Genesis by Karin Slaughter Page B

two-mile radius. Barry Fielding had shown up with
his search dogs, and the animals had gone crazy for the first half hour,
then lost the scent. Uniformed patrolmen from Rockdale County
were doing grid searches, looking for more underground caves, more
clues that might indicate the other woman had escaped.
    Maybe she hadn't managed to escape. Maybe her attacker had
found her before she could reach help. Maybe she had died days or
even weeks ago. Or maybe she had never existed in the first place. As
the search wore on, Will was getting the impression that the cops
were turning against him. Some of them didn't think there was a second
victim at all. Some of them thought Will was keeping them out
in the freezing cold rain for no reason other than he was too stupid to
see that he was wrong.
    There was one person who could clarify this, but she was still in
surgery back at Grady Hospital, fighting for her life. The first thing
you normally did in an abduction or murder case was put the victim's
life under a microscope. Other than assuming her name was Anna,
they knew nothing about the woman. In the morning, Will would
pull all the missing persons reports in the area, but those were bound
to be in the hundreds, and that was excluding the city of Atlanta,
where on average, two people a day went missing. If the woman
came from a different state, the paperwork would increase exponentially.
Over a quarter of a million missing persons cases were reported
to the FBI every year. Compounding the problem, the cases
were seldom updated if the missing were found.
    If Anna wasn't awake by morning, Will would send over a fingerprint
technician to card her. It was a scattershot way of trying to find
her identity. Unless she had committed an arrestable crime, her fingerprints
would not be on file. Still, more than one case cracked open
based on following procedure. Will had learned a long time ago that
a slim chance was still a chance.
    The ladder at the mouth of the cavern shook and Will steadied it
as Charlie Reed made his way up. The clouds had passed with the
rain, letting through some of the moonlight. Though the deluge had
passed, there was the occasional drop, sounding like a cat smacking
its lips. Everything in the forest had a strange, bluish hue to it, and
there was enough light now that Will didn't need his flashlight to see
Charlie. The crime-scene tech's hand reached out, slapping a large
evidence bag on the ground at Will's feet as he climbed to the surface.
    "Shit," Charlie cursed. His white clean suit was caked in mud. He
unzipped it as soon as he was topside, and Will could see that he was
sweating so badly his t-shirt was stuck to his chest.
    Will asked, "You okay?"
    "Shit," Charlie repeated, wiping his forehead with the back of his
arm. "I can't believe . . . .Jesus, Will." He leaned over, bracing his
hands on his knees. He was breathing hard, though he was a fit man
and the climb was not a difficult one. "I don't know where to start."
    Will understood the feeling.
    "There were torture devices . . ." Charlie wiped his mouth with
the back of his hand. "I've only seen that kind of thing on television."
    "There was a second victim," Will said, raising up his voice at the
end so that Charlie would take his words as an observation that
needed confirming.
    "I can't make sense of anything down there." Charlie squatted
down, resting his head in his hands. "I've never seen anything like it."
    Will knelt down alongside him. He picked up the evidence bag.
"What's this?"
    He shook his head. "I found them rolled up in a tin can by the
chair."
    Will spread the bag flat on his leg and used the penlight from
Charlie's kit to study the contents. There were at least fifty sheets of
notebook paper inside. Each page was covered front to back in cursive
pencil. Will squinted at the words, trying to make sense out of
them. He had never been able to read well. The letters always tended
to mix up and