The Lonely Mile

by Allan Leverone

  Maybe she had a concussion. Good. Served her right. She could consider that the first lesson in the retraining process that was going to have to take place, beginning right here and now and continuing wherever in this big world she finally ended up.

  He kneeled next to her and slapped her across the face, hard, just as he had done to himself a few moments ago. She blinked rapidly and peered up at him blankly, confused at first. Then her brain engaged and terror blossomed in those beautiful eyes as her memory clicked in. She began moaning, “Oh, oh, oh…”

  Martin nodded. “Yeah, ‘oh, oh, oh’ is right, little girl. You ever come at me with a knife again, you better kill me with the first swipe because this was your one and only mulligan. Next time I’ll put it places you don’t want to think about. Are you with me on this?”

  Carli moaned again but nodded gingerly at the same time, and Martin knew he had nothing to worry about. Not for a while, at least. His angel wasn’t about to cause him any trouble for the foreseeable future. Maybe this little skirmish would end up being a good thing in the long run. Maybe some time in the next week, he and Carli would look back on this moment and laugh. Probably not, but you never knew. She might be a fast learner.

  At the moment, though, it didn’t seem very funny. The pain continued to ratchet up in Martin’s arm, and he didn’t feel much like laughing. When the hell would that ibuprofen start to work? He reached under Carli’s armpit and pulled, and even in his weakened state, he was able to lift her to her feet using just his good arm. She really wasn’t very big. He walked her to the basement and down the stairs, supporting her with his good arm, and brought her back to her bed, shoving her down on it roughly and snapping the empty cuff back into place on the metal frame. She lay down in the fetal position and closed her eyes.

  Martin thought briefly about getting her some of the ibuprofen from upstairs—although he didn’t think her head injury was severe, he figured she had to have a massive headache—then decided, forget it, she brought this on herself, it won’t hurt her to suffer a little bit, make her get the message loud and clear: Don’t cross Martin. He wants you, but he’ll kill you if he has to.

  He watched her for a moment as her respiration smoothed out and her breathing became slow and steady. She was asleep. Lucky little troublemaker. She’d caused this disaster and then got to sleep like a baby, while Martin still had things to do. Life was so unfair sometimes.

  He sat and watched his angel for a while, filled with lust and longing despite all the trouble she had caused him tonight. Finally, he rose unsteadily and headed to the stairs. It was time to get to the hospital, preferably before he passed out and bled to death.

  CHAPTER 42

  May 28

  IT WAS BARELY 5:30 a.m. Agent Canfield had told Bill to meet him at one of the only places open at that time in the morning—a coffee shop in the tiny town of Union, just off the interstate, not far from the rest stop where this whole mess had begun. And the coffee was surprisingly good. Not as good as at Smokin’ Joe’s at that rest stop, but still, better than average.

  He had been surprised at how quickly Angela answered the phone when he called, given the fact that it was the middle of the night, and he knew how exhausted she had looked in his apartment before she left. She must sleep with the cell phone next to her head on the pillow, he thought, because it had barely begun to ring when she was on the line. And she had sounded awake and alert. “Canfield.”

  Bill had paused for a second, actually pulling the receiver from his ear and staring at it in surprise. He had expected it to ring a while. “Yes…uh…” Now that he had her on the phone, what should he call her? He decided to stick with formalities. He didn’t know if the FBI was in the habit of monitoring the calls of its agents, but figured he’d better be careful. And maybe she didn’t even want him to use “Angie” any more, after the events of a few hours ago. “Agent Canfield, this is Bill Ferguson. I’m sorry to bother you at this ungodly hour, but you asked me to call if I thought of anything helpful, and, well, I have.”

  A moment of silence followed, and Bill could hear the rustling of covers in the background. He pictured the pretty agent sitting up in bed, hair tousled and falling in unruly masses around her face, nightgown riding up her long legs. It wasn’t an unpleasant image.

