Buried Alive (27 page)

I made the jack-off motion. “You must have memories to work from.”

“I used ‘em up,” he hissed. “I been thinking about that sweet Cherry ass. Only thing I got that’s new, an’
I’m gettin’ wore out on it.” He strained sideways, trying to see past me at the screen. “Git that teevee started up again.”

“First I want to show you some other interesting items.”

I retrieved a magazine from the briefcase and opened it just out of grab range. I flipped through pages. “Oh my lord,” Coggins wheezed, eyes wide. “I’m about to loose a load just looking. Slow down.”

I set the magazines aside and opened the briefcase, showed him the thickness of the stack within. He was panting so hard I wondered if I should turn up the oxygen.

“They’re yours, Mr Coggins. Hide them. Look at one magazine a day, one video a week. By the time you get through, the old ones will be new again.”

“Gimme,” he wheezed, his old claw grabbing for the pages like junk to an addict. “Pleeeeease.”

“When you give me what I need.”

“Whaaaat?”

I leaned back and set the magazines on the table, a foot from his reach. I popped the DVD from the player and set it atop the books with the others.

“I need history, Mr Coggins. History.”

After a fifteen-minute conversation with Lester Coggins, I went to Cherry’s office and waited in the lot. Two phone calls about dogs came through in ten minutes. After a few questions I determined neither was Mix-up. Cherry arrived twenty minutes later.

“Are you converted yet?” I said, stepping from my truck and handing back the borrowed briefcase, empty now.

She pushed open the door and we went inside. “I’m a believer, Ryder, but on my own terms. Fact and reason shouldn’t negate faith, but enhance it. Why does religion have to be four hundred years behind everything else?”

“I’m not the one to ask about theology. I just finished whipping an elderly man into a sexual frenzy.”

“Was it worth it?” she asked.

“You be the judge. Coggins ran with Powers for about two years, coupling like ferrets on Viagra. On back roads,
in local motels, now and then grabbing a hot weekend at one of the casino boats on the Ohio River.”

“We knew that from before.”

“Powers also liked money a lot and spent it fast when she got it. Plus she had a thing for cockfights and dogfights. She loved the noise and action and being one of the few females in the crowd, a hundred men eyeballing her. One time she and Coggins attended a dogfight. Coming back, Powers alluded to being friends with folks in the biz, and suggested Coggins might put some of his money in a special investment.”

“Dogs?”

“Powers got coy, called it an ‘educational opportunity’. She alluded to risks, but the money came in hard and fast. She also added that the risks had recently been reduced. Something about being put under a star.”

“Educational dogfights? Under a star? Doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“We’re lucky Lester Coggins remembered that much. He hears through his tongue. Anyway, the pair went back a week later. No fight, but caged dogs were visible. Powers was, according to Coggins, ‘stoned about two planets away’. She laughed and said the place was a school.”

“A school for dogs?”

“Coggins saw small sheds tucked in the trees. Standing in the doorways were a raggedy band of kids, a half-dozen boys, ‘sulky looking’, in Coggins’s description. A couple of them had bandages on their faces. He thought the boys looked about as stoned as Powers.”

“Coggins recognize the kids?”

“He thought he’d seen one around Campton a few times, a kid with the first name of Donald.”

“Donald what?”

I shook my head. “Coggins remembers every sexual encounter he ever had because sex is all that’s important in his life. The kids were just faces. He only remembered the kid’s name because it reminded him of Donald Duck.”

“I’d love to see this so-called school. Where was it?”

“Coggins had no idea. Powers did all the driving. He thought it was east somewhere.”

“Daddy Coggins refused the offer to invest, I take it?”

“Coggins was a glutton for sex, not money. He made a good living as a union miner. Coggins blew Powers off by saying he couldn’t get money without his wife finding out. They started drifting apart about then. Seems Tandee found a new significant other named - I need a drum roll here - Sonny Burton.”

“I should have seen that one coming. When nasty meets nasty, is that nasty squared?”

