The Lonely Mile

by Allan Leverone

  CHAPTER 54

  May 28, 4:17 p.m.

  HE HEARD THE DISTINCTIVE sound of a slide being racked, the heavy, metallic ka-chink that was at once menacing and unmistakable. A split second later, he felt the deadly mass of a handgun barrel pressed into his ear. “Drop it,” commanded a voice so softly that Bill could barely make it out over the shrieking noise of the storm outside.

  For a moment, nothing happened. The wind howled and the thunder crashed and the rain pelted the casement window, and Bill Ferguson knew, if he surrendered his weapon, he was condemning himself and his daughter to death. Confusion battled frustration in his head—fear was running a distant third—and Bill tried to imagine how someone had managed to sneak up behind him after he had just finished clearing the entire house.

  “I said, drop the gun,” the voice repeated. “You have two seconds before I blow your meager brains all over your little girl.” In front of him, Krall had finally realized something was happening, and he turned slowly. The initial look of concern etched on the face of the I-90 Killer, of barely controlled panic, was replaced by a sly smile as he completed his turn and took in the scene.

  Something was wrong here, something more than the fact that Bill had botched his rescue attempt. Something about that disembodied voice behind him sounded chillingly familiar. It was disorienting. He reluctantly held the Browning out to the side with two fingers on the butt of the pistol.

  In his peripheral vision, Bill watched as a hand snaked out and grabbed the gun. It was a slender hand, female, and attached to it was an arm covered with a soaking wet blue windbreaker. An FBI windbreaker. Immediately, he placed the voice. It was the same one he had spoken to dozens of times over the last two days. It was Special Agent Angela Canfield.

  “This is the guy,” Bill said, turning excitedly, wondering why she didn’t get what was going on here. How stupid could she be? “This is the I-90 Killer! Put the cuffs on him before he has a chance to—”

  “Shut up,” Angela Canfield said, pistol-whipping Bill in the forehead with a force that opened a gash and rocked him back on his heels. Blood spurted and dribbled down his forehead in a thick rivulet. “I need a minute to think.”

  As she spoke, Krall reached out, carefully plucked Bill’s Browning from Agent Canfield’s hand, and began examining it. “What are you doing here?” he said to her. “I was supposed to have this chick for a whole week. We had the usual agreement.” The I-90 Killer seemed only annoyed by the fact he had come a half-second away from having his slimy head blown right off his shoulders.

  Carli moaned. It was the first sound Bill had heard her make since descending the stairs. She looked at Bill with huge eyes filled with desperation and maybe even resignation. He wanted to go to her and comfort her, but before he could do that he had to figure out how to deal with this astounding turn of events.

  “Oh my God,” he said. “You’re involved in this, aren’t you?” He looked into Canfield’s face and saw those ice-blue eyes staring unblinkingly back at him, glittering and beautiful and suddenly also cold and calculating. He recalled the frosty gaze she had leveled at him when he sent her away last night. She continued pressing her service weapon insistently into his forehead. He refused to back off and more blood spilled, starting a second track, running into his eyebrows. Soon it would begin to drip into his eyes.

  “Duh,” she said mockingly. “Great sleuthing, Sherlock. How else do you think this moron could escape capture for so long?”

  “Who are you calling a moron?” Krall protested, but Canfield ignored him.

  “It’s the perfect scam,” she continued. “He takes the girls, enjoys them for a week in his own unique way, and then we move them out of the country and along to their new owners.”

  Bill was stunned. “But…these girls are people! They’re human beings, and you’re ripping them away from their families, their lives…”

  “There’s money to be made.”

  “My God,” he said in wonderment. “What is wrong with you? How can you be so cold? This guy here,” Bill indicated Martin Krall with a nod, “has obviously got mental and psychological issues, but you…” His voice trailed off, and he shook his head in utter amazement.

  “Oh, grow up, will you, Mr. Boy Scout?” Canfield replied. “I worked gangs for years when I first started in law enforcement, and you know what I saw?”

