Buried Alive

by J. A. Kerley

  Now and then I take a mood.

  But Jeremy’s Subaru was gone. I checked my watch: eight-fifteen. My brother often took late meals at a café five miles distant, fuel for a night scanning the Asian stock markets. When I turned to head back to the cabin, something stuck my feet in place and I felt a strange tingle in the pit of my belly.

  What if I was wrong, though, and Jeremy had taken Mix-up?

  I had visions of my dog imprisoned in Jeremy’s version of the pit where Crayline had kept the hapless Jessie Stone.

  I crouched low and ran to his yard, stepping from dense forest into manicured grass and neat beds of bright flowers. The doors and windows were locked tight, the door locks too complex for my simple abilities at picking. I stepped back and scanned his second floor. A back window to his office appeared lifted a few inches. I went to his tool shed and retrieved a twelve-foot ladder most likely used to clean leaves from his gutters, angled it against the roof. I listened for sounds and heard only the breeze in the leaves and the far call of a whip-poor-will.

  Within a minute I was inside his office. I ran downstairs, opening doors, looking for a basement or even a large root cellar. Nothing. It hit me that the land here was a foot of topsoil over sandstone or limestone, not conducive to excavation. A fool’s errand, I realized; desperation and fear. I scrambled upstairs to escape.

  The computers hummed as the screensaver etched its endless line across the screen. A question came to mind: Jeremy had alluded to making his money playing the market, but had also said he’d only learned about making money after his arrival here. My brother lied so often even he forgot when his falsehoods crossed paths.

  I pulled close the chair and played my fingers over the keys. I had a few stocks of my own, a portfolio worth about enough to buy an entry-level car, but it provided a sense of control over my money. And it had given me an insight into reviewing charts and graphs and other financial records.

  I discovered Jeremy’s online trading accounts were password-protected, and my brother would never have used the birthdays and names common to most mnemonic passwords. He would simply have assigned each account a meaningless term and remembered it, his mind thriving on minutiae.

  I studied the desktops in turn until seeing a file named TXREC. I opened it and found tax records: gains and losses and estimated quarterly taxes he needed to file. I stared for several seconds at the amounts of the gains. My brother was indeed a canny reader of the market.

  I continued my fast scan until hearing an engine sound. I scrambled to the front window.

  Jeremy!

  His vehicle was canting down the road and approaching quickly, downshifting to turn the bend at his drive. I exited his file, pushed the chair into place. Heard the crunch of gravel beneath his wheels stop as he pulled to the gate. By the time my feet were feeling their way to the ladder rungs, I heard the clatter of the gate chain as he undid the lock.

  When my feet hit the ground, I heard him pull through the gate. Then stop to relock it. I started to slide the ladder closed, forgot the spring-driven stop mechanism. It slapped over a rung like bell. I winced, dropped the ladder to the ground and began feeding it into itself with one hand while the other held the mechanism from the rungs.

  Jeremy pulled to the porch, less than forty feet away, on the other side of the house. His door was opening as I grunted the ladder to the shed. Ducking inside, I replaced the ladder on its wall mount, the sweat of fear pouring into my eyes.

  His back door opened. I edged to the wall and found a slender crack between boards. My brother stepped outside and studied a thermometer mounted on a porch post. He nodded as if pleased by what the day was doing for him and went back inside. I slipped from the door, backed carefully away with the shed as my shield. In seconds I was back in the covering safety of the woods.

  My scan of my brother’s records confirmed what I’d suspected - none of the stock records pre-dated his arrival. He may have fostered his particular insights into the market before arriving, but had only profited once here.

  Which sparked a curious question: Where had my brother gotten the money to buy his property?

  45

  McCoy was at my door the next morning at seven thirty, the normally composed master of the woods looking pale and distraught.

  “What is it?” I asked, hobbling out to the porch while pulling on the second shoe.

  He produced a small black laptop and tapped the keys. “The geocache website. I checked it out of habit a half-hour back.”

  He spun the screen to me. I leaned close and saw map coordinates, above them the dreaded symbol.

