“Maybe there’s something we overlooked the first time and your mind wants you to revisit it,” I suggested.
She shook her head. “I’m not going back in there.”
If she wasn’t ready to face what lay in store for us, I didn’t want to push her. The only problem was that we had come to a standstill. I decided that the only way to move forward was to go back to the outside world and poke around a little. Maybe I could find out more about the girl or why Bobby kept turning up in bizarre ways. I could then return with the knowledge necessary to help her. Leaving her alone was my sole hesitation.
“I need to go for a while,” I finally said.
“Why?” she asked apprehensively.
“So, I can be more useful to you in here. I’m running out of ideas.”
“Oh, no. You’re not leaving me. I can’t stay here by myself. What if some other weird shit happens while you’re gone?”
“It’s psychologically draining for me to project into someone’s mind for an extended period. If I don’t take a break, I’ll be no good for either of us.”
“But if you leave, I could go crazy. You want that on your conscience?”
Recognizing that we had come to a stalemate, I ruminated for a moment. “I have an idea,” I told her. “What’s your favorite place in the whole world?”
“Don’t tell me you’re gonna ask me to go to my happy place. I swear to God I’ll punch you in the face.”
“Okay. Then what’s a place that would help you stay sane until I come back? It can be anywhere as long as it doesn’t cause you any stress.”
She crossed her arms like an obstinate child refusing to play along. “No, thank you.” When she realized I wasn’t going to yield, she uncrossed them. “Alright, fine.” She thought about it. “The beach. Definitely the beach.”
“Good. I want you to close your eyes and focus on the beach.”
She let out a sigh and shut her eyes. After a few seconds, her brow no longer furrowed, and a slight smile crept across her face. The houses that infinitely lined the road dematerialized and the farmland horizon transformed into a vast ocean. The ground beneath our feet turned into white sand. The darkness above transitioned back into day and the sun crept out from behind the clouds. A seagull flew by in the sky. The convertible vanished, and, in its place, two foldable beach chairs appeared. Beth opened her eyes.
“Wow!” she exclaimed. “I did this?!”
“You did,” I confirmed.
She sat down in one of the chairs and motioned to the other. “I conjured one for you too.”
“I noticed.”
“So, what do you do now? Fly off in a spaceship or something?”
I shook my head. “I’ll just disappear.”
She nodded. “Come back as soon as you can. Okay?”
“I promise.”
“Before you go, I just want you to know how much I appreciate you. I couldn’t have done this alone.”
I smiled. “See you soon, Beth.”
“You too, Max.”
I withdrew from her mind and snapped back into reality in her hospital room. She looked peaceful, so I stepped outside into the hallway. I checked the waiting room for Linden, but he was nowhere to be found. I pulled out my phone and saw that I’d gotten a text from him while I was in Beth’s head. In typical Linden fashion, the message was as vague as it was frustrating. All it said was that something had come up and that he’d be in touch shortly.
Not wanting to sit around, I called an Uber and went to Bobby’s apartment. Linden wouldn’t have advised it, but I figured I might have a better chance of getting him to talk one on one. Besides, who knew how long Linden was going to be? I had the Uber driver wait for me at the front gate while I buzzed Bobby’s intercom. After no response, I started to leave. But then his voice came through the speaker.
“Yes?” he said.
“Mr. Fugate?” I said. “It’s Max Crawford.”
“I told you to leave me alone.”
“Yes, sir. You did. However, some things have come to light, and I need to talk to you.”
“I’ve got nothing to say. Don’t come here again.”
“Beth told me about the affair, Bobby. She told me a lot of things. She really needs our help.”
Following a long pause, the gate opened. “Come on in,” he said.
The Uber driver left, and I walked to Bobby’s apartment building. I stepped into a courtyard with a pool and well-landscaped sitting area. Apartments faced the open space, the first-floor ones with substantially sized porches and the second-level ones with equally large balconies. I climbed the steps to Bobby’s second-level residence facing the city and went to the front door. I knocked.
“It’s open!” Bobby called from inside.
I noticed the door was ajar and pushed it the rest of the way. I moved into the apartment and through the entryway. I came upon the living room, which, on any other day, probably exuded wealth and good taste. On this particular day, however, the open, half-empty pizza box on the coffee table, dirty clothes strewn all over the floor, and pile of beer bottles made it more like a frat house the morning after a particularly decadent party. Bobby was nowhere to be seen.
“Mr. Fugate?” I inquired.
He hurriedly entered the room and tackled me against the wall. He threw a punch, but I ducked, and his fist went through the wall. He quickly came at me again, this time backing me into a corner. I could tell by the way he swayed that he’d been drinking. I noticed a set of golf clubs nearby and quickly retrieved a nine iron. I held it up in the air, ready to swing if he attempted another attack. He held his ground.
“You’re full of shit!” he slurred, his breath stinking of gin. “You know that?!”
“I know that Beth still loves you. So much so that she pretended to be Margaret just so she could be with you.”
