Lie Still

38

Ten days later, the FBI exhumed the bodies of four girls from the wooded hill behind Dickie Deacon’s place. One of the first bodies was almost certainly that of Alice, age eight, buried in a clearing near the top, four feet off a ragged path.

Misty identified the ring with an orange plastic gem that they dug out with the third set of bones. Her sister had won two rings in a gumball machine that final summer and never took them off. Alice had insisted they were lucky.

On the third story of Dickie’s house, the FBI found these things: a nicely appointed bedroom with a satellite flat-screen TV, a master bathroom with twenty jars of lemon bath salts, an industrial washer and dryer, a closet of high-tech hunting gear and surveillance equipment, unopened Amazon boxes packed with stuffed animals, a portfolio of horrible, amateurish drawings of Caroline, and a museum-like room dedicated to Dickie’s trophies and fading football jerseys. I know there was more in that house on the hill, but Mike refused to tell me about it. Search teams had settled in at the Best Western, planning on wrestling the kudzu and mud on that hill for months.

The worst day for me was when they found Wyatt. Dug from a shallow grave in a horse stall in the crumbling barn behind Dickie’s house. Forensic investigators estimated his age at death to be between eighteen and nineteen. His preliminary DNA test did not match Richard Deacon’s. He’d been strangled to death, like all the little girls.

It left us to wonder: Did Dickie know that Wyatt wasn’t his son? Sophia Browning has said through her fortress of lawyers that she won’t in a million years offer her DNA for comparison. She’s fighting an exhumation of her father.

Mike reminds me that in every terrible case, there would always be questions. The absolute truth dies with the victim. Mike says he just imagines the scenario that makes him happiest. I imagine that Wyatt found out about Alice and died trying to avenge her.

Dickie had told everyone that his no-good son had taken off, and everyone believed him. The official theory is that he wired money to himself around the country, picking it up in Wyatt’s name, in case anyone ever got wise to his lifestyle or too curious about what happened to his missing son. A dead man on the run is easy to blame.

A few nights ago, Mike and I watched some old football film of Dickie in a state high school playoff game. The film canister arrived at the front door by UPS, in an anonymous brown cardboard box addressed to Mike, the number 88 drawn in Sharpie where the return address should have been.

No soundtrack. We watched every grainy moment.

In the final seconds of the game, the ball was soaring across the field, a Hail Mary pass. No. 88 leapt in the air, his hands reaching up for the impossible ball like a prayer to the gods.

It is hard to square that magnificent moment of grace with the man who, in some odd ritual that made sense only to him, washed his ex-wife in homemade bath salts before he murdered her. Liza Beth Tucker sold eight varieties of bath salts at her gas station in Hazard. She told police that Dickie bought a six-month supply of the lemon salts at a time. He told her his wife liked them, even though Liza Beth knew that his wife had left him years ago.

When serial killer fanatics found out about the bath salts-the kind of loonies who collect famous murderers’ cards the way kids collect baseball cards-they ordered so much of the stuff by phone that Liza Beth set up an Internet site. The home page claims her products “are original recipes loaded with healing properties from the salt dug out of a genuine Kentucky mine.”

If you order the lemon bath salts and pay an extra $5.95, she’ll send you a small bag of dirt from Dickie’s property and an overhead helicopter shot of his place, with hand-drawn X’s where the bodies were discovered. I’d bet the salt is Morton’s and the earth is from Liza Beth’s own backyard.

What can I say? People are sick.