by Glenn Trust
Outside, Lylee walked across the lot to his car and began pumping gas, showing no outward interest in her. She walked slowly and tentatively across the lot, unaware of his presence and of the gray eyes following her.
The girl spoke briefly with the trucker. He smiled broadly and showed her how to climb into the truck.
Lylee watched intently without appearing to. The prey was his. The fat trucker was nothing more than a scavenger, a jackal. Jackals didn’t take prey from lions. This jackal just wasn’t aware that there was a lion around. He would be, soon. The anticipation beat rapidly in his chest, surging adrenaline through him. The predator would fight to protect its kill. A barely audible rumbling sound escaped the thin man at every smile the girl gave the big trucker. It would have been called a growl had it come from another species of mammal.
41. Orders
Tom Ridley stepped out on the bare wood porch of his house as George pulled the county truck up the short gravel driveway.
“How ya doin’, Tom,” George said stepping out, hiking up his trousers at the waist as he walked to the porch.
“George,” Ridley said nodding and standing with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. The screen door behind him creaked as his wife, Margaret, stepped out onto the porch.
“Want some coffee, George,” she asked, nodding her hello.
“Sure. Worked last night. Looks like a long day.”
“Yeah.” Ridley looked up from the spot on the porch he had been staring at. “You see her?”
“Yeah, I did Tom. I need to ask you some questions.”
“Okay, ask away.” Tom looked back down at the porch.
“Tell me what happened, what you saw, heard, anything you remember.”
Ridley continued looking at the porch and started speaking. “Early, before light, I was in the yard and I heard something. Like a car door or something. A minute or so later, I could hear the engine and the sound of the car moving on the gravel, like it was backing up and then moving forward, you know.”
George nodded and waited, letting Tom gather himself and continue.
“Honestly, I figured it was you sleeping on the dirt road this morning in your car when I heard it turning around.”
George’s conscience twitched hard.
“No, Tom, wasn’t me.” Not on Ridley Road at least, he thought, feeling the knife prick at his heart. “What happened next?”
“Well…nothing. I just had breakfast and went about my chores here. Then I headed over to the chicken barns…but I never got there.” He paused, and then continued. “I headed down the road and thought I saw some trash someone had dumped. I was gonna pick it up.” He became quiet. The screen door squealed behind him and Margaret returned holding George’s cup of coffee. Standing beside Tom, she put her hand on his arm.
“Did you see anything else, Tom?”
“You mean besides that little girl out there? No not really.”
“I know it’s hard, Tom, but anything you saw or heard might be important. We don’t have much right now.”
Margaret reached down and handed the coffee to George who was standing on the first step.
Taking a gulp, George shifted his focus to her. “Thanks, Margaret. How about you? See or hear anything?”
“No, George. I was still in bed. Just old Tom here peeing out in the yard, I could hear that pretty good.”
Tom gave her a sideways glance, shook his head, then said, “George, all I heard was a click like a latch on a car door or something. After that, the sound of tires in the gravel. I could tell he was turning around in the road.” He paused as if remembering the moment and then repeated wishfully his earlier statement. “Thought it was you, or someone dumping garbage.”
Tom paused, head down. “I guess that’s what it was. Someone dumped that poor little girl like garbage. How could someone do that, George?” There were tears in the old chicken farmer’s eyes.
George ran his hand through his hair and shook his head before responding. “I don’t know, Tom. There’s bad people. I don’t know why.”
“Most terrible thing I ever seen, for sure,” Tom said softly staring back at the porch.
Margaret reached out, put her work worn hand on her husband’s arm again and patted it this time. Looking George squarely in the eye, she said, “You catch whoever did this. You hear, George Mackey.” It was a command not a question. “You just catch him.”
George looked back at her solemnly and said, “Yes, ma’am, we will. We’ll try.”
“No trying, George.” Her voice was firm. “You catch him.”
It was an order, given in the same tone he had heard as a boy when he and the Ridley’s boy, Robert, would get into mischief, and Mrs. Ridley would straighten them out. The order had been given, and she expected him to carry it out.
First Mrs. Sims, now Margaret Ridley. No pressure there.
George took a deep breath, nodded, and handed the coffee cup back to her. There was nothing more to say. He turned and walked across the bare yard to his pickup. Tom stepped off the porch following.
“George,” he said.
“Yes, Tom.” George stood with his hand on the half open truck door.
“I feel like maybe I should have caught the guy. I mean, I heard him down the road, just a little ways. He probably didn’t even see the house. I could have sneaked up on him with my shotgun. At least maybe then, well maybe the girl would be alive.”
George had to swallow down his own guilt as he tried to put Tom’s mind at ease.
“Tom, there was nothing you could have done. She was already dead when he put her in the weeds.”
“But I should have tried to do something. Instead I just stood there taking a leak.” Tom swallowed hard. “George, that was someone’s little girl, and now…they don’t even know.” His voice trailed off.
