Killer (16 page)

I slip the phone in my back pocket and open the glove box and grab Sallie Fun’s Ruger. I check the magazine. Three rounds, plus one in the chamber. I remove the chambered round and slide it into the magazine and slap the clip back into the gun and click the safety on. I tuck the Ruger into the back of my waistband and get out of the truck. I go to the back of the truck and open the tailgate and climb inside and fumble with my keys to open the toolbox near the cab. I take out a tire iron and a crescent wrench and wire cutters and a hand sledge and I go wandering through the thicket of big rigs that are idling in the parking lot of the truck stop.

This guy Marsh is no dummy,
Nicki had said.
He’s got a real bug up his ass about you. He’s reading all your books…

Marsh had done the same thing I had done, only he got there first.
If I knew those things about Temescal, what about the other things, from the following books?

I wonder if the police have been to St. Stephen, but I don’t wonder long because I have to dodge behind a rig when I see a West Virginia State Police cruiser idling ahead, at the end of the long row of resting trucks.

I wait there for five minutes or so, pressed against the side of a rig, in the shadows, until the West Virginia State Police cruiser pulls away. I wind back the way I came, like a rat lost in a maze. I come out on the other side of the cluster of trucks and watch the State Police cruiser pull out of the truck stop and drive off toward the ramp leading to the interstate. I turn back to the parking lot and see a kid get out of a new Mustang. The kid heads toward the truck stop restaurant with his hand on his girlfriend’s backside.

The kid enters the restaurant with his girlfriend and the moment the restaurant doors close I walk up to his Mustang and look around and then jam the bladed end of the tire iron against the lock in the Mustang’s door and whack the other end of the tire iron with the hand sledge, instantly setting off the alarm. I whack it a second time, then a third time, as hard as I can, and the blade of the tire iron punches the lock in and I open the door. I lean inside and pop the hood release lever under the dash. I lean back out and go to the front of the car and lift the hood. I can’t stop the alarm but I can silence the horn. I find the horn mounted against the firewall and yank the wires from it and the noise stops. But the parking lights on the front and rear of the car are still flashing. I circle the car, bashing each parking light out with the hand sledge.

Back inside the car and under the dash, wedging the blade of the tire iron up under the plastic sleeve around the steering column and popping it off and sorting through wires, remembering a young uniform cop telling me, after three beers,
“Your older vehicles were easier, there was a black ignition wire and a red hotwire and you just had to connect them but now they’ve changed the wire colors; they keep changing them and moving them into solid state circuitry but the good thieves, the pro’s, they keep up…”

I find a black wire and a red one and connect them and nothing happens and then I try a green wire against the black one and nothing and then I find a yellow one that leads to a circuit board and I brush the black wire across the soldered circuits and sparks shoot into my eyes. I strip the plastic sheath off the end of the black wire with my fingernails and press it against the circuit board and close my eyes this time as the sparks burn my fingers and I push on the accelerator with my hand and the Mustang’s engine fires to life. I wrap the unsheathed black wire around the circuit board in a tight knot then I get in and drive off.

I look around and no one seems to have noticed or cared.

“
Who cares about a car alarm?” The young cop had laughed as he drank the fourth beer I bought him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

I head east in my stolen Mustang. I open the glove compartment and look through the owner’s manual and the paperwork from the dealer as I drive. No LoJack manuals or logos on the windows. Good. The car is nice. It smells brand new and the odometer shows 988 miles. The kid must have impressed his girlfriend with his new car. Maybe it got him laid—

Flashing police lights in my mirror. I pull over and let them pass. State troopers, in a hurry to catch up with a Ford F-150 pickup truck that is behind them, parked between two big rigs.

I notice a semi with Michigan plates that has pulled aside, in the westbound lane across from me, to let the troopers pass. The trailer of the truck has an open top and I can see a load of oranges under a gray tarp. I grab my phone and dial Nicki’s cell. She answers on the first ring.

“Jack! Where the hell are you?”

