Eyes of the Predator (19 page)

“Mama said get over there, so
get,” she hissed at her brother through clenched teeth, dragging the struggling
child to his mother.

She was lonely, surrounded by
these strangers, the normal people doing normal things, taking normal trips.
How could she go up to one of them and ask for a ride north to Canada.
Impossible. More than that, it was ridiculous. Canada. They would laugh at it.
The brothers had started to laugh at the idea earlier, until they realized she
was completely serious. Her seriousness had surprised them and amused them, she
knew. But Clay had made his offer anyway, and now, looking around at the others
with normal lives, her running away dream, the one she and Sam had sheltered
under all those hard years, was beginning to seem less achievable than it had
earlier. Worse, it seemed childish. Now, in the cold light of day, she was
frightened and unsure.

The deep voice beside her was
startling.

“Well, hello again young lady,”
Henry said in his most grandfatherly tone. His deep voice and drawl made the
words soft.

Lyn started and turned her head
towards the voice. The large truck driver from the diner the night before,
Kathy had called him Henry, was thumbing through a magazine a few feet away.

He smiled at her and put the
magazine down.

“I thought I saw you in the cafe
earlier. Did you eat?”

She nodded. Her throat was tight.

“Well good. I was a little
worried about you last night when you went off with them two boys. They treat
you all right?”

She nodded again, “Yes, they were
fine. We had breakfast.”

“Good, good. That’s real fine.”
Henry looked out the window. “Looks like they got my rig gassed up and ready.
Just wanted to make sure you was ok.” He smiled and put the magazine back on
the rack.

“Thanks, I’m fine,” she said
softly.

“Ok then. I’ll be heading out,”
Henry said turning away, and then stopped and asked over his shoulder, “You
looking for a ride? I’m headed north if you want to come along for a spell. I’m
going as far north as Richmond, then headed back west.”

“Oh, well…I, well I just…” Lyn
was intimidated by the large man, but he seemed harmless now, just friendly. It
was confusing.

Henry smiled again and in his
deep syrupy voice said, “It’s all right. I understand. Look, I’m going to go
pay for my fuel and check out the rig. Take about ten minutes. Then I’m gonna
crank her up and head out up I-95. If you’re going that way, you’re welcome.
Just come on out to the truck.” Henry pointed out the window and added, “It’s
that big red Freightliner there at the pumps.”

Henry turned around and walked
away.

Lyn stood there, her head
spinning. Two minutes ago, she was ready to take Clay Purcell up on his offer
to go home with him and his brother. She had almost given up on Canada. Now,
out of the blue, she had a ride to Richmond. It was a sign, maybe. A sign that
she shouldn’t give up so quickly, maybe.

Richmond was north, she knew
that. It was Virginia, and Virginia was closer to Canada than Georgia, although
how much closer, she wasn’t precisely sure. But from there another ride north
would get her closer, maybe all the way. So why not go all the way, or at least
try? The uncertainty began to subside and her innate sense of determination
began to take over again. She was poor, not well educated, but she was
determined and that counted for something, usually.

Lyn stood there for a few minutes
looking out the store window and across the large lot. She could see Henry
standing by the red truck. He was talking to the fuel attendant and seemed
totally unaware of her. He had made no threatening statement. Yes, he was a
little sleazy, even creepy, but he had not tried to hurt her or take her and he
could have. He was big. No, he just walked away and said she could come if she
wanted. It was a sign…maybe. Blessing seemed too big a word, but maybe a sign,
a chance. Maybe she should take it. Maybe she
had
to take it or never
know.

Lyn stood for a minute more. Her
final thought on the sign from Henry was that she couldn’t really be picky. She
was not going to get offers from church ladies. Leaving the store, she walked across
the parking lot to the red truck and Henry.

