Detective Carson Ryder Thriller
Series 7–9
J.A. Kerley

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Buried Alive

Her Last Scream

The Killing Game

Coming Soon: The Death Box

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Buried Alive
J.A. Kerley

Dedication

To the Northside Trio:Duane, Dave, and that other guy.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Acknowledgements

Copyright

Chapter 1

R-rrrrrr.

R-rrrrrr.

I felt the phone before I heard it, a rusty saw rasping over my forehead, trying to rip an opening into my subconscious.

R-rrrrrr.

My eyes opened to slats of maple flooring. Chair legs. A crumpled sock. I was on the floor, head in the living room, feet in the bedroom.

“R-rrrrrr.”

Behind me I saw blanket and sheet following like a tangled umbilicus. I had tried to crawl from my dreams again. I rolled to the phone on the bedside table before the saw took another cut.

“Carson Ryder,” I mumbled, cross-legged on the floor and leaning against the bed. The clock showed 7.25 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Outside, gulls keened above my beachside home as the Gulf of Mexico’s waves slapped the shore a hundred paces distant.

“Detective Ryder, it’s Nancy Wainwright at the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior. I need your help.”

I stifled a yawn as my mental Rolodex presented an image of a slender, fiftyish woman with long brown hair and penetrating, intelligent eyes behind round glasses.

“What can I do for you, Doctor?”

“Bobby Lee Crayline’s here at the Institute.”

I rubbed sleep from my eyes. “Again? Why?”

“He’s going to be hypnotized.”

It took a five-count for the words to materialize into a grammatical pattern and snap me bolt-upright with the phone tight to my ear. “Bobby Lee Crayline?” I knew my heart was fully awake. I could feel it pounding. “Who’s doing this?”

“Crayline’s legal team wants to regress Bobby Lee.”

“Regressing Crayline could blow him off his hinges,” I said. “Vangie told me Crayline was the tip of the one iceberg that she never wanted to see beneath the surface.”

Vangie was Dr Evangeline Prowse, psychiatrist, the former head of the Institute, which housed and studied the country’s most dangerous psychopaths and sociopaths. She’d been murdered in Manhattan two years ago, the circumstances strange and sad. Nancy Wainwright had been installed as the Institute’s full-time director some months back. I barely knew her.

“You interviewed Bobby Lee in prison, right, Detective?” Wainwright continued. “Since you have a history with him, I thought maybe you could stop the procedure.”

Another mental Rolodex spun, one hidden in a far corner of my skull, and I saw Bobby Lee Crayline, his green reptilian eyes studying me the moment I entered Holman Prison’s visitation room. I saw his flattened nose and his scarred hands on the far side of the Plexiglas divider, hands skittering over the counter like restless tarantulas. I smelled the stink pouring like gasoline fumes from his jittering, tattoo-smeared body. I’d gone home after the unsettling interview and washed my clothes. Twice.

“Crayline’s legal team won’t listen to me, Doctor,” I explained. “It’s not much of a history and I’m just a homicide dick from Mobile.”

“You’re in that special unit. That has to count for something.”

She was referring to PSIT, the Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team. The team was me and my partner, Harry Nautilus. Few outside the Mobile PD even knew of the existence of the unit called Piss-it by everyone but Harry and me.

“I doubt that will sway anyone,” I said. “Even given Bobby Lee’s obvious psychological damage.”

Bobby Lee Crayline had been arrested seven months ago, at the age of twenty-eight, after his strange abduction of a colleague. His path had always led him in a disturbing direction, a history of breathless violence, starting in high school when he’d beaten two teachers a half-inch shy of death, one teacher today confined to a wheelchair. Though he’d avoided incarceration when it was proven both male teachers – a coach and an assistant – had taunted the sixteen-year-old when he didn’t join the football team, Crayline was expelled from school.