“I’m okay but I can’t talk,” I say. “I’m not going to stay on the phone, but leave the line open. Don’t hang up. I’ll call you in a couple of hours from another phone.”

I open the driver’s side window and lob the phone across the highway and into the back of the Michigan-bound semi as I hear Nicki’s voice, pleading, “Jack! Just tell me where—”

The phone lands perfectly on top of the tarp. I drive away, watching the semi in my rearview mirror as it lurches back into traffic, headed the opposite direction from me.

THINGS PAST

Sharon Belton worked as a cashier at a truck stop outside of St. Stephen, Missouri. He had seen her many times, when he stopped to buy supplies. She, too, had the oval face of the Angel, and she, too, had completely ignored him, even when she rang up his purchases, week after week. She never spoke to him, never made eye contact, and would count out his change without letting her hand touch his, as though he were a leper.

He didn’t try to talk to her. He knew she wouldn’t respond and it wasn’t what he sought, anyway. It wasn’t her indifference or even her resemblance to the Angel that drove him to transform her. What finally drove him to act was the thought of her picture on the cover of the paper, just like his West Virginia Angel. He bought copies of the St. Stephen News and purchased a small digital camera and snapped Sharon Belton’s picture with a zoom lens as she left work one afternoon, walking right past his rig. He printed her picture at a Kinko’s in Kansas City and carefully pasted it onto the cover of the St. Stephen News. For a time it excited him, but it was a fleeting, counterfeit thrill. It wasn’t real.

So once again, he began to plan.

He began by building a tiny room inside the truck’s trailer—deep inside, right up against the cab. He built a false front for the little room, covering the seams of the fake wall by riveting strips of aluminum flashing over them. He scraped the flashing with a wire brush and pounded a few dents in it to match the worn aluminum flashing in the rest of the trailer, so it couldn’t be recognized by even the most careful inspection. He did the same with the two four-by-eight sections of plywood that made up the wall. He installed hinges on one of the sections of plywood, on the side that faced the room.

Inside the tiny, secret room he installed a four-by-six foot stainless steel drain pan he stole from a delivery load to an industrial refrigeration factory. The pan was big enough to hold a body, and it sloped gently toward a drain at the center, designed to collect the condensation from the coiled copper Freon tubes in the enormous air conditioners the refrigeration factory built. Under the drain, he installed a flexible stainless steel tube to collect the body fluids that would sluice into a plastic bucket underneath.

He bought a hunting knife at a truck stop in Davenport—rubber-handled, with a serrated edge. He dug a grave in the woods near an abandoned church in St. Stephen. This time he didn’t remove a layer of topsoil to conceal the grave. With head and hands missing, a positive identification of the body would take a while. And he wanted the body to be found this time.

Then he waited for the next new moon.

And so it came to pass that on one warm, moonless July night, he struck Sharon Belton in the back of the head with a tire iron wrapped in a towel, and took her to the tiny room in the truck’s trailer and began his work. He dumped the fluids into a storm drain at the edge of the truck stop’s parking lot, embalmed the head and hands—stitching the hands together carefully, as he had learned from the embalming book—and placed the china blue porcelain ovals under the eyelids.

He put the West Virginia Angel Caitlin in a heavy steel footlocker with two padlocks, and kept it in the small room in the trailer. Then he buried the rest of Sharon Belton in the woods by the old abandoned church cemetery. His new Angel from St. Stephen satisfied him quite well as he waited for the picture—the picture he knew would come.

And come it did. And this time it was even better.

The St. Stephen News
printed several front-page articles, featuring his new Angel’s yearbook picture, and eventually, after the grave was discovered, a haunting, spectacular photo of the gravesite with the church in the background. He pinned the pictures up in the tiny room in the trailer, along with the pictures from the newspaper in West Virginia, and he felt his power even more intensely. He would look at the pictures over and over, at times scarcely even looking at his new Angel from St. Stephen. The newspaper pictures and articles were becoming his greater source of pleasure now.

