The Buried

by Kathryn Casey

  Beau pulled the Camry into an empty spot, got out and tried doors on a few of the cars. When he tugged on a brown Buick LeSabre, the door clicked open. Maybe two decades old, the car looked in mint condition, the paint still shiny. Beau easily pulled the wires and started the engine. The LeSabre had just under 78,000 miles on it, but the interior looked nearly new.

  Once he lined up the Buick, Beau popped the trunk and then did the same on the Camry. Kristilynn looked as if asleep. He hoisted her up, and the term “dead weight” came to mind. He felt shallow inhales and puffs on his neck as he transferred her into the LeSabre’s trunk. He pushed her legs in after her and slammed the trunk shut, then put his hand up to his side where blood stained his torn shirt, seeping from where Kristilynn stabbed him with the knitting needle.

  “Bitch,” he whispered, as he opened the Camry’s passenger side backdoor. He grabbed the two gas cans, the liquid sloshing inside, and carried them to the Buick, where he placed them on the floor in front of the backseat.

  As he drove out of the lot, Beau thought about his mother and how she and most of the old folks he knew slept late. He figured he had at least a few hours, maybe more, before anyone reported the LeSabre missing. That was plenty of time for what he had planned, the drive to Christ’s Garden to see if the guards were still surrounding the place. Then he realized that he was closer to the second church on his list, Chapel of the Pines.

  Twenty minutes later, Beau slowed down as he drove by the small log cabin-type structure with a wooden cross out front. From the street, Chapel of the Pines appeared deserted, but he knew it had a parking lot around the back.

  Continuing down the road, Beau looked for a place to conceal the car while he scouted out the situation. Just down the road from the church, he pulled into a parking lot next to a creosote plant the EPA closed down for leaking chemicals into the groundwater. The trees overgrown, once he parked the LeSabre it wasn’t visible from the road.

  The car stashed, Beau walked toward the church through the woods carrying the shotgun. Off and on he stopped and listened. He heard nothing, so he drew closer. The church looked deserted. But as he approached the back corner, he heard voices, murmurs from a handful of churchmen, the civilian guards. Sitting in lawn chairs, they had rifles and shotguns across their legs. One appeared asleep, while they others talked softly. In front of the group, a deputy in full uniform hunched down and drew something in the sand.

  “The sheriff wants us to pull back,” the deputy said. “They want this Whittle guy to think the church is unprotected. That way, he might bring the woman here. We can watch the church from back in the woods. If he shows up, we’re supposed to box him in and call for help. Only move in if he makes a move to kill the hostage.”

  Beau wondered how they knew where he’d go. Then he realized Jimi Jo must have told the cops about his list.

  “Shit,” he whispered.

  Beau turned to leave and didn’t notice one of the men turn toward the woods. “Did you hear that?”

  Not waiting to hear more, Beau ran as fast and hard as his legs would take him, so fast that he had no time to look before he stepped, and his foot came down hard on a branch. His ankle twisted, and the branch broke emitting a loud crack.

  “Over there!” someone shouted.

  Fighting the pain from his throbbing ankle and the burning from the cut in his side, Beau hurled through the woods, pushing hard, the thick muscles in his legs pumping. He heard the deputy and churchmen following. Beau had a head start, and the men chasing him were older. But Beau feared that they’d catch up. He ran until he saw the factory parking lot. He judged that he wouldn’t have time to get in the car and drive off before they reached him. So he made an abrupt turn to the right toward a grove of thick, waxy leafed magnolias. Beau winced at the pain as he shimmied back into the darkness under the trees. He lay on his stomach, flat to the ground, and pointed the shotgun at the deputy and churchmen as they rushed past him.

  They came to a halt in the parking lot.

  The Buick sat there, silent.

  “Did you see where he went?” one man asked.

  “Shoot, no,” someone answered. “He was heading in this direction though.”

  “What about that car? Is that supposed to be here?” One of the men looked inside, checked the front seat and glanced toward the back. “Empty.”

