Cemetery of Angels (2 page)

It slid some more. The van left the road, went down an embankment, ran over some short snow coated shrubbery, and came to a jarring rest. The Lincoln swerved to a halt. All Rebecca could think of was to flee.

Run, run, and run as fast as she could. All those miles, all that roadwork, and now maybe if she were lucky maybe it could save her life!

For a moment she was stunned. Then she looked up and screamed. The man had already jumped out of his car. He ran toward her.

She fumbled with the door handle. The man was twenty feet from her. Then a second later, ten. She put her shoulder to the car door and shoved. It flew open. She put her hand on the baseball bat and clutched it.

The man grabbed the other side of her door and pulled violently. She screamed again. That face! That horrible brutish surreal too white razor-shaded face! He was practically snarling. She could smell his foul breath and feel the heat from his body. She could smell the sweat from under the leather jacket.

He was big. Six two. Six
three
!

And strong. Inhumanly strong. That’s what she would remember thinking.

“No! No! No! Help!” she screamed again. But he had stopped her on the most deserted stretch of the road. There were no homes, no houses. Little chance of another car coming by. Zero chance of the police.

“My God!” she thought. He knows me so well that he knew I’d come here. He let me lead him to this spot to kill me!

He pushed a gloved hand into her mouth to silence her. His other hand wrestled with her left arm. Rebecca got lucky. Her right hand emerged from the darkness of her car, wielding the small bat. She swung as hard as she could. Her blow glanced off the top of her car door. But the rest of the blow found its mark, hitting her attacker across the side of the head. She followed with another shot. She got only a piece of him, but the piece was significant.

Impact to the skull. Loud! Blood came from a gash in his forehead. He staggered, cursing obscenely. But he released his grip. She swung again with all her strength. The man was already bleeding hard. He raised his hands to block her third blow.

She felt the crack of the bat against his forearms. It was just enough to cause him to recoil. When she shoved the car door at him, and hit him solidly, she forced him back a little more. She had just enough room to turn.

He lunged for her. Huge arms. Big powerful hands in black gloves.

She felt his hand like a vise on the back of her thigh, but when she swung again with the bat, he braced his arms in front of his chest to protect himself. He lost his footing on the ice, and she was able to run.

She knew better than to choose the road, where he could see her. She chose the woods, instead, seeking cover like a hunted animal. Again, the defense of the rabbit.

The man yelled after her — she would never forget that voice either — and cursed profanely again as she darted into the darkness.

She knew these woods. Even with several inches of snow on the ground, she knew exactly where they would come out on the other side. She stumbled as she ran. At first, at the edge of the woods, there was light that was reflected from the headlights of their two vehicles. The trunks and branches of the trees cast strange shadows and silhouettes among the trees. She moved from one shadow to another, going deeper.

Forty or fifty feet into the woods, she looked back. The man had stopped. He had something in his hands. And somehow, her assailant knew approximately where she was because he raised the thing in his hand and it became a gun.

He pointed it in her direction and began to randomly spray the area. Three shots. She heard them whistle and clatter through the frozen branches of the trees around her.

The nightmare was real.

She crouched low to the ground, nestled close to a fir tree for cover. She would always remember the feel and smell of the evergreen branches.

The man stood for a moment, then fired two more times, even closer to her. She heard one shot thump into the ground a few feet away from her. Another one thumped into the trunk of a nearby tree. Her heart kicked like a boot in her chest.

Rebecca wondered if the man knew where she was or was just guessing. When he took three or four more steps into the woods, she realized that she couldn’t wait to find out. She turned and fled farther. At one point he must have thought he saw her because he fired another bullet.

The snow protected her. It muffled her footsteps in flight. And the ice on the branches created a clatter that distracted him. Best of all, more snow was falling, inhibiting his vision.

She fled farther, until she couldn’t see the road. Then, going by instinct and her own sense of direction, she continued on. She felt like crying, but was too terrified. Plus, she knew she couldn’t. To stop meant to court death again.

