Текст книги "Buried Alive"

Автор книги: Jack Kerley

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

29

Tanner’s body went straight to the state morgue in Frankfort. Cherry arranged to have the body put atop the post-mortem list, going from transport to autopsy. We ate a light breakfast to give the transport a head start, then drove the ninety minutes to Frankfort, the state capital. McCoy returned to the scene to see if he could make any further reconstructions using his woodsman’s knowledge.

“It’s unreal,” Cherry said as we zoomed down the ramp from I-64 to Frankfort, “the perp carried Tanner’s body almost a half-mile. He went down steps, up and down the trail, pulled it to the top of the arch. Oh yeah, he was also carrying a big coil of rope. You know the kind of strength that would take?”

I shook my head in disbelief. I was fit and relatively strong and would have crapped out halfway down the trail. If it was one person, he was built like Mike Tyson in his prime.

The attending pathologist was a man named Vernon Krogan, late fifties, close-cropped gray hair, wide blue eyes incapable of surprise. I knew Doc Krogan, his species anyway, closing in on retirement after a lifetime dis-assembling bodies, many of them victims of hideous and violent crimes. He’d performed the autopsy as if tearing down a carburetor, not interested in philosophical aspects of the device – carburetors have neither philosophy nor theology – but only in such things as carbon accumulation and surface pitting.

The autopsy complete, the body was covered by a drape. Cherry and I stood to the side of the table as Krogan pulled off his mask. The room smelled of death and disinfectant and I’d smell it for days. I used to think the smell was on my clothes, my skin, but realized it had gotten trapped in my head.

“The corpse had been slit open,” Krogan said, removing his mask. “I’d figure a gutting knife, like hunters use on deer. Hang them upside down, slit the belly, let the innards fall out.”

Cherry grimaced. “Tanner’s guts were gone?”

“A crude job, intestines slashed out, cut top and bottom. A lung had been left behind. But mostly everything got yanked out.”

Cherry was having trouble grasping the news. “Tanner was emptied out and sewed back up?” she said. “That’s what you’re saying?”

Krogan pulled off his paper lab gown and jammed it into a receptacle. “Sewed is an imprecise term. Someone punched holes in the opened flaps of flesh, lashed the pieces closed with black boot laces.”

“Why sew him back up?” Cherry asked.

“To keep the stuffing from falling out, of course.”

“Stuffing?” Cherry said.

Krogan paused. “Oh … No one told you? Several of my colleagues came back to take a look.”

“Told us what? Look at what?”

“The emptied abdominal area was packed with a brown substance before being stitched closed.”

“What kind of substance?”

Krogan snapped off his gloves and dropped them in the receptacle. “We’re doing tests, but everything points to horse manure.”

“Tanner was packed with horseshit?” Cherry said, eyes wide.

Krogan regarded Cherry with a look combining curiosity and amusement.

“So far you’ve sent us a man with a soldering iron in his lower bowel, a drowned woman dressed like a hooker, a man crushed by a snack van, and a corpse packed with horsepoop. What do you have going on over there in Woslee County, Detective Cherry? Sure seems like a corker.”

30

“Tanner was full of shit,” Cherry said when we were pulling away from of Frankfort’s city limits and roaring on to Highway 64, heading east to Woslee. “Nothing real academic in that symbol.”

“Hard to ignore,” I acknowledged. “It also suggests Tanner was purposefully poisoned. But how did the stew get on his stove?”

Cherry thought in silence for eight miles, until we pulled on to the Mountain Parkway. “I got it!” she yelled, smacking the steering wheel with her palm. “Remember the three by five card I found, Bless you Brother for your constant inspiration?”

“The card in his kitchen,” I nodded, remembering the seemingly inconsequential find.

“I expect half of what Zeke Tanner ate came from his flock. Folks lacking money to drop in the collection plate make it up with food or services. All the killer needed to do was cook up a tasty-looking bowl of death, leave it on Tanner’s front steps when he was out, the note as the clincher. It would have happened all the time, totally normal, except this time Tanner sat down to his last meal.”

I mulled over Cherry’s words. “Something’s bothering me,” I said. “Tanner was poisoned by our killer, right?”

She nodded. “He used the geocache site to crow to the world. Or whoever was looking.”

