FIVE
Owen directed her onto a little-used, narrow, winding secondary road. The long, backwoods loop off the main roads, called Duffey Road, went to a scattering of houses and camps.
At first, not too far out of Milford Falls, there were a number of squat, ramshackle houses close to the road. Some of them had patches of black tar paper nailed to dingy white siding. More than one had a caved-in roof. A few of those had blue tarps over them to try to hold out the elements, but over time, those too had shredded.
Derelict vehicles, along with old appliances, discarded lawnmowers, storm windows, bicycles, rusted barbecues, and broken lawn furniture, lay scattered around some of the properties. It all sat silently rusting or rotting away among the weeds and overgrown brush.
A few old houses had such a large variety of discarded scrap that the yards looked more like junkyards than homes. Other properties had outbuildings with old tractors and ancient trucks up on blocks. Some of the places had rutted roads leading back to barns in fields behind houses. More than one place had several no-trespassing signs nailed to trees and fences.
Dim porch lights at a few of the houses gave off an eerie glow in the fog, but most of the places were long abandoned and dark. There used to be a textile mill and a variety of other manufacturing plants in Milford Falls that employed a lot of people, but one by one they shut down, leaving no work, so a lot of people moved out. Milford Falls was not an easy place to make a living, so many residents had simply picked up and moved on.
Past the houses there was nothing to interrupt the forest. In places pine trees crowded right up to the edge of the asphalt road. Some of the switchbacks were barely more than a car width wide as the road made its way through the mountainous countryside. The fog, along with the wet, black asphalt and lack of lane markings, made it hard for Angela to see where she was going. It made the drive nerve-racking—to say nothing of sitting beside a man who had raped and killed women because he got off on it.
The county apparently didn’t do much to maintain the road other than lop off any errant limb if it hung down in the way. The road was potholed and crumbling in places. Layers of leaves and pine needles had long accumulated along the sides, obscuring the edge of the pavement. With so many people moved out and leaving abandoned places behind, it felt like the forest was gradually moving in to reclaim the land.
Owen had turned moody as they drove along the lonely road to the spot where he’d dumped the body. She suspected he was resentful of having to provide proof that he’d actually killed a woman. Angela knew that had she not gotten him drunk first, he would not have been as willing to brag about having killed people. She didn’t think that he could be getting sober this soon, but it still concerned her.
Angela was also well aware that her companion in her truck had a hair-trigger temper. To keep him content and thus committed, she had to tolerate his hand down inside the front of her shorts as she drove. Having implied she would welcome such treatment from the right kind of man, she knew that if she was too insistent about rejecting his groping at this point it could easily make him angry enough to simply decide to add her to his kill tally.
She needed him to think of her as sort of a coconspirator impressed with his daring so that he would willingly show her the body or else it might never be found.
So, she did what she had learned to do as a young girl when she had no choice about what was happening to her: she let her mind slip away to another place. It didn’t matter what was happening to her; she wasn’t there. She was gone, her body absently driving on through the drizzly night.
Thirty-one miles up the narrow secondary road, Owen pulled his hand out from the front of her shorts and yelled for her to slow down, bringing her back from that faraway place.
“There!” he called out as he leaned in front of her to point to the left just before they reached an old steel-girder bridge over a more frequently used two-lane road that went to the small village of Bradley. “This is it. Turn in here.”
Angela slowed to a stop. She hit the wiper stalk again to clear the windshield as she squinted into the dark. The bridge surface ahead of them was rain-slick wooden planks. Limbs, heavy with wet leaves, leaned in over the road.
“Are you sure this is the place?” She pulled up the short zipper on her shorts. “I don’t see any road.”
“I never said it was a fucking road,” Owen growled. “It’s just a place where people pull over to turn around or something. Just pull in here.”
Angela turned in to a gap in the glistening green tangle of brush and trees. It was indeed a turnoff. She was concerned that it might be muddy. She definitely did not want to get her truck bogged down out in the middle of nowhere on a seldom-used old road with a killer who could easily get unpleasant ideas.
By the way grasses had overgrown the barely detectable ruts, it appeared that the turnoff hadn’t been used for years. Fortunately, it wasn’t muddy. There was a weight limit on the narrow old one-lane bridge over the highway, so it might have simply been a place where heavy trucks could turn around if they had to, or perhaps it was once an old fire road.
The turnoff only went in fifty or sixty feet before she had to stop because saplings had grown in, blocking the way forward. Even so, with the way it hooked a little to the right, they were easily far enough in that the trees would conceal them from any passing car, especially at night. That was undoubtedly why Owen had picked this spot to rape and murder Carrie Stratton.
Owen opened his door. “We have to walk the rest of the way.”
Before she could get her gun out of the center console, he leaned back in. “What the fuck are you waiting for?”
“Nothing,” she said as she opened her door and got out. “How far is it?”
Owen lifted his arm to point through the moonlit fog. “Back that way. Come on. I’ll show you.”
