by Dudley Lynch
But with Judson, I sensed my follow-up move should be the reverse of my usual wait-them-out move. I lowered my chair to the floor. Leaned across the table. And got as close to him as my supporting elbows would allow.
“Judson, I think you saw something else.”
Chapter 23
As I listened to what Judson said next, I was already reviewing my options. I could do what Judson and his friends had done: take a drive over the prairie. But that was too slow, and it limited what I could view. I wanted to see everything that might be important, and I wanted to see it as soon as possible. That meant from the air.
We didn’t have a helicopter — far too expensive for a department of our size. I could rent a chopper and pilot at Flagler Regional Airport, but I knew that after I paid the bill, I’d have trouble affording toilet paper for the office for the next year.
I could also request the Texas Highway Patrol helicopter from Midland. But who knew when it might be available.
Or I could do what I tended to do most times when I needed to view something from the air. Ask my friend Miles Cayden to crank up his eighty-one-year-old Piper J-3 Cub. “The Balcony Seat,” I called it. The little airplane was cheap, but it allowed you to see what you needed to see, provided what you wanted to look at couldn’t outrun you.
Problem was, I couldn’t take Judson up with me.
The J-3 Cub only had two seats, one behind the other. Besides, its useful load was 450 pounds. Even if Judson managed to squeeze his massive frame into either seat, we’d have needed a malnourished dwarf for a pilot.
I tut-tutted myself for that thought. Not very politically correct, bud.
So I said as little as possible as I listened to the articulate man-child in my interrogation room.
He was fidgety. To an extreme. Didn’t look straight at me again as he talked for several minutes. “I think they were spooked by something. Like they were fleeing, you know. Escaping.”
“That would be a good observation.”
“Scottie and Dennis wanted to go back to town. But I wanted to see if maybe we couldn’t find where they’d been digging. I’m curious like that — gets me in trouble sometimes.” He glanced at his mom. She offered him a wisp of a smile, but it dissolved as soon as he looked away.
He kept going. “Went all the way to the professor’s house, kind of slow-like.”
“You didn’t see anything else?”
“Just some buzzards. Flying. The bodies — they were around front, right?”
I gave him a head tilt.
“So we went back to the ridge road. Saw some tire tracks pointing west. Toward that finger of the hills you can see veering off to the north from the main ridge. So that’s where we headed.”
I offered him another encouraging nod. His mother and I were proving rapt listeners — as attentive as any I could remember being in the room since we’d had a baby killer confess.
Besides, I sensed there was no need to ask any questions. Judson was getting there on his own.
“There was something else. Puzzled us, you know. Especially the first one we saw. But then we saw another one. And another. Wooden stakes, with strips of cloth tied to them. Bright yellow cloth things. It was a trail being marked.”
Chapter 24
Forty-five minutes after I called him, Miles and I were bouncing around the thermals west of town like buzzards.
Well, not quite like buzzards. More like we were on an amusement park attraction being operated with no pity. But then, yes, like buzzards too. Up and down. Bounce and tilt. Circle and bob. Like a tiny cork on the ocean blue. Yes, like buzzards. I hoped we didn’t meet the fate of a certain poor buzzard that came to mind.
Miles dropped the plane to near treetop level as we neared the ridge, and I almost lost my cookies.
Again.
I was sitting up front. That was normal when the Piper carried passengers. The plane balanced better if the pilot sat in the rear seat, even if flying solo.
We were low enough that spotting the trail wasn’t a problem. We could see the tire tracks in the grasses. And the yellow markers. Both headed north. Judson had said the trail continued for five miles.
At seventy-five miles per hour, covering five miles takes four minutes. I know, because I timed it as we approached the geographic anomaly that Judson had called a finger of hills running perpendicular from the ridge. That’s when I saw it.
Saw something. Hard to recognize what it was with the terrain whizzing past so quickly.
The wind noise in an uninsulated cabin and the roar of a sixty-five-horsepower engine almost in your lap made speaking difficult. I turned to look at my flying buddy and went through the motion of pressing the air down with my hand. Could he slow down?
He misunderstood. Took us out over the prairie in a tight turn. And brought us in even lower. Our turbulence whipped the grass blades like a violent storm was passing.
The plane had a bare-bones instrument panel — only five dials. I reached out and tapped the airspeed gauge. Pointed to the main needle. And moved my finger a fraction. Could he slow it down?
We were soon waddling in the air like a fat duck. The needle on the airspeed indicator pointed to forty — knots per hour, not miles. Compared to before, we were crawling through the air. And from my balcony seat, I started to absorb what lay at the end of the trail of yellow markers.
By our third pass, I had begun assigning things to categories. This seemed to make what I was seeing more — what? — investigable.
There was the realtor’s benchmark. Location, location, location. Category number one.
In some ways, the tableau below us was picture-perfect. In western Abbot County’s often uncharitable terrain, that was a departure. An anomaly. We had pretty views but few that you would want to reproduce on a color postcard. Whatever this was, its location was no accident. The choice had been a careful one.
