by N. M. Brown
The escaping stench of death was so strong it sent Frank reeling back onto the dusty ground. Cactus needles dug into his hands and pierced his trousers.
He should have hurried then and saved himself from the nightmares that would plague him for years to come. Instead, he stood up, pulled out a white handkerchief from his pocket, scrunched it up, and placed it over his mouth and nose.
Somewhere in the bright sky above him, a buzzard was circling. Frank walked back over to the case and used his foot to lift back a triangle of the lid. The woman’s body had been forced into the case like a piece of vacuum-packed meat. Grey duct tape had been wrapped around her mouth and eyes. A tattoo in the form of scripted writing stretched across the skin behind her neck. The ranger knew such a feature would hopefully make identifying the corpse easier. He also noted only one of her hands was visible, but all of the fingers had been removed from it. Frank Mankato said a silent prayer and hoped to hell the girl had died quickly.
Chapter Thirty-One
With the headlight of the motorcycle switched off, Mitchell West could now see the sky above the dusty valley of the Horseman’s Centre was vast and sprinkled with pinpricks of stars. The area, which consisted of eighty acres of oversized rocks and dust also held two open horse show arenas and an undulating BMX track – all of which were deserted by nightfall.
An hour earlier, he had stopped at a Pic N Pump gas station, just outside Apple Valley, where he bought himself a six-pack of beer and then made the call to his employers. He then proceeded to drive out of town to the hills at the rear of the Horseman’s Centre, where he parked the bike off the road, drank two tins of beer, and watched the sun go down. He then used the plastic binding to hang the remaining four over his handlebars.
Now, as he leant back on the cracked leather seat of the Honda smoking a Marlboro, West looked to the heavens and wondered for a moment about eternity. Although his own personal god was technology, he occasionally wondered how an omniscient deity would look upon his sins. He reassured himself he had not actually hurt anyone directly, and in case God existed – which he doubted – he would be all good. At least that was what the preachers on the cable TV channels said. Hopefully, this single fact would save his soul when the time came to meet his maker. Not that he was planning on that anytime soon.
As he crushed the cigarette under the heel of his boot, West had been so distracted by the relentless whirring and clicking of the native insects, he did not notice the large man in the Hawaiian shirt, who stepped softly through the undergrowth towards him until he was standing beside him.
‘Why did you call him?’ the large man asked.
‘Shit!’ Mitchell West shuddered. ‘Do you have to sneak up on people?’
‘Why did you call?’ the large man repeated.
‘I got fucking raided,’ West said as he struggled to settle his breathing.
‘You what?’ The large man frowned.
‘A couple of cops came sniffing around my place. They were asking about the site.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘Nothing. I told them squat.’
‘And they left?’
‘Yeah, they left.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘I left in a hurry. All my shit is back at the house – my computers… everything.’
‘Is the website down?’
‘No, it doesn’t need a physical operator.’ West laughed. ‘Jeez, man, did you listen to anything I said at the diner?’
‘No,’ the large man sighed. ‘Probably not.’
‘The site will tick along just fine. But the thing is…’ West puffed out his chest, ‘I’m going to need to, you know, be recompensed?’
‘For what?’
‘Well, I need somewhere to stay now, and I need to replace the equipment.’
‘But you said the site would be fine.’
‘The site will be fine, but I still need a fucking computer. That’s how I make my living.’
‘You were paid up front.’
‘Yeah, but that was before your activities drew some unwanted fucking attention, man.’
‘You need more money then, is that it?’
‘Yes, fuck, yes! Finally.’
The man in the Hawaiian shirt turned away from West and looked into the darkness. ‘Well, should I?’ he called to a darker shadow amongst the oversized boulders.
‘Hey,’ Mitchell West squawked, suddenly spooked. ‘Who the fuck are you talking to, man?’
The large man ignored him and kept his attention on the darkness, from where a soft single word was spoken.
‘Yes,’ it said.
‘Hey,’ West repeated, but by then, the large man had turned back around to face him, jamming a long boning knife deep into his abdomen. Pulling the blade out, he watched as West looked down in disbelief at the hot, dark patch spreading like ink across his T-shirt. The large man was experienced and had pushed the knife in far enough to pierce the spleen, guaranteeing West would bleed to death in minutes.
Mitchell West swayed slightly and his hot blood dripped onto the parched dusty ground. The large man walked back to the bike, where he removed one of the beers from the handlebars. Sparking the can open, the large man took a deep gulp, belched, and settled back to watch the show.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Leighton stood on the balcony of Vicki’s apartment and watched the ocean waves as they crashed in long explosions on the shore. It was a warm afternoon and the beach was crammed with families. Behind him, Vicki was peering intently at a computer screen. She had been silent for over half an hour. Leighton was lost in his own thoughts, remembering taking his daughter to the beach, where she had dug for pretty shells and he had read trashy novels. If he could have a second chance to be with her, he would have put down the book and spent more time digging with his child.
‘Okay there?’ Vicki called to him.
‘Sure. How are you getting on?’ Leighton moved back into the apartment, sat down on the sofa alongside Vicki, and rubbed his hands together.
