Deserted

by E. H. Reinhard

  The old woman immediately screamed for help at the top of her lungs. Kitty delivered a forearm directly to the woman’s mouth, silencing her and sending her over backward to the gravel driveway. A muffled scream came from the old man, gagged and kneeling a few feet away. He tried getting to his feet but was pushed back down by Kerry. Silas walked to the old woman, reached down, and pulled her to her feet by her hair. The old woman wailed in pain. From the corner of his eye, Silas again caught the man trying to rise before once again being pushed down by his daughter.

  “She’s a Bible-thumper, Daddy,” Kerry said. “They both are. This is her husband here. These two were talking bad about me at a truck stop.”

  The man Kerry was holding by his white hair thrashed around.

  “Really?” Silas brought the old woman’s face near his. He stared into her eyes, which were welling with tears. “What were you saying about my daughter?”

  The woman said nothing. She sniffled and sucked in choppy breaths.

  Silas put the blade of his knife to her bloodied mouth. “Tell me what you said.” He slid the blade of the knife between her trembling lips. Silas felt the blade touch her clenched teeth.

  The old man shouted something into his gag.

  Silas looked at Kerry. “What did they say about you?” he asked.

  “The old guy called me a sinner,” Kerry said. “Because of the way I was dressed. Basically, pretty much how I am now.” She pointed at her outfit, a tank top and small pair of shorts.

  Silas pulled the blade from the woman’s mouth and jerked his head to her husband who was trying to talk through his gag. “Do you have something to say, old man? An apology to my daughter, perhaps?” He nodded his head at the man, and Kerry pulled the gag from the guy’s mouth.

  “Take your hands off of my wife,” the man said.

  Silas let go of the woman’s hair and ran his hand all over her face. The old woman jerked her head back. He took hold of her hair again and brought her closer to him.

  “Get your hands off of her!” the man shouted.

  “Tough guy, huh,” Silas said.

  The old man said nothing.

  Silas stared at him. “What’s your name, old timer?” he asked.

  “Henry,” the man said.

  “Ha!” Kerry yelled in excitement. “That’s the first name that I guessed! Daddy, ask the old chick if her name is Gertrude.”

  Silas turned his attention back to the woman. “Is your name Gertrude?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Damn,” Kerry said. “Well, fifty percent still isn’t bad.”

  Silas looked back over at the old man. “Well, Henry. My daughter says that you’re a religious man. Is that correct?”

  “It is, and you all are going to burn in eternal damnation.”

  “Whoa,” Silas said. “Eternal damnation? That doesn’t sound very good.” Silas scratched at his beard with the blade of the knife and stared at the old man. “I tell you what, Henry… Why don’t you ask your God if he can strike me down before I stick this knife in your wife’s belly.”

  The old man remained silent.

  “Ask him!” Silas shouted.

  He mumbled prayers under his breath.

  “Nope,” Silas said. “No tingles from the man upstairs. No compelling inner thoughts to put this knife down and repent.” He balled more of the woman’s hair up in his left hand to get a good grip. “Henry, I have to be honest. I don’t think anyone is hearing your prayers. I think you should try harder.”

  The man prayed louder.

  Silas let him continue. He looked back at the woman, who’d joined in on the man’s prayer.

  “Nope. Just not feeling anything.” Silas turned the knife in his right hand and plunged it into the old woman’s stomach.

  She gasped, and the husband screamed over the sound of the twins’ laughter. Silas pulled out the blade and stuck it into her again. He could feel the woman’s legs going weak through the increased weight in his left hand. He stabbed her again and let go of her hair. The old woman collapsed to the gravel. The man tried to scramble to his feet while screaming for his wife. The other two female captives joined in his screaming—into their gags—while trying to get up and run. Kitty and Kerry kept the two prostitutes in place. Harper took a step toward the old man.

  Silas reached a hand out to his brother’s chest. “Don’t worry about him. He isn’t going anywhere.”