  Bill stared at her silently, in shock, and she continued. “I’ll tell you what I saw. I saw people on the take everywhere. I saw money being made, hand over fist, mountains of money, more money than you could ever count, all going to judges and lawyers and politicians and high-level bureaucrats. I saw myself busting my butt, trying to make a difference, while all the fat cats got rich off my hard work.

  “So when I got this gig and ran down the legendary Mr. Krall, here, I saw the chance, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make my big score. We teamed up, made the right connections, and had a great thing going until you came along and rocked the very lucrative boat.” She shoved the gun barrel into his forehead again and pain blossomed outward from the point of impact. Bill barely noticed.

  “I was within one or two more girls of having enough money to be able to chuck it all, to blow off the FBI and go live on a beach somewhere.” She sighed and shook her head ruefully. “Now this changes everything. I guess I’ll have to work a little longer. On the bright side,” she said, smiling coldly at Bill, “I believe I can make this all work out to my benefit. Yes, I’m pretty sure I can.”

  “But what about—” Bill began.

  “Last night? ‘Oh, Bill, let’s share our loneliness and fear!’ Is that what you’re talking about? You concerned me,” she told him. “I had a feeling you knew more than you were telling me, and I knew I needed to keep a close eye on you. I figured you were just like every other man on the face of this filthy planet. I figured, given the opportunity to roll around in the hay with me, you wouldn’t hesitate. Who would have guessed I would come across the one Boy Scout left in the world?”

  Bill shook his head defiantly. “Tell yourself that if you want,” he said, “but not every man is as twisted and amoral as you seem to believe.”

  Canfield barked out a laugh, short and cruel. “Sure, Bill, if you say so. Let me tell you what I know from personal experience. There’s no such thing as love in this world. There’s only pain and cruelty. And that,” she said, still smiling without a trace of warmth, “brings us neatly back to this moment in time. Here we are, all four of us, and the question is, how do we proceed?

  “Mr. Krall, here, as useful as he is at procuring ripe, virginal young ladies for our little business venture, is nowhere near creative or clever enough to come up with anything resembling a workable conclusion to this thorny problem, but fortunately for me, I am. In fact, I believe I have already developed a plan that will satisfy my needs more than adequately. It’s not perfect, but what in this world is?” Agent Canfield no longer trained her ice-blue eyes on Bill, but appeared to retreat back inside her mind. She seemed to be working at convincing herself of the feasibility of her “workable conclusion.”

  “Yes,” she muttered, now speaking in a near-whisper. “I think this will have to do.”

  She rotated her arm smoothly, shifting the barrel of her weapon just a couple of inches until it now pointed directly at a surprised Martin Krall.

  “What do you think you’re—”

  She fired, blowing his head apart in a fine crimson stew of blood, brain tissue, and pulverized bone.

  CHAPTER 55

  May 28, 4:21 p.m.

  THE ROAR WAS DEAFENING, eclipsing the noise of the storm and effectively drowning out Carli’s scream. The spray of blood from the murdered I-90 Killer’s head covered her face and her clothing, tinting her in a reddish hue. She thrashed on her bed in a panic, trying desperately to escape but unable, anchored to the spot by the unyielding handcuffs.

  Before Krall’s murdered body had hit the floor, Agent Canfield rotated the gun and once again brought
it to bear on Bill Ferguson. The entire bloody incident had taken no more than a half-second’s time and Bill now realized, too late, that he had missed what would likely be his only opportunity to take her by surprise and overpower her. In his shock and disbelief at what he was seeing, he had stood rooted to the spot upon which he was now going to die.

  He had taken a single, reflexive step backward when Canfield fired her gun, bringing his hands together in front of his face in a warding-off gesture—another reflexive action, which would have been completely ineffective had the gun been pointed at him—and now Canfield barked, “Get your hands above your head, now!”

  Bill obeyed, and when he did, the knuckles of his right hand grazed something sharp directly over his head. He felt a stinging sensation and yelped, glancing upward and seeing that he had struck a pair of wooden crossbeams that had been added in an X pattern between the two-by-six studs supporting the first floor above their heads. Like everything else in the house, the support struts needed maintenance badly.