‘Hmm.’ Vicki frowned at the screen. ‘There’s not much data, but what there is generally suggests the site would sit on top of a genuine web page. The imposter would appear genuine in terms of the web address and the appearance, but it would be entirely fake.’
‘Like a fake ATM fascia that crooks use to scam bank cards?’
‘Exactly. Anyway, it would filter the data…’
‘Filter for what?’
‘Whatever made the ideal victim – solo travellers, one-way tickets, isolated locations, age, gender…’
‘Okay, so what can we do with this?’ Leighton tried to sound hopeful.
‘Not a lot,’ Vicki admitted. ‘But, because the memory had stored the general parameters, I was able to go to various bus companies and activate the automatic page redirect.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I found the only sure-fire way to find the damned bus.’
‘And what would that be?’ Leighton asked quietly.
‘To book a ticket on it,’ Vicki said and met Leighton’s gaze.
‘No way!’ Leighton shook his head.
‘Hear me out,’ she said, widening her eyes.
‘I said no way. Look, Vicki, these people are killers – real sadistic bastards. This isn’t CSI!’
‘But I don’t need to physically get on the bus,’ Vicki persisted. ‘We just make a booking and wait out of sight at a bus stop to see if actually shows up. I’ll bring a camera – even if it speeds on by, I can get the plates and a shot of the driver too, maybe.’
‘And then what?’
‘We follow it at a distance and call your old boss, give them everything we’ve got.’
‘Yeah, sure.’ Leighton shook his head dismissively.
‘You don’t agree?’ Vicki turned around fully to look at Leighton. ‘Then, explain what we should do, Leighton. Otherwise, we’re doing nothing!’
‘I just think we could explore other options.’
‘Like what, stake out every bus stop, and hope we get lucky?’
‘It would be a hell of a lot safer.’
‘Well, to be honest, it’s all academic now, anyway.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I’ve already booked the ticket.’ Vicki shrugged her shoulders dismissively.
‘What?’
‘I got a ticket under a false name for a pick-up from outside Blythe, tomorrow afternoon. A similar bus stop to the one Laurie was picked up from. I was going to use the exact same one, but I reckon that would arouse suspicion.’
‘It’s not safe. Christ, Vicki, you don’t want to put yourself in the lion’s den.’
‘So, what are we meant to do, Leighton, huh?’ Vicki stood up in frustration. ‘How the hell do you think we can get these people?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said honestly, ‘but this isn’t it.’
‘You ever hear that line about how all it takes for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing? Well, that’s what we’re doing – nothing!’
Leighton looked shamefully at the ground.
‘Look, as long as we waste time eating nice food and thinking up plans, people are dying! I know you have your demons, Leighton, but this is your chance to save someone else’s son or daughter.’
‘I know,’ he said flatly.
Vicki came over to sit with him and took his hand. ‘If you do this, the next time you go to the cemetery and stand by her grave, you won’t be so hard on yourself.’
Leighton’s gaze now met Vicki’s.
‘I’ve never been,’ he said in a tone of contrition.
‘What?’
‘I’ve never been to her… you know… the cemetery,’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t want to stand there and make it okay, as if what happened was fair.’
‘Do you never feel like going?’
‘Yes, I do… every birthday, every holiday, each time I pass any cemetery or any florist. She loved daisies – those crazy, oversized ones.’
‘Then why don’t you?’
‘Because I’m not that guy – I wasn’t there for her. Hell, I was supposed to keep her safe. And now to go there – to stand on that neat grass, playing the poor grieving father while my daughter has nothing, seems wrong. Does that make any kind of sense?’
‘You were a good father, Leighton.’
‘You don’t know me.’ Leighton shook his head. ‘I was average, at best. Even as a kid, there were things she loved, really loved. When she was eight years old, I took her over to the Bird Sanctuary in Del Mar, and she got all attached to this little injured Merlin hawk they had there – bright red, it was. We were there the day the rescue team brought it in and she held it so gently. Man, after that day she pestered me every single weekend to go there.’
‘Did you go back?’
‘Only once or twice, but the Merlin was gone by then. You see – that’s the busy kind of dad I was. I bought her a little toy, one she took to bed every night, but by then I’d already let her down. I’d broken the one thing good in my life.’
‘Nobody’s perfect, Leighton – I wasn’t the best daughter to my parents, or the best friend to some lonely girl stuck in a dust bowl town with no family, but that doesn’t make me label myself as bad and just roll over and quit. It makes me more convinced I owe it to my friend to stop the people who took her life. Maybe that’s how we forgive ourselves – we make life okay for somebody else.’
Something in Vicki’s eyes convinced Leighton she would not be dissuaded on this one.
‘Look,’ he sighed. ‘If we do this, we need to plan this out. I can call both the Bureau and the station in the morning. I can ask dispatch to let Gretsch know what we’re planning to do. Maybe they could send some support. But if the bus actually shows up, you do not get on it, okay?’
‘Of course.’ Vicki nodded enthusiastically.
‘It might be better if I stood with you.’
‘Then the bus might not stop – all the missing people were travelling alone. Plus, if it slows down long enough for me to make like I’m going to get on, you would still be able to call in the cavalry.’
