Dutch was groaning and gasping audibly now. She listened carefully, then launched another punch—this time with her left arm.
This hit didn’t hurt her hand nearly as much as the last one, and she could both hear and feel something cracking against her knuckles.
Teeth, she realized.
She must have smashed him on the side of his mouth. He was cursing and howling with pain.
The fight was over.
Now Riley drew her weapon. Her hand was hurting, and she hoped she wouldn’t have to fire it. She doubted that she would, but she knew that she could fire with her left hand if she absolutely had to.
Dutch yelled, “Light, damn it! I need some light.”
The hobo named Weasel snapped Riley’s flashlight back on. Another hobo yanked the cover off the campfire and squirted kerosene onto the coals.
Flames leaped up again.
The light revealed Riley standing there, pointing her gun at Dutch. Blood was pouring from the big man’s mouth.
“Nobody move,” she said sharply. “Dutch, put your hands up on your head.”
Dutch looked cowed.
“OK, OK,” he said, obeying her order. As he raised his hands, he leaned forward to spit out a couple of broken teeth.
Despite the pain in her right hand and wrist, Riley managed to smile.
She said, “All right, let’s pick up where we left off. Like I said, I just want to ask you guys a few questions. Just sit down and make yourselves comfortable. Let’s get to know each other.”
As the group of men backed off and began to seat themselves again, Riley heard Officer Lawrence’s voice. He was talking on his cell phone and making his way back down the slope into the ravine.
“OK,” Lawrence was saying. “Just don’t let him get away.”
He ended the call, and Riley asked, “What about the guy who ran?”
“I couldn’t catch up with him,” Lawrence said.
Riley saw that his weapon was still holstered.
Well, at least he didn’t shoot him, she thought.
Lawrence continued, “But he went running straight down the road beside the tracks. He was actually headed back toward the train station, so I called one of our guys and told him to have a team pick him up. He shouldn’t get very far.”
Lawrence looked puzzled as he gazed around at the scene. Riley was standing there with her weapon still drawn, and the largest hobo was groaning and fingering the side of his bleeding mouth.
Lawrence said, “Huh—what’s been going on here?”
Riley let out a small chuckle.
“Oh, nothing much,” she said. “We were just settling down for a nice little chat.”
At that moment, Lawrence’s phone buzzed. His eyes widened with surprise as he took the call.
“What? Are you kidding?”
He listened for a moment, then added, “OK, we’ll be right there.”
Lawrence put the phone in his pocket and stared at Riley.
“They caught up with him, all right,” he said. “And get this—he was trying to get away in a goddamn Mercedes!”
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Riley stared back at Lawrence as she holstered her weapon and snatched her flashlight from the hobo who had picked it up.
“A Mercedes?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Some of our guys picked him up in the train station parking lot. It’s real close to here, and he must have run straight there when I started after him. He was trying to drive off in the Mercedes when they nabbed him.”
Riley shook her hand to try to make the stinging pain from the punch to Dutch’s face go away. She knew she should get some ice on it, but none was readily available, and everything else seemed more important anyhow.
The hobos who had been so threatening just a moment before seemed docile now. Dutch, the one who had attacked her, was sitting on the ground moaning softly. One of his buddies handed him a rag that looked reasonably clean to mop up the blood on his face.
Riley quickly decided it wasn’t worth trying to arrest any of them—not even Dutch.
“Do you guys have a first aid kit?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Weasel said. “We can take care of him.”
“Come on,” she said to Officer Lawrence. “Let’s go see what’s going on.”
Riley and Lawrence left the hobos behind and scrambled up the embankment. When they emerged from the ravine, a vehicle was already approaching. When it stopped alongside side of them, Riley saw that Bill and Jenn were inside. So was Bull Cullen, who had seated himself safely away from Jenn. His nose was swollen and red but no longer bleeding.
Riley and Lawrence got into the car. There was a rather strained silence in the group, but it took only a few moments to drive the rest of the way to the train station. That explained how the hobo had managed to get there so quickly.
The driver took them to a long-term parking lot near the station, where a couple of local cops were doing their best to keep reporters away from a big Mercedes. Riley and the others got out of the car and had to push their way past a cluster of questioning reporters to reach the vehicle.
A patrol car had pulled up in front of the Mercedes, blocking it from the exit. Beside the car, a couple of local cops were holding a man in handcuffs. Riley recognized him as the hobo who had fled—the one the others had called “Spider.”
As they walked toward him, Jenn said, “Do you think maybe that’s our killer?”
Riley thought quickly, then said, “I guess it’s possible. He’s a transient hobo, a freight-hopper. Maybe he gets from one murder location to the next on freight cars, then spots his victims and abducts them. Maybe he steals vehicles to help transport the victims.”
She remembered that the killer had used the same SUV for the first two victims, then had abandoned it in a field and burned it. It seemed likely that he’d stolen it to begin with. After all, he’d definitely stolen Sally Diehl’s hatchback.
And now, here was a hobo trying to drive away in a Mercedes.
Another stolen vehicle, she thought. At least this time he hadn’t gotten away with the car. But did this mean he’d already abducted his next victim?
Might a woman be bound to railroad tracks at very moment, helpless before the next train that came along?
No, it didn’t quite all fit together—not if the whole point of stealing the vehicles had been to carry the victims to the murder scenes. And since this car had been left in the long-term parking section of the station lot, it had probably been here for quite some time—days or even weeks.
A couple of local cops were rummaging through the car, so Riley walked over to them and asked, “Have you found out who owns the car?”
One of the cops handed a registration card to Riley.
He said, “It belongs to someone named Timothy Pollitt. He lives in Chicago.”
Riley breathed a little easier.
Not a woman, she thought.
The other cop held up a time-stamped ticket. “This was inside too. Mr. Pollitt left his car here two weeks ago.” He also produced a printed receipt. “Looks like he paid for a month in advance. I guess he must be off on a long trip.”
“And the keys were right under the seat,” the first cop said. “All somebody had to do was jimmy the door. If this perp was able to drive the car right out of here, the owner might not have even known it was missing.”
“Dumb luck,” the second cop commented.
Riley realized that whoever and wherever Timothy Pollitt was, he was almost certainly not the next intended victim.
But what was this hobo doing, trying to get away in someone’s expensive car? Wouldn’t it have been smarter to grab something less conspicuous? Or did he have some way of knowing that the keys were inside?
She asked the cop, “Have you searched the hobo for any ID?”
“Yeah, and he doesn’t have anything on him—not even a wallet. Just a few loose bills and some change.”
Another vehicle was approaching from the direction of the crime scene. When it stopped, Chief Buchanan got out. So did the Chicago FBI field office chief Proctor Dillard, who came toward Riley and the others.