I spent the remainder of the day hiking in the Gorge, watching Mix-up bark after squirrels and turkeys and splash through the creeks. With the wide blue sky a constant companion, we pushed through green thickets of rhododendron, crossed slender ridges no wider than my truck, yawning drop-offs on both sides. We climbed up and down the steep grades until my knees went weak and we had to return.
I hit the mattress at eight thirty, worn and weary and happy as a clam.
In the morning a strange chirping roused me from my dreams, the sound resolving into the cellphone beside the bed. I thumbed the device open and put it to my ear.
“Hello?”
“—ot a police emer—cy,” bayed a female voice, the lousy reception chopping out half of her words.
“We have—lice emerg—” the woman repeated in a twangy mountain accent, giving no sign she was receiving me.
The phone showed a half-bar of reception. I’d quickly learned cell signals were haphazard in the mountains, wavering. I sprinted out the door and up the hill beside the cabin, yelling, “Hang on!”
When I’d put fifty or sixty feet on my altitude, I looked at the phone and saw another strip of bar on the meter.
“This is——Cherry of———of Kentucky. We need you——mergency.”
“I can’t hear you!” I yelled.
“GPS—ordinates are …” I pulled out my pen, focused on nothing but hearing. The coordinates were spoken twice and I managed to get them, I hoped.
“Who is this?” I yelled. “Identify yourself.”
The call warbled, howled, beeped and died. No caller number had registered. My head whirled with questions as I stumbled down the hillside. Who had my caller been? Who knew I was vacationing in Kentucky?
Wait … the caller thought I was in Alabama. That made a lot more sense. Just to be sure, I grabbed my brand-new, bought-for-the-trip GPS and entered the coordinates.
The position was maybe four miles from the cabin. My caller had been local. There was nothing to do but holster my weapon in the back of my pants, leave my dog a fistful of snacks to distract from my leaving, jump in the truck with the GPS set for the coordinates, and hope for an answer to the mystery.
I followed the jittering GPS arrow until turning on to a gravel road. The gravel crunched under my tires for four miles, diminishing to dirt studded with pebbles. I rounded a copse of pines and saw what remained of a house. Small, single story, rickety porch, brick chimney at one end, the mortar etched thin by the elements. The paint had been scoured away, leaving bare wood turned barn-side gray. I saw a leaning utility pole behind the house, its insulators made of glass, the line part of the rural electrical grid installed in the 1930s, finally allowing many Appalachian families entrance to the twentieth century.
A black power line stretched from the pole to the structure. I saw bright copper connections at the insulator, like the line was an illegal tap, jury-rigged. It fired up alarms in my head as I exited my truck. I double-checked my GPS readout: This was where the woman had directed me.
“Hello?” I called.
Nothing answered but distant crows, though for a few seconds I heard a distant siren. I approached the house with eyes down, wary of snakes in the overgrown weeds. The porch was side-slanting, creaking with my footsteps. The mesh had rotted from the listing screen door.
I slipped my gun from my back-of-belt holster and pushed on the door. It grated open over warped floor-boards. The living room was a clutter of rotted furniture and wood lath and plaster fallen from the walls and ceiling. With the windows boarded, there was little light. I smelled an overwhelming stench, like foul meat mingled with feces. My stomach churned and I tied my red bandana handkerchief over my nose and lower face. The flies were a cloud of dots racing in circles.
A rectangle at the back resolved into a door opening as my eyes adjusted to light strained through holes in the roof and corners of the window boards. There was a light switch on the wall, cracked and dirty. I flipped it, but nothing happened.
I stepped into a dark room centered by a bed, a human shape across it like an X. Thick wires bound the wrists and ankles to posts at the corners. The stench could have made a buzzard retch. I fumbled in my pocket for my butane lighter, scratched up a flame. My feet snagged in a wire on the floor and I kicked it aside as I moved to the head of the bed, my flame shivering in the wretched air, dying as my thumb slipped from the trigger.
I knelt beside the bed, flicked the lighter on again. A man’s hideously shattered face stared at me from between wood-spire bedposts. The broken visage was hideously distorted, eyes bulging from the sockets, the mouth holding a frozen scream.
Ghosts were pouring from the nostrils and mouth.
I recoiled in horror, losing my footing, stumbling over the scummy floor. I regained my feet, unsteady in my motions, staring at white plumes exiting a dead man’s face. I was turning for the door when it exploded open.
I spun as a body slammed into me and I was again on the floor, the muzzle of a gun pressing into my forehead.
“GET YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK. NOW!”
I complied. A hand pressed my face into the filthy floor.
“He’s got a gun,” a second male voice said. I felt my weapon slipped from my waistband.
“It’s OK,” I said. “I’m a co—”
The hand behind my head slammed it to the floor, crushing my words against my face. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
Hands yanked me upright. Blood from my floor-slammed nose started running into my mouth and down my throat. I gagged. My captor spun me into a wall, holding my collar so tight I couldn’t breathe or speak. His face filled my vision, eyes ablaze with anger, breath so close it filled my nose. It was the big sheriff from yesterday, the one named Beale.
