Buried Alive (13 page)

“Hook her up, Agent Rourke.”

“Ryder, too?”

“I don’t think I need to hear him.”

Cherry and I stepped into the church lot two minutes later. Banks of flowers flanked the coffin. Cherry nodded to people, shaking hands or gathering someone in an embrace. She introduced me without reason, a good friend or perhaps a beau. I nodded that I was going outside to take a look around, mouthed
back in five.

I leaned against a sycamore and studied rugged backcountry types smoking and looking uncomfortable in collared shirts and clip-on ties. Bar buddies of Burton, I figured, none appearing particularly malevolent. I watched an ancient woman in a blue dress make unsteady progress toward the men, marking her passage with quivering thumps of cane and talking to herself as she went. She broke into the men’s conversation, speaking to each in turn. They nodded and spoke back respectfully, holding their cigarettes behind their backs, like kids caught smoking on a schoolground.

I avoided looking the two hundred feet to the blue van at the far edge of the lot, figuring Krenkler had field glasses to her tight little eyes.

“Lose your love-muffin already, Carson?”

My head snapped to the smiling face of my brother. His dark suit was as fitted to his frame as a Vogue model,
his smile radiating joyful warmth. Blue had been the perfect choice of shirt, highlighting his robin’s-egg eyes. His cologne recalled smoked sherry served with fresh-picked limes.

“Jeremy? What are you—”

“You were right. If I pretend to be on the side of the angels for an hour or so, I can return home with Miss Cherry convinced of my stellar citizenship. You didn’t tell me she was such a sugary little cupcake, Carson. What’s keeping you from opening her legs and closing the deal?”

“The FBI’s here, Jeremy,” I hissed through closed lips. “They’re watching.”

He froze. “What? Where?”

“At the far end of the lot. Don’t look, just shake my hand like we barely know one another.”

We shook hands as Jeremy backpedaled to a semi-stranger’s distance. “Perhaps I should leave,” he said through a frozen smile.

“They’ll ask who you are and why you left without visiting dear ol’ Sonny.”

We walked to the church. I didn’t see Cherry, but figured she’d slipped out one of the side doors or the back, checking the gatherings there. I took my turn at viewing. A haphazard photo display of the deceased sat on a table beside the coffin, thirty or forty shots. Sonny Burton had a square, ruddy face and wide forehead, his hair waxed thick and combed back in curly waves. Burton was aware of the camera in most shots, meeting
the lens with a grin, perfect teeth flashing as his broad, square hands pulled people to his side. Sonny Burton was a happy man, to judge by the beaming face, like life was an Italian bakery and he got born with a sweet tooth in every socket.

Jeremy appeared at my side. We were alone at the front of the church. “My, my,” he said, glancing at the photographs. “There’s an unhappy fellow.”

“Unhappy?” I si de-mouthed. “Are we looking at the same guy?”

“Learn to isolate, Carson. Cover the white teeth. Cut away the happy eye crinkles and brow furrows. Strip off the upturned lips.”

My brother positioned his hands over an eight by ten shot, blotting out as much face as possible. Only the eyes were left, Burton staring between my brother’s fingers like a man peering from a bunker.

“Jesus,” I gasped. “I see hate.”

My brother removed his hands, leaving the full-face shot of a happy man. I stared like seeing a palimpsest, a Bosch nightmare hidden beneath a Thomas Cole landscape. “The eyes are five per cent of the total, Carson. Burton had the other ninety-five trained to mimic happiness. Practiced from early on in life, it can be completely convincing.”

My brother tapped a photo taken at a birthday party. Burton’s arm circling the shoulders of a gangly, small-framed teen boy with liquid, feminine eyes. A cone-shaped party hat perched atop his head. He was grinning through braces.

Burton’s palms were touching the boy’s body, fingers pressing wrinkles into the fabric of his white shirt. I mentally walled off sections of face, isolating Burton in the slitted bunker. It was like another sense had been turned on. I smelled lust rising from the photograph.

“Burton looks aroused,” I whispered.

“What a fast learner you are,” my brother said.

We moved up to view the deceased himself. There was nothing to learn there but the skill of the cosmetologist. Burton looked as airbrushed as a centerfold, his heavy hands crossed over the chest where last week a truck had rested. I figured a pillow or air bladder beneath the black suit had been the mortician’s restoration of Burton’s ribcage to pre-truck standards.

