The area reserved for the big trucks was a hundred yards beyond the gas station, an unlighted expanse of concrete the size of a football field, with parking spaces indicated by lines of while paint Bogan directed Perkins to the far end of the lot.
In the silence that settled when Perkins cut the motor, Bogan heard the girl’s shallow, uneven breathing. The sound was satisfying; no longer laughing and confident, he thought, no longer warmed by the admiring eyes lingering on her slim body. Now she would pay attention to him. In a quiet, deliberate voice Bogan explained what he wanted them to do, and they obeyed carefully and quickly, like children trying to appease a fearsome, unpredictable adult. It wasn’t the gun they responded to, but the tension coiling beneath his surface calm. They knew with a primitive instinct that he was hoping they might disobey him; they knew he would relish the excuse to throw his self-control to the winds.
They got out of the car on the girl’s side and stood motionless until he joined them. Then the girl, on order, climbed into the rear-seat section and lay face down on the floor. Bogan had already removed his tie and belt. He gave them to Perkins, who knotted the tic about the girl’s wrists and looped the belt about her ankles, buckling it with trembling fingers. When he straightened up, Bogan inspected his work, then closed the rear door. “Now climb into the front seat.” he told Perkins, but when Perkins turned to obey, Bogan struck him heavily with the barrel of his gun, the blow landing just above his right ear. Perkins pitched forward, moaning in pain, but Bogan caught him before he struck the ground and carried him into the field adjoining the parking lot. He rolled the limp body into a ditch and returned to the car.
Safely lay on him like a balm, filling him with a warm complacence. Perkins wouldn’t recover consciousness for hours, if at all; and the only other witness who might identify him was trussed up in the back of his car. Now there was nothing left but to get off the turnpike. And he knew how to solve that problem.
He started his car and drove along the wide, curving lane that led to the turnpike, laughing as he merged smoothly with the swift, southbound traffic. The rain was coming down harder, bouncing on the shining concrete, and the Ford was swiftly lost in the dark streams of cars, with no more identity than a leaf in a storm or a chip swirling down a stream. The beams of oncoming headlights broke on his thick glasses and glittered against the excitement in his eyes.
“Are you all right?” he said in a high, pleased voice. “Are you comfortable?”
The girl lay with her wrists bound at the small of her back, her cheek flat against the car’s rough carpeting. She was trembling with cold and with fear, but she said evenly, “Where are you taking me?”
“Well, I’m not sure,” Bogan said. In truth, he didn’t know; but when they left the turnpike he would make up his mind. He would find a place that was dark and quiet. A field, he thought, or the bank of a stream, where he could rest, where they might talk for a while.
He glanced quickly over his shoulder: she lay with her knees bent, her feet raised in the air, and he saw the soles of her small white shoes, and the shine of his belt looped about her ankles. For the lime being everything was all right. “Just don’t worry about anything,” he said.
In the manager’s office of Howard Johnson’s No. I, Trask and O’Leary questioned the man in the leather jacket who had delivered the message to Sheila Leslie. “Let’s try it once more,” Trask said evenly, after the man told his story for the third time. They had checked his identification and knew he was a family man, steadily employed by a construction company in Philadelphia. He had a gasoline credit card in his wallet, snapshots of his wife and children, and seemed to be a responsible citizen. But Trask said, “Let’s go over it again from the start — every detail, everything you saw and heard and said.”
The man sat in a straight-backed chair under clear, soft overhead lights. He was about fifty, with thinning hair, work-roughened hands, and he wore jeans and a woolen shirt under his leather jacket “Well, like I told you.” he said, blinking his eyes nervously. “First the man called to me, speaking nice and polite, and asked me to do him a favor. The car he was sitting in was one of the popular makes, but I can’t rightly say which one. It wasn’t new. Maybe a ’Fifty or ’Fifty-one. It was a dark color, like I already told you. So he asked me to tell this girl that’s missing that Trooper O’Leary wanted to talk to her.”
O’Leary closed his eyes and ran a hand over his face. She was gone, helpless in a killer’s hands, and it was his fault He hadn’t done his job; instead of questioning her swiftly and impersonally, he had blushed and simpered like a fool, letting his feelings for her come between him and his work.
“Well. I went into the restaurant and told her.” the man in the leather jacket said. “And she smiled real nice and thanked me and went outside. I sat down to my dinner, where I was when you got here and began asking for who gave her the message.” One of the waitresses had remembered that someone had spoken to Sheila just before she went outside; and Trask and O’Leary had shouted for silence in the restaurant, and when they explained what they wanted, the man in the leather jacket had got uneasily to his feel. “I didn’t think I’d done nothing wrong,” he said now, eyes swinging quickly from Trask to O’Leary. “I was just doing a man a favor.”
“You’re sure he used my name?” O’Leary asked him sharply. “You’re sure he said O’Leary?”
“Yes, I’m positive about that.”
“Let’s go back to the start.” Trask said. “It was a young man who gave you the message?”
“Nearly as I could make out, yes.”
“And he was alone in the car?”
“Well, there seemed a kind of shadow in the back, but I didn’t see anybody.” The man hesitated, then said. “The young guy sounded kind of funny, he talked fast, I mean, like he was speaking words he’d memorized.”
O’Leary forced himself to think; his emotions were roiling inside him, blunting his memory and judgment. While Trask went over the man’s story again, O’Leary paced the small office, the overhead lights shining on his pale, set features He got himself in hand with a conscious effort. It occurred to him once again that the killer’s pattern of action suggested a generous time schedule; twice he might have got off the pike — once in the white Edsel, again in the car he had commandeered to pick up Sheila. But he hadn’t made a break for it. This might mean he had some special plan for getting off the turnpike, that he had found a loophole in the pike’s defenses. But how to account for the fact that he had used the name O’Leary to lure Sheila outside? How had he known the name? And that Sheila would respond to it? Then O’Leary recalled the irrelevant bit of information he had gleaned from the gas-station attendant at Howard Johnson’s No. 2. Someone had mentioned O’Leary’s driving, and the attendant had told him that O’Leary was safer at a hundred than most people were at fifty. Or something to that effect. But had the attendant actually used his name?
Trask completed his questioning of the man in the leather jacket, thanked him and excused him. When the man had gone. O’Leary told Trask of the conversation with the attendant at Howard Johnson’s No. 2.
“You get back there,” Trask said. “We’ve got to get a lead, and fast.”
“He’s got the girl in his car,” O’Leary said desperately. “That’s a lead, isn’t it? We can search every damn car on the pike.”
Trask looked away from O’Leary, pained by what he saw in the big trooper’s face. He gestured impatiently at the flash of the turnpike traffic which they could see through the windows of the manager’s office.
“There’s twenty-five or thirty thousand cars rolling out there tonight. Doctors on emergency calls, pregnant women, businessmen making plane and train connections, parents hurrying to sick kids. How can we tie up that traffic? And where would we get the men to search the cars? The pike would be stalled bumper to bumper in a matter of minutes. We’d block the highways coming in from three states Maybe we could stop all cars of a certain kind — like we stopped those Edsels. Or pick up men answering to a fairly general description. But we can’t bring that traffic to a halt without something to go on, Dan. Now you get back to Number Two. Maybe that attendant can give us the lead we need.”