“I guess they’re just getting help from local Bureau offices along the way. Them trying to coordinate with all the local departments on actively fleeing suspects was getting a little much for just Scott and Bill to handle, which is why Ball is sending us to lend a hand. The last victims were in the Kansas City area, which is where we are starting.”
“What happens if they get to Canada?” Karen asked.
“I don’t know. Damn well going to try to keep that from happening. That is, if that’s even where they are going. Scott seems to think they are heading for somewhere in Montana.”
“They could be trying to cross there. Lots of countryside,” Karen said.
“And the girl knows the area. She’s originally from somewhere up there. They could be heading there and then trying to cross the border. Up in the air right now,” I said.
“Did they ever find out how he picked this girl up or if there was a relationship already there?” she asked.
I reached for my coffee, took a drink, and scooped some more eggs onto my fork. “Don’t know. The guy, Nick, was from somewhere in Louisiana. That’s where Bill and Scott originally ID’d him. When they got word of him in Jackson, Mississippi, they went back out after the guy. They think he picked the girl up somewhere between Jackson and Fayetteville. Her prints were found at the crime scene there as well as the ones in Joplin and Overland Park.”
“So a fleeing serial killer has time to meet and convince a woman to accompany him in both running from the law and committing homicides?”
“Don’t know how they got together, but she’s no saint either. Laundry list of priors—criminal mischief, battery, drugs. The sheet is pretty impressive for a twenty-three-year-old female.”
“And how old is the guy?”
“Thirty-five.”
Karen shook her head, picked up her plate, and headed for the sink. I finished the bit of breakfast left on my plate in another two mouthfuls and followed her to the kitchen. Karen rinsed our plates and set them in the dishwasher. She dried her hands and looked at her watch. “Damn, I have to go, babe. My meeting starts in an hour.” She looked over at the pans still sitting on the oven.
“I’ll take care of cleaning up. Beth won’t be here for, like, a half hour yet.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“No big deal.”
She gathered her car keys and bag from the counter.
I walked her to the door leading out to the garage.
“Call me when you get there,” she said.
I grabbed her by the waist and gave her a kiss. “Okay. It should be later this afternoon.”
She smiled and ran her hand through the hair on the side of my head. She craned her neck and appeared to be looking at the hair she was moving around. “Getting grayer, old man. You’ll be completely white in another year at this rate. Maybe we should dye that a bit.”
“Hold on a second. One, it’s not that bad, and I think I have about another twenty years or so until it goes full white. And two, weren’t you the one who wanted my hair grayer on the sides, to the point of you dying it in there? But now that it’s doing it naturally, you don’t like it?”
She shrugged.
“I think you just like to tinker with my appearance,” I said. “Try to make me look like different guys from your soaps and movies.”
Karen smiled. “You got me.” Then she went quiet for a moment. “No, I just want to, you know, hang on to our youth.” She pulled me in close and stared at me. Then she raised her right eyebrow. “We’re not that old, are we?”
I grumbled a bit on the inside. Karen had a real knack for starting the type of conversations that I knew to tiptoe around right before—or shortly after—I went out of town for work. I took a swing at diffusing what I assumed was her feeling old.
“Babe, I fell in love with you the day I met you and will feel that way when you’re a little old granny with a walker. Most beautiful woman in the world to me then, now, and always.”
She swatted my chest, shook her head, and smiled. “Gotta go, the bullshit is getting deep in here. Love you. Be safe.”
I smiled. “Love you too. And I’m serious.”
She pulled open the door into the garage. “Yeah, yeah. Be careful and call me when you can.”
“I will.” I gave her another kiss and saw her off.
My cell phone buzzed in my pocket against my leg. I pulled it out, clicked Talk, and stepped back into the house.
“Hello,” I said.
“Be there in five. Be ready,” Beth said.
“Five?” I asked. “Minutes?”
“Yup.”
“Um, okay.”
I clicked off from the call and walked to the kitchen to quickly clean up. I scooped up my laptop bag and wheeled my suitcase to the front door. Porkchop left the comfort of the couch and came to see me off. I crouched next to him and gave him a petting until Beth pulled up out front. I left the dog with the usual instructions to be a good boy and headed out.
I wheeled my suitcase toward Beth’s black Cadillac as the passenger-side window lowered.
“Hustle, Agent!” Beth shouted. “We’re going to miss our flight!”
I picked up the pace and tossed my bags in the trunk then jumped in on the passenger side.
“I thought our flight didn’t leave until nine forty-five,” I said. “We have, like, two hours.”
She pulled away from the front of my townhouse. “We got a different flight forty minutes earlier, and traffic is looking like a real bitch.”
I checked the time and did a little mental math. “I think we should be good on time. So why the different flight?”
Beth looked over at me and tucked her hair behind her ear. “They have a new scene south of Des Moines, Iowa. The couple is still heading north. They’re past Kansas City.”
I leaned back in the seat. “Are Bill and Scott meeting us at the airport, or are we meeting them somewhere?”
“We’ll get a rental from Des Moines and meet them wherever they’re at.”