Crayline spent the next few years winning amateur “Toughest Man” competitions, often dragged from atop opponents after the round ended. His reputation for crowd-pleasing megaviolence bought entrée into the XFL, Extreme Fighting League, a made-for-TV motley of pro wrestling, full-contact karate, and bar-room brawling. Two combatants fought in a circular, thirty-foot-diameter cage until one was vanquished, often in a shower of blood and teeth. I’d once watched three minutes of XFL before retreating from the television, wondering if the species known as Homo Sapiens – thinking man – had been hideously misnamed.

Bobby Lee Crayline’s XFL career consisted of twenty-two bouts. He generally wounded his opponents in an early round, then toyed with them for several more, spitting insults and inflicting damage until the victim collapsed. Two opponents quit the league, humiliated. In the most notorious incident, one of Crayline’s opponents died of a brain hemorrhage after the match. Because of the viciousness of Crayline’s attack – he had to be pulled from the fighter after the bell – the incident was ruled manslaughter and Bobby Lee received a six-month prison sentence. I interviewed him the first week he was in prison, part of my ongoing research. He was scary and uncooperative and I spent less than ten minutes in his company, which was fine.

A month into his sentence, a savvy lawyer got Bobby Lee transferred to the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior. He remained there for two months before other legal wranglings set him free and he returned to the XFL.

Crayline had won all his XFL fights but his final one, vanquished in the third round by an imposing and experienced fighter called Jessie “Mad Dog” Stone. Bobby Lee Crayline disappeared overnight, no one knowing where he went or why. One waggish sportswriter opined that “Hell hath summoned Bobby Lee to the home office.”

Bobby Lee Crayline’s next public appearance was eight months later, in court, arrested at a remote rented farm in north Alabama’s Talladega Mountains and charged with kidnapping. Chained inside a deep pit in a barn behind Crayline’s house, covered with flies and sores and his own excrement, was Jessie Stone, the one man to ever best Crayline in a fight.

Within a month of Bobby Lee’s arrest, three bodies turned up in the countryside where he spent his teen years, the victims shot to pieces, though nothing thus far tied him to the killings. The coroner put the time of death as approximately two years earlier and the investigation was ongoing. It had been conclusively proved that Crayline was in the area at the time.

But Stone’s kidnapping did the trick: Bobby Lee received a sentence of thirty years in prison and stepped into the big cage three months ago. And there he’d remained until today.

“When’s this procedure supposed to go down?” I asked Dr Wainwright, shaking Bobby Lee Crayline from my thoughts. “The hypnosis.”

“Today at eleven.”

“Grab the reins and stop the session, Doctor,” I said. “Tell the truth: Bobby Lee Crayline is a box that should never be opened.”

“Can you help me convince the lawyers hypnosis is dangerous to their client?”

“You’re giving me too much credit, Doctor. I can’t just—”

“Ask anything. Just please come up here.” It was a plea.

The Institute was west of Montgomery, almost three hours away. I sighed and looked at the anxious eyes of my dog, Mr Mix-up, standing at the doorway with his bowl in his mouth, tail fanning behind. He wanted food and his morning walk.

“I’ll come on one condition, Doc. I can bring my dog.”

“Whatever it takes.”

I hung up and went to my closet; almost empty. I’d been waiting for today to play laundry catch-up. I plucked yesterday’s shirt from the basket to check the aroma index. The shirt got to my nose before my nose got to the shirt. I grabbed from the casual side of the closet: patched jeans and one of Harry’s cast-off shirts, penguins in sunglasses sipping martinis. He’d found it overly conservative. I found it overly large by two sizes, but comfortable. My socks having missed the wash, I went without, jamming my feet into battered running shoes.

I checked the mirror and saw my hair had gotten long again – how does that happen? The man looking back at me resembled a thirty-six-year-old refugee from a Jimmy Buffet concert.

I fed Mr Mix-up, loaded him into my old pickup, painted gray with a roller. I took a deep breath, fired up the engine and raced north toward the Institute, hoping to stop the worst idea I’d heard in a long time.

