The Shadow Highway
The Shadow Highway
THE DEVIL’S ROAD Chapter 05: Follow the Lead --- Issue 01: The Shadow Highway
Welcome to Issue #16 of The Devil’s Road, a serial novel following the exploits of Samantha Hart, a Sequoyah County Sheriff, full of vengeance and fury using her badge to hunt down her sister's killer as she uncovers a trail of bloodshed that coats the heartland. If you missed it, you can read last week’s Chapter 4: Tall in the Saddle, Issue 04: Cold on the Slab.
If you are new to the series, I recommend you check out Chapter 1 which you can read or listen to for free here:
If you are enjoying this series, please consider sharing it with others, and don’t hoard all the good tales for yourself.
And now, please enjoy Chapter 5 Issue 1 of … The Devil’s Road.
In 2004 an Oklahoma Bureau of Investigations analyst discovered a crime pattern along the Interstate 40 corridor between Oklahoma and Mississippi. Subsequently, The Federal Bureau of Investigations (F.B.I.) started the Highway Serial Killings Initiative. They discovered over 500 bodies of women along the interstate highway system with more than 200 potential suspects, a trail of bloodshed that coats the heartland. The Devil’s Road is a serialized novel based on this horrific discovery.
Lieutenant Samantha Hart uses every ounce of will power to pull her foot free from the accelerator which is currently pressed to the floorboard. The Sequoyah County police cruiser slips through the night along Highway 64, the speedometer needle buried below the last number on the dial. All perfectly legal if she had turned on her siren and lights, but that was the furthest thing from her mind.
The wig was gone. A dead body shows up on the side of a road with a poor girls face torn off and sewn back on, and the sheriff’s department can’t seem to collect all the evidence. No doubt, had the body shown up at the Fort Smith Country Club there would have been more attention to detail.
The pattern was clear to Sam. Her stack of case files now numbered twelve. If you followed the dates, it was easy to see they had a serial killer on their hands. Four victims were red heads. The most recent one had a red wig. Nine of them were white, the other three were Native American. That was where he started, in the reservations. Every single victim was a prostitute. All had been beaten, and the recent bodies had been mutilated. Whoever he was, he was refining his process.
Sam had made every effort to handle this through proper channels, but Captain James was only interested in keeping his office. If it didn’t win more votes, it wasn’t worth the effort, but she had family on the line. Her sister was one of the files in that box. Votes be damned.
The car was in neutral now, tires humming as it coasted at eighty miles per hour toward the intersection of Highway 64 and County Road 4490. She pulls the steering wheel hard squealing into the turn before dropping the transmission back into drive and punching the accelerator. In another two miles she’d be to the site.
A beam cuts across the roadside illuminating a loose flap of yellow, “DO NOT CROSS,” police tape. Sam grabs it and ties it back to a stake in the ground. The headlights from her cruiser light up the hillside. She walks to the hilltop where earlier today she stood next to a dead body.
The grass has been trampled flat. She pans her light over the hill in all directions looking for the wig. She nearly lost it in the wind when she arrived on site, but was able to rescue it before it blew away. Unsurprisingly, when she was sent on another call, there was little effort to preserve the site for evidence.
Walking in concentric circles around the hill yields nothing but disappointment. The wig is gone. Sam gets back in her cruiser and does a u-turn to get back to the highway. That’s when she sees it. The cruiser’s headlights illuminate the tall dead prairie grass where a plastic bag flits in the wind.
Sam stands over the plastic bag. Her flash fires on her camera as she snaps a photo of the location she found it. Inside she can see the stained rags, just like the bag she found in Mac Gibbons car.
Sliding the flashlight between her cheek and shoulder, she pokes through the rags in the bag with her ballpoint pen. They are stained a dark maroon color, the color of blood. At the bottom there’s a receipt.
Sam puts on a pair of gloves and reaches into the bag to pull out the receipt. There were four items purchased, a bundle of shop towels, hydraulic fluid, an egg salad sandwich, and a pack of Camel cigarettes. The receipt is from the Ole’ 64 Truck Stop. It was paid in cash.
Again the accelerator hovers a quarter inch off of the floor board. The digital clock on the dash now reads 3:58 AM. She’s been on duty for twenty-two hours, but who’s counting.
Sam’s never had a lead. For over two and a half years there’s been nothing but the collection of evidence. She pieces together what might be, and is ridiculed by her entire department. At first she thought it was because she was the only woman on the force, she was breaking up the boys club. However, after a while she figured out the real reason no one cared. Prostitutes don’t vote, and newspapers don’t care about dead sex workers, but then her sister was added to the list of bodies. Sam finds that last quarter inch of room between her foot and the floor board pushing her cruiser’s engine to a full out roar as she flies towards the Ole’ 64 Truck Stop and the first opening in the case that could solve her sister’s murder.
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