Four-foot-eight with a slight paunch, Ernie wore white coveralls over his clothes, fire boots, and thick knee pads like a carpet layer. Once he and the dog hit solid land, Ernie snatched a heavy canvas bag off the copter.
“Lieutenant, I could use some help,” he shouted, and I moved forward. He threw the bag at me and then pulled three more duffels of equipment out of the cabin. Del, Ernie and I carried the bags closer to the church. As Ernie walked, the dog heeled beside him, attentive. Yellow and black tape marked the edge of the clearing, preserving the scene, not that anyone but raccoons, feral hogs, possums or bobcats might wander through.
Once the copter took off, Ernie glared up at me. I was a foot taller and outweighed him. I’d always thought that one of Ernie’s ancestors might have inspired Tolkien’s hobbits. Ernie’s hands and feet oversized, he had a bit of mischief in his eyes. Despite a persistent frown, Ernie always appeared as if he was trying to smile, just not succeeding.
“I’m not happy about this,” he said.
“I know,” I admitted. “But I’m glad you’re here.”
With that, he shook his head, indicating he didn’t share my enthusiasm. “Any casualties?”
“The pastor is missing,” Del said. “We’re looking for him.”
The church’s front wall was pretty much gone, burnt to the ground. The building’s frame burned black, the surface of the wood beams puckered like black alligator skin. Fires are unpredictable, and for some reason, this one stopped before it consumed the beams from the inside of the back wall.
“Anyone walk in?” Ernie asked. He eyed Del up, looking more than a little perturbed. “Has this scene been violated or tampered with?”
“No,” Del said, sounding aggravated at the suggestion. “Absolutely not. But I did recover broken glass from a bottle or jar near the front door.”
“Let’s see it,” Ernie said. Del led us over to his car and opened the box in the trunk. Ernie stretched on latex gloves. “Anyone touch this?”
“I did, but I wore gloves,” Del said. “Made sure I just touched around the edges.”
“Good.” Ernie lowered his face and took a whiff. Without speaking, he unzipped one of the duffels and pulled out half a dozen shiny, empty, one-gallon, paint-type cans. He brought one over to the box, picked up the glass a fragment at a time and placed it in the can. With a marker he wrote the case number across the top, his initials and then scrawled: GLASS FOUND NEAR FRONT DOOR.
“Okay,” he said. “Time to see what Smoke can find.”
For a moment, Ernie talked quietly to the dog, who stared at him with the admiration of a grade schooler for a favorite teacher. “Okay, boy. Let’s go.”
Walking Smoke around the church’s perimeter, Ernie moved achingly slow. The dog sniffed the air, following along. Back at the church’s front, Ernie unsnapped the leash. “Go,” he said.
Again, the dog circled, paced around the building, taking it all in. Then he stopped and stood near the front door.
Ernie petted the dog and slipped it a small treat, then knelt on his well-padded knees to inspect the ground. “More glass,” he called out to us. After returning for another can, he picked through the debris, claiming bits of evidence. “Looks like a broken bottle of some sort. Lots of splinters.”
As Ernie searched, the dog sat at attention, watching and waiting. Once Ernie finished with the glass, he scooped up a sample of the earth below it, canned it, and pounded down the edges of the can to seal the top with a small rubber mallet from a brown leather tool belt he wore around his waist.
“What happened in Dallas?” Del whispered to me, nodding toward Ernie.
“Last year. A flare up in an apartment building. The top floor,” I mouthed back at him. “The fire was supposed to be out. Ernie barely escaped. Two of his team died.”
Del raised his heavy brows and sighed. We’d all been there, close calls.
Satisfied he had all the glass collected, Ernie said one word, “Okay,” and Smoke stood and took a few steps. From that point on, he stopped every few feet, sat and waited for his master. This went on for more than an hour, as the dog paused periodically near the front and sides of the church. Ernie said nothing, just returned for cans, picked up pieces of rubble and canned more soil samples, always leaving the top half of the can empty for fumes to build. Each can carefully sealed, he noted the location the specimen was taken from and the case number.
