The Buried

by Kathryn Casey

  “Your guy didn’t know the pastor was inside?”

  “I don’t think so. Probably not. There weren’t any cars in the lot. My guess is that the arsonist thought everyone had left.”

  For a minute, neither of us spoke, and then Liam looked at me with a spark of excitement in his eyes. “You know what may have happened, Sarah. You understand, don’t you, that this could have changed him?”

  “Liam, I don’t want to talk about my theories. I want to hear what you think.”

  An awkward smile crawled across his face. “It’s obvious. You’re most likely right. The killing was an accident. The fire was what he wanted. He didn’t plan to take a life.”

  I thought about that, considered it. It was what I judged, and this was confirmation. But then Kneehoff said what I most feared, a possibility I hadn’t wanted to put into words.

  “What you need to worry about now is that your arsonist may have enjoyed the killing. It’s likely that it ramped up the thrill, added adrenaline to the rush. In the future, burning the churches may not be enough.”

  Eleven

  “In the future, burning the churches may not be enough.”

  Liam Kneehoff’s words echoed in my mind as I watched the guards urge him inside the van. A sick feeling in my chest, I lingered while they chained him to the tie-offs. Two armed guards got inside with him, while the other two clambered up into the driver’s and the front passenger’s seats. I slammed the van’s backdoors, and I heard the locks engage.

  As I watched the van pull from the lot, the backhoe drove into the field. Moments later, its engine whined as it stood stationary, emitting a strained burring noise as Miller manipulated the scoop, shaving it against the ground, nudging away at the drought-hardened earth.

  For the duration, I was an observer. I had no role on the site other than to wait.

  Kneehoff’s words had ratcheted up the danger, made it clear that we potentially had more to fear than another church fire. So while Miller and his team worked, I turned to the profile of the arsonist I’d promised Sheriff Delgado. I opened the Suburban’s door and sat inside, grabbed my laptop and started working.

  I did a few computer searches and read the studies, scanned articles on arsonists, refreshing my impressions of the stats and research. I considered personality types, trying to gain more understanding of this particular string of fires. As with serial killers, arsonists were overwhelmingly male. On a spreadsheet, I made a list of possible motives. The first I immediately discounted: money. No one profited from the church fires. At the meeting that morning, I determined none of the churches were insured. I considered but crossed off the likelihood that the fires were set to cover up other crimes, since we had no evidence anything like that had occurred. The final possibilities rang true: Anger and revenge.

  All three in churches, it was obvious that the person setting these fires had a beef with organized religion, faith, or God. Not only fascinated by fire, someone who found intense pleasure watching the flames, this was a person who wanted payback.

  I logged onto the state system and accessed the fire marshal’s website to review the lab reports. The accelerant used? Common gasoline. This wasn’t a particularly sophisticated arsonist.

  Every one of the samples submitted tested positive. The fire had unfolded the way Ernie surmised, a pour pattern around the church, one Molotov cocktail thrown at the front door, another inside.

  The analysis of the glass found inside of the church brought good news. On one shard, a lab tech recovered a fingerprint fragment, not enough to run through the state system to identify the source but sufficient to confirm or eliminate suspects.

  As I worked, a text came in from the warden assuring me that all had gone well. Liam Kneehoff was back in his cell. I whispered, “Thank you,” then returned to work on the profile of the arsonist, while the dig continued.

  The afternoon dissolved as I worked on my computer and made notes, drawing up the arsonist’s profile.

  Out in the field, Tim Miller took turns working the backhoe with two other men, skimming the earth, scraping off inches at a time, digging a 10-by-15-foot hole. Slow going, the volunteers watched for anything the backhoe uncovered that looked human. After each scoop, they swiveled the backhoe to drop the dirt into the dump truck. Another set of volunteers sieved through the soil, checking for bones, scraps of clothing, anything unusual mixed in with the soil. The dump truck periodically emptied onto a growing hill of dirt a few hundred feet from the hole.

  A little more than a foot down, a cry went out from a man observing from the side of the hole. “I see something,” he yelled. “Stop!”

  Tim turned the backhoe off and jumped out of the seat. From all sides, others stepped into the hole, careful where they walked.

  I put my laptop to the side and ran to the dig.

  Two women, Tim and another man knelt in the dirt, carefully inspecting an object that stuck out of the ground, something tan, thin, and knobby. Something that looked like a bone. One of the women, an archeologist, used a small brush to sweep away the dirt.

  “Is that her?” I shouted.

  “Not sure,” Tim said. “Just hold on.”

  My heart pumped with anticipation. Some of the digs had taken a day or two but others weeks, one a month. To find this woman’s remains on the first day would have been –

  “No!” Tim shouted. “It’s some kind of petrified tree root, I think. This isn’t bone.”

  The sun crested in the sky, began its trip down, and the heat built. The SUV too hot to sit in even with the doors open, I borrowed a folding chair from the crew and put it far enough back from where they were digging to avoid most of the dust. While the backhoe scratched up earth, I answered e-mails and responded to requests from departments across the state looking for profiles on cases. I put the finishing touches on one for a sex trafficking case and e-mailed it to El Paso.

