“When will you know for sure if there are any more?” I asked.
Kneehoff hesitated and then ventured, “I’m having some trouble putting them in order.”
“Is there something I can do to help?” I offered.
Kneehoff smiled yet again. “You could give me copies of your sketches to look at.”
The thought turned my stomach. “Why?”
Kneehoff studied my face, looking at me as innocently as he must have once treated the men and women he worked with, the ones who told reporters that there had to be a mistake. The man they knew was kind, gentle, a family man who never cursed or told an off-color joke.
“The sketches and photographs could help me make a better accounting,” he said, his voice purely business. “I could make sure I haven’t mixed them up. Then I can sort it all out in my mind. Figure out if there is a fourteenth victim.”
For the second time this morning, my gut roiled.
“Sarah, I can see that you don’t like this idea,” he said, his voice quieting. “I won’t try to fool you. You know that I enjoy looking at the women. That is part of it. They are after all…fond memories.”
My frown grew longer.
“But there’s more to this,” he said. “I’ve always been someone who completes projects. I want to do this with the same care. I want to make sure we recover them all. All my victims.”
Was he telling the truth? Or was he lying about a fourteenth victim to gain access to the photos and sketches, to keep me from telling the warden we were done? I thought that had to be the case. Yet could I take that chance? What if there was another family waiting for a missing daughter or wife to come home?
Giving Kneehoff copies of the sketches felt wrong. It dishonored the victims. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I bought myself time. “I’ll run it past the warden. He’ll decide.”
Finished, I stood and gathered my supplies, a sketch pad and pencils, an eraser. “Unless you have something else to tell me, we’re done for today.”
Kneehoff’s brow furrowed in disappointment. “Nothing I can think of, but I’ll try to come up with more on this latest woman.”
He’d said the same thing every time we met, but he never added anything to the original identifications. This time, I knew, would be no different.
“It’s been good seeing you, Sarah.”
“Liam, get that map done, so we can start the search.”
“Sure.” he said.
As I walked away, I heard him call out, “I’d walk you to your car, but I’m rather tied up at the moment.”
His long, loud, raucous laugh followed me out the door.
Three
The Allan B. Polunsky Unit’s notorious Building 12 is one of the toughest prisons in the world. The web of somber structures looks as one might imagine Texas’s busy Death Row. Inside, more than two hundred men wait in individual cells for dates with lethal injections.
Our meeting over, I made my way outside. First, I stopped at the front desk to reclaim my holster and Colt .45 semi-automatic with a staghorn grip. I cinched the leather rig around my waist. In return, I handed back the prison lanyard with the badge that identified me as a visitor. From a small bin I claimed my state ID and car key.
As I exited through the sally port doors, heavy steel gates locked with a resounding bang behind me. Walking away, I glanced to my right at Death Row’s dull grey building with its rows of narrow windows, and I thought of all the lost and wasted lives, the victims and the killers. The sun shone unrelentingly above me, the heat oppressive, and the air smelled of dust, the earth dry from a summer-long drought. Once outside the multiple layers of Cyclone fencing topped by curlicues of razor wire, I took a deep breath.
I’ve never liked visiting the prisons, especially this one.
Hoping to clear Kneehoff and the prison from my head, I drove to nearby Lake Livingston State Park and sat for a while on a picnic bench gazing at the water and trees. A fisherman in a boat methodically threw in his line and reeled it back. I listened to the rhythm of the water ebbing against the shoreline and contemplated how it reminded me of the beating of a heart. In the end, the sylvan setting didn’t help. I spent an hour watching the fisherman and the morning sun glistening on the shimmering lake, while I pondered the women in my sketches and contemplated how we might have saved them. I wondered if there was a way – there had to be a way – to ferret out such evil and extinguish it before it formed a Liam Kneehoff.
Devoid of any answers, I eventually put my white Suburban in drive and headed home.