“The guy splashed gas or something around?” Del shouted at Ernie as he crouched next to the building’s foundation.
“Looks like a pour pattern,” he confirmed. “We’ll see once the lab tests come in.”
The perimeter work done, Ernie walked gingerly into the church proper, Smoke beside him. They watched where they put their feet, dodging rusty nails protruding from burnt wood. “Looks like they had hymnals in the pews,” he shouted out. “Lots of fuel in the building for the fire.”
The charred ceiling tiles with streaks of white lay about. Blackened with soot, broken, but still there. As I watched, Smoke sniffed, and then worked his way over to a section near the front of the church. Ernie followed. Where the dog sat, Ernie pushed back some of the rubble, moved away a section of fallen debris. This was a protected area, the fire smothered out underneath the fire-retardant asbestos tiles.
Minutes later, Ernie claimed more evidence containers.
“What’ve you got?” I asked.
“More glass. And the wood floor has burn marks that look like a second point of origin.”
“So they threw two Molotov cocktails? One at the door, the other inside?” I asked.
Ernie glanced at me impatiently. I knew he didn’t like speculation, but to humor me he said, “Again, we have to wait for lab results. But I’d guess yes. Could be that he threw a second one through a front window. There’s flat glass scattered around the burn pattern.”
For fifteen minutes or so, Ernie photographed and collected samples from that location. Meanwhile the other members of the forensic team in their fire suits continued to search the woods around the church, videotaping it and taking photographs. They recorded everything they found, sometimes stopping to pick up suspicious materials, preparing them for evidence collection.
Eventually Ernie headed farther into the church with Smoke in the lead. Before long, the dog focused on a pile of debris beneath the still standing stone pulpit. “I think we have something,” Ernie said, as he photographed that area undisturbed, then started carefully removing a thick layer of ceiling tiles. Not far in, he pulled back and looked over at Del and me.
“Put in a call for a medical examiner,” he said. “We’ve got a body.”
Somehow word leaked out, perhaps from the dispatcher Del called to request the ME. Or curiosity took over and they couldn’t stay away any longer. Within half an hour of the discovery of the body, thirty-some folks arrived, men, women, the old and the young, black, white, Hispanic, a few of them leading children. They came from their homes, from work, in their pick-up trucks and SUVs. They parked on the highway and walked in, edging closer, murmuring.
“That’s our church,” one said. “What happened? Did someone do this?”
“Have you found Pastor Wilson?” a second asked. “We heard that he’s missing.”
“Please, leave,” I said. “You shouldn’t be here.”
When no one took my advice, I separated the women with children from the others and again suggested they go home. “You don’t want your little ones to see this.”
At first, they refused. They appeared drawn to the church, unwilling to go. Eventually, I told them the children couldn’t stay. “Do the right thing. Take them home.”
At that, they apparently understood my concern, that their children would never forget what they saw. Reluctantly, they gathered their youngsters and turned to go.
We cordoned off a larger circle, holding the remaining group back. They didn’t push in. The church members were respectful but persistent. Some cried openly, others held them, offe
ring mute comfort.
As daylight waned, I helped erect generator-powered spotlights aimed at the husk of the blackened church. In the darkness, it became an eerie sight as occasional wisps of smoke escaped from pockets in the layers of rubbish the fire left behind. We called in a volunteer fire fighting team from one of the nearby towns, and they carted in water to hose down hotspots.
Behind us in the driveway a hearse from a local funeral parlor waited, the engine running.
Minutes earlier, the second helicopter of the day delivered an assistant medical examiner from Houston, Stacy Sullivan. Ernie’s fire suit had TXDPS on the back, for Texas Department of Public Safety. Stacy’s read CORONER in large black letters.
Wearing a smoke mask like Ernie’s, Stacy made her way through the rubble to where he stood guard.