  Meanwhile, the pile of discarded rock and dirt grew taller, and the hole hit two feet.

  Hours passed. At three feet down – where Kneehoff said we’d find remains – we saw only dirt, rock, and severed tree roots. By then I’d put my computer away and joined the others on the edge of the hole, watching for anything that could signal a grave.

  “Do we stop here?” Tim asked me, using an old bandana to wipe away the perspiration stinging his eyes. All of us were covered in dust, dirt, and sweat.

  I thought about Kneehoff. He would have enjoyed the prospect of suggesting we stop looking at three feet when the remains waited buried four feet below the surface. Plus Tim and I had discussed that the ground level might have been altered by the upheaval of the trees. That could make a difference. We couldn’t take any chances.

  “As much as I hate to, let’s go down another foot,” I said. “Just to be sure.”

  Tim nodded. “You’ve got it.”

  Just then, I heard something overhead. A helicopter circled, painted on its side: CHANNEL 13 – EYEWITNESS NEWS!

  The searches for Liam Kneehoff’s victims had made news for months, the entire city focused on the fields as we looked for the victims’ remains. Night after night, it was the lead story on the local news, every morning the top headline in the Houston Chronicle. Word had apparently leaked out that we were at it again. Another search. Another victim.

  The helicopter swung lower, and I saw shadows inside. This wasn’t good. It was bound to cause problems. We’d be flooded with well-intentioned people calling in unfounded tips. Relatives of the missing would get their hopes up that we’d found their loved ones. But it was bound to happen. We couldn’t keep this quiet for long. Above us a cameraman inside the helicopter recorded video of the search for the evening news.

  An hour later, the troopers and deputies had a perimeter marked off to hold a crowd of reporters and a growing number of spectators at bay. TV trucks with satellite towers lined the street. The captain called to let me know that some of the local channels carried the story on the four o’clock news and promised more infor
mation at six.

  My phone rang. It was a reporter I’d once given an interview to about another case.

  “Who are you digging for? Do you have an ID of the victim?”

  I hung up.

  By the time the anchors got on the air at six, the hole in the field neared four feet deep, and Tim announced he would keep digging, just in case.

  “He couldn’t have gone down this deep,” I argued. “He didn’t with the other victims.”

  Tim paused, his face weary but determined. I thought of his daughter, her bones in a field not far from an oil well for more than a year before someone happened upon them. I thought how his heart must ache every time he thought of her.

  “A little farther,” Tim said. “I don’t want to wonder later if we’ve just missed her.”

  Although I could have left, I stayed. I put off my meeting with Sheriff Delgado, and my day wore on with the scraping of metal against dirt as the backhoe pushed through Texas clay, tearing up lumps of hard earth. Men and women volunteers stood guard, not giving up, hoping to see the thin, frail bones of a dead woman.

  As the day wrapped up, Tim staked out another area, another fifteen-by-fifteen-foot patch adjacent to the existing excavation.

  “For the morning,” he said.

  Twelve

  Early the following day, Saturday, I drove out to see Sheriff Delgado. After minimum pleasantries, comparing the weather, the heat, woefully lamenting a lack of rain, he handed me the list of what he knew about the church fires.

  There were differences. At the first church, Ernie pegged the point of origin as outside the back door. The other two started near the front doors. At churches one and two, he discovered secondary points of origin, suggesting they, too, were most likely arson.

  “Ernie didn’t find broken glass at the first church, but that might be because the place was already pretty cleaned up. But Smoke detected similar pour patterns at all three,” Del said. “This guy’s not leaving anything to chance. He’s making sure the churches burn hot.”

  I wondered about the settings, where the churches were, what they looked like. After I asked a few questions, I decided to take a look for myself.

  Half an hour later, Del and I arrived at the site of the first fire, St. Theresa of the Flowers Catholic Church, a redbrick structure on the edge of another small, unincorporated town. Here the walls remained, but the fire had gutted the inside. Someone had propped up two-by-fours against the walls to stabilize the building. Nearly everything was gone. The little that survived was damaged to the point of uselessness. The church’s few stained glass windows had gaping holes in shards of colored glass sharp as knives.

  We slipped on our boots and walked inside. In the center of the church, onto what was left of a beam holding up the wall, someone had nailed a partially melted four-foot-tall brass crucifix.

  “As you know, fire goes up and out. The church had a steeple with a bell, and the heat rose. Once it hit the bell, it started clanging,” Del explained. “Folks came running. The inside was already engulfed in flames, but the volunteer fire department got here in time to save the exterior.”

  It had been nearly eight weeks since the fire, and parishioners had carted much of the rubbish away, leaving little evidence for Ernie to collect. The place still smelled of soot, and I pictured what the church must have looked like before, rows of pews, an altar, candles burning and prayers being murmured.

  “This is the one church where the fire was started at the back?” I confirmed. Del nodded, and I thought that made sense. The front of the church faced the town, and there were houses less than a block away. The arsonist didn’t have the cover here he had at Lord’s Acre. He started at the backdoor hoping not to be seen.

