Chapter Twenty-seven
He usually slept like an innocent. Like the dead.
On those times when sleep played coy, leaving him alone with himself, certainty dawned and he knew it was time to act. Tonight, the blood lust had roused him, sending him hunting for the woman who had frustrated him that very afternoon.
Faye Longchamp-Mantooth had been wise to pick up and move. If she’d stayed another night alone in the state park cabin, she would already be a dead woman. Instead, she’d moved to this motel that was no more defensible, except for one thing. He had no way to know which of its dozens of windows was hers.
She had parked near the stairwell, so the location of her car told him only that she was sleeping on the side of the building where he was parked. Sitting in his car with a pair of binoculars, he waited, hoping for a miraculous parting of the draperies that would show him where she slept. Just that one stroke of luck would seal her fate.
Even if the barely parted curtain revealed that she wasn’t alone, he still would go in. Ted Bundy had done some of his best work in a sorority house full of women, walking out to freedom after killing two of them and critically injuring two more. No one had heard a thing.
By comparison, killing a woman—two women, even—would be easy in a motel so crappy that odd sounds were simply part of the low-rent experience.
The voices in his head argued with each other and with him. One urged restraint. The other demanded that he barge in and go door to door, bludgeoning anyone who answered his knock.
For the moment, he had chosen restraint, but there was no guarantee that he could maintain it much longer.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Joe lay in the bed, his six-and-a-half-foot frame stretched out from headboard to footboard. The covers on Faye’s side were undisturbed. The smooth, unrumpled bedspread and linens made him lonely for her, and he supposed that was why he never disturbed them when she was away. He wanted to be lonely without her. He never wanted to get used to her being gone.
Faye had just blown him a good-night kiss and his phone was still in his hand. He studied its blank screen for only a moment before he came to a decision. He shot a text to Amande.
U awake?
She responded immediately. Joe wondered where kids learned to type so fast. He wasn’t even thirty-five and his children made him feel like an old man.
Yeah, but I can’t believe u r. Wut’s up Dad?
Joe was a deliberate typist, but he tried to return her message quickly. An image of his daughter tapping her foot and saying “Any day now, Dad…” gave him speed, but speed lit his dyslexia on fire. Maybe she could read it anyway.
Need hepl bying a plain tiket
Crap. That looked awful. He wished he hadn’t already hit send.
Even with his learning differences, Joe could tell the difference between trendy text abbreviations and embarrassing mistakes. This was why he needed Faye—not to do things for him, but to remind him to take his time.
He heard Amande’s light, firm tap on his door, which meant that he could stop typing and start talking,. Praise God for that. He would have walked down the hall and knocked on her door in the first place, but sometimes it was a little uncomfortable to be the father of a young woman. It was better for her to be the one to decide how she wanted to be seen at this time of the morning.
“Come on in,” he said.
She entered the room in an oversized tee-shirt and gym shorts, golden-brown curls tumbling over her shoulders. Crossing the room in one long-legged step, she flopped across the foot of his bed.
“A plane ticket? Where are you going? Can I come? What website’s giving you problems?”
“Ain’t even pulled one up yet. I figured you could do it in half the time.”
“I love you, Dad, but it’ll be a lot less than half the time.”
He handed her his phone to use, but she waved her tablet at him. “I’ll use this. So seriously…where are you going?”
“How quick can you get me to Memphis?”
“You’re going to see Mom? Does she know? Is it a surprise? I guess you do have an anniversary coming up.…” Her voice drifted off and she cocked her head to the right, studying him. “What’s wrong?”
“Well…hmm.” Amande was nearly grown and she’d led a hard life before he and Faye had adopted her. Joe figured he didn’t need to beat around the bush. “Your mama tried to save a woman’s life yesterday. Well, I reckon I should say she did save her. She called 911 and she did CPR, and the lady was still living when the ambulance took her. It ain’t really your mama’s fault that the hospital couldn’t keep her alive.”
“So you want to go up there and spend some time with her, in case she’s upset about the poor woman. Dad, that’s really sweet. What happened that Mom needed to do CPR? Heart attack? Stroke?”
“Somebody showed her the business end of a shovel.”
“She was beaten with a shovel? Bad enough to kill her? Dad. You have to go.”
“Considering that the person who did the beating is still running loose and your mama won’t come home, yeah. I have to go.”
Amande was too busy tapping on her tablet to answer him. She was also mumbling, but Joe judged that she was mostly talking to herself and didn’t need any answers from him.
“Tallahassee’s the closest airport, but the 5:40 a.m. flight is booked solid. So’s the one that leaves at six. The 6:20 makes two stops and takes thirteen hours to get there. That’s not counting the time to rent a car and get to Mom.”
“That’s what? Twenty hours from now? That’s way too long. How come the airplanes take so blamed
