The Lonely Mile (26 page)

“Yes,” she muttered, now speaking in a near-whisper. “I think this will have to do.”

She rotated her arm smoothly, shifting the barrel of her weapon just a couple of inches until it now pointed directly at a surprised Martin Krall.

“What do you think you’re—”

She fired, blowing his head apart in a fine crimson stew of blood, brain tissue, and pulverized bone.

CHAPTER 55

May 28, 4:21 p.m.

THE ROAR WAS DEAFENING, eclipsing the noise of the storm and effectively drowning out Carli’s scream. The spray of blood from the murdered I-90 Killer’s head covered her face and her clothing, tinting her in a reddish hue. She thrashed on her bed in a panic, trying desperately to escape but unable, anchored to the spot by the unyielding handcuffs.

Before Krall’s murdered body had hit the floor, Agent Canfield rotated the gun and once again brought it to bear on Bill Ferguson. The entire bloody incident had taken no more than a half-second’s time and Bill now realized, too late, that he had missed what would likely be his only opportunity to take her by surprise and overpower her. In his shock and disbelief at what he was seeing, he had stood rooted to the spot upon which he was now going to die.

He had taken a single, reflexive step backward when Canfield fired her gun, bringing his hands together in front of his face in a warding-off gesture—another reflexive action, which would have been completely ineffective had the gun been pointed at him—and now Canfield barked, “Get your hands above your head,
now
!”

Bill obeyed, and when he did, the knuckles of his right hand grazed something sharp directly over his head. He felt a stinging sensation and yelped, glancing upward and seeing that he had struck a pair of wooden crossbeams that had been added in an X pattern between the two-by-six studs supporting the first floor above their heads. Like everything else in the house, the support struts needed maintenance badly.

One of the supports had come loose, hanging off one side of the two-by-sixes. When Bill raised his hands he’d scraped it and splinters dug into the back of his hand. He cried out, shaking his hand.

Canfield screamed, “Get your hands in the air!”

Bill raised his hand again, ignoring the throbbing in his knuckles, well aware that a couple of splinters would soon be the least of his problems. Angela Canfield’s entire body was shaking, and sweat was pouring off her. It ran down her face. Her moment of relative calm had passed, and she was clearly feeling the pressure of this life-and-death situation. Bill realized he was lucky she hadn’t shot him already.

Carli lay panting and moaning on the bed a few feet to Bill’s left, trying desperately to brush the blood off her face and succeeding only in smearing it around. He tried to ignore her. The only way he could help her now was by slowing things down, by attempting to gain an extra couple of minutes for them. If he could manage that, he would then try for a couple more in hopes of figuring some way out of this mess.

Canfield glanced between Bill and Carli, back and forth, muttering to herself under her breath. It sounded to Bill like she was saying, “This could work.” She was still planning, strategizing, looking for a way out, and it seemed obvious to Bill she had decided upon one.

Bill glanced down at Martin Krall’s dead body lying on the floor at the foot of Carli’s bed and nearly puked. The man’s head had been blown apart. His ruined skull was unrecognizable except in the most basic way as a human cranium. Bill knew he needed to do something fast to avoid him and Carli suffering a similar fate. But what?

“Agent Canfield,” he said. “Angela.” He kept his voice low and, he hoped, unthreatening, although the irony of trying to appear unthreatening when she was the one holding the gun was inescapable. “As a female yourself, how could you get involved in something like this? You’re taking young women, still girls, and dooming them to a life of sexual slavery, wrenching them away from their families, forcing them into a life of torture—”

“You’d be surprised at what you can survive if you don’t have a choice,” she said. She seemed marginally calmer, a little more under control, but still her glassy eyes glittered dangerously, a frightening testament to the strain she was operating under. “I’m a living, breathing example of that.”

“What happened to you, Angela?” Bill could see she wanted to explain herself to him. He wasn’t sure why, perhaps because of the emotional bond they had shared last night, but the reason didn’t matter. Talking was good. If she was talking, she wasn’t shooting. His arms were tiring from the strain of holding them up near the rafters, but he concentrated on keeping them high. Lowering them would force another show of aggression from Canfield, and that was exactly what he wanted to avoid.

“What happened to me?” She blinked and paused, either considering whether she wanted to answer the question or remembering. “My earliest memories are of my mother’s boyfriend creeping into my bedroom at night, raising my nightgown to my neck and pulling down my underwear. ‘Playing our secret games,’ he called it. Hardly a night went by that we didn’t ‘play our secret games.’

“I was maybe ten years old at the time the abuse started,” she said. “He used toys and candy to buy my silence, and later, when I got older, he graduated to threats and intimidation. But what he didn’t realize was that I didn’t
want
to tell anyone. I was ashamed and humiliated. All I wanted was for it to stop, for it all to go away. But it never did, until the day he finally went to prison—for something else, by the way—and got what was coming to him.”

Agent Canfield’s eyes were red-rimmed and teary, and the gun shook in her hand but still pointed directly at Bill. “He did things to me that you wouldn’t believe if I told you, things so horrible and painful and damaging that I am permanently sterile. He took a normal little girl and turned her into a dead husk, a shell of a human being. But I survived. I overcame it, and I’m strong. So don’t lecture me about taking girls away from the safety of their loving homes, because I know better. There is no such thing. If your precious little princess was worth anything, she would have been able to overcome whatever fate had in store for her in her new home. She would have survived, too, just like I did.”

Bill wanted to say, “Like you did? I wouldn’t wish what you’ve become on my worst enemy!” He wanted to scream at her and shake her and try to make her see beyond herself and her raging psychosis. But Canfield’s use of the past tense at the end of her sickening soliloquy stood out to him like a sore thumb. It was all he could focus on. “Your princess
would have been able
to overcome her fate, she
would have
survived.”

He knew she was about to act on her improvised plan for dealing with them, and allowing them to walk out of Martin Krall’s house alive was not part of it. He wasn’t surprised. A dirty FBI agent, knee-deep in international human sex-trafficking couldn’t afford to allow two eyewitnesses to survive. Period.

Bill wanted desperately to keep her talking. Talking meant not shooting. But for the life of him, he couldn’t think of any way to prompt her to continue. What could she possibly add to the shocking history of abuse she had just related? What could he say to convince her to open up further? And did he really want to? Delving deeper into the horrors of her past didn’t seem like the way to keep her from killing them; if anything, it might just prompt her to finish them off that much sooner.

But it didn’t matter. Agent Canfield had apparently decided the time for introspection was over. She bent over Martin Krall’s body, transferring her weapon to her left hand and continuing to hold it perfectly centered on Bill’s chest. Then she reached under the dead man’s shirttail and lifted his pistol out of the waistband of his jeans. She flipped his body onto its back, meticulously avoiding the small but growing reservoir of blood that pooled around his shattered head.

Bill thought he knew what her plan was, and it scared him to death.

CHAPTER 56

May 28, 4:28 p.m.

“NOW,” CANFIELD SAID, CROUCHING next to Krall’s body. “This isn’t ideal, not by a long shot, but under the circumstances, it’s going to have to do. I’m not going to be able to retire quite as early as I had hoped, what with Krall’s revenue stream—not to mention the man himself—blown to bits, but with a little luck and, of course, your help, this might just all work out.”

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.