  =(8)=

  My heart sank. Crayline was dead. This couldn’t be happening.

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  “Over by Star Gap. Donna’s heading there now. She wanted me to show you this, then meet her there.”

  “It has to be some kind of joke,” I said, stumbling into the vehicle, wondering if I was having a full-blown nightmare.

  We returned to the Forest Service SUV and McCoy pulled up and out of the hollow. We were closing on the site fifteen minutes later, Cherry waiting and pacing, her face tight with tension. We followed McCoy, walking left, then right, guided by the arrow on the GPS screen. He angled around a house-sized boulder, arriving at a muddy clearing in the forest floor, the mud lightened by dissolving shale, gray, rarer in the area than the dark soil or sand that generally prevailed.

  I heard McCoy gasp. Cherry ran up. Her lips moved but no sound came out. Caudill arrived and stopped dead in his tracks. He turned away and began hyperventilating.

  I stepped into the clearing. Beale’s naked body was on the ground. It took my mind several reality-bending moments to fathom the scene. What had been done to Beale was almost indescribable, requiring a sharp knife and hideous surgery.

  “Is it him?” Cherry asked, only able to look at the body in glances. “We can’t see his face without, uh …”

  “Those are his tattoos,” Caudill whispered. “It’s the sheriff.”

  Cherry called the state forensics and medical people and asked for their most experienced team to unravel the nightmare of Sheriff Roy Beale.

  “Why Sheriff Beale?” Caudill asked, shaken to his bootstraps. “What did he do?”

  “An authority figure, maybe,” I ventured. “Or a threat.”

  “There was nothing to Beale, threat-wise,” McCoy said. “If the killer had only Beale to deal with, he could kill half the folks in the county before Beale Junior even noticed.”

  “Beale Junior?” I said.

  “I thought you knew his daddy was sheriff, Carson,” McCoy said.

  “I do, I just never had to make connections to it before, see it on the timeline.” I turned to Cherry. “Could old Sheriff Beale have known anything about the camp?”

  Cherry said, “I heard a few bad tales about Beale’s daddy, but every county sheriff makes enemies who—”

  “I knew old Beale,” McCoy interrupted. “If there was anything illegal going on, I expect he got paid for not noticing.”

  “He was that bad?” Cherry asked. “You never told me that.”

  “Old Beale was dead and gone. No sense spitting on his memory.”

  Something stirred in my mind. “Mooney Coggins recalled Powers talking about ‘being put under a star’,” I ventured. “Could that have meant a protective alliance with old Beale … the sheriff paid to overlook the camp?”

  McCoy did the money-whisk. “If there was enough of this in the picture, I expect Beale senior would have pretended that part of the county didn’t exist.”

  I re-thought the situation with the new input. I walked from behind the boulder and studied the savaged corpse for a few seconds.

  “What’s another term for not seeing what’s in front of you?” I asked.

  Cherry shot a glance at the wreckage of Roy Beale. Her eyes closed and her shoulders slumped.

  “Having one’s head up one’s….” She couldn’t finish.

  �
�I rest my case,” I said.

  46

  If Krenkler and her crew had been in mop-it-up-and-hop-it-up to DC mode, they pivoted on that dime. We were summoned to the cabin by the park, told to the minute when we should arrive, which had Cherry mumbling under her breath as she took her seat at the conference table, awaiting an appearance by the woman she’d taken to calling The Peroxide Queen. Krenkler stood outside the cabin talking into two cellphones at once, her lacquered hair the only item not in frenzied motion. Three agents swirled around her bringing notes, coffee, chewing gum.

  Caudill arrived as the sole representative of the Woslee force. He didn’t look comfortable with command, pushing the furthest chair back even further and avoiding eye contact.

  “Christ Jesus,” Krenkler barked as she strode into the room, looking at Cherry and me like we did this on purpose, producing a body after she had most likely told HQ the case was wrapping up. “How many nutcases are loose in this goddamn wilderness?”

  “One more than Bobby Lee Crayline,” I said. “At least.”

