Vengeance Road (8 page)

But all he had left were more unanswered questions about the case.

There was only one thing he could do now.

He reached to the floor behind the passenger seat for his lantern flashlight. It had a new six-volt battery and an intense-focus beam. The light was strong.

He left his car and headed for the woods. If he was going to search for more answers, the shallow grave where they'd found Bernice Hogan's corpse was the place to start.

J
olene Peller's body swayed rhythmically to the low drumming of big wheels rolling at high speed.

As she floated in and out of consciousness, she tried to seize upon a way to claw out of the darkness.

She needed to think. Think of what she knew.

Her prison—or tomb—whatever it was, was still moving.

She knew she'd been abducted.

But who had done this? And why?

Someone had bound her hands, gagged her and imprisoned her. She had muzzy memories—or was it a dream?—of someone removing her gag, feeding her bread, chocolate bars, giving her water. Giving her a plastic bucket for a toilet, ordering her to relieve herself. There was tissue, but her hands remained bound with tape.

Mercifully the bucket had a lid.

Then she was forced to swallow capsules.

Drugs?

Someone was keeping her alive.

Like a captured animal.

Who? Who was doing this and what was he going to do to her?

Or had he already done something to her while she was unconscious?

The image made her retch. She swallowed. Please no. Jolene pushed back her tears.

Please.

What did he do to Bernice?

Jolene had no concept of where she was, or how long she'd been here. She was wearing the same clothes she'd worn when she tried to help Bernice.

She wanted to shower, to cleanse herself of this foul, stinking nightmare.

She knew by the steady drone that she was still moving. Maybe this was her chance to do something.

But what?

She was gagged. Her hands were bound, but not her legs or ankles. She was free to move, but she was blind in the absolute darkness. Maybe her abductor was watching her now with some sort of high-tech equipment? Maybe if he saw that she was awake he'd come to her?

To do what?

Jolene's breathing quickened.

She was so scared. She whispered a prayer.

Stay calm.

Using her fingertips, she felt in her pockets for her cell phone. It was gone.

Take it easy.

She steeled herself then probed the soft pad. Feeling its indentations, quilting and seams, she concluded that it was a mattress.

Single-size.

Pushed against a wall.

Jolene drew herself into a sitting position. She was woozy. She waited and breathed slowly. Then she ran her fingers over the walls. They were solid wood with a rough pitted surface. At times, she felt the steel hardware of a hinge-and-bolt assembly. Felt the line of a door frame. But
it was shut up so tight, no light, or hope, leaked through. At times she felt the head of a nail or screw protruding from the wall.

It was familiar.

In high school, when she was a part-time supermarket cashier, she'd helped inventory all the departments, even the warehouse. The big storage containers and trailers smelled like this and had the same rough surface.

They were heavy, insulated, sound-absorbing walls, like those in a cooler. It was not refrigerated but it was cold. Near her were old blankets that smelled as if they'd been used for horses.

Jolene stood.

Waves of dizziness rolled over her and she steadied herself against the wall, waiting for them to subside.

She raised her restrained hands above her head, felt nothing but air.

Then carefully, starting with the nearest wall, she began inching her way around the boundary of her prison, steadying herself against the to-and-fro motion as she felt for a latch, a light switch, a door, a window, anything.

As she groped cautiously, her fingers brushed against the chain bearing her locket. A gift from her mother. She stopped, found it in the dark, and while her bound hands made the simple movement awkward, Jolene touched it to her cheek.

Cody.

It gave her strength.

It fueled her determination to get home to her little boy, who needed her, and to her mother, who'd be worried to death.

What if her mother thought she'd run off? Got stoned, abandoned Cody.

What if she died here and that was the last thought—the last memory—her mother had?

No, no,
NO
!

Jolene couldn't bear the heartbreak for her mother. Her mother, who'd stood by her and supported her when everyone else had written her off.

I love you.

At that moment, Jolene promised her mom and Cody that she'd find a way out and back to the new life she'd worked so hard, so damn hard, to build for them.

Jolene Peller's life would not end in this dark stinking box, or hole, or whatever the hell it was. She'd been through too much, worked too hard to just give up to some crazy motherf—

Jolene tasted the salt of her tears as she completed moving around the perimeter of her cell. About eight-by-eight, she guessed as she blinked back her fear and braced herself in her starting corner. Moving blindly and slowly, she cut across the floor. She extended her right foot, then her left, to feel for a trap door, or anything on the floor.

She was strong, smart and would fight, she told herself in the instant before her heart smashed against her chest and she froze.

Jolene's foot had hit something.

Something that moaned.

G
annon started walking along the water's edge.

It was close to 3:00 a.m., the area was deserted. Breezes fingered through the elm and maple trees. After nearly a hundred yards, he came to the hilly bend where the two women had made the discovery.

His flashlight captured a patch of shimmering yellow, a strip of flapping police tape knotted to a branch.

It beckoned him to the grim scene beyond. But he didn't move. He felt he was being watched. He swept his light beam up high through the trees.

A pair of eyes glowed back at him.

An owl hooted.

As Gannon took stock of the area, he moved his light lower toward the spot where they'd found Bernice Hogan's corpse.

Trees and branches obscured the reach of his light.

He proceeded.

He left the footpath, going deeper into the woods. Few people knew that the scene had been released earlier tonight, after it had been processed by the State Police Forensic Investigations Unit, dispatched from troop headquarters in Batavia five days ago.

They'd seized it for longer than usual.

Maybe they'd had problems with this one?

Now the tape was gone and all barriers had been removed.

No one was here.

