Buried Alive

by J. A. Kerley

  “How did you feel when it sunk beneath the waves?”

  the knife moving in a see-saw motion in the current, as if cutting away bonds, a final glint of light slicing from the blade and then covered forever by green and flowing water…

  “Free,” I said, closing my eyes, amazed at how swiftly I’d been manipulated.

  Jeremy walked over and stood beside me at the window, surprising me by laying a reassuring arm around my shoulders, pulling me tight. “The people Bobby Lee wants to kill are already dead, Carson. That was the terrible clanging in Bobby Lee’s head: He needed to kill people he thought had wronged him, but they were already in the ground. I have no idea who they were, Brother, God’s truth. But you can’t kill someone twice, right?”

  “You’ve not seen Crayline since the Institute?” I asked.

  A half-beat pause. “Not a blink’s worth. He was at the Institute two months, Carson. It’s like you said, I got to know him because I wanted to get in his head. Everyone needs a hobby.”

  “So you haven’t…”

  Jeremy squeezed my shoulder. “Haven’t spoken a word to Bobby in years. I’m happy he’s dead, Carson. I expect he’s happy he’s dead, too.”

  The room seemed to close in and I could take no more of the darkness inside my brother’s home. I turned and exited the cabin, shaking loose from Jeremy’s spell, letting the sun burn his words away. It felt like escaping a darkly enchanted castle, where fierce dreams whirled and fought in the charged air. I breathed deeply, wondering how I’d again let his words pull me into his obsessions.

  Walking back to my cabin I heard tires crunching gravel at my back, turned to see Krenkler in a dark sedan piloted by one of her drones. I turned as the car pulled beside me, Krenkler looking out through the window and folding a stick of gum into her mouth.

  “If you think you got your beauty sleep, Ryder, think again. You look terrible.”

  “Always a pleasure to see you, Agent Krenkler. Might I ask the reason for the delight of your company?”

  “There’s a 2008 Fleetwood Discovery in the Haunted Hollow Campground, empty and locked. The campground manager ID’d a pic of Crayline as the owner. Now that we know who to show photos of, we’re finding out Mr Bobby Lee C stayed at every campground in the area, two days here, three there. He kept moving. You nailed his hideout.”

  “I stumbled on to it.”

  “That’s a big shiny box he was driving. Expensive. He made good money, I figure, as the one-time head honcho of SFL.”

  “XFL - Extreme Fight League.”

  “Whatever. We’re more interested in his current history. Like why did he spend his money living in an RV and killing people? And did he do it other places?”

  “Damn good question.” Fifty-four per cent of all murders went unsolved. A small percentage were serial killings, madmen - and occasionally women - skulking in the dark and taking lives. It was very possible Woslee County wasn’t the first place Crayline visited. Or perhaps it was his shake-down cruise. I wondered if that was why he’d alerted the Bureau, his maniacal ego figuring if he could kill with the Feds around, he could kill anyone, anywhere.

  Krenkler continued: “Did you know Crayline is under suspicion of gunning down three people in his home county in Alabama? Someone shot them four years ago, a rage shooting, the bodies riddled like Swiss cheese.”

  I nodded. Krenkler said, “I take it you also know why Crayline went to prison the last time?”

  “He abducted the only guy who ever beat him in a fight.”

  “Mad Dog Stone. How’s that for a name? Crayline tossed the poor schnook in a pit and fed him garbage. Guess ol’ Bobby Lee Crayline hated to lose. But he lost to you, Ryder.”

  “Is there a point here, Agent Krenkler?”

  “I also wanted to tell you Soldering-iron Man was Charles Bridges, the guy who pissed off Crayline at the Alabama crazy hospital. Like you said, Mr Bridges did occasional work for Dunham, Krull and Slezak.”

  “You spoke to Slezak?”

  Krenkler’s nose wrinkled. “I spoke to him personally. It reminded me of what it must be like to talk to a grease pit.”

  “Good description,” I said, meaning it.

  “Thank you. One more thing you might like to know. Something we dug up from a long time ago back in ol’ Alabammy. Ever hear of the Marshmallow test?”

  I saw a mind picture: a bespectacled experimenter holding a bag of marshmallows while talking to a child sitting at a small desk.