  She fed the red mouth a strip of Juicy Fruit and shot me the hard eye. “You got no anonymous calls this time, Ryder?”

  She was flogging that horse again, obsessed with that damn call. “I’ll answer for the next fifteen times you ask, Agent Krenkler, and I’ll say it slow so you can understand it. I - never - received - any—”

  “Not funny. Answer the goddamn question.”

  A light dawned in my head. “Wait a minute,” I said, staring her full in the eye. “There’s something you’re not telling us, isn’t there?”

  She looked at the floor. I hadn’t figured Krenkler capable of guilt, but there it was.

  “What?” I pushed. “Out with it.”

  “Someone called us here anonymously,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Just like you.”

  “Wait a minute … you’re just now telling us that—”

  “Sheriff Beale didn’t call us in. I’m not sure Beale - rest his dull soul - could have found the FBI’s telephone number without a guide dog. The Bureau got a call three days before Charles Bridges was found. The caller predicted a string of murders here and invited us to take a look. The Bureau gets more weird calls than Jerry Springer. By the time we checked into it, the victim now known as Charles Bridges had shown up. We called Beale and convinced him it was in his best interest to request our presence.”

  Cherry stared at Krenkler. If looks could kill, hers were cyanide laced with strychnine.

  “What kind of lunatic killer invites the FBI to a killing spree?” I said. “And why didn’t you share the information from day one, so we could all know—”

  “Here’s the way it’s going to work,” Krenkler barked, over-voluming my question. “Everything will continue to be run directly from this office with my full—”

  “No way,” Cherry said.

  Krenkler froze as if slapped. Surprised faces turned toward Cherry.

  “You surely weren’t talking to me?” Krenkler said.

  “I’m talking to exactly you.” Cherry stood and put her palms on the table. “Detective Ryder and I may have found a new investigative path. We are going to look into it. WE, as in Detective Ryder and me. I can’t have you treating people like ignorant savages because they don’t live in a city, Agent Krenkler. We need them to talk, not stare at their shoes and mumble.”

  Krenkler snapped her gum like gunshots. “How good are you at running a cash register, Detective Cherry? You’re digging your grave here, career-wise.”

  Cherry said, “Only if I screw up, and I’m not planning on screwing up. If we discover something, we’ll tell you immediately, a gesture of professional respect you seen incapable of giving to us.”

  The room was as silent as the far side of the moon. The cluster of agents were too stunned to do anything but stare at the backs of their hands. Krenkler’s voice dropped to a whisper.

  “I’m not used to being spoken to like this.”

  Cherry said “Guess what, I’ve got four years of college, eight years of on-the-job training, a host of commendations. And I’m not used to being a copy machine.”

  Krenkler stared but found no response. Cherry nodded for me to follow and the door closed at our backs. “Tell me you have something,” I side-whispered as we hightailed it out of the cabin before Krenkler sent the agents after us. “Either that or I’m going to have to send you to store-clerk school.”

  Cherry nodded to her vehicle. Amazingly, she was smiling. She patted my back. “It’s just wonderful what some folks can leverage with a handful of dirty pictures. Get in my ride and I’ll show you what Powers meant by education.”

  We jumped in. Cherry pulled a few pages from her briefcase.

  “A friend who’s a clerk in a state office came in early and started digging for me, bless her bureaucratic heart. Turns out the state keeps a record of kids being home schooled so districts don’t send out truant officers to the homes. It’s just a list of names, but names nonetheless. I did some cross-checking, some elimination because of dates and ages, and presto …”

  She snapped a page in my face with a flourish and assumed a look of detectively success. That or she’d recently devoured a canary.

  “Seven names from way back when …” she said. “Jessie Collier, Elijah Elks, Bemis Smith, Jimmie Hawkes, Creed Baines, Teeter Gasper, and Donald Nunn. Seven names of boys aged eleven through thirteen listed as attending the Solid Word home schooling and camp program under the stewardship of Ezekiel Tanner, pastor, the Solid Word Church of Campton, Kentucky.”

  My heart skipped a beat. Maybe several.

  “Jesus, Cherry, you struck gold.”

