Текст книги "Buried Alive"

Автор книги: Jack Kerley

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

45

McCoy was at my door the next morning at seven thirty, the normally composed master of the woods looking pale and distraught.

“What is it?” I asked, hobbling out to the porch while pulling on the second shoe.

He produced a small black laptop and tapped the keys. “The geocache website. I checked it out of habit a half-hour back.”

He spun the screen to me. I leaned close and saw map coordinates, above them the dreaded symbol.

=(8)=

My heart sank. Crayline was dead. This couldn’t be happening.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“Over by Star Gap. Donna’s heading there now. She wanted me to show you this, then meet her there.”

“It has to be some kind of joke,” I said, stumbling into the vehicle, wondering if I was having a full-blown nightmare.

We returned to the Forest Service SUV and McCoy pulled up and out of the hollow. We were closing on the site fifteen minutes later, Cherry waiting and pacing, her face tight with tension. We followed McCoy, walking left, then right, guided by the arrow on the GPS screen. He angled around a house-sized boulder, arriving at a muddy clearing in the forest floor, the mud lightened by dissolving shale, gray, rarer in the area than the dark soil or sand that generally prevailed.

I heard McCoy gasp. Cherry ran up. Her lips moved but no sound came out. Caudill arrived and stopped dead in his tracks. He turned away and began hyperventilating.

I stepped into the clearing. Beale’s naked body was on the ground. It took my mind several reality-bending moments to fathom the scene. What had been done to Beale was almost indescribable, requiring a sharp knife and hideous surgery.

“Is it him?” Cherry asked, only able to look at the body in glances. “We can’t see his face without, uh …”

“Those are his tattoos,” Caudill whispered. “It’s the sheriff.”

Cherry called the state forensics and medical people and asked for their most experienced team to unravel the nightmare of Sheriff Roy Beale.

“Why Sheriff Beale?” Caudill asked, shaken to his bootstraps. “What did he do?”

“An authority figure, maybe,” I ventured. “Or a threat.”

“There was nothing to Beale, threat-wise,” McCoy said. “If the killer had only Beale to deal with, he could kill half the folks in the county before Beale Junior even noticed.”

“Beale Junior?” I said.

“I thought you knew his daddy was sheriff, Carson,” McCoy said.

“I do, I just never had to make connections to it before, see it on the timeline.” I turned to Cherry. “Could old Sheriff Beale have known anything about the camp?”

Cherry said, “I heard a few bad tales about Beale’s daddy, but every county sheriff makes enemies who—”

“I knew old Beale,” McCoy interrupted. “If there was anything illegal going on, I expect he got paid for not noticing.”

“He was that bad?” Cherry asked. “You never told me that.”

“Old Beale was dead and gone. No sense spitting on his memory.”

Something stirred in my mind. “Mooney Coggins recalled Powers talking about ‘being put under a star’,” I ventured. “Could that have meant a protective alliance with old Beale … the sheriff paid to overlook the camp?”

McCoy did the money-whisk. “If there was enough of this in the picture, I expect Beale senior would have pretended that part of the county didn’t exist.”

I re-thought the situation with the new input. I walked from behind the boulder and studied the savaged corpse for a few seconds.

“What’s another term for not seeing what’s in front of you?” I asked.

Cherry shot a glance at the wreckage of Roy Beale. Her eyes closed and her shoulders slumped.

“Having one’s head up one’s….” She couldn’t finish.

“I rest my case,” I said.

46

If Krenkler and her crew had been in mop-it-up-and-hop-it-up to DC mode, they pivoted on that dime. We were summoned to the cabin by the park, told to the minute when we should arrive, which had Cherry mumbling under her breath as she took her seat at the conference table, awaiting an appearance by the woman she’d taken to calling The Peroxide Queen. Krenkler stood outside the cabin talking into two cellphones at once, her lacquered hair the only item not in frenzied motion. Three agents swirled around her bringing notes, coffee, chewing gum.

Caudill arrived as the sole representative of the Woslee force. He didn’t look comfortable with command, pushing the furthest chair back even further and avoiding eye contact.

“Christ Jesus,” Krenkler barked as she strode into the room, looking at Cherry and me like we did this on purpose, producing a body after she had most likely told HQ the case was wrapping up. “How many nutcases are loose in this goddamn wilderness?”