“But the killer jammed a tool inside John Doe, presumably waiting to enjoy the show from hell. He knelt a foot from Burton’s head and slowly cranked down the snack truck. He stood a dozen feet from Tandee Powers as he bobbed her under water with the rope and pulley …”

It took a couple seconds, but Cherry got it. “There was no personal involvement with Tanner,” she said. “The killer wasn’t in on his victim’s final breath.”

“Something went wrong with the killer’s plans,” I said. “The guy on the bush-hog showing up, maybe. Tanner was sick or hallucinating and got freaked out by the guy, went amok with the gun. How far is it to Tanner’s church?”

“Twenty minutes,” Cherry said, now thinking parallel to me. “I’ll have McCoy meet us there. This is his kind of thing.”

Lee McCoy was parked near Tanner’s shattered church when we arrived. The ranger listened quietly as Cherry confirmed that Tanner appeared not a random bit of mayhem as initially thought, but our fourth serial victim.

“Horse manure?” McCoy said. “Doesn’t that say …”

I nodded. “Brother Tanner was full of shit. Someone wasn’t buying Tanner’s status as a holy man, Lee.”

“We thought Brother Tanner was nuts,” Cherry said. “We didn’t know the problem was part of the bigger picture. Thing is, in all the other cases, the killer was in on the death.”

McCoy had a fast mind. “You’re thinking someone was watching?” he asked.

I nodded. “Nearby and waiting for the mushrooms to take effect, perhaps. Hoping to step in and do nasty, up-close things to the poisoned man, stuff like he did to Burton and Powers. Actions with a personal symbolism.”

Cherry jumped in. “Best-laid plans gone awry.”

McCoy jogged to the fence line behind Tanner’s house trailer and studied angles of sight, peering into pines and hemlocks ringed with honeysuckle. After several minutes of studying the land, he inspected the barbed-wire fence separating Tanner’s land from the dense national forest property in the rear. He studied the wire as he walked, the same curious look he’d given to the trees along the Rock Bridge trail.

“Wire’s been cut here,” he said, pointing to an opening forty feet from Tanner’s back door. Cherry leaned close, studied the truncated wires between two solid posts.

“Cut recent,” she said. “Not a touch of rust.”

McCoy passed through the broken wire and into the woods. I was looking down for footprints or disheveled branches, McCoy looking up, broad brown hand porched over eyes crinkling against the sunlight.

“There,” he said after we’d walked two dozen feet. I looked up and saw a black-and-green metal assemblage resembling a chair attached to the tree about thirty feet up.

“A deer stand,” I said.

“Portable and camouflaged,” McCoy said. “The killer climbs the tree, snaps the stand in place, sits in comfort and watches Tanner’s place. He notes Tanner’s patterns, leaves a pot of toxic stew and waits a bit longer. Hoping he can go inside and have – what did you call it, Carson – his symbolic moments?”

“Jesus,” Cherry said, sighting between the tree and Tanner’s trailer, two hundred feet away. “The guy could have been watching the whole Tanner meltdown from here.”

I climbed the tree. The stand was positioned to reconnoiter the multi-windowed rear of Tanner’s trailer. A man with good binoculars could watch like his nose was pressed to the glass.

I retrieved the stand, hoping we could pull prints, figuring we wouldn’t, given the extreme care our perp had shown so far. McCoy pushed further down the trail as Cherry and I combed the ground beneath the tree for evidence, finding nothing.

“Got a trail back here,” McCoy yelled after a few minutes. We followed his voice to a hard dirt path half obscured by undergrowth.

“Looks rugged,” I said. “Could you ride it on a dirt bike?”

“Somebody has recently,” he said, pointing to a tire scraping in the gray dust. “If it was me, I’d ride to the Forest Service firebreak a quarter-mile north. Then it’s an easy ten-minute run to a real road. This guy had it figured out.”

McCoy’s phone rang. He snapped it open, spoke for several minutes, questioning his caller about times of day, from the sound of things. He asked the caller to verify the official time of sunrise. Waited. Nodded when the information arrived and turned back to Cherry and me.

“The spiders have spoken, folks. And they’re saying something interesting. Let’s re-group back at the park, where I can put together a little show and tell.”

31

We met at the office in the lodge. Cherry had called Beale, protocol, and he’d grumblingly assented to an appearance. He brought Caudill along, presumably to do the remembering if anything important was said.

“You’re doing this without the FBI?” Beale grunted when he entered. “That’s gonna piss off Krenkler.”

