“Tim, that was the closest Kneehoff could estimate the other day when we were out there, remember? His best guess. We have no reason to think he’ll do any better with a return trip.”
“Well, you see, I have a reason. My people tracked down more aerial shots, clearer than the last batch. I still can’t figure it out. But I’m willing to bet that Kneehoff can since he’s the one who buried that woman. I think he’ll look at those photos and be able to pin it down for sure.”
Silence.
“Lieutenant, I can’t keep asking my folks to work out there in this blasted heat in that damn field when we don’t know where to look,” he said, and I heard frustration and a hint of anger. “Tomorrow is Sunday, church day, and they’d all rather be with their families, believe me. Without more information, we could end up having to dig up the whole damn field. You should see the pile of dirt we’ve pulled out of that hole already.”
I thought about the woman in the field, her bones in an unmarked grave. Her family didn’t know what happened to her. If we didn’t find her, for eternity her face would be displayed among the missing. And I thought about Liam Kneehoff, the monster who murdered her, and the thought of allowing him to leave prison walls again, even briefly, terrified me.
“I’ll talk to the captain and the warden. I can’t promise anything, but I’ll ask.”
Nineteen
The first thing the next morning, Sunday, I checked in with the captain. “All clear overnight at Kristilynn’s house?”
“An uneventful stakeout. Only one problem. She made the guy as a cop. Went out and talked to him.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nope, they put some rookie on it. All they could spare. He parked so close to the house, she would have had to be blind not to see him.”
“Shoot,” I said. “Was she upset? Worried that we think she needs protection?”
“No. He told her it was just a precaution. Actually, she was grateful. She asked the cop to say thank you for her.”
That was good news. “We are going to keep this up for a while, right?”
“Just through tonight. It ends tomorrow morning.”
“Longer would be better.”
“You know how tight budgets are, Sarah. I’ll ask again, try to persuade them, but don’t count on it.”
Then I told him about Tim Miller’s phone call, his request to have Kneehoff back out at the dig site. The captain grew silent. He didn’t like it any more than I did.
“I’ll call the warden this time,” he said. “If he disagrees, I can mention making a phone call to the governor’s office.”
For fifteen minutes or so, Tim Miller and I stood staring into the hole, thirty feet across, most of it four- to five-foot deep. The backhoe had been driven out and it waited nearby to be relocated to another section of dirt to start over. It felt like a dry sauna in that field. I could feel my skin crinkling. I usually only wore my official straw cowboy hat when forced to, department photos and such. I had it on to block the sun, but the heat still sizzled on my back. The sky shone a bright blue with nary a cloud, no hope of rain in sight.
“So you found nothing?” I asked.
“Some old bottles, a few steak bones some dog must have buried, but that’s pretty much it,” Miller looked worn and weary, frustrated from so much work that yielded so little. “Maybe today, after Kneehoff takes a look at this, we can close it up.”
“Let’s hope.”
Out near the street, behind the crime scene tape where we’d set up guards, news crews bunched. Cameramen with long lenses attempted to focus in on our faces, the backhoe, and the volunteers who waited for direction. Occasionally one or two helicopters hovered overhead. Mixed among the reporters were a dozen anti-death-penalty protestors carrying signs: LIFE NOT DEATH. NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO KILL.
The demonstrators began shouting when the black prison van with the wire mesh over the windows drove down the road and pulled into the parking lot.
“Looks like my fan club arrived,” Kneehoff said, as the guards lowered him off the van, blinking at the sunlight. He needed help with the shackles, but once on the ground he shuffled forward a few feet.
“I wouldn’t assume they’re fans, Liam,” I said. “They’re just folks against the DP, in all cases. Even yours.”
“Do you agree with them, Sarah?” he asked. He looked at me, taunting, as if expecting me to tell him what he wanted to hear.
“It’s not my call. The jury made that decision, not me.”