“Tom,” George said taking firm hold of his arm in the way friends do. “You didn’t do this, and you are not to blame. There is nothing you could have done, and besides, it’s best you didn’t catch up with him. This is a bad man, a really, bad man. Like an animal. You catch up to him, corner him, and he’s likely to turn on you and hurt you, or worse like a cornered bobcat; shotgun or no shotgun, I’m glad you didn’t go looking for him out there.”
Tom just looked at the ground. Margaret stepped forward and took him by the arm, turning him back towards the house. The look she gave George over her shoulder said it all. Catch him!
George nodded his acknowledgement, accepting his orders quietly.
Pulling the pickup out of the Ridley’s yard and onto the gravel road, he drove the quarter mile down to the crime scene and stayed far off the right side across the road from where the girl still lay in the weeds. He drove through the grass and weeds until he was well clear of the crime scene and then pulled back onto the dirt road.
Sheriff Klineman and Ronnie Kupman stood behind the line of emergency vehicles talking. The sheriff looked hard at George as he drove by. George looked away and picked up speed leaving the scene. Fuck the sheriff.
Mrs. Sims and Margaret Ridley had given him his orders. There was nothing Klineman could add to that. For his conscience, and Tom Ridley’s conscience, and the little girl still lying in the weeds, he hoped it would be enough.
Yeah, George, you just get right out there and catch him.
42. The Brothers
The whine of the circular saw drowned everything else out, echoing in the bare interior of the shopping center he and his brother were finishing out. Clay threw the freshly cut two by four onto a pile beside the saw table. Oblivious to the sound and sawdust around him and in his hair, Clay’s mind was back at the truck stop with the young girl that he had met only hours before.
“Clay!” It was his brother Cy shouting over the noise.
He released the saw trigger and the screeching noise wound down as the blade slowed. The ensuing, sudden silence was heavy in the empty concrete space.
“What, Cy?” He spoke quietly but his voice seem
ed loud in the silence after the saw noise.
“That’s enough,” his brother replied.
“What? What’s enough?”
“We don’t need any more. That’s enough. Let’s start framing them up.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. Yeah.”
The brothers worked together in a quiet rhythm. Well practiced, the work went swiftly without talking. They made it look much easier than it was, the way a professional athlete makes hitting a fastball or catching a pass look like something we should all be able to do, although we all know that we cannot.
In a short time, they squared up the interior wall they were framing and started hanging plywood panels. The panels would be finished and covered with shelving to hold athletic shoes of the type and price they would never consider buying.
Dusting sawdust off, they walked over to an ice chest and each pulled out a drink can. Leaning against a nearby wall, they slid down until they were sitting side by side on the concrete.
“Pretty quiet today. What’s up? Still thinking about the girl?” Cy asked after they sat for a minute sipping their drinks.
“Lyn,” Clay said looking at his can of soda.
“Sorry,” Cy said. “I mean Lyn. Still thinking about her?
“Yeah. I guess I am.”
“So what are you going to do? Might sound crazy, but she seemed pretty serious about the Canada thing.”
“I don’t know.” They were silent for a minute and then Clay continued, “It feels like I should do something. Go talk to her again. Something.”
Cy just sat leaning against the wall, knees up resting the drink can on them saying nothing. This was not like his younger brother. Cy was the ladies man, the one always with a love affair going. Clay was the disinterested one, not worrying too much about the opposite sex.
Not this time though. Clay was taken with the girl. She was pretty enough, for sure, but this was something different. He was distracted by her in a way Cy had not seen before.
“All right, brother,” Cy said, breaking the silence, “Let’s go back and see if we can find her when we get done.”
“What then?” Clay said almost glumly. “She already said she was going on.”
“Why, then you turn on the charm little brother. Make her smile, make her laugh, make her feel safe. Just be you, man. It’ll work out if it’s supposed to. Gotta give it a try though, so let’s give it a try.”
Clay studied the toes of his work boots. “Okay, you’re right.” He jumped up off the floor to get back to work. Reaching back down to give his brother a hand up, he said, “Thanks.”
“No problem. Now let’s us get our asses back to work.”
Five minutes later, they were working on another wall. Things he might say when they went back to the truck stop rolled around in Clay’s head as they worked. He took his cell phone out and checked for calls. There were none. He didn’t know if that was good or bad.
43. Clever Tommy
The images flowing by on the small TV monitor blurred. George shook his head to focus more clearly.
Leaving the Ridley’s, George had gone to the interstate to check out places where the killer might have stopped. His gut told George that he would not want to stay in Pickham County and would move on quickly. He picked the northbound side of I-95, mostly because there was more territory ahead for an escape. The southbound side went directly into Florida. Between Ridley’s Road and the county line there were only a couple of exits on I-95 with gas stations. One was in Roydon. The other was several miles north, almost at the county line. He decided to check the one furthest north first and then come back through Roydon. It didn’t seem likely that the killer would stop for gas so close to the site of body. Hell, he may not have needed gas at all, but it was worth a try.
