18 Seconds

by George D. Shuman

It was black inside the bus; he dropped her on a mattress and left her lying there while he lit a match to a lantern. There was a noisy flicker, then light; she could smell kerosene and chemicals in the air.

  She looked around and grew wide-eyed when she saw the metal rings welded to a rod at the edge of the mattress.

  He was going to tie her down. Going to rape her.

  Sykes shook a cigarette from a pack and tapped it down on the face of his watch.

  The bus windows had been spray-painted black; she could see scratches in the paint in the reflection of the lantern. Oh, God, she thought. Not this!

  When he got his breath once more, he crouched by the lantern and opened a pack of plastic Flexi-Cuffs, knelt and pulled her arms and legs apart, and bound them to the steel rings. Then he produced a roll of duct tape, ripped off a piece with his teeth, and put it across her mouth.

  “Daddy’s got to go to work for a while, but we’ll play later. I promise. Okay?”

  He laughed and blew out the lantern.

  John Payne sat in the living room of his apartment, feet planted squarely on the floor, rocking back and forth in faultless rhythm. His eyes were fixed on a spot on the television, but Angie knew he wasn’t really watching.

  They had never bothered to buy a house, though they once had talked about a small farm outside the city in Lancaster. Never went on exotic vacations, though they’d planned to visit Hawaii and Australia. For whatever reason, the desires had all gone away.

  The apartment had become a place for them to meet, to pretend to believe in the marriage that had been over for years.

  “She cares for you,” she said.

  Payne’s eyes turned to meet hers.

  “Oh, come on, John. You’re always giving her credit for how brilliant she is. Don’t you even know that much? You talk about her incredible intuition and yet you lie here night after night, wondering if she cares about you?”

  Payne’s mouth opened and Angie leaned forward. “I suppose you’re afraid of what will happen to me. This isn’t what I wanted either, John. It’s not there anymore. Move on. Let me move on. Go to her. I’ll find someone, don’t you worry.”

  He’d never wanted to hurt her. The fact was, he did love her, just not in the way she wanted him to. He didn’t have the kind of feelings for her that he did for Sherry.

  “I know you’ve never cheated on me, John, not in the physical sense. You’re not a bad man for wanting someone else. You’re just not doing either of us any good. We can work out the details when you get back, but when you’re with her in Wildwood, you tell her.”

  She stood and walked over to him, put a hand on his shoulder, and kissed him on the top of his head, leaving his hair wet with her tears as she walked out of the room.

  21

  THURSDAY NIGHT, JUNE 2

  WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY

  O’Shaughnessy slapped a mosquito on her neck and turned the police radio down. The three-to-eleven shift was coming out of the Public Works garages for the night; men walked past her to get to their cars in the employee lot. Some looked in at her, others paid her little mind.

  She had a picture of Sandy Lyons in her folder, but he wouldn’t be among them. Sandy was on his day off. The meat wagon would be parked for the rest of the night.

  She put her head against the headrest and watched the last of them walk by. Reagan had asked about her birthday party today. It was only two weeks away and she needed to arrange something with the other mothers. She’d pretty much settled on McDonald’s, Reagan’s favorite. She knew Tim would want to be there and it would be easier for him to slip in and out if they weren’t at the house.

  She wondered if Tim had heard rumors about her and Clarke Hamilton. Could that have prompted his commitment? If he had, he’d keep it to himself, because that was how Tim was. She honestly didn’t want to hurt him, but the possibility was real once they started seeing other people. How far could it go before it became irreversible?

  The separation, she’d thought, had been necessary to give her time to grieve or whatever in the hell she was doing. Maybe more accurately, to exact some form of revenge. She could see now how easily a separation could get out of hand. It might only be isolation and anger in the beginning, but then other people started working themselves into the equation, and things began to snowball until there was nothing left to salvage.

