That was when he felt the most powerful. It got him hard.
Angela had seen all of that. But because it had been so dark and foggy, she hadn’t been quite able to discern in her vision the location of where he’d dumped the body.
She tapped the side of her thumb on the steering wheel. “How far up that way?”
“Fuck, I don’t know,” Owen said, getting a little surly that she wouldn’t simply take his word for it. “Far enough that they won’t likely find her for a long time, if ever.”
“How far is that?”
“From here? From the motel?” He stared off into the fog. “Thirty-one miles,” he finally said.
He knew exactly how far it was to where he’d left Carrie’s body when he had finished with her. Killers could usually return to the exact spot without any difficulty. Sometimes they visited the corpse to help them relive the excitement of the kill. Sometimes they were curious if anyone had found the body, so they would keep it under surveillance. On occasion they would even volunteer to be part of the search party.
With a tilt of her head, Angela gestured toward the motel sign. “Lots of people passing through stay at the Riley Motel. The police would question those kinds of people. How come the police didn’t question you?”
“They did.” His smile turned sly. “I stayed around long enough to make sure they did.”
“You wanted them to question you? If you really did kill her, and the police questioned you, they would figure out that you did it.”
He leaned back and gestured his superiority with a flick of a hand. “Cops are stupid. They don’t have a fucking clue. Especially with someone who knows what they’re doing.
“They don’t got a witness or a body. They don’t got shit. I wanted to stick around and see the looks on their faces. They always get this serious look when they’re searching for a killer, but they don’t know they’re looking right at him. Know what I mean? I’m right there in front of them and it’s like they’re fucking blind. Kind of like you were until I told you. You looked right at me, just like the police did, and you didn’t believe I could be a guy who could kill someone.”
For Owen, the game with the police was part of the thrill. Killing was the rush, but it faded. He thought he was smarter than the police. Playing games with authorities was his way of keeping the excitement going. That and drinking.
“Yeah,” Angela agreed, “I guess it’s not like they could tell that you’ve killed people just by looking in your eyes.”
But Angela could.
From that first glance it had been instantaneous knowledge, almost as if she were sharing—experiencing—his detailed memory of everything he had done to Carrie. In fact, in that same instant she had seen all four women he had killed. She knew the details of what he’d done to each of them.
When she had been young, Angela had sometimes been overcome with agonizing pain in her legs. Her grandmother told her it was caused by her bones growing so fast. Looking into a killer’s eyes brought her that same kind of pain. It made her bones ache.
She knew that other people couldn’t do what she could do, couldn’t recognize a killer by looking in his eyes. She knew she was different from other people.
She believed that her mother’s chronic drug use when she had been pregnant with Angela had been the cause. That constant soup of drugs swirling around inside her mother’s womb as Angela’s fetus was developing had resulted in her being a freak of nature.
Her grandmother said that Angela was lucky all those drugs her mother took hadn’t left Angela retarded, or blind, or crippled. She said once that Angela was lucky to have been born alive. Angela didn’t feel lucky.
She knew that she wasn’t normal and never could be.
Angela knew that she had been born broken.
She knew that her desires, the things that drove her—the things that made her feel alive—were not normal.
And now those things that drove her had her focused in on Owen like a laser.
“Easy enough to brag, to take credit, to say you fooled the police,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you really did it. Lots of losers confess to crimes they didn’t do. Maybe the cops believed you’re innocent because you are.”
“They believed me because I’m smarter than they are,” he snapped. “They can’t catch me.”
“Maybe.” She knew she had to push him that last inch. “Like I said, it’s easy enough to make up the story. Nowhere near as easy to be a man who could actually do it.”
He looked over at her out of the corner of his eye. “I can show you where I left her body.”
She stared at him for a moment. “Thirty-one miles. You said it was thirty-one miles?”
“That’s right.” Owen gestured out into the darkness. “That way. Thirty-one miles. Come on, I’ll show you, then you’ll know I’m telling the truth.” He was beginning to enjoy taking her into his confidence. Unlike other women, she wasn’t repulsed or horrified, but actually interested. With a sly smile he revealed more. “She wasn’t my first, either.”
“You mean to say you’ve killed people before?”
“Two others.” When he looked over at her she could see how bloodshot his eyes were. “She was the third.”
No, Carrie was the fourth. In his drunken haze he was forgetting the skinny prostitute he had strangled to death in a flophouse in Pennsylvania. She’d been a heroin addict who had been killing herself for a long time, not unlike Angela’s mother. Owen had simply finished the job for her. But this was not the time to refresh his memory.
“I’ve never been with a guy who actually killed someone, not deliberately, anyway. That’s fucking hot. At least, it is if you’re telling me the truth.” Angela put the truck in gear and drove out of the lot. “You better not be bullshitting me.”
“You’ll see,” he said with smug confidence.
FIVE
Owen directed her onto a little-used, narrow, winding secondary road. The long, backwoods loop off the main roads, called Duffey Road, went to a scattering of houses and camps.
At first, not too far out of Milford Falls, there were a number of squat, ramshackle houses close to the road. Some of them had patches of black tar paper nailed to dingy white siding. More than one had a caved-in roof. A few of those had blue tarps over them to try to hold out the elements, but over time, those too had shredded.
Derelict vehicles, along with old appliances, discarded lawnmowers, storm windows, bicycles, rusted barbecues, and broken lawn furniture, lay scattered around some of the properties. It all sat silently rusting or rotting away among the weeds and overgrown brush.
A few old houses had such a large variety of discarded scrap that the yards looked more like junkyards than homes. Other properties had outbuildings with old tractors and ancient trucks up on blocks. Some of the places had rutted roads leading back to barns in fields behind houses. More than one place had several no-trespassing signs nailed to trees and fences.
Dim porch lights at a few of the houses gave off an eerie glow in the fog, but most of the places were long abandoned and dark. There used to be a textile mill and a variety of other manufacturing plants in Milford Falls that employed a lot of people, but one by one they shut down, leaving no work, so a lot of people moved out. Milford Falls was not an easy place to make a living, so many residents had simply picked up and moved on.