Chapter 2

Pulling into the lot at the Institute, I noted two vehicles in visitor parking slots, one a big square Benz, burgundy, looking heavy enough to sink into the asphalt like stone through water, the other a gleaming silver Corvette of recent vintage. The juxtaposition reminded me of a brick beside a stiletto, blunt trauma versus puncture.

Nearby waited a brown van with a cage inside, a prisoner-transport vehicle from Holman Prison. It was early January and the temp was forty-eight degrees, the engine running to keep the heater blasting, native South Alabamians thin-blooded by nine months of what most locales called summer. When it dropped below forty degrees, we crawled into steamy bathtubs and hibernated until the magnolias blossomed.

Two bored-looking guards sat inside the van smoking cigarettes. I trotted over, flashing ID and motioning to roll the window down.

“What you boys here for?” I asked.

The driver, a tight-eyed old gunbull with buck teeth centering fat jowls, pushed back his hat. “We brought Bobby Lee Crayline up from Holman. I ’spect he’ll be back out here soon enough.”

“You know he’s here to be hypnotized?”

The gunbull’s lips curled in a sneer. “Fuckin’ legal bullshit to put him in a cushy mental hospital. Crayline should be hypnotized into thinking he’s a campfire.”

“Why’s that?”

“Then we can shovel dirt over him until he goes out.”

I sprinted back to my truck and opened the door, Mr Mix-up launching out like a torpedo, bounding at my heels, spinning in circles. Mix-up had drawn widely from the canine gene pool, his body thick and heavy in the chest, the hair tightly grained but with fluffy tufts behind his long legs and on his tail. His feet were oven mitts, his head a St Bernard with basset-length ears. His eyes were huge and inquisitive. His powerful, deep-chested body was spotted brown and white and black, the back legs brindled a rusty red. The first time I saw Mix-up I thought him a Dr Seuss character come to life.

“Hey, Detective, what the hell kinda dog is that?” the guard yelled out the window.

“’Bout every kind, I think,” I said.

“An’ probably some horse and ostrich, too,” the guard noted, shaking his head in wonder.

I passed through security and headed to the sign-in clipboard to register. The registration sheet held three signatures, two from a firm named Dunham, Krull and Slezak. The firm was from Memphis, high-powered and low-oriented, defending anyone offering big money or big publicity. Neither category seemed to fit Bobby Lee Crayline, but I’d been wrong before.

“Who’s in this meeting?” I asked Theotis Burns as he walked up. Theotis handled administrative operations of the Institute. He was forty-three, smallish in stature, and wore dark suits that flowed like liquid. Theotis reminded me of the rapper-entrepreneur Puff Daddy or P. Diddy, except P-whatever never worked in a venue with red EMERGENCY buttons spaced along the corridors.

“Dr Wainwright and three men,” Theotis said. “One looks like a guy playing a movie star, got poufy white hair and whiter teeth. He’s wrapped in two-thousand-dollar threads, pure silk. One’s a chubby guy in a blue off-the-rack threads, round glasses, Hush-fucking-Puppies over gray socks. Radiates shrinknicity, gotta be the hypnotist.”

“The third one?”

“A hard-looking guy, big, had to surrender a Glock 17 at the outside gate. Wasn’t happy about it, either.”

“What’s your take, Theo?” I asked, knowing he kept a close ear to the ground.

“You know Bobby Lee Crayline was with us for a couple months two years back, Carson? Just after he killed the guy in the ring?”

I nodded. “Vangie was studying him.”

“Crayline’s got one of those personalities that sucks everything to him. He started getting into people’s heads and causing all sorts of trouble. He was never meant to be a permanent resident. Dr Prowse sent him back to prison. Then the appellate judge set him free.”

“I figured he’d be back in the system,” I said. “Took a couple years and a kidnapping – and maybe a few bodies pulled from the dirt in Alabama – but here he is.”

“Doc Prowse thought a lot about hypnotizing Bobby Lee when he was here, Carson, but decided against it. She ever tell you why?”

