Buried Alive (6 page)

“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.”

I whistled Mix-up to my side and we jumped into McCoy’s official Jeep Cherokee, driving out of the long valley, coming to the split where the road wandered back to the only other cabin in the hollow. McCoy nodded toward the cabin as we passed.

“Had a chance to meet Doctor Charpentier, the fellow who lives there?”

“Never seen him.”

“He spends hours in the forest, hiking and thinking. If you see him, stop and say hello. A brilliant man. I’ve never known anyone to absorb information so quickly.”

“Charpentier is a medical doctor?”

“A psychologist from Montreal who took early retirement. He moved here for the climate, finding Canada too cold, the South too hot. Doctor Charpentier thinks Kentucky has the perfect temperature, and our forest reminded him of Canadian woodland.”

McCoy pulled up out of the hollow and drove north. He entered the national forest and wound down to the bottoms, the Red River to our left as we angled southeast.
Whenever the canopy of trees opened, I saw looming cliffs studded with pine on the ridges.

“Beautiful view,” I said.

“Depends on your perspective.” McCoy nodded at a cliff face thirty stories above the valley. “We’ve got a problem with people falling off cliffs. Doped-up locals and drunked-up college kids, mainly. They camp on the ridges for the view, forget where they are, walk over the edge. Last week a man took a two-and-half gainer from the top of that cliff to the bottom. I was on the rescue team. Or maybe body-recovery team is a better term. I’ve personally recovered over two dozen.”

McCoy slowed as a huge recreational vehicle moved toward us in the other lane, crowding the centerline. McCoy slipped past, pulled off the road and stopped the engine. We’d reached the trailhead. It was after we’d exited and gone to the rear to grab our packs that McCoy made his first mention of the grisly events of yesterday.

“I heard you had to spend some time with Detective Cherry,” he said. “She was surprised at your appearance.”

“It was a surprise to us all,” I said.

McCoy cleared his throat. “Did Detective Cherry mention there’d been a death prior to the man in the shack? A very similar event?”

“No, Lee,” I said, more interested than my face let on. “We never quite got around to police chit-chat.”

“It was a week back. Sonny Burton drove a snack truck, chips and pretzels and such. He went missing for two days. His truck was found in a hollow, Sonny underneath it,
hands frozen on to the front tire parked on his chest. Even though he was dead, his mouth was open, like he was screaming. There were a couple boot prints on the ground, what you noticed me looking for the other day. I guess you’re tuned to stuff like that.”

I nodded. “Two murders in a short span of time is probably unusual around here, but not freakishly odd anywhere, unfortunately. What makes you sure Burton is connected to the guy from yesterday?”

“The way the police received notice of both crimes.”

The point Cherry hadn’t discussed. “How?” I asked.

“Through coordinates on a geocache website. The location of Sonny Burton’s body was listed on a geocaching site with geographic coordinates. A couple teen kids found him.”

“Geocaching is hide and seek with a GPS, right?”

McCoy nodded. “It’s a recent craze. People hide things, trinkets, a log book. The coordinates are posted on the web. You use a GPS to find the cache, usually adding a trinket to a bunch of trinkets, or signing the book. There are big national geocaching sites, and little regional ones. The site where Burton’s coordinates were posted is called East Kentucky Geofun. It’s run from a computer server and operated by a kid in Stanton.”

“Cherry checked him out, right?”

“A sixteen-year-old techie – not involved. The site runs itself: Anyone with internet access can post on the site anonymously. Some local kids saw the new coordinates and went out expecting to find a standard cache, a box of trinkets or whatever.”

“But instead found a guy with a truck parked on his sternum. The same happened with the guy in the shack?”

“There were differences,” McCoy said. “Not much, but… It’s odd. Geocache listings are in a standard format for the website: the name of the cache, the coordinates, and the name of the person or persons placing the cache.”

McCoy had my attention. “How are these different?” I asked.

The ranger reached in his pack and produced a sheaf of folded pages. “Let me show you the format of the typical geocache …”

He unfolded a page and handed it to me. Geocache entries copied from a computer screen. The format was simple.

Haystack Rock

N XX.XXXXX° W XXX.XXXXX° / Johnny Cache

McCoy said, “It’s the name of the cache, the waypoint or coordinates, and who placed the thing – in this case a humorous handle. Standard stuff for a geocache.” His finger tracked down the page. “But down here is the entry that led the kids to Sonny’s body …”

=(8)=

N XX.XXXXX° W XXX.XXXXX°

“A strange symbol and the waypoint,” McCoy explained. “That’s all. The computer registers when the cache is placed, so that’s automatic.”

“Any idea what the eight denotes? Time of day, a campsite number, the infinity symbol on its side?”

He shrugged. “Donna Cherry and I spent hours trying to make sense of the number and symbols, together and individually. Nothing.”

“You and Cherry work together?”

“I have law-enforcement powers in the national forest. Plus I know the area better than most anyone else.”

I tapped the second set of coordinates. “This also showed up on the geocache site leading to Soldering-iron Man?”

“Not exactly. The coordinates were different, of course, but so was the number in parentheses.”

=(5)=

N XX.XXXXX° W XXX.XXXXX°

I stared at the pad and did all I could in the face of the information, which was shrug.

We pulled on our daypacks and for four hours I followed McCoy on his rounds: checking stands of white-haired goldenrod, a species only found in the Gorge; checking erosion blocks designed to keep sections of trail from gulleying; noting a deadfall across the path so the maintenance crew could tend to it with a chainsaw, and looking in on the occasional backpacking camper or campers to
make sure they were following rules about campfires and so forth.