Kneehoff looked more relaxed than in the past, actually cheery, and I hated that. I had no problem with folks protesting. People are entitled to their opinions. But I hated that it pleased Liam Kneehoff. Happy as a clam, Mom would have described him. I felt sickened.
Then I looked him over and realized today was different than his first visit to the dig site. I wondered if the warden had taken Sunday morning off and wasn’t at the prison. They hadn’t taken all the same precautions. The leather strap was missing, the one that immobilized Kneehoff’s arms.
“Why isn’t he wearing the chest belt?” I asked the guards.
It turned out that I’d guessed wrong. The warden had given the order.
“Warden Overton didn’t want the news media getting shots of Kneehoff bound up like that in this heat,” said the sergeant in charge, a burly man with grapefruit-size biceps. “He didn’t want to see that picture on the front page. Thought it could blow these demonstrations up, bring in more protestors. We had a bunch in front of the prison all last evening chanting, ‘No death penalty.’”
Kneehoff laughed. “You worried, Sarah?”
“No. Because I’m not going to take my eyes off you,” I said.
“Now, that’s something I’ll enjoy,” he said.
I had the urge to slap him. Instead I smiled slightly. Our interactions fiction, I treated him like I didn’t think he was a deranged animal, when that was absolutely the way I viewed him.
“Good to hear, Liam.”
I looked inside the van and saw the chain they’d used to anchor him to the wall. While the others waited, I climbed in, unhooked it and dropped it down to the guards. “Loop this over the handcuffs to keep him from moving his hands, and lock it behind him to keep his arms down.”
“Look at me, I can barely walk,” Kneehoff said. “How could I do anything? You think I can run in shackles?”
I ignored him, and the guards did as I instructed. As we walked toward the building, the chain dragged behind Kneehoff, and I had the sergeant pick up the loose ends and carry them.
“Hold onto him,” I said, and the sergeant nodded.
We made our way slowly toward Miller’s command station where he had the aerial photos laid out on a table under an awning. At first, all went well. Then, suddenly, Kneehoff’s left foot in his black rubber prison flip flop dragged, and he fell forward, face first.
“Grab him!” I shouted, and the sergeant yanked the chain so hard Kneehoff toppled backward. Two other guards rushed to keep him from falling over, clutching Kneehoff by the upper arms, jolting him upright.
My chest seized, when I saw Kneehoff try to jerk his arms upward, his eyes locked on semi-automatic pistols in the guards’ holsters. As Kneehoff struggled to grab the guns, the sergeant yelled, “Step back!”
The guards did, and the sergeant yanked the chain and cinched it tighter, tugged at the handcuffs, and anchored Kneehoff’s hands below his waist.
Pinned, Kneehoff seethed hatred.
My heart lodged in my throat. I thought about what might have happened. Could he have gotten away? I doubted it, but with a gun in his hands, anything could have happened. Some of us could be lying face down in the dirt.
“Come on, Liam,” I said. “We have work to do.”
The guards, realizing how things had nearly gone terribly wrong, encircled Kneehoff with their hands on their guns as he reluctantly shuffled forward.
The rest of the hour Liam Kneehoff spent at the dig site went without inci
dent. For most of that time, he sat in a folding chair studying the photos. Tim Miller offered him a cigarette, lit it for him and held it up for him so he could take a few puffs. He got him a Dr. Pepper out of the cooler, holding the can up to Kneehoff’s lips. Despite the odd circumstances, a serial killer and a man who’d lost his daughter to the same type of monster, they talked unemotionally, like two men who understood construction. Kneehoff eyed the field again, while Tim held up the photos for him. They walked out, followed by our procession of heavily armed guards. Kneehoff stopped.
“This is it,” he said.
“Thank you, Liam,” Tim said. He put out his hand, then realized his mistake and pulled it back, saying, “We’ll take it from here.”
Finished, Tim looked over at me. “Lieutenant, Mr. Kneehoff can go back to the prison now.”
