The Lonely Mile (12 page)

He put his best, insincere, I’m-just-a-huckster-with-some-swampland-to-sell-you smile on his face and stepped out of the car, crossing the burned-out brown grass of the small front yard in a few, long strides. It was obvious the woman didn’t give a crap about the condition of her property. It was only late May for crying out loud; the lawn shouldn’t be in this kind of horrible condition for another two months yet.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he started out, “I’m so sorry to intrude, but I was wondering…” He was making it up as he went, riffing, enjoying the opportunity to mess with a stranger. He hardly ever interacted with people, and this was kind of fun. He really should get out more, he thought to himself.

By now he had almost reached the woman and it was just beginning to dawn on her that something was seriously wrong. The grin Martin had plastered on his face was only effective from a distance. Up close, people seemed to recognize that the smile was put-on, probably because the good humor it implied never quite reached his eyes. Martin could see the exact moment the alarm bells started going off in her head, the panic beginning to blossom in her eyes, but by then it was much too late.

She took a couple of shuffling steps backward, wanting to turn and run for the safety of her house but afraid to turn her back on this man who was approaching her for some unknown purpose. It was the wrong move, although by now, it didn’t really matter much. By backing up instead of running she was missing the opportunity to prolong her lifespan by maybe two or three seconds.

As he arrived at a point roughly three feet from the now-fearful bus driver, Martin reached behind his back with his right hand and pulled a razor-sharp combat knife out of a leather sheath on his belt. He held it up with a flourish in front of the astonished woman’s eyes. She drew in a great wheezing breath, about to scream, but didn’t get the chance. With the grace born of practice and preparation, two things Martin Krall believed in greatly, he sliced her throat deftly from right to left, severing her vocal cords, opening a great yawning chasm from which blood splattered like crimson water out of a fire hose.

The woman knitted her eyebrows as if the events of the last thirty seconds were beyond her comprehension, which, given the circumstances, they probably were. She shot Martin a look of extreme reproach, as if he had farted in church or something, then finally staggered backward and reached for the spurting neck wound with both hands to try to stanch the flow of blood.

It wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t going to come close to working.

Martin danced out of range of the arterial spray as the bus driver dropped, face down on her front lawn. Martin wondered if she was sorry now she hadn’t taken better care of it; the dry brown grass did little to cushion her fall. Just seconds after she fell, she stopped twitching and Martin got to work. He had a lot to do and not much time to get it done.

He dragged her to his car, doing his best to minimize the amount of blood slopping out of the gaping wound. His body he didn’t care about; he had worn a long-sleeved jumpsuit, which he would later peel off and dispose of. The woman was sturdy, built like a block of wood, and Martin struggled to pull her along. He popped the trunk with the remote control on the key fob and managed to hoist her body up, dumping it in the trunk before slamming the lid on the still-warm corpse.

There was nothing he could do about the blood staining the dusty yard where she had fallen. He just had to hope no one would come traipsing up to the front door for a while. She was too old to have school-age children, so that didn’t seem to be an issue, but you could never tell when a neighbor might drop by to borrow a cup of sugar or do whatever the sheep living in this miserable hellhole did to pass the time. On the bright side, the area was relatively far from town and sparsely populated, so the likelihood of anyone simply stopping in for a visit seemed remote.

Martin jumped behind the wheel and backed out of the driveway, moving quickly but being careful to avoid scraping the front of the bus. He drove the Hyundai he had jacked off an old lady up the country road a couple hundred yards. When he had gotten just far enough to be out of sight of the murdered woman’s house, Martin yanked the wheel sharply to the right and hit the gas, forcing the little vehicle as far into the woods as possible. It jounced and stuttered over uneven ground, finally coming to rest against a massive oak tree.

Satisfied the Hyundai was more or less screened from the view of anyone driving past, Martin grabbed a backpack off the seat next to him, then opened the door and stepped out into the woods. He quickly stripped off the jumpsuit, balling it up and tossing it into the trunk with the murdered bus driver before slamming the lid back down. He wasn’t concerned about leaving behind DNA evidence—there was none of his on file anywhere to match it, and in the unlikely event he was ever caught, he knew he would never see the light of day again. So why worry?

