The Lonely Mile (6 page)

The man hesitated, then edged out from behind the cover of his vehicle, holding his weapon eye-level in a two-handed grip, similar to the one Bill had employed a few minutes ago. It was aimed dead-center at Bill’s body mass, right in the middle of his chest. The shouting had died down, replaced with an expectant silence as all the other cops seemed to have decided at the same time to wait and see what happened next.

Bill was a little curious himself. He had known the cops would be twitchy when they got here; after all, they probably had been given no details other than something bad had gone down at the travelers’ plaza and guns were involved. They didn’t know whether anyone was hurt or maybe even dead inside the building, and they had no way of knowing if Bill was any kind of threat. He had put the odds of getting through this without taking a bullet from a nervous cop’s gun at about fifty-fifty as the sirens approached, but he was beginning to wonder if maybe he had been overly-optimistic.

The police officer moved forward, tension written on his face. “Get yourself face down on the ground, right now,” he said in an almost conversational tone of voice. Bill had expected the man to scream, but he was maintaining a calm posture, clearly hoping to keep this situation from sparking into something deadly.

“Come on, the tar is too hot,” Bill answered. “My weapon is on the ground right in front of you. I’m unarmed.”

“I can’t be sure you don’t have another gun. Get on the ground, and we’ll have you back on your feet in just a couple of seconds.”

Bill figured that was the best offer he was going to get. One way or the other, he was going to end lying on that pavement. He could either do it on his own or with the help of a lead slug or a Taser. He sighed and eased into a prone position, his knees popping and cracking. And he was right. The pavement was hot. He tried to keep his exposed skin out of direct contact with the burning tar.

The cops rushed forward the moment his body touched the ground, one sticking the barrel of his gun in Bill’s ear as another patted him down roughly. When they were satisfied he posed no danger—a process that seemed to take much longer than the couple of seconds the guy in charge had promised—a third cop yanked him to his feet, where he stood surrounded by grim-faced officers of the law who suddenly seemed to have no idea what to do next.

The one who had lifted him off the pavement pulled Bill’s hands behind his back and slapped a pair of cuffs on him, tightening the bracelets unnecessarily. The officer in charge reappeared and asked brusquely, “Where’s the other guy with the gun?” His disposition seemed to have worsened now that Bill was restrained.

“He’s gone; he took off eastbound on the interstate in an off-white box truck, probably ten or twelve years old.”

“Is anyone hurt inside the building?”

“Not unless they cut themselves on broken glass.”

The officer turned and nodded to the cop who had patted him down, and Bill found himself being perp-walked to an idling cruiser. His escort dumped him into the back seat without a word—no warning about hitting his head on the car’s roof like they always seemed to do on television—and slammed the door. Bill supposed the guy didn’t watch much TV. The officer then turned and walked back toward the plaza, where the rest of the cops seemed to be marshaling for an assault on the interior.

The cruiser’s air conditioner was running and the coolness felt refreshing and invigorating after the blistering heat radiating off the pavement. Bill sighed and closed his eyes. He tried to find a comfortable position, not an easy task with his hands cuffed behind his back. It looked like he was going to be here a while. He wished he had his coffee.

CHAPTER 13

“WHAT THE HELL WERE you doing inside that rest area with a loaded gun?”

Bill was seated in an interrogation room at the State Police barracks in Lee while a petite, auburn-haired woman, who had introduced herself rather perfunctorily as “Canfield,” paced back and forth in front of him. She seemed angry, affronted that an ordinary citizen might carry a concealed weapon in a public place.

Bill assumed Canfield was a detective, but since she hadn’t offered her status during the introduction, he couldn’t be sure. One thing he was sure of, though, was that she was extremely unhappy and more than willing to share her displeasure with him.

He had cooled his heels inside the State Police cruiser for close to forty-five minutes before officers returned and removed the handcuffs, apparently satisfied, after speaking with the many witnesses inside the rest stop, that Bill was one of the good guys, or at least didn’t represent the enemy. They had very respectfully informed him that they would be driving him to the station—he waited for someone to say “downtown,” like they always did on TV but was once again disappointed—where he was going to have to answer a few questions.