In a replay of two days earlier, Tim stayed behind and pounded a stake into the ground with the sledge while we walked Kneehoff back to the van. Minutes later, it drove through the lot and waited at the road. As it pulled out, the demonstrators shouted, “Let him live!”
The cameramen recorded footage of the van as it drove away, and I wondered if their cameras caught Kneehoff staring out through the darkened windows. I knew he watched them, his chest swelled with pride. Look at what he’d wrought with a simple podcast interview.
Once the van disappeared from sight, Tim and I reviewed his plans. If this attempt panned out, it appeared that the first dig had been off by nearly two hundred feet. “He seems pretty confident about this one,” Tim said.
“Well, we’ll see. Remember, Liam Kneehoff plays games,” I warned. “That’s the one thing you can count on with him, that he’s always playing some kind of sick game.”
He sighed. “You know, Lieutenant, it’s a shot. Right? Have we got a better option than working with him?”
“No,” I admitted. “But don’t get your hopes up.”
The volunteers moved the equipment over to the wooden stake, and Tim directed them as they angled the backhoe. Soon it scraped across the drought-hardened earth, pulling back and scooping up inches of dirt at a time, swiveling and throwing it into the dump truck.
“You will call me if you find anything, right?” I confirmed.
I realized at that moment that this had all become personal for me, as it had for Kristilynn Cavanaugh. She thought of the dead women as hers, that she lived for them. They mattered to her. I, too, felt a responsibility to all of them. They deserved to be found, to be with their families, to finally go home.
“I will,” Tim said. “Absolutely.”
I’d missed church with Maggie and Mom but thought we’d have the afternoon. On the drive to the ranch, I pushed the phone button on the steering wheel and called Sheriff Delgado, to see if they had Beau Whittle in jail yet.
“I was just going to call you,” Del said. “I know it’s a Sunday, but you need to come quick.”
“You got him?”
“I wish. What I’ve got is another fire.”
Twenty
Beau Whittle had nearly forgotten about the house, the place on the river where his mother had taken him so often. During the decade Edith Mae kept house for the elderly couple, Beau mulched the flower beds, raked leaves in the spring and cut the crepe myrtles back in January so they’d bloom all summer. He hadn’t been there in a couple of years, not since Edith Mae lost the job. It was his fault, she said. But he didn’t truly hold himself accountable.
“It all came from you,” he told her. “You’re the one who done this to me.”
Beau placed the blame for his addictions on heredity. His father died young of a drug overdose. Her church friends didn’t know that Edith Mae, despite professing to be a teetotaler, opened a bottle in the afternoons. By seven most nights she passed out in her lounge chair in front of the TV. With that kind of family tree, Beau reasoned he didn’t have a choice. Why wouldn’t he snort meth? That the old man who owned the river house walked in and found Beau doing it? Well, that was an unfortunate accident. Not that Edith Mae understood when they fired her.
“Lost her job and blamed me, like she blames everything on me,” he whispered. “And it was her fault all along.”
Still, Edith Mae did try to protect him. Like when she called to say Uncle Chet said the sheriff and Texas Ranger thought Beau might be involved in the fires. She didn’t ask Beau if he did it. She knew. He had been lighting fires in the woods since he was six, burnt down a dead oak tree at twelve and a neighbor’s shed at sixteen.
“You better get scarce,” Edith Mae warned. “And if you get caught, you keep me out of it.”
The law after him, Beau decided that the river house presented the perfect option. Every July and August the elderly couple drove to Minnesota to visit relatives and get out of the Texas heat. Unless something had changed, they’d be gone for weeks.
That morning, he woke up in his pickup parked in the woods and decided to set one more fire before he went into hiding. He knew he wouldn’t be able to linger and watch, not with the police after him. But he could stay a little while, at least those first minutes. Later, once he got to the house, he would watch reports of the fire on TV. He’d been disappointed that the news people ignored the first three fires, that reporters didn’t show up with cameras. With what he planned for number four, he reasoned that it would be a very big deal. They would have to come.
He didn’t have to think too long to become convinced. Beau had been itching to set another fire ever since Lord’s Acre.