Not quite a year old, the Suburban replaced my beloved burgundy Tahoe, which I flooded a year earlier trying to save a child in the middle of a hurricane. In the Suburban’s cargo area, the guys at headquarters had bolted a heavy aluminum tool box to the frame. I kept an array of firearms locked inside, night-vision gear, my laptop, and a change of clothes for days I’m unexpectedly called out on the road.
Halfway home on the interstate, I passed one of the billboards going up across the Houston area with my sketches of Kneehoff’s two unidentified victims, the Jane Does whose remains we’d recovered. It stood on the southbound side of the highway in a farmer’s field. Below it, a few mahogany-and-white Herefords listlessly grazed on high grass. In bold letters across the top, the billboard read: DO YOU KNOW THESE WOMEN? On the sides, it listed their approximate ages, eye and hair colors, and the years they went missing. Then at the very bottom, again in bold type, a phone number for the tip line.
We’d run similar ads in area newspapers without luck, and I wondered why no one had come forward to identify either one.
My best guess was that the women were prostitutes estranged from their families. On the days I did their sketches, Kneehoff talked about picking them up on the street, but wouldn’t confirm that they worked in the world’s oldest trade. With his monumental ego, I figured he didn’t like admitting he used money to lure them into his car. He seemed rather proud of his ability to talk victims inside.
After an uneventful drive in the Suburban, the afternoon sun was high when I drove through Tomball. When I grew up there, Tomball was a typical small Texas town. In the past couple of decades, Houston’s sprawl infiltrated. Main Street had turned into a collection of quirky antique stores and quaint restaurants that lured city folks. Quiet thoroughfares that cut through forests when I was a kid became four-lane roads bordered by housing developments with community swimming pools. On the west side of town, the big chain stores had moved in, Office Depot, Lowe’s, Target, a Chick-fil-A.
I took the narrow road with an S-curve, drove under the umbrella of oak trees, and up ahead I saw the Rocking Horse Ranch, my home. Construction trucks parked on the shoulder cut the road down to barely a lane and a half, and a dump truck lumbered ahead of me. We’d had to take the wrought-iron arch over the gate down temporarily to allow the trucks in.
Once the dump truck segued off heading up the hill to the construction site, I parked in front of the garage and climbed out just in time to see my thirteen-year-old, Maggie, and her best friend, Strings, rush out the back door of our old house. In her hands, Maggie carried some sort of strange contraption.
Another one?
Lately, we’d had a lot of her creations around, big and small battery-powered robots. She programmed their circuit boards at the kitchen table, and I’d find snips of wires on the floor. She gave the robots eyes with sensors that kept them from bumping into walls and made them look oddly human. I saw them peeking out from under her bed, resting on shelves. The day before, I discovered a knobby hydraulic cardboard arm reaching down at me from on top of the refrigerator.
“Magpie,” I shouted, falling back to the nickname she’s had since birth. I pointed at the strange object she carried, a mass of wires with narrow shiny aluminum foil panels. For the body, she’d cut the top and bottom off of an empty industrial-size vegetable can and painted it pink. The result resembled a strange robot insect, the legs made up of what appeared to be…
“Are those my crab shell crackers?”
“Don’t you think they make super good legs?”
Maggie looked so excited I thought she might hug me, but that was out of the question, her hands still clutching her robot insect.
“Strings and I found the crackers in the garage, in a box of stuff from our old house.” She considered that for a few seconds, and then shot me an anxious glance accompanied by an awkward grin that showed off her braces.
Using one finger to push his oval glasses with the wire frames back on his nose, Strings jumped in to help. “You don’t mind, right, Mrs. A? I mean, you don’t use them.”
“Well…” They were right that we hadn’t used them lately. The crab crackers were in our stash from our former life. I still had boxes piled up in one corner of the garage, things I didn’t unpack when we came to live with Mom. That happened nearly three years ago, after my husband, Bill, died in a car crash.
