A couple hours later, Lee sat behind the desk in his office with his third cup of coffee in front of him. He’d be needing a fourth cup before long. It was going to be a long day. There was a massive search to coordinate. A lawman had vanished under suspicious circumstances. Lee thought the man was probably dead, but the absence of a body meant an all-out effort to find him was required. So long as even the slightest chance of finding the man alive existed, nothing short of the full utilization of every tool and every able body at his disposal was acceptable.

  He had Pete Acker and Vic Bailey, without question his best men, looking into the missing deputy’s activities prior to when he’d gone missing. Thus far their inquiries had turned up no obvious red flags. The people Lucas had talked to at various stops along his usual patrol route had reported nothing out of the ordinary. But it was early yet. Something had gone wrong somewhere along the way during the deputy’s patrol yesterday. And somewhere out there was a clue as to what that might have been. Sheriff Lee had total faith in the ability of his men to ferret out whatever that thing was.

  In the meantime, he had a ton of other related headaches facing him. A meeting with the enraged mayor of Willow Springs had just concluded. A murderer was loose in the mayor’s community and he was demanding answers. Just before storming out of Lee’s office, the man issued an ultimatum—have a suspect in custody by sundown or else. The mayor was a little vague on the “or else” part, but the implications were clear.

  Get results and get them soon, or get ready to step down.

  It was probably all a lot of hot air. The man was a politician. He’d be up for reelection soon, which meant the need to keep his anxious constituency happy was greater than ever. As an elected official himself, Lee knew he couldn’t be forced out quite that easily. There was no evidence of misconduct on his part sufficient enough to warrant his removal from the post. In truth, though, Lee wouldn’t mind taking an early retirement. After all, that very thing had been on his mind a lot of late. But he remained reluctant to go away before finding Lloyd McAfee’s murderer and solving the mystery of what had happened to his missing deputy.

  The outer offices of the department were crowded with people interested in helping him do that very thing. These included representatives from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, detectives from the Hooperville police force, and various other investigators. On top of all that, there was the blinking light on his desk phone. A detective from Nashville was waiting on hold for him. Lee was in no hurry to resume talking to the man, who had taken a deeply condescending tone with him.

  Reports of a brutal triple homicide had dominated the news out of that city today. The dick from Nashville was looking into any possible connections between the strange murders in Willow Springs and Hooperville. Lee couldn’t see it. The thing with the pumpkins obviously linked Lloyd McAfee’s murder with the double homicide in Hooperville. But there’d been no pumpkins left at the scene in Nashville. Nashville was a big city by Tennessee’s standards. Shocking murders were a semi-regular occurrence there. And there was the fact that the city was more than an hour west of Willow Springs to consider. Hooperville was much closer. If the killer had taken the trouble to travel all that way out there, surely he would have left his unusual calling card at that scene, as well.

  No, the Nashville dick could stew in his bad attitude a while longer. He was obviously barking up the wrong damn tree.

  Lee took another sip from the nearly empty coffee mug as the door to his office came open and Cynthia Ashford poked her head in. “Bob, those TBI men are getting kind of irate. Do you think you could see them now?”

  Lee sighed after draining the last dregs from the mug. “Not just yet. Oh, don’t give me that look. I’ll talk to them shortly.” He held out the empty mug with one hand and, with the index finger of his other hand, punched the blinking line one light on his phone twice, cutting off the call from the Nashville dick. “Be a dear and get me another refill, please.”

  Cynthia came into the office and took the mug away from him. “Your heart’s gonna explode from all this caffeine if you keep going at this rate.”

  Lee smiled and leaned back in his chair again. “There are worse ways to go.”

  22.

  Four days until Halloween,

  Willow Springs, TN

  When the lunchtime buzzer sounded, Susan Rochon stripped off her gloves and safety goggles, grabbed her purse and keys from the bottom shelf of her work station, and joined the fast-moving stream of workers leaving the building. Outside, in a large grassy area adjacent to the back door, were several picnic tables. Many of Susan’s coworkers seated themselves at the tables and unpacked bland meals from various types of containers. The sun was out and the sky was clear. Chillier, gloomier days were coming and the instinct to sit outside in the sun was only natural. When daytime temperatures started dropping precipitously next week, all these same people would shift their lunchtime routines to the cafeteria.