“One more than Bobby Lee Crayline,” I said. “At least.”

She fed the red mouth a strip of Juicy Fruit and shot me the hard eye. “You got no anonymous calls this time, Ryder?”

She was flogging that horse again, obsessed with that damn call. “I’ll answer for the next fifteen times you ask, Agent Krenkler, and I’ll say it slow so you can understand it. I – never – received – any—”

“Not funny. Answer the goddamn question.”

A light dawned in my head. “Wait a minute,” I said, staring her full in the eye. “There’s something you’re not telling us, isn’t there?”

She looked at the floor. I hadn’t figured Krenkler capable of guilt, but there it was.

“What?” I pushed. “Out with it.”

“Someone called us here anonymously,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Just like you.”

“Wait a minute … you’re just now telling us that—”

“Sheriff Beale didn’t call us in. I’m not sure Beale – rest his dull soul – could have found the FBI’s telephone number without a guide dog. The Bureau got a call three days before Charles Bridges was found. The caller predicted a string of murders here and invited us to take a look. The Bureau gets more weird calls than Jerry Springer. By the time we checked into it, the victim now known as Charles Bridges had shown up. We called Beale and convinced him it was in his best interest to request our presence.”

Cherry stared at Krenkler. If looks could kill, hers were cyanide laced with strychnine.

“What kind of lunatic killer invites the FBI to a killing spree?” I said. “And why didn’t you share the information from day one, so we could all know—”

“Here’s the way it’s going to work,” Krenkler barked, over-voluming my question. “Everything will continue to be run directly from this office with my full—”

“No way,” Cherry said.

Krenkler froze as if slapped. Surprised faces turned toward Cherry.

“You surely weren’t talking to me?” Krenkler said.

“I’m talking to exactly you.” Cherry stood and put her palms on the table. “Detective Ryder and I may have found a new investigative path. We are going to look into it. WE, as in Detective Ryder and me. I can’t have you treating people like ignorant savages because they don’t live in a city, Agent Krenkler. We need them to talk, not stare at their shoes and mumble.”

Krenkler snapped her gum like gunshots. “How good are you at running a cash register, Detective Cherry? You’re digging your grave here, career-wise.”

Cherry said, “Only if I screw up, and I’m not planning on screwing up. If we discover something, we’ll tell you immediately, a gesture of professional respect you seen incapable of giving to us.”

The room was as silent as the far side of the moon. The cluster of agents were too stunned to do anything but stare at the backs of their hands. Krenkler’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“I’m not used to being spoken to like this.”

Cherry said “Guess what, I’ve got four years of college, eight years of on-the-job training, a host of commendations. And I’m not used to being a copy machine.”

Krenkler stared but found no response. Cherry nodded for me to follow and the door closed at our backs. “Tell me you have something,” I side-whispered as we hightailed it out of the cabin before Krenkler sent the agents after us. “Either that or I’m going to have to send you to store-clerk school.”

Cherry nodded to her vehicle. Amazingly, she was smiling. She patted my back. “It’s just wonderful what some folks can leverage with a handful of dirty pictures. Get in my ride and I’ll show you what Powers meant by education.”

We jumped in. Cherry pulled a few pages from her briefcase.

“A friend who’s a clerk in a state office came in early and started digging for me, bless her bureaucratic heart. Turns out the state keeps a record of kids being home schooled so districts don’t send out truant officers to the homes. It’s just a list of names, but names nonetheless. I did some cross-checking, some elimination because of dates and ages, and presto …”

She snapped a page in my face with a flourish and assumed a look of detectively success. That or she’d recently devoured a canary.

“Seven names from way back when …” she said. “Jessie Collier, Elijah Elks, Bemis Smith, Jimmie Hawkes, Creed Baines, Teeter Gasper, and Donald Nunn. Seven names of boys aged eleven through thirteen listed as attending the Solid Word home schooling and camp program under the stewardship of Ezekiel Tanner, pastor, the Solid Word Church of Campton, Kentucky.”

My heart skipped a beat. Maybe several.

“Jesus, Cherry, you struck gold.”

