Beau reached in his pocket for his phone. He thought he might call Jimi Jo, find out where she was and if she could meet him somewhere. She’d like this house. He could give her directions so she could come and stay. He wondered if the police talked to her. If they did, he wondered what she told them.
“Where is it?” he muttered checking his jean pockets. When he’d searched them all, he repeated the drill. No phone. “Shit,” he said, thinking about how he’d last seen it on the seat next to him in his pickup truck.
A long breath, and he wondered what to do. He grabbed a cordless phone from a cradle attached to the kitchen wall, held it up and looked at it, trying to think of Jimi Jo’s phone number. He had it stored in his phone and couldn’t remember it.
Just then on television, a news bulletin.
“It looks like someone is burning churches in east Texas again. The fourth church fire in two months today, and this one was set while services were going on. One man badly burned, but authorities say it’s a miracle no one died.”
From there, they cut to a reporter standing outside of St. Peter’s Methodist, an EMS unit in the background, two fire trucks, and firemen in full gear. Beau sat on the couch to watch, pleased.
As the reporter gave a brief rundown of what had happened, how Pastor Wilson died in the Lord’s Acre fire, Beau noticed a woman standing in front of the church, the same Texas Ranger Beau remembered from Chet’s ranch.
“Yesterday, one woman was arrested in connection with the first three fires,” the reporter said. “Jimi Jo Jaspers is in the county jail, booked on arson and a murder charge. Authorities say she’s the accomplice of a man named Beau Whittle, a mechanic, and that Jaspers has confessed to helping Whittle set the first three churches on fire, including the one where the pastor perished.”
“Damn, Jimi Jo!” Beau whispered, as his driver’s license photo appeared on the TV screen. “What’d she go confess for?”
“These cases have a lot of twists and turns. For instance, Texas Ranger Lieutenant Sarah Armstrong, behind me in the blue blazer, recently caused a stir in the media. During a prison visit, she apparently asked the I-45 Strangler, Liam Kneehoff, for help with the investigation.”
The station then cut to video of Kneehoff talking to Trey Wilkins during his death row podcast. “A Texas Ranger who works as a criminal profiler, asked me about a case she’s investigating. She wanted my opinion on a series of church burnings,” Kneehoff said on the video. “Why? Because she knew I would be able to help her understand this man. We’re fellow travelers, you know, serial killers and arsonists, society’s enemies.”
“Arsonists and serial killers are…”
“Fellow travelers,” Kneehoff said. “I understand the man who would do this. I sympathize with him. We’re alike.”
The station cut back to the scene. “Kneehoff’s entire interview is available on the Internet,” the reporter said. “Thankfully St. Peter’s escaped with only minor damage and there were no deaths. But lighting the fire during services takes these cases to a new level. Sheriff Del Delgado told me that he will ask for more state help to continue the investigation.”
Stunned, Beau turned off the television and sat back on the couch. He wondered about the man, Kneehoff, the one in prison. A serial killer, the reporter said. He thought about how Kneehoff said they shared traits. He called Beau a “fellow traveler.”
“This don’t seem all that right,” he muttered. He glanced over at the house phone sitting on an end table and considered calling his mother to find out if she knew anything about Jimi Jo or the investigation. He picked up the phone, thought for a minute and put it back down.
Beau thought about Edith Mae and what she’d say about all this. Mom always said that there were angels and devils in the world, Beau thought. Then he wondered if the man, Kneehoff, was the devil. But if he was, who cared? Beau Whittle figured he was already condemned to hell.
He thought about what the reporter said, that there was more to listen to on the Internet. Again, he wished he had his phone, this time to look for the interview. He thought about going back for it, but decided that was too risky. The sheriff and that woman ranger were looking for him in the RAV 4 by now. Maybe they’d already found his pickup and his phone.
“Damn,” he mumbled, lighting a cigarette.