The police had been careful to stress that he was not under arrest, nor was he considered a suspect in any criminal activity, and they backed up their claim by not cuffing his hands to the iron ring protruding from the middle of the scarred wooden table dominating the interrogation room. Aside from that courtesy, though, Bill doubted there was much difference between how he was being treated and how the I-90 Killer might have been treated.

Bill watched his interrogator as she stomped back and forth. It was like trying to follow a particularly spirited tennis volley. Canfield stopped short of adopting an accusatory tone but came close. She was clearly trying to lean on him, although for what purpose he could not guess.

Canfield—whether that was her first or last name was unclear, although Bill figured it was the latter, since she was very clearly a woman, a good-looking one at that, and he had never known a single female with the first name of Canfield in his life—seemed to find it unlikely in the extreme that an ordinary citizen carrying a concealed weapon would happen to be inside the rest stop at the exact time the I-90 Killer would try to snatch a girl.

Bill thought the kidnapper had probably found it unlikely as well, and tried to hide a smile. He failed, and Canfield stopped right in the middle of a question to ask, “Do you find something funny about this, Mr. Ferguson?”

“Listen,” he said, “I’m not the enemy here. I have a valid, up-to-date license to carry that Browning due to business concerns. Feel free to check, although I imagine you already have. I realize that, mathematically, the odds are against me being in the exact position to see an attempted kidnapping and then stop it, but that’s precisely what happened. Obviously, the girl and her parents related the same story or I would be sitting in a holding cell right now. So why bust my chops? What do you think you’re going to gain from that? I don’t expect a ticker-tape parade from you people, but you don’t need to flog me with a rubber hose, either.”

Canfield leveled her best, flat-eyed cop gaze at Bill, amazed by the outburst, her next question apparently forgotten. Then a trace of a smile seemed to tug at the corners of her mouth for just a second before disappearing. She turned without a word and left the room.

Bill waited fifteen minutes before Canfield—Officer Canfield? Detective Canfield? Agent Canfield?—returned, and when she did, she was lugging a bulky, old-fashioned tape recorder. She took a seat across from him at the table and set the recorder between them, plugged it in, and turned it on. She recorded initial identifying information, the date and their names, before starting a formal interview. The mystery was solved. “Canfield” was FBI Special Agent Angela Canfield, lead investigator on the search for the I-90 Killer.

The FBI was extremely interested in Bill Ferguson as he was the first person they were aware of who had interacted with the elusive I-90 Killer and survived to tell about it, or at least who hadn’t disappeared into thin air afterward, and the authorities wanted to learn every last detail of the encounter.

The other witnesses, all of the people inside the rest stop at the time of the confrontation, were, undoubtedly, being interviewed as well, but the two the authorities were most interested in would be Bill and the young girl who had been the target. They had gotten closest to the man.

Agent Canfield’s initial questions centered on a detailed, physical description of the kidnapper. Then, Canfield took Bill through a timeline from his perspective, again in the most detailed manner possible, of the entire attempted abduction, from beginning to end. Where was Bill when he noticed something was wrong? What was he doing? What drew his attention to the kidnapper? Why did he feel something was amiss?

After she seemed satisfied with the description of the man’s physical characteristics and timeline of the crime, Canfield spent a long time questioning Bill about the vehicle he had seen the I-90 Killer driving. Bill had gotten a pretty close-up view of it as it passed him in the parking lot, and the authorities wanted as accurate a description as possible to add to the alert which had already been issued.

“It was pretty generic,” he said. “A standard truck with an enclosed, square cargo box on the back, like a small moving truck. It had clearly been repainted and its color was off-white. It looked like an amateur paint job to me. The coloring was uneven and beginning to fade.”

“What about identifying markings? Name of a business, telephone number, anything?”

“No,” he said. “There was nothing on the truck at all that I could see, either on the side of the cargo box or on the passenger side door when he drove by.”

“What about the license plate?”