  She spoke with Tim’s mother almost every other day and found it peculiar that the woman never asked her about the separation. Mostly, she was thankful that her mother-in-law respected their privacy and tried not to meddle like so many other mothers-in-law might do. O’Shaughnessy knew that the woman had hope it would blow over quickly, just like her own daughters did, that they all wished she would take him back so they could get on with their lives.

  Her window was down; she popped a Nicorette and was leaning over to reach in the glove box for a penlight when suddenly she sensed someone behind her. She sat up quickly and there was a man looking in her window. Not from several feet away, but right there with his head in her window! He was an older man with droopy eyelids and a frightful-looking scar across his neck. The radio crackled; he smiled and stood upright and walked away without saying a word.

  She could hear her heart beating in her chest. His boots ground on the gravel until he reached a dark-colored Jeep, got in, started the ignition, and sped away.

  She sat there, hands shaking. She felt her service weapon pressing against her back, but she hadn’t thought of it in that moment. It had all happened too suddenly. Why would someone do that? What in the hell was he thinking?

  June bugs whacked noisily against the dome-shaped street lamps as O’Shaughnessy made her way toward the garage. A veil of low clouds raced across the moon. It was light enough to see without a flashlight.

  The lot was empty now and quiet but for the insects. The garage doors were closed, the evening crew gone home. She found the side entrance unlocked, as Ben had promised.

  The steel building echoed her every sound—the door latch, the light switch, her shoes scuffing along the concrete. The room smelled of sour garbage and greasy machinery. She was careful not to brush up against anything, cognizant that the scratching sounds were rats climbing the steel beams. She walked in front of the trucks to the opposite end of the building and at last to a small dump truck numbered 33 sitting on a drain grate. There was a high-pressure hose suspended from a mount overhead, a do-it-yourself carwash. She removed a small plastic jar and a penknife from her pocket, and took a scratch of paint from under the headlight, then another from a rear quarter panel. She sealed the container and walked around the vehicle, playing the light over it until she reached the doors, where she stood on the running board and looked inside.

  There were rags on the floor and a pair of wire snips on the seat. There was a radio under the dash, microphone off the hook, lying on the floor mat. There was a tear in the fabric of the ceiling, and the upholstery was stained black in places. She noticed the side-view mirror was cracked and the passenger-side door latch was missing. She continued around the back of it. The bed was still dripping puddles of soapy water onto the ground; she could smell bleach, and there was a bucket and a wet push broom in the corner behind it. The three-to-eleven driver would have just brushed it clean. Ben had said that was the protocol.

  She used the light to look under the tarp and check the bed for anything out of the ordinary: a hair clip, a piece of jewelry, a broken fingernail. She got on her knees and looked under the chassis. Then she heard a noise outside the shed and froze in place.

  Footsteps were crossing the gravel in front of the closed bay doors.

  She got to her feet and reached for her weapon, quietly pulling it from her holster. Whoever was out there was just on the other side of the door. She could see the shadow moving along the crack of light along the bottom. She waited a full minute, then began creeping down the length of the garage toward the side entrance, staying behind the big compactor trucks. Rats watched her from their per
ches on the backs of the big trucks; she stumbled over a hose, striking her knee against a workbench. The door was thirty or forty feet from her now. There was more noise outside, more steps. Running steps. She stopped and waited. Then she ran as fast as she could to the end of the building and threw open the door.

  Nothing.

  She stepped outside into the lot, gun out in front of her, looking in all directions.

  Insects chattered and bugs continued to batter the halogen lights. Her car was alone in the lot. No one else was in sight.

  She walked toward the administration building and checked the doors. There was a swamp behind the buildings that she had no intention of entering. She waited another minute, then turned to go back inside, and when she did a car door slammed and an engine turned over on the highway behind the trees.

  Sandy Lyons?

