Buried Alive (7 page)

“Did Cherry make any judgment on her own?” I asked. “About
moi
?”

McCoy colored with embarrassment again. “She said we had to check, but that you were probably too, uh, goofy to be a killer.”

The next morning I arose to the
rat-a-tat
of a woodpecker’s beak against a nearby tree. The proverbial early bird, up and working at daybreak. I stretched and yawned and recalled a passing storm during the night, hard rain pounding the metal roof of the cabin, keeping me awake for a few minutes until lulled back into delicious sleep.

My first week was more than half gone, the free week. I had three more weeks of vacation coming. I’d initially planned to take the freebie in the Gorge, then head some other direction. But I was enjoying the mountains, the climbing lessons, the hikes with Mix-up. And, truth be told, the background hiss of a murder investigation was comforting as well, like an old companion in the neighborhood.

Donna Cherry was an interesting cipher too.

I showered and ate and drove to the RRG offices in
the micro-town of Slade, hoping to wangle an extension of my lodging. A bell on the door caught the attention of a teen guy in a corner chair. He scampered behind the desk.

“Miz Fugate around?” I asked.

He tipped back a ball cap. “She’s gone visiting up in Ohio, a sister by Springfield. She ain’t due back for a couple-three days. I’m in charge while she’s gone. Can I help you?”

“I wonder if it’s possible to add another couple weeks to my stay?”

He frowned. “It’s busy season cuz most schools are out. We’re pretty much rented tight. What cabin you at?”

“Road’s End.”

“Lemme look at the reservations.” He pulled a book from beneath the counter and thumbed through pages. “You say you rented Road’s End for the week?”

I nodded. “I won a week’s rental. Miz Fugate’s daughter picked my name from a hat.”

“According to the book, you got the place for a month. Says clear as day in Dottie’s handwriting, rent paid in cash.”

“I never paid a penny, cash or otherwise.”

He pulled off his cap and scratched his head. “Tell you what, put down a deposit for two weeks an’ I’ll check with Dottie if she calls. If she’s already given it over to you for free, I’ll tear up your deposit check. Call here in a couple days and I’ll let you know. But from what I’m seeing, I figure it’s yours. You sure no one else paid for you?”

“Like I said, I won the stay in a contest.”

“Sure don’t sound like Dottie. Mebbe she’s easing up in her old age.”

“I guess,” I said, not knowing what I was guessing at. I wrote the check and headed for the door, perplexed but not dwelling on it. I was halfway out when the kid called to my back.

“S’cuse me, Mr Ryder? Did you say your name got pulled from a hat by Dottie’s daughter?”

I nodded. “I was the lucky one.”

“I never heard of Dottie having any kids.”

I shrugged, wandered out the door. The sun was clean and bright and smelled of pine from the breeze blowing down from the ridges. Then, as if from nowhere, I smelled something coarse and off-key. I looked around for garbage bins, before it hit me the foul scent was a memory of yesterday, blowing not in the wind but through my brain.

I wondered if the poor tormented man had been ID’d. And what his story was. I figured a few minutes of talking to Miz Cherry wouldn’t hurt my vacation mentality and called the Eastern Kentucky Combined Law Enforcement, Region 5.

I got an answering machine, a pre-digital model with tape speed problems.

“This
…
is
…
the
…
Easternkentuckycombinedlawfrcmtiveplslve.
…
a
…
message
…
and
…
wewillgetrightbato
…
you.”

I sighed and hung up. McCoy had given me the number
for his mobile phone so I tried that. He answered on third ring.

“Hey, Lee, I need to see Cherry. Where’s her office?”

“East side of Campton, just through the light on the highway. There’s an antiquey type of place, a Dairy Queen, a dollar store. The EKCLE office is just past. Look close or you’ll drive right by.”

“Where you at?”

“Out by Courthouse Rock, checking on nesting areas for hawks.”

“Wish I was there. No new stars on the GPS horizon, I take it?”

“You mean symbols and numbers? Nope. Just the good old normal kind.”

I drove past the EKCLE offices my first try, then came back around. The office was in what appeared to be a defunct used-car dealership: a gray single-wide trailer on a half-acre of faded asphalt. I saw a plain blue Crown Victoria Police Interceptor model parked outside, the unmarked cruiser Cherry had been using at Soldering-iron man’s murder scene.

I parked and walked the steps to the door, entered. The trailer’s living area had been converted to an office, probably back in the car-dealership days, with paneled walls, grubby blue carpet, a window-unit air conditioner with water stains beneath it. A map of Kentucky centered on one wall. There was a round table surrounded by five mismatched chairs at one end of the room, an old metal
desk at the other. Two battered filing cabinets flanked the desk. The air reeked of tobacco seeping into the woodwork over decades.

Cherry was at the desk pushing a pencil. She wore a white lacy top. Her earrings were turquoise bangles and complemented the red hair. She looked up, frowned, went back to her work.

“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.”

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.XXXXX
^o
W XXX.XXXXX
^o

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 far 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.