And then he knew.
He was in the middle of vacuuming out his van—not because the carpeting was dirty, but because he needed something to do—when the significance of the letters revealed themselves to him. The resulting vision of the truck was so clear that Bill could hardly believe it had taken him this long to figure it out.
The breakthrough came in the form of a mental picture, sort of a waking version of the dreams he had suffered through the last few nights. He thought he had seen the letters before because he had seen them before, and when the vision clicked on in his brain, he could picture the truck in his head as it existed prior to the sloppy, amateur paint job as clearly as if it were parked in the driveway in front of him.
In its earlier incarnation, the truck had been used as a delivery vehicle for a small produce supplier called Specialty Farmers Market, LLC. The company was local and independently owned, supplying grocery stores and markets in the area with fresh produce and vegetables. Bill had seen the trucks on occasion, driving as much as he did between his two stores, and he suspected he may even have supplied the company with tools and small power equipment sometime in the last few years.
The design of the company’s logo had not changed as far as Bill could remember. He figured at some point the owner of Specialty Farmers Market must have upgraded his delivery fleet and sold off his old truck or trucks.
The I-90 Killer had been in the market for just such a vehicle, and Bill assumed he must have bought one of them. Obviously he couldn’t drive around kidnapping teenage girls with foot-high identifying letters emblazoned in green on the side of his getaway truck, so he had done a quick repainting job, and now that paint was beginning to fade. It was a huge blunder for a man who had evaded an intense manhunt for nearly four, long years.
Now that Bill could clearly picture the vehicle, the sixty-four thousand dollar question was this: had the owner of Specialty Farmers Market sold the truck to the I-90 Killer himself, or had he involved a middleman—such as a dealer—from whom the kidnapper had purchased his vehicle?
There was one way to find out.
*
In addition to trucking their produce to various area locations, Specialty Farmers Market operated an independent store, in which they offered their own products for sale, as well as basic grocery staples, like bread and milk. The market was housed in a long, rectangular-shaped rustic log building that looked like a cross between an ice arena and a steroid-enhanced version of Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home. A mammoth concrete and aluminum warehouse protruded out the rear of the store, angling away to the left, with a paved employee parking lot located at the rear of the property.
Bill had never been inside Specialty Farmers Market, but he had driven past it once or twice, so he knew where it was. He figured it was as good a place as any to begin the process of tracking down the company’s owner.
He was well aware that his first move should be to alert Agent Canfield to the potentially critical piece of information he had recovered. He also knew he was going to do no such thing. Bill had spent a lot of time thinking about the situation regarding the I-90 Killer since his meeting with the FBI agent at the coffee shop this morning, and the more he kicked it around in his head, the more a surprising realization began to solidify.
He was going to rescue Carli himself. Forget the authorities.
This lunatic, this “I-90 Killer,” had targeted him specifically; setting his twisted sights on Bill Ferguson’s family solely because Bill had interfered with his attempt to kidnap an innocent girl at an interstate rest stop. He had taunted Bill, approaching his daughter on the street and spelling out in a letter exactly what he intended to do with her, and then he had gone and done it, just a couple of days later.
The authorities, the same ones he was expected to now trust with the job of rescuing his child, had analyzed the letter after its delivery and concluded the I-90 Killer was full of crap, that he was boasting and bragging but would do nothing. Well, he had turned out not to be full of crap; he had done exactly what he said he was going to do. He had taken Carli, and right out from under the noses of the very people who were supposedly protecting her.
And now the FBI, in the form of Special Agent Angela Canfield, was telling him to do nothing; to hand over any information that might be helpful in the search for his daughter, and then to just stay out of the way. Let the professionals handle the search. For the man they had been hunting without success for nearly four years. With Carli’s life hanging in the balance.
No way. Bill didn’t care how sexy and alluring Angela Canfield was, he was not about to run to the phone and pass along the information he had finally managed to recover, and then step aside and wait for Canfield or one of her FBI flunkies to report back to him at their convenience the fate of his only child. The I-90 Killer had snatched Carli Ferguson for a reason; a reason above and beyond the fact that he was a perverted, murdering, slave-trading psycho. He had targeted Bill’s child. And Bill was going to get her back.
Or die trying.
*
May 28, 2:45 p.m.