“You murderous son of a bitch. You sick fucker.” He yanked the bandana from my face, stared, turned to the second cop. “I saw this bastard yesterday with the Compass Point students. The fucker knew we was checking footprints, made some smart-ass remark.” He slammed my head against the wall. I saw stars and heard plaster crumble to the floor. “You planning to get one of the kids alone, smart-ass? One of the women, maybe?”
“Easy, Sheriff Beale,” the second man’s voice said, a younger voice.
The angry man’s eyes glared into mine. I could smell his anger as his hand tightened on my neck. I was being strangled. The room spun away toward darkness. Running footsteps from somewhere …
“BEALE!” a woman’s voice commanded. “Get your hands off him. Now!”
“This is my county, Cherry. You can’t tell me what to do.”
“I can pinch off the money tit, Sheriff. Wanna explain that to the voters?”
A pause. The hand let go. I dropped to my knees and choked breath into my lungs. Even the stinking air in the room tasted good.
“Cuff him, Officer Caudill,” the woman ordered.
I didn’t say a word as the bracelets slapped on, fearing any utterance would cause the hulking sheriff to attack. When I could look up, I saw the sheriff stewing in the corner. Beside him was a cop in his mid-twenties, rangy, with jug ears poking from short yellow hair. The older cop looked homicidal, the young one just looked nervous.
A strong flashlight from across the room filled my eyes, held by the woman who’d kept me from strangulation.
“Lord,” the voice behind the blinding light said. “What is that stink?”
The beam shifted to the ruination of the victim’s face. Gray ghosts continued to stream from his lips and nostrils.
“What the fuck’s coming out of him?” the sheriff named Beale whispered.
I watched the shape behind the light step toward the body, tentative, like a superstitious person forced to walk beneath a ladder. She bravely edged her fingertips into the shapes poring from the victim’s nostrils and mouth.
“It’s smoke,” she whispered, amazed. “No, wait. … It’s wet. I think it’s steam.”
The woman passed the light to the young cop. “Go down the body inch by inch, Caudill.”
She sidestepped beside the corpse as the light revealed a body toned and powerful, with melon-round shoulders and hawser-thick trapezoids. The chest was deep, the waist slender. The legs were spread wide.
She tripped as I had done.
“Point the light to the floor. What’s down there?”
The light found a heavy and outdated electrical conduit snaking from a wall socket toward the body. The light tracked the conduit upward to the bed where it disappeared beneath the victim’s thigh.
“Get over here and put some illumination between the glutes,” the woman said.
“Excuse me?”
“Light the guy’s asshole.”
The cop angled the light into the crevice between the victim’s buttocks. The cord entered a wooden handle protruding from the anus. I heard hissing, like water boiling, and saw red-brown rivulets running from the body’s rectum to the mattress as steam misted upward. It was the second most bizarre sight I’d ever seen. The first was what was happening a couple feet upward.
“What’s up his ass?” Beale said.
“An industrial soldering iron,” Caudill said. “My granddaddy had one. They’re about sixteen inches long and glow red-hot when they’re plugged in.”
The woman said, “Then unplug the damn thing. Get the suspect outside and stick him in my cruiser for the time being. I’ll call Frankfort for a forensic unit.”
Beale manhandled me outside and jammed me into the back of an unmarked cruiser as the woman tapped at her cellphone. I leaned forward and looked through the Plexiglas divider into the front of the cruiser, relaxing a bit at seeing familiar turf. There was the usual radio equipment, miniature computer terminal and input pad, about the same as Harry and I had back in Mobile.
A stack of books on the passenger seat caught my eye and I sat forward to read the titles on the spines. All were on law enforcement, with most of the books written by people familiar to me. The third volume down was a just-published compendium featuring case histories of sociopaths penned by the cops who tracked them down. Written for law-enforcement agencies, the book had sold quite well for a special-interest publication.
I looked up. The woman was at the corner of the porch and thumbing her cellphone. She studied the screen and rolled her eyes. I took it there was no signal to be found.
In the light the woman was in her early thirties, an inch or two above medium height, slender. She wore a blocky black pantsuit that looked straight from the rack at Wal-Mart, black cross-trainers, with a gold badge slung around her neck on what appeared to be a length of clothesline. Her hair was an unruly shag à la early Rod Stewart, red, probably the real thing given her creamy complexion and dusting of freckles.
She looked my way. Stared, like making a decision. She walked over, her eyes a mixture of curiosity and contempt, her voice pure country.
“We caught you standing over the body, fella. Anything you wanna talk about?”
She was hoping for an on-scene confession. Instead, I nodded toward the book in the passenger seat. “Interesting-looking book up there, Detective. Serial Killers by Their Captors. Is it yours?”
She glanced at the stack of books, then back to me, figuring I was working some kind of angle. Or playing with her. I noted her sea-green eyes looked in slightly different directions, a mild strabismus. Though the declination was subtle, it was unsettling, like one eye was looking at me, the other at something on my shoulder.
“The book’s mine,” she said. “Why? You figuring to add to it?”
“Did you read the case history of Marsden Hexcamp and his followers? The cult from coastal Alabama?”
She stared at me for a five-count. “I read that chapter.”
“I wrote it,” I said, leaning forward to jiggle my cuffs. “Can a brother get a little love here?”