“Silver, maybe. Let me read what it says under Purpose. ‘The Solid Word School Program and Wilderness Camp is a rigorous and extensive program of care and discipline designed to strengthen students in mind, body and spiritual teachings.’ I’ve heard both Tanner and Powers talk and I can tell you that phrase got stolen from a legitimate home-school program somewhere.”

“We’ve got to find those kids,” I said. “They’re the key.”

“I’ve already started: Jessie Collier and Donald Nunn are deceased. Collier of an OD when he was twenty, thirteen years back. Nunn got shot in a drive-by in Ashland eight years ago; I’m thinking that he might be the Donald remembered by Daddy Coggins. I’m just crosschecking names and approximate ages with crime stats. Hawkes is in the state pen. Nothing yet on Smith and Nunn.”

“Our only source is in prison?” I said.

“Maximum security at LaGrange.”

“Which is where?” I asked.

She jammed the vehicle in gear, whipped away from the FBI cabins. “Buckle up. We’ll be there in a couple hours. I got things covered.”

We booked for the prison, me looking out the back window for the FBI every few miles. If it looked like a parade of hearses, it was them. But it appeared we were on our own.

Cherry knew the warden at LaGrange and arranged a private room for meeting Jimmie Hawkes, twenty-nine years of age, and a one-time student of the Solid Word home school and camp for disadvantaged children. I hoped Mr Hawkes would have plenty to say.

We stopped at the guard station outside the visitation room. A heavyset guard with caterpillar eyebrows sat at a desk absentmindedly thumbing through a Bass Pro Shops catalog.

“We’re here to see Jimmie Hawkes,” Cherry said.

The caterpillars flicked up from a page of camo hunting gear. “You ain’t eaten recently, have you?”

“Could you explain that, please?” Cherry asked.

The guard walked to the control plate on the wall and pressed a button. The steel door at his back rolled open. “Hawkes is here for trying to rob a Korean grocery in Paducah. Trouble was, the store owner kept a twelve-gauge under the counter. The guy whipped that shotgun up and fired. Took the docs eight years just to git Hawkes where he is now.”

“I can’t wait,” Cherry muttered.

We took our seats at the table. The door opened and Hawkes entered the room in profile, all we saw was the right side of his face. He seemed a series of jitters, each part of his body driven by a different rhythm, spasms in motion.

When he turned to us I heard Cherry stifle the gasp: Hawkes looked like a character from a Batman movie, if there’d been a character called Half-face or maybe just Nightmare. The shotgun blast had torn off the left side of his face from mid-cheekbone outward, blowing away bone, flesh, ear, hair, a third of the mandible.

The result was a face normal on one side of his nose, with no face on the other – just a sloping plain of gray scar tissue rebuilt in the rough shape of a head. There was nothing where his eye used to be, not so much as an indentation. I imagined the left side of his skull was some form of inner prosthetic. His skin resembled lizard hide. The right side of his mouth was normal, the left truncating in the scar, unable to close, making a permanent downcast hole.

“Jesus,” Cherry whispered. I took her hand, squeezed it.

“Guards say you want to talk,” Hawkes said in a strange, lisping rasp. “Got a half you want to talk to?”

47

“Home? What the fuck is a home, lady?”

Hawkes answered Cherry’s opening question, asking where home was in his childhood. “Didn’t have no home. Got run from place to place. Uncles, aunts, mamaw. I learned to stay outside, keep outta the way. Run in, EAT! Go back out, winter, summer, didn’t matter. One day a preacher an’ a sexy lady come around, said they was starting up a bible camp and they was gonna school ME for FREE.” He turned in his chair and waved to an invisible woman. “BYE-BYE, MAMAW, YOU OLD WHORE.”

Hawkes shivered and jittered. I wondered if the shotgun blast had left a bunch of wires hanging loose in his brain, sparking at random to cause the jumping and twitching.

“Did you like the idea of going off with Reverend Tanner and Miss Powers, Jimmie?” Cherry asked.

“Didn’t give a sh-shit. I figured they’d send me somewhere elst soon enough, like always.”

“So you went to the Solid Word school.”

“Words and turds, turds and words,” Hawkes said, disgust on his half-face. “Dog turds, dogs everywhere. Barkin’ and growlin’ all the time. Everything stunk of dog turd. Never cleaned it up, just waited for the rain to wash it away.”

