The Face of Midnight Read online

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE The Dead Girl

  CHAPTER TWO The Chase

  CHAPTER THREE Night in the Basement

  CHAPTER FOUR In Over My Head

  CHAPTER FIVE House on the Hill

  CHAPTER SIX Last Goodbyes

  CHAPTER SEVEN Movie Night

  CHAPTER EIGHT The Midnight Killer

  CHAPTER NINE The Face of Midnight

  CHAPTER TEN Epilogue

  Connect With Me

  Crawlspace - Sneak Preview

  Keep Reading!

  Author's Note

  Copyright Information

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Dead Girl

  Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A guy walks into a car, with a dead girl stuffed behind the back seat.

  And I’m the punchline.

  In the ten minutes it took to get from my apartment to the highway, I kept wondering where the perfume smell was coming from.

  Not from the vents. Not from the pine-tree-shaped air freshener dangling from the mirror.

  I doubt I’d have noticed the body had the Corvette hugging my bumper not flashed its brights at me for driving too slow. I twisted my head around to yell something crude and saw her curled on the floor between the seats.

  A woman, not moving.

  Her hands wedged under the driver’s seat, cold, dead fingers inches from my ankle.

  You might criticize me for panicking and not thinking straight. Until you speed down a highway in heavy traffic with a dead person lounging in the back seat, you have no idea how you’ll react.

  A horn blared. I jerked the wheel and pulled my Honda Civic off the shoulder, narrowly missing a rusty pickup trying to cut me off. Rumble strips thundered. The car shook until my teeth rattled. The Corvette shot around us, the driver’s middle finger extended.

  My foot left the accelerator.

  I had to tell the police.

  Hell, no. That was a terrible idea.

  I’d only lived in Barton Falls for a few months. How would the police react if an unknown twenty-four-year-old showed up at the station with a corpse in his car?

  I dropped down to forty-five mph. Then thirty.

  A chorus of horns assailed me. I was a slab of driftwood bobbing down a raging river.

  Fingers nervously drumming the steering wheel, I avoided eye contact as cars whipped past. What if someone saw the dead woman?

  Impossible. She was too low to the ground to see from another car.

  Unless a tractor trailer passed.

  I risked a quick glance behind me.

  Her face was hidden, but I could see she was young, maybe a teenager.

  Faded jean jacket, cropped blonde hair, body lean and strong beneath painted-on denim.

  I got the impression she was attractive, except that she was dead.

  Another beep brought my head around as I drifted onto the shoulder again. Something large and thick thwacked the undercarriage and dragged under the car until the tires jounced over it.

  I hadn’t been watching the road. I had a terrible vision of driving over someone walking along the highway.

  Vehicular homicide while traveling with a corpse—that’ll get you hard time.

  I squinted my eyes and looked.

  A muffler which appeared to have broken off from a semi flipped and cartwheeled over the guardrail. At least, I hadn’t killed anyone.

  But there was still a dead girl in the backseat.

  I considered pulling over but thought better of it; the last thing I wanted was to draw attention.

  I needed to stop and think.

  The mall exit appeared, and I picked up speed and followed a glut of vehicles exiting the highway. The ramp divided into three lanes and ended at a red light, me in the middle lane. I felt drivers staring over at me as we lined up. I looked straight ahead, sweating like a fat man on the Fourth of July, praying a bus or raised vehicle wouldn’t pull up beside me before the light changed.

  As the red light glared back at me, I wondered about the girl.

  Maybe she was an addict who’d crawled into my car after an overdose.

  Maybe someone had strangled the girl and dumped her body in my backseat.

  Who was she, and why was she in my car?

  The light turned green.

  I accelerated through the median, racing ahead of the other vehicles.

  Just my luck, the mall parking lot was busy, but I managed to find a less congested area at the back of the lot.

  I pulled into the empty parking space, wondering what the hell I was going to do. I didn’t dare touch the girl. Any contact with the body would make the police even more suspicious I’d killed her.

