assigned. We all do that, every nook and cranny of this mud pit gets searched."
He wasn't exaggerating about the mud pit. This was the sloppiest I had ever seen Simpson. It had rained heavy on Thursday, and the moisture was still inside the cave. Not a good day for a fleet of people wearing nice clean new coveralls. Cotton, to boot.
He wiped mud off his light, and used it to read off names from a paper. "Schiffhorst and Addison, you've got Chief Wiggle and Ralph Wiggle. Halpern and Smith, Moe's Cavern. Deenen and Lord-Alge, Principal Skinner."
A few cops were cracking up. Years of hearing these names had stripped them of any giggle factor for the cavers. "Can I make a request to have someone not retarded name these places?" a cop named Travist said. "I mean, once we catch the killer, can we tell him to stash the bodies in his trunk like a self-respecting psycho?"
The layout of the cave was in three levels. We were in Simpson's top level right then. The medium level was Principal Skinner, a low but long passage through breakdown that was a constant pain to go through. The saps assigned to cover that were Alex (Lord-Alge), the grad student I didn't know, and Deenen, some cop who looked even younger than Alex. I saw Deenan talking to Darren, the grotto's Army Reserve guy, who I thought was a pretty decent fellow. Alex was standing over a Simpson map by himself.
The lower level was the stream passage. It ran north for about a quarter mile of rough walking passage before getting impassable. That was where Jed and I were heading. It also went south, where the south group would be checking out.
Sergeant Addison and I would be taking a left about midway through, into the Wiggles. Chief Wiggle was a bear-walking passage that meandered up a tributary until it got too tight to follow. Ralph Wiggle was a smaller belly crawl that paralleled it, about a foot and a half below. There's an inch or two of space connecting the passages at all times, but only at certain spaces can someone go from one to the other.
Jed and the Smith guy would be doing Moe's Cavern. They would be taking a left a little before us, and going up through some big smooth boulders. A series of boulders at the same level provided a floor, although several dozen gaps in the rock led down to small breakdown pockets.
My money was on Moe's Cavern. It was a relatively smooth passage from the stream to the pits. None of the pits were huge, but a lot of them would fit a body.
The Wiggles and Moe's Cavern were both on the far north part of the cave, so Jed and I would be searching pretty close to each other.
I went over to Sgt. Addison, who was on duty when Jed and I first reported the body. "Hey Sarge. How's the search so far?"
"As good as can be expected. This isn't as organized as I hoped it would be, but it'll get the job done. I hope we find this corpse pretty soon. I don't know how you do this stuff as a hobby." He was still wearing the makeshift cave clothes he got from the police garage. The cotton coveralls were ripped at a knee. He had switched to an spare grotto helmet with Petzel, though; no more giant cop flashlight.
Jed's partner Smith was a state trooper. I could hear Jed giving him his talk about raising speed limits. "... scientific studies have proven it's safer to drive at 70 then 55. Your body responds better to faster speeds. I figure if someone in law enforcement comes forward with this data ..." I was already pitying the trooper.
We heard the south crew begin to file in from the entrance, so we took that as our cue to stop dawdling and get moving. One by one, we went down, into Hans Moleman.
Hans Moleman was the breakdown bypass to reach the stream. It's pretty much vertical right through the middle level, and cramped enough so it was impossible, if you lost your grip, to fall more than three feet.
The quick way down was Jasper. This was a small pit that went right from Bart down to the stream passage. This was probably how the corpse got out of the upper level, police were saying. I forget who Jasper is on the Simpsons. I think he's one of the bullies.
Once in the stream, a charred body could be dragged in either direction without much residual evidence on the rocks. It had been a week since it disappeared, so any bits of ash that might have stuck on a rock were probably washed away. Especially with the rain on Thursday.
Hans was no problem for Jed and I, and our cop buddies did it without any problem, too. I noticed the stream was several inches above normal. There were enough rocks to avoid wading through it, but the cops didn't seem to realize that getting your feet wet comes with the territory for caving.
"Any way to do this while keeping your feet dry?" Smith said, annoyed.
"Jumping from rock to rock, when there's rocks to do that with," Jed said. "It's easier to give up and start wading. Might as well get wet and move fast."
After a few minutes the left for Moe's came up. Jed and Smith went into it. "Hold onto your pack," I said. Jed shook his head.
"Is that some good luck caving term?" Addison asked.
"No, it's literal. Two or three years ago Henry dropped his pack in a pit in Moe's. He's that big fat guy topside. This was right at the cusp of him being too fat to do any real caving, so he didn't want to mention he couldn't reach down in the crack his pack fell in."
"So it's down in a crack, still?"
"Somewhere. At least twice people have gone for it, people thinner than Henry. His description of the crack is bad enough for no one to find it yet. Crack city in Moe's."
My trip was extremely boring. Since he was new to caving, Addison took the easier Chief Wiggle, and I went along in Ralph Wiggle, which I just barely fit in. Addison got worn out rather quickly bear walking, so it took over an hour to complete the Wiggles. We both kept a lookout for drag marks, bits of ash or char, anything out of the ordinary. I kept in mind to look for dirt mounds; the corpse might be buried. As I was expecting, no sign of a body anywhere. It'd be way too much of a pain to even bring a body into the Wiggles.
The mud didn't help things any, either. Going through the Wiggles while muddy is not pleasant. It's a sticking, sucking mud that practically ripped Addison's shoe right off his foot at one spot.
I didn't know what to look for, but I can say with all certainty that all I found was mud. Addison seemed to come up with the same assessment. We popped out of the Wiggles muddier, but able to check it off as a big no for body storage. We saw Jed standing on a section of the stream that was still dry, with Smith. "Slight change of plans. Smith is having a bad reaction to being underground."
Smith looked very pale, and he was breathing quickly. I always felt bad for people who freaked out in caves: I just feel bad for them, trapped with their fear for as long as it takes to reach the surface. Jed, too; he shut up and stopped annoying the guy.
"I'll take him out," Addison said. "I'm not too wild about sticking around here myself. You guys OK getting back up?"
"We could do it blindfolded," Jed said. "Let him see some sunlight again. Hey, we never got to check out Moe's Cavern. Ted and I could check it out."
"You need a cop or someone to do it with you. Some of these body signs can go undetected by untrained eyes. How 'bout you wait here, and I'll send down the first free cop I can find?"
It sounded good, so Addison and Smith left.
We sat in silence for five minutes. Jed turned his light off, and I turned my water drip to the bare minimum. I ate some gorp; Jed drank some water.
Some time during this quiet period, someone snuck right up to us. A hand picked up a rock and smashed it on my carbide. I wasn't hurt, but my head got knocked back and my light went out.
Jed's light snapped on, just in time to see the same figure smash his light with the rock. I couldn't see the coverall colors, since it was so muddy. His head was down, assuming it was a him, and he was gone just as soon.
I reached around to find this guy, but he was gone. If this was the same guy as the paintball, he deserved two ass kickings. As well as that murder charge stuff.
"Where'd he go? Where'd he go?" Jed shouted, probably ensuring this guy would not be sticking around. I could hear his arms wave around.
I dug around in my pack for a maglite, but it wasn't working. And my cigarette lighter was gone.
Jed dug around in his pack. His maglite wasn't working. And his glowstick was gone.
"Great. We're dead in the water." he said, fuming. "That guy left us completely blind."