The Buried

by Kathryn Casey

  While we talked, Edith Mae wandered over and stood next to the log. She looked lost, and angry. Del and I briefly talked options and quickly decided to leave. We worried Beau watched from somewhere in the woods. We hoped not. We wanted him confident enough to come back. But before we could go, Edith Mae startled us, wailing, “Beau Whittle, if you’re out there in that damn woods, you get your ass here! Your momma’s waiting for you, and you’re in a mess of trouble!”

  As soon as we dropped Edith Mae at her home, Del got on his phone. Hoping Beau hadn’t heard his mother’s threats, that she hadn’t scared him away, the sheriff called two deputies and ordered them to watch the fire pit throughout the night. Del reasoned they’d have no trouble seeing any fires from a safe distance away with binoculars. “You see anything suspicious, you call for backup,” he ordered. “This guy’s dangerous and armed. I don’t want to hear y’all went in there without backup!”

  From Edith Mae’s house, Del drove me back to St. Peter’s to get my Suburban. Volunteer firemen watched Ernie, but the crowds and the TV people had moved on.

  “Well, I guess that’s progress, but we didn’t get as much from her as I’d hoped,” I said. We’d asked Beau’s mother repeatedly where her son might hide, and she claimed to have no other ideas. Just the fire pit. “Maybe the track on Beau’s phone will work out.”

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Del said. He looked at me and grimaced. “They found the phone in his pickup. He doesn’t have it with him.”

  “Damn. We need a break,” I said.

  “Maybe we got one. Beau left his shotgun, too.”

  Twenty-two

  The letter, more of a note really, took nearly half an hour to write, even though it consisted of only three sentences. Beau Whittle typed with one finger on the keyboard, hunting each key. More times than not he hit the wrong one, backspaced and started over. Finally, he printed it out. He addressed the envelope in a loopy scrawl with no return address and slipped the note inside. Then he searched for a stamp. “Old people always have stamps,” he murmured. He snickered when he found a nearly empty sheet tucked into an address book in the desk drawer. “That works. Only need one!”

  It took less time to find out where Kristilynn Cavanaugh lived. Beau plugged her name into the computer. The spelling of her first name unusual, only one in the Houston area popped up, at an address not far from the 610 Loop. He printed out a map, and within minutes pulled down the long driveway in the RAV4. A few miles away, he thought about the TV news coverage of the sheriff and Texas Ranger at St. Pete’s, in the church parking lot. And he realized whoever owned the RAV4 would have reported it stolen.

  Beau turned the SUV around and drove back to the river house.

  Once he got there, he popped open the garage door and found a fifteen-year-old Taurus, burgundy with a bumper sticker that read: I BRAKE FOR SQUIRRELS.

  He thought for a minute, almost closed the door and took his chances with the RAV4, but again thought better of it. Inside the house, he searched the kitchen cabinets. He tore apart dresser drawers. The keys, when he found them, hung on a peg inside the pantry.

  In the garage, he backed the Taurus out and parked the RAV4 inside. As he got out of the SUV, he thought about the house, that there were snakes and feral hogs in the woods.

  “I bet the old man has a gun,” he muttered.

  This time he started searching in the bedroom. In a closet he found a pump-action shotgun on the top shelf, along with a box of shells. He loaded the shotgun, then put it and the ammunition on the Taurus’ backseat and set off for Houston.

  Twenty-three

  Mom had the table set for Sunday dinner, and the powerful scent of roasting chicken met me at the door. Most summers, we grilled out, but the oppressive heat made even the evenings stifling.

  “Nice of you to drop in,” Mom said, as she walked over and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  She nodded. “All’s well on the home front.”

  The last year or so Mom’s complained less about my absences. We’d come to an understanding that when the cases let up, I’d take comp time and plan something fun with her and with Maggie.

  “Maybe in a few days we can see a movie or drive into the city for dinner?” I suggested. “We could try that Mediterranean restaurant you read about in the newspaper.”

  “I’d rather do the movie,” Maggie said as she walked in.

  I wrapped my arms around her and took a deep breath. She smelled like melted metal. “Were you soldering again?”

