Free Buried Alive by J. A. Kerley

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 inthe 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 deepat 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