Eyes of the Predator (21 page)

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.

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 seemed 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.

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.