Buried Alive (8 page)

We found him staring into a pool of muddy water, sixty feet long or so, twenty wide. At the downstream end was a rough concrete dam, three feet high, crumbling where it met the shore. In the middle was a horizontal metal wheel, two feet in diameter. The wheel operated the gate, a solid door that controlled water flow.

“Weird,” I said, seeing a small man-made pond in the middle of a thickly forested nowhere, stark rock cliffs rising at our shoulders.

“Not if you know the history,” McCoy said. “Fifty years ago one of the logging companies kept a crew shack by the base of the cliff. This was their swimming hole. I’ve taken a dip here a time or two.” He pointed to the center of the pool. “That’s where the GPS coordinates actually lead, oddly enough.”

“You mean the waypoint is in the pond?” I said.

“Might not mean much. GPS units aren’t accurate to more than a couple dozen feet, the older ones are worse.”

“But the other coordinates were almost dead-on, right? The ones leading to the first bodies?”

He nodded. “Under fifteen feet, all of them. For GPS, that’s an arrow dead-center in a target.”

I looked at the wheel on the dam gate. Wheel and screw rusted. Probably unused in decades. “Let’s see if we can open the gate,” I said to Beale. “Let some water out.”

“Hunh?” Beale said.

“Give it a shot,” Cherry said, suddenly interested.

Beale looked unhappy, but splashed into the eight or so inches of water below the dam and stood beside me, taking one side of the wheel as I grabbed the other. Beale needed a better deodorant. We slammed ourselves into the task, but the wheel was frozen solid with rust.

McCoy appeared, dragging eight feet of rusty railroad track, the small gauge used in logging operations.

“There was a spur track here,” he said, grunting the metal over the ground. “Old rails are still scattered around.”

I saw his intent and helped wedge the rail in the wheel. Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.” He was talking leverage, and so was McCoy. The ranger stripped off his shirt to keep the rust from smearing his uniform. Though in his early fifties he looked as hard and limber as a top-flight tennis pro.

“Again,” he said, planting his feet against the wet stones. “On three. One, two …”

This time we threw ourselves into the task with several feet of leverage on our side. The wheel made a grating squeal, then began turning, puffs of rust falling away in
the breeze. Water trickled from beneath the rising gate, then poured through. We stepped away.

In fifteen minutes most of the bed was visible. I rock-hopped toward the center and looked down at an assemblage hanging from the inner side of the dam.

“What is it?” Cherry said from the shore.

“The base of the dam is riddled with decay. Pieces of the metal lathe, a mesh of rebar, are exposed. Someone wired a pulley to the rebar three feet down.”

Cherry walked to the dam, jumped atop its one-foot width, edged out to where I was standing. She crouched and studied the bright metal pulley, obviously brand new, its frame wired to a rusted loop of rebar. She thought for a five-count, stared at me.

Whispered, “Oh my God.”

The others stood on the shore and stared between us, not yet seeing the horror.

Two hours passed. Beale and Caudill returned to the department. Cherry seemed reluctant to leave the scene. The three of us stood between the cruiser and McCoy’s SUV.

“The rope and the pulley, Detective,” McCoy said, looking at me. “You’re surmising that…” His words were replaced by grim pictures in his head. “You can’t be serious. It’s … insane.”

“It fits the evidence,” I said. “The killer looped a rope through the pulley, tied on a carabiner and hooked it to the woman’s collar. She was in the water, four feet deep
at the end of the pool. When the rope was yanked, the victim was pulled under water. Repeatedly, I figure. Why else rig a system where you can pull someone under, then loosen the rope to let them get to the surface again?”

“That’s … torture.”

“So is having a soldering iron jammed up your fundament. And who knows what happened before the truck was driven on to the first victim.”

Cherry nodded down the road. “Why was she taken from the pool and put downstream? Was it to confuse us?”

I saw McCoy’s mind working. “The edges of the dam are eaten away, erosion. There were pocket storms last night, heavy and fast. This creek drains about eight square miles of mountainside watershed.”

“The creek flash-flooded,” I said.

“The body started out in the pool, then rising water pushed it past the dam. The victim was left at the coordinates, but washed downstream a couple hundred feet. The coordinates were exact when the killer departed, some time before the storm hit.”

