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.
We found him staring into a pool of muddy water, sixty feet long or so, twenty wide. At the downstream end was a rough concrete dam, three feet high, crumbling where it met the shore. In the middle was a horizontal metal wheel, two feet in diameter. The wheel operated the gate, a solid door that controlled water flow.
“Weird,” I said, seeing a small man-made pond in the middle of a thickly forested nowhere, stark rock cliffs rising at our shoulders.
“Not if you know the history,” McCoy said. “Fifty years ago one of the logging companies kept a crew shack by the base of the cliff. This was their swimming hole. I’ve taken a dip here a time or two.” He pointed to the center of the pool. “That’s where the GPS coordinates actually lead, oddly enough.”
“You mean the waypoint is in the pond?” I said.
“Might not mean much. GPS units aren’t accurate to more than a couple dozen feet, the older ones are worse.”
“But the other coordinates were almost dead-on, right? The ones leading to the first bodies?”
He nodded. “Under fifteen feet, all of them. For GPS, that’s an arrow dead-center in a target.”
I looked at the wheel on the dam gate. Wheel and screw rusted. Probably unused in decades. “Let’s see if we can open the gate,” I said to Beale. “Let some water out.”
“Hunh?” Beale said.
“Give it a shot,” Cherry said, suddenly interested.
Beale looked unhappy, but splashed into the eight or so inches of water below the dam and stood beside me, taking one side of the wheel as I grabbed the other. Beale needed a better deodorant. We slammed ourselves into the task, but the wheel was frozen solid with rust.
McCoy appeared, dragging eight feet of rusty railroad track, the small gauge used in logging operations.
“There was a spur track here,” he said, grunting the metal over the ground. “Old rails are still scattered around.”
I saw his intent and helped wedge the rail in the wheel. Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.” He was talking leverage, and so was McCoy. The ranger stripped off his shirt to keep the rust from smearing his uniform. Though in his early fifties he looked as hard and limber as a top-flight tennis pro.
“Again,” he said, planting his feet against the wet stones. “On three. One, two …”
This time we threw ourselves into the task with several feet of leverage on our side. The wheel made a grating squeal, then began turning, puffs of rust falling away in the breeze. Water trickled from beneath the rising gate, then poured through. We stepped away.
In fifteen minutes most of the bed was visible. I rock-hopped toward the center and looked down at an assemblage hanging from the inner side of the dam.
“What is it?” Cherry said from the shore.
“The base of the dam is riddled with decay. Pieces of the metal lathe, a mesh of rebar, are exposed. Someone wired a pulley to the rebar three feet down.”
Cherry walked to the dam, jumped atop its one-foot width, edged out to where I was standing. She crouched and studied the bright metal pulley, obviously brand new, its frame wired to a rusted loop of rebar. She thought for a five-count, stared at me.
Whispered, “Oh my God.”
The others stood on the shore and stared between us, not yet seeing the horror.
Two hours passed. Beale and Caudill returned to the department. Cherry seemed reluctant to leave the scene. The three of us stood between the cruiser and McCoy’s SUV.
“The rope and the pulley, Detective,” McCoy said, looking at me. “You’re surmising that …” His words were replaced by grim pictures in his head. “You can’t be serious. It’s … insane.”
“It fits the evidence,” I said. “The killer looped a rope through the pulley, tied on a carabiner and hooked it to the woman’s collar. She was in the water, four feet deep at the end of the pool. When the rope was yanked, the victim was pulled under water. Repeatedly, I figure. Why else rig a system where you can pull someone under, then loosen the rope to let them get to the surface again?”
“That’s … torture.”
“So is having a soldering iron jammed up your fundament. And who knows what happened before the truck was driven on to the first victim.”
Cherry nodded down the road. “Why was she taken from the pool and put downstream? Was it to confuse us?”
I saw McCoy’s mind working. “The edges of the dam are eaten away, erosion. There were pocket storms last night, heavy and fast. This creek drains about eight square miles of mountainside watershed.”
“The creek flash-flooded,” I said.
“The body started out in the pool, then rising water pushed it past the dam. The victim was left at the coordinates, but washed downstream a couple hundred feet. The coordinates were exact when the killer departed, some time before the storm hit.”
“Marking kills with creepy GPS coordinates,” Cherry said, shaking her head. “Dressing a body in sex clothes. Boiling someone’s insides with a soldering iron. This is beyond me, Ryder. You write books about this stuff. What’s your take?”
“It’s about control. The perp controls the victims through torture and making them conform to an image, as with the woman’s garb. He controls us, too, through the geocache game. We don’t discover bodies, he sends us to them.”
“Killing as a game?” McCoy said, looking ill. “Torture as play? Control through dead humans? What sort of world do you live in?”
“Same one you do, Lee,” I said. “I just see it through the basement window.”
Cherry sighed. “Let’s go take a look at the victim’s digs. See if she was as churchy as Beale thinks.”
We made one stop along the way, a tiny and weather-beaten log house a mile down the road, the only other dwelling in the area. The place looked like a relic from the 1800s, save for the silver propane tank nestled against its side and well over a dozen handmade birdhouses dangling from the row of maples in the side yard. Some were raw wood, oak and cedar. Others were painted in reds and blues and greens. It was like an avian subdivision.
“You know who lives here?” I asked as Cherry rolled into the drive.
“An elderly woman, gotta be mid-eighties. I stopped by the only time I was ever out here. Last year when I took the position, I drove every road in the county. She was on her porch. A very old-school mountain woman.”
Cherry knocked several times, shrugged. No one home. We headed on our way to Tandee Powers’s house.
The victim lived six miles distant, in what Cherry described as an “ancient trailer built a couple decades before Noah’s Ark”. It was back in a tight ravine, down one more gravel road with weeds growing between the tire lines.
We swept around a bend. Cherry said, “Oh shit.”
I looked up and saw the smoldering remains of a trailer. Muttering to herself, Cherry pulled in. We exited and kicked through pieces of wood