Page 42 of Return of the Spider
The young women had been talking. He’d heard their murmurs and laughter.
He saw the silhouettes of their heads inclined toward each other as he moved into point-blank range. For an interesting moment as he raised the pistol, Soneji thought they might kiss.
If that was their intention, they never got there. He fired through the right rear window, hitting the driver high in the right cheek, just below her eye.
The passenger screamed in horror; her hands gripped her head as she twisted away from her dead friend, looking in terror for the shooter. She never got to see him.
Soneji stepped sideways and shot. The bullet went through her right hand and into her temple.
They were both clearly stone dead. But remembering his blunder with Abby, he put one more round into each woman. Then he leaned into the car and tore off a flap of scalp from the gaping wound on the side of the passenger’s head.
After that, he’d run back to the Saab and taken the same route he was driving now, north on I-95 past Baltimore and Aberdeen, heading toward the Delaware line. He reveled in his flawless execution until a sobering thought came to him.
He had mastered David Berkowitz. It was time to move on.
But he had things to take care of before he could decide whom to study next. A few tasks he’d left undone the night of the first shooting.
He’d been emotionally and physically exhausted then and had decided to take care of those jobs later. It didn’t matter. There’d been no real rush.
Soneji left the interstate just shy of the Delaware border and headed north on Maryland 272. He passed through Bay View and soon after crossed the Pennsylvania line. The state highway cut through a checkerboard of farms and small woodlots in full fall foliage, all of it so familiar to him.
He turned off south of Oxford, Pennsylvania, and wove his way on county roads toward the Chrome Barrens, a large nature preserve with forests and prairie-like grasslands that were managed as American Indians had managed them centuries ago—with fire.
Indeed, as Soneji got close to the Chrome Barrens, he could smell and see smoke. He crested a rise. There were fire trucks and police cars parked up on the road ahead, ready to act should the flames jump beyond their intended areas.
He debated leaving and returning another time but decided to push on. He took a left on a dirt road well short of the police and fire vehicles, headed north, then pulled over and parked.
Smoke wafted through the trees. Fingers of it crept out onto the farm fields across the road from the preserve.
Soneji had not planned for a controlled burn. Still, it might be a good thing. He was sure he could slide in and out unseen, but the smoke couldn’t hurt—it would give him one more layer of concealment.
He went to the Saab’s trunk, took out knee-high rubber boots and latex gloves, put them on, then pulled out a hiking pack and shouldered it. The pack was an easy load, and he set off into the woods, moving diagonal to the burns. On the far side of a knolldeep in the woods, he dropped into a natural ditch of sorts that ran east.
Glad that the gully concealed him almost to his shoulders and that the damp leaves deadened all sound beneath his feet, Soneji moved quickly to the edge of a clearing. Much of the opening was knotted with thorny brambles, but weeks before, he had used garden shears to trim a path into the yard of a ramshackle uninhabited farmhouse. Beyond the house was a long, low shed, one side open to a rutted driveway leading toward thick pines.
As Soneji crept along the cleared path, he paused often to listen but heard only the chattering of squirrels and crows cawing off in the pines somewhere. Soon he was there at the edge of the yard again.
He crouched and studied the area, trying to see if something was different from his last visit, something that would tell him he was being watched.
CHAPTER
31
Weeds for grass. severalcrooked apple trees in desperate need of pruning. The farmhouse stood to the right of the trees, its once white walls now begrimed with time, paint peeling off the clapboard siding.
The windows appeared intact, but the roof sagged and shingles were missing. A gutter dangled, creaking in the breeze.
A local farmer leased and tilled the fields beyond the pines, but no one had lived in the house since elderly LeeAnne Lawton had died there five years back. Eamon Diggs, her grandson, inherited the land but had shown no interest in selling it, living there, or renting it.
Soneji knew all that for certain. A few years back, he’d read an article in thePhiladelphia Inquirerabout Diggs, who’d been released from prison after doing ten years for the rape and attempted rapeof several young women. The story had noted Diggs’s inheritance and current employment in a granite quarry along with several other ex-cons. Soneji had been intrigued by the serial rapist and was drawn to find the farm.
On that first trip, he’d discovered little to explain Diggs’s hatred of women, but he did find things that intrigued him even more, things that set his imagination free with possibility, things that caused him to return to the abandoned farm with increasing frequency.
Finally satisfied that he was alone and that nothing had changed since his last visit, Soneji moved quickly, staying in the weeds, not wanting to be anywhere near mud as he traversed the yard heading for the long, low, three-sided shed connected to an old workshop with cinder-block walls. He ignored the workshop and halted where the weeds gave way to the shed’s dirt floor.
The shed was divided into six bays. Four were filled with rusting farm equipment. One was largely empty. A filthy beat-up white panel van was backed into the nearest bay, an old tarp over the front end. Soneji studied the dirt around it, saw no prints in the lightly raked soil.
Emboldened, he put on latex gloves and pulled back the tarp, revealing the broken headlight and turn signal. Soneji put down his pack and took out a new headlight, a new bulb for the turn signal, and new covers for both.
