by J. A. Kerley
The position was maybe four miles from the cabin. My caller had been local. There was nothing to do but holster my weapon in the back of my pants, leave my dog a fistful of snacks to distract from my leaving, jump in the truck with the GPS set for the coordinates, and hope for an answer to the mystery.
I followed the jittering GPS arrow until turning on to a gravel road. The gravel crunched under my tires for four miles, diminishing to dirt studded with pebbles. I rounded a copse of pines and saw what remained of a house. Small, single story, rickety porch, brick chimney at one end, the mortar etched thin by the elements. The paint had been scoured away, leaving bare wood turned barn-side gray. I saw a leaning utility pole behind the house, its insulators made of glass, the line part of the rural electrical grid installed in the 1930s, finally allowing many Appalachian families entrance to the twentieth century.
A black power line stretched from the pole to the structure. I saw bright copper connections at the insulator, like the line was an illegal tap, jury-rigged. It fired up alarms in my head as I exited my truck. I double-checked my GPS readout: This was where the woman had directed me.
“Hello?” I called.
Nothing answered but distant crows, though for a few seconds I heard a distant siren. I approached the house with eyes down, wary of snakes in the overgrown weeds. The porch was side-slanting, creaking with my footsteps. The mesh had rotted from the listing screen door.
I slipped my gun from my back-of-belt holster and pushed on the door. It grated open over warped floorboards. The living room was a clutter of rotted furniture and wood lath and plaster fallen from the walls and ceiling. With the windows boarded, there was little light. I smelled an overwhelming stench, like foul meat mingled with feces. My stomach churned and I tied my red bandana handkerchief over my nose and lower face. The flies were a cloud of dots racing in circles.
A rectangle at the back resolved into a door opening as my eyes adjusted to light strained through holes in the roof and corners of the window boards. There was a light switch on the wall, cracked and dirty. I flipped it, but nothing happened.
I stepped into a dark room centered by a bed, a human shape across it like an X. Thick wires bound the wrists and ankles to posts at the corners. The stench could have made a buzzard retch. I fumbled in my pocket for my butane lighter, scratched up a flame. My feet snagged in a wire on the floor and I kicked it aside as I moved to the head of the bed, my flame shivering in the wretched air, dying as my thumb slipped from the trigger.
I knelt beside the bed, flicked the lighter on again. A man’s hideously shattered face stared at me from between wood-spire bedposts. The broken visage was hideously distorted, eyes bulging from the sockets, the mouth holding a frozen scream.
Ghosts were pouring from the nostrils and mouth.
I recoiled in horror, losing my footing, stumbling over the scummy floor. I regained my feet, unsteady in my motions, staring at white plumes exiting a dead man’s face. I was turning for the door when it exploded open. I spun as a body slammed into me and I was again on the floor, the muzzle of a gun pressing into my forehead.
“GET YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK. NOW!”
I complied. A hand pressed my face into the filthy floor.
“He’s got a gun,” a second male voice said. I felt my weapon slipped from my waistband.
“It’s OK,” I said. “I’m a co—”
The hand behind my head slammed it to the floor, crushing my words against my face. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
Hands yanked me upright. Blood from my floor-slammed nose started running into my mouth and down my throat. I gagged. My captor spun me into a wall, holding my collar so tight I couldn’t breathe or speak. His face filled my vision, eyes ablaze with anger, breath so close it filled my nose. It was the big sheriff from yesterday, the one named Beale.
“You murderous son of a bitch. You sick fucker.” He yanked the bandana from my face, stared, turned to the second cop. “I saw this bastard yesterday with the Compass Point students. The fucker knew we was checking footprints, made some smart-ass remark.” He slammed my head against the wall. I saw stars and heard plaster crumble to the floor. “You planning to get one of the kids alone, smart-ass? One of the women, maybe?”
“Easy, Sheriff Beale,” the second man’s voice said, a younger voice.