  “Silver, maybe. Let me read what it says under Purpose. ‘The Solid Word School Program and Wilderness Camp is a rigorous and extensive program of care and discipline designed to strengthen students in mind, body and spiritual teachings.’ I’ve heard both Tanner and Powers talk and I can tell you that phrase got stolen from a legitimate home-school program somewhere.”

  “We’ve got to find those kids,” I said. “They’re the key.”

  “I’ve already started: Jessie Collier and Donald Nunn are deceased. Collier of an OD when he was twenty, thirteen years back. Nunn got shot in a drive-by in Ashland eight years ago; I’m thinking that he might be the Donald remembered by Daddy Coggins. I’m just crosschecking names and approximate ages with crime stats. Hawkes is in the state pen. Nothing yet on Smith and Nunn.”

  “Our only source is in prison?” I said.

  “Maximum security at LaGrange.”

  “Which is where?” I asked.

  She jammed the vehicle in gear, whipped away from the FBI cabins. “Buckle up. We’ll be there in a couple hours. I got things covered.”

  We booked for the prison, me looking out the back window for the FBI every few miles. If it looked like a parade of hearses, it was them. But it appeared we were on our own.

  Cherry knew the warden at LaGrange and arranged a private room for meeting Jimmie Hawkes, twenty-nine years of age, and a one-time student of the Solid Word home school and camp for disadvantaged children. I hoped Mr Hawkes would have plenty to say.

  We stopped at the guard station outside the visitation room. A heavyset guard with caterpillar eyebrows sat at a desk absentmindedly thumbing through a Bass Pro Shops catalog.

  “We’re here to see Jimmie Hawkes,” Cherry said.

  The caterpillars flicked up from a page of camo hunting gear. “You ain’t eaten recently, have you?”

  “Could you explain that, please?” Cherry asked.

  The guard walked to the control plate on the wall and pressed a button. The steel door at his back rolled open. “Hawkes is here for trying to rob a Korean grocery in Paducah. Trouble was, the store owner kept a twelve-gauge under the counter. The guy whipped that shotgun up and fired. Took the docs eight years just to git Hawkes where he is now.”

  “I can’t wait,” Cherry muttered.

  We took our seats at the table. The d
oor opened and Hawkes entered the room in profile, all we saw was the right side of his face. He seemed a series of jitters, each part of his body driven by a different rhythm, spasms in motion.

  When he turned to us I heard Cherry stifle the gasp: Hawkes looked like a character from a Batman movie, if there’d been a character called Half-face or maybe just Nightmare. The shotgun blast had torn off the left side of his face from mid-cheekbone outward, blowing away bone, flesh, ear, hair, a third of the mandible.

  The result was a face normal on one side of his nose, with no face on the other - just a sloping plain of gray scar tissue rebuilt in the rough shape of a head. There was nothing where his eye used to be, not so much as an indentation. I imagined the left side of his skull was some form of inner prosthetic. His skin resembled lizard hide. The right side of his mouth was normal, the left truncating in the scar, unable to close, making a permanent downcast hole.

  “Jesus,” Cherry whispered. I took her hand, squeezed it.

  “Guards say you want to talk,” Hawkes said in a strange, lisping rasp. “Got a half you want to talk to?”

  47

  “Home? What the fuck is a home, lady?”

  Hawkes answered Cherry’s opening question, asking where home was in his childhood. “Didn’t have no home. Got run from place to place. Uncles, aunts, mamaw. I learned to stay outside, keep outta the way. Run in, EAT! Go back out, winter, summer, didn’t matter. One day a preacher an’ a sexy lady come around, said they was starting up a bible camp and they was gonna school ME for FREE.” He turned in his chair and waved to an invisible woman. “BYE-BYE, MAMAW, YOU OLD WHORE.”

  Hawkes shivered and jittered. I wondered if the shotgun blast had left a bunch of wires hanging loose in his brain, sparking at random to cause the jumping and twitching.

  “Did you like the idea of going off with Reverend Tanner and Miss Powers, Jimmie?” Cherry asked.