Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 7-9: Buried Alive, Her Last Scream, The Killing Game. J. Kerley A.
my side window crumbled away. I braked hard for a switchback, rain sweeping my face. Crayline’s lights seemed in my back seat.
“History’s getting fixed,” he roared incomprehensibly. “You ain’t stopping it.”
I ran another blind curve, Crayline cutting low and trying to clip me into a spin. I watched him miss by inches, screaming out his window between shots. Rain blew into my eyes like a gale. I downshifted and gained a few feet. Somewhere ahead was the turn-off to Cherry’s home. Crayline was on my bumper.
Our combined lights showed a lane between trees. I jammed on the brakes, cut sideways and slid off the road a hundred feet before Cherry’s drive. I clipped a tree, fought for control, made the turn on to the lane to Cherry’s house.
Crayline was behind me seconds later. I blinked away rain and saw the lights of Cherry’s house, the tree-studded yard, the drive appearing to continue beyond the cabin.
Crayline was closing fast. A shot screamed off the cab.
I roared past Cherry’s house, waited a millisecond beyond hope, downshifted to second. The truck slowed with a jolt but without brake lights. I aimed into a tree, hit a glancing blow. The air bag exploded. I shoved it aside as Crayline roared past, probably wild with glee at seeing my wrecked truck.
But there would be no stopping and no coming back for Bobby Lee Crayline. I pictured his hideous grin freezing as he looked ahead and saw nothing but air.
Crayline jumped on the brakes. His taillights were horizontal for a split second, then arced inexorably into the valley. I pushed from my truck as the door opened on Cherry’s cabin, I saw a shotgun muzzle sniffing over the threshold.
“It’s OK,” I yelled. “It’s me.”
She stepped outside, wearing an outsized T-shirt and little more. It seemed appropriate, given that I was standing in her yard solely in sodden boxers.
“Sweet Jesus, Ryder. What’s going on?”
I waved her to follow me to the edge of the cliff. We stared into the valley. Forty stories below the trees were orange with the gasoline-fueled glow of Bobby Lee Crayline’s funeral pyre.
Eight thirty a.m. found Cherry and me at the largest of the pair of park cabins the Feds used as their Woslee field HQ. Krenkler had arrived, her hair even brighter and stiffer than I remembered, the out-curling side points like she’d honed them in a pencil sharpener. She was on her cell and sending her harried agents to and fro solely with irate glances and fingersnaps.
She jabbed her fingers toward where we should sit: the dining-room table. Krenkler finished her call, popped a stick of gum between her scarlet lips and gave me her best cross-examination stare as she strode over.
“You knew this guy, Ryder. You interviewed him in the Alabama State Prison. You were at the mental institute when he escaped. He died trying to kill you. That’s three too many coincidences for me. What’s the story?”
Questions I’d been asking myself for hours. I rubbed my face with my hands.
“I’m flummoxed. Utterly mystified. There’s nothing I ever did to Crayline to piss him off. He probably had grudges against half the people in his life, but he picked—”
“You. He wanted you here.”
“There’s no reason for it. I was never anything to him.”
Krenkler had big hands with several shiny rings aboard. She set the hands on the table beside me and leaned close. “You sure it was a woman’s voice that called you to the guy with the tool up his pooper?”
I said, “It sounded like a woman’s voice.” And it had, that being the gender my brother was imitating.
“You’re absolutely sure?”
“Yes,” I said, frazzled and sore and feeling like I was still clinging fifty feet in the air with bullets slapping beside me. “Why?”
Krenkler stood and backed away, leaning against the knotty pine wall, her arms crossed. With her black pantsuit and flared lapels, she resembled a looming raven, only blonder.
“Ryder, can you think of any reason Robert Crayline would want to kill any of the three others he’s killed here?”
I rubbed my face. “I don’t have any idea what he’d have against …” I paused, hearing Crayline’s words the day of his escape, right after the lawyer’s hired goon had spat on Bobby Lee and called him a genetic moron.
“Don’t go dumb on me Ryder,” Krenkler said. “What is it?”
“Bobby Lee threatened a guy the day he escaped. Last name was Bridges. I don’t recall the first name. Bridges was half-bright muscle, probably an occasional employee of Crayline’s legal firm. Call Arthur Slezak, of Dunham, Krull and Slezak in Memphis. Ask Slezak if he’s seen Bridges lately.”
Krenkler frowned. “You think the guy with the tool up his tailpipe might be this Bridges?”
I thought back to the horror show in the reeking shack, saw the body wired to the bed. “The corpse’s face was ruined,” I said, “but the body size fits. Hard and fit. Crayline said he was going to fry Bridges’s guts for supper.”
I heard one of the agents at my back mutter Holy shit. Krenkler glared at the agent. “How about checking on this Bridges?” she snapped. “That too much to ask?”
In the past dozen hours I’d been to my cabin only long enough to put on clothes and note with despair I was still sans dog. I stood.
“Where you think you’re going, Ryder?” Krenkler growled.
“I’m going to shower and go to bed for a couple hours,” I said quietly. “Anyone thinking different better be ready to use their gun.”
Cherry said she’d drop me off, my truck still at her home until photos and reconstructions were made, but Krenkler wasn’t through grilling her on local developments. Now would come the reconstruction: why Crayline had selected Woslee County as his killing field. Cherry didn’t look happy at the prospect of continuing the tête-à-tête with Krenkler, but it was part of the job. I was ferried back by Agent Rourke. He seemed the most human of the robots on Krenkler’s team.
“How is it, working with Agent Krenkler?” I asked him.
“I retire in two months,” he said, not turning his eyes from the road. “Ask me then.”
“Gotcha,” I said.
He dropped me at my front door. I had hoped whatever forces propel the universe had put my night’s ordeal in the book and, checking the account to date, decided I might deserve the return of my dog.
The budgeting was not in my favor.
I showered and changed and, still charged with adrenalin residue, lost my need to sleep. I downed two power bars and made coffee strong as the bolts I’d clung to on the cliff face. I added a tot of Maker’s Mark, going out to the porch to sit and think.
Crayline had been at the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior, the first time during my brother’s tenure. That in itself didn’t mean a whole lot. Though the Institute housed seventy or eighty full-time patients, another hundred or so criminals might rotate through on an annual basis, there for a few days or weeks of evaluation or study. Plus there were levels of security, different wings – “wards” in the semi-hospital parlance used at the Institute. Since Crayline had been there as a transient, a person for temporary study, he might not have had access to the general population which included my brother.
But I had to know, just for my own knowing. I called Dr Wainwright at the Institute, gave her a brief overview of the situation with Bobby Lee Crayline, and asked for records of his stay. Wainwright was apologetic.
“Those