  One of the supports had come loose, hanging off one side of the two-by-sixes. When Bill raised his hands he’d scraped it and splinters dug into the back of his hand. He cried out, shaking his hand.

  Canfield screamed, “Get your hands in the air!”

  Bill raised his hand again, ignoring the throbbing in his knuckles, well aware that a couple of splinters would soon be the least of his problems. Angela Canfield’s entire body was shaking, and sweat was pouring off her. It ran down her face. Her moment of relative calm had passed, and she was clearly feeling the pressure of this life-and-death situation. Bill realized he was lucky she hadn’t shot him already.

  Carli lay panting and moaning on the bed a few feet to Bill’s left, trying desperately to brush the blood off her face and succeeding only in smearing it around. He tried to ignore her. The only way he could help her now was by slowing things down, by attempting to gain an extra couple of minutes for them. If he could manage that, he would then try for a couple more in hopes of figuring some way out of this mess.

  Canfield glanced between Bill and Carli, back and forth, muttering to herself under her breath. It sounded to Bill like she was saying, “This could work.” She was still planning, strategizing, looking for a way out, and it seemed obvious to Bill she had decided upon one.

  Bill glanced down at Martin Krall’s dead body lying on the floor at the foot of Carli’s bed and nearly puked. The man’s head had been blown apart. His ruined skull was unrecognizable except in the most basic way as a human cranium. Bill knew he needed to do something fast to avoid him and Carli suffering a similar fate. But what?

  “Agent Canfield,” he said. “Angela.” He kept his voice low and, he hoped, unthreatening, although the irony of trying to appear unthreatening when she was the one holding the gun was inescapable. “As a female yourself, how could you get involved in something like this? You’re taking young women, still girls, and dooming them to a life of sexual slavery, wrenching them away from their families, forcing them into a life of torture—”

  “You’d be surprised at what you can survive if you don’t have a choice,” she said. She seemed marginally calmer, a little more under control, but still her glassy eyes glittered dangerously, a frightening testament to the strain she was operating under. “I’m a living, breathing example of that.”

  “What happened to you, Angela?” Bill could see she wanted to explain herself to him. He wasn’t sure why, perhaps because of the emotional bond they had shared last night, but the reason didn’t matter. Talking was good. If she was talking, she wasn’t shooting. His arms were tiring from the strain of holding them up near the rafters, but he concentrated on keeping them high. Lowering them would force another show of aggression from Canfield, and that was exactly what he wanted to avoid.

  “What happened to me?” She blinked and paused, either considering whether she wanted to answer the question or remembering. “My earliest memories are of my mother’s boyfriend creeping into my bedroom at night, raising my nightgown to my neck and pulling down my underwear. ‘Playing our secret games,’ he called it. Hardly a night went by that we didn’t ‘play our secret games.’

  “I was maybe ten years old at the time the abuse started,” she said. “He used toys and candy to buy my silence, and later, when I got older, he graduated to threats and intimidation. But what he didn’t realize was that I didn’t want to tell anyone. I was ashamed and humiliated. All I wanted was for it to stop, for it all to go away. But it never did, until the day he finally went to prison—for something else, by the way—and got what was coming to him.”

  Agent Canfield’s eyes were red-rimmed and teary, and the gun shook in her hand but still pointed directly at Bill. “He did things to me that you wouldn’t believe if I told you, things so horrible and painful and damaging that I am permanently sterile. He took a normal little girl and turned her into a dead husk, a shell of a human being. But I survived. I overcame it, and I’m strong. So don’t lecture me about taking girls away from the safety of their loving homes, because I know better. There is no such thing. If your precious little princess was worth anything, she would have been able to overcome whatever fate had in store for her in her new home. She would have survived, too, just like I did.”