“Tell us about the school.”

“Started off nice. GOOD EAT! Lived in little house things. NO RAIN NO PAIN.”

“Did you have school lessons?” Cherry asked.

“We learned this …” Hawkes jumped up and started throwing air punches. He spun to kick something only he could see. The man’s kicks and punches were tight, hard, and controlled. He knew what he was doing.

“Sit, Jimmie,” the guard cautioned. Hawkes sneered, but sat.

“You ended up fighting?” I asked.

“PIN A NUMBER ON YOUR DICK!” he bellowed into our faces, his breath treacherous. “BUST THEIR ASSES AND GET SOME EAT IN THE BELLY!”

“You fought and you ate?”

He backhanded away spit dripping from the keyhole mouth. “Food without maggots. Real EAT! EAT AND EAT MORE. DOPE AND WHISKEY AND GETTIN’ ALL FRISKY! WIN AND FILL THE MOUTH-HOLE!”

“What happened when you lost?”

Hawkes stopped moving as if a spring mechanism had spent its energy. His mouth drooped and his one eye turned inward. He became absolutely still.

“Coach’d come in and have his party,” he said, turning away.

“The coach?”

Hawkes leaned back his head and screamed, “HERE COMES THE SNACK TRUCK!”

I turned to Cherry. The blood had drained from her face. “Is that what Coach said, Jimmie?” I asked.

Hawkes jumped up, planted his feet wide, made the motion of grabbing a head while being fellated. He knifed his hips forward and back. Grunted, “Here … comes … the … snack … truck … uhn, uhnnn, uh-HUUUGRG!”

“Did anyone ever try and get away, Jimmie?” I asked, holding up my hand at the guard, Don’t interfere.

“Yesssssss,” he hissed.

“Did they make it?”

Hawkes’s single eye burned into mine. He made a throttling motion with his hands. “HE did this to a dog. Then HE hung Mister DOG from a TREE.”

My mind’s eye presented a limp canine swinging from a limb, the symbol of the failed escape. “It was to tell you what happened to the boy, right?”

Hawkes gestured me close with his forefinger. “Read the dog, mister,” he whispered. “The dog knows the future.”

“Who killed the dog, Jimmie?” Cherry asked. “The coach? The preacher?”

“The Colonel,” he said.

“Colonel, Jimmie?”

Hawkes cupped his hand over his crotch. “PUT ON YOUR CUPS AND COVER YOUR PUPS,” he barked, as if giving an order. “STICK A NUMBER ON YOUR DICK, BOYS! MAKE THE COLONEL SMILE!”

I said, “The Colonel was part of the camp?”

“YES-FUCKING-SIR, MISTER COLONEL! Colonel was always there.” Hawkes did the money-whisk with both hands. “BIG FUCKING SUGAR! NO MAGGOT FOR THE COLONEL!”

“Maggots?”

“PREACHER-MAN WAS FOOD MAN. MAGGOTS AND SLOP AND PUKE ’TIL YOU DROP. WIN AND GET THE GOOD EAT!”

I glanced at Cherry, shook my head, turned back to Hawkes.

“What did the Colonel look like, Jimmie?”

Hawkes craned his head toward the door, as if readying an escape. He didn’t want to talk about the Colonel.

“Time for me to GO!”

“Just a couple more questions,” I said, whipping out the photo in my jacket pocket, Bobby Lee Crayline.

“This guy,” I said to Hawkes. “Ever see him? Was he ever with you in school? He would have been about your age.”

Hawkes scowled at the photo. Turned away. “GUARD,” he yelled into the air. “I WANT THE YARD!”

“Jimmie,” I pleaded, “just a couple more minutes.”

“I WANT OUT!”

The guard shrugged at us and opened the door.

“Jimmie,” Cherry called to Jimmie Hawkes’s retreating back. “One question, Jimmie. Please? Just for me?”

Hawkes jittered and twitched. He paused in the doorframe.

48

We stood in the sun of the parking lot, five sheets of paper spread across the dark hood of Cherry’s cruiser. Heat rose from the metal as Cherry shifted the sheets like puzzle pieces. She’d asked Hawkes to draw us a map to the “camp”.

“Think this is worth anything?” Cherry squinted at lines and images Hawkes had scribbled.

