by J. A. Kerley
“There’s a five-hundred-dollar reward, Sheriff.”
Beale’s eyes widened. He rocked forward in his chair, hand waving the gimme motion.
I went from Beale’s office to Cherry’s. Her desk was antithetical to Beale’s, a visual cacophony of files, folders, and photos.
“I made these up,” I said, handing over a dozen posters. “If you’re out, could you please—”
“I’ll put ’em all over the place. Give me all you have and I’ll take care of it.”
I gratefully handed her the stack. When I looked down at her desk, I saw it was covered with her handwritten notes and photos of Burton and Powers and the man in the shack.
“You’re pondering the cases?” I said.
She frowned, tossed her pen atop the mound of papers. “I’ve been thinking …”
“And?”
“What if Taithering really is the killer? Or was. What if Charpentier was wrong with all that academic symbol and metaphor hoo-hah, and Taithering was another Manson or Gein or …”
“You mean someone more like the Zodiac Killer,” I said, lapsing into my detective persona. “The Zodiac left cryptic messages.” I went to the whiteboard and picked up a red marker, scrawled the odd geocache sign on the clean white surface.
=(8)=
“How does that relate to Taithering?” I asked.
“I don’t know … yet.”
Cherry crossed the room to the board and wiped the symbol away. I figured she hated the damn thing. She hopped atop the small conference table and pulled her feet beneath her long legs, sitting cross-legged. She fixed me with the right eye.
“Do you ever think we were wrong, Charpentier was wrong … Taithering was the killer?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
She nodded toward the paperwork jungle on her desk. “I’m revisiting Tandee Powers and Burton. Soldering-iron Man’s still a cipher, but he’s wired into this somehow, no pun intended. I want to see if Powers ever crossed paths with Burton.”
“You sharing anything with Krenkler?”
The eyes darkened. “As much as she shares with me. At least until I find something solid.”
“She still using you as a messenger service?”
“No. Sometimes she has me make copies.”
I thanked her for distributing the posters, and turned to carry on the search for my lost dog. I felt Cherry’s eyes inspecting my back as I left.
“Good luck finding your doggy,” she said quietly as the door closed between us.
Chapter 28
The night brought little sleep, every sound causing me to sit up with the hope my companion had found his way home. Either that or I heard ravenous and red-eyed hell-hounds pursing my gentle giant of a dog.
Morning arrived with a siren’s call, literally, a long keening howl at seven a.m. I stumbled out to the porch, saw Cherry stepping from her vehicle. I saw her mouth move but heard nothing until she reached inside to kill the screamer.
“Sorry I’m becoming your alarm clock,” she said. “But a new entry on the geocache site arrived minutes ago.”
“It wasn’t Taithering,” I said, feeling like someone had kicked me in the gut.
Cherry sighed. “Doesn’t look that way. The coordinates are close to Rock Bridge.”
I’d hiked that trail my second day here. Rock Bridge trail inscribed a mile-long circle down into the Gorge to the trail’s namesake, a natural stone arch over Swift Camp Creek. It was basically a dilettante’s trail, the Park Service having poured a slender asphalt band most of the distance, winding through rhododendron tunnels and past towering hemlocks ringed with ferns. Though paved, the trail was no cakewalk, owing to the steep angle in and out of the valley.
Cherry looked past me toward the cabin, saw no happy mound of mutt. “Your dog back?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Look on the bright side. He’s probably found a girlfriend and they’re doing something that doesn’t involve you, at least for a day or two. So come with me, Ryder. We’ve come this far together.”
“What about the Feds?”
“Krenkler’s in Washington. Some kind of meeting not related to here. Her people are still in Augusta. Krenkler was so convinced Taithering was the killer she set up a command post there. The Feds are tearing Taithering’s house apart for evidence. They sent his computer to the forensic lab in Washington, that type of thing. I alerted her to the new geocache entry. She didn’t sound happy, and she’s heading this way on the red-eye.”
I startled internally, fearing the Feds finding my brother’s fingerprints in Taithering’s home. Then I recalled that, save to pat Taithering in camaraderie or consolation, my brother’s hands had never left his pockets. Always a step ahead.