  The motor rumbled. The afternoon sun shone through the windshield, too hot for mid-October.

  Greasy, sweaty scents drifted out from a busy McDonald’s. I watched a minivan lurch past the drive-thru window and head in my direction. I knew a minivan was tall enough for the driver to see the body.

  I had to get out of there.

  My hands touched the wheel, foot poised above the accelerator.

  Nothing to see here. Just a guy in his car with no dead girls in the backseat.

  The van passed and drove off. Close call.

  Throwing the car into drive, I turned down a two-lane road which cut into wilderness. Evergreens grouped close together and towered along both sides of the road. Even with the windows closed I could smell pine and standing water. The swamp glistened back through the trees, smelling of rot and dead things. I wondered how long it would take before the girl started to stink.

  A truck came up on my bumper. I pulled to the shoulder to let it pass, and the truck vanished around a bend, leaving me alone on the road.

  Alone with the dead girl.

  Wiping my hands on my shirt, I looked over my shoulder, afraid of what I might see.

  The girl’s high tops were dusty, beaten. Otherwise, her clothes appeared clean if a little ragged. She hardly looked like a derelict, but that didn’t rule out my murder theory.

  Why me?

  Starting to feel sick, I lowered the windows and let the scents of pine and swamp water roll into the car.

  I didn’t intend to dump her body in the woods, did I?

  No. I just needed to think this through, figure out who she was and why she was in my car.

  I still couldn’t see her face. For that, I’d need to lean over my seat.

  I unlatched the seatbelt, taking one more peek out the window to ensure nobody watched.

  I shifted my body around and bent over the seat.

  She moved.

  A subtle shifting of the legs.

  I stopped breathing.

  I could tell by the taut rigidity of her body that she’d been conscious the whole time, a mouse frozen by a snake’s gaze. The quiet tension inside the car reminded me of the moment before lightning strikes. She was about to make a run for it. I started to say something and found my throat too parched for speaking.

  Maybe if I grabbed her before she got away…

  I reached down.

  Her hand shot toward the door handle. Before I could react the back door flew open. I swung my head over my shoulder and watched her race into the trees, legs pumping like a sprinter.

  I stumbled out of the car, a trembling mess. While I shouted at her to stop, the mystery girl weaved between pines and vanished into darkness. I followed her halfway into the forest and stopped. She was too fast, too strong.

  The woods swallowed her whole.

  The girl was gone.

  Riley wheeled himself out from under the car and grinned, wiping oil on stained and threadbare blue jeans. That muffler I’d whacked on the highway cracked my o
il pan, broke two springs and damaged the control arms.

  Having a friend and neighbor who knew how to repair cars was a sweet perk. Too bad he wasn’t a miracle worker. What I needed was one of those televangelists to lay his hands upon the hood and infuse my Civic with the high-octane, restorative power of Jesus. Anything less meant a one-way trip to the junkyard.

  “Shocks are wasted, too.”

  “Can you resuscitate her?”

  “I could,” he said, shaking out a mop of red hair that made him look frozen in adolescence. “But then you’re looking at a few thousand dollars. For what? Maybe another twenty or thirty thousand miles before a head gasket blows. You’re living on borrowed time. Might just as well put a bullet in her head and start over with something used.”

  “Oh, you gonna let me borrow a couple grand?”

  “I’ve known you forever, Steve. But hell, no.”

  Noticing the landlord glaring across the lot, Riley’s smile faded. He cleared his throat and nervously rubbed the grit off his hands.

  “Jenkins looks pissed,” Riley said.

  “Guess he doesn’t like the tenants turning his parking lot into a junkyard.”

  Riley waved and gave Jenkins a thumbs up. Jenkins shook his head and went back to painting a mailbox.

  “Or maybe he wants his rent money,” he said.

  “I’m only a month behind.”