As they walked into an area of deciduous saplings, Angela could see a small stream to the right down a slight embankment. Some distance away beyond the stream and the trees was the highway that went under the bridge. Back in the expanse of these woods it was possible that Carrie’s body would never be discovered. It wouldn’t be the first body to vanish in these mountains, never to be seen again, or the last.
It was a lonely, miserable place to die. Especially the way Carrie had died.
“You’d better not be bullshitting me,” Angela said to keep his mind on the task of proof as she followed him farther back into woods that grew dense and thick. She didn’t want his mind to wander and get other ideas.
The thick boughs of fir trees would muffle the distant sound of any cars going under the bridge and on up the road, so they certainly would have muffled Carrie’s screams.
If things went sideways, no one would ever hear Angela’s screams, either.
The moon was out, giving the damp, low-lying blanket of fog a faint glow. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to see by as she made her way through a stand of oak. Owen stumbled over rocks here and there. Despite being drunk, he knew precisely where his prize lay and he was eager to show it to her.
Angela had lost sight of her truck back in the fog beyond the trees and thick patches of brush. She counted her strides to mark the distance. The farther in they went, the more the forest had grown in to obscure any trace of the old road. Owen wound his way down a deer path through brush and then along ground thick with fallen leaves between maple and birch trees, avoiding the thicker tangles of brush and denser groves of fir trees. Leaves and needles dripped big drops of water they had combed from the fog. The wet aroma of the woods would have been pleasant if not for the reason she was there.
Angela began to hear the stream burbling among rocks. Moss, spongy under her boots, carpeted the ground in low spots. Water oozed up with every step on the beds of moss. She grew ever more concerned by how far back into the woods Owen was leading her.
“Bad things happen in the woods,” she murmured, not realizing she had said it out loud.
Owen grinned his agreement back over his shoulder, then pointed. “Just over there.”
Not far from the stream, Angela finally spotted the corpse. Owen led her right over to the naked body. It lay on its side, one arm cast out. Angela saw a small pile of bloody blue scrubs not far away. In her mind’s eye, Angela saw again what she had seen when Owen had first walked into the bar and looked into her eyes. She saw Carrie trembling, bleeding, and begging for her life as Owen ordered her to take off the scrubs. The true horror of her ordeal had only begun.
In the warm, wet conditions, the body had already begun to decompose. There were places on the soft belly of the corpse where animals, likely ravens, had torn open the flesh to feast on what was within. Maggots writhed in the open wounds. The smell drove Angela back a step.
“See, I told you,” Owen said, sounding irritated that he’d had to go to all this trouble to prove it to her.
Besides the wounds inflicted after death by animals, there were gaping cuts in Carrie’s chest and neck that had been inflicted by a human animal.
The sight and condition of the body confirmed for Angela the details of what she had seen the first instant she had looked into Owen’s eyes. Death had been slow in coming as Owen became ever more intoxicated with the brutality of what he was doing. Owen liked his victims to be alive so that he could dominate them, terrify them, hurt them. Carrie had fulfilled his sickest desires.
Angela held her breath and put a hand over her mouth and nose before squatting down beside the body to confirm one last detail of the vision she got from Owen’s eyes. As expected, there was a delicate gold chain hanging from between Carrie’s lips, part of it dangling down to coil in the mud by her cheek.
The fine gold chain held a small locket with the photos of her two children. Owen had forced her to swallow it after she had shown him the photos of her two kids in the locket, one in each half, to prove to him that she had children who needed her. She had mistakenly believed it would make her worthy of sympathy. Owen had forced her to swallow the locket to show her he had none. When he pounded his big fists into her gut as she lay on her back on the rocky ground, she had vomited it back up into her mouth.
Angela rose up beside Owen as he gestured to the body. “There’s your fucking proof. Just like I told you.”
She couldn’t even remember how many times growing up when that could easily have been the way she ended up.
“Okay, I believe you. Let’s get back.”
As she walked beside him, looking over at the size of him in the hazy moonlight, she was all too aware that she was alone out in the middle of nowhere with a monster. A monster who had already killed four women for the thrill of it. They had fought for their lives. They had been no match for him.
Not only did he weigh probably twice what Angela did, but much of that weight was muscle. She felt like she was balancing on a tightrope as she walked beside him.
At the same time, it was a glorious rush of emotion.
As her pickup came into sight, Angela was acutely conscious of where her gun was. She often carried a gun inside the waistband at the small of her back, but dressed in shorts and a cropped top, she had no practical way to hide a gun on her—to say nothing of it being illegal to carry a concealed weapon—so she’d left it in the truck. She knew that to get to it now, she would have to get into the truck before he did.
That was only one more detail swirling in the storm of things already thundering around her mind.
“You seen the body,” Owen said as they walked toward the pickup. “Now it’s time for me to take it the way you like it.”
“I don’t want to do it in the mud,” she told him in an assertive tone.
He didn’t like her tone. Not one bit.
The switch flipped.
In a heartbeat, he snatched a handful of her hair in his big fist and pulled her from her feet.
“I don’t really give a fuck what you want, you little cocksucker,” he growled through gritted teeth. “Now I get what I want.”