He bobbed back and forth for a few seconds and then plopped down on a rather expensive looking couch. “Why are you doing this to me? Is this some kind of twisted punishment for having an affair? That’s not against the law, you know.”
“No.” I put down the nine iron and sat in a matching recliner across from him. “But attempted murder is.”
“I didn’t try to kill Beth!”
“Did you hire someone to do it? With her out of the way, you and Margaret could’ve finally been together.”
“Once Beth found out about Maggie and me, she was going to break it off with me anyway. I didn’t need to kill her to make that happen.”
I read his mind. Even with an alcohol-induced, disoriented thought process, Bobby made it very clear that he had nothing to do with what happened to Beth. In fact, his brain took him back to the night the attack occurred. He was at home when he received the call and genuinely shocked to hear about it. After he found out, he called Margaret and told her they had to cool it for a while, more out of how it might appear than the fact his fiancée had been severely beaten.
I honestly couldn’t see what drew Beth to him in the first place. She knew he was a liar and a cheater, yet she still had feelings for him. At that very moment, he continued to nourish his deceitful nature by plotting what he would tell the authorities if necessary as well as the senior partners when he returned to work. He planned to tell them that Margaret had become obsessed with him and threatened to hurt Beth if he didn’t end the engagement. As irrational and paranoid as it was, he saw it as a way to get the heat off him completely so he could ensure his long-term place at the firm.
“So, what now?” he asked. “Am I still a suspect?”
“Not for me, you’re not,” I told him.
“Is Beth going to be okay?”
“I don’t know. She’s stable right now but that could change at any time. Is there anyone you can think of that might have wanted Beth out of the picture?”
“No,” he replied despite being ready to pin the blame on Margaret if it came to it. “She didn’t have any enemies if that’s what you mean.”
“That�
�s what I figured. She’s a good person. Most good people are well-liked…even if they’re not appreciated.” I stood. “Thank you for your time.”
“I’ll see you out.” He got up and blundered over to the door. He opened it to the outside world “Hey, no hard feelings about me pouncing on you when you got here, alright? I’ve been under a lot of stress lately. It’s not something I would’ve done under normal circumstances.”
“Of course not.” I stepped out of his apartment. As he closed the door, I felt a buzz in my pocket. I retrieved my phone and saw that I’d received a text from Linden. “This better be good,” I said out loud and then read it.
Linden: Meet me at the police station ASAP.
Chapter Twenty
I took another Uber to the police station. When I arrived, there was a local news van parked right outside the station. A young reporter spoke to a woman in uniform. As I got out and approached the front door, I noticed that the woman had a name badge that said “Sheriff Luttrell.” I opened the door and was about to step inside when their conversation struck me like a lightning bolt.
“Is it true that you have the Highway Killer in custody?” asked the reporter.
“You know I can’t comment on that, Tom,” Sheriff Luttrell told him. She caught wind of my eavesdropping and scowled at me. “Can I help you, sir?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m looking for Agent Linden. He asked me to meet him here.”
“You must be Mr. Crawford,” she said. “Excuse me, Tom.” She moved away from the reporter. “I’m Sheriff Luttrell.”
I shook her hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
“How about we step inside?” she suggested.
“Of course.” I held the door open for her and then followed her into the station. “This is a very nice town you have here.”
“Why don’t we just cut the crap?” she said. “Linden says you can read minds.”
“I dabble every now and then.”
“Well, I don’t buy into psychic mumbo jumbo. As far as I’m concerned, astrology and all that supernatural nonsense is for suckers.”
“Duly noted.”
“Now what we have here is—”
“Crawford,” Linden said as he suddenly appeared. “Where have you been?”
“Me?” I said. “You just disappeared at the hospital.”
“I’ll let you take it from here,” Sheriff Luttrell said to Linden and then walked away.
“She’s lovely,” I told Linden after she left. “Now will you tell me what this is all about?”
“Walk with me,” he said and started toward the rear of the station. “Did you go anywhere after the hospital?”
“I went to see Bobby Fugate,” I said as we paced side by side.
He stopped mid-step. “By yourself? Are you crazy?”
“What was I supposed to do? Sit around and do nothing? I finally got Beth retracing her steps. Did you want me to waste time and risk losing the progress I’ve made?”
He held up his hand annoyingly like a referee calling a time out. “Alright. Fine. Did he talk to you?”
“Yes. He didn’t try to kill Beth. He cheated on her, but that’s all.”
“Did you read his mind to confirm?”
I nodded. “Now can we please get to back to why we’re here?”
“Absolutely.” He motioned to a hallway that led to another part of the station. “Right this way.”
We walked down the hallway and stopped at a room at the end. He knocked on the door and a detective with a badge on his hip opened it. He let us in, and we immediately came upon a one-way mirror with a view into an adjacent room. Through the mirror, I saw an older man with shaggy hair and an unkempt beard sitting at a small table. He wore torn overalls and a dirty white t-shirt underneath.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“That’s Leonard Feister,” said the detective. “Who are you?”
“This is Max Crawford,” answered Linden. “He’s with me.”