The Minit Mart on I-95 had an antiquated video recording system. It didn’t provide much. The one camera was pointed at the cashier and was probably meant more to prevent pilferage by employees than to prevent robberies. Installed long before the advent of digital video recorders, the system had an old VCR that still recorded on VHS tape. George wondered where you could even find VHS tapes anymore. Hell, even he had a DVR.
If the Minit Mart had had a digital system, he could have focused on a specific time frame and brought up only those images. With this old piece of junk, George was forced to rewind the tape from last night and watch it through to find any possible evidence. It was a long shot. George shook his head again and pushed the fast forward button on the VCR.
He had bypassed for the time being the couple of country stores between Tom Ridley’s road and the interstate as they were closed at night. But the Minit Mart was open twenty-four hours. The go-to-work crowd stopped there for coffee in the morning, and the after work crowd got their six-pack and lottery tickets on the way home. The rest of the day, late at night, and during the early morning hours it was mostly cars and truckers off the interstate.
George had parked the pickup and gone in to have a talk with the manager. The overnight girl, Beth, was gone, off at seven.
Now, George was seated in a dusty old office chair at the manager’s desk in the tiny room behind the cashier’s counter. The tiny monitor and VCR sat on one side of the desk. George held the fast forward button as the images flowed past. He had rewound the tape to about two in the morning to try to limit the search a little. Still, there was nothing to do but watch the tape grind by, minute by minute. Even on fast forward, the minutes seemed to take forever. On top of that, there was nothing to see, just the cash register and small area behind the counter. Occasionally, the clerk, Beth, would enter the area, but she spent most of the time out of view of the camera. The manager said she stocked shelves and the coolers at night when there were no customers.
George looked around the cramped, dusty office and through a small, dirty, tinted window out into the store. This would be a lonely place to work at night. Too lonely, as the empty images on the tape attested. Too much could happen.
Then he saw Beth walk back into the frame. She was talking. She smiled. George thought it was the look of a girl who was flirting or being flirted with. George leaned forward, intent on the image. The person she was talking to was careful to stay away from the counter, just out of view of the camera.
The girl, Beth, smiled some more, tilting her head slightly and looking up at the person just out of view. It was definitely a flirtatious smile, pretending to be shy or flattered, but the unspoken message was, ‘Yes, I am the cutest thing you’ve seen today. Keep talking. You might get lucky’.
George almost smiled himself at the young girl on the tape. Suddenly an arm was thrust into the picture from the spot just out of view. A bill dropped from the outstretched hand onto the counter. George stopped breathing and hit the pause button. The arm was a man’s arm, covered by a long sleeve shirt. Nothing remarkable about it. Not too big, not too small. Just an average sized arm belonging, no doubt, to an average sized man. But the outstretched hand bore a ring. He squinted hard at the screen. There was no zoom function on the system, but the more he looked the more he was sure that the ring was in the shape of a steer’s head…a Texas Longhorn, or at least it could be. George looked around for a minute and then called.
“Tommy!”
“Yeah, George?” The manager poked his head through the door.
“Do you have something to make the picture bigger?”
Tommy thought for a second, wrinkling his brow in concentration. “Well nothing technical or anything like that, but…” he stepped into the cramped office behind George and rummaged around on a dusty shelf. Lifting a stack of yellowed papers, he pulled out an old magnifying glass. “Here try this. It might work.”
“What the hell are you doing with that? Burning the wings off of flies?”
Looking slightly offended, Tommy replied, “No, we keep it to check out suspicious bills. You know, counterfeits.”
“You know how to recognize counterfeits?” George was amazed.
“Well, not reall
y,” Tommy confessed, “but if we get a suspicious bill and bring out this big old glass, sometimes they get intimidated and leave. Actually works…sometimes.”
George shook his head, even more amazed. He had no idea that Tommy was that clever. Probably no one else did either.
He took the glass from Tommy’s pudgy hand and stared at the screen, adjusting the distance to magnify the image. It wasn’t great. The GBI would have to clean it up, but it was unmistakable. A shiny, almost triangular shape with two curving prongs coming out of the top. There it was.
George knew he was looking at the hand that had struck the poor girl in the weeds. The hand that had inflicted all of those painful cuts. The hand that had slowly killed her, taking her life in the slowest most painful way he could. That hand was attached to a body and to a bad man. A very bad man who, except for his hand, could not be seen in the video.
George let the tape run forward and saw two men walk into the frame. Truck drivers. They must have startled the man with the ring.
He rewound the tape and went through it one more time looking for anything he had missed. Cute little Beth did not know how fortunate she was. Probably lots of customers flirted with her, and she flirted back. Flirting with this one, the man with the ring, might have been her last if the two truck drivers hadn’t showed up.
Well, now he had a witness. Beth had talked to the man with the ring. She might have noticed his vehicle, the vehicle George had seen the night before while he tried to doze in his county truck. He winced once more at the thought.
George felt the adrenalin surge. The hunt was on, but time was short. The word had to get out before there was another young girl in the weeds somewhere.