His stomach growling, Beau opened a jar of peanut butter from the pantry. While he ate it with a spoon, he looked around the house. In a kitchen alcove near the laundry room, he spotted a computer. He pressed the button and turned it on. The welcome screen loaded with a slot for a password. He tried the address of the house and the couples’ last name. Neither unlocked the screen. He leafed through a stack of papers, but found nothing that worked.
He kept at it, until he discovered a rectangle of paper taped underneath the keyboard. On it someone had handwritten: Riverhouse1.
When he keyed that in, picking it out with his index fingers, the opening screen popped up, a photo of the old couple fishing on the river.
He clicked onto the Internet, and then entered SERIAL KILLER INTERVIEW CHURCH BURNINGS. A list of websites popped up, one a link to a video. Beau clicked on it, and for the next hour watched mesmerized by Liam Kneehoff, the man who claimed he and Beau had a connection. No one before, not even Edith Mae, had ever claimed to understand Beau.
After he watched the interview once, he cued it up again. During the third viewing, Beau stopped the video and played and replayed one particular section.
“Do you regret that she got away?” Wilkins asked in the video.
Kneehoff smiled. “I did, of course. I would have done anything to finish what I’d begun.”
“You would have?”
“Oh, yes, definitely. She was the one responsible, you know, the one they used to identify and arrest me. Kristilynn Cavanaugh was the beginning of the end for me. In fact, for years I sat in my cell thinking of her, wishing someone would kill her for me.”
Twenty-one
The captain had Ernie and his arson dog, Smoke, airlifted as soon as I called. He arrived shortly before I did. While I climbed out of the Suburban and walked over to Del, Ernie stalked up and down near the firetruck, apparently trying to figure out who was in charge of the brigade.
Getting nowhere, Ernie yelled at the men with the hoses. They either couldn’t hear him or ignored him. Flustered, Ernie walked toward us, Smoke at his heels.
“Hi, Ernie, thanks for coming –” I started, but he walked right past me.
“Sheriff, I need that water turned off now. That fire is out, been out for a long time, and they’re destroying my evidence. They need to back up and get away from the building.”
“Ernie, you sure it won’t –” Del started.
“Sheriff, I said now!” Ernie sputtered.
Del looked at him for a moment then glanced at me, as if implying I was responsible for bringing this madman into the investigation. Which, of course, I was.
A glint of determination in Del’s narrowed eyes, he stalked toward the firemen, shouting, “Whoa, whoa! Turn that water off!”
Vintage Ernie, he’d never been good at politics. Single-minded, he honed in on what he wanted and expected it done. Working for the state fire marshal, he had authority, but that wasn’t always easy to get across to the locals. The hoses finally cut off and shouting ensued, Del yelling at the fire chief to let Ernie take over, the chief shouting back that he had to make sure the fire wouldn’t flare up.
“You got it out!” Ernie shouted, walking away from me and heading toward the squabble. “I promise you, it’s not flaring up unless one of you relights it!”
“Okay, everyone, get back to the truck,” Del yelled. “Let the fire marshal take over.”
Unhappy, the fire chief shot them both angry looks as he pulled his men back. “That church burns any more, it’s on your heads,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry about it,” Ernie said. “I do this for a living, you know.”
Once he had Erni
e settled down, Del looked at me and shook his head. “You know, I didn’t think Beau would light another one so fast, not with us searching for him. How damn stupid or brazen is this guy?”
“Del, we can’t assume he’ll lay off,” I cautioned. “Beau Whittle is an addict, and this is what gets him high. Lighting a fire gives him a sense of power, of being in control.”
“I know, but…,” then he stopped and looked at me, furious. “Sarah, there were people in that church!”
“I understand. And that’s what’s most disturbing. When he chose to set it.”
Across the street a small gathering of reporters mixed in with curious townsfolk. The church’s redbrick front was blackened, parts seared, but there wasn’t a lot of damage. It didn’t go up the way a wooden structure would have.
For the next two hours, I watched as Ernie processed the scene while I went over with Del what he’d done the evening before to look for Beau Whittle.