The detective nodded. “Same story,” he said, motioning to Leonard. “Hasn’t changed a word of it.”
“What story? What does this guy have to do with anything?”
“Will you give us a minute?” Linden asked the detective.
“Sure,” said the detective as he exited the room. “Gotta take a piss anyway.”
“Over the past twenty years, there have been a series of unsolved murders that took place between Ohio and Kentucky,” Linden explained after the detective left. “Each one involved a young woman about Beth’s age.”
“So, what’s the connection?” I asked.
“Every one of them was beaten to death and their bodies found near a highway.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”
“I wanted us to rule out other possibilities first. I wasn’t sure it was even relevant.”
“Relevant?! How could it not be relevant?!”
“Because the last murder took place eleven years ago. It could’ve been someone pretending to be the original killer to get us off track. I didn’t want it to taint your investigation.”
“Fine,” I sighed. “Despite the fact that, once again, you’ve withheld vital information from me, I’m going to go along with it for Beth’s sake.”
“Good. So, like I said, the last murder was over a decade ago. All of a sudden, this guy…” He pointed at Leonard through the one-way mirror. “Comes into the police station and confesses to every one of the murders, including the attack on Beth.”
“How many were there before Beth?”
“Five. Two of them were a few weeks apart. The other three were separated by years.”
“How old is this Feister guy?”
“Sixty-six. He’s lived outside of Louisville his whole life. He would’ve been forty-five at the time of the first murder and fully capable of committing the others.”
“And I suppose you want me to read his mind to see if he’s telling the truth.”
He patted me on the back. “That’s why I like you, Crawford. You’re always a step ahead where I need you.”
Ignoring his self-serving admiration, I went into the interrogation room. Leonard Feister barely even gave me a glance. I sat down in the chair across from him. Rather than speak to him immediately, I read his thoughts instead. He wondered who I was but refused to give me the satisfaction of asking. I pulled a picture of Beth from my pocket and laid it on the table in front of him. He recognized her right away, but it was the same photograph used in the newspaper.
“Why you showin’ me that?” he asked. “I already told you I done it.”
“What did you do exactly?”
He sighed. “I beat her up. I beat all of ’em up. She just got lucky.”
“Is she lucky to be in a coma?”
“Better than bein’ dead.”
“I’m Max Crawford,” I finally introduced myself. “I’m working with the local and federal authorities. So, you say you beat her up. How many times did you hit her?”
“I can’t remember that! Look, I said what I’m gonna say to those other fellows.” He crossed his arms. “You’re wastin’ your time.”
I delved further into his mind to discover that he wanted to be famous. He fantasized about being talked about on television and having books written about him. He even imagined a movie about his life and being portrayed by Al Pacino. With all the daydreaming going on, I couldn’t see if he had actually done anything wrong. I needed him to be in the moment. I pointed to the picture of Beth.
“Tell me about the night you beat her,” I said.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “You’re not gonna let up. Are you? I was driving around looking for women. I found one, and I beat her up.”
I took another glimpse into his thoughts. He still wasn’t focused on Beth or the others.
He was no longer fantasizing though. This time, his daily routine went through his head. He basically worked all day at a factory and then went home to be alone at night. Nothing s
tood out except the fact a pervasive sadness permeated his entire life. All he wanted was to be noticed. It didn’t matter for what.
“Do you have a family, Leonard?” I asked.
“I got nobody,” he answered.
“How does that make you feel?”
“What the hell kind of dumbass question is that?”
“Here’s what I think, Leonard. I think you made the whole thing up.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you want to be remembered for something. Even if it’s bad.”
“That’s not true!”
“If it’s not, then tell me about the night you beat her,” I said, motioning to the photo of Beth a second time.
“I don’t remember all the details! It was late at night!”
I saw that, as much as he tried, he couldn’t recall any specifics about his alleged encounter with Beth. “You’re lying, Leonard.”
“I am not!”
“Then tell me one thing. What was she wearing that night?”
After imagining several different outfits, he settled on generic. “A green dress!”
“Nope.” I got up from my chair. “She wore denim jeans with a blue and white University of Kentucky t-shirt.” I started to leave the interrogation room. “Goodbye, Leonard.”
“Wait!” he called after me pleadingly. “I can tell you about the others! I know their names! I know their birthdays! I even know the days I killed ’em and where we were!”
I read his mind again to see that he had researched the other victims online long after their murders took place. “That’s all public knowledge, Leonard. We’re finished here.”
I rejoined Linden on the other side of the mirror. I’d never experienced someone lying about committing a crime before. However, it didn’t surprise me. I’d encountered several inmates that exuded pride for what they’d done. Somehow notoriety overshadowed remorse, and they thrived on the attention it brought them. Leonard Feister was neither responsible for what happened to Beth nor the murders of the other women. He just wanted credit for it. I watched through the one-way mirror as he put his head down on the table.
“Nothing?” said Linden.
“Nope,” I replied. “If he did it, there would be at least some memory of it floating around. All I found evidence of is a desperate man whose greatest fear is to be forgotten.”
When Beth Wakes Up Page 13