4:42 a.m.
Joshua’s bedside phone rang.
Sylvia was asleep beside him, her arm draped lovingly across his chest, and she jerked involuntarily when the phone jangled. He was already awake, however, thinking about what would happen at First Capital Bank in just under twelve hours.
Surprised by getting a call at this time of night, he slid out from under Sylvia’s arm to answer the phone. She rolled in the other direction with a soft, sleep-infused sigh.
Joshua spoke into the receiver. “Yes?”
“Someone has not been playing well with others.”
“What?”
“I know what you were doing in that train car, Joshua.”
An initial, almost debilitating chill swept over him, but it dissolved quickly with the revelation that this did not sound like something a cop would say. “Train car?”
“You’ll learn it’s not smart to leave that much evidence behind. Remember, everything you touch is an arrow leading back to you. You have to leave arrows that point somewhere else.”
Words that might have come from the mouth of Joshua’s own father, if he were not dead.
This is the man! This is the one you’ve been trying to get the attention of! The one from Illinois and Ohio!
Joshua stepped as far from the bed as the phone cord would allow, then whispered so Sylvia wouldn’t hear, “You’re the one who killed Hendrich.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To leave an arrow pointing somewhere else.”
Joshua processed that. “The gate was locked, how’d you get him in there?”
“The hole in the fence. It’s amazing how compliant someone will be when he believes his life is in danger and that it might be spared.”
“And you banged on the track to alert me? Why?”
“You were cutting it too close. One of the detectives was on his way to your boxcar.”
“But how did you find me? How did you-”
“Colleen.”
“Colleen?”
“Let’s just call it luck.”
Joshua’s heart was racing almost as much as it had when he’d listened to Colleen scream in the boxcar. “When can I meet you?”
“Is that what you want? Is that why you’re doing all this?”
“Yes.”
“Auditioning?”
He hadn’t thought of it exactly that way before. “Yes.”
“What you’ve been doing is child’s play-having someone leave a man in an alley? Coercing someone to drop off a corpse at a hardware store? I’m not sure you’re taking this seriously.”
How does he know? How did he find you!
“I can assure you that I am.”
“Why the hands?”
“Colleen’s?”
“Yes, why did you cut off her hands?”
“My father taught me that, except he did it after they were dead.”
“They?”
“The people he brought to the place beneath the barn. He first took me down there when I was eight. He showed me what to do.”
Joshua expected the man to ask him what’d happened there under the barn, or what exactly his father had taught him to do, or maybe, if he’d eaten Colleen’s hands. But the man did not ask any of those things. Instead he said, “What do you have planned next?”
“Something special. It involves a police officer.”
“Go on.”
Joshua was beginning to get the sense that he’d already shared too much with this man. He didn’t recognize the voice, but he wondered if it might possibly be a law enforcement officer after all. “That’s all I can tell you.”
“I need to know you’re serious.”
“I am. Quite serious.”
“When will it happen? With the officer?”
“Today at twilight.”
Sundown.
Dusk.
The gloaming.
“Four twenty-five. To be exact.”
“Four twenty-five.”
“Yes.”
“If I’m impressed, I’ll contact you and we’ll meet. If I’m not impressed, you’ll never hear from me again.”
“We’re the same,” Joshua said, sensing that the man was about to hang up. “You know that. You and I.”
“If I thought you were the same as me, I’d never agree to meet with you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’d be afraid you were going to kill and eat me. But not necessarily in that order.”
And then the line went dead.