After a quick discussion, it was decided that nobody really wanted to crawl into the vent and dig out what was probably just a bunch of bones by this point. But, to my great relief, both Luke and Liam decided that it would be best for the video if one of them did it. After a quick match of rock, paper, scissors, we had the vent cover off and Liam was on the floor, shining a powerful flashlight into the vent. “I don’t see anything in here but a lot of dust,” he said.

“He might have to crawl in there a little way,” Squint said. “I don’t know how far Two-Knives pushed our bodies in there because we were both kind of out of it yet, but he has to have pushed the a ways in. Wouldn’t want the vent to fall off and have a guard find us, after all. Then they might actually have to fix it.”

I relayed the information and Liam looked back at me, blowing his hair away from his eyes. “And how much does it matter to you to get these bodies out?” he asked me.

“Tell him to stop being such a candy ass and get in the vent,” Squint complained beside me.

“A candy ass?” I asked with a light laugh.

“Well, thank you,” Liam said back jokingly at the same time Squint answered “A wimp, a wuss, a lily-livered jackass, whatever you want to call them!”

I concealed a chuckle at that as best as I could. “Squint wants you to get into the vent.”

Liam sighed and started slowly army crawling into the opening. “All right, all right, anything for you, Squint,” he said, sounding exasperated. He inched forward slowly, his body slowly disappearing into the opening until he was just about to his knees. “Guys, I found it!” he yelled back to us, the tinny sound of his voice barely audible. “He pushed it past a bend, but I should just about be able to…”

The last part of his sentence was stretched out, as though he were concentrating on trying to grab something. Then we all heard a bunch of shuffling, and a minute later, he pushed the end of a mummified leg out of the vent with his foot.

“Hey, be careful with that, would ya?” Squint complained. “It might be a bit shriveled up is all, but I don’t want it broken up any more than it has to be.”

I called our Squint’s concerns to Liam, and he called back, “Sorry, it just fell off when I grabbed it. The bodies are kind of falling apart, but I think I might have gotten them.”

He started slowly scooting back out of the vent, going significantly slower than when he entered. As he moved, brown leather started to appear with him, covered in tatters of worn gray fabric. He wormed himself out of the vent quickly afterward, immediately rolling away from the bodies on the floor. “I am definitely not fucking it for the next gross thing we do. Luke also has to do the individual investigation this time, because I sure as shit am not.”

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Luke reached down to help him off the ground. “I’m fine with that - you deserve a bit of a break after this.”

Caitlin refocused the cameras to be sure that they were aimed toward Luke and Liam and away from the bodies, then went to look at the brown, shriveled shapes on the floor. As they lay, they almost didn’t look like bodies until you saw the skull and small amounts of hair still sticking out of the remaining browned flesh. “I don’t know if that vent actually didn’t work anymore,” Caitlin said. “It looks almost like they were mummified.”

“Either way, we need to figure out what we’re going to do now,” Liam said. He dusted himself off, Luke helping as best as he could, but there was still a gray tone where his clothes had touched the vents as he crawled. “We walked in here with no bodies, and now there’s suddenly two.”

“Well, they’re not going to think you did anything, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Caitlin said. “These guys died before you were born. I think the only reasonable answer is to call the cops and let them know. There’s probably still some cold case on them somewhere.”

“Well, let’s ask them,” Luke suggested, grabbing the camera and turning it toward me.

“Sure,” I said. I turned to where they had been standing, but there was just a blank wall. “Squint?” I asked, turning around to look behind me - maybe they’d moved to get a better look. “Baby Face?” I turned again, but there was no one in the room other than the four of us and the two corpses. “I think they left?”

“Left?” Liam asked. “As in, poof?” He gestured an explosion with his hands, and I shrugged. I wouldn’t personally describe going into the light that way, but if it worked, it worked.

“They did say that the thing that kept them here was the fact that they were undiscovered. I guess now they’re discovered,” Luke reasoned.

“Yeah, but you’d think they’d want to stick around for the burial or something,” Liam said.

“They didn’t seem like the type to want to stick around for formalities like that,” I joked. “Or, at least, they would have wanted to dip the moment the police got involved.”

Caitlin sighed. “I’ll call the caretaker to let them know why there’ll be police on the property with us. Luke, you call the cops and explain the situation. You might want to avoid talking about Andi’s portion of it. I’d imagine some police stations don’t take kindly to the idea of psychics.”

“Some don’t,” I agreed. “Although I’ve got enough of a record of helping my local police department that it should lend me some credibility if they start asking too many questions.”

Luke nodded, and both he and Caitlin moved off to the side of the room to make their calls without getting interference from each other’s conversations. I walked over to Liam, who was still looking a little gray in general, and I lightly grabbed his arm. He had been staring off into space, and when I touched him, he jumped slightly. “How are you holding up? That can’t have been fun,” I whispered.

Liam shrugged, but the movement didn’t have the same lighthearted nature that it usually did. “I think we’re all just lucky that I’m not horribly claustrophobic, or else it would have been significantly worse. When I was holding the bodies, it was almost too snug to get back out.” He sighed, loudly enough that Caitlin looked back at us for a moment before she decided that her conversation required more of her attention. “I think that’s the closest I’ve been to a real dead body, though.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised.

He nodded. “We’re not out here investigating current murders or anything. Basically, everywhere we go, we’re investigating deaths that happened like 50 years ago. This,” he said, gesturing to the bodies, “is an absolute first.”

“But the important question is, is it a first you’ll be okay with?” I asked.

Liam was quiet for a moment, as though weighing the answer, but then he slowly nodded. “I’ll be okay,” he said. “But I’m going to need a very long, very hot shower to get me there, I think.”