Buried Alive Page 15

  Oakes jutted his chin. “I stand up for my own.”

  Sandhill opened the door. Nautilus winked at him; time to shuck the oyster. He walked to the threshold. Paused as if something had just become clear in his head. He turned to the farmer.

  “I know that you were part of the escape plan, Mr Oakes. The bales on your trailer were a shell. The shooter wasn’t on a motorcycle, but on the road, maybe holding up his hand like he needed help. The van stopped, the shooter went to work. Bobby Lee Crayline and the shooter slipped into the space in the bales, and you dropped more bales in place to close them off. You answered all the questions, then hopped on your tractor and pulled away.” A hint of a smile crossed his lips. “How’d I do?”

  Oakes’s eyes shifted from Nautilus to Sandhill and back again. “Prove it,” he spat, his chest puffed in defiance. But Nautilus saw fear in the man’s eyes and heard the quiver in his voice.

  “We always do,” Nautilus said, stepping outside, talking over his shoulder as he and Sandhill went down the rickety stairs. “Be a lot better for you if you tell us now, Mr Oakes. A judge will knock years off your sentence for telling the truth. By the way, we already know about that other nasty stuff you did. Everything.”

  Sandhill tsk-tsked. “We’ve been watching you for some time, Farley. You’ve been a bad boy.”

  With these people, Nautilus and Sandhill knew, there was always other stuff. It made them natural paranoids.

  “Wh-at stuff?” Oakes said, voice cracking. “What are you lying about now?”

  As if cued by Cecil B. DeMille, Babe Ellis appeared from the side of the house, grinning like a delighted goblin.

  “WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?” Oakes railed at Ellis. “WHAT WERE YOU DOING BACK THERE!”

  Ellis didn’t look at Oakes. He smiled broadly at his fellow cops and brandished a pudgy yellow envelope with the word EVIDENCE stamped over both sides.

  “I ASKED WHAT YOU GOT THERE?” Oakes screeched. He sounded like a terrified child.

  Nautilus high-fived Ellis, as if he had a major crime-breaking find in the envelope instead of his own handkerchief. The men walked to the car, laughing as though every wish they’d ever made had just been granted in triplicate.

  Come on, come on … Nautilus thought.

  “I didn’t have any fucking choice,” Oakes whined to their backs, defeat in his voice. “Bobby Lee said I had to do it.”

  29

  Tanner’s body went straight to the state morgue in Frankfort. Cherry arranged to have the body put atop the post-mortem list, going from transport to autopsy. We ate a light breakfast to give the transport a head start, then drove the ninety minutes to Frankfort, the state capital. McCoy returned to the scene to see if he could make any further reconstructions using his woodsman’s knowledge.

  “It’s unreal,” Cherry said as we zoomed down the ramp from I-64 to Frankfort, “the perp carried Tanner’s body almost a half-mile. He went down steps, up and down the trail, pulled it to the top of the arch. Oh yeah, he was also carrying a big coil of rope. You know the kind of strength that would take?”

  I shook my head in disbelief. I was fit and relatively strong and would have crapped out halfway down the trail. If it was one person, he was built like Mike Tyson in his prime.

  The attending pathologist was a man named Vernon Krogan, late fifties, close-cropped gray hair, wide blue eyes incapable of surprise. I knew Doc Krogan, his species anyway, closing in on retirement after a lifetime dis-assembling bodies, many of them victims of hideous and violent crimes. He’d performed the autopsy as if tearing down a carburetor, not interested in philosophical aspects of the device - carburetors have neither philosophy nor theology - but only in such things as carbon accumulation and surface pitting.

  The autopsy complete, the body was covered by a drape. Cherry and I stood to the side of the table as Krogan pulled off his mask. The room smelled of death and disinfectant and I’d smell it for days. I used to think the smell was on my clothes, my skin, but realized it had gotten trapped in my head.

  “The corpse had been slit open,” Krogan said, removing his mask. “I’d figure a gutting knife, like hunters use on deer. Hang them upside down, slit the belly, let the innards fall out.”

  Cherry grimaced. “Tanner’s guts were gone?”