  She opened the door, this time throwing on the overhead lights, and ran back to the pickup truck. The doors were locked. Maybe that was normal. She made a mental note to check with Ben. The missing door latch inside the cab bothered her, too. She’d formed a picture of Anne Carlino trapped inside the cab and unable to get out. Or maybe Lyons threw his victims in the bed and covered them with the tarp. That would make more sense if they were unconscious or already dead. The bed was disinfected and hosed down at least fifteen times a week. She looked at the drain grate and wondered if anything was trapped beneath it. Wondered if the women were already dead when he put them in the truck.

  Jeremy Smyles hadn’t killed that girl, O’Shaughnessy had always been sure of that, and Billy Weeks had two female witnesses who swore he was back on the boardwalk at eleven the night of the kidnapping. They knew the exact time and date, they’d said, because it was Billy’s “birthday” and they had dreamed up the gift of sleeping with him together.

  Weeks had also given detectives access to his car and apartment and there wasn’t a drop of blood anywhere. Most convincing were the results of the polygraph he’d insisted on taking.

  She played her light over the ceiling, across the back window, and up and down the seats. Then she circled to the passenger side and did it again. No, a new scenario was beginning to take form in her mind. The orange city truck parked by the boardwalk, just a regular part of the landscape, unnoticed by anyone who might have seen.

  She was going around the windows for the last time when something reflected in her light and she stopped and took a breath.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  She played the light carefully around the door. A single strand of hair was caught in the window molding. Her heart began to race. She pinched it between her fingers and pulled it gently; it came away without breaking, nearly two feet long and light brown. Just like Tracy Yoland’s.

  Lyons’s hair was short and black and not an animal in the world could have accounted for what she had in her hand.

  She patted her sports coat pockets with her free hand and found a plastic envelope. She delicately placed the hair into it. Then she sealed it and started to check the rest of the truck.

  It didn’t come easy; indeed, it wouldn’t have come at all, if it hadn’t been for the radio going off in the cab. She looked inside, shining the light down at different angles to see where the crackling noise was coming from. She had seen the two-way radio bolted under the dash, but it was unlit and obviously turned off. So what was she hearing?

  The scanner wasn’t visible from the driver’s-side window, but leaning over the hood and shining her light down into the windshield on the passenger side, she saw a bead of green light from a handheld radio tucked under the seat. It wasn’t the scanner, though, or its existence that made the effort worthwhile. It was the dark reddish spot on the dash only visible when looking down from the hood. It looked like a bloodstain.

  You stupid shit, she thought. You put her inside the truck and now I’ve got you.

  Her heart was pumping. She needed to get help right away. She needed to impound the truck and get it to the crime lab. She knew she could break in and search it without a warrant. The truck was city property. But the blood was too important to lose and a warrant was too easy to get. She was going to do this by the book. No loose ends. No problematic searches. No appeals. She had him and she wasn’t letting go!

  O’Shaughnessy called the dispatcher and told her to take two marked units out of service and send them to her location. She also wanted her midnight detective on the scene. Then she called Clarke at home and asked him to meet her early to approve an affidavit for Judge Vickroy before he went to court. Next she woke Ben Johnson and told him that she was going to be seizing the meat wagon and that she needed him to shut down the city incinerator immediately. Ben made it sound like she’d asked him to cap Vesuvius. “Do you know how long it takes that unit to go down, Lieutenant?”

  She hated to call Gus at home, knowing he’d probably spent the night at the hospital, so she decided to wait until morning. She’d have the truck towed to headquarters, where they could process it in the police garage. She would also let Gus come up with a plan for siphoning the drain in the truck bay and sifting the ashes of the county’s incinerator. There had to be bones or teeth. It only made sense that Lyons would have used the incinerator to dispose of them.

  A small army grew around the Public Works garage that morning. A bleary-eyed Ben Johnson was running between the arriving day shift and the cops and trying to find a quiet place to go through his call-up list to close the incinerator. Incinerators weren’t like kitchen stoves, he kept trying to tell her. It took days to cool the chamber sufficiently before anyone could handle the residue. When pushed, he reduced it to forty-eight hours but still called it a minimum.

