Buried Alive

Oakes’s eyes shifted from Nautilus to Sandhill and back again. “Prove it,” he spat, his chest puffed in defiance. But Nautilus saw fear in the man’s eyes and heard the quiver in his voice.

“We always do,” Nautilus said, stepping outside, talking over his shoulder as he and Sandhill went down the rickety stairs. “Be a lot better for you if you tell us now, Mr Oakes. A judge will knock years off your sentence for telling the truth. By the way, we already know about that other nasty stuff you did. Everything.”

Sandhill tsk-tsked. “We’ve been watching you for some time, Farley. You’ve been a bad boy.”

With these people, Nautilus and Sandhill knew, there was always other stuff. It made them natural paranoids.

“Wh-at stuff?” Oakes said, voice cracking. “What are you lying about now?”

As if cued by Cecil B. DeMille, Babe Ellis appeared from the side of the house, gri

“WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU?” Oakes railed at Ellis. “WHAT WERE YOU DOING BACK THERE!”

Ellis didn’t look at Oakes. He smiled broadly at his fellow cops and brandished a pudgy yellow envelope with the word EVIDENCE stamped over both sides.

“I ASKED WHAT YOU GOT THERE?” Oakes screeched. He sounded like a terrified child.

Nautilus high-fived Ellis, as if he had a major crime-breaking find in the envelope instead of his own handkerchief. The men walked to the car, laughing as though every wish they’d ever made had just been granted in triplicate.

Come on, come on … Nautilus thought.

“I didn’t have any fucking choice,” Oakes whined to their backs, defeat in his voice. “Bobby Lee said I had to do it.”

29

Ta

“It’s unreal,” Cherry said as we zoomed down the ramp from I-64 to Frankfort, “the perp carried Ta

I shook my head in disbelief. I was fit and relatively strong and would have crapped out halfway down the trail. If it was one person, he was built like Mike Tyson in his prime.

The attending pathologist was a man named Vernon Krogan, late fifties, close-cropped gray hair, wide blue eyes incapable of surprise. I knew Doc Krogan, his species anyway, closing in on retirement after a lifetime dis-assembling bodies, many of them victims of hideous and violent crimes. He’d performed the autopsy as if tearing down a carburetor, not interested in philosophical aspects of the device - carburetors have neither philosophy nor theology - but only in such things as carbon accumulation and surface pitting.

The autopsy complete, the body was covered by a drape. Cherry and I stood to the side of the table as Krogan pulled off his mask. The room smelled of death and disinfectant and I’d smell it for days. I used to think the smell was on my clothes, my skin, but realized it had gotten trapped in my head.

“The corpse had been slit open,” Krogan said, removing his mask. “I’d figure a gutting knife, like hunters use on deer. Hang them upside down, slit the belly, let the i

Cherry grimaced. “Ta

“A crude job, intestines slashed out, cut top and bottom. A lung had been left behind. But mostly everything got yanked out.”

Cherry was having trouble grasping the news. “Ta

Krogan pulled off his paper lab gown and jammed it into a receptacle. “Sewed is an imprecise term. Someone punched holes in the opened flaps of flesh, lashed the pieces closed with black boot laces.”

“Why sew him back up?” Cherry asked.

“To keep the stuffing from falling out, of course.”

“Stuffing?” Cherry said.

Krogan paused. “Oh … No one told you? Several of my colleagues came back to take a look.”

“Told us what? Look at what?”

“The emptied abdominal area was packed with a brown substance before being stitched closed.”

“What kind of substance?”

Krogan snapped off his gloves and dropped them in the receptacle. “We’re doing tests, but everything points to horse manure.”

“Ta

Krogan regarded Cherry with a look combining curiosity and amusement.

“So far you’ve sent us a man with a soldering iron in his lower bowel, a drowned woman dressed like a hooker, a man crushed by a snack van, and a corpse packed with horsepoop. What do you have going on over there in Woslee County, Detective Cherry? Sure seems like a corker.”

30

“Ta

“Hard to ignore,” I acknowledged. “It also suggests Ta

Cherry thought in silence for eight miles, until we pulled on to the Mountain Parkway. “I got it!” she yelled, smacking the steering wheel with her palm. “Remember the three by five card I found, Bless you Brother for your constant inspiration?”

“The card in his kitchen,” I nodded, remembering the seemingly inconsequential find.

“I expect half of what Zeke Ta

I mulled over Cherry’s words. “Something’s bothering me,” I said. “Ta

She nodded. “He used the geocache site to crow to the world. Or whoever was looking.”

“But the killer jammed a tool inside John Doe, presumably waiting to enjoy the show from hell. He knelt a foot from Burton’s head and slowly cranked down the snack truck. He stood a dozen feet from Tandee Powers as he bobbed her under water with the rope and pulley …”

It took a couple seconds, but Cherry got it. “There was no personal involvement with Ta

“Something went wrong with the killer’s plans,” I said. “The guy on the bush-hog showing up, maybe. Ta

“Twenty minutes,” Cherry said, now thinking parallel to me. “I’ll have McCoy meet us there. This is his kind of thing.”

Lee McCoy was parked near Ta

“Horse manure?” McCoy said. “Doesn’t that say …”

I nodded. “Brother Ta

“We thought Brother Ta

McCoy had a fast mind. “You’re thinking someone was watching?” he asked.