Читать книгу Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 7-9: Buried Alive, Her Last Scream, The Killing Game - J. Kerley A. - Страница 37

“Tanner was full of shit,” Cherry said when we were pulling away from of Frankfort’s city limits and roaring on to Highway 64, heading east to Woslee. “Nothing real academic in that symbol.”

“Hard to ignore,” I acknowledged. “It also suggests Tanner was purposefully poisoned. But how did the stew get on his stove?”

Cherry thought in silence for eight miles, until we pulled on to the Mountain Parkway. “I got it!” she yelled, smacking the steering wheel with her palm. “Remember the three by five card I found, Bless you Brother for your constant inspiration?”

“The card in his kitchen,” I nodded, remembering the seemingly inconsequential find.

“I expect half of what Zeke Tanner ate came from his flock. Folks lacking money to drop in the collection plate make it up with food or services. All the killer needed to do was cook up a tasty-looking bowl of death, leave it on Tanner’s front steps when he was out, the note as the clincher. It would have happened all the time, totally normal, except this time Tanner sat down to his last meal.”

I mulled over Cherry’s words. “Something’s bothering me,” I said. “Tanner was poisoned by our killer, right?”

She nodded. “He used the geocache site to crow to the world. Or whoever was looking.”

“But the killer jammed a tool inside John Doe, presumably waiting to enjoy the show from hell. He knelt a foot from Burton’s head and slowly cranked down the snack truck. He stood a dozen feet from Tandee Powers as he bobbed her under water with the rope and pulley …”

It took a couple seconds, but Cherry got it. “There was no personal involvement with Tanner,” she said. “The killer wasn’t in on his victim’s final breath.”

“Something went wrong with the killer’s plans,” I said. “The guy on the bush-hog showing up, maybe. Tanner was sick or hallucinating and got freaked out by the guy, went amok with the gun. How far is it to Tanner’s church?”

“Twenty minutes,” Cherry said, now thinking parallel to me. “I’ll have McCoy meet us there. This is his kind of thing.”

Lee McCoy was parked near Tanner’s shattered church when we arrived. The ranger listened quietly as Cherry confirmed that Tanner appeared not a random bit of mayhem as initially thought, but our fourth serial victim.

“Horse manure?” McCoy said. “Doesn’t that say …”

I nodded. “Brother Tanner was full of shit. Someone wasn’t buying Tanner’s status as a holy man, Lee.”

“We thought Brother Tanner was nuts,” Cherry said. “We didn’t know the problem was part of the bigger picture. Thing is, in all the other cases, the killer was in on the death.”

McCoy had a fast mind. “You’re thinking someone was watching?” he asked.

I nodded. “Nearby and waiting for the mushrooms to take effect, perhaps. Hoping to step in and do nasty, up-close things to the poisoned man, stuff like he did to Burton and Powers. Actions with a personal symbolism.”

Cherry jumped in. “Best-laid plans gone awry.”

McCoy jogged to the fence line behind Tanner’s house trailer and studied angles of sight, peering into pines and hemlocks ringed with honeysuckle. After several minutes of studying the land, he inspected the barbed-wire fence separating Tanner’s land from the dense national forest property in the rear. He studied the wire as he walked, the same curious look he’d given to the trees along the Rock Bridge trail.

“Wire’s been cut here,” he said, pointing to an opening forty feet from Tanner’s back door. Cherry leaned close, studied the truncated wires between two solid posts.

“Cut recent,” she said. “Not a touch of rust.”

McCoy passed through the broken wire and into the woods. I was looking down for footprints or disheveled branches, McCoy looking up, broad brown hand porched over eyes crinkling against the sunlight.

“There,” he said after we’d walked two dozen feet. I looked up and saw a black-and-green metal assemblage resembling a chair attached to the tree about thirty feet up.

“A deer stand,” I said.

“Portable and camouflaged,” McCoy said. “The killer climbs the tree, snaps the stand in place, sits in comfort and watches Tanner’s place. He notes Tanner’s patterns, leaves a pot of toxic stew and waits a bit longer. Hoping he can go inside and have – what did you call it, Carson – his symbolic moments?”

“Jesus,” Cherry said, sighting between the tree and Tanner’s trailer, two hundred feet away. “The guy could have been watching the whole Tanner meltdown from here.”

I climbed the tree. The stand was positioned to reconnoiter the multi-windowed rear of Tanner’s trailer. A man with good binoculars could watch like his nose was pressed to the glass.

I retrieved the stand, hoping we could pull prints, figuring we wouldn’t, given the extreme care our perp had shown so far. McCoy pushed further down the trail as Cherry and I combed the ground beneath the tree for evidence, finding nothing.

“Got a trail back here,” McCoy yelled after a few minutes. We followed his voice to a hard dirt path half obscured by undergrowth.

“Looks rugged,” I said. “Could you ride it on a dirt bike?”

“Somebody has recently,” he said, pointing to a tire scraping in the gray dust. “If it was me, I’d ride to the Forest Service firebreak a quarter-mile north. Then it’s an easy ten-minute run to a real road. This guy had it figured out.”

McCoy’s phone rang. He snapped it open, spoke for several minutes, questioning his caller about times of day, from the sound of things. He asked the caller to verify the official time of sunrise. Waited. Nodded when the information arrived and turned back to Cherry and me.

“The spiders have spoken, folks. And they’re saying something interesting. Let’s re-group back at the park, where I can put together a little show and tell.”