  The old man ran to his wife and went to his knees at her side. He wailed and screamed.

  “Can you keep those two under control, Kitty?” Silas asked.

  Kitty stood behind the two women, who were back on their knees. She stepped past Kerry and put a hand on each of the hooker’s shoulders. “I got them.” Kitty put her head right in between the two women’s faces. “You run, you die.”

  “Okay. Kerry, do me a favor and shut the old guy up,” Silas said.

  Kerry took a couple quick steps to the old man, who was hunched over his wife’s body. She licked the tip of the pocket knife she’d used to cut the straps and stuck it into the side of the old man’s throat. He knelt up straight, blood spraying from the side of his neck, before collapsing over on top of his wife. The two women Kitty was holding down once again tried to get to their feet and flee. Harper went to Kitty and assisted her in keeping the two in place. Both women screamed into their gags.

  Silas stood looking at the two remaining captives, whom his brother and daughter were holding down. Kerry came to Silas’s side.

  Silas looked down at her feet and then glanced over at Kitty to check her footwear, a pair of black boots. “Go put on your boots, Kerry. And grab that ax from the pile of wood up by the house.”

  Kerry smiled and disappeared around the trailer of the truck.

  “What do you think, Kitty? Chase and chop?” Silas asked.

  “Hell yes,” she said.

  A moment later, Kerry reappeared from around the side of the trailer—boots on her feet, ax hanging from her hand.

  “Okay,” Silas said. “Just like old times.” He switched hands with the knife and patted the back right pocket of his pants. “You got a coin, Harper?”

  “Yeah, I think I have some change.” He took his hands from the prostitute and rummaged inside his pockets. His hand came back with a quarter.

  “Same as always. Kerry, you’re heads. Kitty, you’re tails. Flip it,” Silas said.

  His brother set the quarter on his thumb and flipped it into the air. He stared down where the quarter landed among the stones of the driveway.

  “Tails never fails,” Harper said.

  “Yes!” Kitty yelled.

  “Whatever,” Kerry said.

  Silas snapped his fingers at Kerry.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Give your sister the ax,” Silas said.

  Kerry walked the ax over and passed it off to Kitty.

  Kitty pulled the woman to her feet by the shoulders of her shirt. “Run, Hooker! Run!” she yelled and pushed the leather-skirt wearing woman away from the group. “Watch out for snakes!”

  The woman made a beeline from the gravel driveway and into the brush.

  Kitty lifted the ax and took two running steps after her.

  “Wait!” Silas shouted. He stared at the woman running toward a mountain off to the east. Silas watched until the woman had a good fifty-foot head start. “Get her!” he shouted.

  Kitty immediately ran after the woman.

  Kerry and Harper cheered Kitty on, and Silas could hear his sister-in-law and nephews doing the same from up near the house.

  He chuckled. “It never gets old.”

  “Is that one mine?” Kerry motioned to the remaining woman being held down by her uncle.

  Silas tossed Kerry the knife, which she caught perfectly by the handle. “Gut her,” he said.

  Silas looked on as Kerry knelt over the woman being held down by Harper and viciously stabbed at her. He lifted his head and looked off into the distance in search of Kitty
. Silas spotted nothing but brush. A hundred yards away, near the large fire pit, Silas could see the rooftops of rusted-out cars that had been parked there years prior. He knew the area well, as he and Harper had had many nights around the fire. Silas spotted movement and focused on one of the cars in the distance. He saw an ax blade come up over the roof of the car and swing down. A moment later, Kitty popped up from behind the vehicle. She held the ax, covered in blood, up above her head.

  “I win!” Kitty shouted.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We’d wrapped the meeting with Gallo and the other agents. Gallo put his guys on getting the word out about the twin girls to every roadside gas station, truck stop, and weigh station along the interstate through Texas. He left us in the conference room while he stepped out to call the local police department that had handled the abandoned car and homicide the day prior. The plan—for Beth, Bill, Scott, and myself—was to drive out to the local PD to take a look at the vehicles in their impound lot and drive out to where they’d been found. Until Ball called us back with anything they got on their end in Manassas, or we received more information on whom the abandoned vehicle belonged to, there wasn’t much else we could look into.

