EIGHTEEN
After she finished cleaning the truck of Owen’s blood and fingerprints, Angela went inside the cabin and unlocked the door to the basement. Her grandparents had always kept the door locked. Angela did as well.
She flicked on the light and then descended the steep wooden stairs. The basement had a low ceiling and was only about half the length of the house. Granite ledges sloping down from both ends formed a shallow V under the house. The floor of the house spanned that V, resting on the rock ledge at either end.
The teak floorboards of the basement were spaced about a quarter inch apart so that the floor could be washed down with the hose stored on the wall at one end. Water would run through the spaces and down the sloping stone underneath and then into the chasm under the far side of the basement.
That chasm was carefully concealed with a good-size hatch. Her grandfather called that chasm the hell hole.
She suspected that it had been created by a split in the gigantic granite formations of the mountains to either side, as if the mountains had pulled apart and the ground had cracked open, leaving a fissure that went down into the bowels of the earth. Her grandfather had put the geological oddity to use. Angela suspected he had chosen to build the cabin on that particular spot specifically because of that rift in the earth.
After clearing away the trees, accumulated deadfall, and brush that had originally covered and concealed the opening, he built his place resting right over that abyss.
Angela liked to think of the two mountains, one to each side, as her grandparents watching over her. Grandmother Mountain to the left and Grandfather Mountain to the right, their spirits always there stoically sheltering her.
Angela knew that there had to be a bottom to the hell hole under the basement floor, but everything she’d tried to measure the depth had been unsuccessful. She once bought rolls of string, tied a big bolt to the end of one, and then fed the string down the hole, tying on the end of new rolls when one ran out, until she ran out of rolls. It surprised her that she hadn’t hit bottom. In all, the string she had used had been over five hundred feet long.
The metal bolt at the end of the string had swung around, near the top bouncing off wide walls as it descended, but lower down it hit nothing, so she knew the abyss wasn’t constricted. She was even more surprised when she let the string go and watched the end flutter away down into the darkness. She counted the seconds until it hit bottom. She never heard a sound. As far as Angela knew, it might as well still be falling.
When she’d aimed a powerful light down into the hell hole, the light revealed smooth granite walls that sloped inward a bit, then widened again, then got crooked for a bit, and then opened wider yet as they descended until the light simply evaporated in the darkness.
Her grandfather had told her to be careful around the hell hole because if she ever fell in she would never be seen again. There were no shelves of rock, stone spurs, or roots to grab hold of if you fell in, no corners to wedge a foot, nowhere to get a grip to climb back out. Greasy layers of moss grew in places and covered the flat stone where moisture seeped through fine cracks. It was nothing but basically a slippery smooth and somewhat crooked granite shaft down into a great abyss.
She knew that her grandfather was right. If you fell in, there was nothing to stop you. No one would ever hear you screaming for help on the way down, and you would not survive the fall. Even if you somehow did, you would never be able to climb out. You would die in the cold blackness.
Angela suspected that over the thousands of years before her grandfather had built the cabin, all sorts of animals had probably slipped on the sloping ledge and fallen to their death. She imagined that there were prehistoric predators down at the bottom of the abyss. Sometimes she wondered if there might even be a saber-toothed tiger down there.
Angela had once tossed a flare down into the bottomless pit. She watched it fall until the shrinking dot of flickering reddish light had gradually vanished into nothingness.
Another time she had held several smoking pieces of incense over the hole to see if air was moving up or down through the opening, which would indicate another entrance somewhere down in the hole—a side shaft—but the smoke revealed absolutely no air movement. The hole was not the entrance into a subterranean cave system. It was just a hole. A very deep hole, but just a hole.
When her grandfather had shown her the hell hole, she had asked him if Frankie was down in that hole. He said only that men like Frankie belonged in hell. As far as Angela was concerned, that told her everything she needed to know.
Frankie was no longer alone in the hell hole. That first man Angela had recognized as a killer had joined him after his three-day introduction to hell. Other men had followed, all killers she had recognized by what she had seen in their eyes. They were killers who would never again harm anyone. Their remains would never be found. They would be down there forever with the other, ancient predators.