  But Susan wouldn’t be joining them then either. She hated her job at the factory. It paid the bills—barely—but the work was far from rewarding. She’d been doing it for years and had long ago come to feel like a soulless automaton. She was just a cog in a big machine, and an easily replaceable one, at that. No special skill was required to do what she did, nor was any advanced schooling. Anyone could do it with just a little on-the-job training. It was mindless, soul-killing grunt work and not at all what she’d imagined for herself when she was younger. She’d had big dreams back then, higher aspirations, but it had all come to nothing. Now she was stuck in a rut of interminable shifts rendered even more numbing by a seemingly permanent state of mandatory overtime. Thus she relished any opportunity, regardless of how fleeting, to flee the premises.

  She hurried out to her Dodge Dart and sped away from the factory, tires squealing on asphalt as the old car rocketed out of the parking lot and out into traffic, heedless as always of oncoming cars. Horns blared. Tires screeched. Fists were shaken. Susan paid it all no mind whatsoever. The Dart was old and on its last legs. She’d welcome a collision. It’d give her a legitimate excuse for a delayed return to the factory and, if the damage on her side of things was severe enough, she might even manage to coax a replacement car out of her insurance company. Sure, it was a long shot, but a sufficiently fortuitous accident might be her only viable means of swinging a vehicle upgrade.

  The Pilot truck stop was a quarter mile down the road from the factory. Sometimes she spent her half-hour lunch breaks at the Krytal’s on the other side of the street, but most days she stopped in at Pilot instead. At Krystal’s, you sometimes had to wait in line an annoying amount of time to place your order, and when you finally got your food, you were lucky if you got a full ten minutes to wolf your lunch down. She could get in and out of Pilot in just a few minutes, long enough to grab a beer or soda and a couple bags of shitty junk food. Her workday diet would horrify a nutritionist, but all the empty calories never seemed to hurt her. She had a fast metabolism and stayed slender no matter what. It was one of the few ways in which she was truly lucky.

  Today Susan grabbed a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor, a bag of corn chips, a stick of beef jerky, and a two-pack of Hostess Ding Dongs. The big bottle of malt liquor was a minor risk. Usually if she opted for a quick drink at lunch, she grabbed a 16-ounce tall can. As far as she’d ever been able to tell, the junk food did a fine job of covering any smell produced by a malt liquor container that size. But a 40 was a different beast altogether. Downing this thing would be the equivalent of knocking back half a regular six-pack inside of about twenty minutes. She would have a mild buzz on when she got back to work, no question. This was mildly worrisome, but she’d done it a couple times before without getting in trouble. With only a little luck, today should be no different.

  Besides, she really felt like she needed every one of those extra ounces today. The toll the job was taking on her psyche was feeling more burdensome than ever. There were times lately where she felt like she was near a breaking point. She needed a change, a big one, but she had no clue how to make that happen. A better job would require going back to school and completing her degree, but she couldn’t afford to do that. She was stuck. It made her want to scream.

  Outside, as she stalked across the lot to the far corner space where she’d parked the Dart, she twisted the cap off the 40 bottle and let the little piece of aluminum slip from her fingers. It hit the dirty asphalt and rolled until a pebble stopped it cold. Susan took her first swig from the paper sack-covered bottle as she neared her car. The sack obscured the nature of the beverage she was imbibing, of course, but it had to be obvious to all but the most clueless observer what she was actually doing. It was another of those little risks. One, obviously, she was willing to take.

  But there were no cops in the vicinity and she made it back to the Dart without incident. As she reached the car, she fished her keys out of her purse while raising the bottle to her mouth to take another deep pull from it. She sensed the presence rushing up behind her at the last possible moment. Dropping the bottle and her keys, she reached into her purse again, frantically fumbling for the can of mace she always carried with her. The 40 bottle shattered on the asphalt as her fingers brushed the slim canister. Before she could grasp it, however, a gloved hand slapped a wet cloth over her mouth.