Bill shook his head. “I tried to read it, but there was so much blue smoke pouring from the exhaust that it totally obscured the tags. I couldn’t even make out what state the vehicle was registered in. It could have been Massachusetts or New York. Or neither one, for that matter. In fact, I would say the smoke might represent the only real identifying characteristic of the truck. It needs a ring job badly. Aside from that, it’s completely anonymous. There are probably ten thousand trucks just like it all over the east coast.”

From there, the interview deviated into Bill’s perceptions of the attempted kidnapper. The man had successfully evaded capture by law enforcement for well over three years. Every time they got close, he would frustrate authorities by simply disappearing. “If you had to choose one word to describe this man, what would it be?” Canfield asked.

Bill sat quietly, thinking. The question had surprised him. The agent didn’t hurry him; she seemed to have all the time in the world.

“Arrogant,” he finally answered.

“How so?”

“Even when I had my weapon trained right on him, he seemed to feel he was in complete control. Looking back on it now, I suppose he was, considering how it turned out, but at no time did he ever seem to doubt his own ability to escape from a situation that had to have appeared pretty hopeless.”

“He wasn’t nervous?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Bill said. “He was definitely nervous. He was sweating up a storm and smelled like he hadn’t showered for days. I feel sorry for that poor girl—he was hugging her like a second skin. But even though he was nervous, he acted like he believed he was smarter than everyone else in the room and could use that intelligence any time he wanted to fashion his escape.”

Canfield paused, studying Bill. It had been a long time since an attractive woman looked at him that closely—definitely since before the divorce, probably since
way
before, if he was being honest with himself—and Bill wasn’t about to complain or hurry her along. It seemed clear her interest in him was strictly professional, but still, he had to admit that it felt kind of good. Plus, it was obvious she was trying to formulate a question she didn’t quite know how to ask, and he was more than happy to let her twist in the wind for a while as payback for leaning on him so hard about his gun at the beginning of the interview.

At last, she cleared her throat. “Why do you suppose…”

He thought he knew what she wanted to ask but waited her out. Finally she finished, rushing through the question as if embarrassed about asking. “Why do you suppose he didn’t just shoot you and take the girl? He was holding a human shield, but you had no such protection.”

Bill smiled. “I’ve been asking myself exactly that question since about five seconds after the guy drove away. I really don’t have a clue. The only thing I can guess is that maybe he was afraid shooting me would cause a mass panic and that the rest of the people inside the rest stop might stampede wildly toward the door in an attempt to escape, blocking him in. He must have known the cops were on their way and that he had a limited amount of time to get out. After all, this State Police barracks is only a mile or so away from the place.”

At last, Agent Canfield turned off the recorder and unplugged it, winding the cord around the machine. She reached into the breast pocket of her chambray shirt and pulled out a business card, handing it to Bill. “This has my office number as well as my private cell phone number on it. If you think of anything else, I don’t care how small or unimportant it seems, please call me. Any time, night or day, I don’t care. We need to catch this guy, and we need to do it before he takes another girl.”

“How is she?” Bill asked.

“Who?”

“The teenage girl the guy tried to kidnap. Allie, I think, was her name. How is she doing?”

Canfield thought about it and laughed. It made her whole face light up and Bill wanted to tell her she should do it more often. “The girl is fine,” she said. “She’s a tough kid. Her mother, though, that’s a different story. I don’t think she’s going to let that poor thing out of her sight again. Ever.”

Canfield stood and picked up the recorder, indicating the interview was over. “I’ll take you back to the rest stop to pick up your vehicle.”

“Isn’t that kind of a menial job for a big-shot FBI Special Agent?”

She laughed again and said, “We’re stretched a little thin at the moment, as you might imagine. Everyone available is back at the rest area cleaning up your mess.” She said it with a smile.

The pair walked out of the State Police barracks and the heat rolled over them. The pavement felt soft and mushy underfoot. “Seriously, though,” Canfield said, “nice work back there. You could have been killed, but you managed the situation, and now that seventeen-year-old girl is going home with her parents tonight when she could have been God-knows-where, facing an unthinkable fate.”