Martin trudged out of the woods the way the car had come in, doing his best to straighten the crushed tree branches and scrub brush the car had smashed down on the way in. When he reached the pavement, he peered back at his handiwork. It wasn’t perfect, but the foliage above was thick, it was dark as a hooker’s heart in there, so it would probably not be discovered for a little while, and a little while was all he needed. The camouflage job didn’t have to be perfect. In another hour or so, Martin would depart this little town for good, and after that, it wouldn’t matter whether anyone found the lady or not.

He jogged back along the edge of the road, thankful for small towns and people who valued their privacy. There wasn’t one nosy neighbor to worry about and not a single car had passed by on this little, out-of-the-way cow path the entire time Martin had been here, and that included the time he sat parked up the road waiting for the driver to come out of her house. The whole thing had all gone down so easy it almost didn’t seem fair. But he wasn’t done yet; the most challenging portion of the day’s activities was still to come.

Martin retraced his steps to the scene of the murder and picked the bus key off the ground. The driver had been so busy dying, she had forgotten all about it. It was slick with her blood, and he was momentarily disgusted. Who knew what nasty diseases the old bat had been carrying around? It was one thing to get her blood on his overalls; he could deal with that, but all over his hands? The idea was just repulsive. He wiped the key off as best he could on the ground, succeeding mostly in getting dirt and dead brown grass all over it.

Oh, well. You couldn’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, as the expression went, and Carli Ferguson was going to make one tasty omelet.

CHAPTER 27

BILL WATCHED AS SANDRA Mitchell stood with her hands on her hips in the middle of her spacious kitchen, facing him and the others seated at the kitchen table, a group which included her husband, Howard, and the FBI Special Agent in charge of the I-90 Killer case, Angela Canfield. He was glad Carli was safe at school. “I think we should just take Carli and leave town, go on a vacation, do anything to get her out of the sights of that madman.”

Canfield nodded placatingly, holding her hands out in front of her, palms forward, as if trying to ward off an evil spirit. Bill felt a little sorry for her. He had been in similar situations many times during arguments with his ex-wife, and knew that getting her to change her mind when it was made up was like trying to stop the sun from setting in the west.

“Believe me, I understand how you feel,” Canfield said gamely. “But, as I explained already, I believe this letter is nothing more than a bluff, a chance for the dirt bag to put the unsuccessful kidnapping behind him while at the same time tweaking the man he holds responsible for his failure. He’s probably very frustrated at the moment because he has never experienced anything approaching this level of failure before.”

“You
believe
he’s bluffing, but you really don’t know,” Sandra countered. “Let’s face it, Agent Canfield, if you really knew what was going on with this man, you would have caught him years ago. But he’s still on the loose, terrorizing innocent young girls. So you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t put a whole lot of stock in what you have to say.”

“Can I offer a compromise?” Bill interrupted. “There are only a few days of school left. Graduation activities start soon and it’d be a shame for Carli to miss them after spending the last twelve years with her friends, right?” Nobody argued, so he carried on. “How about letting her finish out the year, just these last few days, letting her take part in graduation? Then you can whisk her off to Europe or wherever. You can disappear all summer if you’d like; I won’t even put up an argument, custody-wise. Just let her finish out her high school career. She deserves that.”

“Obviously, it’s your choice, Mrs. Mitchell,” Agent Canfield added. “But you’ve seen the police presence we have established right outside your door, and I can assure you, it is just as strong at the high school. Carli is safe at school during the day, as we’ve impressed upon her not to leave the grounds for any reason until classes have ended. And she’ll come home on the bus and be met here, so I don’t see any way there can be a problem.”

