“One of my deputies.”
“So the kid radioed in and said he saw flames. He was supposed to wait for backup. But instead he said he wanted to get close enough to get a visual,” Del explained. We stood in the clearing. The fire pit was black, reduced to embers, and in the center was a body, burned beyond recognition. The leather on the kid’s belt had burned, but the metal buckle remained, melted around the edges like his badge.
“How old was he?” I asked.
“Twenty-six. He’d been with us three years.” Quiet, unemotional, Del’s eyes never left the body. The medical examiner knelt in the ashes, inspecting what was left of the young man. “The dispatcher told him to wait for backup, but he didn’t listen. The kid was a good guy, but gung-ho. We’d had talks about that, but it obviously didn’t deter him. I guess he thought he had the situation under control.”
We looked around, and I tried to visualize how it happened. The deputy saw the fire and called it in, then made his way to the pit, most likely hiding in amongst the trees. The moon had been full the night before, giving him less cover.
“Beau must have heard him.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking,” Del said. “As far as what the kid told the dispatcher, he wasn’t going to confront Beau, just keep eyes on him and wait for the others to arrive.”
“They found him in the fire? It was still burning?”
“Yeah, but the doc says it looks like the kid was shot, too. Only good thing about all this is he might have died before Beau torched him.” Del took off his cowboy hat and toyed with the corners of his mustache. “We’ll know for sure when they get him back to the morgue and look at his lungs, see if he sucked in any smoke.”
We stood there for a long time just looking at the kid’s body. Del pulled out a white cotton handkerchief and wiped his face. He’d been at the crime scene for less than an hour, but sweat stained his shirt. Just past seven, this day like all the others started out unremorsefully hot and would without a doubt build.
“No sign of Beau?”
“Nope, and no sign of a car, but we tracked footsteps back through the woods. They led to a deserted driveway, some kind of old path. We think he parked the car there.”
“Huh,” I said. Del gave me a quizzical glance. “Nothing. Just thinking that Edith Mae didn’t mention a driveway, did she?”
“Nah, she didn’t”
“I think that woman’s not telling us everything she could,” I said.
“I don’t know about any driveway in the woods,” Edith Mae insisted. We’d woken her and she still wore her cotton nightgown, white with small blue flowers, slippers and a bathrobe. Her hair stood on end like she’d put some kind of pomade on it before bed.
“Edith, you said your family went out there often. Where did your husband park when he took you camping? He didn’t leave the truck out on that itty bitty road did he?” Visibly angry, Del had a hard time keeping his voice calm. “If you’d told us about the damn driveway, we would have watched it.”
“Well, I…”
“Now I’ve got a dead deputy. You know, Shawn Hawkins?”
Edith Mae screwed her mouth up into a worried look. “I remember little Shawn. He used to work at the convenience store weekends.”
“Yeah, that’s him,” Del said. “When we leave here, I’ll be telling his momma that he’s dead. And down the road, when we’ve got this all sewed up, she’ll be hearing that your boy, Beau, murdered Shawn. That’s two now, Edith Mae. Pastor Wilson and Deputy Hawkins.”
Edith Mae sat on the couch and buried her face in her hands.
“I need to know everything you know,” the sheriff said. “And I need to know it now.”
“I didn’t know about a driveway or whatever it is,” she insisted. “When I went there, we parked on the shoulder, on the road.” Del looked skeptical, and Edith Mae glared at him. “I’m telling you we did! Beau must’a found or built that way in to park his car. His daddy didn’t do it!”
“Okay, forget the damn driveway,” Del said. “But you do know something that could help us. You know where that boy of yours might go, where he could hide out. I bet you do if you just think it through!”
Edith Mae whispered, “I don’t.”
I stood back and watched her squirm. She knew something.