  When consciousness returned an indefinite time later, her wrists were bound behind her back and a dirty rag was lodged in her mouth. A strip of duct tape had been slapped across her mouth to keep her from spitting out the rag. She was flat on her back on an uneven metal surface. There was a pattern of shallow grooves in the metal. Something heavy had been laid across her midsection to help keep her motionless. It felt like an extra-large sandbag. More than one, maybe. She hadn’t been blindfolded, but a heavy tarp had been draped over her body, which blinded her almost as effectively. After a few moments, however, her basic situation became clear. Her abductor had loaded her into the bed of a pickup truck. Probably an old one, based on the irregular rumble of the engine and the severe jouncing motion caused by worn out shock absorbers.

  The abduction had been executed with ruthless speed and precision. It’d also been a shockingly brazen act, occurring as it had in broad daylight in a public place. Despite the act’s brutal efficiency, the brazenness suggested an unbalanced mind. Once this realization came to her, a creeping terror began to displace the analytical thinking that had been keeping her relatively calm. Some strange man, probably one with a fair amount of experience at this sort of thing, had taken her against her will and was now transporting her to some unknown location to do who-knew-what to her. That she’d been taken by a man seemed obvious. In general, women didn’t do things like this. Unless she managed to get free of her bonds and pull off a miraculous escape, some form of sexual violation would likely be perpetrated upon her person.

  And then, almost certainly, a violent death would follow.

  Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes and trickled down into her ears. She whimpered behind the gag, frustrated by her inability to call out for help. The feeling was made worse by the certainty that there were people around who could help her if only they knew of her predicament. She heard engine sounds and tinny music emanating from car radios, as well as the occasional blare of a horn. The truck’s frequent stops and starts also seemed to confirm that the driver was still making his way through city traffic. Whenever the truck rolled to a temporary stop, she imagined oblivious people sitting behind the wheels of their vehicles, never guessing that a woman in dire peril was only a few feet away. It made her want to scream. And she tried. But the combination of the gag and the myriad traffic noises rendered the sound imperceptible to anyone other than herself.

  After a while, the traffic noises began to recede, taking any faint hopes of rescue with them. The truck had been puttering along at a slower speed for a couple minutes by the time it rolled to a stop again. Susan strained her ears but detected no sounds of other engines idling in the vicinity. They were no longer in the thick of midday city traffic. She flinched when a loud metal ratcheting sound penetrated the silence. Finally, the ratcheting sound stopped and the truck rolled forward again a short distance before again coming to a stop.

  The ratcheting sound restarted. Then it stopped again.

  The engine cut off. In a moment, Susan heard a squeak of hinges as the driver got out of the truck. This was followed by an echoing sound of footsteps as he approached the rear of the vehicle and let down the tailgate. Somewhere nearby someone was weeping quietly. Susan took an odd kind of comfort in knowing some other unfortunate soul was also imprisoned in this place. It wasn’t right, but she couldn’t help it. The thought of facing whatever miseries awaited her here with only the man who’d taken her for company was too horrible to bear. Her heart pounded as her abductor climbed up into the truck bed, grabbed hold of the tarp, and hauled it away from her.

  A flickering overhead light provided dim illumination.

  Susan stared up into the sneering face of her abductor, her heart sinking as she thought, Oh, no. Not him.

  23.

  Four days until Halloween

  Willow Springs, TN

  A sheriff’s department cruiser was parked at the curb outside the Everly house on Broadbent Lane and a black SUV was parked in the wide concrete driveway. No family members were hanging around outside, but Ricky Bennet figured they were definitely home. The bored-looking deputy behind the wheel of the cruiser was proof of that. No way would Sheriff Fatso have one of his men stationed outside an empty house while a homicidal maniac was on the loose somewhere in Willow Springs. He was a borderline incompetent hayseed, but he wasn’t completely stupid.

