Three varieties of "What?" came down from above. Jed tried shouting up what happened, but the echo and the voices shouting down got confusing. We climbed up to the Bart room through the Hans Moleman passage.
It was good to see a color besides green. There were half a dozen people in Bart with lights on, all cops from what I could see.
Jed rattled off a twenty second version of our story. "Right after Sgt. Addison and the FBI agent left, about an hour ago, someone snuck up and bashed our lights in. All of our backups had their batteries yanked or were outright stolen. If we didn't find an old glowstick, we'd still be down there. It took half an hour to wade back because we had to check every shadow for a second ambush!"
The cops swarmed over us, making sure we were OK, checking our smashed helmets. The disk of my carbide was a metal taco, and Jed's Petzel had plastic hanging off like an old Bandaid. A cop gave us working maglights.
The leader of the search, someone I hadn't gotten the name of yet, asked where our search partners went. "My partner Smith got, uh, a little wigged out by the whole underground thing." Jed said. "Ted's partner, Sgt. Addison, took him back topside. We stuck down there."
"Smith went up with someone else," Addison said. I hadn't noticed him in the crowd. "I stayed right here."
"Jed and I waited for you to come back, but then we got our lights punched out and no one showed," I said.
"But didn't Purlitz meet up with you?" Addison said.
"Who?" Jed and I blurted at the same time.
"Lt. Purlitz. Travist said you two met up with Purlitz and didn't need me to help with the search."
"This is the first I'm hearing of it." Jed said incredulously. "Who's this Travist?"
"I'm Officer Travist." Another individual in the sea of muddy faces came forward. "I heard the guy yelling up from the hole, that you two ran into Purlitz."
"What guy?" Addison questioned.
"I don't know, some guy. I couldn't see down the hole, and he sounded official enough."
"There's a Purlitz here today, but he's upstairs coordinating this thing topside," the leader said, putting his hands on the sides of his track suit. "He's not down here."
"When did this guy yell up?" Addison asked.
"A minute or two after you came up. You were helping Smith out when he was shouting, so you couldn't hear."
"So this guy yells to Travist that an imaginary cop1s with Jed and Ted, Travist relays it to Addison, and Jed and Ted are left with whoever the hell was shouting," Track Suit summed up.
"Sounds like it," Addison said softly. "Too many damn heads in here to keep track of."
"Squeeze 20 people in a pothole," Track Suit muttered, "half of them are civilians, the other half of them are taking orders from a guy in a hole. Christ."
"OK," Addison said, "we need, right this very second, to find out where everyone is now, and where they were an hour ago. Both north and south teams."
"I saw all of both teams," Track Suit said. "North team first. Ted and Sgt. Addison went down, they were one team. Jed and Agent Smith went down, they were another team. Then there was Alex and Officer Deenan, working that middle passage."
"Where are Alex and Deenan now?" Addison asked.
"They went back up. Didn't find anything."
"And the south group is still looking for the corpse?" Addison checked.
"Right. In that group you've got Harry, Gunther and Darren as your cavers. Anyone remember which guy was with which one of the cavers?" No one did. Track Suit was mildly annoyed. "Well, we can talk to them as they come up. Whoever left their cop for a few minutes is probably our guy. Travist!"
"Yeah?"
"We need communication with upstairs. Get up as fast as you can, check if Alex and Deenan ever separated during their search, especially an hour ago. Oh, and make sure Purlitz never came down here. Then come right back. Got it?"
"Got it." He took off, probably glad to not be contributing to the confusion any more.
For fifteen minutes we waited for the first people to come back. The cops talked quietly about other communication errors. Jed and I checked our helmet damage.
A thought came to me. "Hey, why are we assuming that it's a caver who hit us? We're not the only people down here."
"The work you made for us, some of us wouldn't mind taking a swing at you," Track Suit said chuckling. "But seriously, that's a good question. All we know about this guy is, he knows caves. It points more towards caver than anyone else, but it's not enough to rule anyone out. Say, either of you have anyone here doesn't like you too much?"
"No one," I said immediately.
"Nope," Jed agreed after a second. Just that morning he made a list of grotto suspects, with Gunther at the top because he hated Jed. But Jed must have known that naming a name would be practically accusing him of the murder. And it finally sunk in that even a scumbag like Gunther wasn't capable of murder in Jed's eyes.
Harry and his FBI partner were the first to finish the search and come up. They found nothing.