We flew back and forth over it again and again. A tiny plain. The size of, say, three or four football fields arranged in a square. Three acres at most. Little more than a good-sized plot for the family horse. You could drive within a few yards of the area and never know it was there.
It was hidden, cuddled by its surroundings — encircled by an escarpment of eroded crags and rocks. I was curious about why I’d never known about this extraordinary setting before. It was so out of sync with our usual western Abbot County landscape that I’d have remembered it. But then, I’d never flown over this exact spot before. Or, for that matter, because of its isolation, even driven by it.
Another reason it was so well hidden? Before you reached it, you had to navigate a thicket of trees.
The moment I saw them, I knew that they were aristocrat pear. In the spring, they would produce brilliant white flowers. In the fall, stunning deep red leaves. In between, the trees made stately green sentinels, which was the case at the moment. They weren’t native to Abbot County. Moreover, the circle they made at the edges of the clearing was too perfect. They had been carefully placed when they were planted. They had to have been growing for a decade, probably more.
And there were four features in the clearing that I categorized as symbols.
First, there were the two large, gleaming white oval shapes dominating the center of the clearing. I was only guessing, but I thought both designs had been formed with rock. White decorative rock. The kind people in Flagler sometimes used to landscape their yards so they wouldn’t have to mow the grass.
Viewed from the air, the ovals conveyed the feeling that they were meant to be considered a pair. One was positioned above the other, almost but not quite touching. They were identical in size and arranged in perfect vertical alignment.
The second feature in the clearing was a phrase in Latin. It curved in an arc that aligned with the tree line. I got my ballpoint pen and notepad out of my shirt pocket, braced the pad against my leg, and wro
te what I was seeing in block letters:
“UNUS MUNDUS.”
I’d double-check what that meant as soon as I got back on the ground. But I remembered enough from my college classes in the classics to do an impromptu translation: “One world.”
Even from the air, the Latin words sprang out at you. That was because each of the letters was tall — eight feet or more. Tall and a brilliant white, like the two ovals. You’d need a reconnaissance satellite to see them from space, but I doubted this was the point. I had the same feeling about the line of characters that was the third feature: “E TENEBRIS.”
More Latin. That one I’d have to look up. But like the letters in the Latin phrase above it, these had been created with obvious care. Again, the characters were sizable. They too were placed in an arc, though this one was at the bottom of the circle of trees. It bent in perfect symmetry to the curve of the tree line.
My feeling was that none of the designs — the ovals, the letters — had been there long.
I felt the same way about a large pile of red dirt that lay beyond the trees close to where the tire tracks ended. It was almost sure to be left over from the large hole that had been dug above the bottom sequence of letters.
This was my fourth feature. It had destroyed the careful symmetry and placement and beauty of everything else because it didn’t fit with the artful surroundings. If anything, it looked like an afterthought. The empty chamber was almost certain to be a cavity into which any number of body bags could be lowered.
On the flight home, I brooded over my growing confusion. I’d been hoping what Judson Mayes had belatedly confessed to seeing would offer us a firm leg up on identifying our killer or killers.
But what kind of murderous mentality went to all this trouble? Especially, if the “trouble” had required many years of planning and preparation?
I had a hunch the county assessor’s office could point me in the right direction. As soon as I got back to the office, I planned to ask Helen to call him and find out. I needed to know who owned the most unusual swatch of landscaping I’d ever seen in Abbot County. And the only one I’d ever seen with what I guessed was an open grave dug amid trappings that were otherwise beguiling and beautiful.
There was more on my mind. I realized I’d not bothered to ask Judson a crucial question: had he noticed any damage to the front end of the pickup truck that had almost run him and his buddies down?
We were going to have to talk again soon.
Chapter 25
Angie and I took turns cooking on Thursday nights. Why that night? Because Thursday nights were as close as we could come to a regular date night. Other nights belonged to other priorities.
On weekends, I could get busy helping my deputies manage Saturday and Sunday night misbehavior at Abbot County’s honky-tonks. And frequently on weekdays, Angie got called out to one of her other counties. On these occasions, she might get home late. Or not at all.
Some Thursday nights weren’t promising, either. I thought this might be one of them. On the phone, I suggested we could eat out. But she wouldn’t hear of it. “I’ve got fresh salmon. And fresh asparagus. And key lime pie.”
She’d subleased a patio apartment not far from downtown and was already home. And she had a plan. You’re a pretty lucky stiff, sheriff — don’t disappoint the lass. I wasn’t going to, but I needed this to be a “working” date night.
It went well.
Had a nice rhythm.
Proceeded as I’d hoped.
For a while.
Beautiful, flaky salmon fillets, pan-seared to perfection. Crunchy asparagus, baked how I liked it — to the precise point of becoming tender. The key lime pie was ambrosial, and not only because it was my favorite dessert.
