FOUR
Every once in a while on the half-mile ride up the winding road a streetlight appeared out of the fog, looking like a hovering alien spacecraft. The dark, featureless mass of woods glided by to either side. The yellow center line and the stripe along edge of the road seemed like the only things grounded in the real world.
As they drove by ever more houses at the edge of Milford Falls proper, Owen rested an elbow on the armrest. Her gun was under the lid of that armrest. With him leaning on it, she knew she would never be able to get to it.
When the neon sign for the Riley Motel began to materialize out of the fog, his left hand reached down to gently clasp her bare right knee. As she turned in to the motel’s parking lot, the hand slid up the inside of her thigh to her crotch. When she put the truck in park, he twisted toward her and shoved his big right hand down inside the top of her low-rise shorts.
Before he could worm his fingers into her, and without making a fuss about it, she simply put her wrist under his and levered his hand back out, as if to say she considered him nothing more than a harmless oaf.
“You feel nice down there,” he said, speaking from a daze of desire. “I like a natural pussy, not shaved bald like whores do today. I like the way you left a patch of hair.”
“Glad you approve,” she said in an icy tone. “We’re here. Get out.”
“Why don’t you come on in and we can finish what we started.”
She knew he was speaking from within the fantasy he had already begun to construct.
“We didn’t start anything. Like I said, you’re not my type. Ordinary guys are a turnoff.”
“Come on—”
“No.”
He sat back, the stern finality of the word yanking him out of his trance. He blinked.
“I’m no ordinary guy,” he said, rather defiantly.
“Bullshit. You’re halfway decent looking, but I already told you, I’m into bad boys and you aren’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know that you haven’t got what it takes to be the kind of guy I go for. You’re a gutless nobody, a poser, trying to talk yourself up and playing the part of a badass to impress me. I’ve met a hundred guys like you. You’re all the same. You’re ordinary, like them.”
His eyes flashed with anger. “I’m not ordinary. I’ve killed people.”
Deliberately showing no reaction, Angela looked over at him for a long moment. She rolled her eyes as she shook her head in disgust.
“You haven’t got the balls to kill anyone. You’d wet your pants if you tried to grab someone and they told you to fuck off.”
“I’m not kidding.” He lowered his voice as he leaned in. “I’ve killed people,” he said again.
“Yeah, right. You’ve killed people. Good for you.” By her tone, she let him know that she didn’t believe him, even though she knew it was true. “Now get out.”
“Did you hear about that whore who disappeared? Carrie something …”
Angela knew who he was talking about. Carrie Stratton was no whore. She was a nurse who worked at the hospital.
The hospital usually used overnight-delivery services, but if it was after the cutoff time for a pickup and there was urgent need, the hospital sometimes used a courier service, and Angela’s courier service was usually their choice to rush specimens to one of several labs in bigger cities. On rare occasions they had even sent her to specialty labs in Buffalo, Newark, or New York City.
It wasn’t a big hospital, so she knew a number of the people who worked there. She’d briefly met Carrie Stratton a couple of times. Carrie had a son and daughter not yet in their teens. Her husband worked for the power company.
Carrie had taken the night shift to earn extra money for her family. Everyone liked her. Angela had picked up a specimen a few days back and Carrie had been the one who checked it out.
It had been late at night and they told her it was critical that she get it to a special lab for testing first thing in the morning. When she was pulled over by a state trooper on I-86, she showed him the package from the hospital marked “urgent” and got out of a speeding ticket with a stern warning. Angela didn’t heed the warning but she did get the sample to the lab on time.
That was the night before Carrie had vanished.
Everyone at the hospital was upset over the disappearance of the young nurse. They knew that she wasn’t the sort to run off or something. Her car was still in the parking lot. Everyone feared she had been abducted. Even though lots of people were looking for her, hoping to find her safe and sound, everyone was grimly aware that the search might not end happily.
Right up until the moment Owen had walked into the bar a couple of hours earlier and she’d looked into his eyes, Angela hadn’t known, either, what had happened to Carrie Stratton.
“I think I heard something about a woman people were looking for,” Angela said. “What about her?”
Owen leaned in a little, lowering his voice. “I killed her.”
“Knock it off, Owen,” she said as she scanned the wet cars in the dark lot. “People say she ran away with a new lover.”
“I was her new lover,” he said, snorting a laugh. “But she didn’t run away. I fucked the bitch. Fucked her good and hard. She told me that she could identify me and that I was going to go to prison. For what? Fucking a whore? So, I killed her.”
Angela let out an impatient sigh. “You’re a goddamn liar, Owen, trying to play like you’re a badass.”
Owen cocked his head to the side. “If I was telling you the truth?”
Angela appraised him in the reddish light from the motel sign. “If you really had the balls … but I don’t believe—”
“I can prove it.”
Angela rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”
“No, really. I can fucking prove it.”
“How?”
“I can show you where I put her body.”
“You could show me her body?” Angela ran a black fingernail down his arm as she let her lips spread in a smile. “I’ve never been with a man who killed someone. Well—other than that guy who killed a man in a bar fight, but that was more of an accident than anything. It wasn’t deliberate. It would take some kind of man to set out to do something like that.”
“Did you ever watch someone die?” he asked as he stared into the memory. “Watch the life go out of them?” He looked back at Angela. “An ordinary guy wouldn’t have the nerve. They couldn’t do it.”
She knew he was driven to dominate women, to hurt them. He liked to watch them die. It aroused him sexually. That lust was growing ever stronger, and there was less time between his kills. It wouldn’t be long before he was aching to kill again. Just recalling it was making him ache to kill again.
“Maybe I had you wrong.”
“Come on up to my room.”