The burial site was some thirty yards from the footpath, along hills and valleys, amid a stand of maple and shrubs. It was a long shot that the women would have spotted it, but conditions and lighting must have been just right.

Or maybe the killer wanted it found? The area was popular with walkers, hikers, birdwatchers.

During his time on the crime beat, Gannon had studied the same textbooks detectives studied to pass their exams. And he'd researched and reported on enough homicides, and murder trials, to know the procedures of an investigation and the collection of evidence.

He knew that buried-body cases and outdoor crime scenes posed problems. Weather conditions can harm any trace evidence, blow it or wash it away. Animals can damage a body, or carry evidence far from a scene. The perimeter can be impossible to establish.

Still, the investigators would have been thorough. They would have gridded the area; would have done a lot of things, like look for tire impressions back at the parking lot, or foot impressions here.

As he walked, he raked his light over the ground in front of him, looking at the flattened trail that was likely used by investigators as the entry-exit path to the scene.

He found nothing else in the empty forest. The state police had not released details on the cause or location of Bernice Hogan's death. Early rumors held that she was killed elsewhere and dumped near the creek. But later, Adell had told him that they believed she was murdered here, given the amount of blood that had soaked into the ground.

While Gannon continued, meticulously sweeping his light everywhere, he tried to imagine Bernice Hogan's last
moments. As he ascended a small rise, he inched his light forward until—
Jesus, there it is
.

The hole in the ground was about six-by-two feet and about three feet in depth, a rounded, cup-shaped withdrawal of soil clawed from the earth.

This was the work of the scene experts.

To the right of the hole lay a neat mound of fine, dark soil. To the left, a neat pile of branches and twigs. A few fragments of white string were present, likely used to section the site and screen soil excavated from and around the grave. All in keeping with the transfer theory, which arises from the fact that a killer will always leave, or take, some sort of trace evidence from a victim or a scene.

The area had been methodically cleaned by the unit.

Gusts hissed through the treetops, tumbled down to the site, hurling grit into the dark forest and into Gannon's eyes.

He sat down on the rise nearby overlooking the grave.

Remnants of torn-off police tape waved from trees, like the aftermath of an explosion of the monstrous act committed here.

A human being was murdered right here.

In the distance, he saw the lights of the suburbs, rows of safe middle-class homes twinkling in a different world that was light-years away from Bernice Hogan's.

He looked down at her grave.

What a lonely place to die.

Did she glimpse heaven in her last moments?

He set his flashlight on the ground, pulled his notebook from his rear pocket, snapped through it until he found clear pages.

Soon, more people would come to the site. A parks crew would likely arrive first to restore it. That was the usual way things went in cases like this. They'd fill the hole, disperse the twigs.

Then morbid attraction would play out.

Neighborhood kids, the little ones, would dare each other to venture here. Teenagers would buy beer to party here and scare each other. Walkers, joggers and the like, would point respectfully and say, “They found her out there.”

Gannon sat on the rise asking himself if there was more he could do as songs from warblers and field sparrows coaxed the sun to come up.

Stiff, he rubbed his eyes and stood. All he could do was search the edges of the area. It was not likely that the scene people had missed anything, but you never knew.

He walked in a spiral pattern, expanding it as he circled the grave site. He kept his eyes to the ground, scanning it for anything that might have been overlooked.

As he walked, faraway noises of dogs barking, a car horn, the sounds of the city waking echoed while he searched the ground.

Maybe Brent and Esko had some key fact evidence they were holding back.

It was a safe bet that Karl Styebeck would be familiar with this area. But so would plenty of other people. It was the suburbs, a metro area just minutes from the Canadian border.

Then there was the mysterious blue rig with unique writing on the door. And what about the angle that another woman had argued with Bernice Hogan the night she vanished, according to Lotta, the waitress at Kupinski's?

As Gannon continued circling the scene in an ever-widening pattern taking him to the park's outer limits, he found discarded items: beer cans, whiskey bottles, take-out containers, cigarette wrappers, a rusted license plate, a bicycle wheel and an old tire.

They were such a long way from the scene he wouldn't expect that the unit missed them, or that they'd be a factor.
Still, he noted their location on a crude map, with a brief description.

His body was heavy with exhaustion.

Time to pack it in, head home, have a hot shower, get a few hours of sleep and start fresh. As Gannon turned to leave, he saw another scrap of trash, a piece of paper caught in some shrubs.

Looked like some sort of receipt.

He yawned.

Might as well check it out.

Removing it from the branches, Gannon saw that it was a ticket for a one-way bus trip.

Buffalo to Orlando, Florida.

Hold on.

Somewhere, in the far recesses of his memory, a tiny alarm began sounding a short, high ring, telling him this was important.

Why?

The ticket was unused. There was no name on it. It was bought a week ago, almost the same time Bernice Hogan had vanished.

The pinging in Gannon's brain was getting louder.

Why was this important?

He should know. He should know.

He did.

Yes. He did know.

Peller.

His heart beat faster as he flipped back through his notes, back to Mary Peller who'd come to the newsroom to plead for help finding her daughter, Jolene.

Jolene, whom she'd lost to drugs and the street.

Jolene, who'd done things she was not proud of for money, like prostitution, maybe?

Jolene, who was twenty-six and missing.

All right, this was stupid. Her name was not on this ticket. No one's name was on it. He'd found it, what? Sixty, seventy, eighty yards from the scene?

He was beyond tired.

He took out his cell phone and photographed the ticket, then the location.

All right, he needed to find out exactly who had purchased this one-way ticket to Orlando, Florida.

He needed help and he needed it now.

He dialed a phone number.