The woman knitted her eyebrows as if the events of the last thirty seconds were beyond her comprehension, which, given the circumstances, they probably were. She shot Martin a look of extreme reproach, as if he had farted in church or something, then finally staggered backward and reached for the spurting neck wound with both hands to try to stanch the flow of blood.
It wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t going to come close to working.
Martin danced out of range of the arterial spray as the bus driver dropped, face down on her front lawn. Martin wondered if she was sorry now she hadn’t taken better care of it; the dry brown grass did little to cushion her fall. Just seconds after she fell, she stopped twitching and Martin got to work. He had a lot to do and not much time to get it done.
He dragged her to his car, doing his best to minimize the amount of blood slopping out of the gaping wound. His body he didn’t care about; he had worn a long-sleeved jumpsuit, which he would later peel off and dispose of. The woman was sturdy, built like a block of wood, and Martin struggled to pull her along. He popped the trunk with the remote control on the key fob and managed to hoist her body up, dumping it in the trunk before slamming the lid on the still-warm corpse.
There was nothing he could do about the blood staining the dusty yard where she had fallen. He just had to hope no one would come traipsing up to the front door for a while. She was too old to have school-age children, so that didn’t seem to be an issue, but you could never tell when a neighbor might drop by to borrow a cup of sugar or do whatever the sheep living in this miserable hellhole did to pass the time. On the bright side, the area was relatively far from town and sparsely populated, so the likelihood of anyone simply stopping in for a visit seemed remote.
Martin jumped behind the wheel and backed out of the driveway, moving quickly but being careful to avoid scraping the front of the bus. He drove the Hyundai he had jacked off an old lady up the country road a couple hundred yards. When he had gotten just far enough to be out of sight of the murdered woman’s house, Martin yanked the wheel sharply to the right and hit the gas, forcing the little vehicle as far into the woods as possible. It jounced and stuttered over uneven ground, finally coming to rest against a massive oak tree.
Satisfied the Hyundai was more or less screened from the view of anyone driving past, Martin grabbed a backpack off the seat next to him, then opened the door and stepped out into the woods. He quickly stripped off the jumpsuit, balling it up and tossing it into the trunk with the murdered bus driver before slamming the lid back down. He wasn’t concerned about leaving behind DNA evidence—there was none of his on file anywhere to match it, and in the unlikely event he was ever caught, he knew he would never see the light of day again. So why worry?
Martin trudged out of the woods the way the car had come in, doing his best to straighten the crushed tree branches and scrub brush the car had smashed down on the way in. When he reached the pavement, he peered back at his handiwork. It wasn’t perfect, but the foliage above was thick, it was dark as a hooker’s heart in there, so it would probably not be discovered for a little while, and a little while was all he needed. The camouflage job didn’t have to be perfect. In another hour or so, Martin would depart this little town for good, and after that, it wouldn’t matter whether anyone found the lady or not.
He jogged back along the edge of the road, thankful for small towns and people who valued their privacy. There wasn’t one nosy neighbor to worry about and not a single car had passed by on this little, out-of-the-way cow path the entire time Martin had been here, and that included the time he sat parked up the road waiting for the driver to come out of her house. The whole thing had all gone down so easy it almost didn’t seem fair. But he wasn’t done yet; the most challenging portion of the day’s activities was still to come.
Martin retraced his steps to the scene of the murder and picked the bus key off the ground. The driver had been so busy dying, she had forgotten all about it. It was slick with her blood, and he was momentarily disgusted. Who knew what nasty diseases the old bat had been carrying around? It was one thing to get her blood on his overalls; he could deal with that, but all over his hands? The idea was just repulsive. He wiped the key off as best he could on the ground, succeeding mostly in getting dirt and dead brown grass all over it.
Oh, well. You couldn’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, as the expression went, and Carli Ferguson was going to make one tasty omelet.
CHAPTER 27
BILL WATCHED AS SANDRA Mitchell stood with her hands on her hips in the middle of her spacious kitchen, facing him and the others seated at the kitchen table, a group which included her husband, Howard, and the FBI Special Agent in charge of the I-90 Killer case, Angela Canfield. He was glad Carli was safe at school. “I think we should just take Carli and leave town, go on a vacation, do anything to get her out of the sights of that madman.”
Canfield nodded placatingly, holding her hands out in front of her, palms forward, as if trying to ward off an evil spirit. Bill felt a little sorry for her. He had been in similar situations many times during arguments with his ex-wife, and knew that getting her to change her mind when it was made up was like trying to stop the sun from setting in the west.
“Believe me, I understand how you feel,” Canfield said gamely. “But, as I explained already, I believe this letter is nothing more than a bluff, a chance for the dirt bag to put the unsuccessful kidnapping behind him while at the same time tweaking the man he holds responsible for his failure. He’s probably very frustrated at the moment because he has never experienced anything approaching this level of failure before.”