  She coughed and cleared her throat. “Okay,” she said. “What is it?” She sounded distant, preoccupied, and he assumed she felt uncomfortable talking to him.

  “You remember I told you the guy drove an old, piece-of-crap truck out of the plaza parking lot after the failed kidnapping? And it had been repainted, but the paint job was fading? Well, there was green block lettering, three rows of it, on the side of the cargo box. The lettering was just beginning to show through the fading, amateur paint job. I remember now what it said.”

  Now she sounded focused, all business. “How soon can you meet me?”

  “Just tell me where and when. I’m not going back to sleep now, that’s for sure.”

  The agent had then suggested this coffee shop. Bill was aware of its existence, but wondered how Agent Canfield had known about it.

  Now they sat facing each other across a small table, steam rising from their cups. Canfield had ordered some kind of latte thing, and for Bill, it was his usual, basic, black coffee. They were alone in the cramped dining area, at least for the time being.

  “So you saw portions of the original paint job?” Agent Canfield stared at Bill with an intensity he found equally fascinating and disturbing. She was dressed in a loose-fitting t-shirt, which did nothing to hide her figure, and a pair of sweat pants like the ones college kids wear with the name of their school running down one leg. Instead of a school, though, Agent Canfield’s said “FBI” in gold lettering. She had obviously thrown on the first things she dug out of a bag.

  “Yes,” Bill nodded. “There were three rows of green, block lettering painted diagonally across the side of the truck’s cargo box. None of the rows were completely visible on their own, but I could make out a few letters in each row.”

  “And they were?”

  “The letters in the first row were ‘SPE,’ and in the middle row were the letters ‘FAR,’ with the letters ‘ET’ running along the bottom.”

  Agent Canfield wrote the notations down in a small spiral pad Bill hadn’t noticed until just now. He wondered where she had been keeping it, since she wasn’t carrying a purse or any kind of bag. Probably, the sweat pants had pockets. Although she wrote quickly, Bill could see, even from the upside down position of the pad, that her handwriting was neat and legible. She wrote the letters in a descending diagonal pattern on the page, then spun it around so he could look at her handiwork. “Like this?” she asked.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  She flipped the notebook around again on the table and stared at it, taking a sip of her latte. Her eyes never left the page as she drank. She shrugged. “Okay, I give up. What does it mean?”

  “I’m not sure.” Bill shook his head, frustrated. “I feel like I’ve seen this before, or something similar, on a vehicle in the area, but nothing is coming to me. I’ve been thinking about it pretty much non-stop since I called you, and I just keep drawing a blank.”

  The agent looked up at Bill thoughtfully. “It’s okay. Keep gnawing at it. If you really have seen it before, eventually, it will come to you. In the meantime, we’ll get the rest of the federal task force together this morning along with the local cops and run it by everyone. Maybe something will shake loose with someone. Either way, it gives us something to look for other than a plain white box truck. Within the hour, this description will be sent to every law enforcement agency on the east coast. If the guy is still driving this truck, someone will see it.”

  “Do you really think he’s still using it?”

  She shrugged again. “Who knows? It seems like a strange choice of vehicles for a kidnapper to use. It’s slow and cumbersome to drive, but for whatever reason he seems to prefer it. In some ways, it’
s not a bad option. Those vehicles are pretty much invisible. They are all over the roads, and who pays attention to them? Nobody,” she said, answering her own question. “Hopefully we’ll get lucky, and he won’t realize you saw him driving it.”

  Bill shook his head. “I wouldn’t count on that. He knows I saw him. He looked right at me as he drove by. I could almost have reached out and touched the guy; he was that close to me.”

  She took another sip of her latte and licked foam off her upper lip. “We’ll just have to wait and see. Maybe he’ll make a mistake. But I have a question for you.” The agent looked deeply into Bill’s eyes, her direct stare boring into him as if she could see into his soul.

  Her mouth was drawn down into a tight frown. “How could you have missed this lettering when I talked to you right after the attempted kidnapping?”

  “You mean when you interrogated me?”

