“You believe he’s bluffing, but you really don’t know,” Sandra countered. “Let’s face it, Agent Canfield, if you really knew what was going on with this man, you would have caught him years ago. But he’s still on the loose, terrorizing innocent young girls. So you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t put a whole lot of stock in what you have to say.”
“Can I offer a compromise?” Bill interrupted. “There are only a few days of school left. Graduation activities start soon and it’d be a shame for Carli to miss them after spending the last twelve years with her friends, right?” Nobody argued, so he carried on. “How about letting her finish out the year, just these last few days, letting her take part in graduation? Then you can whisk her off to Europe or wherever. You can disappear all summer if you’d like; I won’t even put up an argument, custody-wise. Just let her finish out her high school career. She deserves that.”
“Obviously, it’s your choice, Mrs. Mitchell,” Agent Canfield added. “But you’ve seen the police presence we have established right outside your door, and I can assure you, it is just as strong at the high school. Carli is safe at school during the day, as we’ve impressed upon her not to leave the grounds for any reason until classes have ended. And she’ll come home on the bus and be met here, so I don’t see any way there can be a problem.”
Bill could see his ex-wife giving serious consideration to their logic, turning the words over in her mind, looking for flaws. He had spent nearly sixteen years married to Sandra, and he could still read her expressions with ease. She would have made a lousy poker player. It pained him to offer up a solution that would mean he didn’t get to see his little girl for nearly three months, but he had to admit, he was more than a little concerned for her safety, regardless of Canfield’s assurances. If leaving the area for a while was what it took to keep her out of harm’s way, he was one hundred percent in favor of the idea.
The kitchen was silent as the small group awaited Sandra’s reaction. “Well, there aren’t many options. It’s either pack up and leave today or wait just a few more days. Either way, we’re getting her out of here.” Still, nobody spoke. She sighed and turned to her husband. “I want you to call the travel agent, right now, and book a trip for us. For the summer. Starting the day after graduation.”
“Of course,” he said. “Where would you like to go?”
“I don’t care—somewhere well away from here.”
CHAPTER 28
MARTIN FELT STRANGELY AT ease as he sat in the school bus, just another driver waiting in the long line of buses outside the high school at the end of the day. The big vehicles rumbled, filling the air with the oily smell of dozens of diesel engines. He had been a little concerned about other drivers poking their heads into the bus with the intention of chit-chatting with their dead friend while they waited for their passengers, so he had prepared a cover story about being a newly hired substitute driver, just in case, but it hadn’t turned out to be a problem.
His fellow drivers sat behind the wheels of their vehicles, staring straight ahead through the tinted windshields like automatons. Probably regulations, Martin decided; they weren’t permitted to leave the cabs with their engines running just in case one of the budding, young delinquents came out of school early and decided to take a bus for a joy ride.
After disposing of the driver’s body inside the stolen Hyundai and then hiking back to her house, Martin had pulled his disguise out of his backpack and hurriedly applied it. It was nothing elaborate, just a mullet wig—making him look like a 1980s vintage Billy Ray Cyrus—which he then covered with a green, John Deere baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Above his upper lip he applied a fake brown mustache, and he was good to go.
There was no point going overboard; it wasn’t like he was trying to fool Sherlock Holmes, for crying out loud. All he had to do was alter his appearance just enough so a seventeen-year-old girl wouldn’t recognize him; a girl who would undoubtedly be distracted and not paying the slightest attention to who was behind the wheel of her bus anyway. She would be engrossed in a conversation with her best friend, frantically texting another friend, or lost in the music of her iPod. Or, more likely, all three at once. Whatever.
Martin felt confident Carli Ferguson would not walk onto the bus and examine the face of her driver to ensure it was not the same guy who had handed her the threatening letter two days ago. No one would expect him to take the bold step he was planning today, least of all a na?ve, small-town high-school girl, which was exactly why he was doing it.
The front doors of the school were thrown open, and a swarm of students began to exit, moving faster and looking more alert than they probably had all day. After squeezing through the natural bottleneck of the doorway, the kids fanned out and began searching for their buses, scanning the long yellow row of vehicles parked along the access road leading from the street to the paved parking lot behind the school.
Each bus had its own number on a white placard in the side window. The students searched the row of buses for their number, then clambered aboard. Martin knew the process would take only about five minutes after the school’s doors had swung open; the students weren’t anxious to spend any more time at the school than was absolutely necessary.
Martin held a newspaper to his face and pretended to read as the kids boarded, confident in the anonymity his disguise afforded but doing his best not to watch as the teens climbed on. He was anxious and nervous but trying to project an air of routine boredom. It was not an easy look to achieve, especially knowing that any one of the girls climbing the aluminum steps and brushing his arm on the way down the center row might be his angel, the girl with whom he would soon be enjoying a glorious week of unbridled passion.