“So we won’t have to deal with Feds at the site?” I asked.
“Not for a while, at least.”
I looked down: wrinkled shirt, Levis, bare feet. “I don’t suppose I have time for a shower? Before we head to Rock Bridge?”
She hid the smile poorly. “You got time for shoes. That’s it.”
In a minute I was inside the SUV and pulling on a fresh shirt and my hiking boots. Cherry turned and headed out of the hollow, passing my brother’s home.
“No stopping for Charpentier?” I asked.
She shifted to low and angled up the hill. “I’ll be frank, Ryder. The guy’s got more smarts in his pinky than I do in my entire brain. He knows things about the insides of people I’ll never see …” She clammed up and concentrated on driving.
“There’s a but in there,” I prompted.
“But the more I think about it, the more the guy weirds me out. It’s like he knows too much about how people work … does that make sense? It makes me nervous when he looks at me. It’s like he’s studying thoughts I haven’t had yet. If we find anything that needs shrink action, then we’ll come calling on the Doc.”
Nice alarm system, Cherry, I thought, pulling on my seat belt for another whirlwind adventure in driving.
When we arrived, Beale had closed off the road, Caudill and another county cop manning the block. Caudill waved me through, then turned to stop one of the ubiquitous RVs from pulling on to Rock Bridge Road. I wondered what Caudill would tell the tourists.
We’ve got a madman killing folks right and left. Have you considered Yosemite?
We drove to the trailhead and found McCoy pulling a backpack from the gate of his vehicle. Beale was pacing and tapping his holster, trying to appear in command. When he saw me, his dark eyes went a shade darker, but he didn’t complain aloud.
“Christ in a hammock, where you been, Cherry?” Beale bellowed. “I ain’t got all day.”
“Let me go first, Sheriff,” McCoy said, shouldering into his pack. “There are things I need to see.”
“Like what?”
“Spiders.”
Beale, confused, jumped in behind McCoy. Cherry and I fell in after that. We descended a long series of wood and rock steps into the valley, jogging toward the coordinates on the geocache site. Every hundred feet or so McCoy stopped to peer into trailside vegetation.
“Almost there,” McCoy yelled, studying his GPS as we ran alongside Swift Camp Creek and passed Creation Falls. “The coordinates are at Rock Bridge.”
We picked up speed, Beale now stumbling and puffing two hundred feet back, years of biscuits and gravy taking their toll.
“Oh, lord,” I heard McCoy say.
Rock Bridge was at the far end of a miniature plain, a flat and open acre scoured by seasonal floodwaters. The top of the rock arch was fifteen feet above the slow, green water, the bottom about ten feet from the surface.
Zeke Tanner’s naked body was hanging in the space between the arch and the water, ankles lashed together with rope, arms dangling down, as if frozen in the process of diving. He was twisting in the breeze and as the body swirled toward us I saw a rough zigzagging of tattoos from his pubis to his sternum. They looked like black lightning bolts.
The s
ight froze me in my tracks. Cherry was half the distance closer, her hand cupping her mouth in horror.
“What’s with the tattoos?” I said.
Cherry turned, her face ashen. “They’re not tattoos, Ryder. They’re stitches.”
It was late morning when Harry Nautilus and Conner Sandhill met Sheriff Babe Ellis at a Dairy Queen in west-central Alabama, climbing into Ellis’s county-cop cruiser, unmarked. All three men gazed longingly at the window posters of caloric treats offered by the DQ. “Eve didn’t tempt Adam with an apple,” Nautilus said. “It had to have been a banana split.”
Ellis, six foot six, almost three hundred pounds, patted his belly, a soft roll over his belt. “Tell me about temptation.”
“Tell me again why we’re here,” Conner Sandhill said, tugging at his thick black mustache. Like Nautilus and Ellis he was well over six feet tall. “Some sudden impulse of Ryder’s, right?”
Nautilus nodded. “Carson’s pretty sure he doped out Bobby Lee Crayline’s escape method, wants us to put the screws to a guy named Farley Oakes.”
“How’d Carson figure it out?” Ellis asked, still gazing wistfully at the poster of the banana split.
