Buried Alive (28 page)

“There was nothing to Beale, threat-wise,” McCoy said. “If the killer had only Beale to deal with, he could kill half the folks in the county before Beale Junior even noticed.”

“Beale
Junior?”
I said.

“I thought you knew his daddy was sheriff, Carson,” McCoy said.

“I do, I just never had to make connections to it before, see it on the timeline.” I turned to Cherry. “Could old Sheriff Beale have known anything about the camp?”

Cherry said, “I heard a few bad tales about Beale’s daddy, but every county sheriff makes enemies who—”

“I knew old Beale,” McCoy interrupted. “If there was anything illegal going on, I expect he got paid for not noticing.”

“He was that bad?” Cherry asked. “You never told me that.”

“Old Beale was dead and gone. No sense spitting on his memory.”

Something stirred in my mind. “Mooney Coggins recalled Powers talking about ‘being put under a star’,” I ventured. “Could that have meant a protective alliance with old Beale … the sheriff paid to overlook the camp?”

McCoy did the money-whisk. “If there was enough of this in the picture, I expect Beale senior would have pretended that part of the county didn’t exist.”

I re-thought the situation with the new input. I walked from behind the boulder and studied the savaged corpse for a few seconds.

“What’s another term for not seeing what’s in front of you?” I asked.

Cherry shot a glance at the wreckage of Roy Beale. Her eyes closed and her shoulders slumped.

“Having one’s head up one’s….” She couldn’t finish.

“I rest my case,” I said.

If Krenkler and her crew had been in mop-it-up-and-hop-it-up to DC mode, they pivoted on that dime. We were summoned to the cabin by the park, told to the minute when we should arrive, which had Cherry mumbling under her breath as she took her seat at the conference table, awaiting an appearance by the woman she’d taken to calling The Peroxide Queen. Krenkler stood outside the cabin talking into two cellphones at once, her lacquered hair the only item not in frenzied motion. Three agents swirled around her bringing notes, coffee, chewing gum.

Caudill arrived as the sole representative of the Woslee force. He didn’t look comfortable with command, pushing the furthest chair back even further and avoiding eye contact.

“Christ Jesus,” Krenkler barked as she strode into
the room, looking at Cherry and me like we did this on purpose, producing a body after she had most likely told HQ the case was wrapping up. “How many nutcases are loose in this goddamn wilderness?”

“One more than Bobby Lee Crayline,” I said. “At least.”

She fed the red mouth a strip of Juicy Fruit and shot me the hard eye. “You got no anonymous calls this time, Ryder?”

She was flogging that horse again, obsessed with that damn call. “I’ll answer for the next fifteen times you ask, Agent Krenkler, and I’ll say it slow so you can understand it. I - never - received - any—”

“Not funny. Answer the goddamn question.”

A light dawned in my head. “Wait a minute,” I said, staring her full in the eye. “There’s something you’re not telling us, isn’t there?”

She looked at the floor. I hadn’t figured Krenkler capable of guilt, but there it was.

“What?” I pushed. “Out with it.”

“Someone called us here anonymously,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Just like you.”

“Wait a minute … you’re just now telling us that—”

“Sheriff Beale didn’t call us in. I’m not sure Beale - rest his dull soul - could have found the FBI’s telephone number without a guide dog. The Bureau got a call three days before Charles Bridges was found. The caller predicted a string of murders here and invited us to take a look. The Bureau gets more weird calls than Jerry Springer. By the time we checked
into it, the victim now known as Charles Bridges had shown up. We called Beale and convinced him it was in his best interest to request our presence.”

Cherry stared at Krenkler. If looks could kill, hers were cyanide laced with strychnine.

“What kind of lunatic killer invites the FBI to a killing spree?” I said. “And why didn’t you share the information from day one, so we could all know—”

“Here’s the way it’s going to work,” Krenkler barked, over-voluming my question. “Everything will continue to be run directly from this office with my full—”

“No way,” Cherry said.

Krenkler froze as if slapped. Surprised faces turned toward Cherry.

“You surely weren’t talking to me?” Krenkler said.

“I’m talking to exactly you.” Cherry stood and put her palms on the table. “Detective Ryder and I may have found a new investigative path. We are going to look into it. WE, as in Detective Ryder and me. I can’t have you treating people like ignorant savages because they don’t live in a city, Agent Krenkler. We need them to talk, not stare at their shoes and mumble.”