"You two stick together the whole time?" Track Suit asked.
"Yeah, the whole time."
"Is something wrong?" Harry asked. His giant mustache was half coated in mud.
"Someone attacked Jed and Ted down there," Track Suit answered, talking more to the agent than Harry. "We're checking to see if anyone has any unaccounted time."
"Nope, we were in earshot the whole search."
"All right. Head on upstairs."
Five minutes later, the second group came out, Gunther and a state trooper. They found nothing. I wasn't rooting for anyone to be guilty, but Gunther was a jerk all the same.
"You two stick together the whole time?"
"Yes we did." the trooper said wearily. "Every joyous moment we were together."
"So you two were in contact with each other the whole time?"
Gunther looked at Track Suit. "Dude, I wasn't touching this guy or anything."
"But neither of you went off for a few minutes?"
"No, we followed the damn plan. Why?"
"Just checking. Go on upstairs." Track Suit said.
The trooper stuck around as Gunther climbed up and out. "Can you believe that guy? Two minutes into the search, he's trying to get me to pull some speeding ticket he's got. And they were New Jersey tickets, to boot. I work in a different state, moron."
"Well, if he turns out to be the killer, we'll be able to bring him in on bribery charges and work from there," Track Suit muttered.
Darren and a local cop came out third and last. They found nothing. "You two stick together the whole time?"
"Yeah. Darren left for a few minutes, but other than that, we were within spitting distance."
The room went quiet. "When'd he leave?"
"About an hour ago. But he came right back. Why?"
Track Suit shifted attention to Darren. "You left your partner for a few minutes, an hour ago?"
Darren looked around nervously. "Yeah. I had to find something."
"About an hour ago?"
"Yeah."
"What were you looking for?"
"Just some litter. Alex said he left a candy bar wrapper in a side passage and felt bad about littering, so I went over there and got it for him."
"What candy bar?"
"Huh. Oh, um, a Snickers."
"And would you have this wrapper on you?"
"Well, uh, I couldn't find it."
"You just said you picked it up."
He thought before answering. "Well, I looked but I couldn't find it. Hell, it's a lot smaller than a corpse, and we can't find that!" The joke only make him look more guilty. "OK, it wasn't a candy bar wrapper. It was ... geez, it what is it important?"
Travist noisily popped back through the entrance, moving very fast for a new caver. "Purlitz stayed up there the whole time! And Deenan said Alex never left his sight, the whole search."
Track Suit looked over at Darren. "Well, that just leaves you, Darren. We're going to have to talk upstairs about this."
"Upstairs? Are you arresting me?"
"No, not yet. We'll just be going to the station, if you'll let us take you. You can refuse, but then we'll definitely arrest you. It never hurts to cooperate."
Darren hung his head low. "This is nuts. I don't even know what this is for! Don't you have to tell me?"
I got close to Addison. "Why aren't they telling him?"
"Same reason they're not arresting him yet. You arrest someone, you have to tell them why. But if he agrees to go to the station, you can question him on everything, get him to guess why he's in there, let him basically give you all the evidence you need to arrest him and make that arrest stick in court."
"I guess." It seemed a little shady.
"Look at him squirm. He's guilty of something."
Most all of the cops followed Track Suit and Darren out. Jed and I sat on some rocks.
"Jeez. Darren. It was Darren." Jed stared at his gloves.
"I know. He was only #2 on your suspect list."
"Shut up about the damn list! I'm sorry I ever made that thing."
"Well, now you know why I didn't like it. For me, just seeing that list made me feel like someone we knew was the murderer. For you, it came to actually seeing the guy get arrested. I guess you smart people can think more and not see emotional results than the rest of us."
"He's not arrested. They're just bringing him in for questioning." Jed clarified.
"But that's because they think he did it."
"I know. They grill him for a few hours, then get enough evidence to arrest him both for attacking us and for torching the guy. Which we STILL haven't found."
"Any chance he attacked us but didn't kill the body?"
"There's no motive if he didn't. Not much if he DID do it, come to think of it. Well, besides the pleasure obtained from breaking our stuff."
"I hope he confesses." I said. "Skip the whole murder trial. He can say where the body's hidden. There's still parts of here that haven't been searched. Plus, we'll know he did it. Straight from the horse's mouth."
"I know. Seeing him going off, saying he didn't do it, it's got a real Fugitive feel to it. Innocent man arrested."
"It sucks."
"Sucks it does, Teddy."