The busy clerk at the cash
register was not too busy to have noticed the pretty girl and the fat man at
the magazine rack. He saw her walk to the truck and shook his head. Runaways,
you saw them all the time at truck stops; usually young girls, alone and
scared. They would fall for any line from these truckers. The clerk didn’t get
it. Why, he would be happy to give the pretty little brunette a ride. Watching
her slim form cross the lot, he felt the twitch in his balls and the start of a
boner. Of course, no one would notice under his three hundred and twenty
pounds.

“That’ll be seven ninety-five,”
Todd the clerk said to the old couple with two hot dogs and two sodas at the
counter.

Outside, Henry showed Lyn how to
climb up into the tall Freightliner. The clerk watched over the heads of the
old couple. He pushed his groin against the counter as he rang up the next
customer. Little girl if you want a ride, he thought, ride this.

George Mackey and Chief Deputy
Kupman walked away from the body of the girl, carefully retracing their steps
through the grass and back to the dirt road. George was quiet. Ronnie assumed
he was thinking about the ring mark he had found on the girl’s head where her
murderer had apparently struck her. It was a good observation; the kind of
thing that George was good at seeing, things that might be invisible to others.

Looking back, Ronnie saw that
Sheriff Klineman was talking with Bob Shaklee, moving his hands animatedly. No
doubt, he would be trying to put some spin on George’s theory that the same
person had committed both murders that had taken place in the county within the
last twelve hours. Bad enough to have two murders, but to have a serial killer
going around killing old black men and young girls just weeks before his
reelection campaign was scheduled to start was potentially devastating, at
least for the sheriff.
His reelection chances would be a toss-up at
best. Of course, Klineman’s concern for the devastation to the old black man
and young girl and their families was a matter of conjecture.

Knowing Klineman, Kupman realized
he might just as easily be trying to find a way to spin it so that he could
take credit for the potentially case breaking piece of evidence, the ring mark
on the girl’s head. Something like, ‘Yeah, I taught George everything he knows
about law enforcement,’ or ‘Yeah, George is like a son to me. He discusses
every case in detail with me to verify his theories’ or at the very least, ‘I
always make sure my deputies have the very latest training in investigative
procedures…so on and so on…’

A smirk born of distaste for the
man plastered itself across Kupman’s face. The sheriff was all politician.

They walked past the still
waiting hearse drivers from the funeral home. Timmy Farrin from the local radio
station had a portable tape recorder out and appeared to be interviewing the
taller undertaker, for want of anyone better to question. The Savannah stations
must be getting close. Timmy was taking whoever and whatever he could get to
fill the airwaves emanating from Everett. Not often a local story here got
noticed by the big stations. Timmy had to make the most of it. Unfortunately
for him, he didn’t have the weight, meaning a sufficiently large audience, for
the sheriff to grant him any special access to the scene or to interview the
GBI or the sheriff himself.

Thanks to cable and satellite
dishes, most people in the county got their news straight from the Savannah or
Jacksonville stations. The AM station that Timmy worked for was mostly daytime
religious programming for the folks out at the Pine Grove Retirement Home, with
interludes of country music. Nighttime programming was mostly Braves baseball
during the season, or local high school football and basketball call-in shows
other times. The sheriff would make damn sure that the Savannah stations got
the story first, and they in turn would make sure that he was prominently
interviewed, in full uniform, stars on his collar and all, explaining how all
the resources of his department were being allocated to finding the
killers
of the girl and Harold Sims.

It was going to be quite a spin
job to make sure that it was clear that they were unrelated cases, oh yes, and
that there was absolutely no Klan connection with Mr. Sims’ death, oh yes, and
that the killer, who was almost certainly not from Pickham County, would be
caught and brought to justice swiftly. Oh, and did he mention that his vast
resources were being completely dedicated to the two separate and distinct
cases. Quite the spin job, but Chief Deputy Ronnie Kupman had faith in his
sheriff. Of course, Timmy would get his interview, after the sheriff had been
seen by all the voters in the county on the evening news broadcasts from the
major metropolitan areas.

George stopped by Ronnie’s car
looking at the ground for several seconds. Raising his head, he looked into
Ronnie Kupman’s puzzled face.

“Something I have to tell you.”