Krenkler snapped her gum like gunshots. “How good are you at running a cash register, Detective Cherry? You’re digging your grave here, career-wise.”

Cherry said, “Only if I screw up, and I’m not planning on screwing up. If we discover something, we’ll tell you immediately, a gesture of professional respect you seen incapable of giving to us.”

The room was as silent as the far side of the moon. The cluster of agents were too stunned to do anything but stare at the backs of their hands. Krenkler’s voice dropped to a whisper.

“I’m not used to being spoken to like this.”

Cherry said “Guess what, I’ve got four years of college, eight years of on-the-job training, a host of commendations. And I’m not used to being a copy machine.”

Krenkler stared but found no response. Cherry nodded for me to follow and the door closed at our backs. “Tell me you have something,” I side-whispered as we hightailed it out of the cabin before Krenkler sent the agents after us. “Either that or I’m going to have to send you to store-clerk school.”

Cherry nodded to her vehicle. Amazingly, she was smiling. She patted my back. “It’s just wonderful what some folks can leverage with a handful of dirty pictures. Get in my ride and I’ll show you what Powers meant by education.”

We jumped in. Cherry pulled a few pages from her briefcase.

“A friend who’s a clerk in a state office came in early and started digging for me, bless her bureaucratic heart. Turns out the state keeps a record of kids being home schooled so districts don’t send out truant officers to the homes. It’s just a list of names, but names nonetheless. I did some cross-checking, some elimination because of dates and ages, and presto …”

She snapped a page in my face with a flourish and
assumed a look of detectively success. That or she’d recently devoured a canary.

“Seven names from way back when …” she said. “Jessie Collier, Elijah Elks, Bemis Smith, Jimmie Hawkes, Creed Baines, Teeter Gasper, and Donald Nunn. Seven names of boys aged eleven through thirteen listed as attending the Solid Word home schooling and camp program under the stewardship of Ezekiel Tanner, pastor, the Solid Word Church of Campton, Kentucky.”

My heart skipped a beat. Maybe several.

“Jesus, Cherry, you struck gold.”

“Silver, maybe. Let me read what it says under Purpose. ‘The Solid Word School Program and Wilderness Camp is a rigorous and extensive program of care and discipline designed to strengthen students in mind, body and spiritual teachings.’ I’ve heard both Tanner and Powers talk and I can tell you that phrase got stolen from a legitimate home-school program somewhere.”

“We’ve got to find those kids,” I said. “They’re the key.”

“I’ve already started: Jessie Collier and Donald Nunn are deceased. Collier of an OD when he was twenty, thirteen years back. Nunn got shot in a drive-by in Ashland eight years ago; I’m thinking that he might be the Donald remembered by Daddy Coggins. I’m just crosschecking names and approximate ages with crime stats. Hawkes is in the state pen. Nothing yet on Smith and Nunn.”

“Our only source is in prison?” I said.

“Maximum security at LaGrange.”

“Which is where?” I asked.

She jammed the vehicle in gear, whipped away from the FBI cabins. “Buckle up. We’ll be there in a couple hours. I got things covered.”

We booked for the prison, me looking out the back window for the FBI every few miles. If it looked like a parade of hearses, it was them. But it appeared we were on our own.

Cherry knew the warden at LaGrange and arranged a private room for meeting Jimmie Hawkes, twenty-nine years of age, and a one-time student of the Solid Word home school and camp for disadvantaged children. I hoped Mr Hawkes would have plenty to say.

We stopped at the guard station outside the visitation room. A heavyset guard with caterpillar eyebrows sat at a desk absentmindedly thumbing through a Bass Pro Shops catalog.

“We’re here to see Jimmie Hawkes,” Cherry said.

The caterpillars flicked up from a page of camo hunting gear. “You ain’t eaten recently, have you?”

“Could you explain that, please?” Cherry asked.

The guard walked to the control plate on the wall and pressed a button. The steel door at his back rolled open. “Hawkes is here for trying to rob a Korean grocery in Paducah. Trouble was, the store owner kept a twelve-gauge under the counter. The guy whipped that shotgun up and fired. Took the docs eight years just to git Hawkes where he is now.”

“I can’t wait,” Cherry muttered.

We took our seats at the table. The door opened and Hawkes entered the room in profile, all we saw was the right side of his face. He seemed a series of jitters, each part of his body driven by a different rhythm, spasms in motion.