The forensic team scattered around us, in the woods funnels of light broke through the darkness. They wore miners’ type helmets with lights that beamed off the front illuminating their paths as they continued to search for any evidence tied to the fire.
Behind us the crowd of church members stood on tiptoes to see past the floodlights and us. Occasionally one or another coughed, or we heard whispers.
Soot scattered into the air with Stacy’s every step. Inside the perimeter of what used to be the church, she followed Ernie’s footprints into the demolished building. Once she reached him, Ernie pointed. They whispered, and Stacy crouched.
“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” Del said, breaking the near silence.
“What?” I asked. “The fire?”
“Sure, that, but more the fascination with it. The excitement guys like this get out of watching things burn.”
“It is a hell of a thing,” I agreed.
I considered what I knew about arsonists, firebugs, recalling how the power of a blaze intoxicates them. That brought to mind Liam Kneehoff sitting on death row. His enjoyment came from killing. He had a lot in common with whoever burnt the church. Arsonists and serial killers both experience sexual pleasure from destruction. They do for kicks what the rest of humanity finds inconceivable.
Inside the church’s burned-out hull, Ernie took photographs, the camera’s flash sending out bursts of light, as Stacy removed layers of rubble from on top of the body. They worked together, Stacy uncovering the corpse, inspecting it, and Ernie recording her progress with his camera.
“The church is gutted. I guess no one saw the fire last night? No one tried to put this out?” I asked Del.
“No. One of the church men, John Anderson, drove over this morning. He thought he heard something in the woods last night. Wanted to make sure everything was okay, that the place wasn’t robbed or something. He called 911, then went to the pastor’s home, didn’t find him.”
I wondered what the man heard in the woods. “Is Anderson here?”
Del pointed into the crowd at a man wearing jeans and a white dress shirt. “You want to talk to him?”
“Later,” I said.
Finished photographing, Stacy walked out and grabbed a white body bag, then pulled down her mask and called out to me. “Lieutenant, we need help.”
After we suited up in coveralls from the crime scene van, put on gloves, fire boots, and masks, Del and I picked our way into the building. When we reached Stacy, I saw the body. The top was charred a crusty black. The incredible heat had contracted the muscles and bound his legs and arms in a tight fetal position. His hands were clenched in fists. The skin thinnest on the face and head, I saw patches of white skull exposed between strips of seared muscle and flesh. The dead man had no face.
We were all funeral quiet.
Trying not to think about what we were doing, that a day earlier this had been a living, breathing human being, I squatted next to the others. Stacy laid out the body bag, unzipped it, and then splayed it out. I slipped my hands under the man’s shoulders. On the underside, where the fire didn’t reach, I felt soft flesh. Del took the feet, and Ernie and Stacy held the body at the back and hips. I felt a quickening in my chest as we lifted and then lowered the body into the bag. As soon as we had the body positioned, I stood and took a deep, somewhat labored breath. Despite the mask, I inhaled soot or smoke and coughed, hard. Two, three times, until I ripped the masked off, feeling suffocated.
When my hacking stopped, I noticed Del’s eyes above his mask a study in sadness.
Stacy zipped the body bag, and then all four of us heaved it up and carried it to the hearse. As we did, the vigil of mourners divided into two lines bordering the driveway, clearing our way. In the darkness, I heard sobbing, murmured prayers, saw men and women cleaved together in search of scarce comfort. A woman shrieked in agony.
We slid the body bag onto a gurney inside the hearse, and then stood back while Stacy climbed inside to secure it. Just then from behind us, one of the forensic guys yelled, “Lieutenant, I think we may have something!”
“You okay here?” I asked Stacy.
“You bet,” she said.
Del pulled off his mask, and we took off, walking into the dark woods, following the voice to where the man who called waited behind a massive oak.
“What is it?” Del asked.
“On the ground.” The man aimed his flashlight at the base of the tree.
I looked down and saw a cigarette butt, flattened as if stepped on, the paper still white as if fresh. In that moment, our mood lightened.
