Page 32 of So Deranged

“Three-thirty-three.I remember because Julio and I were laughing about it.”

“Did you notice anything unusual?”Faith asked.

“Not really.I mean, not noticing anything unusual was unusual.”

Faith straightened in her chair and folded her hands.“Can you explain?”

“I mean, people don’t just abandon cars unless something’s going on, right?Either they’re doing drugs or the car’s stolen, or they got hurt or something.But the truck was fine.Looks like the guy just parked and got out.”

Faith frowned.“And the truck was just on the side of the road?”

“Yeah.Just pulled up to the dirt right before the dirt turned into a concrete divider.”

Faith wondered what would have caused Kevin to get out of his truck in the middle of the night in the middle of almost nowhere.Had he known the killer and agreed to meet him there, or had some other seemingly innocuous event prompted him to pull over to the side of the highway?Perhaps he saw another vehicle in need and stopped to help the broken-down motorist, only to discover too late that it was a ruse.

“How long do you believe the truck had been sitting there?”Faith asked.

“Had to have been a couple of hours, at least,” Pedro said.“The engine was cool when we picked it up.”

“Was it drivable?”

“Oh yeah.It still is.You’re welcome to come take a look at it if you want.We didn’t drive it for liability reasons because we didn’t have the owner’s permission.It’s going to stay on our lot for thirty days or until the MVD releases the title.We’ve touched it all over the place to get it onto the truck, and we did need to get inside to load it onto the truck, so there will be a lot of fingerprints, but I’ll talk to Julio.I’m sure he won’t mind if we give you fingerprint samples so you can figure out which is ours and which might be the bad guy’s.”

That was a tempting offer, but Faith was pretty sure the bad guy hadn’t touched Kevin’s truck.It was Kevin he was interested in, not the truck.

“I’ll let you know,” she said.“Thank you.”

“Yeah, for sure.That’s crazy.I’ve picked up a lot of vehicles, but I think this is the first murder I’ve seen.”

“Here’s hoping it will be the last one,” Faith said.

“Your mouth to God’s ears.”

She hung up and called the police department.They gave her a name of Charity Lancaster for the trucker.Faith got Charity’s commercial DL number and tracked her to a company called Spee-D Shipping out of Baltimore.Their trucks were equipped with GPS tracking devices, and looking through the data on Charity’s device showed that she didn’t stop anywhere in Connecticut.She called in the truck while driving and kept on driving all the way to Boston.

So she wasn’t the killer.

She sighed and folded her arms across her chest.She had a timeline now, but like Paul Martinez’s timeline, it ended in a black hole.Kevin Barnes had last been seen by his coworkers.He had then driven to Redding for reasons unknown and stopped on the side of the highway, also for reasons unknown.He had been killed sometime between nightfall and say one a.m., then taken to an archaeological dig in Collis P.Huntington State Park and buried as they had found him earlier.

She called the Tin Can and got the bar’s security footage sent to her laptop.She saw the group from Daring Auto arrive.As Matt had said, they had all stayed there until the bar closed.It was possible that someone else had left before they arrived at the bar, but that would mean Matt either didn’t notice, or he was complicit in Kevin’s death.If it was only Kevin they had to worry about, she might have pulled that thread, but the chances that one of them also had an interest in Paul Martinez were very slim.

The trucker angle intrigued her, though.The killer probably wasn't a commercial driver, but maybe he was someone who traveled a lot.Maybe he drove in a circuit throughout the region, or maybe he drifted along the road like Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole.

Except those two had chosen their victims at random.Not entirely at random, but they weren’t nearly so picky as this killer was.

And Faith was certain he was picky.He wanted depressed veterans so he could give them some sort of honorable death.Whether he wanted vengeance and was showing respect to a fallen enemy or he wanted to dispense mercy to people he thought were struggling, Faith didn’t yet know.

But he chose his victims specifically.He chosethem.

It all came down to the burial sites.That was the link.That would tell her where to look.Once she knew that, it would be easy to find the person who shouldn’t be there, the person who was either too perfectly in place or just out of place enough to grab her attention.

And she had to hurry.Something told her that their killer would strike again and soon.He had a taste for it now, and one thing that all serial killers shared was the inability to walk away once they were in the game.He’d strike again, and unless Faith wanted to look at another body in another shallow grave, she had to find him soon.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Faith called Michael and found that his own search had been fruitless so far.“These guys are all baby Cuthberts,” he said.“They want to talk my ear off about the Revolutionary War, and when I finally get through and get them to understand that a man died, they’re useless.They…” he sighed.“We should have had them all drive back up here.I feel like I went to Yale for no reason.”

“Do you have anyone else to talk to?”Faith asked.

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