“Come up to your room?” She withdrew her hand. “Okay, I get it. You heard about the disappearance on the news and now you’re trying to take credit. You think it will get you laid if you say you’re the guy who killed her. Nice try, asshole. I gave you the ride you wanted, now get the fuck out.”
“No really, I wasted the bitch. I killed her and dumped her body.” Owen waved a hand in a northerly direction. “Up that way. Up the road that way.”
Angela knew that the police and a lot of volunteers were conducting an extensive search of the area around Milford Falls. They hadn’t found anything yet.
The first instant she had looked into his eyes when he’d come into the bar, Angela had known exactly what Owen had done. Carrie hadn’t told him that she could identify him and he was going to go to jail. That was his just his excuse to justify killing her. In her mind’s eye, Angela saw Carrie begging, promising not to say anything if he let her go. She told him that she had two children who needed her. She had cried and begged for her life. She had shown him their photos in a locket. Carrie couldn’t know what Angela knew—that begging for her life only amped Owen up.
That was when he felt the most powerful. It got him hard.
Angela had seen all of that. But because it had been so dark and foggy, she hadn’t been quite able to discern in her vision the location of where he’d dumped the body.
She tapped the side of her thumb on the steering wheel. “How far up that way?”
“Fuck, I don’t know,” Owen said, getting a little surly that she wouldn’t simply take his word for it. “Far enough that they won’t likely find her for a long time, if ever.”
“How far is that?”
“From here? From the motel?” He stared off into the fog. “Thirty-one miles,” he finally said.
He knew exactly how far it was to where he’d left Carrie’s body when he had finished with her. Killers could usually return to the exact spot without any difficulty. Sometimes they visited the corpse to help them relive the excitement of the kill. Sometimes they were curious if anyone had found the body, so they would keep it under surveillance. On occasion they would even volunteer to be part of the search party.
With a tilt of her head, Angela gestured toward the motel sign. “Lots of people passing through stay at the Riley Motel. The police would question those kinds of people. How come the police didn’t question you?”
“They did.” His smile turned sly. “I stayed around long enough to make sure they did.”
“You wanted them to question you? If you really did kill her, and the police questioned you, they would figure out that you did it.”
He leaned back and gestured his superiority with a flick of a hand. “Cops are stupid. They don’t have a fucking clue. Especially with someone who knows what they’re doing.
“They don’t got a witness or a body. They don’t got shit. I wanted to stick around and see the looks on their faces. They always get this serious look when they’re searching for a killer, but they don’t know they’re looking right at him. Know what I mean? I’m right there in front of them and it’s like they’re fucking blind. Kind of like you were until I told you. You looked right at me, just like the police did, and you didn’t believe I could be a guy who could kill someone.”
For Owen, the game with the police was part of the thrill. Killing was the rush, but it faded. He thought he was smarter than the police. Playing games with authorities was his way of keeping the excitement going. That and drinking.
“Yeah,” Angela agreed, “I guess it’s not like they could tell that you’ve killed people just by looking in your eyes.”
But Angela could.
From that first glance it had been instantaneous knowledge, almost as if she were sharing—experiencing—his detailed memory of everything he had done to Carrie. In fact, in that same instant she had seen all four women he had killed. She knew the details of what he’d done to each of them.
When she had been young, Angela had sometimes been overcome with agonizing pain in her legs. Her grandmother told her it was caused by her bones growing so fast. Looking into a killer’s eyes brought her that same kind of pain. It made her bones ache.
She knew that other people couldn’t do what she could do, couldn’t recognize a killer by looking in his eyes. She knew she was different from other people.
She believed that her mother’s chronic drug use when she had been pregnant with Angela had been the cause. That constant soup of drugs swirling around inside her mother’s womb as Angela’s fetus was developing had resulted in her being a freak of nature.
Her grandmother said that Angela was lucky all those drugs her mother took hadn’t left Angela retarded, or blind, or crippled. She said once that Angela was lucky to have been born alive. Angela didn’t feel lucky.
She knew that she wasn’t normal and never could be.
Angela knew that she had been born broken.
She knew that her desires, the things that drove her—the things that made her feel alive—were not normal.
And now those things that drove her had her focused in on Owen like a laser.
“Easy enough to brag, to take credit, to say you fooled the police,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you really did it. Lots of losers confess to crimes they didn’t do. Maybe the cops believed you’re innocent because you are.”
“They believed me because I’m smarter than they are,” he snapped. “They can’t catch me.”
“Maybe.” She knew she had to push him that last inch. “Like I said, it’s easy enough to make up the story. Nowhere near as easy to be a man who could actually do it.”
He looked over at her out of the corner of his eye. “I can show you where I left her body.”
She stared at him for a moment. “Thirty-one miles. You said it was thirty-one miles?”
“That’s right.” Owen gestured out into the darkness. “That way. Thirty-one miles. Come on, I’ll show you, then you’ll know I’m telling the truth.” He was beginning to enjoy taking her into his confidence. Unlike other women, she wasn’t repulsed or horrified, but actually interested. With a sly smile he revealed more. “She wasn’t my first, either.”
“You mean to say you’ve killed people before?”
“Two others.” When he looked over at her she could see how bloodshot his eyes were. “She was the third.”
No, Carrie was the fourth. In his drunken haze he was forgetting the skinny prostitute he had strangled to death in a flophouse in Pennsylvania. She’d been a heroin addict who had been killing herself for a long time, not unlike Angela’s mother. Owen had simply finished the job for her. But this was not the time to refresh his memory.
“I’ve never been with a guy who actually killed someone, not deliberately, anyway. That’s fucking hot. At least, it is if you’re telling me the truth.” Angela put the truck in gear and drove out of the lot. “You better not be bullshitting me.”
“You’ll see,” he said with smug confidence.