But it didn’t last as long as he had hoped. Soon he began to fantasize about the walls of the tiny room becoming covered with his Angels, his story, his gospel. Angels, blossoming like the lilies of the field.
Consider how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

He waited until the stream of stories about Sharon Belton trickled to a halt, then he left Kansas City. He found a new route advertised in the back of a trucking magazine—delivering precision grinding plates from a small plant in San Bernardino that reconditioned disc brakes. The hauls were short: from San Bernardino to Oxnard, Burbank, and Pasadena.

But the short hauls through the heavy Southern California traffic were hard on him. He no longer had long, dark stretches of highway to be alone with his thoughts. He had to deal with more people, more traffic, and then the migraines started.

He was one of many now, lost in the mass of drivers, workers, drug dealers and hookers at the enormous truck stops. He began to feel powerless and anonymous. Common. He was losing his special feeling in the nights he spent with his pictures and his new Angel from St. Stephen. He needed more. He needed to be known. He needed his story to be told, and told right. The whole story.

He worked the problem over and over in his throbbing head. He got pain pills and Valium from truckers in San Bernardino. They sold meth for the long-haul drivers and Valium and various painkillers to come down from the amphetamines. The Valium helped, but not for long. It was not enough. He grew more restless, and he began to drink. He hated losing control, and the drink and the Valium gave him brief blackouts.

After six months he gave up his route and bought a used van from a kid in Oxnard. He installed a ramp so he could drive the van right up into the trailer of his rig and hide it there. He had saved plenty of money—he was often paid in cash—and since he had no Social Security number, no DMV or police records, no bank account or address, he paid no taxes. So he stopped working entirely and spent his time driving the streets of Los Angeles, Pasadena, and Burbank in his van. But it only increased his sense of being small and ordinary, when all about him were garish monuments to power and celebrity.

He
had
to find a way to have his story told. He needed his gospel spread, but he wasn’t going to die for it. But how to tell his story without giving himself away? He needed his Paul, but he would have no Golgotha, no Calvary, no cross. He was no martyr. He was better—bigger—smarter than that. He was a man and not divine. But that was the point. What man could perform the miracles of transubstantiation as he had? He had the power to transform these course, vulgar young women into Angels. And the world would soon know it. He would find a way.

He spent sunny, empty afternoons perusing bookstores. He controlled his headaches with more Valium and painkillers and eased his restlessness by reading. He found he now had much more interest in the true-crime stories than the fiction he read before. Especially if they were authentic and not shallow and sensationalistic like most of them were.

And it was then that he came across a book—a pocket-sized true-crime collection about famous serial killers. It was well researched and well written. He found it fascinating and he read it over and over, and noted the author’s name.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Two hours later and by now the kid has no doubt gotten the cops all over his missing Mustang and I have to assume they’ve found my truck. I see a car dealership off the interstate as I enter the suburbs of Baltimore. I pull over and drive around to the rear of the lot where it isn’t as brightly lit. I pull up close behind a row of
Certified Pre-Owned
cars and get out of the Mustang with my crescent wrench. I remove the rear license plate frames from two of the closest cars. The frames don’t have tags, just the name of the dealership on a flimsy rectangle of plastic. I toss them in the Mustang, then yank a sign that reads
Low Mileage!
from under the wiper blade of a third car and toss it in the Mustang as well. Then I drive off, looking for an all-night gas station, preferably in a very bad part of town.

I find one as I approach downtown Baltimore just before dawn. There is a lone customer, an elderly man in a burnt-orange double-knit suit, pumping gas into his late-model Chrysler. The gas tank is on the passenger side of the Chrysler.

Perfect.

I pull in and circle the pump, looking for security cameras. I see one camera over the cashier’s window and that’s it. I pull around to an alley on the other side of the gas station where I can’t be seen by the camera. I get out of the Mustang with my dealer plates and tools and
Low Mileage
sign and leave the doors unlocked and the windows down. I would write
STEAL ME
across the Mustang’s windshield but I don’t have anything to write with.