  “A crude job, intestines slashed out, cut top and bottom. A lung had been left behind. But mostly everything got yanked out.”

  Cherry was having trouble grasping the news. “Tanner was emptied out and sewed back up?” she said. “That’s what you’re saying?”

  Krogan pulled off his paper lab gown and jammed it into a receptacle. “Sewed is an imprecise term. Someone punched holes in the opened flaps of flesh, lashed the pieces closed with black boot laces.”

  “Why sew him back up?” Cherry asked.

  “To keep the stuffing from falling out, of course.”

  “Stuffing?” Cherry said.

  Krogan paused. “Oh … No one told you? Several of my colleagues came back to take a look.”

  “Told us what? Look at what?”

  “The emptied abdominal area was packed with a brown substance before being stitched closed.”

  “What kind of substance?”

  Krogan snapped off his gloves and dropped them in the receptacle. “We’re doing tests, but everything points to horse manure.”

  “Tanner was packed with horseshit?” Cherry said, eyes wide.

  Krogan regarded Cherry with a look combining curiosity and amusement.

  “So far you’ve sent us a man with a soldering iron in his lower bowel, a drowned woman dressed like a hooker, a man crushed by a snack van, and a corpse packed with horsepoop. What do you have going on over there in Woslee County, Detective Cherry? Sure seems like a corker.”

  30

  “Tanner was full of shit,” Cherry said when we were pulling away from of Frankfort’s city limits and roaring on to Highway 64, heading east to Woslee. “Nothing real academic in that symbol.”

  “Hard to ignore,” I acknowledged. “It also suggests Tanner was purposefully poisoned. But how did the stew get on his stove?”

  Cherry thought in silence for eight miles, until we pulled on to the Mountain Parkway. “I got it!” she yelled, smacking the steering wheel with her palm. “Remember the three by five card I found, Bless you Brother for your constant inspiration?”

  “The card in his kitchen,” I nodded, remembering the seemingly inconsequential find.

  “I expect half of what Zeke Tanner ate came from his flock. Folks lacking money to drop in the collection plate make it up with food or services. All the killer needed to do was cook up a tasty-looking bowl of death, leave it on Tanner’s front steps when he was out, the note as the clincher. It would have happened all the time, totally normal, except this time Tanner sat down to his last meal.”

  I mulled over Cherry’s words. “Something’s bothering me,” I said. “Tanner was poisoned by our killer, right?”

  She nodded. “He used the geocache site to crow to the world. Or whoever was looking.”

  “But the killer jammed a tool inside John Doe, presumably waiting to enjoy the show from hell. He knelt a foot from Burton’s head and slowly cranked down the snack truck. He stood a dozen feet from Tandee Powers as he bobbed her under water with the rope and pulley …”

  It took a couple seconds, but Cherry got it. “There was no personal involvement with Tanner,” she said. “The killer wasn’t in on his victim’s final breath.”

  “Something went wrong with the killer’s plans,” I said. “The guy on the bush-hog showing up, maybe. Tanner was sick or hallucinating and got freaked out by the guy, went amok with the gun. How far is it to Tanner’s church?”

  “Twenty minutes,” Cherry said, now thinking parallel to me. “I’ll have McCoy meet us there. This is his kind of thing.”

  Lee McCoy was parked near Tanner’s shattered church when we arrived. The ranger listened quietly as Cherry confirmed that Tanner appeared not a random b
it of mayhem as initially thought, but our fourth serial victim.

  “Horse manure?” McCoy said. “Doesn’t that say …”

  I nodded. “Brother Tanner was full of shit. Someone wasn’t buying Tanner’s status as a holy man, Lee.”

  “We thought Brother Tanner was nuts,” Cherry said. “We didn’t know the problem was part of the bigger picture. Thing is, in all the other cases, the killer was in on the death.”

  McCoy had a fast mind. “You’re thinking someone was watching?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Nearby and waiting for the mushrooms to take effect, perhaps. Hoping to step in and do nasty, up-close things to the poisoned man, stuff like he did to Burton and Powers. Actions with a personal symbolism.”

  Cherry jumped in. “Best-laid plans gone awry.”