  “With no job, you’ll be two months behind next week.”

  “I’m doing the best I can. You know Jenkins had it in for me the day I moved in. He’d throw me out tomorrow if he thought he could rent the place for what I’m paying, which is a helluva lot more than you or anyone else seems to be paying at King’s Road Apartments.”

  I did my best to contain my resentment. I’m sure it flashed in my eyes because Riley sheepishly looked away. We’d grown up together in Smith Glen, another failed upstate New York industrial town, about an hour down the highway from Barton Falls. Back home, I’d been mulling over the possibility of community college six months ago when Riley called. He’d heard the new computer manufacturing plant in town was hiring and suggested I apply.

  To know the weather is to know Barton Falls: Five months of frozen, barren winter. Four months of rain out of a slate sky that descends like a veil and suffocates you. We live for three months of summer, those sunny days when optimism brims and you start to believe that maybe next winter won’t be so bad, and someday these old industrial towns will rise from the ashes.

  Six months after the plant hired me, the company shut its doors and fled to Florida, where taxes are lower and summer is eternal. Maybe I should have escaped with them.

  It wasn’t Riley’s fault. I shouldn’t have left home on a whim. I was stupid enough to believe Barton Falls was different than Smith Glen.

  I was seven years out of high school. The successful friends I’d grown up with had graduated from college three years ago and started families. I’d see them in three years at our ten-year high school reunion, a prospect that made me feel sick and small. I was almost out of time, and I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do with my life.

  “Anyway, I know a dude who will give you a few hundred for parts.”

  “A few hundred?”

  He raised his hands defensively.

  “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m not the one who drove over Godzilla. And a few hundred bucks should buy you time with Jenkins.”

  ”I swear the weirdest crap happens to me.”

  “There’s an understatement. Tell me again about the dead girl.”

  “Stowaway.”

  “Okay, the stowaway. You seriously don’t know who she is or why she was in your car?”

  “I didn’t have the doors locked. Maybe she was in the act of hot-wiring my car, saw me coming, and ducked into the backseat.”

  Riley cocked an eyebrow and swept his arm at my ruined vehicle.

  “Screw you, too, buddy,” I said. “That car was worth more than a few hundred bucks before yesterday, maybe even worth stealing.”

  “A sexy car thief.” He glanced wistfully at the gray October sky. “What’s it like to be you, Steve Morgan?”

  The Midnight Killer.

  Hearing those words was enough to make most of us shiver and look over our shoulder when the sun dropped below the land. The first person to put a name to New York state’s serial killer was a reporter for the ROCHESTER SENTINEL named Mulligan. The Midnight Killer moniker took on its own life when the national news picked up the story.

  The Midnight Killer murdered nine people, two men and seven women, between spring and autumn of that year. He struck in seemingly faraway places like New York City and Buffalo, too distant to worry a sleepy little town in the middle of nowhere.

  Then September came. The killer abducted a female student walking home late at night on the Syracuse University campus. The state police recovered her head outside of Albany, stuffed inside a sluice pipe, bloated and pig-like, covered by twigs and leaves and clogging the water flow. The rest of her body remained missing. Just an hour east of Barton Falls, Syracuse was too close for comfort.

  I didn’t make it a point to think about the Midnight Killer that October, but you have to understand what it was like that autumn. You couldn’t open the paper or watch the news without some mention of the murderer who always eluded the police and FBI. A real-life serial killer stalked our backyard. After six months of killings, we all walked a razor’s edge between paranoia and unbridled terror.

  Our local news came from the KANE GROVE PRESS, a small town rag which originated a few towns south of Barton Falls and tended toward the sensational. The Midnight Killer headlined today’s paper because of his recent inactivity. I scanned the article in the grocery store checkout line with a loaf of bread cradled under one arm, while an elderly lady wearing thick, dark lensed glasses reminiscent of a nuclear physicist’s protective eyewear tried to read the article around my shoulder.

