Past the houses there was nothing to interrupt the forest. In places pine trees crowded right up to the edge of the asphalt road. Some of the switchbacks were barely more than a car width wide as the road made its way through the mountainous countryside. The fog, along with the wet, black asphalt and lack of lane markings, made it hard for Angela to see where she was going. It made the drive nerve-racking—to say nothing of sitting beside a man who had raped and killed women because he got off on it.
The county apparently didn’t do much to maintain the road other than lop off any errant limb if it hung down in the way. The road was potholed and crumbling in places. Layers of leaves and pine needles had long accumulated along the sides, obscuring the edge of the pavement. With so many people moved out and leaving abandoned places behind, it felt like the forest was gradually moving in to reclaim the land.
Owen had turned moody as they drove along the lonely road to the spot where he’d dumped the body. She suspected he was resentful of having to provide proof that he’d actually killed a woman. Angela knew that had she not gotten him drunk first, he would not have been as willing to brag about having killed people. She didn’t think that he could be getting sober this soon, but it still concerned her.
Angela was also well aware that her companion in her truck had a hair-trigger temper. To keep him content and thus committed, she had to tolerate his hand down inside the front of her shorts as she drove. Having implied she would welcome such treatment from the right kind of man, she knew that if she was too insistent about rejecting his groping at this point it could easily make him angry enough to simply decide to add her to his kill tally.
She needed him to think of her as sort of a coconspirator impressed with his daring so that he would willingly show her the body or else it might never be found.
So, she did what she had learned to do as a young girl when she had no choice about what was happening to her: she let her mind slip away to another place. It didn’t matter what was happening to her; she wasn’t there. She was gone, her body absently driving on through the drizzly night.
Thirty-one miles up the narrow secondary road, Owen pulled his hand out from the front of her shorts and yelled for her to slow down, bringing her back from that faraway place.
“There!” he called out as he leaned in front of her to point to the left just before they reached an old steel-girder bridge over a more frequently used two-lane road that went to the small village of Bradley. “This is it. Turn in here.”
Angela slowed to a stop. She hit the wiper stalk again to clear the windshield as she squinted into the dark. The bridge surface ahead of them was rain-slick wooden planks. Limbs, heavy with wet leaves, leaned in over the road.
“Are you sure this is the place?” She pulled up the short zipper on her shorts. “I don’t see any road.”
“I never said it was a fucking road,” Owen growled. “It’s just a place where people pull over to turn around or something. Just pull in here.”
Angela turned in to a gap in the glistening green tangle of brush and trees. It was indeed a turnoff. She was concerned that it might be muddy. She definitely did not want to get her truck bogged down out in the middle of nowhere on a seldom-used old road with a killer who could easily get unpleasant ideas.
By the way grasses had overgrown the barely detectable ruts, it appeared that the turnoff hadn’t been used for years. Fortunately, it wasn’t muddy. There was a weight limit on the narrow old one-lane bridge over the highway, so it might have simply been a place where heavy trucks could turn around if they had to, or perhaps it was once an old fire road.
The turnoff only went in fifty or sixty feet before she had to stop because saplings had grown in, blocking the way forward. Even so, with the way it hooked a little to the right, they were easily far enough in that the trees would conceal them from any passing car, especially at night. That was undoubtedly why Owen had picked this spot to rape and murder Carrie Stratton.
Owen opened his door. “We have to walk the rest of the way.”
Before she could get her gun out of the center console, he leaned back in. “What the fuck are you waiting for?”
“Nothing,” she said as she opened her door and got out. “How far is it?”
Owen lifted his arm to point through the moonlit fog. “Back that way. Come on. I’ll show you.”
As they walked into an area of deciduous saplings, Angela could see a small stream to the right down a slight embankment. Some distance away beyond the stream and the trees was the highway that went under the bridge. Back in the expanse of these woods it was possible that Carrie’s body would never be discovered. It wouldn’t be the first body to vanish in these mountains, never to be seen again, or the last.
It was a lonely, miserable place to die. Especially the way Carrie had died.
“You’d better not be bullshitting me,” Angela said to keep his mind on the task of proof as she followed him farther back into woods that grew dense and thick. She didn’t want his mind to wander and get other ideas.
The thick boughs of fir trees would muffle the distant sound of any cars going under the bridge and on up the road, so they certainly would have muffled Carrie’s screams.
If things went sideways, no one would ever hear Angela’s screams, either.
The moon was out, giving the damp, low-lying blanket of fog a faint glow. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to see by as she made her way through a stand of oak. Owen stumbled over rocks here and there. Despite being drunk, he knew precisely where his prize lay and he was eager to show it to her.
Angela had lost sight of her truck back in the fog beyond the trees and thick patches of brush. She counted her strides to mark the distance. The farther in they went, the more the forest had grown in to obscure any trace of the old road. Owen wound his way down a deer path through brush and then along ground thick with fallen leaves between maple and birch trees, avoiding the thicker tangles of brush and denser groves of fir trees. Leaves and needles dripped big drops of water they had combed from the fog. The wet aroma of the woods would have been pleasant if not for the reason she was there.
Angela began to hear the stream burbling among rocks. Moss, spongy under her boots, carpeted the ground in low spots. Water oozed up with every step on the beds of moss. She grew ever more concerned by how far back into the woods Owen was leading her.
“Bad things happen in the woods,” she murmured, not realizing she had said it out loud.
Owen grinned his agreement back over his shoulder, then pointed. “Just over there.”
Not far from the stream, Angela finally spotted the corpse. Owen led her right over to the naked body. It lay on its side, one arm cast out. Angela saw a small pile of bloody blue scrubs not far away. In her mind’s eye, Angela saw again what she had seen when Owen had first walked into the bar and looked into her eyes. She saw Carrie trembling, bleeding, and begging for her life as Owen ordered her to take off the scrubs. The true horror of her ordeal had only begun.
In the warm, wet conditions, the body had already begun to decompose. There were places on the soft belly of the corpse where animals, likely ravens, had torn open the flesh to feast on what was within. Maggots writhed in the open wounds. The smell drove Angela back a step.
“See, I told you,” Owen said, sounding irritated that he’d had to go to all this trouble to prove it to her.
Besides the wounds inflicted after death by animals, there were gaping cuts in Carrie’s chest and neck that had been inflicted by a human animal.
The sight and condition of the body confirmed for Angela the details of what she had seen the first instant she had looked into Owen’s eyes. Death had been slow in coming as Owen became ever more intoxicated with the brutality of what he was doing. Owen liked his victims to be alive so that he could dominate them, terrify them, hurt them. Carrie had fulfilled his sickest desires.