Del smiled, a grin that said more than words.
“Bag it,” I said. “Let’s hope we just got lucky.”
Seven
Stacy accompanied the body to the morgue, while Ernie and the forensic crew got ready to work through the night.
It had been a long day, and more work waited for me before bed. Del and I agreed to talk the following afternoon, after the lab results came in. Nothing more to be done tonight.
Before heading home, I approached the man in the crowd Del identified as John Anderson. “I need to hear about last night.”
Appearing embarrassed, he wiped away a tear. “Pastor Wilson was a good man. He cared about us. I could always talk to him.”
“I bet he was,” I said, touched by the man’s grief. “I am sincerely sorry for your loss.”
Anderson’s hands trembled. “I knew about the other fires, the two churches. Everybody around these parts has been talking about them,” he said, hoarse with regret. “But folks said they weren’t set by no one. I’d heard they were just normal fires, not arson.”
“I know,” I said. “Please, just tell me what happened last night.”
Describing the evening before, he said he heard voices in the woods. He’d watched but saw nothing and finally decided he was mistaken and left. Later, he had second thoughts. “I couldn’t sleep last night. This morning, I told Ebba, my wife, I should have stayed and made sure the church was safe,” he said. “I drove over here first thing this morning, on my way to work.”
At that, he blotted another tear. “Pastor Wilson was still inside picking up after services when we left last night. I went to his house. He wasn’t there.”
“Can you tell me where you thought the voices came from? What direction?”
Anderson pointed toward the big oak where the cigarette butt was recovered. This seemed promising. “Does Pastor Wilson have family we can contact?”
“A daughter in Austin. The pastor is… I guess I should say was a widower. His wife died of cancer last year.”
“Ah. Well, if you give us the daughter’s name, we’d like to reach out to her.”
At that, Anderson’s eyes filled yet again. “To tell her that her father’s dead, right? That’s what’s left of him in the bag, isn’t it?” He looked at me expectantly, as if hoping that his fears weren’t true.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “The medical examiner will have to figure out whose body we found. But at this point, that’s our best guess.”
The man looked beaten. “This is my fault. I could have stayed and stopped it.”
“You
couldn’t have known.” After terrible crimes, after devastating events it wasn’t unusual for folks to want to rewrite the past, but it was useless. Somehow the living had to come to terms with their inability to make things right. They needed to find peace. “Mr. Anderson, if you had stayed, it’s unlikely that the arsonist would have given up. Whoever did this had already decided what he’d do to your church.”
“But if I’d stayed until our pastor left to walk home, he might still be alive.”
To that, I had no reassuring response. I knew John Anderson would struggle for the rest of his life with the possibility that he could have saved his friend. “You can help Pastor Wilson now. You can write out a statement describing everything you know. There’s a chance that’ll help the sheriff figure out who did this.”
After midnight I arrived at the Rocking Horse, assuming Mom and Maggie had been asleep for hours. I had one last task to complete before bed. I climbed the steps inside the garage and opened the door into my workroom. The light switched on, I turned on my desktop computer and opened my briefcase. I took out the sketch pad with my drawing of Victim Thirteen, the woman Liam Kneehoff described that morning. I entered my password and gained access to the DPS Website, then clicked on MISSING PERSONS.
Once the page loaded, I keyed in the year but not the month Kneehoff said he’d abducted the woman. He’d given me an approximate date for the abduction, but I knew he played games, weaving bad information in with good. So along with the year, I listed the bare minimum.
FEMALE. WHITE. DARK HAIR.
Then I thought about what else Kneehoff said. I took a chance and added CLEAR LAKE, the suburb south of Houston where he said Victim Thirteen planned to get off the bus. I pressed enter and waited. In seconds the screen flashed photos of a woman who disappeared from that area about that time. She looked nothing like my drawing.
“Shoot.” I mused, angry, considering how Kneehoff refused to make anything easy.
The Buried Page 5
