“We got down to my car fast as we could. I drove out and stopped by the ditch. I held my lighter close and looked at his face and I knew he was dead. I didn’t want Ruthie to see him. Sometimes a car won’t come along for a half hour. I drove home fast and phoned. It was about twenty-five after nine when I phoned. Then we came back here to... meet you people and tell you about it.”
“You did not see the plate on the Buick?”
“No, I told you, Sheriff. It was out of state, but I don’t know from where.”
“I want to thank you, Howard, and you, Ruth, for your good citizenship.” The little red light went off.
“Can we go now, Sheriff?” the boy asked.
“Yes.”
“Will I be in the papers?” the girl asked, smiling.
“You sure will, honey,” one of the reporters said. “How about a few more questions before you take off, kids?”
“Sure,” the girl said.
Kemp heard one of the other reporters say, “Al, that dog pack thing writes itself. Wolf pack. Hey, I like that better! Wolf Pack Murder.”
“This is the third score for that wolf pack, Billy. If they’re the same ones.”
“What do you mean — if? It all matches up, Al. Uvalde, Nashville. It’s the same bunch. By tomorrow, boy, the wire services and the networks will be in here like...” The confidential voice faded away on the summer night. Kemp lengthened his stride to catch up with Tauss and Razoner.
Tauss was saying, “... might as well strut while he has a chance. The FBI is on this one already. But while he’s showing off, old Gus better not slip up on any of it or they’ll peel him good. Kemp? Let’s get on back to town. Get in.”
And he was sitting between them again as the driver turned the car around. Dallas Kemp felt remote and wooden.
“Those people... they took Helen.”
“And they took the honeymoon money, Kemp.”
“But what are you going to do? What’s going to happen?” He heard his voice break.
“Try to stop them. The trick is find them.”
“I heard those reporters talking. It sounded as if those people are... wanted for other things.”
Razoner laughed abruptly, without mirth. “Other murders. Don’t you read the papers?”
“I... I remember something recently. In the Southwest, though.”
“In Texas and then in Tennessee and now here,” Captain Tauss said. “If they weren’t the hottest thing in the country already, they are now. Three men and a girl. And we haven’t made one of them yet. Tonight is the best break yet. Witnesses. Descriptions.”
“I don’t understand,” Kemp said. “What are these people doing? Why? Who are they?”
“They,” said Tauss, “are the kind of people who make police work tough. There’s no rhyme or reason or pattern. Maybe they’re hopped up. They all of a sudden decided to buck society all the way. I don’t know why. I’ll bet they couldn’t tell you why. They’re after kicks, not profit. They’ll do all the damage they can, and if they’re smart it’ll be a lot, and they’ll be caught. That’s the one sure thing. The surest thing in the world. It’s not knowing where and when that makes it rough. From the pattern, they’re heading northeast. Yesterday it was an eight-state alarm.”
“I suppose,” Kemp said, “I’ve got to... go tell Helen’s people.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Lew Razoner said.
“What do you mean?”
“They found her purse in the Olds. It had her identification. Gus is no damn fool. He knows how big the Wisters are. He sent a deputy there first thing, and didn’t spill it to the press. Next he’ll come on the scene with a flock of reporters, and milk it dry.”
“She may be badly hurt,” Dallas Kemp said.
“About the only thing you can do and the only thing her people can do is pray.”
They went directly to headquarters. Captain Tauss was anxious to alert the Chief of Police and the Commissioner, and give them all pertinent details. They had no more need of Kemp. He got into his station wagon and drove out to the Wister home. On the way he heard the eleven-thirty news over the car radio from local station WROE.
“... murdered Arnold Crown, owner of a local service station, and abducted his companion, Miss Helen Wister, only daughter of a socially prominent Monroe family. The murder and kidnaping occurred on a deserted stretch of Route 813 about ten miles east of the city limits at approximately nine-fifteen this evening. Three men and a woman are involved. Sheriff Gustaf Kurby has stated that this is unquestionably the work of the same foursome who murdered a salesman near Uvalde, Texas, last Tuesday, and killed again yesterday near Nashville. Road blocks have been established and it is hoped that the foursome is trapped in the area bounded by...”
He punched the button that turned the radio off. The flat voice of the announcer could not make it any more real. It was all nightmare. It had the impersonal malevolence of summer lightning. It had struck Helen. Life had no point without her. It was monstrously unfair. People like that belonged in the impersonal newspaper headlines. They had no right coming into your life, destroying things. Life had been neatly planned. Nineteen days before the marriage. He had the plane tickets to Mexico City, the suite reserved at the Continental Hilton. A thing like this couldn’t happen.
When he got to her home, she would be there.
But he saw the official cars in the drive. And as he walked to the front door he looked in and saw Jane Wister. Her face was twisted. Tears were wet on her cheeks. She looked seventy years old.
Six
It was March in Laredo, and hot. John and Kathryn Pinelli were excessively polite to each other, and to me. As I said, we hung around there a day and a half. It didn’t have to be that long. But it was a stepping-off place. I got the black Chrysler completely serviced. I had to unload it and reload it so Kathy could get to her hot-weather wardrobe.
It was a strange thing about her — her taste in clothes. In New York it was rich and conservative and good. But as she got more informal, she seemed to lose her judgment. Maybe it was the Hollywood years coming out. Theatrical. Maybe, on the other hand, that outfit she wore in Laredo was a way of punishing John Pinelli in some way that I didn’t understand. Something had suddenly gone dead-wrong between them. So wrong that I could sense it wouldn’t ever be right again. It changed the reasons for the trip and everything else. It turned it into a different trip. It was as though we had all forgotten where we were going.
The outfit she put on to go shopping in, in the heart of Laredo that full day we were there, I felt funny letting her out of the car. She’d put on tight little pumpkin-colored short shorts, and a full-sleeved yellow silk blouse, with a Chinese type collar. She wore a white straw coolie hat and white gloves and high red heels, and sunglasses with red frames. I tell you, when she walked away from the car, she kept everything working for her. She handled it with a runway strut, and those heads snapped around and the jaws fell open when Kathy went by. I don’t know what she was proving, and I don’t think she did. Those little legs were wonderful, and no lady ever walked like that.
It got hot in the car. I got out and waited in the shade of a building. She was gone almost an hour, and I saw her coming in the distance, carrying a silver package. She came swinging toward me, a lovely little doll, and I had to grin at her, but her mouth did not move in response. She took off her glasses as I opened the car door for her. Her eyes were ten thousand years old.
“Buy something pretty?” I asked her.
“This is a stinking hot town. Get me home before I die, Stassen.”
So there wasn’t anything to say on the way back to the motel. We got a fairly decent start in the morning. I’d guess that by nine-thirty we’d had breakfast and we were across the river. At Customs I had to unload the car and carry everything inside, then carry all the sealed suitcases back out and load it again. Neither of them carried a damn thing.