  “Mark my words, he’s dead,” she said, sniffing. “And good riddance.”

  “Maybe he’s just laying low for a while,” I said.

  I grabbed a pack of gum off the rack and set the bread and paper on the conveyor belt. The cashier flashed the I need a manager to help me light, and I groaned. I always got stuck behind the shopper who paid by check.

  “No. It’s in his blood. He wouldn’t stop unless he was dead.”

  “Maybe it’s not a he,” I said, praying the manager would hurry so I could get out of there.

  “The paper says he’s a he.”

  “Then I guess it must be true.”

  It didn’t make me proud to be sarcastic, but she’d started to grate on me. I just wanted to beat the rain showers back to my apartment. She leaned over the belt, trying to read more of the article and annoyed that I’d made it difficult.

  At last, the manager arrived to get the line moving. I paid for the newspaper, bread, and gum. As I turned to leave, I handed the newspaper to the woman.

  “What’s this for?”

  “So you can finish the article.”

  By the time I’d walked home, Riley’s guy had come through for me. He showed up an hour later to tow away the corpse of my car. I pocketed $450 for the Civic, grabbed a beaten mountain bike for $50 at a garage sale, and used the remaining money to buy groceries and get Jenkins off my back about the rent.

  The supermarket on the east end of town hadn’t called yet, and honestly, I hoped they wouldn’t. I’d applied for the assistant store manager position. Another dead-end job would snap the trap shut, and I’d be stuck in Barton Falls forever.

  The sun was down. Although it wasn’t cold enough to see my breath, I felt winter creeping up on Barton Falls. Throwing on an extra sweatshirt, I took the bike out for a ride, hoping to reach the Blue Lake Cafe on the west side of town before I caught hypothermia.

  I pedaled up Cayuga Street, the cold and dark flying at me. Dead leaves scratched and crawled along the sidewalks. With Halloween a week away, macabre decorations
adorned houses up and down the block.

  Skeletons glowed in the night; cornstalks framed entrances. Gravestones, glowering pumpkins, and cackling witches peeked out from the shadows. Fortunately, no one had the bad taste to erect a serial killer dummy.

  Feeling the chill of the wind bite at my ears, I pulled the hood over my head. Few cars traveled along Cayuga Street, the majority of town already locked inside their homes for the night. At one point I noticed a car following a few blocks back. Then it turned down a side street.

  A shifting wind pulled the scent of a wood stove out from the neighborhoods to mix with the leaf mold. I reveled in my freedom, just me on the silent streets with no need to wake up early tomorrow.

  I cut down Church Street, the lights of downtown sparkling to the west. Gothic churches soared to either side of me, some dark, others with fiery light at the windows. A crone pushed a shopping cart of cans and bottles down the sidewalk, muttering to herself. She stopped and watched me. The cold stare of her eyes made the hair stand on the back of my neck.

  I pumped the pedals, leaving the crone in the distance.

  The blast of a car horn nearly made me lose my balance. An old Chevy Impala had crept up on my back tire without me hearing. As the driver gunned the engine and passed, someone yelled asshole and tossed a beer can out of the window. Teenagers, probably. Maybe I wasn’t so alone on the roads tonight. I began to feel vulnerable on my new bike.

  I took a left on Elm, cutting across State Street, which housed the public library. The lights were still on, the silhouettes of people moving between the stacks. I passed Main Street, its sidewalks empty, the shops closed.

  The streetlights were fewer here, the way ahead cloaked in shadow. At seven o’clock in summer, the sun would be shining and the temperature warm enough for shorts. But in the waning days of October, all was black and cold.

  I whipped past side streets where nary a light shone inside houses. It seemed entire communities had gone to the grave, yet I could see the outlines of vehicles in driveways.

  My imagination conjured a disturbing image of a murderer lurking in those houses, the dark interiors hiding a trail of blood and bodies. What if the killer watched me from a window?