  “The Bing Nursery School studies at Stanford,” I affirmed, wondering what the hell it had to do with Bobby Lee Crayline. “Young kids were offered treats, like candy or marshmallows. An experimenter gave them a choice: eat one marshmallow right then, or wait for the experimenter to leave the room and return fifteen minutes later. If they waited the full time, they got two marshmallows.”

  “An experiment in patience?” Krenkler asked. “Or maybe self-control? Most kids popped the treat straight away, right?”

  “What’s truly being observed is the child’s ability to reason,” I corrected. “To create a situation where they can out-think their own need for immediate gratification to gain the larger reward. Some did it by covering their eyes, or looking away, or singing, or playing games with their fingers. What does this have to do with Crayline?”

  Krenkler consulted some notes on her lap. “Back in the early eighties a psych class at Alabama U. replicated the test with children in the rural Talladega Mountains. One of the test cases was Crayline. I guess Crayline’s screwed-up parents heard the test paid a stipend, used the kid to make a few bucks.”

  I pictured a skinny, poorly nourished Bobby Lee diving on the treat like a hawk on a sparrow, jamming it down his gullet with unwashed hands. “I take it Bobby Lee devoured the marshmallow and maybe the experimenter’s hand?”

  “Listen to this, Ryder: when the experimenter told Crayline one marshmallow now or two in fifteen minutes, the kid looked up and asked, ‘How many do I get if I sit here until tomorrow?’”

  “What?”

  “The researchers put Bobby Lee to the test with a dozen marshmallows. Not all night, of course. But three hours.”

  “Crayline waited three hours to pounce on the candy?” It was unheard of.

  “The kids are observed through a one-way mirror, naturally. When the experimenter left the room, Crayline closed his eyes and didn’t move a muscle for three hours.”

  “Jesus.”

  “The prof said he’d never seen anything like it. They might have let the test continue, but little Bobby was starting to spook them.”

  I pictured Bobby Lee Crayline sitting motionless at the table, the delicious reward an arm’s length away. It seemed to defy everything I knew of the man.

  Krenkler continued. “So either Crayline has enormous willpower and self-control…” she let the words hang, waiting for my conclusion.

  “Or he could invent an interior world so lavish that time meant nothing. When he stepped inside himself, time stopped.”

  “How’s that for weird?” Krenkler asked. “Anyway, thought you’d like to know.”

  I couldn’t tell whether Krenkler actually thought I should know that tidbit about Crayline, or she just wanted to display the FBI’s power to dig. Like maybe I’d made contributions to the case, but she wanted me to know that the Bureau was on top, nonetheless.

  Did it matter?

  The sedan kicked gravel and spun away. I stiff-legged my way back to the cabin, made fruitless calls to the local animal shelters, and finally went to bed.

  38

  I awoke at four in the afternoon and called Cherry, asked what she was up to now that the threat of Bobby Lee Crayline had blown past like a hurricane. The destruction had been severe, but all that remained was the mopping up.

  “Krenkler’s got me studying Crayline’s backstory,” she said. “Still trying to find the connection between him and the victims, other than Charles Bridges.”

  “Where you going to start?”
r />   “By thawing a couple of steaks.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I also have some potatoes the size of footballs. Two, to be exact. Know anyone with an appetite?”

  It was unsettling to re-visit Cherry’s drive and see Crayline’s tire impressions in the grass, two straight lines that disappeared off the cliff. I saw the tree that had stopped me dead, peeling off my front fender. My truck looked disheveled, but ran fine, a trouper.

  Cherry met me on the porch.

  “Nice to see you arrived fully dressed. And without company. You hungry?”

  I was ravenous. I followed her into her home. We polished off a beer and ate soon thereafter, planks of rare meat and fluffy Idahos with butter, sour cream and crumbled bacon troweled within. In twenty minutes I filled a six-month cholesterol quota.

  We headed into the living room, the windows wide. The rain that had bedeviled me last night was paying penance by freshening the grass and trees and filling the air with a gentle balm of chlorophyll.

  “I’ve got to do a little homework yet today, Carson,” she said. “If I can keep feeding Krenkler information, I figure she’ll book back to Washington. I think with the threat gone, her thrill’s gone.”

