Murder in the Forest, Chapter 46
As the house exploded and the Cassidy girl was being rescued, Terry Mason hid on a side road on a hill above the setting. He used a binocular to observe the police removing Courtney from the house and swore bitterly. Now, the bitch would certainly tell the cops anything they wanted to know about her kidnapping and treatment and that he still held Melissa. Damn! But the good news was, he saw the garage erupt in flames and saw that the heat was too intense for anyone to open the door and see the white van burning within. The cops were more interested in staying away from any possible additional explosions and in comforting and clothing the girl. He noticed that they had a female cop to do that, judging from her walk and the way that she sat by Courtney as the men held back. Did Courtney know about his blue van? No, he decided. The wenches had never seen their cars. That had been a security measure. When the girls were allowed out of the cabin, they'd been blindfolded or the cars were out of sight in the garage or on the front side of the house. They'd been walked in the back yard or tethered there. So, he was safe in that respect.
And the van bore California license plates stolen some three years before, when he and Bamka had vacationed in San Francisco and Sacramento. If there was an alert still out for the stolen plates, it probably wouldn't extend to Washington state police files.
The plates were out of date, but he'd run off a decal that'd fool all but a really alert cop and stuck it in the corner of the plates, where some states provided such stickers to update existing plates. Did California do that? He didn't know and hoped that any cop who saw him wouldn't know, either. Unless he was stopped and the cop got really intrusive, he should be okay. It was sort of academic, anyway. If a cop looked in the van and saw Melissa, the game would be over! He made up his mind to kill any cop who wanted to see in the back of the van or who heard Melissa if she cried out from behind her gag. There was no other way, and once Courtney told investigators about the Bigfoot murders being his fault, killing a cop would hardly matter. He'd already be looking at as severe a sentence as the law allowed. Should he kill Melissa and hide her body? If Courtney told the cops that he had Melissa and they saw no girl in the van and saw his fake California driver's license, they might just let him pass. There'd be nothing to indicate that he was a wanted fugitive. But he thought more and decided to keep the girl. He wanted her, and she had gotten to be very skilled at slaking his lusts. If he was stopped, a close look at the license plate decal would probably fry him, anyway. So: if he was stopped, he'd let the cop approach, and then kill him. Nothing else was safe. Hopefully, he wouldn't encounter a police unit with more than one cop in it or run into a roadblock. And the sooner he got underway, the less chance that he'd get caught in one of those. They were probably giving orders right now to establish roadblocks!
Traffic cameras on freeways were supposedly now capable of detecting the license plates of wanted vehicles, and would trigger an alert to police. But only currently wanted vehicles and plates would be programmed into that system. Washington State Patrol had probably never been warned of the plates being stolen, and the time interval between the theft and now wouldn't leave many cops who'd remember an old alert, anyway. Newer officers would never have seen the original alert.
He knew that in many cases, police only issued alerts within their own and surrounding counties. Sometimes, even murder warrants were never sent beyond the surrounding counties or state borders.
Yes, if he could evade nearby roadblocks, he might well avoid capture. He only needed to get a few miles down the highway before he'd pull off onto a rural road and then into a gravel road that led to his hideout back in the woods. He'd hide there for awhile, until the cops decided that he'd escaped and stood down roadblocks and most hopes of catching him. The FBI would withdraw their agents and use them to look for him in cities, using high tech scanners at airports and train and bus stations to detect fugitives, an outgrowth of the interest in apprehending terrorists who might enter the USA. Did Seattle have such technology? It certainly might, at least at airports. But he had no intention of using public transportation, so that was a moot point. If he needed to ditch his present van, he'd just kill someone and steal a suitable vehicle.
Feeling somewhat better, he entered the van and told Melissa to be quiet and that he'd stop soon to let her pee and get a drink. "We're going to be at our new home before long and we'll spend a few weeks there," he revealed. "By the time we leave, the cops will have quit looking for us around here. They'll assume that I just drove as fast as possible to a big city."
And, so he started the van and took off, hoping to get beyond the range of any urgently stationed road blocks. In fact, he passed where the first block would be established by just three minutes before patrol cars arrived and laid out caltrop sheets to puncture tires, with a narrow lane between, to allow cars to pass if cleared by police. He never knew how close he'd come to being apprehended, but guessed correctly that it must have been a near thing.
He felt much safer after leaving the highway and driving down a gravel road and then into a dirt track that few knew about, leading to a remote place where he had stored supplies in a cave that was hard to detect. He was feeling pretty good when he parked the van and opened the rear doors to pull Melissa out, untie her feet, and remove her blindfold that she might walk to her new place of service. With any luck, no one would see his tracks where he pulled onto that dirt road. Few people ever came back here, far from anything. Unless some hunter stumbled onto them, he and his hostage would likely be alone for a long time to come. He smiled as he relaxed for the first time that day, and began thinking of how he'd have the blonde slave serve him that night. He felt an erection rising in his groin as he groped her and began leading her to his lair.