“You’re not being honest with us, Edith Mae, and that’s a mistake,” I said. I bent down, looked that old woman in her bloodshot eyes and dared her to lie to me. She pulled back, but I leaned closer. “You better tell us the truth before this thing comes back and bites you. Beau may not be the only one in prison when this is over. I hear it’s not a good place to live out your golden years.”
She gulped hard, all the while doing her best to leer right back at me. “Well, I’m telling you that I can’t think of no place that boy of mine could hide,” she said. “So help me God!”
Del and I paused to compare notes on the street in front of Edith Mae’s house. “I still think that old biddy’s lying. You, too?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She knows something, and she’s not telling.”
“Damn her.”
“You’re short staffed watching the churches,” I said. “I’ll call the captain and ask him to assign a trooper to keep tabs on Edith Mae. I want to know where she goes, who she talks to.”
“Thanks. That’d be a help.” Del nodded.
“No problem. Anything else I can do?”
Del shook his head. “Not that I can think of. We’ll talk later. I’ve gotta go and tell Mrs. Hawkins that her boy’s dead.”
Thirty-three
As the sun rose, Beau slowed down on the road and decided not to drive directly back to the river house. Instead, he circled to make sure no one followed him or waited to pull out and corner him. Still uncertain, when he reached the river he drove half-a-mile past his hideout, planning to continue driving if he saw anyone suspicious.
Convinced no one waited for him, he finally pulled into the driveway, drove the Taurus around to the side of the house and parked.
Once inside, he searched through the old man’s closet and pulled out a golf shirt and jeans. He had blood on his clothes, streaks across the front where the deputy bled out while Beau carried him to the fire pit. The guy writhed and tried to get away from him, but Beau wrapped his arms around him and held tight. Weak, the deputy didn’t have the strength to fight Beau off.
“I should have dragged that guy,” Beau said, pulling off his shirt. “Messed up my clothes.”
“They’re coming to help me. You better let me go,” the deputy had shouted at him while Beau pushed him toward the pit. The guy was hurt, shot below the shoulder, but still alive. “They’re on their way.”
“Well, they ain’t here yet, so they’ll be no help to you,” Beau said, laughing.
He thought back to the deputy in the fire, the screams and the horror on his face.
“Guess they didn’t high tail it out there quick enough to help him,” Beau Whittle said with a snicker. He vaguely remembered Shawn Hawkins from high school and never liked him. Maybe that made the killing even sweeter.
When he heard the sirens, he ran through the woods toward the Taurus. By the time the deputies found the body, he had fled.
Out of the shower, the old man’s clothes didn’t fit Beau like he’d hoped. The pants too short, Beau scouted around and found a scissors. He cut them off below the knee and made long, baggy shorts. The golf shirt fit around the chest, but the sleeves ended four inches above his elbows. Rolled up to the shoulders, they didn’t look too odd. He found a billcap with “MADE IN AMERICA” stamped on the front and a pair of sunglasses.
Beau threw his own clothes in the washing machine, added soap and turned it on.
While the washer churned away, Beau turned on the television. Before long, The Today Show cut away to local news.
“This morning, a grisly murder in the woods,” the pretty blond at the anchor desk said. “A sheriff’s deputy in rural Texas found brutally murd
ered, his body burned. The main suspect is the same man allegedly responsible for one other death and four church fires in the area.”
Beau stared at the television screen. When they showed his driver’s license photo and asked people to be on the lookout for him, he smirked. The cigarette that dangled from his lips dropped ashes on the old couple’s carpet and burned a hole. He stomped it out.
“To catch me, you’ve gotta find me,” he taunted no one in particular.
Over a breakfast of eggs and toast, Beau thought through the previous night. The fire and the killing had eased the feeling in his gut, silenced the anxiety, but that wasn’t what he wanted. He’d told Liam Kneehoff that he’d take care of Kristilynn Cavanaugh for him.
“I made a promise,” he whispered.
How to do it?
