Eyes of the Predator (39 page)

The man’s glistening, nude body
stood in front of the girl. Despite the chill in the room, he was covered from
head to foot in a sheen of sweat and excitement. The dim light from the
bathroom behind the girl cast a yellowish glow across the room.

In his right hand, Lylee held a
large hunting knife. The blade rested on the top of the girl’s shoulder.
Without putting any pressure on the knife, he slowly dragged the heavy knife
across the shoulder and the flesh separated into a small cut, dripping blood.
The girl’s eyes widened and focused on him through the stinging pain.

Good, he thought. Good.

The man moved his left hand down
to his groin and held himself. In a brief swirling moment of lucidity, Lyn realized
that her struggle for life now depended on her ability to maintain her distance
from what was happening in the room, and from what was happening to her.

Giving in to the terror and pain
would give him what he wanted and take her to a place she would not survive.
Desperately, her wide, frightened eyes focused on the fluttering curtains. She
searched frantically in her mind for the pines swaying in the cool breeze. They
were lost. She was lost.

Her eyes clamped shut so that she
would not see what was happening in the room. Somewhere a cricket chirped
distantly. She followed the chirping hum until she dared peek out through half
closed lids. Her eyes opened wider, and she was there again in the cool pines
where the breezes blew. She was safe in the pines, and she would stay there as
long as she could.

“Pickham 301, out at state patrol
post, Toccoa.”

Clay’s head jerked violently at
the words from the portable radio beside him on the seat.

“Ten - four, Pickham 301, out at
Toccoa.”

Amazed that his plan had worked,
at least a little bit, Clay pulled over to the shoulder of the two lane highway
to scan the map he had been driving with in his lap. Since leaving Augusta, he
had meandered his way through the northeast Georgia countryside to the area of
I-85 and the South Carolina line. Finding the highway he was on, he placed a
large finger on the dot that said Toccoa on the map. Maybe an hour he thought,
maybe less.

Then what? Good question.
Somewhere in his brain, Clay knew that this whole excursion was now more
obsession than anything else. He had to know that the girl was safe. Had it not
been for the traffic stop by the state patrol last night and the subsequent
information he was able to gain from his time at the patrol post, he probably
would have turned back by now. He would be listening silently to Cy’s
justifiable anger at Clay’s desertion from their job and business.

But knowing that the girl, that
Lyn, was in a car with a killer had changed all that. He would go on. He had
stopped wondering why. The question no longer troubled Clay. He was committed
to seeing this through to the end. That was that. Figuring it all out could
wait until later. For now, he would follow the trail and see where it took him.

Pulling back onto the road, he
steered the truck to the northwest. Somewhere up there ahead was an old Chevy
with a young girl in it and a man who had left two bodies behind in Pickham
County and was capable of who knew what. The thought caused Clay’s foot to
press slightly harder on the truck’s accelerator.

Rye County Deputy, Grover
Parsons, had been on the sheriff’s department for just a little over two years.
It had been his dream as a young boy to go into law enforcement. The local
department was just his starting point. He had bigger plans. He was building
his skills and gaining experience so that his application to the State Patrol
would be well received. In the mean time, he enjoyed patrolling the woods and
farmlands of north Georgia. He was young and single, and like most of the young
men in the area, he had grown up hunting in the mountains and fishing the cold
streams. These had remained his primary off-duty activities and had developed
in him a self-confidence and independence that served him well as a deputy.

His dad liked to brag about the
time his boy, Grover, had been fishing a creek alone up on Taylor Mountain when
a black bear had come out of the woods not fifteen feet from where Grover stood
knee-deep in the cold water. Telling the story, his dad made it sound like his
boy, Grover, was a modern day Davy Crockett, wrestling the bear and subduing
him with a pocketknife.

The truth was that the bear and
the young man had stared at each other for several seconds, both equally
startled by the other’s presence. Eventually, Grover turned, pointed his
fishing rod at the bear, and waving the rod tip in the bear’s face shouted,
“Go!” The bear did, and Grover went back to his search for trout in the
mountain stream. Still, Grover was known around the county as a calm,
independent, and robust young man who would not easily back down and who was
very resourceful.

