The Lonely Mile(47)
The agent looked up at Bill thoughtfully. “It’s okay. Keep gnawing at it. If you really have seen it before, eventually, it will come to you. In the meantime, we’ll get the rest of the federal task force together this morning along with the local cops and run it by everyone. Maybe something will shake loose with someone. Either way, it gives us something to look for other than a plain white box truck. Within the hour, this description will be sent to every law enforcement agency on the east coast. If the guy is still driving this truck, someone will see it.”
“Do you really think he’s still using it?”
She shrugged again. “Who knows? It seems like a strange choice of vehicles for a kidnapper to use. It’s slow and cumbersome to drive, but for whatever reason he seems to prefer it. In some ways, it’s not a bad option. Those vehicles are pretty much invisible. They are all over the roads, and who pays attention to them? Nobody,” she said, answering her own question. “Hopefully we’ll get lucky, and he won’t realize you saw him driving it.”
Bill shook his head. “I wouldn’t count on that. He knows I saw him. He looked right at me as he drove by. I could almost have reached out and touched the guy; he was that close to me.”
She took another sip of her latte and licked foam off her upper lip. “We’ll just have to wait and see. Maybe he’ll make a mistake. But I have a question for you.” The agent looked deeply into Bill’s eyes, her direct stare boring into him as if she could see into his soul.
Her mouth was drawn down into a tight frown. “How could you have missed this lettering when I talked to you right after the attempted kidnapping?”
“You mean when you interrogated me?”
She smiled. It was like the sun breaking through the mist on a foggy morning. “Okay, yes, when I interrogated you.”
“I’m not sure, exactly. When he first drove by, I was so stunned that I mostly just stared at him, sitting there in the cab of the truck. Then, after he passed me, as he was heading for the highway, all of my attention was devoted to trying to get the license plate number or at least part of it. But that blue smoke was so thick it obscured the plate very effectively. And the lettering on the cargo box is barely visible. It’s very faint. I think the only reason I even noticed it at all is because I wasn’t looking directly at it. If I had looked right at the side of the truck, I probably would have missed it entirely.”
Agent Canfield continued to stare at the letters she had written on the otherwise blank page of the note pad as if she might be able to decipher their meaning by the sheer force of her concentration. Bill wasn’t entirely sure she couldn’t.
He cleared his throat, and she looked up at him expectantly. “Don’t you think it’s odd,” he said, “that, in over a dozen kidnappings—”
“Fourteen,” she interrupted, “Fourteen, if you include the attempt you broke up last week.”
“Okay, fourteen. Don’t you find it a little strange that, in fourteen kidnappings, no one else has ever seen this truck? Even though the lettering is faint and obscured and difficult to read, it’s hard to believe, in all that time, nobody else would have noticed it.”
Canfield sat for a moment pondering the question. “You have to remember, all of the other kidnappings were completed successfully. As far as we know, they all went off without a hitch, at least to the point that no one had seen the kidnapper get into his vehicle with any of his victims. Once inside the truck, he basically became invisible for the very reason we already discussed. Nobody notices those box trucks. They’re everywhere.”
“I suppose,” Bill said, still unconvinced. Then he shrugged. “So, what happens now?”
“We transmit this information as widely as possible and continue working the case. If this guy is still using his truck, we’ll get him. I like our chances. These slime balls are creatures of habit; they like to stick with what has worked for them in the past. Either way, though, we keep on keeping on. This is one more piece of evidence. A big one.”
“Did the search of the murdered school bus driver’s property turn up any usable evidence?”
“I really shouldn’t be discussing this with you.”
“Come on, I bought you a latte; that’s got to count for something at 5:30 in the morning.” He didn’t mention last night because she probably didn’t want to hear it. Bill supposed he couldn’t really blame her.
She smiled. “Fair enough. I can tell you this much. We found plenty of prints on the stolen car the guy used to get to her house and to dispose of her body. They were all over the steering wheel and gearshift, as well as on the door handle and the trunk.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“Well, yes and no,” she answered. “Incredibly, there’s no match in the system that we’ve been able to find. This guy’s never been in the military and he’s never been convicted of any crime, as far as we can tell. So the prints will help us convict him when we finally catch him, but they’re useless to us in terms of actually running him down.”
Bill was incredulous. His voice hitched as he pictured Carli, alone and afraid. “This guy kidnaps and murders teenage girls, and he has no criminal record?”
“I know it’s hard to believe. It was hard for us to swallow, too. It is unusual but it’s not unheard of. Some people with severe sociopathic tendencies are able to function in society relatively normally for years before giving in to their most destructive urges.”