  One of the churchmen came out of the woods, the oldest of the group, holding his palm against his chest, struggling for air. “We need to catch that guy. Leave the car. We’ll come back and look at it. Let’s go.”

  The deputy nodded, and they started off again, running through the parking lot and into the woods.

  Beau paused, biding his time for a minute, maybe two, and then walked gingerly forward as quietly as possible toward the car. He eased the door open and got in, left the door open while he started it. The engine kicked in, and he slammed the door.

  In the woods, the men turned and looked back toward the factory.

  “Damn it!” someone shouted.

  As if choreographed, they turned in a single unit. They reached the lot in time to see the Buick LeSabre drive off.

  Forty-six

  Only on the phone for a few moments, Del’s sour expression signaled that he was listening to bad news. “Did anyone get a license plate number?”

  He repeated it, and I wrote it down. “We’ll get out a BOLO,” he said. “Keep watch. I don’t think he’ll come back, but who knows for sure what this guy will do?” With that, Del hung up.

  “Which church?” I asked.

  “Chapel of the Pines,” Del said. “Beau showed up. At least they think it was Beau. No one got a good look. They gave chase, but he got away in an old brown Buick LeSabre.”

  “Did they see Kristilynn?”

  “No. They got a look inside the car, and she wasn’t there.”

  “Damn.”

  “She could be in the trunk,” he said. “That’s where Beau had the women before.”

  I nodded, hopeful. I thought about what we should do next. “No sense in going to Christ’s Garden. Now that he knows the churches are still guarded. He won’t risk it.”

  “Yeah,” Del said. “So what do we do?”

  “Let’s head back to the house and see how the forensics people are doing. Maybe they’ve found something.”

  “The blood looks worse than it is,” the sergeant in charge of the crime scene unit said. We stood in the driveway near a white van with Texas DPS on the side. “She wasn’t bleeding heavily, at least.”

  “That’s encouraging,” I said. “Of course, bleeding to death’s not the only way she could die. Internal injuries. A concussion. He could have clubbed her again with the shotgun.”

  “And it was an hour ago,” the sergeant said. “Anything could have happened after they left here.”

  Del’s cell rang.

  While he took the call, I walked closer to the house and looked around. The team had every light turned on. I had to let them do their jobs. I’d get in the way inside, but I needed to know what they saw. My nerves bristled when I thought about Beau driving through the last hours of the night before dawn. Where was he? What had he done with Kristilynn?

  Once he hung up, Del found me.

  “They traced the license plate and found the black Camry in a parking lot outside an apartment building. Then they traced the Camry’s license plate to a house in Kristilynn’s neighborhood. The deputy who knocked on the door says no one’s home. But in the garage he found that burgundy Taurus you chased, the one with the bumper sticker. It reads, ‘I break for squirrels.’”

  “This guy changes cars like most men change shirts,” I said.

  “Well, he’s a mechanic, so he knows how to rig them,” Del said with a hopeless shrug. “How’re they doing inside?”

  “I’m waiting to ask,” I said as one of the forensic folks walked out.

  A lanky guy in white coveralls, hairnets on his head and over his pilgrim beard, rushed past. I stopped h
im. I’d been thinking about what I knew about the time Beau spent in the house. The only clue I had was that the note he sent to Liam Kneehoff appeared to be printed off a computer. That opened up certain possibilities.

  “Have you got a computer guy in there?” I asked.

  The forensic guy gave me a bored look. “Talk to the sarge,” he said.

  We walked back to the sergeant, who stood talking to a petite woman who collected blood evidence.

  “We have multiple blood scenes,” she said. “We found a knitting needle with blood on it and blood drops close to the pool of blood. The drops were round, as if the person was standing and they fell straight down.”

  “And that means?” Del asked.

  “From the position of the drops, near the blood pool, which we’re assuming came from the hostage, we think maybe she stabbed him. This Whittle guy may be injured.”

  “Good news,” I said. “Maybe enough to slow him down?”