The woman ranger seemed determined to get in his way. Did she know he was the one after Kristilynn? That Beau couldn’t be sure of. But something, maybe that podcast he’d watched, had convinced the ranger that Kristilynn could be in danger. The ranger had seen the Taurus twice now. He’d been lucky to find that driveway, the one with the dark house, so he had a place to hide.
Beau thought through the situation. The ranger appeared to be working alone. The other squad cars only showed up after she spotted him. He hadn’t noticed them patrolling the area when he got there.
“That ranger’s not there twenty-four seven. She leaves during the day.” He thought about marching up to the front of the house with his shotgun in the morning or afternoon. But what if Kristilynn had a job? She could be gone. The neighbors might be around, their kids playing outside. “That won’t work. I need to stick with nighttime, when I’m sure that woman’s home.”
He thought about the ranger again and how she’d seen the Taurus twice. “I need a different car,” he whispered.
Just then the house phone rang. He looked at it and decided that it had to be someone for the old couple. He didn’t answer. It rang and rang. Then stopped. Moments later, it rang again.
“Shit,” he mumbled. He walked over, looked at the phone, picked it up and pressed the button. But he said nothing.
“Beau, you there?” Edith Mae said.
Only silence.
“God damn you, Beau Whittle. If you’re there, you better open up that mouth of yours and say something. Or the next time I see you, I’m gonna beat the bejesus out of you!”
Thirty-four
The Rocking Horse was quiet when I pulled in at about ten that morning. I thought about Shawn Hawkins on most of the drive, his parents and family, his friends. The kid was still wet behind the ears, but apparently full of too much piss and vinegar. He should have waited for the others, but, then, he didn’t understand the darkness that waited for him in the woods.
Mom had left a note on the table: “Bobby and I are out to lunch. Maggie is at Strings’ house.”
After the final period, Mom drew a red heart. At sixty-eight, she still reminded me of a young girl in ways.
After a shower and a change of clothes, I drove to the Jacobs house, down the road from the church Reverend Fred ran. I found Maggie and Strings tending to his 4H project, a beige Brahman, in one of the corrals. Strings raised one every year and nearly always won the category at the local fair. This one seemed particularly massive. My daughter, while comfortable around horses, tended to keep a distance from cattle, and I noticed she stood back while Strings wielded a flat scrubbing brush, soap suds building up on the animal’s neck.
“You safe in there?” I called out to Maggie.
Her dark hair was tousled and she had hay jutting out of one side like you sometimes see folks who stick pencils behind their ears. She shot me a wide grin and ran over. “Mom!” she shouted. “How come you’re here?”
“Because I missed you,” I admitted. “And I just had to get a hug. I really need one.”
In my arms, Maggie felt like everything I loved wrapped in one bundle. I took a long breath and cow and soap overpowered me, but even that didn’t convince me to let go.
“Can you stay?” she wanted to know.
“No. But I really needed that hug,” I said, and she laughed.
“Mom, you are too funny. What are you going to do when I go off to college?”
“Probably track you down on campus and embarrass you in front of all your friends,” I said, and she laughed again. “Just a quick stop. I do need to go. But I wanted to see you.”
“Okay,” she said. Maggie pecked my cheek before she hurried back to help her friend. I walked toward the Suburban, glancing back at her as I opened the door, wanting one last look at my daughter before I left.
Just then Reverend Fred walked out of the house.
“Sarah, I’m glad you’re here. This church thing isn’t getting any better, now is it? I just heard about that young deputy on the news.”
“No. No better,” I admitted. “We need to catch this guy.”
Once he reached me, Strings’ dad lowered his voice. “Do you think our church could be in any danger?”
I considered it for just a minute. “No, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep a better eye on it, especially at night.”
“You know, folks like this guy, they haven’t got a grudge against religion.”
“No?” I said. “It seems like it, don’t you think?”
“Nah, they’re just mad at the world. They could be burning up anything,” he said. “It’s just that the churches are there, empty, and waiting at night. And they’re cowards who convince themselves God gave them a raw deal.”