She continued through the woods. Her eyes, frozen with tears, adjusted to the dim light. Given the terrifying circumstances, she found her way to the other side of the woods with relative ease. She guessed that she had been in the woods for half an hour.

She came out on Hillspoint Road.

Hillspoint, she knew, led to McSherry Street, where she lived. She shivered from the cold and from the sweat beneath her clothes. Her perspiration was freezing on her, but she kept walking.

Twice, sets of automobile headlights appeared on the road, both times from behind. Twice, in response to the lights, she hid in shrubbery by the roadside. It took seventy more minutes to find her way home.

She entered the house without her keys.

Her children were with Bill down in the playroom. Her husband came upstairs. He froze when he saw her. He was astonished at the sight of her.

“Becca?” He called her by her pet name. “What the…?” His brow knit into a deep frown. He opened his arms to her. “What happened?”

Her emotions released. Tears came so fast and so vehemently that she was unable to coherently tell him what had happened.

“Becca, kid. Just calm yourself,” he said tenderly. “Then tell me. What happened? Where’s the van? Are you all right?” He held her. “An accident? Did you have an accident?” She was shaking. She saw herself in the mirror. She looked a wreck. She still couldn’t talk. “Did someone hurt you?”

She couldn’t answer.

“Do you need a doctor?” he asked.

“No” she finally shook her head.

“The police?” He asked next.

She nodded.

“I want you to calm down first,” he said, his voice still soft and understanding. “I’m not leaving to go to the telephone with you in this state.”

Rebecca took her husband’s hand and clutched it. Bill Moore had never seen any woman this traumatized, much less his wife. He knew full well that something terrible had happened to her.

“I was about to come out with the other car to look for you,” he said. “Now what happened? Come on, honey. You need to tell me. What happened?”

Fortunately, Patrick and Karen stayed in the downstairs playroom. She was able, with trembling lips, with her husband’s trusted arm around her, to begin to tell what had transpired. He led her through the story, growing angrier as she recounted everything. Eventually, she collapsed and sobbed uncontrollably. Then, when she had told the entire story, Bill Moore picked up the telephone and called the Connecticut State Police.

“We’ll find this man,” Bill vowed as he dialed. “And we’ll make sure he never sees the light of day again.”

Two police cars — three cops, two in uniform — responded within ten minutes. A young plainclothes sergeant named David Chandler was in charge.

Chandler was in his late twenties, big, strapping, and blond. He was alone in his car while the two uniformed men shared a patrol vehicle.

A neighbor watched Karen and Patrick as Sergeant Chandler drove the Moores back to the spot on Tremont Lane where Rebecca had left her van. The Dodge was still off the shoulder of the road in the snow of a shallow ravine. Someone had turned the ignition off, cut the headlights, and closed the door.

Bill Moore sat with his wife in the back of the detective’s car. He watched as the two uniformed men carried a pair of heavy flashlights, scanned the woods, and looked for clues. The snow was steadier now, bringing peace to what had been a tableau of violence. Yet the snow also covered any clues.

Too much snow had fallen to find footprints near the car, or tire tracks or skid marks. Chandler thought he could see the point where Rebecca Moore had entered the woods to flee, but he couldn’t be certain.

He walked back to the Moores’ Dodge and looked at the ground. Then he came back to his car. “Mrs. Moore, you said you hit the man with a baseball bat.”

“Two or three times,” she said. “A child’s bat. My son’s. I swung it hard.”

For a moment, Sergeant Chandler had a congratulatory look in his eye. “Did it draw blood?” he asked.

“I saw blood,” she said. “Right by the front window of my car.”

“What did you do with the bat?”

“I ran… and when I ran into the woods, I dropped it.”

Chandler nodded. The police radio crackled and the heat thundered out from under his dashboard.

“Just be calm,” Bill Moore whispered to his wife. “No one’s going to hurt you now.”

The two uniformed men joined Chandler. They discussed something among themselves. One of the uniformed men grimaced. Then two of them went to the edge of the woods and looked in vain for footprints in the fresh snow.

Chandler pushed a booted toe through the freshly fallen stuff near Rebecca’s vehicle. Like the officers at the edge of the woods, he found nothing.