We hustled toward the front door just as Cherry was entering, nearly bumping heads.

“Dr Charpentier?” she said, surprised at seeing my brother.

“I began feeling better,” Jeremy said. “I thought I’d accept your invitation.”

“Thank you for coming,” Cherry said.

Jeremy nodded and glided outside, hands in his pockets and walking slowly, a man innocent of everything in the world, even care. Cherry went out to check cars for non-local license tags. I sat in a middle pew and watched a fast-thinning crowd drift in and out for several minutes. The visitation was nearly over.

A slight man in his early forties caught my eye. He stood a dozen feet from Burton’s casket, holding a box
of flowers, roses perhaps, the box long and slender. His choice of flowers seemed out of place at a funeral, but he didn’t look overly sophisticated. His thin and sallow face looked nervous, and I put him among the people unsettled by ceremonies of the dead. In that, we shared the same feeling.

My scan was broken as the elderly woman from outside passed by, still mumbling to herself, unsteady with the cane. When she glanced at the man something seemed to click behind her bifocals and she turned for further study. He seemed to feel the woman’s stare and looked away, clutching his flower box tighter. The woman pursed her lips in thought, then turned and muttered from the church, leaving only stragglers in the room.

I heard the man’s footsteps cross the room to the casket. I looked up to see him studying Burton. I could only see a portion of the man’s face and noted a nervous tic twitching his cheek. Had it just started?

The man stood still as stone. When he moved it was to untie the bow on the box of flowers. The bow fell to the floor. Followed by the lid.

Not flowers in the box, but a baseball bat. The man lifted the bat like a sledgehammer and brought it down on the corpse’s face. A hideous
chunking
sound. Face powder exploded into the air like pink smoke. The bat came down again, this time the head blew apart, pink clots of gelatinous goo flying through the air. I heard screaming and running at my back.

The bat was lifting for a third shot when I got there, diving at the guy. He jumped aside, swinging the bat after me, catching me behind the ear. I went sprawling to the floor. My dizzy attempts to push to my feet resulted in a slow-motion breaststroke. The man was six feet away, still hammering. More cold goo splattered my face. A table leg below the casket broke under the onslaught and the coffin tumbled, spilling Burton to the floor beside me. His face was a puddle, a single eye floating in the middle. An inflated bladder had been provided to give volume to the deceased’s chest, but it was damaged in the attack.

I watched in horror as Sonny Burton, now a Cyclops, stared at me, his chest deflating with a rubbery, blubbering hiss.

I was too unsteady to stand. The knot behind my ear was a beaut. Cherry lashed together a bag of ice from the church’s fridge and held it to my head. Jeremy stood to the side, arms crossed, concern on his face. Krenkler crouched in front of me, face filling my vision.

“Who was it?” she snapped. “What did you see?”

“I, uh—” trying to get words to fit in my mouth.

“Come on, Ryder, spit it out.”

“He had, uhm, slight build, brown hair and eyes, I think. Cheap gray sport coat over … gray flannel slacks. Brown shoes like Hush Puppies.” I felt a wave of nausea and rode it out.

“I was out back grabbing a smoke,” a man said to Cherry. “The guy went in the woods. Not even running, just walking fast.”

Krenkler turned to her adjutants. “Get on it!”

I tried to stand but Cherry’s hands kept my shoulders down. “How about you wait right here and we’ll go take a look.”

Krenkler stood to follow Cherry, stopped. She narrowed her eyes at my brother.

“What’s your name?”

“Dr Auguste Charpentier, at your service.”

“You don’t leave until we’ve had a chance to talk, you hear me?”

“
Certainement.
”

Cherry was back in minutes, Krenkler and the boys at her heels. I raised an eyebrow in question.

“It’s just a strip of trees behind the church, a four-acre wood lot for the family a block east. A block west is a failed restaurant. I figure our batter parked there, walked over, had his inning, zipped back to his vehicle. No one saw a thing. How’s your head?”

“He could have slammed a home run into my skull. But he didn’t. He bunted.”

“He tried to murder you,” Krenkler scoffed. “You got lucky.”

I looked through a cloudy recollection. “I’m sure he choked up on the bat and thunked me pretty lightly, all things considered.”