Leighton turned his head and looked back towards the ocean.
‘If we are going to do this, I want you to be armed. Take my revolver, okay?’
‘Sure.’
‘You’ll be armed, you promise?’ Leighton asked quietly.
Vicki nodded. ‘I promise. This is the only way we will know for certain.’
‘Okay,’ Leighton sighed, ‘we’ll do it.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
The night shift in the Midland Truck Repair Centre was thankfully over for Mike Bernal. As he drove his orange truck along the deserted stretch of road from Peoria to Blythe, he was lost in thought. When his radio crackled and hissed to life, he switched it off and sighed.
Things between him and Janey had been at a low point, and he felt something needed to change. It seemed they rarely spoke, except to exchange functional information, and even these simple conversations seemed to be loaded with unexpressed dissatisfaction.
On some nights, he would go sit in the truck, smoking a cigarette, and listening to the emergency channels on his scanning radio. He knew it was illegal to listen in on those crackly frequencies, but it beat the hell out of cable television. As he sat in the darkness, he often stared at the stars and visualised whatever drama was unfolding out there on the roads or in the nearby towns.
Mike wondered momentarily about whether he should have brought her flowers like he had done the previous week. It had worked to the extent the conversation was, at least for the Saturday, less depressing. But then, to continually bring home gifts to raise the atmosphere to normality would seem to almost be rewarding her distance. It would possibly just be simpler to ask her what was wrong, but he guessed he already knew the answer to that.
Janey had turned forty just two months earlier. He still found her as attractive as ever, but he often found her scrutinising her reflection in the bathroom mirror. He suspected she was lonely. In some respects, he understood – it couldn’t be easy living in such an isolated property with no real neighbours for miles, but the secluded bungalow had been her dream house. At least, it had been at first.
Mike’s jeep was rounding the curve of Tom Wells Road when the speeding bus nearly hit him. The narrow road was neither designed for nor accustomed to an intercity bus. It thundered around the corner, taking up most of the middle of the road. The suddenness of the unexpected wall of metal shuddering towards him, forced Mike to skid onto the dusty verge. This misshapen edge of the road was so strewn with rocks the wheels of the jeep shuddered and threw up a cloud of debris, forcing him to a stop. Mike swore as he slammed a fist against the dashboard. Glancing in his side view mirror he found – as expected – the bus was long gone into the cloud it had left in its wake.
Whilst he waited for the dust to settle, Mike pulled a packet of Winston cigarettes out of the glove box, removed one from the pack and pushed in the cigarette lighter. When it popped, he used it and blew a grey cone of smoke out. His brief brush with death left him off-centre for a minute. Staring into the dry scrubland, his eyes fell on the distant Rockies, and he felt the soothing effects of nature. It seemed perhaps more important than ever to get things back on track at home.
Once his rattled state of mind had settled, Mike restarted the engine and drove off the verge and back onto the road. He drove much more slowly around the next bend he came to. He knew this corner well, as it was located only fifty meters from his home. Perhaps if he had been driving faster, he would not have noticed the thing at the side of the road. This small fact would be something he would think about for years afterwards. But the slow pace allowed him to catch a glimpse of it – a bright yellow tennis shoe, just like the ones his wife wore. This was not a soft pastel yellow, but rather the screaming bright colour of emergency services. Whenever she wore them around the house, Mike would call her Big Bird or BB for short. Wh
at a strange coincidence, Mike thought, that a shoe, just like his wife’s, should be discarded in the scrubland so close to their house.
Mike smiled to himself and decided he would use this funny fact to break the ice when he got back to the house. He would ask Janey if her shoes had started breeding. Maybe they could take a walk along the verge together so he could show her the lone shoe. He could tentatively take her hand on the walk back and offer to fix brunch, or they could go out to somewhere nice in Blythe – get back on track together.
Steering into the driveway of his sprawling bungalow, Mike switched off the engine and stepped out of the jeep.
At the side of the house, white, clean clothes were drying on the taught washing line. This sight was always something which reminded Mike of his childhood, and he found inexpressible comfort in the fact Janey was so reliable in her quietly meticulous care of their home.
Opening the screen door, Mike found the inner door was ajar. This did not alarm Mike – on hot days, both the front and rear doors were kept open to allow a breeze. What did alarm him, however, was the single item of footwear lying in the middle of the hallway.
‘Janey?’ he called as he knelt down and picked up the yellow tennis shoe.
There was no reply.
Mike felt an uncomfortable shift of energy inside him, confirming at some primal level something was very wrong. He took the shoe with him as he hurried back outside into the bright morning light. Clambering back into the jeep, he revved the engine and sped off in screeching cloud of dust.
When he got to the place where he had seen the shoe, Mike pulled up the jeep, switched on the emergency warning lights and climbed out. The internal part of him already knew what to expect, and was simply allowing his conscious mind to catch up.
As he reached out to the discarded training shoe, Mike picked it up and held it next to Janey’s shoe – making a perfect pair. On the recovered shoe, a smear of blood was vividly contrasted against the bright yellow material. He held the two shoes to his stomach and let out a single sob.