  She pulled a canvas bag from beneath the swing, shaking a clattering handful of DVD boxes to a small table. I saw slick photos and graphics and titles like XFL Championship III: The Battle in Seattle, and XFL Highlights: Blood in the Cage.

  “From a video store in Winchester,” Cherry said. “I don’t know jackshit about Crayline. So I wanna see him moving. Hear his voice. I want to look at the audience. You think that’s strange?”

  “I understand completely.” It was the way I worked: suck up detail like the mother of all vacuum cleaners and learn the quarry on a cellular level. Though Cherry’s perp was dead, his history was a living entity, and she could follow it like a trail if she was diligent or lucky or usually - I’d found from experience - a combination of both.

  We watched six of the seven bouts Cherry had rented, taped after Crayline became one of XFL’s rising stars, a man who deserved his own specials. He won them all in brutal fashion. And even when hit hard - punched, kicked, pummeled - he always roared back as if pain were fuel. Or maybe pain was just a passing sensation, like mild hunger, or the errant thought of a long-dead acquaintance.

  His countenance was always one of anger - deep, visceral, frightening. The only time we saw anything bordering on happiness was when Crayline was with a guy who looked like a body builder with a hefty jewelry and Armani suit allowance. Twice we saw Crayline wrap the guy in a bear hug after winning a match.

  “You catch who the suit with the steroid shoulders is?” I asked.

  “Mickey Prince, the owner of the XFL. The P.T. Barnum of extreme sports or whatever. Likes cameras, being in People Magazine, stuff like that. Big shoulders. Bigger mouth.”

  Cherry reached to the floor and picked up the final DVD, tossed it to me.

  Emblazoned over the cover were the words, XFL World Championship XII: River of Blood.

  It was the championship bout. The only fight Crayline ever lost.

  Cherry fast-forwarded through announcer hype to the introduction of the fighters in the cage: Bobby Lee Crayline and Jessie “Mad Dog” Stone.

  Stone was not a tall guy, five-ten or so, but he resembled a doctor’s anatomical wall chart covered with a film of tanned and oiled flesh. His face was square and looked younger than the body somehow, even with cauliflower ears and a nose lowered and fattened by repeated breaks.

  The clang of a bell. Stone and Crayline circled, firing jabs, attempting kicks, measuring one another. Crayline dumped a couple hard shots in Stone’s direction, the blows dying on Stone’s big forearm. Stone shot back, catching Crayline in the side of his head, causing him to go for the clinch. I saw Crayline grinning as he jabbered into Stone’s ear, jumped back, firing a kick at Stone’s head.

  The bell pulled the fighters to their corners for mop-up and various instructions. Stone seemed to listen to his corner man; Crayline just aimed eagle eyes across the ring at Stone.

  The next round started. Another clinch, Stone pressed against the cyclone fencing of the cage, Crayline’s mouth running like a set of chattering toy teeth. In the background the crowd was in bloodlust, howling, screaming, waving fists. Men built like XFL fighters stood beside guys looking like they lived on lard fondue.

  “What an audience,” Cherry said. “These people would have loved the Roman Coliseum.”

  A flurry of blows. Stone feinted left, dodged right. Stepped forward with an uppercut, his cleanest shot of the match. It knocked Crayline two steps backward and allowed Stone the straight-arm punch that set Crayline on his ass. Crayline tipped over, his mouth spitting red foam across the mat. The camera zoomed in tight to adore the spectacle.

  When the referee called the fight in Stone’s favor the crowd, predictably, went rabid. Stone’s people came into the cage, wrapped him in a robe. Crayline was below the raised cage, being led away by handlers, wiping his face with a towel. He paused to again hug Mickey Prince.

  “Wait,” Cherry said. “Look at Crayline.”

  Cherry paused the machine on Crayline’s face. He had turned back to look into the cage as Stone gave his victory speech. Crayline wore not the expected look of defeat, but a strange and smirking triumph, the oddest face I’d seen on a man beaten in a fight.

  Almost six months from that day, Jessie Stone would be discovered in a deep-dug hole in a barn in West Virginia, imprisoned in filth and fed garbage, and only by good fortune rescued from death at the hands of Bobby Lee Crayline.

  Was Bobby Lee Crayline already planning his revenge?