Chief Deputy Kupman straightened
up. It was unusual, but George seemed actually to have something serious and
official on his mind.

“Speak up Deputy. What is it?”

“Last night…well,” George
hesitated then went on, “last night I saw, well I think I saw, the perp’s car.”

“You what?” Chief Deputy Kupman’s
eye narrowed.

“Well, I was parked in the old
rest area out on Highway 28, backed up in the trees.”

“When?”

“After I left the Sims’ place.
Before daylight but it was close to dawn, maybe couple of hours before shift
change. It was still pretty dark.”

“What you mean, George, is that
you were sleeping in the old rest area, right?”

“Yeah, I was,” George said, not
flinching under Ronnie’s gaze.

“What did you see, George?”

“Old model, maybe mid-nineties,
GM make. Probably a Chevrolet, maybe a Pontiac. Wasn’t shiny, more like it was
covered with dust or dirt, or maybe primer paint. Couldn’t really make out the
color in the dark. It woke me up as it went by, so I got a pretty good look.”

“You mean a good look for someone
who just woke up and who didn’t bother to check it out. I don’t suppose you got
a tag number did you, George?”

“No, sir. I didn’t. But I could
tell that it was not a Georgia plate. It was a lighter color and reflected,
even in the dark. Sorry.”

“Well, I suppose that young girl
out there in the weeds might be sorry too, if she knew,” Ronnie said harshly.
The look on George’s face made him immediately regret the remark.

 George was taking this
hard. He knew he had probably seen the killer, or at least his car, coming back
from Ridley’s Road and had done nothing but close his eyes and go back to
sleep, while that poor girl lay in the weeds like a bag of garbage. No one
would take that harder than George.

The fact was that after twelve
years with the department, Deputy George Mackey made forty-two thousand five
hundred dollars a year, plus overtime, which the sheriff routinely denied to
everyone. He was never going to be promoted, at least not under Sheriff
Klineman. He would never have Ronnie’s job as Chief Deputy, no matter who was
sheriff. And, he would spend his entire career working every part-time job he
could find to make ends meet and to pay his child support to Darlene, and to
maybe put something away for the girls’ college. Those were the facts.

George wouldn’t complain because
he loved what he did, and he was good at it, and he knew he was good. It was a
hell of a thing, to find the thing you’re good at. A lot of people never did.
George was smart enough to know that he had found what he was good at, and he
didn’t want to lose it. And yet, he was telling Ronnie something that could
cost him his job.

So George Mackey was tired last
night, probably like most nights, and had seen a car go by that he didn’t
bother to check out. Standing morosely before Chief Deputy Kupman, guilt
dripped from his pores into the sandy soil.

Kupman quietly considered the
situation for a moment while George waited, gazing at the ground. So sometime
around four this morning, Deputy Mackey couldn’t keep his eyes open and pulled
into the rest area to ‘rest his eyes’. While doing that, he caught sight of the
possible perpetrator’s car. Actually, it was the
probable
perpetrator’s
car since no one else would have been likely to be out on that stretch of
highway that time of day. He had been at a murder scene a couple of hours
earlier on the other side of the county, but at the time, no one knew about the
second murder, the girl.

Kupman took all of this into
account. He did this because if the sheriff ever found out, George would no
longer be a deputy. He took all of the circumstances into account and made his
decision.

“Sorry, George. You didn’t
deserve that,” Ronnie went on.

“Yes, I did Ronnie. You’re right.
She deserved better, whoever she was.”

“No, I’m not. First of all, you
shouldn’t have been sleeping. That is my official opinion, and you are
officially reprimanded for it. I mean it.” Kupman paused letting the
seriousness of his words sink in. “Having said that, let’s consider the
circumstances. At the time, we only knew of one murder. It was on the other
side of the county and no one would have expected the killer to stay around and
murder an unknown young girl. We all thought he was probably long gone up the
interstate. You were pumped up on adrenaline. Once you had no other duties at
the crime scene, fatigue set in. Understandable that you were tired and not
your fault…”