In a minute I was inside the SUV and pulling on a fresh shirt and my hiking boots. Cherry turned and headed out of the hollow, passing my brother’s home.
“No stopping for Charpentier?” I asked.
She shifted to low and angled up the hill. “I’ll be frank, Ryder. The guy’s got more smarts in his pinky than I do in my entire brain. He knows things about the insides of people I’ll never see …” She clammed up and concentrated on driving.
“There’s a but in there,” I prompted.
“But the more I think about it, the more the guy weirds me out. It’s like he knows too much about how people work … does that make sense? It makes me nervous when he looks at me. It’s like he’s studying thoughts I haven’t had yet. If we find anything that needs shrink action, then we’ll come calling on the Doc.”
Nice alarm system, Cherry, I thought, pulling on my seat belt for another whirlwind adventure in driving.
When we arrived, Beale had closed off the road, Caudill and another county cop manning the block. Caudill waved me through, then turned to stop one of the ubiquitous RVs from pulling on to Rock Bridge Road. I wondered what Caudill would tell the tourists.
We’ve got a madman killing folks right and left. Have you considered Yosemite?
We drove to the trailhead and found McCoy pulling a backpack from the gate of his vehicle. Beale was pacing and tapping his holster, trying to appear in command. When he saw me, his dark eyes went a shade darker, but he didn’t complain aloud.
“Christ in a hammock, where you been, Cherry?” Beale bellowed. “I ain’t got all day.”
“Let me go first, Sheriff,” McCoy said, shouldering into his pack. “There are things I need to see.”
“Like what?”
“Spiders.”
Beale, confused, jumped in behind McCoy. Cherry and I fell in after that. We descended a long series of wood and rock steps into the valley, jogging toward the coordinates on the geocache site. Every hundred feet or so McCoy stopped to peer into trailside vegetation.
“Almost there,” McCoy yelled, studying his GPS as we ran alongside Swift Camp Creek and passed Creation Falls. “The coordinates are at Rock Bridge.”
We picked up speed, Beale now stumbling and puffing two hundred feet back, years of biscuits and gravy taking their toll.
“Oh, lord,” I heard McCoy say.
Rock Bridge was at the far end of a miniature plain, a flat and open acre scoured by seasonal floodwaters. The top of the rock arch was fifteen feet above the slow, green water, the bottom about ten feet from the surface.
Zeke Tanner’s naked body was hanging in the space between the arch and the water, ankles lashed together with rope, arms dangling down, as if frozen in the process of diving. He was twisting in the breeze and as the body swirled toward us I saw a rough zigzagging of tattoos from his pubis to his sternum. They looked like black lightning bolts.
The sight froze me in my tracks. Cherry was half the distance closer, her hand cupping her mouth in horror.
“What’s with the tattoos?” I said.
Cherry turned, her face ashen. “They’re not tattoos, Ryder. They’re stitches.”
It was late morning when Harry Nautilus and Conner Sandhill met Sheriff Babe Ellis at a Dairy Queen in west-central Alabama, climbing into Ellis’s county-cop cruiser, unmarked. All three men gazed longingly at the window posters of caloric treats offered by the DQ. “Eve didn’t tempt Adam with an apple,” Nautilus said. “It had to have been a banana split.”
Ellis, six foot six, almost three hundred pounds, patted his belly, a soft roll over his belt. “Tell me about temptation.”
“Tell me again why we’re here,” Conner Sandhill said, tugging at his thick black mustache. Like Nautilus and Ellis he was well over six feet tall. “Some sudden impulse of Ryder’s, right?”
Nautilus nodded. “Carson’s pretty sure he doped out Bobby Lee Crayline’s escape method, wants us to put the screws to a guy named Farley Oakes.”
“How’d Carson figure it out?” Ellis asked, still gazing wistfully at the poster of the banana split.
“He says he got the idea from Mexicans and corn. Don’t ask.”
“Where the hell is Ryder?” Sandhill snorted. “I haven’t seen him in weeks.”
“Vacationing in Kentucky,” Nautilus said.
“But he’s still thinking about a six-month-old case not even in his jurisdiction?” Ellis chuckled.
Nautilus shook his head. “You know Carson. Can’t let anything go.”
“Ryder’s probably spent thirty years investigating why the Tooth Fairy doesn’t visit any more,” Sandhill said. He turned to Ellis. “You said you had a rap sheet on Oakes?”
Babe Ellis passed Nautilus and Sandhill copies. The men studied the crimes. There wasn’t much, but it was telling. Ellis put the blue Crown Vic in gear.
Farley Oakes lived in a small frame house a couple hundred feet back from the road. It needed paint. There was a work truck on blocks in the front yard. The barn was a hundred feet beyond, a small corral to the side. A rusting green tractor nosed from the barn like sniffing out visitors. Nautilus counted two No Trespassing signs, three Private Property – Keep Out signs. Mr Oakes seemed a tad fearful of outsiders.
“How you want to work it?” Ellis asked.
“I’ll lead,” Sandhill said. “But I need you to be an irritant, Harry.”
Nautilus grinned. “It’s the sand in the oyster that gives us pearls.”
“Lawd,” Ellis sighed. “You guys stay up nights working on the routine?”
They pulled to a stop at the end of the rutted drive. Ellis pointed to a bright red Dodge Ram pickup parked in the side yard. It glittered with chrome.
“There’s about forty thousand bucks’ worth of truck. Looks a little out of place, don’t you think?”
“Let’s hit it and git it,” Nautilus said, opening his door.
Ellis looked at the property, then at the house. “You guys handle the inside stuff. I’m gonna go look for a place to take a leak, right?” He grinned and disappeared around the side of the house, heading for the barn and moving mouse-quiet for a man so large.
Nautilus and Sandhill were a dozen paces from the door when it banged open, Oakes framed in the doorway, wearing an angry look and holding a shotgun. He glowered at Nautilus.
“Git off my property, whoever you are.”
Nautilus held up his badge. “I’m Detective Harry Nautilus, Mr Oakes. My partner, Detective Carson Ryder, was at the prison-van situation – remember him? This is Detective Sandhill.”
“Oh my goodness,” the man said as he digested the information. “I’m sorry. I thought you was insurance salesmen.”
The weapon was quickly tucked behind the door.
“We’re flummoxed by the killings, Mr Oakes. We’d like to ask a few more questions. Just to see if anything’s jogged in your memory over the past few months.”
Oakes shrugged, tapped his forehead. “I cain’t think of anything. I been trying.”
“May we come in for a couple minutes, run some questions by? It won’t take long.”
“Hang on a sec. I got to tidy up a few things.”
He