Killer: A Novel

by Stephen Carpenter

  I may not be on a rampage but I’m definitely on a crime spree. Two counts grand theft auto, evading arrest, interstate flight... I am roaming the quiet countryside, preying on the young and the elderly.

  Guilty with an excuse, Your Honor. That might just work, as long as I don’t have to add kidnapping to the list. I don’t want to but if I have to…

  Unless I’m too late, I think as I take the bypass to Trenton.

  I have racked my brain for more memories of Dave as I have driven along the back roads and state highways, and I have come up with nothing. As much as the booze helped me remember, the resulting hangover has blotted everything out again. But I know where I am going and what I have to do next and that is enough for now.

  And here we are, the 53rd Street exit off 295. This is it. There is a little red brick house here. With a white trellis. I drive around, looking for the house that Laurie Vaughn lives in—Laurie Vaughn, from the fourth book, Killer Unmasked. Marsh can’t follow me here because he hasn’t read Killer Unmasked. No one has. It isn’t finished. It exists only on my hard drive, back at the cabin.

  And then I see it: red brick, white trellis, and the name VONN on the mailbox.

  Vonn to Vaughn.

  And as I look at the house I remember a flicker of an image—the house, in a picture Dave showed me: “This is where a little piece named Laurie Vonn lives with her mom…”

  And then the memory flickers out, like film breaking in a projector.

  “Lives,” he had said, not “lived.”

  I park the car and get out and head toward the house.

  Please be alive, and please listen to me. Please, God.

  I knock on the battered screen door. I have thought for hours about what to say to her, and what not to say. Sorry to bother you, but I’m pretty damned sure there’s a serial killer who’s planning to murder you so you should get in my stolen car and get the hell out of here…

  She’ll never come with me, of course. I have to warn her without scaring her too much…

  I knock again.

  Please be at home, please be alive. Please...

  I lean around the stoop to look in the front window but the curtains are closed. I hear a TV. I knock again, harder.

  “Who is it?” A young woman’s voice.

  “Laurie? Is that you, Laurie?” I yell through the door.

  The door opens a crack and here she is, looking at me suspiciously over the chain. She doesn’t look like the picture in my head, exactly, but she looks a hell of a lot closer than the other girls had by the time I got to them.

  “Who are you?” she asks.

  “I’m Sam Blevins, I’m your neighbor, from down the street,” I say. I can hear her TV in the background but it doesn’t sound like a news channel.

  Her eyes move up and down me quickly.

  “Did the police ever show up here last night?” I ask her.

  “What?”

  “The police, I called them last night. Didn’t they get here?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, fear in her eyes now.

  “Shoot. I was afraid of that,” I say. “There’s been a bunch of break-ins in the neighborhood and last night when I was coming home off the late shift I saw this guy looking in your windows. I called the police but I guess they never showed up here, huh?”

  “Oh my God,” she says.

  “You should call ‘em,” I say. “He was definitely checking your place out.”

  She looks at her watch. “I can’t right now, I’m late for work. But when I get home I will. What did you say your name was?”

  “Sam. I live down at the end of the block, next to the Stevens?”

  She nods vaguely, glancing down the street. She is dressed in an orange waitress outfit, her nametag “Laurie” pinned to her blouse.

  “Okay, well, thanks,” she says.

  “Okay, take care,” I turn and head back to the car.

  I get back in the Chrysler. Now what? I wasn’t prepared for this. I should have told her more, but what the hell could I have said? I wait in the car for a couple of minutes, until she comes out of her house and walks down the sidewalk and gets in her dirty red Honda Civic and drives off. I follow her onto the interstate, heading back the way I came.

  I follow Laurie Vonn’s Honda through the late-morning traffic until her turn signal blinks and she takes the exit. She makes a right onto a bypass road and I follow her until she turns left, into the broad driveway of a gigantic truck stop.

  Another truck stop, I think as I watch her park behind the sprawling building that houses the diner and the arcade and the shops within.