“They’ll be apprised of everything going on, Roy. And you can tell them anything we leave out, right?”

The barb zoomed by Beale, who nodded and broke wind as he sat. Inside the room it was the five of us and, for about a minute, a female ranger in her early twenties who entered to hand McCoy a file holding slender strips of paper and a few other pages. McCoy studied the information as he and the young ranger spoke quietly in a corner. When she turned to leave McCoy patted her shoulder and said, “Great job.” The kid practically floated out the room on a cloud of euphoria.

“Can we get some goddamn coffee in here?” Beale bayed.

“The waitresses only work in the restaurant, Roy,” McCoy said quietly, turning from his task to pull his wallet. “But if you run over there I’ll buy the coffee. Donuts, too.”

Beale’s eyes darkened in dilemma: be the coffee gopher or miss out on a freebie. He snatched up McCoy’s twenty and waddled out the door.

McCoy finished his calculations and looked up. “The road into Rock Bridge trail? Eight vehicles went down it after seven p.m. yesterday. Five before eight p.m. One was between eight and nine, just barely dark. Here’s the two I think we’re interested in: one vehicle headed toward the trailhead just past midnight, exited at half-past two. The second vehicle entered at bit before five a.m. and left at six-ten.”

I stared at McCoy as if he’d conjured polka-dot elephants as the table’s centerpiece. “How the hell do you know that, Lee?”

He dangled the slender scrolls that resembled calculator paper. I saw printing, numbers and times. “Ever see a pair of skinny hoses crossing the road and attached to a box to the side? Traffic counters. We have several throughout the park, including one on that final stretch of Rock Bridge Road leading to the trailhead. They count entering and exiting vehicles.”

Cherry looked up. “You’re saying …?”

“I’m saying the vehicle crossing the counter at midnight was carrying the body. The perpetrator took it down the trail to the arch, strung it from the bridge.”

“The other vehicle,” I said, confused by the timeline, “the one that crossed the counter hose near five a.m., why don’t you think it was our man?”

“The killer had to haul the body to the bridge, then create the suspension system. That meant getting in the water, running rope under the bridge, climbing back atop the arch and setting the knots. Then hiking back out. Had to take at least two hours.”

“What about the later entry?” Cherry asked.

McCoy leaned forward. “A strange story by itself. Someone went to Rock Bridge a bit after five in the morning. ”

“Whoa,” I said, holding up a hand, my alarm bell ringing. “That’s supposition, Lee. All your counter registered was a vehicle on the road. You can’t conclude that the person in the vehicle got out and hiked to Rock Bridge.”

“Maybe it was a benign civilian who drove to the trailhead,” Cherry said, weighing in on my side. “An insomniac who couldn’t sleep. Or an alky having a predawn eye-opener. Believe me, I see a lot of that. The mystery early visitor left without ever setting foot down the trail. He or she might never have gotten out of their car.”

“That’s not what the spiders tell me,” McCoy said. I said, “Pardon me?”

“We’re all hikers here. We’ve all been the first person down a trail at daybreak, right? What do you do about every hundred feet?” McCoy used his hands to make a swimming motion in front of his face.

“Push away spider webs,” I said, getting the clue. “I always use a walking stick or fishing pole to knock them down.”

“There should have been cross-trail webs on the way to Rock Bridge. The spiders are industrious critters with plenty of time to string webs after the killer was gone. But I didn’t find a single strand … all the way to the bridge. Our five o’clock visitor went all the way to the body, knocking aside the webs.”

“It jives with Miz Bascomb,” I said. “She heard a vehicle on the road a few hours after the killer drowned Tandee Powers. The vehicle with the stick shift.”

McCoy cleared his throat. His brow was knit in frown, his chin perched on tented fingertips. “It’s interesting to me that the killer is gone before two or three a.m., but nothing appears on the geocache site until hours later, after daybreak. That seems to jive more with the appearance of the second person.”

“You think the killer’s not entering the symbol and data on the site?” Cherry said, shaking her head. “The mystery visitor is?”

“The timing suggests it,” McCoy said.

“It’s a reach,” Cherry said. “But I’m at the point where reaching is progress. The question is – if it’s true – why?”

I saw Judd Caudill’s hand quiver on the table. It lifted two inches, fell to the table, a kid in class wanting to raise his hand, but frightened he’ll get laughed at for his answer.