  But it wasn’t only that. The community and several surrounding counties relied on the incinerator, which meant he would have to stockpile dead animals and disposable wastes without somehow violating the health codes. During some summer months they burned fifty thousand tons of waste, and income derived from other communities would be lost for any period it was down. In other words, it was going to cost the city money.

  Fingerprint technicians dusted the exterior of the truck, lifting several promising prints from the passenger-side door. A police contract crane took the truck to the impound lot, where Gus’s people would work on the inside. Ben Johnson had to reassign the meat wagon crew and find another truck in his fleet to handle the dead-animal pickups. The only thing that did seem to go right that night was that the new guy, Earl Sykes, called in sick. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about reassigning him while his truck was out of commission.

  O’Shaughnessy agonized all night long about whether to interrogate Sandy Lyons. If it had been a matter of paint samples, she would not have. The results could have waited. But with blood and hair she needed to seize the truck, and it was going to be plain for anyone to see that she was interested in him. If she waited, she would lose the element of surprise. If Lyons had time to think it over, he was going to have his alibi and an attorney ready.

  In the end, she decided to bring him in. At 6:30 A.M. detectives were knocking at his door.

  FRIDAY, JUNE 3

  She watched him through the blinds of her office. He was sitting in one of the chairs next to a detective’s desk, legs crossed, thumbing through a magazine. McGuire was sitting next to her.

  “Looks like he’s waiting to get his teeth cleaned.”

  “He’s certainly no virgin,” Mac said. “How long do you think the interview will take?”

  “About as long as it takes him to say the word ‘attorney.’” She shrugged. “Of course, he might start sobbing and confess. That’s why we do this, isn’t it?”

  McGuire laughed. “I’ll bring the tissues.”

  She stood and grabbed her jacket. “Let’s get him in there before he falls asleep.”

  The interview with Sandy Lyons went as predicted. No tissues were needed. The moment they brought up the abductions, he clammed up and demanded an attorney. Lyons had been around the block.

/>   O’Shaughnessy hadn’t slept since Wednesday night and was heading for the door when Randall called her name.

  “Lieu.” The detective’s voice was hesitant. “It’s Celia Davis, Youth Division. She says it’s important.”

  She picked up a phone. “O’Shaughnessy.”

  “Lieu, you may want to meet me in the unit block of Forty-fifth. I have another missing female.”

  O’Shaughnessy’s heart stopped. She took a breath and replaced the phone, looked around the room for her sergeant. “Mac, stick around just a couple minutes more. I’ll call you from my car.”

  Detectives weren’t assigned to investigate missing persons as a rule; Youth Division investigators were, because 95 percent of all missing persons are juveniles. O’Shaughnessy had made it known that she wanted all missing females called in to her office first so that the detectives could get a head start if the case turned into a crime. At least until summer was over or the abductions were solved.

  She drove north on Atlantic to Forty-fifth and found a parking space behind Davis’s marked unit. The officer was talking to a woman by a summer cottage; two wiggling spaniels had their forepaws on the chain-link fence.

  She opened the gate and the spaniels covered her thighs with dirty paw prints. “Lieu, this is Connie Riker. Connie was expecting a friend to arrive in town last night, a woman by the name of Marcia Schmidt.”

  Riker had the dogs by their collars and was dragging them back toward the house. She managed to get them behind a screen door that they battered with their paws trying to get back out.

  “Her friend still hasn’t shown, and Connie is worried something happened to her along the way.”

  Connie brushed her hands clean. “I wasn’t sure who to call,” she apologized. “I did talk to the state police early this morning around one A.M., and gave them a description of my car. They said there hadn’t been any accidents in the southern part of the state involving a female last night and nothing at all on my tags. I half believed that her husband wouldn’t let her come, but when I called her house a few minutes ago, I got no answer, and I’m not sure anymore. I know I’m probably wasting your time.”