  The door opened, and Gallo walked back into the conference room, holding a stack of papers in his hand. He closed the door at his back, took a chair at the end of the table, and passed out the papers to the group. I took the stapled stack of four pieces of paper that Gallo handed to me and looked through them—a couple of copies of driver’s licenses from an older man and a woman with the same last name. The next two pages were photocopies of a couple of typed addresses and some handwritten notes.

  “Abandoned-vehicle owners were Henry Baisemoore and Mary Baisemoore,” Gallo said. “Age seventy-two on the man, sixty-eight on the woman. The Royse City PD checked the house that the vehicle was registered to and found no one present. They’ve since contacted a daughter of the couple”—Gallo glanced down at the papers in front of him—“a woman by the name of Meredith O’Brien. I guess that she tried to make contact with her parents but was unsuccessful. She provided two cell-phone numbers that I’ll be looking into shortly and a bit about their daily routine.” Gallo looked up from his papers. “It seems that the couple regularly frequented a truck-stop diner after church on Mondays. The name of the place is in those papers there, and it’s in the vicinity of where their vehicle was found.”

  “Both of the vehicles are with the Royse City PD?” Scott asked.

  “Correct. Neither vehicle has been touched,” Gallo said. “I guess both the car and the pickup truck were towed in last night, and the Royce City PD was waiting on someone from the crime lab to go over them. I told them to put that on hold, and we’d like to take that over. I’m getting a team out there today yet.”

  “Okay,” Scott said.

  I saw Scott glance over at me.

  “Hank, do you and Beth want to check out this truck stop and the location of where these two vehicles were found?” Scott asked. “Bill and I can head over to these two cars with a couple of forensics guys and see what we can find there.”

  “I’m fine with that,” I said.

  “So you’re going to get banking and phone records for these two that owned the abandoned car?” Bill asked, his eyes fixed on Gallo.

  “As soon as we’re done here, that’s what I’ll be on,” Gallo said. “Hank, any word back from your home office on the Tennessee thing? Any video or anything new?”

  “I haven’t heard anything back yet,” I said.

  “All right. If you’re out and get something, just relay it back to me.” Gallo rolled his chair back from the conference table and stood.

  The rest of our group did the same. Beth, Bill, Scott, and I left the Bureau office for our cars and started our hour drive toward Royse City. I called Ball on the drive, looking for an update. He said the Knoxville office had sent a pair of agents out to the truck stop and he expected to hear something back within the hour. As far as the names Sarah Goff had provided, the home office had yet to get any hits. The signs for Royse City passed by outside our rental car’s passenger window. A moment later, Bill and Scott exited the freeway in front of us.

  “How far are we looking at, yet?” Beth asked.

  I glanced down at the navigation running on my phone in my lap. “Says eleven more miles up Interstate 30 here, and it should be right there as soon as we exit.”

  “And where the car was found from there?”

  “I looked earlier, and it seemed like around ten miles away or so.”

  Beth nodded and continued driving.

  A couple minutes later, we passed a billboard advertising the truck stop we were heading toward. After another few minutes, my phone’s robotic navigation voice piped up, letting us know the next exit was ours.

  Beth exited the freeway and stayed left at the bottom of the ramp. When the light flashed green, we went under the overpass and spotted our truck stop ahead on the right. I pointed out the windshield, and Beth turned into the lot. We found a parking spot near the diner and stepped out. From the back of the car, I grabbed my bag, which contained the copies of the missing couple’s driver’s licenses. If they were regulars, someone would surely recognize them.

