by R. J. Jagger
As they walked he kept a close eye on her.
With her hands tied she wouldn’t be able to pick up a rock or a stick or anything, or be able to climb a tree.
He didn’t think she’d be stupid enough to try to make a run for it. They both knew he was faster, even without her hands tied.
Screaming for help was something she might try.
But it was unlikely that they’d come across anyone and even less likely that she would actually see them, with her glasses long gone. And even if she did shout, he could knock her head off within a second. If some stupid fool actually did hear her and came over to investigate, he’d handle that too, with pleasure.
They followed the stream for more than a mile and ended up sitting on a boulder. She was quiet, keeping her face pointed away from him, staring at the movement of the water. After a time she said, “I have to use the facilities.”
Ganjon immediately pictured some grand escape plan. If he untied her, what could she do? He looked around, couldn’t think of anything obvious, but still didn’t like the idea.
“Wait until we get back.”
She shook her head and her eyes pleaded with him.
“I’ve already been holding it. I’m ready to bust, honest to God.”
She really did have a desperate look on her face.
Damn it.
He stood up, grabbed her under the arm and pulled her up, then walked her over to the base of a Cottonwood, in an area where there was some brush cover. He reached under her oversized T-shirt, pulled her panties down to her ankles, and held her steady while she stepped out of them.
“Thanks,” she said.
He waited, a few steps away, looking the other way but keeping her in his peripheral vision.
“That’s better,” she said, afterwards.
“No problem.”
Then she let out a nervous laugh.
“I’ve never done that in front of a man before.”
For some reason that registered with him on some emotional level.
“Yeah, well, me too.” Then, “Time to head back.”
Her eyes looked into his and he could see the fear in them. “What are we going to do, when we get back?” she asked him.
That was a good question and he knew why she asked. She was trying to find out if he was going to kill her this afternoon, in which case this might be her last good chance to escape, in which case she’d have to try something now no matter how unlikely the outcome.
He didn’t need that.
“I’m not sure yet,” he said.
She seemed petrified and he grabbed her arm above the elbow, just as a precaution.
They walked in silence, a tense silence. “I’ll do anything you want,” she said after they started getting closer to the farmhouse. Her voice trembled. “Anything, anything at all. You just say what you want and I’ll do it. There’s no need to kill me.”
Another two hundred yards and they’d be back.
He felt like the king of the world, listening to this beautifully broken woman who now cowered in his presence. He had become her God, her universe, and for the first time she’d acknowledged it in no uncertain terms.
“I thought maybe we’d exercise,” he suggested nonchalantly, meaning her God had spared her life, at least for the moment.
She looked at him and he could read the doubt in her eyes.
“Exercise?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I have a whole routine I do when I can’t get to the gym. You don’t need any equipment.”
She nodded, demurely. “That sounds good.”
“You take good care of yourself,” he said. “I’ll bet you work out four or five times a week. Am I right?”
She nodded. “When I can.”
“See?” he questioned. Then he changed the subject. “Anything? You’d do anything? You really mean that?”
She couldn’t agree fast enough.
“Anything you want. Whatever you say.”
He nodded.
“We’ll see.”
They were almost at the house.
She must have felt like she was getting a toehold on him, because she said, “If you let me go, I swear to God I’ll never say a word to anyone. You won’t have to worry about me, I promise.”
He felt like a cat with a mouse.
“You promise, huh?”
“On my mother’s grave.”
He frowned.
“But you’ve seen my face,” he observed.
It was a huge fact.
They both knew it.
She looked like two cold hands had just picked her up and shaken her. “But I won’t ever tell anyone what you look like.”
“And you’ve figured out that I’m the person who killed those women at Ohio State,” he added.
“It doesn’t matter.”
He put on an inquisitive college professor look, and said, “So let’s see if I have this straight. You want me to let you go. And then when you’re in a police room somewhere, totally safe and sound, with no chance in the world of me getting to you again, not in this or any other lifetime, and the dedicated and concerned little homicide cops and FBI agents ask you all their little questions, you’re not going to say a single word, because you made a promise to me.” He looked at her. “Do I have it right?”
She looked frantic.
“I won’t say a word and that’s the truth. I would owe you that, if you let me go.”
“But,” Ganjon said, as if at a high school debate, “you’d have to tell them, otherwise I’d just do the same thing to some other poor woman, and you couldn’t have that on your conscience now, could you?”
He expected her to say something but she didn’t.
She just looked beaten.
They were at the house now. “Well, we’ll see,” he said. Then, thoughtfully, “Maybe we’ll be able to work something out. Who knows?”
He opened the back door quietly, stuck his head inside and listed for sounds. Nothing came. Then he pulled her around to the front of the house to see if there were any cars or other signs of life.
Nothing.
Nothing but a gorgeous spring afternoon in Colorado.
Inside he untied her, told her to take off the T-shirt, which she promptly did, and watched the wonderful muscles in her body work while he let her make a pitcher of lemonade.
Suddenly his cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his front pants pocket and looked at the number. It was the South Beach brat, Jay Yorty.
