Every once in a while on the half-mile ride up the winding road a streetlight appeared out of the fog, looking like a hovering alien spacecraft. The dark, featureless mass of woods glided by to either side. The yellow center line and the stripe along edge of the road seemed like the only things grounded in the real world.
As they drove by ever more houses at the edge of Milford Falls proper, Owen rested an elbow on the armrest. Her gun was under the lid of that armrest. With him leaning on it, she knew she would never be able to get to it.
When the neon sign for the Riley Motel began to materialize out of the fog, his left hand reached down to gently clasp her bare right knee. As she turned in to the motel’s parking lot, the hand slid up the inside of her thigh to her crotch. When she put the truck in park, he twisted toward her and shoved his big right hand down inside the top of her low-rise shorts.
Before he could worm his fingers into her, and without making a fuss about it, she simply put her wrist under his and levered his hand back out, as if to say she considered him nothing more than a harmless oaf.
“You feel nice down there,” he said, speaking from a daze of desire. “I like a natural pussy, not shaved bald like whores do today. I like the way you left a patch of hair.”
“Glad you approve,” she said in an icy tone. “We’re here. Get out.”
“Why don’t you come on in and we can finish what we started.”
She knew he was speaking from within the fantasy he had already begun to construct.
“We didn’t start anything. Like I said, you’re not my type. Ordinary guys are a turnoff.”
“Come on—”
“No.”
He sat back, the stern finality of the word yanking him out of his trance. He blinked.
“I’m no ordinary guy,” he said, rather defiantly.
“Bullshit. You’re halfway decent looking, but I already told you, I’m into bad boys and you aren’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know that you haven’t got what it takes to be the kind of guy I go for. You’re a gutless nobody, a poser, trying to talk yourself up and playing the part of a badass to impress me. I’ve met a hundred guys like you. You’re all the same. You’re ordinary, like them.”
His eyes flashed with anger. “I’m not ordinary. I’ve killed people.”
Deliberately showing no reaction, Angela looked over at him for a long moment. She rolled her eyes as she shook her head in disgust.
“You haven’t got the balls to kill anyone. You’d wet your pants if you tried to grab someone and they told you to fuck off.”
“I’m not kidding.” He lowered his voice as he leaned in. “I’ve killed people,” he said again.
“Yeah, right. You’ve killed people. Good for you.” By her tone, she let him know that she didn’t believe him, even though she knew it was true. “Now get out.”
“Did you hear about that whore who disappeared? Carrie something …”
Angela knew who he was talking about. Carrie Stratton was no whore. She was a nurse who worked at the hospital.
The hospital usually used overnight-delivery services, but if it was after the cutoff time for a pickup and there was urgent need, the hospital sometimes used a courier service, and Angela’s courier service was usually their choice to rush specimens to one of several labs in bigger cities. On rare occasions they had even sent her to specialty labs in Buffalo, Newark, or New York City.
It wasn’t a big hospital, so she knew a number of the people who worked there. She’d briefly met Carrie Stratton a couple of times. Carrie had a son and daughter not yet in their teens. Her husband worked for the power company.
Carrie had taken the night shift to earn extra money for her family. Everyone liked her. Angela had picked up a specimen a few days back and Carrie had been the one who checked it out.
It had been late at night and they told her it was critical that she get it to a special lab for testing first thing in the morning. When she was pulled over by a state trooper on I-86, she showed him the package from the hospital marked “urgent” and got out of a speeding ticket with a stern warning. Angela didn’t heed the warning but she did get the sample to the lab on time.
That was the night before Carrie had vanished.
Everyone at the hospital was upset over the disappearance of the young nurse. They knew that she wasn’t the sort to run off or something. Her car was still in the parking lot. Everyone feared she had been abducted. Even though lots of people were looking for her, hoping to find her safe and sound, everyone was grimly aware that the search might not end happily.
Right up until the moment Owen had walked into the bar a couple of hours earlier and she’d looked into his eyes, Angela hadn’t known, either, what had happened to Carrie Stratton.
“I think I heard something about a woman people were looking for,” Angela said. “What about her?”
Owen leaned in a little, lowering his voice. “I killed her.”
“Knock it off, Owen,” she said as she scanned the wet cars in the dark lot. “People say she ran away with a new lover.”
“I was her new lover,” he said, snorting a laugh. “But she didn’t run away. I fucked the bitch. Fucked her good and hard. She told me that she could identify me and that I was going to go to prison. For what? Fucking a whore? So, I killed her.”
Angela let out an impatient sigh. “You’re a goddamn liar, Owen, trying to play like you’re a badass.”
Owen cocked his head to the side. “If I was telling you the truth?”
Angela appraised him in the reddish light from the motel sign. “If you really had the balls … but I don’t believe—”
“I can prove it.”
Angela rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”
“No, really. I can fucking prove it.”
“How?”
“I can show you where I put her body.”
“You could show me her body?” Angela ran a black fingernail down his arm as she let her lips spread in a smile. “I’ve never been with a man who killed someone. Well—other than that guy who killed a man in a bar fight, but that was more of an accident than anything. It wasn’t deliberate. It would take some kind of man to set out to do something like that.”
“Did you ever watch someone die?” he asked as he stared into the memory. “Watch the life go out of them?” He looked back at Angela. “An ordinary guy wouldn’t have the nerve. They couldn’t do it.”
She knew he was driven to dominate women, to hurt them. He liked to watch them die. It aroused him sexually. That lust was growing ever stronger, and there was less time between his kills. It wouldn’t be long before he was aching to kill again. Just recalling it was making him ache to kill again.
“Maybe I had you wrong.”
“Come on up to my room.”
“Come up to your room?” She withdrew her hand. “Okay, I get it. You heard about the disappearance on the news and now you’re trying to take credit. You think it will get you laid if you say you’re the guy who killed her. Nice try, asshole. I gave you the ride you wanted, now get the fuck out.”
“No really, I wasted the bitch. I killed her and dumped her body.” Owen waved a hand in a northerly direction. “Up that way. Up the road that way.”
Angela knew that the police and a lot of volunteers were conducting an extensive search of the area around Milford Falls. They hadn’t found anything yet.
The first instant she had looked into his eyes when he’d come into the bar, Angela had known exactly what Owen had done. Carrie hadn’t told him that she could identify him and he was going to go to jail. That was his just his excuse to justify killing her. In her mind’s eye, Angela saw Carrie begging, promising not to say anything if he let her go. She told him that she had two children who needed her. She had cried and begged for her life. She had shown him their photos in a locket. Carrie couldn’t know what Angela knew—that begging for her life only amped Owen up.