  I pull around, among the trucks now, and stop where I can see her get out of her car and enter the service entrance at the back. I nose the Chrysler out from between the trucks and pull around to the side of the diner and I wait. After a minute or two I see her inside, through the big windows that wall the spacious diner. I watch as she tucks her order slips into the pocket of her uniform and begins her shift, taking orders from the truck drivers in the diner.

  How long can I sit here? I see a pay phone next to the garage bay doors. I have to assume Nicki’s phones are already tapped, so I decide against calling her.

  I watch the truckers come and go in the diner.

  I can’t just sit here in my stolen car and watch her all day. I let the motor run, leaving the heater on against the cold. I lean my head back against the headrest and realize how exhausted I am. In half a minute my eyelids are closed. I catch myself and sit up straight. Can’t fall asleep. Not in this car, not now. I watch a trucker climb from his cab next to me and light a cigarette with a silver Zippo lighter. He has a chain on his hip—a long, heavy chain swinging from his belt loop to his wallet in his back pocket. I watch him tuck the Zippo into his jacket and head inside the diner.

  I stare at the chain on the guy’s hip, trying to think about why this means anything to me… But the warmth of the heater and my exhaustion overcome me and I decide it’s okay if I just close my eyes for a moment and I turn off the engine but leave the key in the accessory position so I can listen to the news. That should keep me awake.

  CNN says Michigan State Police have set up a roadblock for me. Great. They followed the cell phone. Marsh and the FBI are closing in on a truckload of oranges.

  Then I fall asleep.

  THINGS PAST

  It was at a bookstore in Pasadena where he met Beverly Grace. She had the Angel’s face, and when he asked her for more information about the author of the serial killer collection he found so fascinating, she looked right through him and shook her head and walked away without so much as a word or even a glance back at him.

  So, yet again, he began to plan. He was always more at ease when he had a purpose, a direction, a goal. To the work, to the work…

  He had become much more proficient with his skills and it only took a few weeks of observing the routine of Beverly Grace before he transformed her, and buried what was left at Temescal Canyon. This part of his work no longer held much of a rush. Even communing with her, with his new Angel—Angel de Los Angeles—was a secondary pleasure. It was the stories he waited for.

  And this time he was overwhelmed.

  He was not prepared for the full force of the Los Angeles media—TV, newspapers, radio, and now the internet, which he accessed on a notebook computer in the back of the rig’s cab. The endless stream of news about the missing Beverly Grace drove his pleasure to extreme heights—but too much so. This time there was so much attention—too much attention—that he began to worry. And he was infuriated that his story was being told in the most hackneyed and haphazard way. There were all kinds of inaccuracies and lurid speculation. And, of course, there was nothing near the full understanding or real recognition of his special power. There was only stupid, titillating tabloid noise.

  So he left Los Angeles just as the stories reached their frenzied peak, on the morning of May 16, 2001.

  He drove his van
up the ramp into the back of his trailer and kicked his rig’s engine to a roar and clutched and shifted through the traffic until he was on the 10 freeway and he headed east with a nice tailwind and a full tank of diesel and his three Angels and all of his stories.

  East, east, whence came the wise men.

  East, whence rose the star.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “Know what I like about you, Doc?” he asks me.

  I am sitting on a little mound of dirt in the small plateau above Temescal Canyon Park with Dave pacing slowly in front of me while I drink my bottle of Jack.

  “You listen.” He paces slowly around the mound, looking down at it, walking around behind me, then back around in front of me, his wallet chain swinging at my eye level. “People are so wrapped up in themselves they don’t know how to listen. They don’t pay attention. Most of the time I let it slide, but when some little cunt looks right through you like you don’t fucking EXIST... Well, you can’t let that stand. Beverly Grace learned that I EXIST. You can bet your ass on that.” He gives the low sound of a laugh that isn’t really a laugh as he walks around and around the small mound of dirt I am sitting on.

