Free Buried Alive by J. A. Kerley Page A

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 bird-houses 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 and charred aluminum.
    “It burned down in the night,” McCoy said, crouching at the edge of the burn field and studying the remains of a box spring and mattress. “No one could see flames back here in the hollow, and the smoke wouldn’t show on a clouded night. It was probably destroyed before the rain hit.”
    Cherry walked over and stood above McCoy, looking into the wreckage. Her shoulders were slumped.
    “That’s one thing about old trailers,” she sighed. “They burn two ways: hot and to the ground.”

11
     
    Cherry returned me to my car and waved off my offer of conversation to pass the time while she did paperwork. I went back to the cabin to empty Mr Mix-up, passing Charpentier’s house. A lone figure was visible behind the cabin, hoeing in the garden. I waved, but the psychologist was too absorbed in his task to notice.
    I’d been back at Road’s End all of ten minutes when McCoy appeared. I held my fingertips an inch distant from my ear holes. “If you tell me there’s another cache on the site, Lee, I’m not gonna listen.”
    “No, thank God. But I got to thinking about the, uh, unusual aspects of the crimes. Do you think Dr Charpentier could help? He’s a psychologist.”
    I thought a moment and shrugged. “He may be a clinician who specializes in smoking cessation or phobias, orautistic children. There are all sorts of specialties, Lee, few helpful when dealing with monsters.”
    “Are we missing a chance by not asking, Carson?”
    The ranger had a point. I hopped in McCoy’s SUV and drove the thirty seconds to Charpentier’s cabin. The doc was still in his garden, bent over with his back to us, weeding a potato mound. His waist was slender, suspenders running from loose khakis to shoulders broader than I remembered from our near-meeting in the forest.
    “He looks in good shape,” I noted.
    “When he arrived in late winter, Dr Charpentier removed an acre of trees. Cut them, split them into firewood. He rented equipment to pull the stumps. The soil is clay, and he had truckloads of topsoil brought in, all for his garden. He seems a natural at backyard agriculture, a man given to nurturing. When he’s not in his garden or working on his land, he’s in the forest, studying.”
    “The cabin looks older than a few months.”
    “It was built a decade ago by the Brazelles, a