I used my linen napkin to blot my mouth. “I’m so happy you’re probably the most stubborn person I’ve ever met.”
Angie glanced over her shoulder at my notepad, resting by her phone at the end of the bar. “And now I’m going to earn my keep.”
“Not yet.”
I leaned across the table as far as I could reach without toppling into my plate and kissed her. She kept her lips pressed to mine longer than simple courtesy required. It gave me more hope that this was going to work out fine.
When she pulled back, she launched an impish look in my direction. “Heard you booked a flight without taking me.”
“It was only a two-seater.”
“I could have sat in your lap.”
“And I’d not have gotten any work done.”
This time, she leaned over to kiss me, and I knew it was time to get to the serious side of our working date night.
I walked to the end of the bar. Retrieved my notepad. And her phone. It was one of the FBI’s smartphones. She could do everything on it I did on my laptop, she being a phone person and me an old-fashioned laptop person. I handed the phone to her and asked her to search something. I read out the first row of letters I’d copied during the flyovers at the clearing.
“That’s Latin.” She’d studied the language too, first at Texas Christian University and then at the University of Iowa. “Means one world.”
“Thought so too. But what about these.”
I gave her the letters at the bottom of the circle of trees.
E TENEBRIS.
She frowned. “‘Out of’ something, I think.” She punched it into a translation site on her phone. “‘Out of the dark.’ Now, what else can I do to help the brilliant Yale Divinity School graduate with? That was an advanced degree, wasn’t it?”
I threw my napkin at her. “Well, brainy gumshoe that you are, type that in.”
She giggled. “Type what in?”
“‘Out of the dark.’”
She gave me that little half-smirk that signaled she was about to have some fun at my expense. “You want all five billion Google results or just those on the first page?”
“What are the ones on the first page about?”
“A supernatural thriller film about a Spanish family that moves into a haunted house in Colombia.”
“Try ‘E tenebris.’”
“At your service, Great Swami.”
She said the first entry was a poem by Oscar Wilde. So were the next three entries. Then she quoted from an entry in the Masonic Dictionary. It noted that in early mythology and the primitive ages, darkness preceded light. “That means the sun is the child of night or darkness, Oh Learned One.”
On that note, we abandoned our scholarly research.
Chapter 26
Angie was up and gone before I raised an eyelid. She’d be dodging armadillos and tortoises all day. Fielding a lot of “Howdy, how yah doins.” And not be back until after sundown. She was on one of her goodwill day trips to sheriff and police departments in her northernmost tier of counties. She’d had a 250-mile drive ahead.
By the time I’d showered and shaved, I realized what my first official action of the day would be. Call Helen and ask her to set up a meeting in the Conference Room Corner.
My plan was to summon all available deputies. Tell them everything we knew. See if I could instill a heightened sense of urgency. Give out specific assignments. And send them off on what might be one of the most challenging quests in their law enforcement careers. And mine.
We needed to identify one or more missing people who had been in Abbot County.
We had ten sets of bones plus assorted tissues, and we still needed to find ten personal histories — ten identities — to go with them.
Knowing who they were should help us know why they were at the Huntgardner house. Until we knew why they were there, we shouldn’t expect to understand their deaths. If we could understand their deaths, we’d have a much better chance of determining if all of them had been murdered. It wasn’t likely, but the deaths could have been accidental.
And I’d have do
ne all this pretty much as planned had I not glanced in the back seat of my patrol car as I left Angie’s house.
My eye flitted across a cardboard box that should have been delivered days ago. One crammed with books.
Obviously, there was no great urgency surrounding the books or they wouldn’t still be sitting back there. They were mostly paperbacks, a few new but most of them used, books about anything and everything and sometimes little of nothing. I’d been intending to drop them off at an abandoned warehouse next to the Flagler Shorthaul Railway’s switching yard. My homeless friend, the Count, maintained his library there. On a dilapidated bookshelf he’d scrounged from a dumpster.
I’d first known him as Mason, last name, origins and intervening history all unknown. To me, at least.
I realized that by heading in Mason’s direction, I could fulfill two goals with a single trip. A jewelry store whose engagement and wedding rings I’d been wanting to check out was close by. That sealed the deal. First, inspect more rings. Then, take my homeless friend his books. Or at least leave the box sitting by his bookshelf.
It’d been three years since I’d given him the bad news. That he couldn’t spread his grubby sleeping bag in our local laundromats every night.
That night, he’d declined a ride to our county homeless shelter. But he’d later taken a liking to living in a tent. He never explained to me where he got his lodgings. All I knew was the tent appeared one day staked under a live oak tree in the abandoned community gardens known as “The Acres.” Other homeless folks had soon joined him, bringing their own tents. The old two-story warehouse containing his library was across the street.
His name change had come shortly after I started bringing him boxes of discarded paperbacks. That was because I’d learned how much he liked to read. One of those well-thumbed books had been Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. This was when he’d started calling himself the Count.