“He says he got the idea from Mexicans and corn. Don’t ask.”
“Where the hell is Ryder?” Sandhill snorted. “I haven’t seen him in weeks.”
“Vacationing in Kentucky,” Nautilus said.
“But he’s still thinking about a six-month-old case not even in his jurisdiction?” Ellis chuckled.
Nautilus shook his head. “You know Carson. Can’t let anything go.”
“Ryder’s probably spent thirty years investigating why the Tooth Fairy doesn’t visit any more,” Sandhill said. He turned to Ellis. “You said you had a rap sheet on Oakes?”
Babe Ellis passed Nautilus and Sandhill copies. The men studied the crimes. There wasn’t much, but it was telling. Ellis put the blue Crown Vic in gear.
Farley Oakes lived in a small frame house a couple hundred feet back from the road. It needed paint. There was a work truck on blocks in the front yard. The barn was a hundred feet beyond, a small corral to the side. A rusting green tractor nosed from the barn like sniffing out visitors. Nautilus counted two No Trespassing signs, three Private Property – Keep Out signs. Mr Oakes seemed a tad fearful of outsiders.
“How you want to work it?” Ellis asked.
“I’ll lead,” Sandhill said. “But I need you to be an irritant, Harry.”
Nautilus grinned. “It’s the sand in the oyster that gives us pearls.”
“Lawd,” Ellis sighed. “You guys stay up nights working on the routine?”
They pulled to a stop at the end of the rutted drive. Ellis pointed to a bright red Dodge Ram pickup parked in the side yard. It glittered with chrome.
“There’s about forty thousand bucks’ worth of truck. Looks a little out of place, don’t you think?”
“Let’s hit it and git it,” Nautilus said, opening his door.
Ellis looked at the property, then at the house. “You guys handle the inside stuff. I’m gonna go look for a place to take a leak, right?” He grinned and disappeared around the side of the house, heading for the barn and moving mouse-quiet for a man so large.
Nautilus and Sandhill were a dozen paces from the door when it banged open, Oakes framed in the doorway, wearing an angry look and holding a shotgun. He glowered at Nautilus.
“Git off my property, whoever you are.”
Nautilus held up his badge. “I’m Detective Harry Nautilus, Mr Oakes. My partner, Detective Carson Ryder, was at the prison-van situation – remember him? This is Detective Sandhill.”
“Oh my goodness,” the man said as he digested the information. “I’m sorry. I thought you was insurance salesmen.”
The weapon was quickly tucked behind the door.
“We’re flummoxed by the killings, Mr Oakes. We’d like to ask a few more questions. Just to see if anything’s jogged in your memory over the past few months.”
Oakes shrugged, tapped his forehead. “I cain’t think of anything. I been trying.”
“May we come in for a couple minutes, run some questions by? It won’t take long.”
“Hang on a sec. I got to tidy up a few things.”
He disappeared behind the door. It reopened three minutes later, Oakes gesturing them inside.
The tight space was cluttered with magazines, unwashed clothes, a dining-room table strewn with a disassembled alternator, the pieces interspersed with plates, dried food clotted to them, cigarette butts studding the food. Nautilus shot a look at the magazines: Handgun Digest, Modern Weapons, Southern Partisan. The only clean place was a computer desk in the corner, a large monitor behind a keyboard. Hanging above the desk was a Confederate battle flag.
“I ain’t as neat as I should be, but then if any of you fellas are single, you know we’re all pretty sloppy.”
Time to put the sand in the oyster, Nautilus thought. He smiled benignly.
“I’m single, Mr Oakes,” he lectured, a ghost of condescension in his voice. “I keep things neat by setting aside fifteen minutes daily for putting things in their proper place. Just amazing at what that fifteen minutes can do, if you put your mind to it.”
“Mebbe I’ll give that a try,” Oakes said, voice tighter. “Fifteen minutes, you say?”
Nautilus looked around Oakes’s home. Frowned.
“Here, maybe more like an hour.”
Oakes’s eyes flashed. He turned away and shunted aside a pile of clothes on the couch. “You can sit here, you want.”