  We walked in through the front entrance, and I looked around. Off to the right was the gas station itself and the front counter with the cash registers. Directly before us was a wall with a hall in the center, leading to the restrooms. A bank of pay phones were bolted to the wall farther left, with a map of Texas above them and a small red arrow marking our current position. Farther to the left, the wall opened up into the diner. We walked left toward the hostess station at the diner’s entry and stopped when a dark-haired thirty-something-year-old woman stepped out from near the register with a pair of menus. She flashed us a smile. Judging by her attire, a brown apron over a cream-colored shirt and a name badge, I put her as the hostess.

  “Just two today?” she asked.

  “We’re actually looking for someone who may be able to answer some questions for us.” Beth reached into her blazer, pulled out her credentials, and quickly flashed them at the hostess.

  “Oh, okay. Let me see if Joe or one of the other managers is available. One minute.” The woman walked toward the right rear of the dining area and vanished down a short hall, which probably led to the kitchen area.

  While Beth and I stood at the hostess station and waited, I surveyed the diner. Booths with brown vinyl seats wrapped the edges of the room. The two rows down the center held another eight booths each. The far wall was windows looking out at endless parking stalls for tractor trailers. The left wall was more windows looking out on the area Beth and I had parked and the fuel pumps in the lot. My eyes went to the drop ceiling and specifically the corners, looking for cameras. I didn’t see any aside from the one directly above my head over the cash register. A moment later, a long-haired man walked from the small hallway that the hostess had disappeared into. He came directly toward Beth and me, dressed in a similar brown apron but wearing a dress shirt underneath with a pack of cigarettes tucked into his breast pocket. The dress shirt told me he was probably the manager we sought. The man looked as though he was in his forties. I spotted a couple tattoos on his arms, the most prominent one of a guitar on his right forearm.

  He stopped before Beth and me at the edge of the hostess station. “I’m Joe Ramsey, manager of the diner. Is there something that I can help you with?” he asked.

  “Agents Rawlings and Harper. We have a couple of questions regarding some patrons of the diner here.”

  “Sure. Did you just want to follow me back to my office or grab a booth?”

  “Either is fine,” I said.

  “Let’s head to my office.” The manager turned and started back down the hallway he’d come from.

  Beth and I followed him down the hall, left through a swinging doorway, and around the kitchen to an office tucked into the back corner. We walked in, and he closed the door at our
backs.

  “Have a seat,” he said.

  Beth and I sat, and the manager took a seat across from us at his desk.

  “So what can I help you out with, now?” he asked.

  I took the bag from my shoulder and undid the flap on the top. I pulled the papers Gallo had given us, with the copies of the couple’s driver’s licenses. I turned the page in my hand so he could view it and set it on his desk. “Are you familiar with this man or woman?”

  He looked at the photos on the driver’s licenses for only a moment before nodding his head. “Yes, they come in once or twice a week. I’m not familiar with them on a personal level, but I recognize them as customers.”

  “Did you see them in here yesterday?” Beth asked.

  “They were here.” The manager rubbed at his chin. “They had a bit of a verbal confrontation with a woman that was eating here.”

  “Describe her,” Beth said.

  “The woman?”

  “Yes, whoever this couple had an altercation with,” Beth said.

  “Early twenties, blond hair.” He paused for a moment, tapping his fingertips on the surface of his desk. “Attractive.”

  “Was she alone or with anyone else?” I asked.

  “She was sitting with another girl. Probably the same age. Dark haired.”

  “Twins?” I asked.

  “Oh, that I guess I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I could ask their server, Jan, if that would help.”

  “It would. Do you know what the nature of this altercation was?” I asked.

  “I think the older couple maybe said something about her that she overheard or something.”

  I stared at the guy, who was holding something back, I was pretty sure. “Did you want to just tell us everything that happened?”

  The manager let out a breath. “Okay, I guess the old couple called the other woman a sinner due to her style of dress, and she confronted them. After she left their table, I was requested and spoke with the older couple for a moment. They said they were having a problem with the woman that was, at that time, standing at the pay phones. I walked to her and asked her if there was some kind of problem, and she told me that the older couple made some remarks about her so she confronted them. That was about it, really.”