Page 53 of Crossing Lines

Chapter Thirty-Two

A white Toyota Camry sat in the parking lot of the small wooded picnic area beside the river. Its driver-side door gaped open. No one could be seen in or around the car.

Sam and Jo approached the car cautiously with their guns drawn, anyway.

Lucy wasn’t as cautious. She ran to the other side then back to Sam and Jo. No one was there, either in the car or on the ground.

“I don’t like the looks of this.” Jo holstered her gun and squinted into the forest, looking for any sign of Vicky. Maybe she’d just seen a stray dog or cat and wandered into the woods. All Jo saw were chirping birds and chipmunks scurrying amongst the dead leaves.

“Me either.” Sam inspected the area for anything out of the ordinary. Over by a rock, Lucy whined. Sam went over to see fresh tire tracks in a small patch of dried mud.

“Looks like a car pulled over here recently. It must have been within the last hour, because the mud hasn’t fully dried. Someone must have spilled some water, or maybe it’s condensation from the AC running in the car.” Sam took a picture with his cell phone.

Jo went back to the car and looked in the back. A black leather purse sat on the floor. Jo put on a glove then looked inside, her heart sinking when the name on the license confirmed what Jo already knew.

She held the license up for Sam to see “It’s Vicky’s car. Someone must have grabbed her somehow. No one leaves their purse in a car and the door open.”

She held the purse out for Lucy to sniff. “Lucy. Find.”

Lucy trotted off, sniffing the edges of the area near the woods. If the killer had taken Vicky from her car into the woods here, Lucy would find the trail. Maybe they could catch him before... Jo didn’t want to finish the thought.

“She might have been lured into the woods.” Sam watched Lucy as she sniffed in a circular pattern, returning to the car then following a trail straight to the tire track. She stopped there and looked at them.

“Or lured her into another car somehow.” Jo’s spirits sank. If the killer had taken her into the woods here on foot, it would be a lot easier to catch up to them. But if he had lured her into a car… they could be anywhere by now.

Sam’s phone trilled. “It’s Wyatt.”

He put it on speaker.

“Robert Summers is on the move. Heading east out of town. I’m following but got caught up in traffic because Bullwinkle decided to lumber out into the middle of the road. Robert just turned onto Old River Road, but I can’t get there.”

Sam, Jo, and Lucy sprinted for the Tahoe. Old River Road was the road that led past the place the teenagers partied, where Kirsten Stillwater had last been seen.

“He left just now?” Sam asked Wyatt as he buckled in.

“Yep, about four minutes ago.”

“We’re on our way. We’ll cut over on Chester Road to avoid the traffic.” Sam started the car and peeled out.

Jo glanced back at Vicky’s car. “That’s odd. Vicky’s been grabbed already. If Robert is the killer, then how is it possible that he’s been at home all this time?”

Sam blew out a breath. “He could have gotten out earlier and Wyatt didn’t notice? Maybe he stashed her somewhere and went back home?”

“Maybe.” Jo hoped, if that was the case, that he hadn’t already killed her and was just now heading back to dispose of the body. “If he did, maybe he’s not finished with her. We can still save her if we hurry. But we’ll never catch up with him. Old River Road is five minutes from here, and he could go anywhere off that road. There’s plenty of cutoffs.”

“I have an idea of where he might be going. The Summers family has an old fishing cabin on the big bend in the Sacagewassett, and that road leads out there.”

Somehow it didn’t make Jo feel any better that the man they suspected of being a serial killer had a remote fishing cabin where no one could hear his victims scream.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The cabin was in the densest section of woods. Here, the trees were so thick that it looked like twilight even though the afternoon sun was bright. The lush canopy of foliage above filtered the sun’s rays.

Aside from the dark shade, the thing that struck Sam was the silence. No birds chirped. No squirrels foraged. No frogs croaked.

No victims screamed.

The only thing he could hear was the rushing of the river that flowed past about twenty feet from the cottage.

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