  “You should just see,” she whispered. “It’s in my bedroom.”

  “Sarah, are you working on those church fires?” Bobby asked when he peeked around the corner. “What a bloody mess. Terrible to burn them. Who’d do that? And as dry as we are, that kid’s gonna start half the state on fire if one gets out of control.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Good to see you, too.”

  “We saw it on the news,” Mom said. “Why would he set that last one with all those people inside?”

  “When we find him, I’ll ask him,” I said.

  Bobby sidled up beside Mom and slung his arm around her. She nuzzled against him, and he leaned down and kissed the top of her head. They looked perfect together, and I noticed Mom sigh, and it made me sad.

  “Dinner’s in twenty minutes,” she said. “I hope you’re hungry.”

  I took a shower, changed into jeans and a T-shirt, then stopped at Maggie’s door. She had a piece of blue paper taped at eye-level that read: PLEASE KNOCK. I did, and she slipped the door open and peeked out. She looked up and down the hallway, and then pulled me inside, like something out of an old spy movie.

  “Mom, wait until you see.”

  With that, she pointed toward a foot-high robot on her floor. She hadn’t put the face on yet, but the white scalloped plate sat on her bed, beads for eyes, nose and mouth. The body had wheels instead of legs, and she’d repurposed my crab crackers as four bony arms.

  “What does it do?”

  Maggie turned it on, and it maneuvered in a straight line around the floor, backing up when it sensed something in front of it. The thing had a metal pail attached to the front, and the crab-cracker arms clanked inside it and out, snapping.

  “What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

  Maggie giggled. “You’ll see.”

  The three desserts waiting for us on the kitchen counter confirmed that Mom was still apprehensive and undecided. I was just about to help myself to mashed potatoes when my phone rang.

  “Sarah, we’ve got her,” Tim Miller said. “Just now. We’ve just called in the ME. They’re on their way.”

  “I’m coming,” I said, seeing Mom watch me from the stove.

  I hung up and looked over at Maggie. She shrugged. “It’s okay, Mom. But if Gram gets to pick the restaurant, I want to pick the movie.”

  “I’ll make up a plate for you and put it in the frig,” Mom said. “Don’t forget to eat when you get home.”

  The media hadn’t left. Cameras and reporters lined the street, and satellite trucks beamed out breaking news from the dig site. As I drove in, I realized that I was probably being watched live on TVs across Houston.

  It didn’t matter, and I thought little of it. What I did ponder was the same thing I knew the reporters were questioning: Who did we find? I thought of the one hit I’d had on the Internet that looked like Liam’s description, Jennifer Allen.

  Was that her in the field? We’d know soon.

  I found Tim standing off by himself at the rim of the hole, smoking a cigarette. In the field with the others for three days, he looked drained. As might be expected for a man of his age, he had a few health issues. It’d been a long day, and the other volunteers were pressuring him to go home and get some rest. But Tim refused to go.

  “I’m not leaving her out here,” he said, when I walked up. “Now that we found her, we’re getting her out of here.”

  “T
im, you know, they’re just trying to take care of…”

  He tilted his head and stared at me. “Lieutenant, you asked me to find her. I have, and now this is my girl out here. I’m staying!”

  That decided, I didn’t mention it again.

  In truth, Tim’s part of the search was over. When the call went out to the medical examiner’s office, they sent out a specialized unit. The bone recovery division arrived in a van equipped with archeologic tools, brushes, and small shovels. Nothing for us to do, Tim and I sat on folding chairs and watched as an assistant medical examiner and two minions carefully pushed back the earth and gradually cleared the dirt that covered the bones.

  In the hours since Tim had driven in the stake, the volunteers dug a ten-foot long and four-foot wide rectangle. Although Kneehoff claimed that he’d buried her deeper, the bones were little more than a foot below the surface. I felt sure he’d played with us with the first hole, telling us he buried her three feet down. It made me wonder if the whole thing had been one of his games. He may have known all along where to dig and sent us to the wrong spot the first time for amusement.

  If Tim had considered that, he’d dismissed it as unimportant. To him, all that mattered was that the woman’s remains had been found.