Deputies had spread out searching for the pickup and talking to folks who knew Beau, including Pastor Chet and the men Beau worked with on the ranches. None knew much about Beau, who tended to be introverted on the job. They all mentioned Jimi Jo. When Beau did talk, he talked about her, his girlfriend, and that they planned to get married. When asked where he might hide, it didn’t surprise me that they all agreed it would be the woods.
“Beau hunts, has a shotgun with him in the truck all the time,” Del said. “But they don’t know where he goes hunting, so that leaves a lot of forest to search. I thought about calling in the helicopters to fly over, but they’d need some idea, Sarah. I can’t have them search the whole damn county.”
“Yup,” I said. “That’s probably true.”
Del had also called in the forensic folks and they spent much of the prior evening processing Jimi Jo’s trailer. Despite the piles of trash inside the place, the search went well. It turned out that Beau’s arson supplies were in the shed. They found rags, bottles and jars similar to those used to make the bottle bombs. Everything had been tagged as evidence and sent to the fire marshal’s office in Austin to be processed and compared to the samples Ernie collected at the scenes.
“I tried to talk to Edith Mae again, but she wouldn’t even open the door. Yelled at me to get away. I couldn’t force her to talk,” Del said. “I had the folks at the office subpoena Beau’s financial records, but all he has is a credit card. I’m not expecting to see much there. I decided our best shot was put a trace on his phone. The AT&T records we’ve gotten so far look like he’s addicted to that thing.”
Then Sheriff Delgado mentioned a RAV4 missing from the church parking lot and said he had a BOLO, a be-on-the-lookout, issued for it. “We don’t know if Beau took it, but we’re thinking he might have it. So we have a BOLO out on Beau’s pickup and the RAV4, to cover both possibilities.”
“Okay,” I said. “Sounds good. I want to go talk to Edith Mae.”
“I told you I tried.”
“Let’s stop to see a judge. Get ourselves a search warrant for her house. We need to tell her what her boy tried to do this morning.”
“I’m not letting you in!” Edith Mae screamed from behind the door. “I told you Sheriff, leave me alone! I don’t know where Beau is. I got no idea!”
“Mrs. Whittle, you don’t have a choice,” I shouted back. “As we explained. We have a search warrant signed by a judge. Your son is wanted on a murder charge. Did you know that this morning he lit another church on fire? This one filled with people?”
For a moment, silence. “Beau wouldn’t do that. I know he wouldn’t,” Edith Mae scoffed. “I don’t care what you’ve got. I’m not letting you in here.”
The sheriff frowned. “Edith Mae, with or without your permission, we’re coming in. If you don’t open this door of yours, you’ll be at Home Depot buying a replacement, because I’m ordering my men to get the battering ram and we’re going to…”
The door creaked open, and I saw one eye surrounded by wrinkles. “Are you going to let us in?” the sheriff asked.
“I guess I don’t have a choice,” the old woman answered. “But I’m not telling you anything. You understand?”
Moments later, the sheriff and I had Edith Mae with us on the front porch while the forensic team moved into the house. “Let me tell you about what happened at St. Peter’s Methodist this morning,” I offered. “The place was pretty full, when –”
“I saw it on TV,” Edith Mae cut me off. “I’m telling you Beau wouldn’t do that. Just like he wouldn’t kill Pastor Wilson.”
“You don’t think so, huh?” I asked. “But you’re not denying that your son likes to set fires?”
“Well,” she started. “That may be. Beau burned down a shed once and a dead tree. But he never hurt no one.”
I nodded. “You know, Edith, I kind of agree with you.”
Del looked surprised and gave me a quizzical look. “Jimi Jo said that Beau didn’t plan to kill anyone at Lord’s Acre, that they were there to burn the church not murder Pastor Wilson. He just happened to still be inside. She called it an accident.”
Edith Mae leaned toward me, closed one eye and looked at me through the other, suspicious. “Jimi Jo told you that? She said my boy burned down Lord’s Acre and killed the pastor?”
“Yes, she did,” Del said. “And, like the lieutenant said, she called Pastor Wilson’s death an accident.”