“You’re expecting accuracy in a map drawn by a man with two-thirds of a brain? Aiming us at a place almost two decades gone?”

Cherry leaned over the hood, shuffled the pages yet again. “I might be able to dope out landmarks he was talking about. Here …” she pointed to a lollipop shape Hawkes had scrawled beside a line representing a road. “He called it the cow tree.”

I did dubious. “And?”

“There’s a pasture by the county line with a huge beech, the tree near the road. There’s a spring-fed creek by the tree and the farmer keeps salt blocks there as well.”

“Shade, water, salt. Cows?”

“Usually a couple dozen at least, all ringing the tree. And here’s what Hawkes called Beer Stop. If this is the tree I’m thinking about, there’s a little grocery a mile down the road that sells beer and wine. It’s been there since I was a kid.”

Cherry pulled a sheet from the bottom of the arrangement, set it on top. Joined the lines Hawkes called roads. She tapped on the center page. “This so-called map, Ryder? It might actually make sense if I can figure out Hawkes’s other landmarks.”

“This wavy line,” I said, pointing to a wavering doodle. “He said that was a creek, didn’t he?”

“Yep. And this triangle over here was – what did he call it? – the big boat rock? It could be a big pointy boulder that looks like a battleship pushing out of the mountain. There’s one like that a mile or so from the grocery.”

I tapped a dark smear of ink. “He called this big muddy field.”

“It fits the landscape,” she said. “I’m thinking we tape these pages together and go a-hunting.”

It took two hours of driving, circling, doubling back. We ended up at a chained gate blocking a dirt lane overgrown with weeds. The chain was crusted with rust, the lock a red block of oxidation.

Cherry said, “This is where Hawkes’s map leads, as far as I can figure.”

“No one’s been through this gate in a long time,” I said. “We’re on foot from here.”

We crawled warily over the barbed-wire fencing running from the gate in both directions and followed the lane for several hundred feet before encountering a second and taller perimeter of barbed-wire strung with rusted cans, a cheap alarm system. We found a tumbled section and pushed through, following the lanes to a two-story house of logs tucked in a tight hollow surrounded by hundred-foot cliffs, too sheer to climb without bolts planted for climbers.

There were a half-dozen windowless outbuildings on the hillside sloping to the cliffs, little larger than outhouses. Rhododendron had grown up over the years, the shacks almost hidden in the green. Behind the row of houses was a half-acre motley of hurricane-fence enclosures and tumbledown doghouses. The topography put the canine area a few feet above the outbuildings. Hawkes had been right about dog excrement, it would have washed down the hill directly beneath the little boxes.

“Dog turds, dogs everywhere … Everything stunk of dog turd.”

Neither Cherry nor I uttered a word as we angled toward the house. The place was empty, save for the bats. No furniture, no fixtures, not so much as a scrap of newspaper on the floor. Chinking had fallen from between the logs and birds had nested in the empty spaces.

We went to inspect the row of outbuildings: sheds, reeking of animal urine from years of possums, rats, birds and raccoons. Each shed had the remains of a mattress on the floor, now no more than rotted fabric filled with insects. Cherry swung a creaky door on heavy iron hinges, studied a latch.

“The doors lock from the outside, Ryder,” she said. “And this was supposed to be a school?”

“The one-room schoolhouse from hell,” I said.

At the furthest end of the hollow was an old barn, large, the wood weathered almost black. We circled it, spying a huge cage on its side in the bushes.

“That cage is big enough to hold a doggone horse,” Cherry noted.

“Or a couple of humans,” I added.

We came around to the front again, no other openings in the building. The sliding door was frozen with rust so we pulled it back enough to slip inside, turned on our flashlights. On both sides of the structure were four-tier bleachers, twenty feet long. I estimated the place might hold a hundred-fifty screaming onlookers.

In the corner was a tabletop set-up, behind were shelves screwed into the beams. The bar area, I figured. The only liquor allowed at events had to be purchased there at ten bucks a pop. Another profit center. Plus oiled-up gamblers wagered more money. The bar also explained the shards of busted glass glittering from the floor: bottles dropped, or banged on the bleachers in bloodlust frenzy. I kicked loose glass that had been stuck in the dirt for years.

