The highway unspooled in front of him like a mourner’s ribbon. Behr drove through the night, the speedometer pegged at what he hoped was an unticketable sixty-seven miles per hour, his trunk full of the remains of human evil, and the inside of the car heavy with the sense that he’d become the same in order to stop it. He fought white-line fever and visions of himself being found by the staties having fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed into a tree. But mostly he tried to will away the images that kept coming back on him in flashes nonetheless.
—Abler, stripped down, strange skin, pale and waxy. Completely hairless beneath the awkward hairpiece, was he physiologically designed to be more efficient at killing without leaving trace evidence?
—Behr himself stripped down for his work, to just his underwear and shoes.
—The hacksaw and a beef knife.
—The hoisting hooks and the drain.
—The concrete channel running red.
Everything he’d needed was in that garage, from the tools to the heavy rubber gloves, to the construction-grade contractor bags, to the cleaning supplies.
It’s just meat, Behr had said to himself as he set about the grimmest task he’d ever faced. Meat to be handled and processed. Don’t think about what it is. Don’t think about anything now, just do what needs to be done.
That was what he’d always told himself in the farmyard as a boy, in the slaughterhouse where he’d worked as a young man, and in the hunting field more recently, and that’s what he told himself again. The work was as physical as it was revolting, and he was streaming sweat as he fought back his nausea.
And when it was done, when everything was wrapped in heavy-duty plastic and placed in the stained mason’s bags that Behr had found there, and assumed were for that very purpose, and once he’d scrubbed himself off with scouring powder at the slop sink, and had poured bottles of bleach around on the floor, because even though bleach made luminol glow, maybe nobody would think to use it if they didn’t see any blood, and because it would at least wipe out his own DNA, he paused. There was one more thing he wanted to do.
Behr looked at the refrigerator, and then crossed to it. He took the jar containing the piece of Danielle Crawley’s leg and put it in his pocket. He closed the refrigerator door and turned to go when some swatches of color that he’d missed before caught his eye now, with the overhead lights on. They were on top of the refrigerator, in a transparent plastic tub pushed back toward the wall. He saw that inside the tub were a few women’s shoes, including a single lavender pump. He reached for it and saw it was size seven, and the brand was Nine West. It was the match to the one found near where Kendra Gibbons had disappeared. The shoe went in his other coat pocket. He’d solved his case, and it did him absolutely no good.
Then it had been time to go. Behr took the entrenching tool, the item that had nearly ended his life, and secured it in the straps of one of the mason’s bags and grabbed another small shovel that was leaning against a wall.
He waited, pressing his ear against the door, listening but not hearing a sound outside, until he could wait no more. Gloveless now, he covered the doorknob with a rag and prepared to step out. He considered rigging the garage to burn after he’d left, it wouldn’t have been difficult with all the photography chemicals, but he thought better of it. He didn’t need the fire department and police responding and looking for Abler right away. The time before any search began would be to his advantage, and later, he knew, be it hours, days, or weeks, someone, perhaps the wife, would enter the garage seeking Abler, and instead discover the trove of horrible evidence. Then either there would be a massive news story with the authorities called in, or there wouldn’t be a peep. He wondered at the toll living with a sociopath for all these years had taken on the wife, and if she would tell the world what she had found, or if she had a bit of it in her in the first place, and would keep everything quiet.
Behr shut the lights and let himself out the side door. He half expected to find a ring of police cruisers awaiting him, but there were none. He’d been in the garage close to four hours and it was nearing 10:30. The house was dark, but he stayed close to the garage so as not to make any silhouette. When he’d gotten all the bags outside, he fastened the heavy padlock in place behind him and wiped it down.
The last piece had to do with his car. It was parked around the corner, a long, heavy haul with the bags, especially the thick plastic sack containing the torso, which he’d cinched around his waist. If he was spotted or had gotten a parking ticket, it would be a problem. He would be caught by the very same means by which he’d hoped to catch Abler.
He bent his knees, lacing his fingers through the handles of the mason’s bags, and stood, the dead weight yanking down on the muscles of his back and legs. He made the carry, straining to stand erect, as if not burdened, in case anyone saw him, his arms and legs quivering from the effort, the leather handles cutting into his palms. He turned the corner and reached his car, where he found the windshield blessedly free of tickets. Sweating and panting, he untied the burden around his waist and leaned against the trunk, then opened it with a hand that shook from the exertion. He loaded the bags inside, slammed the trunk lid shut, and drove away.
On his way out of town, before he hit the interstate, but a good five miles away from Abler’s house, he stopped at a Citgo station to fill his tank and do what he wished he’d done before going to Abler’s house: he passcode-locked his phone, wiped it, and hid it behind the toilet in the men’s room. He couldn’t afford to ping any cell towers where he was going. He paid cash for the gas and the largest cup of coffee and bottle of Gatorade they had and set out, going north and west.