At that, Edith Mae walked over and sat in a metal rocker, one so old the paint had worn thin and rust crept up the back. “So she says Beau was the one who burned the church. You’re not lying to me about that?”
“No, we’re not lying to you,” I answered.
Edith Mae chewed on that for a few minutes, and we let her. We wanted it to penetrate all her objections. “What happened this morning?” she asked.
Del told her all of it, the church members listening to the sermon when they smelled smoke and saw the flames. Someone shouted, “Fire!”
“There were little children in that church. An old woman with a walker,” I said. “Beau must have decided he liked killing after Pastor Wilson died. The assistant fire marshal says Beau tried to throw a bottle bomb inside the church, to block the door and keep people from getting out. He wanted at least some of them to die in the fire.”
Edith Mae shook her head as if that simply wasn’t possible. “My boy wouldn’t do that!” she said, her voice low and raspy. “Beau couldn’t.”
The sound of the sheriff’s phone ringing cut her off. He clicked it open, said, “Sheriff Delgado here.” Then he went quiet and listened.
Edith Mae looked up at me. “Beau wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t ever. I’m telling you, he never hurt anyone. Never –”
“They found Beau’s pickup,” the sheriff said, his head cocked to the right as if challenging Edith Mae. “It was on a road behind St. Peter’s, the church where those folks almost died in the fire this morning.”
At that, Edith Mae leaned so far back in the rocker I thought it would topple over. We were quiet. I pictured a church full of families, and Beau lurking outside hoping to kill them. Somehow, that image must have finally gotten through to Edith Mae. She looked up at me, then at the sheriff.
“I’ll help you. I don’t want no one else dead,” she said. “But you better be telling me the truth. Because I done a lot of bad things in my life, but I’ve never before turned on my own blood.”
In chilling detail, Edith Mae then told the story of her son’s life. From childhood on, Beau had been a firebug.
“We had Beau late, a menopause baby. His daddy and me wanted kids, but they didn’t come. Then out of the blue, I got pregnant. The boy seemed okay, until his dad died,” she said. “A few months later, I found Beau burning logs out in the woods. A couple of years after that, he almost set the house on fire lighting paper in a garbage can. I yelled and screamed, but I couldn’t break him of it. Then the tree and the shed. Finally, I helped him build a fire pit out in the woods, let him go out there to light fires.
That became his place. I thought it would get it out of his system, you know?”
“Where is it?” I asked.
We parked on the side of a small country road and walked between the trees into the woods, brittle, dry leaves cracking under our feet.
“Over that way,” Edith Mae said. “We used to come here with Beau’s dad, pitch a tent and sleep out under the stars. Beau never really was the same after his daddy died.”
Once she’d decided to open up, Edith Mae talked willingly, filling us in on her son’s life. His father had a cocaine problem, one that started before Beau was born. It kept getting worse. “Beau’s daddy died out here.”
“Where you built the fire pit?” I asked.
“Right near there. I told Beau his daddy died of an overdose because I knew he’d believe that. He was little, but he still saw what the drugs did to his old man. Made him mean and depressed,” Edith Mae said. “I didn’t want Beau to know the truth. His daddy went out here in the woods and shot himself through the head. I found him crumpled up in the woods, the gun in his hand. I wasn’t surprised. The drugs had taken over, and I figured that was his only way out.”
We reached the circle of boulders in a clearing. Beau had a fallen tree trunk on one side, high enough to sit on. Del walked into the pit, which had to be ten feet across, squatted and looked at the ashes. “You know, Sarah, these look fresh to me. I’m not the world’s authority on fires, but these ashes haven’t broken down much yet. And some are wet, like someone threw water on to put it out.”
“You think Beau could have stayed here last night?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Del said.
I poked around, looking under the trees, and it didn’t take long before I found a cigarette butt. A filterless one. “Del, have you got an evidence bag?”
“In my car trunk,” he said.
I walked out, grabbed a few, and trudged back, bagged the cigarette butt, held it up to show him.
“You think it’s his?” Del asked.
“Not sure, but it could be.”
The Buried Page 13