“What is it, Judd?” I asked. “Speak up.”

“I was, uh, thinking. My cousin is the county representative for the state environment agency. He checks new installations of septic tanks and goes in after the tanks have been installed to see if they’re done right…” He paused, still unsure of himself.

“Go on, Judd,” I said. “We need every idea we can get.”

“Uh, well, I was just thinking … what if the later person is like a killing inspector or something?”

Beale had entered during Caudill’s appraisal, bags in hand and confectioner’s sugar smearing his face. He started laughing uncontrollably.

Caudill shrunk down in his seat. I wrote Killing Inspector? in my notebook and underscored it twice.

32

It was four in the afternoon when we left the meeting, heads spinning. We were standing in the lodge parking lot looking over the steep cliffs and mulling the new information when Harry called.

“You were dead on, Carson,” he said, after giving me a brief rundown of the action. “You should have seen Oakes’s face when Babe came strutting out from the back of the house, grinning like he owned the mortgage on Oakes’s soul.”

“The perils of a guilty conscience,” I said, buoyed by Harry’s sprawling and cheerful voice. “How Oakes get enlisted?”

“A couple ex-cons showed up a week before Crayline was brought to the Institute for hypnosis. Hardcore Aryan types, the kind of assholes who think Bobby Lee Crayline’s something to aspire to. They brought a carrot and stick. The carrot was fifty grand if Oakes bought in. The stick was, Don’t help Bobby Lee, and he’ll take it real hard.”

“Fifty grand is nothing compared to being on Crayline’s shit list,” I said.

“Like you figured, Carson, the hay bales were the hiding place. Oakes drove away from the madness, brought Bobby Lee to the farm, hid him in a dug-out dirt hole under the house. The space was about the size of a coffin. Get this: Crayline stayed there seven weeks.”

“Seven weeks?”

“When the roadblocks were taken down and everybody thought Crayline was five states away, he slipped out.”

I tried to imagine the willpower it would take to stay almost motionless for one week, unable to stretch, starving, bitten by insects, voiding yourself, all in a casket-sized hole in the ground.

I said, “Crayline say anything to Oakes before he booked?”

“Oakes asked Bobby what he planned to do with his new freedom. Bobby Lee said he was going to kill history, Carson. His exact words.”

“Kill history?”

“You got any idea what that means, bro?”

“Nope, brother. And I don’t want to.”

Harry had a call on the second line and I reluctantly let him get back to business. I walked to Cherry. She looked at me expectantly.

“You were smiling during the call. Good news about Mix-up?”

“Just some input on a case far from here, the one I referred to earlier.” I felt my shoulders slump, like someone was letting the air out of my body.

Cherry studied my face. “I know just what you need, Ryder. A fix. Just like what I need. Good thing my dealer is about a minute away.”

She drove down the steep hill. Instead of pulling to the highway she continued straight a quarter mile, ending up at an acre of asphalt, a parking lot. To the left was a wooden cottage with a sign saying SKYLIFT TICKET OFFICE – SOUVENIR SHOP. Towering beside it was a huge and horizontal steel wheel. The slow-spinning wheel was running cables to a rocky peak about a half-mile distant. Suspended from the lift’s cables were red park benches, basically, some heading up, others returning from the top. Most were empty, the lateness of the hour, I figured.

I swallowed hard and followed Cherry into the cottage, saw racks of souvenir T-shirts, caps, postcards. A smiling man stood behind a cash register. He was in his sixties, round-faced and pot-bellied, wearing a Natural Bridge cap that looked fresh from a rack.

“This is Bob Quint,” Cherry said, nodding to the capped man. “He’s my dealer.”

“Been a while since you’ve had a fix, Donna,” the guy said. “At least on my watch.”

“Twenty-seven days. No wonder I’ve been such a bitch.” She rummaged in her purse for some bills. “I need to get a ticket for my friend here.”

“You don’t need a ticket?” I asked.

“Donna has a lifetime pass,” Bob said, winking at Cherry. “Something we worked out a few years back.”

Ticket secured, Cherry yanked me out the door like a toy wagon. “We need to get on before anyone else shows up.”

“Why?”

She ignored my question, tugging me out to the platform where a teenager took our tickets. A bench coming down the mountain swirled in a circle, came around and we jumped aboard. The kid dropped a heavy restraining bar across our laps and whoosh, up and away we went.