The angry man’s eyes glared into mine. I could smell his anger as his hand tightened on my neck. I was being strangled. The room spun away toward darkness. Running footsteps from somewhere …
“BEALE!” a woman’s voice commanded. “Get your hands off him. Now!”
“This is my county, Cherry. You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I can pinch off the money tit, Sheriff. Wanna explain that to the voters?”
A pause. The hand let go. I dropped to my knees and choked breath into my lungs. Even the stinking air in the room tasted good.
“Cuff him, Officer Caudill,” the woman ordered.
I didn’t say a word as the bracelets slapped on, fearing any utterance would cause the hulking sheriff to attack. When I could look up, I saw the sheriff stewing in the corner. Beside him was a cop in his mid-twenties, rangy, with jug ears poking from short yellow hair. The older cop looked homicidal, the young one just looked nervous.
A strong flashlight from across the room filled my eyes, held by the woman who’d kept me from strangulation.
“Lord,” the voice behind the blinding light said. “What is that stink?”
The beam shifted to the ruination of the victim’s face. Gray ghosts continued to stream from his lips and nostrils.
“What the fuck’s coming out of him?” the sheriff named Beale whispered.
I watched the shape behind the light step toward the body, tentative, like a superstitious person forced to walk beneath a ladder. She bravely edged her fingertips into the shapes poring from the victim’s nostrils and mouth.
“It’s smoke,” she whispered, amazed. “No, wait…. It’s wet. I think it’s steam.”
The woman passed the light to the young cop. “Go down the body inch by inch, Caudill.”
She sidestepped beside the corpse as the light revealed a body toned and powerful, with melon-round shoulders and hawser-thick trapezoids. The chest was deep, the waist slender. The legs were spread wide.
She tripped as I had done.
“Point the light to the floor. What’s down there?”
The light found a heavy and outdated electrical conduit snaking from a wall socket toward the body. The light tracked the conduit upward to the bed where it disappeared beneath the victim’s thigh.
“Get over here and put some illumination between the glutes,” the woman said.
“Excuse me?”
“Light the guy’s asshole.”
The cop angled the light into the crevice between the victim’s buttocks. The cord entered a wooden handle protruding from the anus. I heard hissing, like water boiling, and saw red-brown rivulets running from the body’s rectum to the mattress as steam misted upward. It was the second most bizarre sight I’d ever seen. The first was what was happening a couple feet upward.
“What’s up his ass?” Beale said.
“An industrial soldering iron,” Caudill said. “My granddaddy had one. They’re about sixteen inches long and glow red-hot when they’re plugged in.”
The woman said, “Then unplug the damn thing. Get the suspect outside and stick him in my cruiser for the time being. I’ll call Frankfort for a forensic unit.”
Beale manhandled me outside and jammed me into the back of an unmarked cruiser as the woman tapped at her cellphone. I leaned forward and looked through the Plexiglas divider into the front of the cruiser, relaxing a bit at seeing familiar turf. There was the usual radio equipment, miniature computer terminal and input pad, about the same as Harry and I had back in Mobile.
A stack of books on the passenger seat caught my eye and I sat forward to read the titles on the spines. All were on law enforcement, with most o
f the books written by people familiar to me. The third volume down was a just-published compendium featuring case histories of sociopaths penned by the cops who tracked them down. Written for law-enforcement agencies, the book had sold quite well for a special-interest publication.
I looked up. The woman was at the corner of the porch and thumbing her cellphone. She studied the screen and rolled her eyes. I took it there was no signal to be found.
In the light the woman was in her early thirties, an inch or two above medium height, slender. She wore a blocky black pantsuit that looked straight from the rack at Wal-Mart, black cross-trainers, with a gold badge slung around her neck on what appeared to be a length of clothesline. Her hair was an unruly shag à la early Rod Stewart, red, probably the real thing given her creamy complexion and dusting of freckles.
She looked my way. Stared, like making a decision. She walked over, her eyes a mixture of curiosity and contempt, her voice pure country.