I hadn’t needed anything out of the boxes in more than a year, but I saved the dishes, pots and pans, and kitchen gear for when Maggie and I moved out on our own someday. I’d always figured we wouldn’t live with Mom forever. But with Bobby and Mom building a new house up on the hill, leaving the ranch house for me and Maggie, it appeared that we’d be here long term. So I wasn’t sure how to respond to Maggie using my favorite crab crackers for robot legs. Maybe Mom would buy dishes, gadgets and silverware for her new kitchen. Or she could be planning to take her things with her. I might need to unpack my own kitchenware in the ranch house. Somehow we’d never gotten around to talking about it.
“I guess not,” I said. “But did you take anything else?”
Strings shot my daughter a wary glance. “Oh, Maggie, that’s not a question you wanted her to ask.”
In the past year, Strings had shot up until he towered a full foot over Maggie. His voice had also dropped octaves lower and rarely broke into adolescent gravel. Maggie looked up at him, cautioning, but he insisted, “Well, you didn’t, now did you?”
“What Strings means…” Maggie started, and then suddenly stopped.
This didn’t look good. I figured she wasn’t sure what to say and that my beloved Mexican cocktail skewers with the carved stone flower tops were probably embedded somewhere in another of her creatures.
“What does Strings mean?” I asked, my voice unmistakably serious.
“Nothing really,” Maggie insisted. “Just that I may have picked out a few other things I thought would make a neck, and a plate that would make a really good robot face.”
“Can’t you use parts from some of the other robots you made?”
“She’s already doing that, Mrs. A,” Strings said. “Maggie used a bunch of the stuff from the other robots to make Igor.”
“Igor?”
“I named him after a lab assistant in an old Frankenstein movie,” Maggie said, holding her creation up again to show me. The thing looked, well, so bizarre it was actually kind of cute, like those sixties troll dolls or the furry creatures in that old movie Gremlins.
A year ago, Maggie thought she’d be an astronomer. Then she took a class in robotics, and suddenly her goal switched to engineering. I looked at my teenage daughter, gangly, hair the darkest brown, my late husband’s hazel eyes, holding a half-built robot, and I wondered, “What are you planning to do with this creature once he’s done?”
At that, she turned to me as if including me in a conspiracy, the gleam of a juicy secret in her eyes. “It’s a surprise for Gram and Bobby.” She scanned the area to make no one else could hear before mumbling, “For their wedding.”
“Ah,” I said.
We had just entered choppy waters. The wedding was truly all consuming. It had become a morning-to-night quest for perfection, not just for Mom but for Maggie. I understood how important it was to both of them. We’d had some rocky years, in many instances because of my job, and this was finally something truly worthy of celebration.
“I tell you what,” I said, landing on a solution. “Show me what you picked out later, and if it’s not something I’ll miss, it’s yours.”
Maggie grinned wider, but appeared just a hint cautious. “What if it’s something that –”
“Sarah, you’re finally home!” Mom called out just then, heading toward us from the stables, covered in dust and wearing her old jeans and a plaid work shirt. She was leading Maggie’s horse, Warrior, down the hill, and he strutted calmly behind her. Solid black, the two-year-old was one of my favorites. He had an old soul, never seemed to panic, and there was a lick of understanding, horse intelligence, in his big brown eyes.
“You’re not looking much like a bride today,” I shouted back. Mom’s white curls were standing up nearly straight with bits of hay in them. “Taking off a day to play ranch hand?”
“Very funny,” she said, as she came to a stop a few feet from me. I could smell the stables on her, the hay and the horses. “Bobby’s at the office. He’s picking me up later for dinner. I was just tired of all the plans for the wedding and the arm-long list of decisions he’s waiting on me for, floors and tile for the new house. I decided to spend a day with the horses to regain my sanity.”
While Mom talked, I ran my hand down Warrior’s neck, rubbing his strong back. Excluding family, I pretty much preferred the company of horses over most people any day, so I understood. A good horse could be life-confirming-reassurance that as screwed up as the world can get some things remain proud and good.
About then, I heard Bobby’s truck drive onto the property.
“Just like a man, arriving two hours before he said he would and me looking like a wet hen,” Mom muttered. She ran her hand through her hair knocking out some of the hay and pulled on her clothes to straighten the wrinkles.