At first we skimmed the ground, no higher than twenty feet, following a path rising toward the mountain, a hundred-foot-wide swath cleared of trees, looking like a golf fairway. To the sides the trees were thick and dark. A small creek ran at the woodsy edge to my right. We passed beside a huge boulder. Previous riders had pitched coins atop it for fun. The surface glittered. I wondered if I could jump to it and make my escape.

“What was that about a lifetime pass?” I asked Cherry.

“It’s a long story,” she said, watching a cardinal in a nearby tree, a dot of red in the green.

“Edit,” I said.

“Bob and his wife Cindy own the lift, not the state, which receives a cut of the proceeds from passengers and the concessions. The skylift cost a helluva lot. When the previous owners wanted to retire, Bob put together financing from several places but was still two hundred grand short. He made a naïve decision.”

“Borrowed from a shady source?”

She nodded. “The interest jumped from manageable to oppressive in six months. It looked like the lender might grab the lift, which was the plan all along. I renegotiated the deal with the lender, grabbing his attention by offering ten-plus.”

“Per cent interest?”

“Years in prison.”

The ground began to fall away. Suddenly we were fifty feet up. Eighty. A hundred. I cleared my throat and checked the firmness of the restraining bar. We passed one of the cable supports. I wondered when it had last been maintained.

“You look nervous, Ryder. Don’t you have the hots for rock climbing?”

“I’m fine,” I said, forcing a yawn. “I imagine a skylift gets inspected at regular intervals, right?”

Cherry patted my arm. “It’s steel. The supports are rooted in bedrock. But you feel safer hanging your life off a tiny bolt fifty feet up. Is that sweat on your forehead?”

I mumbled something. She laughed. “You know what’s going on here?” she said.

I looked past my dangling shoes. The ground had dropped away another twenty feet.

“What?”

“It’s control. You’re in control when you climb. You have no control over the lift. That’s it, right?”

I didn’t answer, afraid my voice would squeak. I looked ahead. The lifting cables ceased paralleling the ground and rocketed up the vertical cliff face. How could they be so steep and not rip from the upper supports on weight alone?

Cherry spun to check the benches behind us. Empty. There was no one coming down, either. We were alone on the lift.

She said, “This is way against the rules, but…”

Cherry pushed the restraining bar up and over our heads. We now sat unrestrained on a slender bench dangling above a rocky chasm. And rising. Cherry crossed her legs and pointed to the ground, growing more distant every second.

“Look at the world, Ryder,” she said. “What’s it doing?”

No way I was looking down. “I don’t know. Rotating?”

“It’s falling away.”

A gust of wind made the bench quiver and I grabbed the edge of the seat. Cherry smiled serenely and put her hands behind her head.

The lift took us higher than most surrounding mountains, providing a panoramic view of miles of rugged, rumpled green. Cherry sighed, the good kind, where fresh air replaces bad thoughts, tight muscles unfurl and, for her at least, the world falls away.

Reaching the peak, I jumped off to feel the joy of solid ground pushing back against my feet. It was a short walk to Natural Bridge, the park’s namesake, a magnificent natural arch carved over millennia by wind and rain, twenty feet wide, a hundred long, flat on top. We stood near the edge and scanned the mountaintops.

“I can’t figure out how it works,” Cherry said.

“How what works?”

“When the world starts to drive me nuts – like the past three weeks – I jump on the skylift and it’s truly as if the world falls away. I’m above it all, at least for a while. I feel better. Cleaner. You studied psychology. Does that seem crazy?”

“What do you mean?”

“The skylift’s just a glorified carnival ride that lifts me a few hundred feet. Nothing’s changed. But it makes me feel different, better. Why is that?”

“You surrender yourself to the metaphor,” I said. “Making the journey a symbol for escape, being above it all. If you’ve prepared yourself to believe strongly enough – to trust the metaphor – your subconscious allows it to happen.”

“I needed someone to tell me that. Thank you.”

She smiled and turned to the view. I wanted to hold her hand. Not in any romantic fashion, but to verify the presence of another human being standing beside me in the sky. But when I opened my hand and moved it toward hers, I felt a thrill rise in the pit of my belly and realized that perhaps there could have been a passing touch of romance in my heart.

And then a following wave of folks from the lift – two dozen German tourists – came down the trail chattering and taking pictures. The spell was broken and we returned to the world below.