Wheeling his county car into the
parking lot of the small country store and cafe that sat at the crossroads in
Crichton, he advised the radio dispatcher that he would be out having lunch.
Walking through the front door, he nodded at the old man behind the register
who was reading the Atlanta paper spread on the counter in front of him. The
old man gave him a quick lift of his head in return and went back to studying
the paper.

Seating himself at one of the
four small tables on the cafe side of the building, he greeted the man at the
next table.

“Hey, Gannet. How’s it goin’?”

The man smiled back over his
cheeseburger and gave a muffled reply through a mouthful. “Good, Grover. Pretty
good.”

“Afternoon, Fran,” Deputy Parsons
said to the heavy woman who walked up, wiping her hands on a white apron.

“Afternoon, Grover,” she said
with a smile and then looked quickly over at the counter where the old man, her
husband, still had his head bent over the newspaper. The smile turned to an
exasperated scowl for a moment before she looked back at Grover and asked,
“Usual?”

“Yep. Cheeseburger, fries and a
coke.”

“Right,” she nodded, and waddled
to the small kitchen in the back.

The deputy looked over at the man
at the next table and spoke to pass the time until his food arrived.

“Wonder what she would do if I
ordered a tuna sandwich?” he said grinning.

Gannet stifled a low laugh
through a mouthful of fries. Everyone knew that you could get two meals at
Fran’s cafe. Fried eggs and bacon for breakfast, and cheeseburger and fries for
lunch. That was it. No reason to order anything else, but she always came out
to ask.

“So anything goin’ on at your
place, Gannet?”

“No, not really,” the owner of
the Creek Side Cabins replied. He munched a bite of burger and added as an
afterthought. “Had a young couple check in this morning. Early, just after
five.”

“Really? That’s a little strange,
isn’t it?” Grover looked towards the kitchen where the sounds of metallic
scraping on the old griddle signaled that lunch would be ready soon. He was
hungry and his stomach growled.

“Yeah, but they’d been traveling
all night. Needed a place to rest for a couple of days, they said. Told them we
had a full house this weekend, but they could stay until then.”

The kitchen noises were now
accompanied by the aroma of the sizzling burger wafting through the area.
Grover’s stomach gurgled in anticipation.

“Kind of unusual, isn’t it?
Someone checking in so early and in the middle of the week this time of year?”

“Yeah. Bit out of the ordinary.
They seem like nice folks though. Man’s from Texas.”

Deputy Parsons’ eyes squinted
slightly. “From Texas?” he asked reaching into the breast pocket of his shirt.

“That’s what he said. Had Texas
plates on the car.”

Parsons opened the small notebook
he retrieved from his pocket and scanned down the page. “Gannet, you remember
what kind of car?”

“Chevrolet, I think. Older one,
but seemed in pretty good shape.”

“And the man? What did he look
like?”

“Not real big. Kind of average.
Thin, brown hair. Not much else.” Gannet looked at the deputy with concern. The
cheeseburger was forgotten. “What’s wrong, Grover? My wife is still there. Is
she in some kind of danger?”

“No, probably not, Gannet. Tell
me about the girl. What did she look like?”

“Can’t.”

“Why? You said it was a couple.”

“Well, that’s what the fella
said. He and his wife. He called her Sarah. But she stayed in the car and never
came in.”

Deputy Parsons stood up quickly,
stuffing the notebook back in his pocket. He called to the kitchen. “Gotta go,
Fran. Box it up, and I’ll come back later.”

“It’ll be cold, Grover!” she
shouted after him. “And that’s no fault of mine.” Fran poked her head out from
the kitchen to see Grover Parsons move quickly through the door followed by
Gannet trying to keep up with the deputy. She gave another scowl at the old man
at the counter, who never looked up from his paper, and then disappeared back
into the kitchen where agitated banging and clanging could be heard for some
time.

Outside, Parsons turned to
Gannet. “Follow me. When we get there, you go in the office and stay there with
your wife. Don’t come out.”

“What is it, Grover? What’s going
on?”