I nodded. “Vangie was afraid he’d decompensate. That direct contact with his past might create conditions in which he’d become even more dangerous.”

“He’s barely wrapped as it is.”

“He siphons off the worst impulses by beating the hell out of others, Theo. It’s an escape valve.”

Theotis shook his head and retreated down the hall. I led Mix-up to a small meeting room, tossed a biscuit on the floor. When he was rolling on the biscuit, his curious pre-chow ritual, I closed the door and turned down the hall toward the conference room.

I knocked and stuck my head inside. The room was spare, the lighting indirect, the cool air tinted with false lemon. Two men were at the table, one resembling country singer Porter Wagoner, hound-dog features beneath a white pompadour. He had a booth-built tan and looked in his late fifties. Theo was right about the threads: Where Wagoner would have worn ten pounds of sequins, this guy was tucked inside three thousand bucks’ worth of sedate gray silk.

Beside Pomp’n’tan was a tall and broad-shouldered guy in his mid-thirties. His eyes were deep-set and dark and when added to his thick eyebrows suggested a Neanderthal on steroids. His black suit was cut large, allowing easy access to the Glock he’d had to surrender.

A penguin-bodied man sat to the side with a briefcase in his lap. Bald with side fringes, pencil mustache, soft blue eyes behind thick trifocals. He was sixty or so, dressed in a formless suit. The hypnotist shrink.

“Where’s Dr Wainwright?” I asked.

“The restroom,” the Neanderthal said, eyeing me like a bum who’d stumbled into a wedding. “Wait outside and you won’t miss her.”

“I’ll wait in here,” I said, stepping into the room.

“This is a private meeting.” He stood, hand blocking entry further than two steps. It was a bouncer’s move and I’d never liked bouncers.

“I’m on the VIP list,” I said.

“I said this is a private meeting.”

When I started toward a seat the Neanderthal stopped me with a stiff finger at my sternum. Another bouncer move. I jammed my leg in front of his, grabbed his wrist and rotated like an ice skater starting a sit-spin. The Neanderthal went sprawling across the floor, sending two chairs tumbling. He was up in a half-heartbeat, fists clenched, flashing I’m-gonna-kill-you eyes. I whipped out my badge wallet and ID.

“Not recommended,” I said.

“What’s going on here?” Doc Wainwright appeared at the threshold, looking between the upended chairs and my ID display.

“A get-acquainted session, Doc,” I said.

“Sit, Bridges,” said a voice behind me. Scarcely louder than the hum of the air conditioning, it was a command. Pomp’n’tan was studying me with interested eyes. He held a business card between index and second finger, as if slipping a tip to a bellhop.

“Read it to me,” I said.

“Arthur Slezak, of Dunham, Krull and Slezak. Counsel of record for Robert Crayline. The gentlemen with me are Charles Bridges, who you just, uh, met. And this is Dr Walter Neddles, psychiatrist and certified hypnotist. May I see your identification, please?”

Slezak donned reading glasses and studied my particulars as I studied his hands: pink with perfectly manicured nails, on his left wrist a Rolex that cost as much as I made from January through June. I saw him frown, as if trying to grasp a memory.

“Mobile?” he said. “Aren’t you a bit far from your jurisdiction, Detective?”

“I’ve asked this man to be here,” Wainwright said, taking her chair at the head of the table.

“Why’s that, Doctor?”

“Detective Ryder knows the danger Mr Crayline represents. He’s against the hypnosis as well.”

Neddles cleared his throat. “I assure you, Dr Wainwright, that I’ve hypnotized dangerous people. Terrence Crump, Ernesto Vasquez, Rhonda Sue Bolz—”

“I’ve met them all,” I interrupted. “I tracked and arrested Crump, who attacked elderly women. Bolz was a hospital poisoner. Vasquez killed winos or railroad bums. Have you studied Bobby Lee Crayline, Doctor? His capacity for violence is on another level.”

Slezak had a butter-smooth smile on his face. “If Mr Crayline is resistant to hypnosis, we’re gone. All I’m requesting is the opportunity.”

