by J. A. Kerley
“What can I do for you, Ryder?”
“I was gonna buy a used car, but it looks like your inventory’s low.”
She set the pencil down. Spiked me with the left eye, brushed me with the right one. “Something on your mind?”
I spun a chair to the front of her desk and sat. “Thank you for sending Lee McCoy to inspect me yesterday. We had a great hike and a fine supper, which you doubtless know.”
“I didn’t send him to—”
“Your spy confezzed,” I said in my Hollywood Nazi, which sounded closer to Scottish. “I br-r-r-roke him.”
She rolled her eyes. “Lee’s so straight they use him to calibrate plumb-bobs. Given your appearance on the scene, I wanted him to sniff you over, Ryder. No apologies.”
“No apology requested. It’s what I would have done.”
“Really? I’m amazed I did something a big-city detective would do. My day is made. Thanks and bye.”
I kept my seat. “Any ID come through on the body?”
“There’s a problem. The fingers were burned. The prints were damaged.”
I saw the case materials arrayed on her desk. Felt a rush of adrenalin. I said, “McCoy told me about the murder of the snack-truck guy. How about I take copies of the cases back to my cabin and check for anything you might have missed.”
“Excuse me, did you say ‘missed’?”
I nodded toward the remnant-store surroundings. “I’m just trying to be helpful, Detective. This is hardly the forefront of law enforcement.”
Donna Cherry brushed back a bright lock of hair from her forehead and leaned forward with her elbows on her desk. “It’s true that I work in a thirty-year-old trailer that smells like cigars. I got a busted answering machine and a vehicle with a hundred forty thousand miles on it. I spend half my time trying to cement jurisdictional alliances with politicians who can’t spell either word. But guess what, Mister Big-city Hotshot? This program is eight months old and serious crime in my territory is down seventeen per cent. How y’all doing in Mobile?”
She snatched up the pencil. Looked down at her work.
“Have a nice vacation, Detective, but please have it somewhere besides my office.”
Chapter 10
I made it two steps from the trailer before turning back inside. Cherry didn’t look up. I stood in front of her desk and did my best contrite look, a good one, because it was real.
“Now what am I doing wrong?” she said, still writing.
“Absolutely nothing. You’re obviously a professional doing exceptional work with limited resources, Detective Cherry. Mobile’s not generally considered a major metropolitan area and usually I’m the one considered a hick and a yokel. I’ve never been on the other side and I guess I was seeing how it felt. It was stupid and small and I apologize for my general everything.”
She looked up and stared at me with the off-centric eyes. The left one still didn’t like me, but I think the right one was coming around. She started to speak, but was interrupted by the phone, grabbing it up.
“This is – Oh, hi, officer, what’s—”
Her face darkened. She asked several questions and hung up. “Come on,” she said, standing and pulling her weapon from inside the desk. “Maybe you can be useful somehow.”
“What is it?” I followed her to the door.
“Judd Caudill reports a new addition on the geocache website. He and Beale are heading there now. It’s in the national forest so they alerted McCoy. Number eight is back.”
I buckled my seat belt as Cherry swooshed away, the big engine sucking air and burning tires. Cherry drove like a female version of my partner, Harry Nautilus: with total confidence and less-than-total control. As with Harry, I pulled the belt tourniquet-tight, holding my breath and closing my eyes when the situation warranted.
After fifteen wild minutes, we rounded a bend with tires flinging gravel into the trees. I saw McCoy’s SUV parked beside a Toyota compact with a Transylvania University sticker on the bumper.
“Uh-oh,” Cherry said. “Civilians. Probably saw the coordinates online.”
She pulled a large shoulder bag from the trunk of the cruiser. I offered to carry it but she waved me off. We jogged down the sole path for several hundred feet to a shallow meadow at the base of a cliff. We found McCoy, talking to a young male and female in T-shirts and hiking shorts, she wearing a floppy Tilley hat, he a Cincinnati Reds ball cap. I saw a GPS unit clipped to his belt. The girl was the kind of distraught that shivers, stops, starts shivering again.