Owen would have joined them except that it was more important to Angela that she find out where he had left the body of Carrie Stratton, the last woman he had murdered. Her family needed to know. Owen’s corpse would reveal her location.
Angela pulled the sheath with the knife out of her boot. She tossed the knife, in its sheath, down the hell hole. She heard it skip against the stone walls a few times on its way down, and then there was nothing but silence as it descended.
Next, she sat on the metal chair off to the other side of the basement and removed her boots and socks. She tossed them down the gaping black hole. Next, she shed her shorts, underpants, and top, dropping them down into the darkness.
Everything she’d had on went down into the abyss.
She didn’t want to have to worry about some forensic scientist finding blood in a seam of her boots, or a speck in the fabric of her shorts or top. Part of the way she kept anyone from finding any evidence was to get rid of it in a way that it would never be found. That included the knife. Owen’s blood was all over that knife. For all she knew, there were seams in the knife’s construction that held blood evidence.
The only way she could be sure the authorities never found any evidence was if they never found any evidence. Simple as that. The only way she could do that and be safe was if everything always went down the hell hole. She never made exceptions. It wasn’t worth the risk.
From one of the cabinets, Angela retrieved a new knife in a new sheath. It was just like the one she’d used on Owen. There were a dozen and a half more of them, all the same, all razor sharp, lined up in a row in the cabinet.
Completely naked, with the new knife, she went back upstairs to shower and get some clothes. She wished the experience of killing Owen could have lasted longer. She would have loved to have given him more of what he deserved. At least he was dead, now, and couldn’t ever hurt anyone again.
But already, that glorious, intoxicating high was fading.
After she showered and put on some clean clothes, she checked her phone on the nightstand.
There was a missed call from Hospice.
She could have called them back—there was always someone available. Instead she sent a text.
Sorry I missed your call. I had to work.
She deliberately didn’t provide any other information or say when she would have time.
She tossed the phone back on the nightstand and retrieved her Walther P22 and the Gemtech suppressor. Most people called them silencers, but her grandfather had told her that they were suppressors because they suppressed sound, they didn’t completely silence it. She pulled out a couple of boxes of subsonic ammunition and loaded ten magazines.
She liked using the suppressor when she practiced, especially at night. Night, and fog, seemed to carry sound for miles. She didn’t like to unnecessarily attract attention, especially attention from gunshots.
Gunshots drew sheriff’s deputies and game wardens. She’d found that out a long time ago and decided that she didn’t want to repeat it. There was nothing illegal about shooting on her own property, but they still had come to investigate the reports of gunfire. Also, when using a suppressor she didn’t need to use hearing protection, which allowed her to be more alert for anything out of the ordinary, like someone sneaking up on her.
Suppressors required federal licenses to be legal, the same as fully automatic weapons. She didn’t want a machine gun, but she wanted suppressors, and she didn’t want to go through the long and arduous process of getting a federal license for them. That process would surely raise suspicions and put a red flag by her name.
One good thing about knowing drug dealers and their friends was that they could usually get you just about anything illegal you wanted if you had the cash. Angela had the cash, and bought a large number of suppressors, no questions asked, no ID, no background check, no paperwork, no waiting.
Even with a suppressor, gunshots emitted a loud crack when the bullet went supersonic. The subsonic rounds avoided the ballistic crack, so with those subsonic rounds and a suppressor the gun was virtually silent. Most of the sound was the slide cycling as it ejected the spent round and loaded a live one.
Even though those subsonic rounds were slower, they were still lethal. A bullet needed to be traveling at only two hundred feet per second to penetrate the human skull, providing it hit relatively squarely. If it hit that deadly triangle, it was guaranteed to kill.
Outside, Angela wound up her grandfather’s triangular target. She practiced nearly every day. She practiced so much that she could just about hit the target with her eyes closed.
Practice was also a form of focused violence, which helped extend the high of dispatching Owen.
Angela took shooting practice seriously. That very first man she had recognized as a killer opened her eyes to her strange ability. He would have added her to his kill tally when he snuck into her cabin had she not been such a good shot. Her grandfather had taught her well.
She missed her grandparents. Some killer had put a bullet in the back of their heads—some killer that she knew she could now recognize by looking into his eyes.
He had better pray to God that Angela never found out who he was.