Dying Breath. Heather Graham

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       1

      Boston, Massachusetts

      The North End

      Summer

      Griffin Pryce ran hard and as fast as he could, ahead of Jackson Crow by maybe ten feet. Not that it mattered. The clue had led them to the historic old cemetery, but once there, they’d have to look.

      Thankfully it was summer. There was no abundance of multicolored autumn leaves to cover the ground; they would hopefully find an area that had been disturbed easily enough.

      This was the first time the kidnapper/killer known as the Undertaker had actually left his victim in a cemetery. At least, so Griffin believed.

      He was known to box his victims, nail them into wooden coffin-like crates.

      Now, the box might well be a coffin.

      There—behind dozens of slate stone markers, few really over the bodies they memorialized anymore and even fewer that had been rechiseled so that the words honoring the dead were legible—he saw where the ground had been ripped up.

      He raced to the area—then swore when he hit a soft spot in the ground and went down—straight down—a good four feet.

      “Here!” he shouted, though, of course, shouting was rather inane since Jackson surely recognized that Griffin had fallen into some kind of a pit.

      Not so strange, he knew. In 2009, a woman had fallen into the stairway of a long forgotten tomb at the Granary cemetery. Time had a way with slate seals and old granite and the earth. Thousands had been buried here throughout time; all kinds of vaults lay beneath the surface.

      He just prayed that they had found the right place, right now; that they were in time.

      He heard Jackson coming up behind him as he frantically worked to dislodge more dirt from underneath himself. He doubted that the kidnapper would have had enough time to dig too deeply.

      Thank God, he hadn’t. He found the poor wooden coffin in which the victim had been buried alive. As he worked to remove heavy clods of dirt and bracken, Jackson was already on the phone calling for backup and an ambulance.

      Backup wasn’t far behind them. But before others arrived, Jackson joined him in the hole. They pried open the coffin lid.

      And found Barbara Marshall.

      She was pale beyond death; her lips were blue.

      For a split second, Griffin and Jackson stared at one another. Then Jackson braced the coffin as Griffin pulled the woman from it, crawled from the hole with her in his arms, eased her gently to the ground and began resuscitation. He counted, he prayed, applied pressure and tried to breathe life into the woman.

      Even in the midst of his efforts, a med tech arrived; Griffin gave way to the trained man who moved in to take his place.

      “We may have been too late!” he said, the words a whisper, yet fierce even in their quiet tone.

      “Maybe not,” Jackson said.

      The emergency crew worked quickly. Griffin stood there, almost numb, as Barbara Marshall was moved, as a gurney was brought, as lifesaving techniques went into play with a rush of medical equipment.

      Then she was whisked away, and he and Jackson were left gasping for breath as their counterpart from the police department arrived, while uniformed officers held back the suddenly growing crowd—and the press.

      At last, with enough breath, Griffin looked at Jackson. “Think she’ll make it?”

      “She may.”

      “Think he’s watching?” Griffin asked.

      “Hard to tell. Whoever is doing this is also leading the semblance of a normal life,” Jackson said.

      “So he—or they—could be at work, picking kids up from school, or so on,” Griffin murmured.

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