  “No way to know,” she said. “Sorry.”

  At that, the blood analyst left, and I turned to the sergeant. “Do you have someone doing a forensic search of the computer?”

  “Why?”

  “Our guy printed a note during the time he stayed here and mailed it. I want to know what else he did on the computer.”

  “Yeah, I have one, but I have him boxing everything up to bring to the lab,” the sergeant explained. “I’ll let him know we need a quick on-site analysis.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  The sergeant walked away and Del asked, “What’re you looking for?”

  “No clue,” I said. “Just hoping for a break.”

  The clock edged toward six, and the sun made its way up into the sky. I walked down to the river and watched the current. The air smelled of the woods and the water, and usually that would have brought some sense of peace. Instead, I couldn’t stop thinking about Kristilynn, wondering where she was and if she was still alive.

  It’d been eight days since Reverend Fred asked me to look into the Lord’s Acre fire. Eight days.

  I thought of Liam Kneehoff on death row, all his creature comforts removed from his cell, no radio, wondering what was going on in the world and in the investigation into Kristilynn’s abduction. Filled with so much evil, he’d found a way to do his bidding while captive in one of the most secure prisons in the world.

  “Lieutenant!” someone shouted, and I saw the sergeant walking toward me. “We’ve got what you asked for.”

  The tech ran a scan of the computer, and he had a stack of papers laid out on a picnic table. One report listed the computer’s recent history. There I found links to news reports on the church fires along with multiple visits to the Death Row podcast with Kneehoff’s interview. Each of the four times he visited the site, it appeared that he stayed and watched the entire segment.

  The same day he listened to the interview, Beau typed the note to Kneehoff and searched the Internet for Kristilynn’s address. He found it on a white pages website. Off and on, he was back at it, the night before monitoring news reports on the abductions.

  “What’s this?” I asked the tech, picking up a wrinkled sheet of paper. “Did he write this?”

  “If no one else in the house did, he must have,” the guy said. “It was written a few hours ago, after the kidnappings. Then printed. We found this crumpled up in the wastebasket.”

  One more church. The women with it.

  Then I go like my dad did, but by fire.

  I remembered what Edith Mae told us about Beau’s father, that she’d told Beau he overdosed, but that his father actually shot himself through the head.

  “Del, I know where Beau is going,” I said. “Get everyone together. We need to hurry.”

  Forty-seven

  Kristilynn slowly regained consciousness. She opened her eyes and saw darkness interrupted by only a thin bead of sunlight seeping through cracks around the old car’s trunk. She’d never had such a headache before. Not since she came to after jumping from Liam Kneehoff’s SUV. It felt like that again, the incredible pain when she woke up in the hospital. That day, she had no idea where she was until she saw the doctors and nurses. Her mother gazed down at her, squeezing her hand.

  “You’re going to be okay,” her mom said. “You’re going to live.”

  All these years later, her mom dead, Kristilynn remembered the joy and fear in her mother’s eyes. Oh, Mom, it’s all happening again, she thought. Maybe this time I won’t survive.

  In the darkness, Kristilynn felt for a latch, some way to open the trunk.

  “Ouch!” she murmured when she nicked her finger on a rough piece of metal. She kept searching but found nothing. She wondered where he was taking her and if Sandy McCuskey escaped. If Sandy did, help might come. But maybe Beau found Sandy and killed her.

  Anything was possible.

  Beau had stomped back into the house in a terrible rage. She remembered how the knitting needle felt when she plunged it into his side, how he cried out. Then he slammed her, and everything turned black.

  Wondering how long she’d been knocked out, she touched the top of her head and felt something sticky. Blood.

  Trying to think clearly, Kristilynn again examined the trunk’s interior by touch, desperate to find anything she could use as a weapon. Over to one side, she touched something soft that smelled of mildew. An old blanket, she guessed. That wouldn’t help. Finally, she found something pushed way to the back, round metal, an aerosol can. She tucked it between her knees and went back to exploring. What she wanted was something she could use as a club, like a car jack. But she had no luck. She found nothing more.

