Page 50 of Return of the Spider
“What about the wedding?” she asked just before he left.
“I don’t know,” he said evasively. “I don’t know if this is the right time, and I’m conflicted. Got to work some things out.”
“Like the fact no one from your family would be there?”
“You got it in one, smarty-pants,” he said, which made Roni giggle. He kissed Missy again and left.
He spent his day doing just enough sales work to satisfy hisbrother-in-law, then pulled the Saab onto I-95 and headed south toward Maryland. He thought about the power of simplicity and then about the power in his own hands and the ways that power could be enhanced with a rope, a sash, a noose, a wire garrote.
He saw himself throttling Missy in multiple ways and then imagined other women, nameless women, all of them fighting for air, their struggles as real to him as if he’d had a big fish on a line. It didn’t really matter to him who they were. They were all fish, swimming below the surface until he lured and caught them.
The idea of actually strangling someone, up close and personal, began to overtake Soneji’s mind. A part of him wanted to start casting about for a victim right then.
But he had not done his homework yet, and he had more important things to do. He began to breathe deep and slow, telling himself to calm down, to be patient.
Fifteen minutes later, he took the exit for Route 272 toward Bay View and the Pennsylvania line. He quickly drove north, passing the turnoff to the old Diggs farm, continued on through Oxford, and took Pennsylvania Route 472 toward Kirkwood and Quarryville.
Five miles beyond Kirkwood, he passed a sign for Keegan’s Granite, drove on a mile, then pulled off onto the shoulder. He waited until the road was clear, then took out his binoculars and a pack and entered the woods.
He heard a series of thuds, muffled explosions, then crashing. The temperature was dropping as he slipped forward, hearing cutting machines ahead. Within minutes he was in the shadows near a chain-link fence that surrounded the granite quarry where Eamon Diggs worked.
Soneji had done some research and discovered there was morethan one sex offender working in the quarry; he wanted to see if he could spot the other man, Harold Beech.
He lifted the binoculars to his eyes and saw men moving through dusty air toward the big slabs of granite that had just been dynamited off the wall. Other workers maneuvered stone saws into position to cut the slabs into more manageable pieces.
A few minutes later, a horn sounded, announcing the end of the workday.
Soneji scanned the men walking out of the quarry and exiting the cabs of the big machines. He spotted Diggs—big dude, long beard, ponytail sticking out from under his hard hat. He was climbing down off a backhoe that had been clearing scrap rock from the quarry.
Diggs did not join the other machine operators climbing the hill to clock out at the end of their shift. He stood waiting until he was joined by another man, a squat little guy in a coverall, respirator, goggles, and yellow safety helmet, all of it covered in pale dust from cutting stone.
The man tore off the respirator and goggles, grinned, and laughed at something Diggs said. Together, they started up the hill.
It wasn’t until both men were close to Soneji and he saw them in full profile that he recognized the squat little guy as Beech. He smiled.
He suddenly had a desperate need to know what they were talking about and just how buddy-buddy the two sex offenders were. Soneji trotted back through the woods, dodging low-hanging branches, and skidded down the bank to the Saab.
Within minutes he was on the shoulder of the road across from the entrance to Keegan’s Granite. He watched a line ofvehicles leave the quarry until he spotted Diggs’s old black Chevy K-10 four-by-four, followed by a very loud, very rusted Subaru sedan with cardboard duct-taped across the back window and a perforated muffler hanging by a wire.
The front passenger-side window was down. Beech was at the wheel, trying to light a cigarette as he followed Diggs toward Kirkwood.
Keeping a car or two between them, Soneji followed; he pulled over when they turned off and headed toward Diggs’s place, a dilapidated double-wide trailer. He waited five minutes and then drove there, saw the duo on the stoop drinking bottles of Budweiser.
To the far left of the trailer, closer to the road, a dead whitetail doe hung upside down off a rope rigged to a pulley and crossbar bolted into the trunks of two pines. An archery target sat a few feet away.
He drove past. The two sex offenders were laughing at some shared joke and barely noticed him. That was how he wanted it. Soneji noted faded clothes on a line close to the trailer and decided a return trip was needed in the near future.
They did time for their crimes, but they haven’t changed,he thought. Sexual violence was as much a part of Diggs and Beech as the insatiable need to watch the light go out in someone’s eyes was for Soneji. He couldn’t change that if he wanted to, and neither could they.
Heading south toward the interstate a few minutes later, Soneji felt confident that given the chance, Diggs would rape again, and given the same chance, Beech would go at some young girl with a broomstick or whatever.
They would not be able to help themselves. He was certain of it.
Soneji laughed. The situation could not have been better.
He decided to stop on the way home at a marine-supply store near Baltimore. There was a tool he needed to get that would be critical if he was to learn the lessons of the greatest asphyxiator of them all.
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