Reverend Fred had made a good point about anger directed at the vulnerable.
Sitting across from Liam Kneehoff in the prison room where we’d been together so often over the previous months, I wondered if on any level he blamed God for what he’d become. Perhaps he saw that as justification for taking so many lives. But I knew better. I understood why Kneehoff murdered, and it had more to do with desire than revenge. Like the arsonist, the serial killer used his crimes to find a release. They were time bombs lit by obsession.
“I thought you’d be here earlier, Sarah. They said you would.”
“I had a stop, Liam. A personal matter.”
“Ah, something for the wedding. Just ten days away now, isn’t it?”
Not in the mood, I opened my sketch book and looked over at him. “Liam, I didn’t get much sleep last night, so let’s can this and get to work. Tell me about this woman.”
“How disappointing. And I looked forward to our time together all morning.”
“Did you get the photographs and the drawings?”
“Yes. Yesterday. They proved quite helpful.”
“Great. That’s good to hear. So again, let’s get started.” I stared at him, said nothing.
Eventually, he grew tired of waiting for me to fill the dead air. “Well, if we must.”
“You know the drill, Liam. This is our ninth drawing. So let’s start where we always start. Tell me about the overall shape of her face.”
He frowned. “You do look tired, Sarah. Long night, I guess. Any reason in particular?”
I didn’t answer. “Again, tell me about the shape of her face.”
For the next hour, we compartmentalized the face of a woman Liam Kneehoff claimed to have murdered. She had an oval face, a high forehead, a chin that came nearly to a point. Her eyes were brown, Kneehoff said, and then he described how they came to points at the ends that crinkled up a bit.
“Laugh lines?” I asked. “How old is she?”
“Oh, I think she’s my oldest. Mid-thirties?” As he readjusted in the chair, the chains rattled, and behind him the three guards inched forward. When he settled back down, they relaxed.
As he talked, I sketched.
Across the bridge of the nose, light freckles, longish eyelashes. Cheekbones soft. Liam talked, and I drew. The woman had bags under the eyes, just slight ones, and I thought she looked familiar in some odd way. Nothing I could put my finger on. Liam described more, and I kep
t drawing, until he stopped and watched me.
I looked at the face and struggled. “Why does she look familiar?” I asked. “Have we drawn this one before?”
“No, we haven’t. I’m sure of it.”
I stared at the drawing. It was different than the others. The face was all there, but it looked flat. I wasn’t sure if I would recognize this woman if I saw her on the street. There was something dead about the dark eyes, too undefined in the contours of the face. The drawing looked sketchy around the nose and the mouth. What was wrong?
“Liam, this looks rather generic.”
“Generic?” he said, his voice rising a bit at the end of the word, as if challenging me. “I don’t know what you mean. It looks good to me.”
“It’s….” I kept looking at it, wondering. It looked so odd. Vaguely familiar yet nondescript. “The others looked more alive. They had a sense of who the women were. This one doesn’t.”
Kneehoff scoffed. “It’s just that you’re exhausted. You’re spending way too much time chasing that firebug, Sarah. You need a good night’s sleep.”
While true, that excuse didn’t sit well. There was something wrong with the drawing. “You know, I don’t think this woman exists,” I said. “Liam, I think you’ve manufactured a fourteenth victim in order to keep your execution at bay.”
Convinced that I was right, I sat back in the chair and stared at him.
“Manufactured the woman? That’s not true.”
“Why then does she look like a caricature?” I asked.
This time Kneehoff sighed and shook his head. “You know, Sarah, that’s a perfectly good drawing of a real woman. I can’t help that you’re too wiped out to recognize that.”
I held up the sketch. “So you’re happy with this?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
Again, I felt confused. “And this is the final one, the last victim?”
“To my deep regret, yes,” he said, and I felt my chest clench in disgust. “Sarah, this is the last one. You won’t have to subject yourself to my company in the future. We are done.”
The Buried Page 18