  McCoy jogged to the fence line behind Tanner’s house trailer and studied angles of sight, peering into pines and hemlocks ringed with honeysuckle. After several minutes of studying the land, he inspected the barbed-wire fence separating Tanner’s land from the dense national forest property in the rear. He studied the wire as he walked, the same curious look he’d given to the trees along the Rock Bridge trail.

  “Wire’s been cut here,” he said, pointing to an opening forty feet from Tanner’s back door. Cherry leaned close, studied the truncated wires between two solid posts.

  “Cut recent,” she said. “Not a touch of rust.”

  McCoy passed through the broken wire and into the woods. I was looking down for footprints or disheveled branches, McCoy looking up, broad brown hand porched over eyes crinkling against the sunlight.

  “There,” he said after we’d walked two dozen feet. I looked up and saw a black-and-green metal assemblage resembling a chair attached to the tree about thirty feet up.

  “A deer stand,” I said.

  “Portable and camouflaged,” McCoy said. “The killer climbs the tree, snaps the stand in place, sits in comfort and watches Tanner’s place. He notes Tanner’s patterns, leaves a pot of toxic stew and waits a bit longer. Hoping he can go inside and have - what did you call it, Carson - his symbolic moments?”

  “Jesus,” Cherry said, sighting between the tree and Tanner’s trailer, two hundred feet away. “The guy could have been watching the whole Tanner meltdown from here.”

  I climbed the tree. The stand was positioned to reconnoiter the multi-windowed rear of Tanner’s trailer. A man with good binoculars could watch like his nose was pressed to the glass.

  I retrieved the stand, hoping we could pull prints, figuring we wouldn’t, given the extreme care our perp had shown so far. McCoy pushed further down the trail as Cherry and I combed the ground beneath the tree for evidence, finding nothing.

  “Got a trail back here,” McCoy yelled after a few minutes. We followed his voice to a hard dirt path half obscured by undergrowth.

  “Looks rugged,” I said. “Could you ride it on a dirt bike?”

  “Somebody has recently,” he said, pointing to a tire scraping in the gray dust. “If it was me, I’d ride to the Forest Service firebreak a quarter-mile north. Then it’s an easy ten-minute run to a real road. This guy had it figured out.”

  McCoy’s phone rang. He snapped it open, spoke for several minutes, questioning his caller about times of day, from the sound of things. He asked the caller to verify the official time of sunrise. Waited. Nodded when the information arrived and turned back to Cherry and me.

  “The spiders have spoken, folks. And they’re saying something interesting. Let’s re-group back at the park, where I can put together a little show and tell.”

  31

  We met at the office in the lodge. Cherry had called Beale, protocol, and he’d grumblingly assented to an appearance. He brought Caudill along, presumably to do the remembering if anything important was said.

  “You’re doing this without the FBI?” Beale grunted when he entered. “That’s gonna piss off Krenkler.”

  “They’ll be apprised of everything going on, Roy. And you can tell them anything we leave out, right?”

  The barb zoomed by Beale, who nodded and broke wind as he sat. Inside the room it was the five of us and, for about a minute, a female ranger in her early twenties who entered to hand McCoy a file holding slender strips of paper and a few other pages. McCoy studied the information as he and the young ranger spoke quietly in a corner. When she turned to leave McCoy patted her shoulder and said, “Great job.” The kid practically floated out the room on a cloud of euphoria.

  “Can we get some goddamn coffee in here?” Beale bayed.

  “The waitresses only work in the restaurant, Roy,” McCoy said quietly, turning from his task to pull his wallet. “But if you run over there I’ll buy the coffee. Donuts, too.”

  Beale’s eyes darkened in dilemma: be the coffee gopher or miss out on a freebie. He snatched up McCoy’s twenty and waddled out the door.

  McCoy finished his calculations and looked up. “The road into Rock Bridge trail? Eight vehicles went down it after seven p.m. yesterday. Five before eight p.m. One was between eight and nine, just barely dark. Here’s the two I think we’re interested in: one vehicle headed toward the trailhead just past midnight, exited at half-past two. The second vehicle entered at bit before five a.m. and left at six-ten.”

