Buried Alive (23 page)

Cherry said she’d drop me off, my truck still at her home until photos and reconstructions were made, but Krenkler wasn’t through grilling her on local developments.
Now would come the reconstruction: why Crayline had selected Woslee County as his killing field. Cherry didn’t look happy at the prospect of continuing the tête-à-tête with Krenkler, but it was part of the job. I was ferried back by Agent Rourke. He seemed the most human of the robots on Krenkler’s team.

“How is it, working with Agent Krenkler?” I asked him.

“I retire in two months,” he said, not turning his eyes from the road. “Ask me then.”

“Gotcha,” I said.

He dropped me at my front door. I had hoped whatever forces propel the universe had put my night’s ordeal in the book and, checking the account to date, decided I might deserve the return of my dog.

The budgeting was not in my favor.

I showered and changed and, still charged with adrenalin residue, lost my need to sleep. I downed two power bars and made coffee strong as the bolts I’d clung to on the cliff face. I added a tot of Maker’s Mark, going out to the porch to sit and think.

Crayline had been at the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior, the first time during my brother’s tenure. That in itself didn’t mean a whole lot. Though the Institute housed seventy or eighty full-time patients, another hundred or so criminals might rotate through on an annual basis, there for a few days or weeks of evaluation or study. Plus there were levels of security, different wings - “wards” in the semi-hospital parlance
used at the Institute. Since Crayline had been there as a transient, a person for temporary study, he might not have had access to the general population which included my brother.

But I had to know, just for my own knowing. I called Dr Wainwright at the Institute, gave her a brief overview of the situation with Bobby Lee Crayline, and asked for records of his stay. Wainwright was apologetic.

“Those records are just for staff, Detective. And not even the general, non-medical staff. Only the doctors are allowed to view the records.”

“It could be important,” I said.

“I’m very sorry. There are certain notes and observations made that could be subject to privacy issues.”

“It wasn’t that long ago, Doctor, you begged me to come to the Institute to help stop Bobby Lee Crayline’s hypnosis. I came running. Afterwards, you said you owed me big-time and if there was anything you could ever do to—”

“I remember,” Wainwright said.

“In my book that was a promise. I’m here to collect.”

A long pause. She said, “Let me close the door to my office.”

I started taking notes as Wainwright looked through Crayline’s records, but after a couple minutes I flung the notes to the floor of the porch, too angry to write. My voice was even as I thanked Wainwright and told her she’d closed the account.

I hobbled toward my brother’s cabin, fists clenched as tight as my jaw.

I stood on Jeremy’s porch and willed myself calm. If he saw my anger he’d shut me out or disappear into the forest. I had to appear serene. The door was unlocked and I entered.

“Jeremy,” I called, stepping over the threshold. “Where are you?”

“Upstairs, in my office,” he yelled, joy in his voice. “Come watch me make money, Brother. The blustering drunkard is starting the day on a binge.”

I took the steps two at a time, strode the hall to his open office door. He was at his desk, wearing a dark pinstriped suit, pink shirt, tightly knotted tie. It seemed odd until I realized he was in his business mindset. He had his gentleman gardener garb, his button-down business dress, his retired academic outfit, his rugged outdoorsman wear … he affected the uniform necessary to fully complete each personality.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

He spun in his chair. The screens on his desk danced with charts and graphs and crawls of stock symbols. “The Chinese Ministry of Economics issued a report calling for increased spending on infrastructure. The drunkard is puking gold … I’ve got a heavy position in an Asian copper-mining company that jumped eight points in an hour on the Hang Seng Index. I’m about to—”

“NO! What the hell is going on here?” I said, flailing my arms, meaning
here,
the locale, the region.

He regarded me warily before turning back to the monitor. “Whatever kind of question is that, Carson? It’s vague. What are you talking about?”

I crossed the room in a half-heartbeat, grabbed the back of his chair and spun him to face me. My voice was a constricted hiss. “I’m talking about Bobby Lee Crayline. He just tried to kill me. He’s dead, thankfully.”

The surprise in my brother’s eyes turned to evasion, which in Jeremy was less a tactic than an emotion. He switched into acting mode, moving up-angled eyes back and forth, as if searching a catalogue of names in his head.