  In the darkness, she concentrated on controlling her breathing, slowing it down. She rolled over on her side facing the front of the car, popped the top off the aerosol can, and held it against her chest. Whatever it was, it might at least temporarily blind Beau if she managed to spray his eyes. What she’d do next, she didn’t know. Maybe it would just make him angrier. But then, what did she have to lose? She tried to picture how it could unfold, but every time she visualized Beau opening the trunk and reaching for her, her body quaked with fear. She had to calm down. She had to take control.

  Just then the car swerved hard to the right.

  Veering off the road, Beau turned into the gap between the trees, the makeshift driveway near the fire pit. On the drive there, he’d watched the road and saw no suspicious cars. Early in the morning, not long after sunrise, he’d passed no one.

  He parked at the dead end. Wasting no time, he grabbed the two gas cans out of the backseat. He locked the car doors and took off walking through the woods toward the pit.

  When he arrived he looked around at the chaos the forensic team had left. The deputy’s body was gone, taken away, and they’d scooped up most of the ashes with him. Pieces of yellow crime scene tape hung from trees. They’d trampled the brush.

  “Damn mess!” Beau muttered. To him, the pit where he lit his fires, where his father died, had always been a sacred place.

  Putting the gas cans next to the pit, he started picking through the trees looking for kindling and logs. The task turned out to be easy, the drought leading the thirsty trees to drop whatever they could to survive. Before long, he had a foot-high pile of dead leaves and twigs with a two-foot-tall web of fallen branches on top.

  He thought about the fire, how it would look, and he thought about Kristilynn in the trunk. He felt anxious, worried he’d be discovered, and decided to get started, murmuring, “I got no time to waste.”

  With that, he bent down and grabbed one of the cans and loosened the cap. The smell of gas surrounded him.

  At that moment he thought he heard something, maybe someone, in the woods. He put the can down near the pit, turned and grabbed the shotgun. He trudged ten feet toward the road, in the direction of the sound. He stood, quiet, and listened. A few feet away, an armadillo dug in an ant hill.

  “Damn thing,” he said. “I ain’t got no time for this.”

>   Leaving the armadillo to its work, Beau returned to the fire pit. He grabbed the can and finished taking the cap off. As he poured the gas on the kindling and wood, he thought he hadn’t really needed it. The wood parched, it looked primed for a blaze. But he splashed it around anyway, thinking he might as well make sure the flames took quickly. The can empty, he put it behind him, next to the full one. He thought about emptying the other can into the fire, but decided not to bother.

  That done, he stood back, lit a piece of branch and threw it into the fire. The whoosh of the gas vapors catching sucked in the air around him, and his excitement built as the flames exploded.

  Again he heard something in the woods. He reached over and grabbed the shotgun.

  Forty-eight

  Del parked far enough back not to be seen. We grabbed our rifles and ran toward the fire pit. Halfway there, I smelled fire. Beau had the stage set for his grand exit, his final stand. I wondered if Kristilynn was with him, or dead somewhere, her body dumped in the woods. I heard cars pull up behind us on the road, our backup, troopers and deputies, the rangers out of Conroe. We were heading into the woods, armed but fearing the shadows around us.

  Fanning out, we picked our way closer. I saw flames.

  The blaze soared so high, I figured that Beau must have poured something on it. The heat intense, we stopped fifty feet back. I didn’t see Kristilynn or Beau, just the bonfire.

  Leading the way, Del signaled for us to move forward, but at that precise moment something exploded near the pit. Whatever it was, it sent out shockwaves.

  I fell to the ground and covered my head with my hands. Shards of burning debris flew around me. Something hit my leg, and I felt a sharp pain. The thunderous sound of the blast ended. When I sat up, a jagged scrap of metal had torn through my khaki pants. Blood stained the fabric red.

  I smelled burning flesh, and realized it was my own. I screamed as I pulled the hot metal out.