“There’s more. The night Powers took Coggins to the dogfight? There was a main parking area filled with cars. There was also a second lot tucked away behind the barn, something like VIP parking. There were a few cars and trucks there … and one large white step-van.”

“Maybe Burton was already hanging around, you think? One of the originals? He’s always had white delivery vans.” She stepped to the window and studied
the distant peaks while rubbing her temples. “You know what this resembles, don’t you?”

I nodded. “What Crayline went through in Alabama around the same time, eighteen to twenty years ago. Except there was nothing that could be called educational in Crayline’s history.”

“Education, education …” Cherry mumbled, scooting to her desk and riffling through the paperwork overload. She snapped a page from the heap and began reading.

“Tandee Powers was a substitute teacher, Carson. Almost twenty years ago. It didn’t seem to agree with her, she taught at the local junior high a few dozen times. I checked all that, no ties anywhere. But she also filed for a home school certificate eighteen years ago, kept the papers active for five years. Zeke Tanner had teacher aspirations, too.”

“Tanner?”

“I remember him talking about setting up a school when he first started as a preacher. Talking about adding a TV link to services, building a network, turning the church into a major venture like what’s-his-name down in your state, Ryder. The chunky guy in the big scandal?”

“Richard Scaler.” I recalled Scaler’s empire, his college and TV outlet. Compared it with memories of Tanner’s trailer-church, folding chairs in front of the pulpit that numbered less than thirty.

“Did Tanner do anything about the school?” I asked. “Like getting it off the ground?”

“Big dreams with no follow-through, that was Zeke.
As far as starting a school, you file an application. It’s a formality. You don’t need a teaching certificate, experience, anything. There are illiterates teaching home schools.”

“Eighteen years back. Would there be a paper trail?”

She picked up the phone. “No one in the Kentucky bureaucracy ever throws anything away. It’s finding it that’s the trick - could take months. I’ve got a friend in the system and a favor to call in. Keep your fingers crossed.”

“I’m running back to the cabin to check on Mix-up,” I said. “Keep yours crossed, too.”

We waved our crossed fingers at one another.

No sign of my dog. I fought the visions of wounded animals crawling from car strikes to die miserably at the side of the road and forced down a power bar for supper. I grew steadily angrier at my brother for luring me here. He’d wanted company and someone to keep the law from checking his background, and I’d nearly been killed and worse, lost my dog.

Jeremy hated any kind of pet - dogs especially - and his mention of poisoning Mix-up wouldn’t leave my mind.

It was almost dusk when I crept through the woods behind his house, thinking I might push him on Mix-up, make sure he was telling the truth. Or maybe I just wanted him to give me an excuse to punch out a few of his lying teeth.

Now and then I take a mood.

But Jeremy’s Subaru was gone. I checked my watch:
eight-fifteen. My brother often took late meals at a café five miles distant, fuel for a night scanning the Asian stock markets. When I turned to head back to the cabin, something stuck my feet in place and I felt a strange tingle in the pit of my belly.

What if I was wrong, though, and Jeremy
had
taken Mix-up?

I had visions of my dog imprisoned in Jeremy’s version of the pit where Crayline had kept the hapless Jessie Stone.

I crouched low and ran to his yard, stepping from dense forest into manicured grass and neat beds of bright flowers. The doors and windows were locked tight, the door locks too complex for my simple abilities at picking. I stepped back and scanned his second floor. A back window to his office appeared lifted a few inches. I went to his tool shed and retrieved a twelve-foot ladder most likely used to clean leaves from his gutters, angled it against the roof. I listened for sounds and heard only the breeze in the leaves and the far call of a whip-poor-will.

Within a minute I was inside his office. I ran downstairs, opening doors, looking for a basement or even a large root cellar. Nothing. It hit me that the land here was a foot of topsoil over sandstone or limestone, not conducive to excavation. A fool’s errand, I realized; desperation and fear. I scrambled upstairs to escape.

The computers hummed as the screensaver etched its endless line across the screen. A question came to mind:
Jeremy had alluded to making his money playing the market, but had also said he’d only learned about making money after his arrival here. My brother lied so often even he forgot when his falsehoods crossed paths.