“I’m sorry, Carson. I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

“You know exactly who Bobby Lee Crayline is,” I said, sick of his games. “You got into the heads of everyone who came near you at the Institute. You needed to know what made them tick and how they could be of use to you.”

“That’s so cynical. I never had any real contact with the man.”

“STOP LYING!” I roared. From nowhere my hands were around my brother’s throat, lifting him from the chair, spinning him into the wall. “Did you know the staff at the Institute keep round-the-clock track of who the inmates talk to, relate to, spend their time with? It’s an interaction study to see who pairs up, weak with weak or weak with strong … and who appears to be using who.”

“It’s
whom,”
my brother snarled. “And it’s disgusting.”

“From the moment Crayline walked in the door, you started circling him. Nodding the first day, speaking in passing the second, eating together on day three. Five days later you two were bonded like Siamese twins. Crayline started his mornings in the community room, waiting for your dramatic daily entrance. The staff read the body language, Jeremy. You were the Alpha in the relationship. Big nasty dangerous Bobby Lee Crayline treated you like some kind of wizard king.”

“A pack of lies from a den of spies.”

“You know what else was recorded, Jeremy?”

“My bowel movements, from the sounds of it.”

I wrenched him tighter to the wall. “You and Bobby Lee Crayline sitting alone in a corner of the ward, Crayline sobbing on the couch as you patted his back and whispered in his ear. People like Crayline don’t cry like babies, Jeremy. What was all that about?”

Jeremy pushed my chest, hard. It broke my grip,
sending me backwards. “All right,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender. “I remember Bobby. He had things clanging together inside him, issues.”

“Everyone there has issues!” I snapped. “They define issues. What did you and Crayline talk about?”

“I told Bobby things about my past. My experiences touched something inside him. He seemed fascinated at how I’d overcome my history. My abuse.”

“You told him how it ended?” I said. Jeremy had disemboweled our father and strung bits of him in the trees.

My brother smiled and stabbed his hand in the air, as though plunging a knife deep into tissue. “Not an end, Carson. A beginning.” He canted his head, regarding me with curiosity. “Helluva day, wasn’t it, Carson? The day the cops came to tell us we were free?”

…
police at the door telling my mother her husband had been found in a nearby woods, lashed to a tree, disemboweled while still alive, his innards spread across the ground and into the surrounding trees as if a terrible ritual had been performed.

I said, “I’ll remember it forever.”

“Do you remember the knife I used, Carson? You do, don’t you? Father’s old hunting knife, the one he’d gotten from his father? Hidden in the back of his top desk drawer?”

I
felt the knife in my hand as if I’d held it yesterday. Razor sharp. Hickory handle, an eight-inch stainless-steel blade with a curve like a gentle smile.

“Of course,” I said. “I know the knife. Why is this important to—”

“Did I ever tell you why I selected it?”

“I don’t know. I guess it was close and wouldn’t be missed.”

My brother shook his head like I was wasting his time. “Don’t be a simpleton, Carson. It was Daddy’s beloved knife. I needed to do something very important with it. But first, I needed to perform a magic trick: I had to move the knife from his alliance to mine.”

My brother’s voice had dropped into a soft monotone and I again felt him leading me into the chaos of his mental landscape. “You’re talking about befriending wood and metal?” I scoffed.

“I’m talking about a power akin to magic, Carson. Gaining power over the past. I started by opening the drawer to get the knife used to seeing me. Later, I took it on visits to my room where it learned to trust me. After I’d made the knife mine, I put it above the ceiling tiles. Beside the light above my bed.”

“Jeremy, this is completely insa—”

“SHUT UP! Whenever Father entered my room, he walked beneath the knife. I visualized fingers of blood-red light reaching from the knife to Daddy dear. It felt delicious. By the time I used the knife, Carson, I had granted it power unheard of by Excalibur: the power to cut me free of my past.”

I shook my head. Excalibur, befriending knives, transforming time through delusions … Talking to my brother
was like being locked in a revolving door and thrown into a maelstrom. I walked to the window, finding the reality my brother was attempting to dissolve. Reality was the amber sunlight filtering through the trees and dappling the garden. Reality was the red wheelbarrow, the weathered shed, the hoe against the fencepost. Reality was the finches pecking at the feeder, the bees crisscrossing above the hives.