“What do you want to know?”

“That’s private, except to say that Mr Crayline might know things he may not know he knows.”

“That’s suitably vague,” I said, “You going to ask Bobby Lee about the three bodies found in his old home-town?”

“Purely circumstantial,” Slezak pooh-poohed. “Never tied to Mr Crayline.”

“So far,” I said.

“I’ve decided this is too dangerous,” Wainwright announced, finding her courage. “I’m sorry for your trouble, Mr Slezak, but I refuse to allow the hypnosis.”

Slezak plucked out a sheaf of paper from the briefcase at his feet. He slid reading glasses over the lengthy nose and tapped the pages. “Did you know, Dr Wainwright, that the land beneath the Institute is leased from the state for a dollar a year? And there’s a clause stating if the Institute poses a threat to the well-being of the local citizenry, the deal can be revoked?”

“We’ve never posed a threat to anyone,” Wainwright said.

Slezak feigned confusion. “Did not a patient escape from this very institution just two years ago? A man who murdered his father and five women? Wasn’t he a prime suspect in the death of Evangeline Prowse, the former director of this institution?”

“Jeremy Ridgecliff,” Wainwright said, leaning forward, her voice tight. “The man was never loose in this area. And no one really knows what happened after his escape. Surely you heard the rumors regarding Ridgecliff’s supposed role in the hotel explosion during the—”

Slezak cut her off mid-sentence. He snapped his fingers and turned to me.

“I know why the name Ryder sounds familiar. You were the cop sent to New York to stop Ridgecliff. Don’t tell me you think the man is anything but a vicious killer.” Slezak raised a white eyebrow, as if Ridgecliff’s guilt was written in the sands of Time and anyone thinking otherwise was moronic.

“I do question Ridgecliff’s guilt. Revisiting the women’s murders could have different findings this time around.”

“But isn’t Ridgecliff still in hiding?” Slezak countered. “No effort to proclaim innocence? Never contacted anyone?”

My face grew hot and I looked away. I’d spoken to Jeremy Ridgecliff a week ago, the seventeenth conversation I’d had with him since his escape. I actually spoke to him on a fairly regular basis, though I never knew where he was calling from.

It’s said everyone has one big secret. Here’s mine: Jeremy Ridgecliff is my biological brother, our kinship concealed by my long-ago name change and other obfuscations. Those who knew could be counted on one hand with digits to spare. I’d spent years hiding my ties to Jeremy and our childhood, only to be slammed into him in New York and made part of his escape mechanism. I had no idea where he was, only that he was brilliant enough to develop exacting mechanisms to avoid capture.

“Detective Ryder?” Slezak prodded. “You’re not answering my question. Is Ridgecliff on the run from the law?”

“Yes,” I said. It was all I could say.

Slezak gave me a lizard smile and turned to Wainwright. “A mad killer set loose, Doctor? Imagine if that fact was presented to the citizens who allow prime taxpayer land to be leased for a paltry sum. A funding backlash might ensue.”

“We do important work here,” Wainwright said. “You can’t jeopardize that in order to—”

Faces turned my way as I stood and crooked a come-hither digit at Nancy Wainwright.

“Doc? How about a brief meeting in the hall?”

She followed me outside and I closed the door. “It’s a goddamn bluff,” she said. “The slimy bastard won’t do it.”

“He might, just to show he can,” I cautioned, having met too many Slezaks.

“Having to defend the Institute would wear me out,” Wainwright sighed, leaning against the wall, arms crossed. “Upset the staff. Jeopardize serious research. The scum bucket has me by my weakest point.”

“Slezak’s crafted his whole life around exploiting weaknesses, Doc.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s obvious they’re gonna do the hypnosis somewhere. Here, at least you’re in charge, right?”

She reached out to one of the EMERGENCY buttons recessed into the white walls, ran her finger lightly over its blood-red surface.

“For whatever that’s worth,” she said.

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