“Yeah,” Angela agreed, “I guess it’s not like they could tell that you’ve killed people just by looking in your eyes.”
But Angela could.
From that first glance it had been instantaneous knowledge, almost as if she were sharing—experiencing—his detailed memory of everything he had done to Carrie. In fact, in that same instant she had seen all four women he had killed. She knew the details of what he’d done to each of them.
When she had been young, Angela had sometimes been overcome with agonizing pain in her legs. Her grandmother told her it was caused by her bones growing so fast. Looking into a killer’s eyes brought her that same kind of pain. It made her bones ache.
She knew that other people couldn’t do what she could do, couldn’t recognize a killer by looking in his eyes. She knew she was different from other people.
She believed that her mother’s chronic drug use when she had been pregnant with Angela had been the cause. That constant soup of drugs swirling around inside her mother’s womb as Angela’s fetus was developing had resulted in her being a freak of nature.
Her grandmother said that Angela was lucky all those drugs her mother took hadn’t left Angela retarded, or blind, or crippled. She said once that Angela was lucky to have been born alive. Angela didn’t feel lucky.
She knew that she wasn’t normal and never could be.
Angela knew that she had been born broken.
She knew that her desires, the things that drove her—the things that made her feel alive—were not normal.
And now those things that drove her had her focused in on Owen like a laser.
“Easy enough to brag, to take credit, to say you fooled the police,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you really did it. Lots of losers confess to crimes they didn’t do. Maybe the cops believed you’re innocent because you are.”
“They believed me because I’m smarter than they are,” he snapped. “They can’t catch me.”
“Maybe.” She knew she had to push him that last inch. “Like I said, it’s easy enough to make up the story. Nowhere near as easy to be a man who could actually do it.”
He looked over at her out of the corner of his eye. “I can show you where I left her body.”
She stared at him for a moment. “Thirty-one miles. You said it was thirty-one miles?”
“That’s right.” Owen gestured out into the darkness. “That way. Thirty-one miles. Come on, I’ll show you, then you’ll know I’m telling the truth.” He was beginning to enjoy taking her into his confidence. Unlike other women, she wasn’t repulsed or horrified, but actually interested. With a sly smile he revealed more. “She wasn’t my first, either.”
“You mean to say you’ve killed people before?”
“Two others.” When he looked over at her she could see how bloodshot his eyes were. “She was the third.”
No, Carrie was the fourth. In his drunken haze he was forgetting the skinny prostitute he had strangled to death in a flophouse in Pennsylvania. She’d been a heroin addict who had been killing herself for a long time, not unlike Angela’s mother. Owen had simply finished the job for her. But this was not the time to refresh his memory.
“I’ve never been with a guy who actually killed someone, not deliberately, anyway. That’s fucking hot. At least, it is if you’re telling me the truth.” Angela put the truck in gear and drove out of the lot. “You better not be bullshitting me.”
“You’ll see,” he said with smug confidence.
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.”
Ang
ela 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.”
SIX
Angela clamped on to Owen’s wrist with both hands lest he pull her hair out by the roots as he dragged her across the rough ground. Her weight was no problem for him to handle. With the urgency with which he pulled her along, and with the way he was holding her by her hair, twisting her neck around, she could only get in a half step here and there. Most of the time, she was off balance as she was dragged like a rag doll.
Angela didn’t say anything. She knew Owen had done all the listening he intended t
o do.
When they reached the pickup, instead of pulling her into the cab as she had expected—the cab where her gun was—he went around to the back of the truck. He dropped the tailgate with his free hand, hopped up, and with one swift yank hauled her up by her hair.
Owen threw her down in the bed of the truck. He was done with proving to her that he was no ordinary guy. He had switched into psycho mode and was now intent only on what he wanted. He would now dictate what was going to happen. She knew that she shouldn’t expect anything less of him. She had told him, after all, that she liked guys who took what they wanted.
Angela was acutely aware of how very alone they were, and that no one would hear her screams any more than they had heard Carrie’s.
In a flash he was on top of her, pawing at her.
“I like your tits,” he said in a breathless pant laced with lust. “I don’t like those big, fake, plastic tits most whores have these days. I like real tits, like yours.”
“Kiss me,” she whispered urgently into his ear.
He pushed a knee up between her legs, forcing them open as he pressed his mouth over hers. His breath stank of alcohol.
Angela pressed her mouth back at him, encouraging him. He responded by pushing his tongue into her mouth. She didn’t resist. He unbuckled his belt and unzipped his pants, letting his uncomfortable erection spring out before going for the zipper of her shorts.
As his tongue probed deep into her mouth and his hand was busy fumbling with opening her shorts, she reached down to the top of her right boot, her fingers searching blindly.
Once she found what she was looking for and had a firm grip on the handle, she abruptly clamped her teeth down on his tongue as hard as she possibly could and pulled her head back.
Owen cried out in surprise, anger, and pain. His immediate instinct was self-preservation, so he leaned forward, going with her to keep his tongue from being torn open by her teeth should he jerk back.
At the same time as she clamped down on his tongue with her teeth, Angela yanked the knife from its sheath in her boot. She rammed her left forearm against his throat, abruptly pushing him back as she kept her teeth tightly clenched on his tongue, leaving less than an inch between their lips.