Chapter 16
The killer had been feeling the heat. Not just the incessant heat of the late July days, but the fire inside to satisfy something that had been burning in him for most of his life. He hated that bitch. She needed to die. They were all bitches who didn’t care about him.
He had watched the moons and knew it was time so he went on a hunt. He’d spotted the Mexican girl walking into the YVC parking lot toward a handful of cars parked there. She was perfect. Fairly tall, slender with long black hair. She walked to a white Honda and climbed in. She left the parking lot, turned left on Nob Hill and headed out to I-82. He followed a ways behind as she merged onto the freeway and headed south toward the Lower Valley.
When she was down the freeway a few miles he pulled up alongside of her and waited for her to look at him. When she did, he pointed at her tire with some urgency. It worked almost every time. She pulled over, and he pulled in behind her. Being on the freeway wasn’t ideal. Other times he had been on quiet rural roads. But if he was careful it would work. He watched the traffic and when there was a break he jumped out. She had already gotten out and was checking her tires when he came from behind and punched her, hard in the face. It always stunned them enough that he could then overpower them. He caught her as she was falling, dragged her to the backseat of his rig and quickly put zip ties around her wrists and ankles. He put duct tape around her mouth and laid her in the seat where she couldn’t be seen.
He waited for traffic to clear in both directions again, and then drove her car down the embankment, through the barbed wire siding fence and into a bunch of brush next to the Yakima River. From the freeway it was almost impossible to see the car, and it might be fall when the leaves all dropped before anyone did. Even if someone got real nosy about the break in the fence, it would still take a while he told himself.
He wiped the steering wheel, the knob on the shifter, and the door handles and then walked back up to his car, jumped in and was gone.
It wasn’t the ideal place for what he did, but he was positive no one had paid any attention to the guy helping a disabled motorist.
He was living in a crappy double wide mobile home out in Terrace Heights. Way out past the county landfill with no neighbors within two miles. That’s where he took them. And that’s where he took her. He loved to see the fear in their eyes. And when they saw the hatred he had for them they even got more frightened.
He didn’t make them suffer for long. He would yell at them and tell them how much he hated them until he couldn’t scream anymore. Then he would strangle them with his bare hands. And when he was sure they were dead he would use his hunting knife to cut open their chest and rip out their heart.
The next day he would put the heart in a plastic garbage bag, put it in with the rest of his trash and drop it by the landfill as he was going to work. Later that night he would load the body in the back of his rig and drive up into the mountains to set them free.
Some of the bodies he would pack over his shoulder. On others he had used his game cart to wheel them out away from the roads. He never knew where he was going to set them free, but he always knew when he saw it, even in the almost pitch dark.
When he woke up the next morning, he saw the news that the idiots in the sheriff’s office had finally figured out that the killings were done by the same person. Duh! They still hadn’t made the connection to Colorado though. They really were stupid. But sooner or later someone would check around and they’d know these weren’t his only victims.
Maybe he’d head to someplace new. Or maybe he’d stick around to see just how close they might come. Maybe he’d find another victim. Maybe not.
It was going to be a hot one. McCain could already feel the heat creeping in through the east-facing windows, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. It had been a late night, and he would probably still be sleeping if Jack hadn’t awakened him to go out to pee.
He switched on the TV as he ate some cereal and watched Wendy Storm giving the weather forecast. She was the nighttime weather person but was filling in for the normal morning person, or so she said. Wendy confirmed what McCain already knew: it was going to be Africa-hot out there again today. She signed off by saying, “stay cool out there, that’s the weather, I’m Wendy Storm.”
McCain said, “I shit you not.”
He had the next three days off, so today McCain thought he would go up and do a little more snooping around in the mountains. He had seen that vehicle go up the road below him last night, or more correctly, earlier this morning. He thought it might have been a camper making a late arrival, but he wanted to check it out anyway. And he wanted to look around the Wenas side of the hill too.
Before he got going, he called Sinclair.
“Hey, McCain,” she said in a tone of voice he had not heard before.
“If this is not a good time, we can talk later,” he said.
“The stuff is