Nautilus studied the ragged couch like it was infested with lice. “I think I’ll stand, thank you.”
“Do what you want,” Oakes grunted.
Sandhill leaned against the wall, arms crossed. “You know, Mr Oakes, that a man named Bobby Lee Crayline escaped from the van that day. You said just before you got to the scene you heard motorcycles moving away.”
“That’s what I told the cops.”
Sandhill stepped close, his broad body all Oakes could see. “Crayline was a member of the Aryan Conquest. It’s like a prison club for white guys only. You ever heard of that particular organization?”
The farmer scratched his temple with a yellowed nail. Shrugged at Sandhill.
“Can’t say as I have.”
“It’s figured that a person or persons unknown drove by the van on motorcycles,” Sandhill said, “blew off the driver’s head with a shotgun. The van crashed and the fuel tank ruptured. They would have worked fast to get Crayline out and on a bike, haul his ass away. Was that what you heard?”
“I was hauling hay bales with my tractor. It’s loud. I just barely heard them bikes over it. Then I seen the smoke and run over fast.”
“And you found?”
“The front window was busted on the van and the guy on the passenger side was crawling out of the fire. I pulled the guy away. That’s when the cop came up, the Ryder fella.”
Sandhill doodled in his notebook. “Tell me, Mr Oakes, was the—”
“Where’s that black guy?” Oakes said, suddenly aware that Nautilus was no longer in the room.
“In the john, maybe. Tell me, Mr Oakes, was the back door open on the van?”
But Oakes was heading around the corner to the kitchen, looking for Nautilus. “Hey, you there, come on out here. There ain’t nothin’ back there.”
“I was just taking a tour, Mr Oakes,” Nautilus said, standing in front of an ancient, shuddering refrigerator. “I haven’t been in many farmhouses. Just seeing how you people live.”
Nautilus emphasized the words you people.
“What people you talking about?” Oakes said.
Nautilus did wide-eyed innocence. “Just you people, you know? Agrarians.”
Oakes’s eyes went dark. “I’ll tell you how my people live, Mister Detective. We live out here in the clean and open air. Not all piled up together. We live righteous, God-fearing lives and—”
“The door on
the van, Mr Oakes,” Sandhill interrupted. “Was it open?”
Oakes spun. “How’m I supposed to remember that? There was a crash and a fire and I was busy tryin’ to save a man’s life and—”
“Details, Mr Oakes,” Nautilus interrupted, stepping closer to Oakes. “Sometimes at a crime scene there are details that people remember after time has gone by.” He spoke as though trying to make a slow child understand a simple concept. “It’s like they suddenly see the scene with more clarity. Clarity means—”
“I goddamn know what the hell clarity means.”
“You were pulling a trailer full of hay bales?” Sandhill asked, his turn to take a step closer to the farmer.
“I just goddamn said so.”
“Where did you get the bales, Mr Oakes?” Sandhill asked. “And where were you taking them?”
“Get the bales?” Oakes slapped his forehead. “It’s a farm! Don’t you know nothing? I think it’s time for you two to—”
“Were you feeding animals? Taking the bales to a feeding station?”
But Oakes was looking from side to side, Nautilus no longer in sight.
“Where the hell has it gone now?” Oakes spat, angling his head to peer into the kitchen. Sandhill stepped aside, revealing Nautilus sitting at Oakes’s desk. Nautilus looked up, two dog-eared paperbacks in his hand.
“I’m right here, Mr Oakes. I was just admiring some of the books you enjoy. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Are you aware scholars have found both to be of spurious origin? Spurious means—”
Oakes snatched the books from Nautilus’s hand.
“I’ll read whatever I goddamn want. It’s a free country – least it used to be. And I think it’s time for you to get your snooping black ass out of here.”
Nautilus shot Sandhill a get-ready nod and the pair shuffled to the door. Oakes stood in the center of his living room with his arms crossed, framed by yellow newspaper clippings, rotted food, broken machinery and a deceased flag. Nautilus paused and turned.
“I checked your past, Mr Oakes. You and four buddies harassed two black women you thought were lesbians, punched one of them. A couple years later you burned a six-foot cross in the front yard of—”