  Ricky wanted to discuss that very subject with his old buddy’s wife, but the presence of the cruiser almost prompted him to drive on by and save the idea for another time. There was just one problem with that. He wasn’t sure there’d be time for a discussion later. After giving the matter considerable thought, he thought he knew who’d killed Lloyd McAfee. He was also pretty sure he knew why it had happened. The clues were there, though they would only be obvious to a select few. Of those few, one was dead and two were now missing.

  For Ricky, the clincher had come earlier today, when he’d driven out to Jimmy Martin’s trailer. He’d wanted to talk the matter over with him and see if he could get a sense for whether his old friend’s thinking on the subject had developed along the same lines. Nothing had seemed amiss as he drove up to the trailer. The old pickup he’d occasionally seen Jimmy riding around town in was parked outside, suggesting he was probably home. When no one answered his repeated strident knocks on the trailer’s door, however, he turned around on the little porch and scanned the area for signs of anything that didn’t look right. It didn’t take long for something to catch his eye. He stepped off the porch and knelt in the scraggly, dying grass in front of the pickup, dipping his fingers in a patch of something dark that turned out to be a pool of coagulated blood.

  After making this ominous discovery, he kicked in the trailer’s door and did a quick inspection of its interior. It was unoccupied. Despite the lack of a body, it seemed clear to Ricky that Lloyd’s killer had come after Jimmy. He’d either been killed or abducted, though the blood staining the ground outside suggested he’d been seriously wounded at the very least. Coming on the heels of Lloyd’s death and Chuck’s disappearance, it was hard not to find this disturbing. Not because he genuinely cared about any of his old friends—he’d only been on speaking terms with Lloyd—but rather for what it implied for him.

  I’m next, he’d thought, standing there in Jimmy’s cramped little kitchen. I’m the only one left, so the fucking psycho’s definitely coming after me soon.

  His first impulse was to call Bob Lee and spill everything he knew. Once the law knew who they were looking for, tracking the man down would become a much simpler matter. But Ricky despised the sheriff, who’d given him a hard time in the old days. On more than one occasion, he’d been treated in a way that could without question be characterized as police brutality. His complaints about it had been laughed off by local officials. A lot of years had passed, but the experiences were at the root of a deeply ingrained hatred and distrust of authority figures. There was also the matter of how he would be perceived once the story of what he and his friends had done all those years ago came to light. Not just by the law, but by all the other people in his life. Friends, neighbors, coworkers. His status as a town hall agitator and loony conspiracy theorist had already reduced his social circle considerably. Ricky had a healthy disdain for his fellow man in general, but he had no wish to become completely ostracized from the community.

  So the hell with telling the sheriff. Something had to be done, of course. Somewhere out there was a man who wanted him dead. He just wasn’t sure what to do about it yet. In the short term, he decided he would deal with the situation by becoming a moving target. If the killer didn’t know where he was, he wouldn’t be able to get to him. This obviously meant he would have to avoid returning home for a while. As a lifelong bachelor, he lived alone, so this wasn’t too big a deal. Someone would have to look in on his dog, but that was a problem with a relatively easy solution. He’d just call the old lady who lived next door and tell her about the rock-shaped hide-a-key stashed under his back porch.

  Halloween was only a few days away. Ricky was certain the killer’s quest for vengeance was tied to that event. And he had a feeling the man he’d bullied so mercilessly long ago meant to go out in a blaze of bloody glory. One way or another, then, the whole thing would be over soon. In the meantime, he would determine whether there might be some chance of profitably exploiting his secret knowledge of the situation.

  From what he understood after querying mutual acquaintances, Karen believed her husband had taken off with some neighbor lady who’d confessed to an affair with him. Both had disappeared shortly afterward, which gave the idea extra credence. But Chuck’s wife didn’t know what Ricky knew. Maybe he could share just enough information to make her believe there was a more sinister explanation behind her husband’s disappearance. And if he could do that, maybe he could shake some money out of her for a carefully edited version of the rest of it, along with a promise not to let the law know where she’d gotten the story.