  * * *

  I wake suddenly to the rumble of a massive diesel engine as the truck next to me starts up and pulls out toward the driveway. I look at the clock on the dashboard: 3:35 in the afternoon and the sky has darkened and it looks like rain.

  I look at the diner and I don’t see Laurie Vonn. Shit. I turn the key to start the car and the engine cranks lazily. Damn it. The battery is low from sitting with the radio on for hours while I slept. I turn the key back to the off position and pray and then turn it again and finally the motor kicks to life. I rev it a few times, then pull out, toward the rear of the diner where Laurie Vonn parked her car. It’s still there. I circle around, looking in the windows of the diner. I don’t see her. The lunch crowd has thinned, leaving only the stragglers, the coffee-drinkers, and a couple of waitresses chatting with the short-order cook over the counter. The news on the radio has moved on to the weather report—a big storm headed toward the northeast. I let the motor run for a while to charge the battery, then I turn it off and get out and head toward the diner, worried that I haven’t seen Laurie Vonn.

  I enter the truck stop shop, a surprisingly large store with racks of clothing, drinks in refrigerated shelves, groceries, drugs, and souvenirs. I keep my head down and try on a stone-washed denim jacket with the words “Keep On Truckin’” across the back. Then I grab a black and white New Jersey Devils cap that has a blood red lightning bold across it and peruse a tall carousel with sunglasses. I try on a few, choosing a tobacco-brown-tinted pair that cover my bandaged brow.

  I take them all to the counter, where a doughy, grandmotherly woman smiles at me from behind the register.

  “Find everything okay?” she asks.

  “Fine,” I say, smiling but keeping my head low. I glance up at the TV high up in the corner of the store and see my face on CNN—my old California driver’s license photo, followed by my mug shot from my arrest for Richard Bell’s murder. I run my hand over my face, to cover it. The nice, grandmotherly woman behind the register apparently hasn’t mastered the scanner or doesn’t trust it. She methodically types in every number from the bar codes on the hat, the jacket, and the sunglasses, and finally comes up with a total.

  “Ninety-one seventeen,” she says to me.

  I hand her five twenties and as she counts out my change I pull the tags off the merchandise, trying not to seem in too much of a hurry. I pull on the cap, slip on the sunglasses, and take the change she hands me.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “You have a great day,” she beams at me. She may be the happiest person I have ever met.

  I put the jacket on and walk into the diner. I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the tall windows. I look like a guy who is trying to hide who he really is.

  I look around at the restaurant patrons. Everyone here looks like that. The only difference is I am standing at the entrance to the diner conspicuously. I see the sign for the restrooms and head toward it as an excuse to walk all the way through the place and look around for Laurie Vonn. I don’t see her. I get to the restroom and use it and wash up and adjust my bandages so they’re not visible under my new sunglasses. Has the ER in Burlington contacted the police about me? I don’t remember hearing anything about it on the radio. No description of me having any injuries. I was just a random bum that everyone in the ER forgot about. Funny where you take comfort sometimes.

  I stop and think before I head back out. I decide I’ll sit in the diner, order something to go, then return to the car. Beyond that, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.

  I walk back into the restaurant. Laurie Vonn had worked the section by the front window, so I take a booth on the opposite side of the dining area. It wouldn’t do to have her come up to take my order and recognize me. I take one of the menus from the metal rack that holds the condiments at my table and open it and look over the top of it, watching for Laurie. After a couple of minutes a young woman hurries up to me with her order pad in hand. She is slightly heavy but cute and she wears the same orange uniform as Laurie. Her nametag says Orlanda.

  “What can I get you?” she asks. She barely glances at me.

  “Coffee and a grilled cheese to go.”

  She writes it down. “You want fries or cole slaw?”

  “Fries, please.”

  She writes it down and turns my upside-down coffee cup over so it can be filled. “Be right back with your coffee,” she says, and hurries off.