  She smiled. It was like the sun breaking through the mist on a foggy morning. “Okay, yes, when I interrogated you.”

  “I’m not sure, exactly. When he first drove by, I was so stunned that I mostly just stared at him, sitting there in the cab of the truck. Then, after he passed me, as he was heading for the highway, all of my attention was devoted to trying to get the license plate number or at least part of it. But that blue smoke was so thick it obscured the plate very effectively. And the lettering on the cargo box is barely visible. It’s very faint. I think the only reason I even noticed it at all is because I wasn’t looking directly at it. If I had looked right at the side of the truck, I probably would have missed it entirely.”

  Agent Canfield continued to stare at the letters she had written on the otherwise blank page of the note pad as if she might be able to decipher their meaning by the sheer force of her concentration. Bill wasn’t entirely sure she couldn’t.

  He cleared his throat, and she looked up at him expectantly. “Don’t you think it’s odd,” he said, “that, in over a dozen kidnappings—”

  “Fourteen,” she interrupted, “Fourteen, if you include the attempt you broke up last week.”

  “Okay, fourteen. Don’t you find it a little strange that, in fourteen kidnappings, no one else has ever seen this truck? Even though the lettering is faint and obscured and difficult to read, it’s hard to believe, in all that time, nobody else would have noticed it.”

  Canfield sat for a moment pondering the question. “You have to remember, all of the other kidnappings were completed successfully. As far as we know, they all went off without a hitch, at least to the point that no one had seen the kidnapper get into his vehicle with any of his victims. Once inside the truck, he basically became invisible for the very reason we already discussed. Nobody notices those box trucks. They’re everywhere.”

  “I suppose,” Bill said, still unconvinced. Then he shrugged. “So, what happens now?”

  “We transmit this information as widely as possible and continue working the case. If this guy is still using his truck, we’ll get him. I like our chances. These slime balls are creatures of habit; they like to stick with what has worked for them in the past. Either way, though, we keep on keeping on. This is one more piece of evidence. A big one.”

  “Did the search of the murdered school bus driver’s property turn up any usable evidence?”

  “I really shouldn’t be discussing this with you.”

  “Come on, I bought you a latte; that’s got to count for something at 5:30 in the morning.” He didn’t mention last night because she probably didn’t want to hear it. Bill supposed he couldn’t really blame her.

  She smiled. “Fair enough. I can tell you this much. We found plenty of prints on the stolen car the guy used to get to her house and to dispose of her body. They were all over the steering wheel and gearshift, as well as on the door handle and the trunk.”

  “That’s encouraging.”

  “Well, yes and no,” she answered. “Incredibly, there’s no match in the system that we’ve been able to find. This guy’s never been in the military and he’s never been convicted of any crime, as far as we can tell. So the prints will help us convict him when we finally catch him, but they’re useless to us in terms of actually running him down.”

  Bill was incredulous. His voice hitched as he pictured Carli, alone and afraid. “This guy kidnaps and murders teenage girls, and he has no criminal record?”

  “I know it’s hard to believe. It was hard for us to swallow, too. It is unusual but it’s not unheard of. Some people with severe sociopathic tendencies are able to function in society relatively normally for years before giving in to their most destructive urges.”

  “Convince me Carli’s still alive, Agent Canfield.”

  She was silent for a moment. “She’s alive,” the agent answered, placing her hand on Bill’s arm as he grasped his cup on the table. He felt an electric charge run through his body at her touch and wondered whether she felt it too. “I’m going to tell you something in addition to what I said at your apartment, but if I do, you have to understand it’s just a theory.”

  “Of course. I promise. You can trust me, Angela,” he said, referring to more than just the case.

  “The media has been trumpeting this whole ‘I-90 Killer’ thing for years, but we believe he might be into something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “What do you know about human trafficking, Bill?”

  “Sexual slavery. I’ve had my suspicions about that since reading the I-90 Killer’s letter.”