“You know he won’t mind. He loves this about you,” I said, and Mom grinned. She did know.
“Nora, my girl,” Bobby shouted. A big man with a cap of white hair, bushy eyebrows and rheumy green-gray eyes, he had a toughness about him, the look of the oilman he’d been for decades. As soon as he reached Mom he grabbed her and planted a lingering kiss on her lips, apparently not put off by the fact that she smelled of the stable.
Still, she flustered. “Bobby, if you’d told me –”
“We’re past that, Nora. We’re about to get hitched,” he said. “You can’t be worried every time your husband arrives home early.”
Somehow that man had an amazing power over my mother, dropping decades off her face whenever he showed up. She giggled like a girl, and I couldn’t help but laugh with her. Yet I felt a familiar ache, one I recognized as a mixture of happiness for her and envy, sadness that I might never have love like that in my life again.
Bobby’s long arm encircled Mom’s shoulders, and he pulled her close. “Having a gab fest here, ladies?”
“Sort of,” I admitted. “We’re talking about that monstrosity you’re building up the hill. I was just about to ask how the house is coming.”
The wedding approaching in a few weeks, Bobby was putting the final touches on the place, built on acreage he’d bought from a neighbor at the far end of the ranch. In contrast to our ramshackle ranch house, a conglomeration of rooms added to an old cabin over the years, the new place was modern, a split log contemporary with a soaring A-frame marking the center. Bobby wanted a bit of privacy. Mom wouldn’t leave the ranch and move to his place in the city. We didn’t want them to go. The new house was a compromise.
“It’s coming. But so far it doesn’t have master bathroom tile or a kitchen counter,” he said, gazing pointedly at Mom.
A bit uncomfortable, she sighed. “Well, you weren’t supposed to find me playing hooky.”
I knew Mom loved Bobby and that this would be a good marriage for her. As happy as it made me, I’d miss her, even if she was just a quarter mile down the road and up the hill. Our lives were changing, and they probably wouldn’t ever be the same.
“I’ll get to it this afternoon,” Mom said. “I’m driving into town in ha
lf an hour for a doctor’s appointment. I’ll stop at the tile store on my way home.”
“Doctor’s appointment?” Bobby asked, but Mom brushed him off.
“You know at our age, it’s one doctor after another, even when we’re healthy,” she said. “I’m too old and mean to get sick”
At that Bobby broke into a knowing laugh. “Nora, you aren’t near old and never mean.”
Changing the subject, Mom motioned at the gadget in Maggie’s hands and asked, “What’s that? Another robot? What’s this one do?”
“Nothing special,” Maggie said.
“You know Maggie, Mrs. Potts,” Strings jumped in, calling Mom by the name she’d soon abandon in favor of Bobby’s last name, Barker. “Maggie’s always messing around with an experiment.”
Mom looked at Maggie, and then at Strings. She eyed me.
“Someday, Maggie’s going to take over my company,” Bobby said, a bit of mischief in his eyes. “She’ll have robots drilling oil wells.”
With that, Mom apparently felt outnumbered. Instead of pushing, she shrugged and moved on. I noticed an appreciative glance from my daughter to her friend, and I figured they’d just weaseled out of having to explain something that was obviously top secret.
Just then, a blue van with MOUNT ZION AFRICAN CHURCH scrawled on the side pulled into the driveway, Reverend Fred Jacobs, Strings’ dad, behind the wheel.
“Coming to pick you up?” I asked Strings, surprised because the kid’s bike was propped up on a tree.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
Fred Senior parked the van and popped out the door, followed by his wife, Alba, and their three daughters. Alba and the girls wore brightly colored caftans with big sleeves, and Alba had a matching turban. She waved at Mom, who walked up to meet her.
“I wish I’d known you were coming. I’ve got a doctor appointment in town pretty soon,” Mom said. She and Alba spent their off time trading recipes and hovering over the younger children, who Mom babysits off and on. “But I made blueberry cobbler this morning, and we have ice cream. While I get dressed, why don’t you and the girls have some?”
The Buried Page 3