“Sure,” I said. “What info did you get on the new scene?”
“Um, I’m drawing a blank on the victim’s name, but Bill said the guy was in his seventies. The man’s daughter is who found him, which is awful. The house looked ransacked, the man’s truck gone. The prints already came back as the couple. There is a BOLO out on the truck across the state.”
“The man at the scene? Nailed to the kitchen table?” I asked.
Beth nodded.
“And…?” I made a motion of having something around my neck.
“Yeah. Same as the others.” Beth glanced over her shoulder to check her blind spot and put her foot farther into the gas. “Shit, we’re going to miss our flight.”
“Plenty of time,” I said.
Beth took every opportunity to weave through cars and use the road’s shoulder to avoid traffic. She held her badge out the window five or six times and shot down surface streets at fifteen over the speed limit.
We arrived at the airport forty-five minutes before our plane departed. Beth parked her car in the long-term lot, and we made our way inside. She maintained an almost jogging pace, only taking a second here and there to yell back at me to hurry up. We had our bags checked, made it through security, and jogged to our gate with minutes to spare. Beth and I boarded the aircraft. The stewardess closed the airliner’s doors at our back as soon as we stepped on. Beth and I took our seats one row from the front.
I looked over at Beth wedging her laptop bag under the seat ahead of her. “Told you we’d be just fine on time.”
She shook her head, chuckled, and rubbed her eyes.
“What?” I asked.
CHAPTER THREE
Our flight was nonstop and mostly empty and took us just under three hours in the air.
When Beth and I stepped from the jetway into the airport, I looked left and right. “Um, is this place open?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I see a guy pushin
g a broom over there.” I jerked my chin at him. “And, wait, there’s a woman and small child back over there by the tumbleweed blowing through. This place is a ghost town.”
Beth shrugged. “Small regional airport, I guess.”
“Do we know if this place even has rental cars?”
“Yeah, Jim booked us one. We’ll be fine.”
I followed Beth through the empty corridors until we found the baggage claim. We grabbed our suitcases when the belts started rolling a few minutes later and made our way over to the rental-car counters. With the airport being exceptionally dead, we were off in our rental car inside a half hour of landing.
“Where are we meeting these two?” I asked.
“They’re at…” Beth grabbed her phone from the rental car’s dash and clicked on the hotel name the navigation was guiding us toward. “The American Lodge in Osceola.”
“Oh yeah, the ol’ American Lodge in Osceola. I know right where that is.”
“Smart ass. The navigation says we have about a half hour yet.”
“Got it,” I said.
Beth spent the rest of the trip talking about her ex-husband and how he was coming to Virginia the following week. She asked if Karen and I would like to go out and have dinner with them. Karen had yet to spend much time with Beth, and I figured, seeing as how she was technically my partner in my new arrangement, it wouldn’t be the worst thing if she and my wife knew each other a bit better. I left her with the answer that I’d see what Karen’s schedule was like.
“That is our hotel back there,” Beth said.
She put on her turn signal to exit the freeway and pointed out the windshield at a hotel sitting tucked in behind a pair of gas stations and a fast-food restaurant. I got a better look at it as we made a few turns and neared. The main building, closest to the street, resembled that of a ski lodge with a large peaked roof over the drive-up entryway for dropping bags. Huge wooden pillars with brown stone facades at the bottom supported the overhang from the front of the building—tucked behind it was the hotel itself, looking far less lodge and more rectangular three-story hotel. Beth pulled into the parking lot and found a spot. She dialed Bill, said a few words, and clicked off.
“He’s going to meet us in the lobby,” Beth said. “I guess there is a restaurant in here that they want to grab a quick lunch at and go over everything.” She pulled the handle of her car door and stepped out.
I did the same. “Are we getting a room here or what?”
“Let’s just see where they’re at with everything, and then we’ll make a decision one way or the other.”
“Sure.”
I followed Beth toward the front entrance. She pulled the big wooden-handled door, and we walked in. The lobby looked like that of a standard hotel, with a reception desk to our right bookended by a rack of brochures on the far side and a coffee station nearer to Beth and me. To our left was a hallway leading to the hotel’s pool and a bank of two elevators. The far wall was the restaurant, Patrick’s, which looked to be some form of burger pub.
One of the elevator doors opened, and Bill and Scott emerged.
“Found the place, huh?” Bill asked. He wore a dark suit with a white dress shirt and red tie. His short brown hair looked as it always did. He carried a leather bag draped over his shoulder that, I assumed, was filled with whatever the two had put together on the investigation.
“That we did,” Beth said. “And, like usual, that stuff is going to rot out your insides.”
Bill rocked the can of whatever flavored energy drink he was holding, swishing the fluid inside. He took a drink from it. “My wife has been on me about it. I needed it today, though.”
“How was the flight in?” Scott asked. He jammed his hands in the pockets of his black slacks.
“Had to do a little hustling, but it was fine,” Beth said.
“Good. Let’s grab a booth in here and go over what we have. Did you guys eat anything yet?” Scott asked.
“Just breakfast for me,” I said.