“Marking kills with creepy GPS coordinates,” Cherry said, shaking her head. “Dressing a body in sex clothes. Boiling someone’s insides with a soldering iron. This is beyond me, Ryder. You write books about this stuff. What’s your take?”

“It’s about control. The perp controls the victims through torture and making them conform to an image, as with the woman’s garb. He controls us, too, through the geocache game. We don’t discover bodies, he sends us to them.”

“Killing as a game?” McCoy said, looking ill. “Torture as play? Control through dead humans? What sort of world do you live in?”

“Same one you do, Lee,” I said. “I just see it through the basement window.”

Cherry sighed. “Let’s go take a look at the victim’s digs. See if she was as churchy as Beale thinks.”

We made one stop along the way, a tiny and weather-beaten log house a mile down the road, the only other dwelling in the area. The place looked like a relic from the 1800s, save for the silver propane tank nestled against its side and well over a dozen handmade bird-houses dangling from the row of maples in the side yard. Some were raw wood, oak and cedar. Others were painted in reds and blues and greens. It was like an avian subdivision.

“You know who lives here?” I asked as Cherry rolled into the drive.

“An elderly woman, gotta be mid-eighties. I stopped by the only time I was ever out here. Last year when I took the position, I drove every road in the county. She was on her porch. A very old-school mountain woman.”

Cherry knocked several times, shrugged. No one home. We headed on our way to Tandee Powers’s house.

The victim lived six miles distant, in what Cherry described as an “ancient trailer built a couple decades before Noah’s Ark”. It was back in a tight ravine, down one more gravel road with weeds growing between the tire lines.

We swept around a bend. Cherry said, “Oh shit.”

I looked up and saw the smoldering remains of a trailer. Muttering to herself, Cherry pulled in. We exited and kicked through pieces of wood and charred aluminum.

“It burned down in the night,” McCoy said, crouching at the edge of the burn field and studying the remains of a box spring and mattress. “No one could see flames back here in the hollow, and the smoke wouldn’t show on a clouded night. It was probably destroyed before the rain hit.”

Cherry walked over and stood above McCoy, looking into the wreckage. Her shoulders were slumped.

“That’s one thing about old trailers,” she sighed. “They burn two ways: hot and to the ground.”

Cherry returned me to my car and waved off my offer of conversation to pass the time while she did paperwork. I went back to the cabin to empty Mr Mix-up, passing Charpentier’s house. A lone figure was visible behind the cabin, hoeing in the garden. I waved, but the psychologist was too absorbed in his task to notice.

I’d been back at Road’s End all of ten minutes when McCoy appeared. I held my fingertips an inch distant from my ear holes. “If you tell me there’s another cache on the site, Lee, I’m not gonna listen.”

“No, thank God. But I got to thinking about the, uh, unusual aspects of the crimes. Do you think Dr Charpentier could help? He’s a psychologist.”

I thought a moment and shrugged. “He may be a clinician who specializes in smoking cessation or phobias, or
autistic children. There are all sorts of specialties, Lee, few helpful when dealing with monsters.”

“Are we missing a chance by not asking, Carson?”

The ranger had a point. I hopped in McCoy’s SUV and drove the thirty seconds to Charpentier’s cabin. The doc was still in his garden, bent over with his back to us, weeding a potato mound. His waist was slender, suspenders running from loose khakis to shoulders broader than I remembered from our near-meeting in the forest.

“He looks in good shape,” I noted.

“When he arrived in late winter, Dr Charpentier removed an acre of trees. Cut them, split them into firewood. He rented equipment to pull the stumps. The soil is clay, and he had truckloads of topsoil brought in, all for his garden. He seems a natural at backyard agriculture, a man given to nurturing. When he’s not in his garden or working on his land, he’s in the forest, studying.”

“The cabin looks older than a few months.”

“It was built a decade ago by the Brazelles, a pair of retired optometrists from Dayton, Ohio. Beautiful folks, but Mr Brazelle, Theo, developed Alzheimer’s and it became too dangerous for him in the woods. Sad. The property was on the market for less than a month when Doc Charpentier bought it. The land extends behind the cabin for a couple thousand feet, almost as wide. The cabin sits on thirty acres overall.”

“Charpentier lives there full time?”