My brother’s voice broke into my thoughts. “You don’t believe me? You came into possession of father’s magical knife, Carson. You discovered it behind a brick in the storm cellar, right? Where it had been waiting for you.”

“It was just a knife, Jeremy,” I sighed, keeping my eyes outside, looking at the real. “It was always just wood and metal.”

hidden behind a loose brick, rolled in a strip of velvet, the blade mottled with dark stains

“Really? What did you do with the knife, Carson?” he asked. “What happened?”

“You know that, Jeremy. I threw it away.”

“Oh? Just tossed it in the trashcan? Or perhaps flung it out into a field?”

“I threw it in the Gulf, Jeremy.”

“So the knife went into the sea,” he purred. “Interesting. Where in the sea, Carson? Where exactly?”

at the mouth of Mobile Bay, or perhaps throat

“It’s not important.”

“Come on, O brother mine,” he said. “Tell big brother about the knife.”

“I was on the Dauphin Island ferry. I threw the knife overboard. No big deal.”

waiting far out on the waters and knowing the sea floor was littered with the carcasses of broken ships and doomed men

“Ah. In the channel where the Battle of Fort Morgan occurred. Seems a heroic place to drop a sad old knife, Brother. Down to the depths where the bones of the valiant dead rattle and cry.”

the knife concealed in my belt, shirt overhanging, my thumb sliding over the edge of the blade as I looked side to side, no one watching

“Yes,” I admitted.

“How did you feel when it sunk beneath the waves?”

the knife moving in a see-saw motion in the current, as if cutting away bonds, a final glint of light slicing from the blade and then covered forever by green and flowing water
…

“Free,” I said, closing my eyes, amazed at how swiftly I’d been manipulated.

Jeremy walked over and stood beside me at the window, surprising me by laying a reassuring arm around my shoulders, pulling me tight. “The people Bobby Lee wants to kill are already dead, Carson. That was the terrible clanging in Bobby Lee’s head: He needed to kill people he thought had wronged him, but they were already in the ground. I have no idea who they were, Brother, God’s truth. But you can’t kill someone twice, right?”

“You’ve not seen Crayline since the Institute?” I asked.

A half-beat pause. “Not a blink’s worth. He was at the Institute two months, Carson. It’s like you said, I got to know him because I wanted to get in his head. Everyone needs a hobby.”

“So you haven’t…”

Jeremy squeezed my shoulder. “Haven’t spoken a word to Bobby in years. I’m happy he’s dead, Carson. I expect he’s happy he’s dead, too.”

The room seemed to close in and I could take no more of the darkness inside my brother’s home. I turned and exited the cabin, shaking loose from Jeremy’s spell, letting the sun burn his words away. It felt like escaping a darkly enchanted castle, where fierce dreams whirled and fought in the charged air. I breathed deeply, wondering how I’d again let his words pull me into his obsessions.

Walking back to my cabin I heard tires crunching gravel at my back, turned to see Krenkler in a dark sedan piloted by one of her drones. I turned as the car pulled beside me, Krenkler looking out through the window and folding a stick of gum into her mouth.

“If you think you got your beauty sleep, Ryder, think again. You look terrible.”

“Always a pleasure to see you, Agent Krenkler. Might I ask the reason for the delight of your company?”

“There’s a 2008 Fleetwood Discovery in the Haunted Hollow Campground, empty and locked. The campground manager ID’d a pic of Crayline as the owner. Now that we know who to show photos of, we’re finding
out Mr Bobby Lee C stayed at every campground in the area, two days here, three there. He kept moving. You nailed his hideout.”

“I stumbled on to it.”

“That’s a big shiny box he was driving. Expensive. He made good money, I figure, as the one-time head honcho of SFL.”

“XFL - Extreme Fight League.”

“Whatever. We’re more interested in his current history. Like why did he spend his money living in an RV and killing people? And did he do it other places?”

“Damn good question.” Fifty-four per cent of all murders went unsolved. A small percentage were serial killings, madmen - and occasionally women - skulking in the dark and taking lives. It was very possible Woslee County wasn’t the first place Crayline visited. Or perhaps it was his shake-down cruise. I wondered if that was why he’d alerted the Bureau, his maniacal ego figuring if he could kill with the Feds around, he could kill anyone, anywhere.