Buried Alive

“Country ham?” I asked, studying the package.

He gri

I cradled the ham to my chest like a cache of diamonds and ran it to the fridge. The best country hams rarely see store shelves but are traded in the shadows by cognoscenti. I poured coffee and we sat on the porch, chatting about weather and light topics. Something seemed a bit amiss in the proceedings – I was, after all, a man with an unknown co

“Twenty-seven years. All in the Daniel Boone Forest, a good half stationed here in the Gorge. I grew up in Clay City fifteen miles west. I used to ride my bike here before I could drive.”

“You must know every step in the Gorge.”

He winked. “The Gorge keeps a few places hidden. That’s its nature. Today I’m heading into the backcountry to check a stand of white-haired goldenrod.”

Maybe it was something in me that harkened to childhood, Smoky the Bear and Ranger Rick or whatever. Maybe it was McCoy’s spiffy, hard-creased uniform, or the cool wide-brim hat, but my cynicism melted and my heart skipped a beat at the prospect of hiking alongside a for-real forest ranger.

I sighed like a jilted teen. “Jeez, I’d give my eyeteeth to tag along.”

He smiled. “We’ll be out for a few hours. Best to pack a sandwich.”

I grabbed my daypack and a canteen before McCoy had a chance to change his mind.

“You bringing your pup?” McCoy called through the door. “Dogs aren’t allowed in Natural Bridge Park, but they’re fine in the Gorge.”

I whistled Mix-up to my side and we jumped into McCoy’s official Jeep Cherokee, driving out of the long valley, coming to the split where the road wandered back to the only other cabin in the hollow. McCoy nodded toward the cabin as we passed.

“Had a chance to meet Doctor Charpentier, the fellow who lives there?”

“Never seen him.”

“He spends hours in the forest, hiking and thinking. If you see him, stop and say hello. A brilliant man. I’ve never known anyone to absorb information so quickly.”

“Charpentier is a medical doctor?”

“A psychologist from Montreal who took early retirement. He moved here for the climate, finding Canada too cold, the South too hot. Doctor Charpentier thinks Kentucky has the perfect temperature, and our forest reminded him of Canadian woodland.”

McCoy pulled up out of the hollow and drove north. He entered the national forest and wound down to the bottoms, the Red River to our left as we angled southeast. Whenever the canopy of trees opened, I saw looming cliffs studded with pine on the ridges.

“Beautiful view,” I said.

“Depends on your perspective.” McCoy nodded at a cliff face thirty stories above the valley. “We’ve got a problem with people falling off cliffs. Doped-up locals and drunked-up college kids, mainly. They camp on the ridges for the view, forget where they are, walk over the edge. Last week a man took a two-and-half gainer from the top of that cliff to the bottom. I was on the rescue team. Or maybe body-recovery team is a better term. I’ve personally recovered over two dozen.”

McCoy slowed as a huge recreational vehicle moved toward us in the other lane, crowding the centerline. McCoy slipped past, pulled off the road and stopped the engine. We’d reached the trailhead. It was after we’d exited and gone to the rear to grab our packs that McCoy made his first mention of the grisly events of yesterday.

“I heard you had to spend some time with Detective Cherry,” he said. “She was surprised at your appearance.”

“It was a surprise to us all,” I said.

McCoy cleared his throat. “Did Detective Cherry mention there’d been a death prior to the man in the shack? A very similar event?”

“No, Lee,” I said, more interested than my face let on. “We never quite got around to police chit-chat.”

“It was a week back. So

I nodded. “Two murders in a short span of time is probably unusual around here, but not freakishly odd anywhere, unfortunately. What makes you sure Burton is co

“The way the police received notice of both crimes.”

The point Cherry hadn’t discussed. “How?” I asked.

“Through coordinates on a geocache website. The location of So

“Geocaching is hide and seek with a GPS, right?”

McCoy nodded. “It’s a recent craze. People hide things, trinkets, a log book. The coordinates are posted on the web. You use a GPS to find the cache, usually adding a trinket to a bunch of trinkets, or signing the book. There are big national geocaching sites, and little regional ones. The site where Burton’s coordinates were posted is called East Kentucky Geofun. It’s run from a computer server and operated by a kid in Stanton.”

“Cherry checked him out, right?”

“A sixteen-year-old techie – not involved. The site runs itself: Anyone with internet access can post on the site anonymously. Some local kids saw the new coordinates and went out expecting to find a standard cache, a box of trinkets or whatever.”

“But instead found a guy with a truck parked on his sternum. The same happened with the guy in the shack?”

“There were differences,” McCoy said. “Not much, but… It’s odd. Geocache listings are in a standard format for the website: the name of the cache, the coordinates, and the name of the person or persons placing the cache.”

McCoy had my attention. “How are these different?” I asked.

The ranger reached in his pack and produced a sheaf of folded pages. “Let me show you the format of the typical geocache …”

He unfolded a page and handed it to me. Geocache entries copied from a computer screen. The format was simple.

Haystack Rock

N XX.XXXXX° W XXX.XXXXX° / Joh