“He travels occasionally. I think he’s writing a book.
Though he mostly keeps to himself, he can be surprisingly social. I’ve seen him at the park lodge talking Plato with vacationing philosophy profs from Western Kentucky University. The next afternoon he’s drinking beer and trading off-color stories with the crew cleaning out his septic tank.”

“Doctor Charpentier?” McCoy called as we stepped closer. “Hello … Doctor?”

The hoe kept its rhythmic pattern, Charpentier oblivious to our presence. “He’s wearing a headset,” I said, seeing the telltale white cord trailing from his ears. “An iPod or something.”

Charpentier kept his back to us as we approached, the hoe chopping merrily away. A dozen feet distant, behind chicken-wire fencing, I saw stands of tomatoes and rows of cabbages. Sugar baby melons vined along the ground, looking like green cannonballs peeking from the leaves. There were hutches to the side, chickens perhaps, or rabbits. Further back, along the tree line, I saw white boxes nestled in the trees: bee hives. Charpentier seemed a man who enjoyed being self-sustaining.

When we were within a dozen feet of the Canadian psychologist, McCoy called out.

“Doctor? Doctor Charpentier?”

Charpentier half turned and saw us. He was wearing a red bandana under the floppy white hat, a sweatband. His face lit with the prospect of visitors and turned away as he set his hoe against a nearby wheelbarrow and pulled the buds from his ears.

McCoy said, “Doctor, I want you to meet one of your temporary neighbors. He’s renting Road’s End.”

Charpentier turned fully to me. He stripped away the sweatband, then removed his sunglasses. My knees softened and a hiss rose in my ears.

Charpentier was Jeremy Ridgecliff. My brother. Two years gone from the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior, an escapee.

Jeremy grabbed my hand in his right hand, his left hand under my forearm, steadying me. His palm was as hard and dry as oak. His eyes twinkled with delight.

“So pleased to meet you, Mr Ryder,” he said, his voice inflected with a French accent. “Have you journeyed far?”

My first attempt at speech was a dry hack.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Charpentier smiled. “I didn’t quite catch that.”

“Our guest is from Mobile, Alabama,” McCoy offered. “He’s a police detective. Part of his work involves psychology. A subject we’d like to talk to you about. We have a problem in the Gorge area, and may be able to use your expertise.”

“My, my … I’m so infrequently useful these days. Anything I can do to help will be an honor, Detective, uh … I’m sorry,” he said, flicking the ear buds at his neck. “I play my music too loud and my ears take a few moments to recover. You said your name was Carton? Is that like Sydney Carton in the Dickens novel,
A Tale of Two Brothers?”

“Carson,” McCoy corrected. “It’s Carson Ryder. And wasn’t that
A Tale of Two Cities,
Doctor?”

Jeremy clapped his hands. “Of course. My subconscious mingled the title with two characters in the story, Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton. They were close as brothers.” Jeremy looked at me with amusement. “I forget, Mr Ryder … which man sacrificed himself for the other?”

“I don’t recall,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

My brother struck the exaggerated profile of a ham actor. “’Tis a far far better thing I do now than …” He turned back to me. “Or something suitably noble. Now then, Mister
Carson
Ryder, what sort of detecting do you do that involves psychology?”

“Homicide. Plus I also work a special unit that tracks psychopaths and sociopaths.”

“Oddly enough, I’ve had a bit of experience there,” my brother said, innocent as a starling.

Ten minutes later, Jeremy and I stood side by side on the porch of a fictitious Canadian psychologist and watched as McCoy drove away, Jeremy waving and calling
adieu
! Claiming other duties, McCoy had dismissed himself after the length of a glass of iced tea.

When I heard McCoy’s vehicle finish grinding up the steep lane to the top of the ridge, I turned to Jeremy.

“Explanation time, brother,” I said.

I followed Jeremy inside. The living room was a huge space, stone fireplace holding one end, bookshelves the other. Windows reached from the shelves to the vaulted ceiling peak. The wood walls shone softly, polished to a buttery gloss. The furniture was more delicate than the cabin; a couch, sofa and chair set on a braided rug inscribing an oval on the oak floor. A low table set centered the grouping. A chrome lamp arched fifteen feet from its base in the corner to the shade floating over the table. To the rear I saw a well-appointed kitchen with hanging pots, a beaten copper counter.