  Bill wanted to say, “Like you did? I wouldn’t wish what you’ve become on my worst enemy!” He wanted to scream at her and shake her and try to make her see beyond herself and her raging psychosis. But Canfield’s use of the past tense at the end of her sickening soliloquy stood out to him like a sore thumb. It was all he could focus on. “Your princess would have been able to overcome her fate, she would have survived.”

  He knew she was about to act on her improvised plan for dealing with them, and allowing them to walk out of Martin Krall’s house alive was not part of it. He wasn’t surprised. A dirty FBI agent, knee-deep in international human sex-trafficking couldn’t afford to allow two eyewitnesses to survive. Period.

  Bill wanted desperately to keep her talking. Talking meant not shooting. But for the life of him, he couldn’t think of any way to prompt her to continue. What could she possibly add to the shocking history of abuse she had just related? What could he say to convince her to open up further? And did he really want to? Delving deeper into the horrors of her past didn’t seem like the way to keep her from killing them; if anything, it might just prompt her to finish them off that much sooner.

  But it didn’t matter. Agent Canfield had apparently decided the time for introspection was over. She bent over Martin Krall’s body, transferring her weapon to her left hand and continuing to hold it perfectly centered on Bill’s chest. Then she reached under the dead man’s shirttail and lifted his pistol out of the waistband of his jeans. She flipped his body onto its back, meticulously avoiding the small but growing reservoir of blood that pooled around his shattered head.

  Bill thought he knew what her plan was, and it scared him to death.

  CHAPTER 56

  May 28, 4:28 p.m.

  “NOW,” CANFIELD SAID, CROUCHING next to Krall’s body. “This isn’t ideal, not by a long shot, but under the circumstances, it’s going to have to do. I’m not going to be able to retire quite as early as I had hoped, what with Krall’s revenue stream—not to mention the man himself—blown to bits, but with a little luck and, of course, your help, this might just all work out.”

  She placed the I-90 Killer’s weapon in his dead hand, wrapping her own right hand around his and setting her gun on the floor at her feet. Then she used her left hand to steady her right, angling the weapon upward and pointing it at Bill, who was no more than three feet away, hands still raised in the air.

  “Here’s what happened,” she said, apparently deciding to run the story past her captive audience. Bill didn’t mind. Talking meant not shooting, although it had become crystal clear that the shooting would begin soon enough. “You got Krall’s address from Ray Blanchard and ran down here without telling anyone—bad idea, by the way, in case you hadn
’t realized it by now—but the farmer’s market owner didn’t believe you when you told him you would bring the information to me. He called and advised me that you had been in his store and figured out Krall was the one who had your daughter. All this, you already know.

  “As soon as I took the call, I realized that you were in incredible danger. I jumped in my car, leaving Mike Miller in charge at the Leona Bengston crime scene, and rushed here to protect you. I’ll probably get an official reprimand placed in my personnel file for coming here alone—it’s against Bureau policy, and for good reason—but as you might have guessed by now, I don’t much care about that.” Canfield smiled coldly at Bill. He wondered how he could have missed the utter lack of emotion in her shockingly blue eyes.

  “Then, when I got here,” she continued, “I came through the door just as the sound of gunshots erupted from the basement.” The FBI agent now seemed to be talking to herself as much as to Bill, rehearsing her story and poking at it, checking for holes. “I rushed down the stairs to find Krall, the infamous and extremely dangerous I-90 Killer, standing over the bodies of poor, unfortunate Bill Ferguson and his beautiful young daughter, Carli. I fired my service weapon, striking the murderer and killing him, but it was too late. You and poor Carli were already dead.

  “I tried my best to revive the two of you, performing artificial respiration on both of you all by myself, but it just wasn’t to be. It’s a tragedy, really.” She looked up at Bill, seemingly awaiting some kind of response. He stared back in shock and horror.

  “Well,” she said. “What do you think?”

  “What do I think?” Bill shook his head. He tried to find words to express the revulsion he felt as he looked at her, but none would come. Words seemed wholly insufficient. Finally, he gave it a try. “My God, you’re a monster.”