In the past, a fire satisfied him longer. But the last one, the one the pastor died in, sent excitement surging through him like he’d never before experienced. Watching the fire, seeing the man struggle inside, gave him a rush more powerful than drugs. In the past, a fire would last him for weeks. But here it was just four days out, and he already felt that hollowness in his gut. The emptiness that only another fire would fill.
He thought about the churches where Edith Mae sometimes went for help, and the ones where Jimi Jo’s mom asked for prayers before the cancer took her. And Beau decided that he’d pay St. Peter’s Methodist, the largest of the churches on his list, a visit.
About seven that morning, he snuck into town, and parked on a country road half a mile from the church. He lugged through the woods what he needed, one can of gas, two Molotov cocktails. As he walked, he wished Jimi Jo was with him. She would have liked what he had planned. He felt sure of it.
Staying on the outskirts of the town, Beau hid in the woods and watched worshippers arrive dressed in their Sunday best. The sixty-year-old church had a redbrick front, half-a-dozen steps leading up to the door, and cathedral windows, narrow and rounded at the top. An old woman with a walker clambered up the steps, while a young man with tattoos held the door open for her. Couples waved at each other as they filed in. Children held their parents’ hands. Soon they were all inside, and Beau came out from behind cover.
The service started. He heard the choir singing as he walked quickly through the lot, trying doors on a few pickups before he found the green RAV4 unlocked. Bending to get a good angle, Beau used a screwdriver to pop open the dashboard and pull out wires. Seconds later, the engine started.
He left it running.
Circling back to the church, Beau heard snatches of what sounded like a sermon warning the flock to walk a narrow path. Inside, all eyes would be on the preacher.
Seizing the moment, Beau poured a heavy stream of gas around the front of the church, stood back, lit and threw the first Molotov cocktail at the door. A whoosh, and the flames spread. Then he lit and threw the other bottle at a window adjacent to the door, aiming it at an angle, hoping it would flare up and block the door.
He missed.
Instead the bottle smashed on the window frame and fell into the already burning fire. “Shit,” he said, turning to run.
From inside the church he heard screams, people shouting, “Fire!”
How frightened they all must be, Beau thought as he scrambled
into the RAV4, trying not to attract attention. He wanted to see the panic on their faces as they fled, wanted to hear the screams. Two men ran out first, one carrying a satin banner he tore off a wall. He threw it on the fire and stomped on it. The second man grabbed a hose hooked up to a spigot and blasted water at the blaze.
The banner squashed the flames some, but they reared up and caught the fabric on fire. The man kept at it, but it flared, catching fire to his pants. He screamed and stepped back, fell and tried to roll. The man with the hose turned it on him.
As Beau drove the RAV4 from the lot, he glanced back and saw people run out from the church’s backdoor. In front, the fire was nearly extinguished. The woman with the walker shuffled forward and nearly fell, but managed to keep walking.
“Shit, shit, shit!” Beau muttered, thinking how much easier it had been with Jimi Jo. She could have covered the back of the church. Too hard to control the people by himself. Too hard to make sure they stayed in the church.
Half-an-hour’s drive later, the house on the river looked much the way he remembered it. It had a long driveway, a garage, and was hidden deep in the woods. No one answered the doorbell. Beau waited a few minutes, then bent down and searched the front porch. He found a key under a flowerpot.
Once inside, the place looked the way he expected, closed up like no one had been there for days or weeks. The nearest house half a mile down the road, he didn’t worry when he turned on the television. He looked in the refrigerator and found little there, but the freezer had a good stock of meat and the pantry shelves held rice, beans, pasta and cans of vegetables and chili. He had enough to hole up for weeks.
The television on, he watched for a breaking news report about the church burning. The stations coming out of Houston kept on with regular programming, Sunday political programs, cartoons, one played an old movie, the other services from a big city mega church, the pastor railing about “coming to Jesus” and “standing with the righteous!”
The Buried Page 12