The floor between the bleachers resembled a perverse three-ring circus. On one end was a square pit about twelve by twelve, a yard or so deep. On the other end was a slightly smaller and less-deep pit, circular. Dogs and chickens, respectively.

In the center of the floor was a rectangular hole about twelve feet by five, four feet deep. Cherry’s beam touched the pit, pulled away as if repulsed, returned to light the damp and scuffed bottom.

“Remember what came out of Crayline’s memory?” she said. “The kids fought in a long pit nicknamed the grave. You think that happened here, too?”

“The other kids Crayline fought had to come from somewhere.”

“But Crayline was kept in the Alabama mountains. He was never in Kentucky that we know of.”

“Because he got trucked in and out in the dead of night,” I said, my beam climbing the rafters, finding a row of broken light bulbs cupped by gray, sheet-metal shades. They looked like lamps from Auschwitz.

We retreated down the lane, escapees from Sodom. Cherry turned for a final look. I saw her shudder. “It’s like a Ray Bradbury nightmare, Ryder. A carnival of horror.”

“A horror that was filled by Powers,” I said, the blanks in the puzzle beginning to take shape. “She found isolated, troubled kids from hideously dysfunctional homes. Told parents about her special school where kids would get fed, receive a righteous education, whatever. She just needed permission, a few papers filled out. She’d been a … what did you call her?”

“A classified teacher. It’s an assistant’s position that doesn’t need a teaching certificate. But anyone needing to check Powers out would see teaching in her background. Plus she knew the jargon when submitting the home-school forms, not to set off any alarms.”

“And, of course, she had the church-lady talk.”

“Miz Powers had everything covered,” Cherry said. “The parents simply gave the kids away.”

“Happy to get them gone, I expect. Putting Billy or Bobby’s leash in the hands of folks spouting chapter and verse made it easy.”

“Tanner was the head spouter, I imagine,” Cherry said. “The Pious Teacher and the Man of Faith. Maybe Tanner believed it at first. Then the money started and he got hooked. I’ll bet he still deluded himself, telling himself he’d use the gambling proceeds to build the grand religious edifice in his mind.”

We climbed the barbed-wire again. Cherry said, “Eighteen years back would have been about the time Zeke got sick with all the old-timey religion, the save-yourself-from-Satan spiels.”

“A pure man of God couldn’t be throwing himself into rampant sex and gambling and cruelty to children. It must have been Satan acting through him. By attacking Satan, he could still claim the high ground of an alliance with God. It’s aligning symbol and metaphor to absolve yourself of baser instinct. When you’re not at fault, every low and self-serving wish can be freely granted.”

Cherry shook her head, holding down a strand of wire to help me over. “I swear religion like that is a form of madness. How about Burton?”

“Burton didn’t need to re-arrange private symbolism to suit his needs. He was simply amoral, taking what he needed with no bothersome conscience.”

“He was also a boxer, Ryder,” Cherry reminded me.

I nodded, recalling the air punches and kicks Hawkes had demonstrated. The moves had been drilled into him so deeply they were fluid and powerful years later.

“The boys needed a coach, right?” I said. “Can’t make money unless you win, can’t win unless you know what you’re doing.”

“There’s one more person in this hell broth, Ryder. The Colonel. I got the impression from Hawkes that the Colonel was the top dog, so to speak.”

We reached the gate and turned for a final look, seeing only the rustic tranquility of trees and meadow and birds flitting tree to tree. Butterflies tumbled round red spikes of sumac. Insects rasped in the warm air.

“This whole dirty scheme needed a leader,” I said, chipping rust from a barbed-wire point with my thumbnail. “And someone to bankroll the start-up. Buying this place and building the houses. Double-stringing the area with barbed-wire. Building bleachers and fight pits.”

Cherry wrinkled up her nose. “Let’s get gone from here. The reek of dogshit is making me sick.”

We were a half-mile from buildings where dogs hadn’t been kept for years. There was no smell left; Cherry’s mind was supplying the odor.

I began to smell it, too.

Followed by the feeling of eyes on the back of my neck. A tingling, like an ice target painted across my spine. I picked up my pace, shooting glances at the ridge-line above. Though I saw nothing, I continued to feel the cold eyes even as we drove away.