“We caught you standing over the body, fella. Anything you wanna talk about?”
She was hoping for an on-scene confession. Instead, I nodded toward the book in the passenger seat. “Interesting-looking book up there, Detective. Serial Killers by Their Captors. Is it yours?”
She glanced at the stack of books, then back to me, figuring I was working some kind of angle. Or playing with her. I noted her sea-green eyes looked in slightly different directions, a mild strabismus. Though the declination was subtle, it was unsettling, like one eye was looking at me, the other at something on my shoulder.
“The book’s mine,” she said. “Why? You figuring to add to it?”
“Did you read the case history of Marsden Hexcamp and his followers? The cult from coastal Alabama?”
She stared at me for a five-count. “I read that chapter.”
“I wrote it,” I said, leaning forward to jiggle my cuffs. “Can a brother get a little love here?”
8
We were in a bilious yellow meeting room in the Woslee County Police Department. It smelled of boiled coffee, tobacco smoke, and drugstore aftershave. Donna Cherry, head of Eastern Kentucky Combined Law Enforcement, Region 5, sighed and dropped the phone into the cradle after checking my background with the Mobile police. She leaned cross-armed against the wall and stared at me with the offset eyes. The call hadn’t made them any friendlier.
“Let’s start again, Ryder.”
“Come on, I’m not really a suspect, am I?” I argued. “You just verified that I—”
“I verified you’re a cop. What I didn’t verify was how you happened to be on the scene of a murder before the locals arrived.”
“You called me, dammit. My cellphone rang and you gave me coordinates. Asked for help.”
“That’s a bald-faced lie, Ryder. I never called you.”
“You have a distinctive voice,” I said, mentally adding nails on a blackboard.
She glared at me, angry I wasn’t breaking down and confessing to God-knows-what, then stood with the eyes still hammering hard. I felt the silent pounding as she paced behind my back. She sat across the table, her question bag re-filled.
“You said the call confused you, Ryder. If so, why didn’t you call back to ask for more information?”
I was getting irritated. I’d received a cryptic call for help, ran to offer assistance, was being grilled for the effort.
“You blocked your number. But you know all this, don’t you, Detective Cherry? You’re gaming me for some reason.”
“I AM NOT GA—” She caught herself and took a couple seconds to compose, tapping clear-polished nails on the desk. I saw anger in one eye, bewilderment in the other, averaged it out into exasperation. “How could I call you without knowing your number, wise guy?” she asked.
“I’ve told several locals I’m a Mobile detective, gave them my cell number. The people at Compass Point Outfitters. A lady at the service station in Pine Ridge. Dottie Fugate at the cabin-rental company.”
“So what?”
“I know how the country grapevine works. One of them called you, said ‘Guess what, there’s a homicide dick vacationing in the area.’”
She gave me incredulous. “You’re saying when faced with a homicide my first thought was to call the big-city detective?”
I gave her my most sardonic smile. “You called me, lady. I didn’t call you.”
She put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. “If I called you, why didn’t anyone expect you on the scene, Einstein? You figure that one out?”
Actually that one bothered me a bit. But I was working on theories. “The cell connection was lousy. You didn’t realize your message got through. When you found me with the body, my face under a bandana, you figured me for the perp.”
“And not the hotshot hard-on from Mobile.”
“Your words, not mine,” I said. “But let’s get back to my question: Why are you gaming me?”
“I am not running a game here, Ryder,” she said slowly, as though explaining something to a child. “I did not call you anonymously because you’re a big-time detective who writes books and all. What I am trying to do is reconcile your story with your actions.”
Cherry seemed truly convinced she hadn’t called me. I wondered if the woman had two personalities, each with its own line of sight. I decided to bag my confrontational attitude and appeal to her rational side, if there was one. I pulled out my cellphone, thumbed to Call History.
“Let’s try a timeline,” I said, holding my phone screen so Cherry could see the info. “There’s my call, at 6.57 a.m. It says Caller Unknown. My only call today, the call from, uh, the woman with the distinctive accent. When did you get the message about the body, Detective Cherry?”