  Del and I walked through the church and saw burn marks Ernie had circled in red paint on the cement floor, the interior point of origin. We also found a streak of red marking a stain where an accelerant flared up and blackened the concrete. “Looks like he was inside when he lit the fire. Maybe he didn’t use a Molotov cocktail here,” I speculated. “That’s a trail. Maybe he lit a wick and linked it to something he used as fuel.”

  “The hymnals,” Del said, as if he’d just remembered. “There was a pile of burned hymnals in the center of the church.”

  I looked over at him. “Del, I don’t mean to criticize, but why didn’t you suspect this was arson? You could have called in the fire marshal and requested help.”

  At that, his frown pushed his chin up and puffed out his cheeks, covered with a rough salt-and-pepper stubble. Age had softened his face, and gravity had given him the beginnings of jowls. “You know, they didn’t call me about this fire. The local volunteer fire chief wrote the cause off as burning candles. I didn’t even hear about it until the second church went up in flames. Then I dropped into town to look into it. I was told by the local police chief that it wasn’t arson. He was sure.”

  “Why didn’t you point that out at the meeting when you came under fire?”

  “Because it’s my county,” he bellowed, his eyes intent. That reminded me of what Bill used to say about Del, that his emotions sometimes ran too deep, clouding his judgment.

  “I should have looked into it instead of accepting the explanation,” Del admitted. “Two church fires should have been suspicious enough to get my attention.”

  I agreed, but said nothing.

  Church two, Pathway to Salvation Cowboy Church, was hidden in the woods.

  A converted barn, it held Sunday services for a congregation of a hundred, mostly ranchers and their workers, folks who lived on small spreads in the area. The farm it sat on was abandoned. Frequent floods from a nearby river convinced the owner to give up trying to make his living raising hay and tending cattle.

  Walking through what little remained of the church, I was struck with the simplicity of the place. No pews, the small group of congregants sat on folding chairs the fire had reduced to melted metal and rubble.

  “Nothing’s been done here. Looks like they aren’t planning to rebuild,” I said.

  “Nah,” Del agreed. “There aren’t that many folks, and most aren’t the kind with extra cash. My guess is they’ll look for another donated building.”

  I sized up the place and noticed the remnants of exposed wires. “Is that why they thought it was an electrical fire, because of the condition of the building?”

  “Yup,” he said. “The place had been jerry-rigged to accommodate the church. They had wiring strung across the floor for lamps. Old extension cords didn’t fit like they should and were plugged into half-broken sockets. And hay, lots of hay, left from when the owner used it to house livestock. Fuel for the fire. The place must have flared in the flick of a match.”

  Once again outside, I considered the remote location. “How far’s the closest town?”

  “Nothing particularly close. This is pretty much out in the sticks.”

  We walked down the dirt path that led from the unpaved parking lot and saw nothing but the road and the woods, no buildings of any kind. We stood there talking for five, ten minutes and no one drove by. “Did someone take the church sign down?”

  “I don’t think they had one,” Del said. “One of the folks told me they didn’t need one. They weren’t much into recruiting new members. Everyone who belonged here knew how to find the church.”

  “Is this church in the phone directory? On the Internet?”

  “I suppose so. Isn’t everything?” Del said.

  “Let’s check.”

  Leaning against Del’s county car, we searched on our phones, typing in PATHWAY TO SALVATION. Websites for religious counseling popped up, but nothing about the burnt church. I nosed around a bit more, looking for anything to do with the church, trying to find a phone number. Nothing.

  “This is interesting,” I told Del. “How did the arsonist know about this church? Unless he lives in the area?”

  Fifteen minutes past noon, Del and I stopped at a corner barbeque joint for lunch, a beat-u
p shack off the side of the road with picnic tables and a smoker made out of an old oil drum. I assessed the rust coating the metal smoker and wondered if I should be eating anything cooked in it. But as I dispatched my brisket sandwich, fat oozing out of the bun, I decided not to mention it to Mom, who feeds my sugar addiction but worries about my fondness for charred meat.

  On the table, Del and I spread out the paperwork we pulled together and exchanged lists. I looked over his, including the times and dates of the fires. All three occurred either on a weekend or in the evening.

  “Maybe our guy has a job,” I suggested. “If so, it looks like he works traditional hours.”

  “Could just be that he’s doing it while they’re empty,” Del said.

  “I don’t think so,” I mused. “I mean, aren’t most of these small churches closed up during the day. The pastors all have other jobs, don’t they?”

  Del hesitated a bit, and then said, “I guess you’re right.”

  “Well, then they’re empty most days.” With that, I took out the profile I’d pulled together. “So Del, we’re working with percentages, here, right? Nothing is guaranteed. Okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got it.”

  “The truth is that not a lot is certain about arsonists. Because many are never caught, we don’t have a wide-range of cases to look at,” I explained. “What we do have suggests that arsonists are overwhelmingly men. They’re predominantly white, low-income and relatively young. They’re usually poorly educated and not always terribly bright.”

  Del appeared to think that through. “But you’re saying this is in general and maybe pretty sketchy, since there are so few closed cases to look at?”