This call could mean money.
“Okay,” he said. “This is your first test. I’m going to answer this with you standing right there. If you scream anything out, then so much for your promise.”
“No problem,” she said. “You’ll see.”
He pressed the green button on the phone, giving her a warning look.
“Jay,” he said in as upbeat a voice as he could muster. “Are you saving me any of those South Beach women or are you getting them all lined up for yourself?”
Yorty sounded high on coke but eventually got to the point. He was glad he caught Ganjon still in Denver. He wanted him to go back to Donald Vine’s and see if he could get as good a deal on the ’57 Chevy as he did on the Porsche.
It wouldn’t hurt to have a ’57 in his collection, if it was the right one and the right price.
Ganjon watched as Megan Bennett poured lemonade from the pitcher into two glasses filled with ice. She walked over and handed one to him.
“Here you go,” she said.
He took it and drained half the glass.
Yorty said, “Sounds like you’re busy getting lucky, so I’m signing off, partner. Call me tomorrow with some good news on that ’57. Okay?”
“You got it.”
Ganjon punched off, set the phone down on the table and looked at the woman. “That must have been frustrating, not knowing whether to shout out or not.”
“No, I told you . . .”
“You should have,” he said.
&nbs
p; God it felt great telling her that.
Suddenly his cell phone rang again. Incredibly, the woman jumped for it, astonishingly fast, and grabbed it just before he did.
Goddamn bitch!
She bolted out of the kitchen, phone in hand, looking at it as she ran, trying to find the right button to push.
He all but ran through the kitchen table and lunged for her.
He missed and landed flat on the floor.
Damn!
The wind shot out of his lungs and his muscles didn’t want to work.
He got up by sheer force and stumbled.
She ran out the front door and shouted into the phone.
Her voice was frantic.
Help me please!
I’m Megan Bennett!
I’m in a farmhouse!
He’s going to kill me!
He charged after her, his brain burning with a thousand fires.
The lying little whore just made her last mistake!
Chapter Nineteen
Day Five - April 20
Friday Noon
_________
Teffinger took a bit of a Subway sandwich, turkey with everything except mayo, as he and Katie Baxter stared at the tube. The Channel 7 noon news kicked off with the Megan Bennett story, thirty beautiful seconds worth.
“That was intense,” she said. “You can look downright mean sometimes, do you know that?”
Teffinger shrugged.
“This is it,” he said. Megan Bennett would be one of the top news stories for at least the next three or four days. Someone out there could pick up the phone any minute and give them the critical lead they needed.
Baxter wrinkled her forehead. “So what was that deal with your reporter friend, Sarah Upjohn, when the press conference was over?”
Teffinger looked as innocent as he could but had a pretty good idea what she was talking about. “What do you mean?”
“I saw her rubbing the twins all over you.”
“That was an accident,” Teffinger explained.
“Oh, please,” Baxter said.
He shrugged.
“The twins have a mind of their own. What can I say?”
She looked incredulous. “You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to buy her for what she’s worth and sell her for what she thinks she’s worth. I could use the money.”
Teffinger smiled.
“You could retire.”
“We could both retire.”
She pushed a piece of paper across the desk. “The FBI number you asked for,” she reminded him. “Are you calling in a profiler or something?”
Teffinger picked it up then dialed the number of the FBI Field Office, Cincinnati, Ohio, which had jurisdiction over Columbus. While it rang he shook his head.
“No, something else.”
After talking to a short string of people, more than he really had time for, he was finally connected with someone who could actually help him, namely the Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Charles Miller. Teffinger filled him in on the Megan Bennett case and the fact that she reportedly bumped into an FBI agent shortly before she disappeared.
“So the way I understand what happened,” Teffinger explained, “according to this coworker of Megan Bennett, is that this FBI agent was working on a case involving the murder of an OSU woman, as well as two other abductions that were believed to be related. He then manages to bump into Megan Bennett, halfway around the world, years later, who just happened to have gone to the same school where the killings took place. Shortly after that conversation she disappears. Call me skeptical but there are a few more coincidences going on here than I’m used to.”
Teffinger felt a long pause on the other end of the phone.
“This is interesting,” Miller said. “Very interesting. I can confirm that this office was in fact heavily involved in the investigation of an OSU student by the name of Beth Williamson, which would have been, let’s see, I’m guessing about five years ago now. The person assigned with primary responsibility for the case is Special Agent Sam Dakota, who just happens to be one of our best. But he wasn’t in Denver last week, or even last year.”
“He wasn’t?” Teffinger questioned.
“No,” Miller said. “He’s right here in town and has been. Of course, everyone in the office knows about the case, so I’m trying to think of who else might have been in Denver recently, but, quite frankly, no names are jumping up. No one’s there on assignment there out of this office, that’s for sure. And as for vacations, no, no agents have been off for at least three weeks.”
“Interesting,” Teffinger said. “But there was an actual case, though? Involving an OSU woman?”