I pulled close the chair and played my fingers over the keys. I had a few stocks of my own, a portfolio worth about enough to buy an entry-level car, but it provided a sense of control over my money. And it had given me an insight into reviewing charts and graphs and other financial records.

I discovered Jeremy’s online trading accounts were password-protected, and my brother would never have used the birthdays and names common to most mnemonic passwords. He would simply have assigned each account a meaningless term and remembered it, his mind thriving on minutiae.

I studied the desktops in turn until seeing a file named TXREC. I opened it and found tax records: gains and losses and estimated quarterly taxes he needed to file. I stared for several seconds at the amounts of the gains. My brother was indeed a canny reader of the market.

I continued my fast scan until hearing an engine sound. I scrambled to the front window.

Jeremy!

His vehicle was canting down the road and approaching quickly, downshifting to turn the bend at his drive. I exited his file, pushed the chair into place. Heard the crunch of gravel beneath his wheels stop as he pulled to the gate. By the time my feet were feeling their way to the ladder
rungs, I heard the clatter of the gate chain as he undid the lock.

When my feet hit the ground, I heard him pull through the gate. Then stop to relock it. I started to slide the ladder closed, forgot the spring-driven stop mechanism. It slapped over a rung like bell. I winced, dropped the ladder to the ground and began feeding it into itself with one hand while the other held the mechanism from the rungs.

Jeremy pulled to the porch, less than forty feet away, on the other side of the house. His door was opening as I grunted the ladder to the shed. Ducking inside, I replaced the ladder on its wall mount, the sweat of fear pouring into my eyes.

His back door opened. I edged to the wall and found a slender crack between boards. My brother stepped outside and studied a thermometer mounted on a porch post. He nodded as if pleased by what the day was doing for him and went back inside. I slipped from the door, backed carefully away with the shed as my shield. In seconds I was back in the covering safety of the woods.

My scan of my brother’s records confirmed what I’d suspected - none of the stock records pre-dated his arrival. He may have fostered his particular insights into the market before arriving, but had only profited once here.

Which sparked a curious question: Where had my brother gotten the money to buy his property?

McCoy was at my door the next morning at seven thirty, the normally composed master of the woods looking pale and distraught.

“What is it?” I asked, hobbling out to the porch while pulling on the second shoe.

He produced a small black laptop and tapped the keys. “The geocache website. I checked it out of habit a half-hour back.”

He spun the screen to me. I leaned close and saw map coordinates, above them the dreaded symbol.

=(8)=

My heart sank. Crayline was dead. This couldn’t be happening.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“Over by Star Gap. Donna’s heading there now. She wanted me to show you this, then meet her there.”

“It has to be some kind of joke,” I said, stumbling into the vehicle, wondering if I was having a full-blown nightmare.

We returned to the Forest Service SUV and McCoy pulled up and out of the hollow. We were closing on the site fifteen minutes later, Cherry waiting and pacing, her face tight with tension. We followed McCoy, walking left, then right, guided by the arrow on the GPS screen. He angled around a house-sized boulder, arriving at a muddy clearing in the forest floor, the mud lightened by dissolving shale, gray, rarer in the area than the dark soil or sand that generally prevailed.

I heard McCoy gasp. Cherry ran up. Her lips moved but no sound came out. Caudill arrived and stopped dead in his tracks. He turned away and began hyperventilating.

I stepped into the clearing. Beale’s naked body was on the ground. It took my mind several reality-bending moments to fathom the scene. What had been done to Beale was almost indescribable, requiring a sharp knife and hideous surgery.

“Is it him?” Cherry asked, only able to look at the body in glances. “We can’t see his face without, uh …”

“Those are his tattoos,” Caudill whispered. “It’s the sheriff.”

Cherry called the state forensics and medical people and asked for their most experienced team to unravel the nightmare of Sheriff Roy Beale.

“Why Sheriff Beale?” Caudill asked, shaken to his bootstraps. “What did he do?”

“An authority figure, maybe,” I ventured. “Or a threat.”