Buried Alive by J. A. Kerley Read Free Book Online Page B

the road wandered back to the only other cabin in the hollow. McCoy nodded toward the cabin as we passed.
    “Had a chance to meet Doctor Charpentier, the fellow who lives there?”
    “Never seen him.”
    “He spends hours in the forest, hiking and thinking. If you see him, stop and say hello. A brilliant man. I’ve never known anyone to absorb information so quickly.”
    “Charpentier is a medical doctor?”
    “A psychologist from Montreal who took early retirement. He moved here for the climate, finding Canada too cold, the South too hot. Doctor Charpentier thinks Kentucky has the perfect temperature, and our forest reminded him of Canadian woodland.”
    McCoy pulled up out of the hollow and drove north. He entered the national forest and wound down to the bottoms, the Red River to our left as we angled southeast.Whenever the canopy of trees opened, I saw looming cliffs studded with pine on the ridges.
    “Beautiful view,” I said.
    “Depends on your perspective.” McCoy nodded at a cliff face thirty stories above the valley. “We’ve got a problem with people falling off cliffs. Doped-up locals and drunked-up college kids, mainly. They camp on the ridges for the view, forget where they are, walk over the edge. Last week a man took a two-and-half gainer from the top of that cliff to the bottom. I was on the rescue team. Or maybe body-recovery team is a better term. I’ve personally recovered over two dozen.”
    McCoy slowed as a huge recreational vehicle moved toward us in the other lane, crowding the centerline. McCoy slipped past, pulled off the road and stopped the engine. We’d reached the trailhead. It was after we’d exited and gone to the rear to grab our packs that McCoy made his first mention of the grisly events of yesterday.
    “I heard you had to spend some time with Detective Cherry,” he said. “She was surprised at your appearance.”
    “It was a surprise to us all,” I said.
    McCoy cleared his throat. “Did Detective Cherry mention there’d been a death prior to the man in the shack? A very similar event?”
    “No, Lee,” I said, more interested than my face let on. “We never quite got around to police chit-chat.”
    “It was a week back. Sonny Burton drove a snack truck, chips and pretzels and such. He went missing for two days. His truck was found in a hollow, Sonny underneath it,hands frozen on to the front tire parked on his chest. Even though he was dead, his mouth was open, like he was screaming. There were a couple boot prints on the ground, what you noticed me looking for the other day. I guess you’re tuned to stuff like that.”
    I nodded. “Two murders in a short span of time is probably unusual around here, but not freakishly odd anywhere, unfortunately. What makes you sure Burton is connected to the guy from yesterday?”
    “The way the police received notice of both crimes.”
    The point Cherry hadn’t discussed. “How?” I asked.
    “Through coordinates on a geocache website. The location of Sonny Burton’s body was listed on a geocaching site with geographic coordinates. A couple teen kids found him.”
    “Geocaching is hide and seek with a GPS, right?”
    McCoy nodded. “It’s a recent craze. People hide things, trinkets, a log book. The coordinates are posted on the web. You use a GPS to find the cache, usually adding a trinket to a bunch of trinkets, or signing the book. There are big national geocaching sites, and little regional ones. The site where Burton’s coordinates were posted is called East Kentucky Geofun. It’s run from a computer server and operated by a kid in Stanton.”
    “Cherry checked him out, right?”
    “A sixteen-year-old techie – not involved. The site runs itself: Anyone with internet access can post on the site anonymously. Some local kids saw the new coordinates and went out expecting to find a standard cache, a box of trinkets or whatever.”
    “But instead found a guy with a truck parked on his sternum. The same happened