Teffinger took another bite of the Subway as soon as he stopped talking and chewed with a purpose. He was starved for some reason.
Baxter, who was listening to the conversation, made a face at him, which meant he was chewing with his mouth open.
“Oh, most definitely,” Miller confirmed. “This is all extremely confidential, which you already know, but here’s the long and short of it. The OSU woman, Beth Williamson, drops off the face of the earth one day. The Columbus police find her about three weeks later. Someone sealed her in a 55-gallon drum, naked and without any food or water, and set her out in the woods, about two hundred yards off an old gravel road. Nice guy that he is, he punched air holes in the top. Needless to say, she lived a whole lot longer than she wanted to.”
“Jesus,” Teffinger said.
“Yeah,” Miller said. “Exactly. The Columbus P.D. had never seen anything like that before and brought us in when they hit a wall.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh,” Miller said, “let me back up. The information about the drum was held close to the vest. The official statement, as far as public information goes, is that she was found in the woods.”
“Understood.”
“Okay, so we start working the case pretty hard,” Miller continued. “We find out that the deceased was enrolled in an upper-level psychology class taught by a professor by the name of . . . ah, crap, I can’t remember his name . . . but it’s not important anyway. What is important is that this professor, as part of his class, had his students write a couple of paragraphs describing the way they’d most hate to die. He was going to do some kind of correlation to match the responses to personality traits or some such bullshit. It was all psychobabble to me. Anyway, what do you think the Williamson woman wrote about?”
“I think I know,” Teffinger said.
“Well, then you’re a smart fellow,” Miller said, “She wrote about being stuffed inside a drum and dumped in the woods to rot a slow death.”
“Damn.”
“Major damn,” Miller agreed.
“So what did you come up with?”
A pause.
“Special Agent Dakota would be the best person to answer that,” Miller said. “He’ll be back in the office later this afternoon, and I’ll have him call you if you’d like.”
“I’d like.”
“The investigation was exhaustive to say the least. We also got the media involved and that generated hundreds of tips. We investigated the professor as a suspect but eventually dismissed him. The file takes up eight file cabinet drawers, to give you an idea.”
Teffinger was impressed.
“The biggest case I ever had only took up three.”
“There you go, then.”
“Did you get any information on the suspect’s size?” Teffinger questioned. “The reason I ask is, we have reason to believe that the person who took Megan Bennett out here in Denver may be a pretty big guy, I’m talking somewhere in the six-four range.”
“You know,” Miller said. “I’m trying to think. Special Agent Dakota would know this better than me, but I’m pretty sure we pegged our suspect as extremely strong, based on some calculations we did relating to the movement of the drum. I’m not sure that we ever translated that to a body height, though.”
“Good enough,”
Teffinger said. “What about the other two abductions?”
“Okay,” Miller continued. “Two other female students were also both from this professor’s psychology class. They disappeared after the Williamson woman, in separate incidents. The first one disappeared the next semester, which would have been the fall semester, and the second one disappeared during the spring semester the next year. Neither one of them was ever found. In fact, we were never even able to identify the locations they were abducted from.”
“But both had been enrolled in this professor’s class?” Teffinger questioned.
“Yes,” Miller said. “The three cases are definitely connected. Some day their bodies will show up and we’ll be able to verify it. Right now we need fresh blood to move the investigation forward.”
“Well, it looks like I might have that for you. One question,” he said. “Do you remember whether Megan Bennett was in this psychology class?”
“Not off the top of my head,” Miller said. “But I can look it up pretty easy and get back to you.”
“Any chance you could do that right away?”
“That’s two questions.”
Teffinger smiled. “You FBI guys don’t miss a thing, do you?”
“That’s three questions.”
Fifteen minutes later the fax machine gurgled. Teffinger walked over and pulled out two pages. The first was a cover sheet from Special Agent Charles Miller.
Lieutenant Teffinger: Megan Bennett was in fact enrolled in the psychology class we talked about. Attached please find a copy of the paper that she submitted to her professor. Looks like you have our fresh blood.
Teffinger turned to the next page and read the description that Megan Bennett had provided as to the way she’d most hate to die.
He walked back to his desk, set the fax on top of a pile of papers and sank into his chair. Then he closed his eyes and started to work out the details of what it would be like to go like that.
Baxter’s voice suddenly appeared from out of nowhere.
“Nick, what is it?”
He opened his eyes and found her standing in front of his desk.
“Picture this as a way to die,” he said. “You’re strapped into a chair and you have a helmet over your head, sealed at your neck. Air is fed into the helmet from a blower. As long as the blower’s on, no problem, you have plenty of air. But the blower shuts off every five minutes. You have a switch in your hand, taped there, so you can’t drop it. You press the switch and the blower kicks back on and runs for another five minutes. No problem. Except you sit there hour after hour after hour and sooner or later you start to get sleepy. You need to stay awake to keep turning the blower back on. Now you’re up twenty-four hours, now thirty-six, now forty-eight. Now you’re hallucinating and fighting like a madman to not fall asleep. But you know you can’t stay awake forever.”