  “You know, Kneehoff really had it pegged this time,” he said, taking a long drag off his cigarette. He held it in his hand, the smoke trailing, as he pointed at the hole. “The bones are pretty darn close to where he estimated.”

  “Where was the stake?”

  “Lieutenant, I tell ya, it couldn’t have been more than three feet from where we found her.”

  The evening dragged.

  Before long, Tim napped in the chair, nodding off to the murmur of voices and the whisking of brushes against dirt. A short time later, the assistant ME cleared the last clump of clay off of a human skull. I climbed down to get a better look. Most men’s foreheads angle back and have at least a slight ridge across the eyebrows. On this one, the forehead went nearly straight up. The skull looked relatively small. I could, of course, be wrong, but it looked like a woman’s skull, and she still had her upper teeth. “Did you find the mandible?” I asked.

  “Yeah, over there,” the doc said, pointing toward a cardboard box with padded compartments.

  Inside, the lower jaw and teeth nestled beside a variety of other smaller bones, fingers and toes. “We have dental records on file for Jennifer Allen, a missing woman who looks like the drawing. Can we take a look?” I asked.

  “Out here?” she questioned. It was a bit unusual.

  “If you can? Just something unofficial.”

  “Give me a few minutes.” Although she didn’t sound happy at the prospect, she agreed.

  Minutes later, Tim woke up, and I explained what we had. “The doc is looking now, comparing the dental X-rays.”

  Tim looked long and hard at me and shook his head. “I get so tired of the misery and waste of it all.” He didn’t have to explain what he meant. We’d had this conversation before, about the useless violence we both saw. Too often we collaborated on trying to find justice in the horror it left behind. “Lord help us, why can’t this stop?”

  I had no answer.

  The assistant M.E. motioned for us, and we walked over to the table where she had her laptop out, Jennifer Allen’s dental records, black, gray, and a ghostly white, on the screen. “Look here,” the doc said. “See the two fillings on the right side, and that crown on the left?”

  “Sure do, doc,” Tim said. “Match the remains?”

  “Yes, here, here, and here.” Wearing beige cotton gloves, the assistant ME held up the jawbone and pointed at three molars, two on the right and one on the left. “I can’t say for sure, not until we get an X-ray, but my guess is that you’ve found her.”

  “So she’s Jennifer Allen.” I said, not a question but more confirmation. The assistant M.E. nodded.

  “Like I said, I can’t say for sure. We need to do a more thorough comparison,” she explained. “If you call tomorrow around noon, I’ll have an official ID. I’ll make it a priority.”

  I thought about Jennifer’s daughter, nearly a teenager. She’d have to be told that her missing mother had been dead all along, buried in a field where horses grazed on top of her unmarked grave.

  I considered staying until they had all Jennifer’s remains bagged and on the way to the morgue, but the doc said it would be an all-nighter. Morning would come quickly, and I had Beau Whittle to help find.

  The sun setting, the searchers turned on gas-powered generators and clicked on the flood lights. I looked at my watch. It was after nine. The news would be on soon. I thought about the choppers flying overhead beaming video of the dig to their TV stations. I thought about Kristilynn. Would she catch a ten p.m. newscast and see close ups of the skull pulled from the dirt?

  I grabbed my phone and searched my contacts. Kristilynn lived less than half-an-hour away.

  Twenty-four

  “Lights out,” he whispered. “Time for bed.”

  In the shadows, Beau Whittle sat in the Taurus’s front seat, midway between two streetlights, three houses past the one marked with a metal plaque that bore Kristilynn’s address on Willoughbee Lane.

  Kristilynn Cavanaugh lived in a quiet 1980s neighborhood of two-story English Tudor-style houses, stucco and half timbers mixed with brick. Each spring, azaleas replaced winter’s pansies. Summers, women wearing gardening gloves turned over the earth and planted zinnias and begonias, daisies and impatiens.

  The drought allowed none of that.

  Water restrictions in force, flowers had long-since dried up and withered away. Brown patches tarnished once-green lawns. Everything thirsted, crying for Houston’s usually plentiful rains.

