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.”
Canfield laughed. “I’m a monster. And you’re what? A hero? Maybe. But I’ll be a living monster and you’ll still be a dead hero. For what it’s worth, I will emphasize to my bosses and the media how close you came to rescuing little Carli here. It’s a great story and will go a long way toward shifting people’s attention off any lingering questions they may have about my role in this whole thing. Not that the Bureau will want to dig too deeply, anyway.”
Canfield’s voice trailed off, and she appeared wistful. It was the first hint of emotion Bill had seen in her otherwise blank eyes since she had snuck up behind him when he was about to blast Martin Krall. In a way, seeing that tiny shadow of her former humanity was even worse than the almost robotic lack of emotion she had displayed up to this point.
It looked like she had finally satisfied her inner need for explanation. That was bad. If she was talking, she wasn’t shooting. Time had run out, and Bill still had no idea what to do.
Some time in the last few minutes the storm outside had finally dissipated, and he could hear the almost imperceptible sound of Carli sobbing atop the filthy bed off to his left. It was as if she didn’t dare make any more noise than she absolutely had to, but she simply couldn’t hold in the terror. His right hand throbbed from where he had scraped his knuckles on the splintered pine support strut hanging half off the ratty two-by-six beams that seemed to sum up this entire crumbling home perfectly.
FBI Special Agent Angela Canfield nodded to herself. “Yeah. This’ll work,” and she adjusted her two-handed grip around Martin Krall’s dead hand, using the first two fingers of her own right hand to force Krall’s lifeless pointer finger through the trigger guard on his Glock. She aimed took dead aim on Bill Ferguson’s chest, center mass, just as she had been taught back at the academy.
“Look at the bright side,” she told Bill. “At least you get to go first. You don’t have to watch your little girl take one between the eyes.”
She squeezed the trigger.
CHAPTER 57
May 28, 4:30 p.m.
BILL GRABBED THE ONE-INCH by one-inch pine support hanging uselessly off the two-by-six joist directly over his head, yanked it hard in one smooth motion, down and to his left, across his body, and slashed at Canfield, half-stepping to the right as he brought his arm down, driving it toward the murderous agent.
Two nails, which stuck out the front of the support at an oblique angle, pierced the skin of Canfield’s delicate neck just as Martin Krall’s gun discharged. For the second time in a matter of minutes, the ear-splitting boom of a handgun rocked the enclosed space, and the sharp smell of the discharged weapon filled the air.
Carli screamed. Instantly, Bill felt a burning sensation in his left arm above the elbow, and he knew he had been shot. He continued driving the makeshift stake through Angela Canfield’s neck, somehow keeping his balance as the bullet ripped through his left arm, following through like a baseball pitcher throwing toward home plate. A great spray of blood, crimson and terrifying, erupted from her neck as the stake ripped through her carotid artery, opening a gaping wound.