  I stared at McCoy as if he’d conjured polka-dot elephants as the table’s centerpiece. “How the hell do you know that, Lee?”

  He dangled the slender scrolls that resembled calculator paper. I saw printing, numbers and times. “Ever see a pair of skinny hoses crossing the road and attached to a box to the side? Traffic counters. We have several throughout the park, including one on that final stretch of Rock Bridge Road leading to the trailhead. They count entering and exiting vehicles.”

  Cherry looked up. “You’re saying …?”

  “I’m saying the vehicle crossing the counter at midnight was carrying the body. The perpetrator took it down the trail to the arch, strung it from the bridge.”

  “The other vehicle,” I said, confused by the timeline, “the one that crossed the counter hose near five a.m., why don’t you think it was our man?”

  “The killer had to haul the body to the bridge, then create the suspension system. That meant getting in the water, running rope under the bridge, climbing back atop the arch and setting the knots. Then hiking back out. Had to take at least two hours.”

  “What about the later entry?” Cherry asked.

  McCoy leaned forward. “A strange story by itself. Someone went to Rock Bridge a bit after five in the morning. ”

  “Whoa,” I said, holding up a hand, my alarm bell ringing. “That’s supposition, Lee. All your counter registered was a vehicle on the road. You can’t conclude that the person in the vehicle got out and hiked to Rock Bridge.”

  “Maybe it was a benign civilian who drove to the trailhead,” Cherry said, weighing in on my side. “An insomniac who couldn’t sleep. Or an alky having a predawn eye-opener. Believe me, I see a lot of that. The mystery early visitor left without ever setting foot down the trail. He or she might never have gotten out of their car.”

  “That’s not what the spiders tell me,” McCoy said. I said, “Pardon me?”

  “We’re all hikers here. We’ve all been the first person down a trail at daybreak, right? What do you do about every hundred feet?” McCoy used his hands to make a swimming motion in front of his face.

  “Push away spider webs,” I said, getting the clue. “I always use a walking stick or fishing pole to knock them down.”

  “There should have been cross-trail webs on the way to Rock Bridge. The spiders are industrious critters with plenty of time to string webs after the killer was gone. But I didn’t find a single strand … all the way to the bridge. Our five o’clock visitor went all the way to the body, knocking aside the webs.”

  “It jives with Miz Bascomb,” I said. “She heard a vehicle on the road a few hours after the killer drowned Tandee Powers. The vehicle with the stick shift.”

/>   McCoy cleared his throat. His brow was knit in frown, his chin perched on tented fingertips. “It’s interesting to me that the killer is gone before two or three a.m., but nothing appears on the geocache site until hours later, after daybreak. That seems to jive more with the appearance of the second person.”

  “You think the killer’s not entering the symbol and data on the site?” Cherry said, shaking her head. “The mystery visitor is?”

  “The timing suggests it,” McCoy said.

  “It’s a reach,” Cherry said. “But I’m at the point where reaching is progress. The question is - if it’s true - why?”

  I saw Judd Caudill’s hand quiver on the table. It lifted two inches, fell to the table, a kid in class wanting to raise his hand, but frightened he’ll get laughed at for his answer.

  “What is it, Judd?” I asked. “Speak up.”

  “I was, uh, thinking. My cousin is the county representative for the state environment agency. He checks new installations of septic tanks and goes in after the tanks have been installed to see if they’re done right…” He paused, still unsure of himself.

  “Go on, Judd,” I said. “We need every idea we can get.”

  “Uh, well, I was just thinking … what if the later person is like a killing inspector or something?”

  Beale had entered during Caudill’s appraisal, bags in hand and confectioner’s sugar smearing his face. He started laughing uncontrollably.

  Caudill shrunk down in his seat. I wrote Killing Inspector? in my notebook and underscored it twice.

  32

  It was four in the afternoon when we left the meeting, heads spinning. We were standing in the lodge parking lot looking over the steep cliffs and mulling the new information when Harry called.

  “You were dead on, Carson,” he said, after giving me a brief rundown of the action. “You should have seen Oakes’s face when Babe came strutting out from the back of the house, grinning like he owned the mortgage on Oakes’s soul.”