“Probably nothing, and then we
can go back and finish our burgers. Just need to check it out. That’s all.”
With that, the deputy cranked the car and pulled onto the two lane road that
would lead back to the Creek Side Cabins and an old Chevrolet.

Deputy Grover Parsons picked up
the mike as he increased speed. All of north Georgia law enforcement heard the
transmission or had it relayed to them within seconds.

The break came in the early
afternoon. George Mackey and Sharon Price had only spent a brief time at the
state patrol post outside Toccoa. Nervous energy and knowing that there was
only a limited amount of time before a third murder, in as many days, would be
committed by the man in the Chevrolet, made the anxious waiting unbearable.

They had checked in with Bob
Shaklee, who was doing the same in west Georgia near the Alabama line. Waiting.
It was all they could do. They were all in position as best they could be
without knowing where the Chevy had been headed. They all knew that the clock
was ticking for the young girl. They hoped the break would come before time
expired. They were also aware that the break might never come.

Investigative success usually
involves a combination of detailed, professional retrieval and analysis of
evidence, deductive skill, and artful intuition that leads investigators on the
right path. The two GBI agents and the deputy from Pickham County knew that
many investigations took wrong turns and headed down false paths only to be
later recognized as such.

Successful investigations often
turned on the slightest of chances; a single misspoken word, a chance witness,
an escape vehicle breaking down, or some other random, fortuitous act. These
and a thousand other items
might
lead an investigation to a successful
conclusion. Unfortunately, there were a million things that could steer it
wrong.

The fact that the description of
the vehicle, perpetrator, and possible next victim had been broadcast across
Georgia and the southeastern States might bring them the break they needed. Or,
it might not. Scores of BOLO’s are broadcast across the law enforcement
frequencies daily in Georgia in addition to the thousands across the entire
country. The sad reality is that most never turn up a lead, at least not a
timely one. In a nation of three hundred and fifty million and twice as many vehicles,
the odds were against them. One older model Chevy with a white male and white
female occupants riding in plain view on the public road system were more
hidden than the proverbial needle in a haystack. They were all but invisible.
If the driver was a bit more cautious and made efforts to conceal his
movements, spotting them would be highly improbable, if not virtually
impossible. Unless the gods smiled soon and they got their break, the clock
would expire for the young girl in the Chevy.

It was Price who finally spoke in
the midst of her nervous pacing.

“Let’s go, George.”

He looked up from a metal chair
in the break room.

“Where to?”

“I don’t know. Anywhere. We can
do our own search grid for the car.”

“There’s troopers and deputies
all over Georgia looking, Sharon. Not likely we’re going to be much help. We
need to stay in the north Georgia area and Bob in the west so we can respond if
the car or the man and girl turn up.”

“I know, but that doesn’t mean we
have to sit here.” She paused, thinking. “Let’s start our own grid and start
checking every little road.”

“That’s a lot of roads.”

“Yeah, but not as many as down in
the flat lands. The hills and mountains up here limit the number of roads.” She
paused again, conscious of how ridiculous she must sound, and then shrugged and
said, “It’s a shot, George. That’s all, just a shot. Besides, I can’t stand
just sitting here waiting, doing nothing.”

Listening, George thought of the
young girl’s voice on the cell phone message. Like Sharon, he knew that her
time was limited, if she still lived at all. He shook his head to shake that
thought away. He could not be late again. And with that thought burning in his
brain, he looked up.

“All right. Let’s do it. I can’t
stand the waiting either.”

After grabbing some triangularly
cut sandwiches and drinks from the break room machines, they loaded into
George’s pickup and headed out from Toccoa. Sharon outlined a fifty square mile
grid to the north and west, crisscrossed by small winding county roads and
state highways. She navigated and George followed her directions as they
munched the cardboard sandwiches and gulped their drinks. Both knew that their
small search was almost certainly futile, but they didn’t speak about it.
Sharon studied the map and George drove and both scrutinized every vehicle they
saw. George would slow whenever they came to some small store or gas station or
crossroads so that they could examine the vehicles and any people they might
see. After the brief inspection, he would pick up speed again, eyes scanning
alertly for an older Chevy with Texas tags. It felt better to be moving, doing
something, doing anything, futility be damned.