He nodded and waved for Beth and me to follow him.
We headed into the restaurant and were seated toward the back. Bill sat nearest the wall with his case tucked in beside him. He slipped out a file from inside and set it up on the tabletop. He flipped the file cover open but closed it immediately as our server approached. We put in an order for a round of coffees and told her we’d need some time on our food order.
After she left, Bill reopened the file and brought out a few sheets of paper that were paper clipped together. “This was our scene from overnight.”
I took the sheets he slid across and held them so Beth and I could see it. The first page was the report listing the man’s name, the address where the crime occurred, the nature of the crime, and the like. I flipped another page in—photos from the scene. An elderly man was facedown on his kitchen table in a pool of blood. Both of the man’s hands were out before him and nailed to the table’s surface. The next few photos were of the injuries to the man’s neck from the device used to strangle him.
I looked up at Bill and Scott. “Was this guy doing the nailing-to-the-table thing back in Louisiana?”
Scott shook his head. “No, that’s new. We first saw it at the scene in Fayetteville then again in Joplin and Overland Park.”
“So it may be a thing that the woman does?” Beth asked.
“It’s kind of what we were thinking,” Bill said. “We have the twins looking into it and seeing what we can find there. Maybe we can attribute homicides to the woman as well, prior to her hooking up with Nick Frane. We also have a bit of an issue with the vehicle that was left. We don’t really know what to make of that.”
“Vehicle?” I asked.
“Yeah, look another page or two in,” Bill said.
I flipped the page and then another until I found a photo of a burned-out sedan. I couldn’t identify the make or model.
“That is the vehicle that was owned by the Fayetteville victim. We found it torched outside of Joplin,” Scott said.
“So they what, lit it up so we couldn’t tie the vehicle to the previous homicide and track which way they are headed?” I asked.
“That would make sense, except for the circumstances involved,” Bill said.
I motioned for Bill to continue.
“Well, they didn’t light it up to cover evidence. We know who they are, and they have to know that, so it’s not like we were going to get prints off of it. Besides that, if they were trying to completely destroy the vehicle, they wouldn’t have half-assed the burning of it as much as they did. I mean, you can see the license plates are undamaged. They didn’t bother to steal new ones or take them off or anything. Yet that’s still not the big one. They burned the damn thing on the side of the road—a well-traveled road.”
“State highway, actually,” Scott interjected.
“Exactly,” Bill said. “They weren’t trying to hide the vehicle. I mean, they could have just parked it in a woods somewhere and left it. It probably wouldn’t have been found for months. They were almost calling attention to it with everything they did.”
“It’s almost like they want us to know which way they are headed,” Scott said. “Or just not all that bright.”
“So do we have anything further on which way we think they are headed?” Beth asked.
“That’s what we need to find out. Right now, we’re sitting here, waiting for them to commit a crime, going to that crime scene, and then waiting for them to strike again. We need to get ahead of them.”
“That’s a given,” I said. “So how?”
“We need a fresh scene to get a net cast. These two are only traveling fifty to a hundred miles a day, but we’re not finding where they are striking until the next day. We’ve been putting out BOLOs on each vehicle that we have them taking last, but we’re always two steps behind. At this moment, we have them in Glen Larson’s white 2004 Ford F-150. It came from the scene at Overland Park. But that scene was found last night, and we weren�
��t on the scene until early this morning.”
“How many hours has it been since the man, Glen Larson’s, time of death and right now?” I asked.
Scott looked at his watch. “Almost twenty.”
“So we’re screwed,” I said. “In reality, they could have made another vehicle switch, and if they decided to veer from what they were doing, they could be hours into Canada by now, same goes for Mexico. They could literally be anywhere.”
“We have alerts at every border crossing, top and bottom. Border patrol has their photos, everything. We covered our ass back and forth there. The chance they got out of the country without us knowing is slim,” Bill said.
I wasn’t exactly sold on the idea that the couple couldn’t get across undetected but decided to take Bill and Scott’s word for it that they’d notified everyone and done everything in their power to get the information needed to the responsible parties.
“Okay, so what exactly do we have as far as support going on right now?” I asked.
“We have the couple’s faces on every damn news channel across the US. Our tip line is funneling the calls that come in through local offices, and anything that needs to be investigated further is being looked into locally and reported to us. We have the twins digging in on any and all video footage, traffic cams in the areas, things like that. They’re also trying to get anything possible on the woman that we don’t already have. As far as boots on the ground, every local branch is at our disposal, as well as, I’d imagine, whatever help we need from local law enforcement. All local branches of the Bureau that have air support will lend it, and for those that don’t have it where we need it, we can turn to local law enforcement for help.”
“What can we do actionable, right now?” Beth asked.
Bill and Scott were silent.
CHAPTER FOUR
In the RV, Nick and Molly headed west on I-80. Barely an hour had passed since they’d left the home of the old couple in a blaze. Nick was staring at the RV’s fuel gauge, and the warning light illuminated. Whether Molly had torched the couple’s house or not, they would be ditching the RV within the hour—they were almost out of gas.
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