Bill could see his ex-wife giving serious consideration to their logic, turning the words over in her mind, looking for flaws. He had spent nearly sixteen years married to Sandra, and he could still read her expressions with ease. She would have made a lousy poker player. It pained him to offer up a solution that would mean he didn’t get to see his little girl for nearly three months, but he had to admit, he was more than a little concerned for her safety, regardless of Canfield’s assurances. If leaving the area for a while was what it took to keep her out of harm’s way, he was one hundred percent in favor of the idea.

The kitchen was silent as the small group awaited Sandra’s reaction. “Well, there aren’t many options. It’s either pack up and leave today or wait just a few more days. Either way, we’re getting her out of here.” Still, nobody spoke. She sighed and turned to her husband. “I want you to call the travel agent, right now, and book a trip for us. For the summer. Starting the day after graduation.”

“Of course,” he said. “Where would you like to go?”

“I don’t care—somewhere well away from here.”

CHAPTER 28

MARTIN FELT STRANGELY AT ease as he sat in the school bus, just another driver waiting in the long line of buses outside the high school at the end of the day. The big vehicles rumbled, filling the air with the oily smell of dozens of diesel engines. He had been a little concerned about other drivers poking their heads into the bus with the intention of chit-chatting with their dead friend while they waited for their passengers, so he had prepared a cover story about being a newly hired substitute driver, just in case, but it hadn’t turned out to be a problem.

His fellow drivers sat behind the wheels of their vehicles, staring straight ahead through the tinted windshields like automatons. Probably regulations, Martin decided; they weren’t permitted to leave the cabs with their engines running just in case one of the budding, young delinquents came out of school early and decided to take a bus for a joy ride.

After disposing of the driver’s body inside the stolen Hyundai and then hiking back to her house, Martin had pulled his disguise out of his backpack and hurriedly applied it. It was nothing elaborate, just a mullet wig—making him look like a 1980s vintage Billy Ray Cyrus—which he then covered with a green, John Deere baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Above his upper lip he applied a fake brown mustache, and he was good to go.

There was no point going overboard; it wasn’t like he was trying to fool Sherlock Holmes, for crying out loud. All he had to do was alter his appearance just enough so a seventeen-year-old girl wouldn’t recognize him; a girl who would undoubtedly be distracted and not paying the slightest attention to who was behind the wheel of her bus anyway. She would be engrossed in a conversation with her best friend, frantically texting another friend, or lost in the music of her iPod. Or, more likely, all three at once. Whatever.

Martin felt confident Carli Ferguson would not walk onto the bus and examine the face of her driver to ensure it was not the same guy who had handed her the threatening letter two days ago. No one would expect him to take the bold step he was planning today, least of all a naïve, small-town high-school girl, which was exactly why he was doing it.

The front doors of the school were thrown open, and a swarm of students began to exit, moving faster and looking more alert than they probably had all day. After squeezing through the natural bottleneck of the doorway, the kids fanned out and began searching for their buses, scanning the long yellow row of vehicles parked along the access road leading from the street to the paved parking lot behind the school.

Each bus had its own number on a white placard in the side window. The students searched the row of buses for their number, then clambered aboard. Martin knew the process would take only about five minutes after the school’s doors had swung open; the students weren’t anxious to spend any more time at the school than was absolutely necessary.

Martin held a newspaper to his face and pretended to read as the kids boarded, confident in the anonymity his disguise afforded but doing his best not to watch as the teens climbed on. He was anxious and nervous but trying to project an air of routine boredom. It was not an easy look to achieve, especially knowing that any one of the girls climbing the aluminum steps and brushing his arm on the way down the center row might be his angel, the girl with whom he would soon be enjoying a glorious week of unbridled passion.

The bus was roughly half full, and things were progressing smoothly when one of the boarding students peered at him closely and asked, “Where’s Mrs. Bengston?”

Martin’s heart began hammering a staccato beat in his chest, and, for a brief moment, he feared maybe the kid could hear it. His first instinct was to reach for the semi-automatic pistol concealed under the waistband of his jeans, but he controlled it. There was no reason to overreact. Yet.