The Night Monster_ A Novel of Suspense - James Swain [104]
“Next to me,” I said.
Buster glued himself to my side, and together we climbed down. Nearing bottom, we both started to slide. I righted myself, and drew my Colt.
“Get out and show me your hands,” I said loudly.
There was no response from the pickup. I approached in a crouch, my gun held with both hands. In the moonlight, two men hung upside down in their seats. One had a hunting rifle with a sniper sight clutched in his hands, while the other held a pistol. Their faces had been blown clean off.
Reaching in through the open driver’s window, I killed the pickup’s ignition. I didn’t like killing people without knowing who they were, and I searched the driver’s pockets, and found a wallet along with a handful of loose change.
I pulled out a driver’s license. Holding it up to the moonlight, I read who the dead man was. I cursed loudly.
Walking around to the other side of the cab, I picked the other dead man’s pockets. I found his wallet, and read his ID. I cursed again.
I hurried back to the highway with my dog. Linderman and Seppi stood next to my Legend, waiting for me. Linderman threw my keys back to me.
“Find anything?” the FBI agent asked.
“You just killed the sheriff of Chatham and his deputy,” I said.
CHAPTER 53
drove to Daytona without seeing another car on the road. It was a welcome relief, considering what had happened.
Daytona had more cheap hotel rooms than probably anywhere else in Florida. Many were located near the speedway where the Daytona 500 was held each year. Linderman chose the Holiday Inn across the street from the speedway, and rented a suite in the rear of the building, which let me park away from the road.
We took Seppi to the suite on the hotel’s second floor, and fed her black coffee and doughnuts and let her watch TV. The sheriff and his deputy’s killings had done a number on her, and she flipped through the channels aimlessly, unable to focus on any one program. I asked her if she wanted us to send someone to the nursing home to make sure her mother was all right, and she shook her head.
“No one’s going to hurt my momma now,” she told me.
A few hours later, the director of the FBI’s Jacksonville office, Special Agent Vaughn Wood, arrived, along with his female assistant. Wood wore a black turtleneck and black cargo pants that made the dark rings beneath his eyes much more pronounced. His assistant wore a blue pantsuit and looked like a soccer mom. They’d brought a tape recorder with them, which they set up in the suite’s living room in order to interview Seppi.
Seppi sat on the couch and chain-smoked cigarettes. Linderman sat in a chair facing her, and did the questioning, while Wood, his assistant, and I stood against the wall. Seppi started by talking about her background. She was a native of Chatham, as were her parents, and had had a normal upbringing. Then, she described her abduction from Daytona Community College, and why she’d never gone to the police.
“I love Chatham,” Seppi said, feathering the smoke of her cigarette through her nostrils. “But my town has a dirty secret that I was raised not to talk about it. So this is hard. You understand?”
Everyone in the suite nodded.
“In the late 1980s, the paper mill shut down, and Chatham hit the skids,” Seppi said. “There were no jobs, and times were tough. One day, some locals were sitting around a bar getting drunk. One of them was a guy named Travis Bledsoe.
“Travis had a few drinks, and accidentally cut his hand with a knife. Travis looked at the wound, and started talking about his hand’s earning potential, and its value on his insurance policy. That’s how the whole thing got started.”
“How what got started?” Linderman asked.
“How the townsfolk in Chatham started losing limbs to collect on the insurance,” Seppi