  I put the menu down—now that I’ve ordered it might seem odd if I keep reading it. Or am I being paranoid?

  Can you be called paranoid if people really are after you?

  A New Jersey State Police car pulls up and parks right outside the window. Two beefy state troopers get out of the car and head toward the restaurant.

  Call me paranoid, I think as I raise my menu to hide my face again.

  Orlanda returns with the coffee pot as the troopers walk in the front door and head right for my booth, looking right at me.

  Shit. I look away, then look back at them. There is no question they are headed right for my booth—for me.

  I raise the menu higher. I can see only their Smokey the Bear hats approaching over the top of the laminated plastic.

  No, no, not here, not now, not like this…

  Orlanda starts pouring my coffee as they come up behind her. They stop and look down at me.

  Fuck.

  They stand there, behind Orlanda, waiting for her to finish with my coffee. In the time it takes her to fill the cup, dozens of frantic thoughts ricochet around in my head—

  They’ll wait for her to finish and then they’ll start asking me questions: “Would you mind stepping out of the booth, please?”

  Run.

  No. Just get up and walk the other way as soon as she fills the cup. There’s another exit, by the restrooms…

  NO. Stay put, you jackass. Don’t make eye contact. If they question you be casual but remember that cops expect a certain amount of fear when they confront civilians... What the hell’s that on his hip? A .357? No way that’s State Police issue. I’m Sam Blevins, I live at 6130 N. 53rd Terrace. “Hang on, I left my wallet in the car, I’ll go get it...”

  Shit shit shit—

  The big trooper suddenly winks at me over Orlanda’s shoulder, then he grins broadly at me.

  What the FUCK?

  Then, as she finishes pouring, the big Trooper wraps his arms around Orlanda and gives her a big hug, startling her.

  “Ah!” she yells.

  “Hey, Orlanda!” The bear-hugging Trooper says.

  “Jeez— God! Don’t do that!” she says, laughing. She knows them. “You nearly made me spill coffee all over this nice man.”

  “Aw, we wouldn’t do that,” says Smokey the Bear Hug, and he looks down at me and grins again. I grin back, adjusting the brim of my
hat so that my hand moves in front of my face. I laugh a little, pretending to enjoy this light moment, but all I can think is you fucking asshole, you should be out looking for people like me, not harassing waitresses.

  The troopers flirt with Orlanda all the way up to the counter, where they each take a stool and order coffee and turn their backs on America’s most infamous rampaging serial author.

  THINGS PAST

  After leaving Los Angeles, he meandered across the country in his rig for two months, taking a rambling route that eventually led him to Trenton, New Jersey, where ordered breakfast at a truck stop from a waitress whose nametag read Laurie. She had a perfect oval face, with clear, clean skin that was flawed only by a splash of tiny freckles across her nose and high cheekbones. She even wore her hair the same as the Angel—long ochre locks that piled around her shoulders in silky coils. Physically, she was nearly identical to his original porcelain Angel.

  She took his breakfast order without looking up from her pad. She forgot his coffee. And after she brought his food she didn’t come by his table again, except to slap his check down on the table as she hurried by without a word or a glance. It was late morning and he was the only diner in her section. She wasn’t busy. She was in a hurry to go laugh and flirt with the short order cook.

  He lingered over breakfast—over the empty plate she never came to clear away. He watched her.

  It was too soon, though. The news about Beverly Grace was still on the cable channels. Laurie would have to wait.

  He slept in the cab that night, his rig parked near the restaurant, and snapped a picture of Laurie as she arrived at work the next morning. He waited in his cab all day, reading his true-crime paperback and watching the news and checking online for stories about Beverly Grace. Then, just before Laurie’s shift ended, he dropped the ramp from the rear of his trailer, backed his van out, and followed her home. He couldn’t transform her yet—not for a long time. But he could prepare. He hadn’t made any mistakes yet, and he wasn’t about to start.