“Breaker one, nine. This is Red Devil rolling down I-forty. We gotta bear in the grass at mile marker two, three, seven. Over." There's a hiss on the line as the message floats through the air, sending a warning out to the bucket brigade.
"Copy, Red Devil. Bear in the grass, I-forty, marker two, three, seven. Over."
In thirty seconds, that warning will be in the mouth of a stranger. Thirty seconds after that, it'll be shared again in the other direction. Within ten minutes, every truck driver in 300 miles east and west of that location will know there's an Oklahoma State Trooper tucked in the tall grass along Interstate 40. Nobody paid for that information. It didn't require a subscription or a checkmark to guarantee that all the "users" would hear what you had to say. It was simple and anonymous.
Every few hundred miles along this network, you'll find a place to stop, fuel up, and clean off, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Paperback novels with yellowed, sun-bleached covers sit on spinner racks in the windows, or you can grab a clamshell with a few tapes and a gnarly audio tale to help keep your eyes open as you push on a few hours more. Louisiana has its trinity of flavors, but so does the road. For five dollars, you could get a tall coffee, a pack of cigarettes, and a Hostess cupcake, and they tasted better the later into the evening you waited to fill up.
The more remote the stop, the more established the economy. Sleeping bays, coin-operated showers, and for those looking, a shadier side that didn't wait until dark to come out and play. Everything was paid in cash. A driver could drop four hundred dollars in fuel and amphetamines and leave no trace. Their logs were kept with pen and paper. They called them comic books because they were more fiction than not. As long as you got where the man told you to get by the time they told you to be there, who cared what you did from start to finish.
You could cut through dozens of police districts after an overnight bender in Amarillo and be crossing the Arkansas state line before anyone reported a crime. No cameras, no card readers, and a safety network just one click of the radio away. This was a great place to hide, and that's why it became a prime hunting ground.
The women who worked those lots were the most vulnerable. Few noticed when they went missing, as so many were already running from something. These were people's daughters, sisters, mothers, and friends. They didn't deserve to be treated the way they were, or ignored the way we did. One at a time and nobody could see them. It took hundreds before anyone would.
It took until 2003 for anybody to sit down and count. Terri Turner, a criminal analyst with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, connected the murders of seven women along the interstate highway system in her state. Her work led to the F.B.I.'s Highway Serial Killings Initiative in 2004. That database now holds more than 750 murder victims and nearly 450 potential suspects.
They were there the whole time, but nobody was counting.
A trucker’s CB could move a warning about a trooper three hundred miles in ten minutes. It never once carried a warning about these killers.
A warning only travels on a network that's listening for it, and there was no channel tuned in for these women. What they had was a name passed hand to hand across a gravel lot.
“Don't get in that one. The one hauling the reefer. Last time he was through here, the girl that went with him never came back.”
From the world of The Devil's Road coming January 2027.