When he turned to us I heard Cherry stifle the gasp: Hawkes looked like a character from a Batman movie, if there’d been a character called Half-face or maybe just Nightmare. The shotgun blast had torn off the left side of his face from mid-cheekbone outward, blowing away bone, flesh, ear, hair, a third of the mandible.

The result was a face normal on one side of his nose, with no face on the other - just a sloping plain of gray scar tissue rebuilt in the rough shape of a head. There was nothing where his eye used to be, not so much as an indentation. I imagined the left side of his skull was some form of inner prosthetic. His skin resembled lizard hide. The right side of his mouth was normal, the left truncating in the scar, unable to close, making a permanent downcast hole.

“Jesus,” Cherry whispered. I took her hand, squeezed it.

“Guards say you want to talk,” Hawkes said in a strange, lisping rasp. “Got a half you want to talk to?”

“Home? What the fuck is a home, lady?”

Hawkes answered Cherry’s opening question, asking where home was in his childhood. “Didn’t have no home. Got run from place to place. Uncles, aunts, mamaw. I learned to stay outside, keep outta the way. Run in, EAT! Go back out, winter, summer, didn’t matter. One day a preacher an’ a sexy lady come around, said they was starting up a bible camp and they was gonna school ME for FREE.” He turned in his chair and waved to an invisible woman. “BYE-BYE, MAMAW, YOU OLD WHORE.”

Hawkes shivered and jittered. I wondered if the shotgun blast had left a bunch of wires hanging loose in his brain, sparking at random to cause the jumping and twitching.

“Did you like the idea of going off with Reverend Tanner and Miss Powers, Jimmie?” Cherry asked.

“Didn’t give a sh-shit. I figured they’d send me somewhere elst soon enough, like always.”

“So you went to the Solid Word school.”

“Words and turds, turds and words,” Hawkes said, disgust on his half-face. “Dog turds, dogs everywhere. Barkin’ and growlin’ all the time. Everything stunk of dog turd. Never cleaned it up, just waited for the rain to wash it away.”

“Tell us about the school.”

“Started off nice. GOOD EAT! Lived in little house things. NO RAIN NO PAIN.”

“Did you have school lessons?” Cherry asked.

“We learned this …” Hawkes jumped up and started throwing air punches. He spun to kick something only he could see. The man’s kicks and punches were tight, hard, and controlled. He knew what he was doing.

“Sit, Jimmie,” the guard cautioned. Hawkes sneered, but sat.

“You ended up fighting?” I asked.

“PIN A NUMBER ON YOUR DICK!” he bellowed into our faces, his breath treacherous. “BUST THEIR ASSES AND GET SOME EAT IN THE BELLY!”

“You fought and you ate?”

He backhanded away spit dripping from the keyhole mouth. “Food without maggots. Real EAT! EAT AND EAT MORE. DOPE AND WHISKEY AND GETTIN’ ALL FRISKY! WIN AND FILL THE MOUTH-HOLE!”

“What happened when you lost?”

Hawkes stopped moving as if a spring mechanism had
spent its energy. His mouth drooped and his one eye turned inward. He became absolutely still.

“Coach’d come in and have his party,” he said, turning away.

“The coach?”

Hawkes leaned back his head and screamed, “HERE COMES THE SNACK TRUCK!”

I turned to Cherry. The blood had drained from her face. “Is that what Coach said, Jimmie?” I asked.

Hawkes jumped up, planted his feet wide, made the motion of grabbing a head while being fellated. He knifed his hips forward and back. Grunted, “Here … comes … the … snack … truck … uhn, uhnnn, uh-HUUUGRG!”

“Did anyone ever try and get away, Jimmie?” I asked, holding up my hand at the guard,
Don’t interfere.

“Yesssssss,” he hissed.

“Did they make it?”

Hawkes’s single eye burned into mine. He made a throttling motion with his hands. “HE did this to a dog. Then HE hung Mister DOG from a TREE.”

My mind’s eye presented a limp canine swinging from a limb, the symbol of the failed escape. “It was to tell you what happened to the boy, right?”

Hawkes gestured me close with his forefinger. “Read the dog, mister,” he whispered. “The dog knows the future.”

“Who killed the dog, Jimmie?” Cherry asked. “The coach? The preacher?”

“The Colonel,” he said.

“Colonel, Jimmie?”

Hawkes cupped his hand over his crotch. “PUT ON YOUR CUPS AND COVER YOUR PUPS,” he barked, as if giving an order. “STICK A NUMBER ON YOUR DICK, BOYS! MAKE THE COLONEL SMILE!”