Krenkler shook her head like I was an idiot. I heard an ambulance in the distance. “Your ride’s on its way, Ryder,” Krenkler said. “Consider yourself lucky it’s not a hearse.”

I felt a wave of nausea and bent forward. Krenkler turned
the eyes to my brother, scoping him from hair-part to Florsheims. She didn’t look happy with the results.

“Let’s you and me go over here and talk, Doc. I’m interested in hearing your story.”

I arrived at the nearby hospital in minutes. The small institution was backed up, and after a cursory inspection to make sure I wasn’t about to die on the floor, I was left sprawling in the waiting room, watching the clock and sucking coffee.

Jeremy arrived twenty minutes later, dropped off by a Woslee cop.

“What happened with Krenkler?” I whispered. “What’d you tell her?”

“I’m a retired psychologist who specialized in dysfunctional psychology. Thus it made sense for you and Miz Cherry to have invited me along.”

I relaxed a half-degree. My fear had been Krenkler’s running some form of check on Jeremy while he sat before her.

“No in-depth questions?”

“I gave her all my fictional accomplishments, then begged to be put on the case as a consultant. Said I’d be by her side night and day, all for free.”

“What!”

He grinned. “It got the intended results: She couldn’t push me out the door fast enough. The Krenklers of the world don’t want consultants, Carson. It means sharing the spotlight.”

My noggin finally got X-rayed and pronounced solid. Cherry had arranged for an off-duty ambulance driver to return us to the hollow, where we arrived at half-past eight in the evening. On the way back, Jeremy had ceaselessly grilled me on every aspect of Sonny Burton’s abuse and the perpetrator, prying from my aching head pictures I hadn’t recalled earlier: the bat-wielder’s curious gait toward the corpse, halting, like a man walking a plank. I recalled the tic in his cheek and the ferocity of his attack on Burton’s face, as if the batter’s very life depended on destroying the visage.

Jeremy coaxed the memories from me with a quiet hypnotist’s voice, pausing as he absorbed the information, analysing. We stepped from the vehicle, thanked our driver, watched the taillights flee from the dark and quiet hollow. I turned to walk the last section to my cabin, to soak in the peace before falling into bed. I paused before my brother closed the door to his cabin, turned to him in the twilight.

“The man with the bat, Jeremy,” I said. “He’s the killer we’re after, right?”

“No, Carson,” my brother answered. “He’s simply an opportunist.”

Sometime in the wee hours, my battered head woke me up. Or maybe it was the picture in my mind, a snippet: the elderly woman who passed by the attacker. She didn’t do a double-take, it was more like a take and a quarter, but I’d forgotten to mention it to anyone. I wrote it down
so it wouldn’t slip my mind, and in the morning called Cherry about it.

“Tell me again what the woman looked like,” Cherry said.

I gave my description. “You know anyone like that?”

“Miss Ida Minton,” Cherry said. “She’s an institution, the librarian at the high school for something like eight hundred years. She retired when I was a sophomore.”

“What you gonna do?”

“Got an hour to spare?”

Miss Ida Minton lived in a small retirement home near Campton. Her room was pin-neat and smelled of lilacs and baby powder. She wore a pink polyester pantsuit and a thick white sweater, blue slippers on her feet.

“Miss Ida goes in and out,”
Cherry had warned, referring to the elderly lady’s memory.
“Sometimes she remembers the tiniest details, the next minute she forgets where she is.”

I wavered on a loose-legged chair, fearful of its solidity, as Cherry asked the retired librarian about her seeming recognition of our mad batter.

“Who?” Miss Minton said.

I leaned closer. “I noted you looked twice at a gentleman at the church, Miss Ida,” I said, recounting the description as best I could.

“I don’t recall. What day was that?”

“Yesterday, Miss Ida,” Cherry said, taking the woman’s fragile hand. “At Sonny Burton’s visitation.”

The woman paused, frowned. “I remember Sonny Burton. He didn’t like to read. A lost cause.” She looked at Cherry. “Wasn’t there some sort of commotion later? At the visitation?”

“Yes, ma’am. And Mr Ryder is asking about that. And another gentleman you might have recognized.” She repeated my description.

Nothing. Then a light seemed to dawn behind the woman’s glasses. “Didn’t I see a student named Willie Taithering from maybe twenty-two or -three years back?”