  “That’s right,” Canfield agreed. “It can be an extremely lucrative undertaking, especially where young, pretty, American teenage girls are concerned.”

  “He’s kidnapping girls and—what? Shipping them out of the country? To whom? Where do they go?”

  “Our theory,” Canfield said, “is that he is just one link in what is probably a very extensive chain of conspirators. We believe he started out as a kidnapper, and, in the beginning, he did sexually assault and murder his first couple of victims. We found their remains, so we know that to be true.” Bill winced and she said, “Sorry. Would you rather I not go on?”

  He shook his head. “I need to hear this.”

  “That’s what I thought. Somewhere along the line, this disturbed man who was kidnapping and murdering teenage girls was co-opted by players much bigger and more frightening than he. How this connection was made and how extensive the ring is, we don’t know. But now we think he satisfies his compulsion, taking the girls and probably getting some sort of time limit within which he can enjoy them in his own way as long as he doesn’t damage them irreparably, then he passes them along to a contact, who smuggles them out of the country, probably to buyers in Russia or the Middle East.”

  “Oh my God, that makes me sick.” Bill’s hand shook and coffee slurped over the side of the ceramic cup, overflowing the saucer and pooling on the scarred and chipped table.

  “I know it’s hard to hear,” Canfield said gently, “but the thing you should focus on, and the reason I told you, is that we believe Carli is still alive, and just as importantly, is still in this general area. If we catch a break or two, like we seem to have done with your memory about the truck, we just might be able to nail this twisted bastard before Carli is shipped out of the country. If we don’t find her before that happens…” Her voice trailed off. There was no need for her to continue.

  Bill hung his head, thinking hard as he tried to digest the implications of this information. Carli was alive. He held onto that nugget of hope like a drowning man clinging to a life raft. She was alive, and if she was alive, she could be saved. That was what he needed to focus on, not the horrifying scenario Angela Canfield had just laid out.

  The FBI agent finished her coffee, setting the cup down on the table with a jarring clatter that sounded much too loud, echoing off the bare walls, vinyl flooring, and ceramic dinnerware in the empty restaurant. “I’ve got to get this information out to everyone in the field. Thanks for calling, Bill. It goes without saying that this i
s a huge break. If you think of anything else, let me know immediately. I would prefer if you only called me. It makes things easier to have just the one point of contact. Thanks for the coffee.”

  Agent Canfield rose from the table and glided out the door without a look back. Bill watched her through the big, plate glass window as she got into a plain Chevy Caprice sedan and drove away.

  He sipped the last of his coffee. He wanted to scream, to hit somebody or something. He didn’t feel the information he had just given Agent Canfield was huge unless it led directly to the capture of the I-90 Killer. Bill knew in his heart that the kidnapper of his child was no longer driving around the east coast in that ratty old box truck; he couldn’t possibly be stupid enough to continue using it after Bill had seen him in it. The guy had successfully kidnapped thirteen girls before making his first and, so far, only mistake. He was much too smart to keep using the vehicle a witness had seen him driving.

  And as far as using the available evidence to convict the I-90 Killer after his capture, Bill couldn’t care less about that. Fingerprints, DNA evidence, the lettering on the bastard’s truck, none of it mattered to Bill, at least not in terms of using it to attain a conviction in a court of law. Bill didn’t care about a winning a trial or incarcerating the lunatic or anything else.

  Beyond finding Carli alive and rescuing her, what he wanted more than anything else in the world was the I-90 Killer, dead and buried. It was a visceral need, almost like the intense thirst of a man lost in the desert. He had missed his chance to put the man in the ground once; he wouldn’t make that mistake again if he ever got another crack at him. He drained his cup, threw down some money, and stalked out of the coffee shop.

  CHAPTER 43

  CARLI’S HEAD POUNDED RELENTLESSLY. It felt like the USC Marching Band had taken up residence inside her skull and was practicing for their next halftime show. She had suffered on and off from migraines ever since young childhood, so Carli Ferguson knew headaches, and this one was off the charts.