He opened the driver’s door to the Dodge Caravan, leaned in and pulled out the baseball bat. He walked back to where the Moores sat in his car. “Is this the bat?” he asked.

Rebecca looked at it.

“Yes, it is.”

“It was in your car.”

“Then someone put it back”

“It’s clean,” he said, inspecting it. “Clean and dry.” He paused, raising his eyes, and studied her for a moment. “No blood on it. But I can have it checked for prints as well as a serology test.” She stared at it, also.

“The man was wearing gloves,” she said. “I remember.”

“Uh huh.” He looked at her again. “I’ll have it checked for prints, anyhow,” Chandler said.

“Did you find any blood? In the snow?”

“No. None on the car door, either.”

Chandler trudged thoughtfully to his two uniformed men.

He said something to them, and then came back to his own vehicle.

“I’d like to take you to the station to get a statement from you, Mrs. Moore,” he said. “I’d also like to take your van into our garage for fingerprints. May we do that?”

Bill Moore put his hand on his wife’s. “My wife already told you that her assailant was wearing gloves, didn’t she?” he asked.

“Her attacker might have taken them off,” Chandler said. “Plus there are paint scratches where another vehicle hit your front left fender.”

“That’s from when he ran me off the road,” she said.

“Then I need to take some paint samples,” Chandler said. “See, Mr. and Mrs. Moore, it’s your call. But I can’t do anything without your help. Can I take the van?”

“How long do you need it?” Bill Moore asked.

“Two days maximum.” Rebecca sighed.

“I don’t think I’ll be up for driving tomorrow, anyway,” she said.

“You can take it,” Bill told the detective. They went back to the supermarket parking lot and drove around, looking for the car that had run her off the road.

Rebecca didn’t see it. Nor did she see the man with the wraparound sunglasses who had tried to kill her except in her mind where she saw him continually.

Then they went to the State Police headquarters just off Interstate 95 in Westport.

Another detective, a woman named Rhonda Larsen, joined the inquiry. Detective Larsen asked Rebecca to run through her story again. She obliged. Then she told it a third time when detectives from the Town of Fairfield joined them.

Rebecca then spent an hour looking at photographs, her husband watching her the whole time, offering her support.

“Anything?” Sergeant Chandler eventually asked.

Rebecca shook her head. The answer was the same after an hour. At one point, Chandler turned to Bill Moore.

“What sort of work are you in, sir?”

“I’m an architect,” he said.

“You work locally? Commute to New York?”

“Both. I do freelance assignments when they’re subcontracted to me.”

A slight pause and he added truthfully, “I’m trying to open my own business.”

Chandler nodded.

“So you work out of your home? Or have an office somewhere?”

“Out of my home,” he said. “Went to the University of Virginia School of Architecture. My former roommate’s got his own firm in Southern California. He’s been trying to get me to go out West and join him.”

“Don’t want to relocate to California, huh?” Chandler asked.

“I’ve given it some thought. Both Rebecca and I have.”

“You must like it here.” Bill glanced at Rebecca.

“Up until this evening I did,” he said. “Now …? Never thought this type of thing would happen to us. Know what I mean?”

Chandler nodded, commiserating. Rebecca quietly continued through a digital database, prom shots of violent felons. “The whole country’s turning into a jungle,” Chandler added philosophically. “Stuff like this is everywhere. Drugs. Guns. You even get violence on kids’ TV shows.” He shrugged. “You won’t find California any safer. Maybe you’ll find it worse.”

“I just want to make a living,” Bill Moore said. “And I want my family to be safe.” Sergeant Chandler nodded.

Bill Moore had the feeling that the policeman’s questions had been probing for something. But whatever the cop had been looking for, Moore had apparently satisfied him. Chandler dropped the line of questioning and they went back to the mug shots.

Still nothing. After another hour, the police took the Moores home.

Rebecca took a sedative to be able to sleep that night. But she found herself awake toward 3:00 A.M., aware of every nighttime creak of the house. Bill slept soundly beside her. She was grateful for her husband’s presence.