“We were looking for a new cache,” the girl said, holding her shoulders like she was hugging herself. “It was on the Gorge-area site. We were looking upstream where the coordinates directed us. But we didn’t see anything. Then we came down here and we-wuh-wuh-wuh … We saw … that thing in the water.”
Her words drowned in a spasm of shivers. McCoy tossed me his GPS. It was a good one, displaying the site in the manner shown on the net:
=(8)=
N XX.XXXXXo W XXX.XXXXXo
Eight again, not five. The local coordinates.
I handed the device back. McCoy flicked his eyes toward a line of oaks. Cherry and I headed that way, finding a meandering creek on the far side of the trees, pools separated by shallow, rocky runs, the water maybe a foot in depth. Floating face-down in a pool was a woman’s body. It was slender and well maintained. Strands of false blonde hair drifted in a Medusa circle around the head.
I stepped into the water for a closer look. The victim wore a black leather corset, black boots, a black collar. Hooked to the collar were several yards of blue climbing rope. I held the dripping rope up for display. Cherry grimaced.
We heard voices. Beale and Caudill had arrived. The two cops ran over and looked down.
“Shit,” Beale said, looking disgusted. “Let’s pull it out.”
“Let’s deal with the kids first,” Cherry said. “Get them gone.”
The girl was still speaking, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “No, we j-just saw the coordinates. We were at M-Miguel’s Pizza and Ken was on his laptop. W-we saw a new cache had been added, so we turned on the GPS and went l-looking.”
She dissolved into shivers and tears. I saw Cherry catch Beale’s eye, nod toward the couple. Beale looked back, confused.
“What you want?”
“Get their statements, Sheriff Beale. Did they see anyone else on the way here? Cars, hikers, that type of thing.”
He patted his pockets. “Got something I can write in?”
Caudill said, “There’s a pad in the car, Chief. I’ll go fetch it.”
“Bring me a goddamn pen, too.”
Cherry and I trudged back to the body. She opened the bag and pulled out evidence bags, latex gloves, scene tags, a camera and other necessaries, photographing the scene from every possible angle. We splashed into the creek and wrestled the woman from the water and laid her supine on the ledgerock.
She was a woman who had been attractive while alive. Even at her age – which I guessed as late forties – her body was well-sculpted, slender and heavy-breasted. Her black corset laced through the front, plump white breasts spilling from hard cups. The boots were knee-length, laced. A black leather collar circled her neck, and centering the collar was a stainless steel O-ring. The blue rope was attached to the ring with a carabiner.
“Captive somewhere?” Cherry suggested.
“Looks that way.”
“The boots are maybe three sizes too big,” she said, wiggling the boots as water dripped out. “Plus that corset get-up isn’t laced tight, and doesn’t look like it would. One item’s too small, the other’s too large.”
“You don’t think the boots and boogie gown are hers?”
“No,” Sheriff Beale interrupted from behind us. “Not a chance.”
Cherry and I turned. Beale had finished his note duties and dismissed the kids. “You know the victim, Sheriff?” Cherry asked.
“Tandee Powers. Lives in Hazel Green, not too fa
r from here. Churchy lady. Used to be a teacher who did stuff for orphan kids and that. Took a real pervert to dress her like a whore.”
He looked sick and walked away, acting like he was checking the bushes for clues. We inspected the body, noting some bruising and several deep scratches, but no major wounds. The local ambulance company arrived, ready to transport the body to a nearby funeral home. It needed chilled storage until the Kentucky crime lab could add it to their backlog.
When the body was gone, we scoured the area for evidence. Cherry and I walked with our heads low, studying. Beale and Caudill stomped in circles. McCoy wandered with his GPS unit in hand. I watched him head upstream until he disappeared around a bend. Finding nothing in the vicinity of the body, the four of us trotted after McCoy.
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 birdhouses 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.”
Chapter 11
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.”