  After he found the house that afternoon, Beau decided on a nighttime assault. He left for a while, returning just before sunset. An empty McDonald’s bag rustled when he squirmed to try to get comfortable. He’d been sitting in the car most of the day, and his joints had started to complain.

  Time on his hands, he worked on his plan to get the woman, control her and drive her away. First, he wanted her asleep, sound asleep so she wouldn’t hear him when he backed into her driveway and opened the trunk. Then he’d find a way into the house, an unlocked window, or he’d break one. Once inside, he’d wake her up with the shotgun pointed at her face. He smiled anticipating the shocked look she’d have, the fear.

  To his disappointment, the lights remained on throughout Kristilynn’s house. Nine-thirty, and he grew progressively more impatient. Maybe she doesn’t need to be sleeping, he thought. Maybe I can break in and take her by surprise.

  A new plan took hold. He’d need to get closer, turn around and pull the car up in front of the house. He’d parked too far away to walk with the shotgun. Someone would see him. Once he had the car in position, he could run up to the door, break it down, tie the woman up and flee with her.

  Weighing the pros and cons, Beau decided to get busy. He turned the key and started the Taurus, but before he put it in gear, he heard something. He glanced in the side mirror and saw headlights. A white Suburban approached from behind and stopped across from Kristilynn’s house. The lights went out on the SUV, and someone parked.

  In the Taurus, Beau flipped the ignition off and slunk down in the seat. He watched in the side mirror, grateful that he hadn’t made his move. If the Suburban had arrived just moments later, Beau would have been parked in front of Kristilynn’s house and walking up to the front door with the shotgun.

  Someone climbed out of the Suburban, a woman wearing jeans and a white shirt. She walked across the street to Kristilynn’s and rang the bell. The door opened, and the woman disappeared inside. Beau thought the visitor looked familiar, but he wasn’t sure. He wondered if she’d stay.

  “I’ll wait and see what happens,” he muttered. “Give her a chance to get out of the way.”

  Time passed, minutes, then half-an-hour, an hour. Finally the woman walked out and cl
osed the door behind her. Beau wondered if Kristilynn was even home. He hadn’t seen her open the door for the woman, or wave good bye and lock it when the woman left.

  As the visitor walked back to the Suburban, Beau recognized her. At first he wasn’t sure when he’d seen her before, but then he realized that she looked like the Texas Ranger working on the church burnings. That seemed odd. “What is she doing here? Is she looking for me?”

  As the ranger crossed the street, a few houses behind her a door on a parked car opened. A man rushed out. Enough drug arrests in his past to know, Beau pegged the stocky guy as a cop.

  The ranger and the cop talked, and the ranger looked angry. She kept pointing at the cop’s car, as if telling him to leave her alone. Furious, she stalked toward her SUV, while the guy sulked away.

  In the Taurus, Beau fidgeted and tried to get a better look at the woman, to make sure she was the ranger. He thought so, but could he be wrong? As he turned, his elbow hit the steering wheel, and the horn sounded. BLARE! BLARE!

  Panicked, he swiveled forward in the seat, twisted the key in the ignition and took off, driving too fast for a residential street. In the rearview mirror, he saw the woman run toward him. As he turned at the corner, Beau saw her run for her Suburban.

  “Shit!” he called out to no one.

  He rounded another corner, took yet another, and then saw a house at the back of a cul-de-sac with a long driveway, dark, with no lights on. He pulled in to get off the street, at the end of the driveway swerving to the right and angling into a parking area behind the house. Hidden in the shadows, Beau killed the engine and headlights. He grabbed the shotgun, got out and ran to the corner of the house, where he stood in the dark with the shotgun raised and waited.

  Time passed.

  The neighborhood quiet, he saw no one. Then the rumble of an engine, and moments later headlights appeared. The white Suburban hesitated down the street. He saw the front first, then the entire SUV as it glided forward. The windows dark, he could just make out the shape of the woman backlit by the streetlights. He pictured her narrowing her eyes, peering up driveways, hoping to see the burgundy Taurus. He held his breath as the Suburban slowed passing the house where he hid. At the end of the driveway, the Suburban stopped. He wondered if she could see the Taurus.