  “We’re out of tapes,” Cherry said, punching off the player. “Which is good, because I’m sick of looking at Bobby Lee Crayline, though I get the feeling he’ll be much on my mind until this case gets put to bed.”

  She gathered the tapes and put them in a brown grocery bag, shoved the bag under the couch.

  “There. Now I don’t have to look at the damn things.”

  I checked my watch. Barely eight p.m.

  “There’s a lot of night left,” I said. “What should we do now?”

  “I’ll pour us a cognac,” she said quietly. “Seems that’s where we left off last night.”

  I heard bees.

  39

  “You know what I can’t get out of my thoughts?” I asked Cherry.

  “I surely do,” she replied. “Not that I mind.”

  The sun was rising and Cherry’s home was redolent of fresh-brewed coffee. Her cup was on her bedside table, mine in my hand as I sat cross-legged, sipping and thinking.

  I laughed. “Beyond that.”

  She pulled the sheet over her face in mock exasperation. “You’re about to talk work, aren’t you?”

  “Sorry.”

  She popped out with a sigh. “Lay it on me. Uh, I mean continue.”

  “Bobby Lee never had a good word for anyone that I can discern. But he was hugging that Prince guy like a brother.”

  “And?”

  “I wonder, did Bobby Lee ever have a confidant?”

  “I can’t imagine it.”

  I couldn’t either. But I also knew that for a brief period in the Institute, Crayline had confided bits of his past to my brother and was even, at one point, moved to weeping. The public tends to view serial killers as freaks of nature, which is wrong. They’re almost always freaks of nurture, or non-nurture, to be specific, coming from families and backgrounds so dysfunctional and often savage that the average person would find it hard to believe such treatment could be given an animal, much less a human being. Usually, the killers’ humanity got destroyed along the way. They might hurt and kill with impunity, but sometimes, deep within, beat a morsel of heart that craved contact with reality.

  “I think you ought to talk to this Prince guy,” I told Cherry. “It’s possible Crayline confided in him.”

  “Oh sure, Crayline told Prince
he was going to kill people.”

  “Not that. But maybe something to help us unlock Crayline. I remember Slezak saying the XFL was operated out of Louisville. How far is that from here?”

  “Two hours. This means I have to get dressed, right?”

  “Not quite yet.”

  Before we committed to the trip, a friendly voice had called the organization, representing a company wanting to deliver Mickey Prince a case of steaks, the caller figuring Prince got lots of yummy gifts from people wanting to cash in on his success.

  “Prime filets frozen in dry ice, ma’am,” the caller had claimed. “Will Mr Prince be in today to take them home? Or should we wait delivery to another day?”

  “Mista Prince is in the oh-uh-fus until tomorra aft’noon,” the receptionist had trilled in an accent thick enough to cause the caller to picture her in an antebellum dress and sunbonnet, sitting side-saddle in her chair. “He’ll be dee-lighted. Mista Prince luuuves a good steak.”

  By ten thirty we were standing in the Louisville lobby of X-Ventures. The receptionist was not as pictured. “Did y’all have an appointment with Mr Prince?” the woman challenged, not calling up hoop skirts and bonnets. This Clydesdale-sturdy woman conjured images of Slavic prison guards named Ulga, only with nattier tailoring.

  “Appointments are so gauche,” I told Ulga, trying a lighthearted approach. “They impair spontaneity.”

  Humor was not her métier. “Mister Prince is a busy man. You must have an appointment.”

  “I understand. But inform Mr Prince that we’re here, please. In case he finds an opening in his schedule.”

  “And exactly whom shall I say is calling?”

  We showed our badges. Ulga made a phone call. She said nothing, just pointed us toward the back of the building, through the gym area. I suspected it was for effect, to show visitors this wasn’t an accounting firm. It was obvious a re-location was in progress, large moving boxes stacked in corners, several of them with the THIS END UP arrow pointing at the floor.

  We walked down a fenced-off corridor to the side. A round fight ring centered the gym, in it a compact black guy was chasing a towering white guy backwards with a series of snap kicks. We passed a man whose torso was blue with tattoos, punching a wall-mounted board wrapped with sisal rope. His knuckles looked like raw meat. Two guys with shaved heads and brick-muscled bodies stood beside the guy, bellowing, Go! Go! Go!