She scrabbled through the papers in front of her, plucked up a sheet. I saw her eyes juggling information. “We received information at six forty.”
My rational side lost out to my hand slamming the table. “But you people didn’t arrive until almost seven thirty!” I barked. “Ten minutes after I did, even though you were notified before my call. Did you stop for breakfast along the way?”
Her jaw clenched and she looked away. “Our notification wasn’t by, uh, traditional means. It took some time to, uh, deal with.”
“The message came by carrier pigeon?” I asked.
“Not your business.”
“The hell it isn’t. Someone called me with your voice and sent me to a crime scene and now I’m halfway to being accused of the murder.”
“No one’s accusing you of anything, Ryder,” she said, adding: “Not yet.”
“Then I can escape the Donna Cherry Memorial Madhouse, right?”
The eyes blazed, the jaw clenched. She stood stiffly and nodded toward the door.
“You’re free to go.”
I stood, started to walk away, paused in the doorframe. I turned round and lit my eyes with false bonhomie.
“The next time you know I’m in the neighborhood and want a consultation with the hotshot hard-on from Mobile, Detective Cherry, just call and use your real name. It won’t be hard …” I made the thumb-pinkie phone sign, wiggling it beside my cheek. “You’ve got the number, right?”
I winked and walked out the door.
The next morning I awoke to birdsong and the cackling of crows, the sound so full and rich it pushed aside the weirdness of the preceding day’s events. The air through my open window smelled of pine and rising dew. The clock showed 6.23. Mix-up scampered out for the performance of his morning duties.
After showering and dressing and gulping down my coffee, I met Gary for a two-hour lesson on the cliffs. I returned feeling pumped and happy at half past ten, noting a man sitting in one of the rockers on the porch, patting my dog’s head.
It was the ranger who had been with Sheriff Beale the day before I’d been summoned to the murder scene. He smiled and stood as I pulled up. I stepped to the porch and shook hands with Lee McCoy, senior ranger for the Red River Gorge area of the Daniel Boone Forest.
“Country ham?” I asked, studying the package.
He grinned. “Pepper-rubbed, cob-smoked, finished off with a year’s hanging. Fry a minute in hot butter starting to brown, flip over for another minute. Your mouth’ll think it’s stepped into heaven.”
I cradled the ham to my chest like a cache of diamonds and ran it to the fridge. The best country hams rarely see store shelves but are traded in the shadows by cognoscenti. I poured coffee and we sat on the porch, chatting about weather and light topics. Something seemed a bit amiss in the proceedings – I was, after all, a man with an unknown connection to a dead body, but McCoy seemed oblivious to my conflicts, more concerned that I was having a good vacation experience. But perhaps his loyalties rested with the tourism industry. I asked McCoy how long he’d been with the Forest Service.
“Twenty-seven years. All in the Daniel Boone Forest, a good half stationed here in the Gorge. I grew up in Clay City fifteen miles west. I used to ride my bike here before I could drive.”
“You must know every step in the Gorge.”
He winked. “The Gorge keeps a few places hidden. That’s its nature. Today I’m heading into the backcountry to check a stand of white-haired goldenrod.”
Maybe it was something in me that harkened to childhood, Smoky the Bear and Ranger Rick or whatever. Maybe it was McCoy’s spiffy, hard-creased uniform, or the cool wide-brim hat, but my cynicism melted and my heart skipped a beat at the prospect of hiking alongside a for-real forest ranger.
I sighed like a jilted teen. “Jeez, I’d give my eyeteeth to tag along.”
He smiled. “We’ll be out for a few hours. Best to pack a sandwich.”
I grabbed my daypack and a canteen before McCoy had a chance to change his mind.
“You bringing your pup?” McCoy called through the door. “Dogs aren’t allowed in Natural Bridge Park, but they’re fine in the Gorge.”