Interspersed with these bouts of “business”, McCoy pointed out a few things I would have seen on my own, and a hundred more I wouldn’t have noticed. At a cliff face he explained strata, naming the epochs and conditions that had created the demarcations. He showed me where Native Americans had built camps and villages. He pointed out caves cut by underground streams, rolled away logs to display salamanders and other hidden critters.

We paused for lunch on a high ridge, the panoramic Red River Gorge spreading below like a postcard from Heaven. Mix-up chomped jerky sticks and took a nap. In minutes we pulled our packs back on. We were descending switchbacks on a curving trail when I saw a slender, white-bearded man approaching on the right-turning path ahead, visible across a slight ravine. His shoulders were wide, hips slender. He wore large sunglasses, a wide-brimmed safari hat, a blue shirt and khaki pants. He carried a walking stick and had a set of compact field glasses strung from his neck. He moved with ease, as if the trail were a city sidewalk.

“That’s Dr Charpentier,” McCoy said, sounding pleased. “You’ll enjoy meeting him.”

I saw Charpentier pause to study something in the trees, then resume his approach. The trail curved behind a stand of rhododendron and I lost sight of him.

We kept walking, but the trail remained empty, as if
Charpentier had vaporized. I turned back to McCoy and a hundred feet behind saw Charpentier moving away with carefree grace. For a split-second I wondered if some mystical forest physics had occurred, Charpentier passing through us like neutrinos through the earth.

“Uh, Lee….” I said. “How did Charpentier do that?”

McCoy pointed up the hillside. “A spur trail goes to a campsite above. He walked past us up there.”

“Charpentier’s antisocial?”

“Focused. When he’s thinking about something important, he doesn’t stop to chat.”

I shot a final look at Charpentier. He’d turned our way with field glasses to his eyes. I had the uneasy feeling they were trained on me.

In return for being my guide, I offered to fix supper for McCoy and he was happy to accept. We’d have a nice conversation, I figured, though it might veer into an area the ranger wasn’t expecting, one including the irritable Miz Donna Cherry.

I found a roadside stand offering silver queen corn, tomatoes, sugar onions, banana peppers, new potatoes the size of golf balls, and a local offering called greasy-grits beans. The grocery store provided smoked hocks. I cooked the beans, potatoes, onions and hocks together in stages, steamed the corn. I sliced the tomatoes and mixed them with sautéed peppers and onion, drizzled vinegar and olive oil over the concoction.

McCoy arrived at seven bearing two bottles of wine,
red and white, just to be prepared. We ate like stevedores and I asked questions sparked during the hike. We retired to the porch to watch the falling sun light the sky behind the western peaks. I leaned back in my chair and set my heels on the porch railing. Mix-up gnawed at a ham bone, a dog in bliss.

“Lemme ask a question, Lee. Sheriff Beale about took my head off when he found me at the scene. It wasn’t the height of professionalism. What’s his story?”

McCoy took a sip of wine. Sighed. “Roy’s daddy was sheriff, granddaddy before that. Roy’s part of a lineage that connects to a different time, back when a sheriff made up the rules as he went along, favors for kin and friends, revenge on enemies. Roy’s daddy died six years back, slammed by a heart attack while bedded down with a friend’s wife.”

“So Beale Junior got the sheriff job?”

“There was an interim sheriff for three years until the term ran out and it came election time. Like his daddy, Roy’s kin to half of everyone in the county. I reckon every relative that voted for Roy figured no one else in their right mind would.”

“Doesn’t inspire confidence.”

“Roy’s father and grandfather were stubborn and humorless men. Hard as flint, the both of them. Roy’s soft as a pillow, so he has to act the role he’s seen. Sometimes when I hear Roy talking and swaggering, it’s like hearing a high school student doing Henry V. The only problem is, I saw it done by Olivier.”

I laughed at the analogy. McCoy leaned back and folded his arms over his chest, studying the darkening sky. “Thankfully, Donna Cherry is in charge,” he said. “Sort of.”

“I noted she sometimes seems to out-rank the locals, sometimes not.”

“The state police and county agencies are stretched thin by budget problems. The state created Eastern Kentucky Combined Law Enforcement, where professionals help coordinate law-enforcement efforts in rural regions. We’re in region five, Cherry’s region. She was working in Berea, population of fifteen thousand folks or so. But she’s originally from here in Woslee County, the first in her family to attend college, about the first to finish high school.”

I put my hands behind my neck, stared into McCoy’s eyes. Smiled.

“Does Donna Cherry often use you as her spy, Lee? Or is this something new?”

He froze in his rocking.

“Pardon?”

“You stopped by this morning out of nowhere. Took me on a hike. Asked me a lot of questions. Probably would have asked me to dinner if I hadn’t invited you. This was all at Cherry’s suggestion, right? I can almost hear her voice. ‘Couldja get close to Ryder, Lee? Make sure he ain’t turned from a psycho tracker to psycho killer.’”

It was a poor impersonation of Cherry. My brother
was a natural mimic and could have nailed the voice. McCoy cleared his throat and turned, embarrassment coloring his face, no attempt to lie his way free.

“Donna wanted me to take you out on the trails and get a read on you. She thinks I’m a decent judge of character.”

“And your verdict?”

He nodded toward the table inside, still set with dishes. “I’m pretty sure insane killers can’t cook that good.”