Home  Table of Contents  Next

Jennifer's Murderer

Chapter Fifteen

John Cantrell idled in the motel court with his parking lights flashing. At times, to be conspicuous was to be invisible. Dimitri had glanced his way with a worried expression, but idling traffic in a motel court was far too par for the course to spark concern.

John had done as had been expected of him. He had followed Dimitri to his prey, although not in time to stop him from harming another innocent victim. She’d be dead by now, by John’s estimation, murdered by a wounded, desperate and sick man, one with very little time of his own left to live. John had been able to read the state of the man’s soul by his posture, his walk, and the twisted expression on what had once been a handsome face. Dimitri Carvelli had been pushed over the edge, not by the world around him, but by his own pathological appetites.

John opened the manila folder on the seat at his side and glanced again at the only girl who absolutely had to die. She was getting to him already, a beautiful child, jail-bait, some father and mother’s long-lost baby girl, a child in a woman’s body, legs like a Barbie doll, and an oval face with pouting, heart-shaped lips. Her dark eyes touched the depths of his soul. He had no other information on her, just the picture and the need for her death.

“Bullshit.”

He smacked the steering wheel with his fist, increasingly agitated and frightened by his plight. He was further from home turf than he had been in twenty years. He felt like an illegal alien in an otherwise harmless place called Iowa. A week ago, he would have defined Iowa as a place filled with pigs and dull-witted farmers wearing bib-coveralls, but the people around him were, if anything, a consistently more impressive bunch than he would have found about the hood.

He sighed heavily and stared at the motel door through the rain streaming down the side window of his rented car. He’d wait another few seconds. By then, Dimitri would finish what he had started. Jennifer Wessner would be coming for her soon, and Dimitri would be ready for her. John couldn’t see beyond that extrapolation. Jennifer had stayed out of reach up until now. She’d not go down without a fight. He didn’t want to watch it happen.

The full-sized white Ford all but brushed the side of his car and stopped blocking his view of the door. A girl got out, oblivious to the downpour. He caught only a moment’s glance.

“Son of a bitch!”

It was her, Jennifer Renee Wessner, pounding at the motel room door with her car blocking his view and his line of fire. John started the engine and backed away as Jennifer called out impatiently.

Whatever she heard, or didn’t hear, from the other side of the door put her on alert. She backed from the door and brought her right hand up to the purse slung over her left shoulder, almost as if she reached for a gun.

“Way to go,” John murmured, impressed by survival instincts to match his own despite sex and age. She held her ground and waited. And waited.

Dimitri Carvelli burst through the door, awash with the blood of his victim and bellowing laughter at the horrified expression of the girl standing in his way. Dimitri thought he was dealing with still another helpless victim, and John thought himself fated to watch her die. With his own life at stake, she had to die.

But this would-be victim ignored the lunging knife. The speed and decisiveness with which she sensed trouble and reacted startled both men. Trained mercenaries seldom moved with such crisp precision. She made a half turn like a karate expert to evade the swing of the knife, whipped a small pistol from her purse, and opened fire at point blank range as he stumbled by. Dimitri was hit at least once. He threw himself to one side, fell, and tried to roll clear.

John’s hand was twisting the door handle when stroboscopic red, blue, and white lights exploded directly behind him. He glanced at his rear view mirror and cried out in exasperation. He hadn’t seen the highway patrol car pull into the drive.

A halogen spotlight pinned Jennifer and her drawn gun in a beam of white light. “Freeze!” an officer bellowed from alongside John’s door. “Drop the weapon and lie face down on the ground! Do it now!”

John saw the shocked expression on her face, and then Dimitri rose into sudden view. Jennifer dived to one side to avoid him, but when he came up shooting, he had a new priority target. A bullet ticked its way through John’s windshield on the passenger’s side of the car, ricocheted off the sheet metal roof overhead, and went out the back way. The front windshield remained intact. The back window turned opaque. Dimitri’s gunfire took out a tire of the patrol car. Its windshield exploded and rained across the inside dash.

Maybe Dimitri would have had the foresight to save his last bullet for the girl, but she ducked through the cover of the downpour and circled around to her car like a wraith. With a whine of tires sliding on the slick pavement, the white Ford vanished into the rain.

Dimitri went after her in a darker foreign sedan, leaving the officers pinned down by the shock of the unexpected exchange of gunfire and a disabled vehicle. John put his car in gear and followed in pursuit of the two, leaving his headlights off in the dimming light. The two cars ahead of him were but two sets of red tail lights in the gray downpour on the open road. The Ford was the faster of the two, easily outpacing Dimitri until traffic slowed her to the speed limit.

Maybe Dimitri took a pot shot at her. That or some other consideration caused her to slew off the road and bounce across a roadside ditch. She spewed mud and gravel accelerating down an unpaved lane leading into an empty pasture. Dimitri did a quick u-turn and followed without hesitation.

John turned in behind them, still in stealth mode, confident that neither Dimitri nor Jennifer had noticed his presence. The dirt lane quickly deteriorated into a quagmire. Rather than risk getting bogged down behind the two, John pulled out of sight into a grove of trees. He shut off the lights and engine, dropped the keys onto the floor, and abandoned the car.

John raced through the downpour until he saw the two cars stopped ahead and Dimitri limping his way after the girl across an open expanse of terrain. She could easily outdistance the both of them with her long legs and soon managed to do so. John was beginning to hope she’d make a clean escape when he spotted the gray hulk of the barn dead ahead. She be a fool to trap herself, unless…

Dimitri made a bee-line toward it. John picked up his pace, alarmed by the prospect of the spunky girl turning the tables on the wanton killer. Dimitri’s untimely death would be an unfortunate turn of events. Garko would order him to kill the girl himself, and he would refuse, regardless of consequence. Killing the girl was beyond his capability now. Dimitri’s premature death could too easily spell his own as well.

Dimitri was bellowing his rage into the storm. “Satan will feed upon your souls!” he was yelling above the roar of the rain. “Rosie, you bitch! You think you know everything!”

Delirium, or vital information to commit to memory? There was something strange about Dimitri’s maniacal pursuit of Jennifer Wessner, more to the man’s madness than met the eye.

John arrived at the barn in the nick of time to witness the trap a child had set for a madman. There was just enough daylight left to see Dimitri staggered down the central isle of the barn between empty stalls. Jennifer Wessner stood overhead on the precipice of the loft with a pitchfork balanced in her right hand, about to send it plunging into Dimitri’s back.

“What the hell are you doing on my property!” John called out, and then ducked out of sight when Dimitri whipped about and fired a wild shot.

“I’m calling the police!” John cried at the top of his lungs.

The threat of a witness turned Dimitri away from his prey-turned-predator. He fled back toward his car, slipping and sliding along the way and roared off back toward the highway. John went headfirst into bushes alongside the barn and stayed out of sight until Jennifer’s Ford crept cautiously toward the highway a few minutes later.

Lightning laced the sky overhead in delicate tendrils of white hot light. John ran for his car, caught up to her, and kept her in view five miles down the road. He followed at a safe distance until her turn signals came on. She turned off the road and pulled into the drive of the first house on the side street.

John went on by, laughing uproariously. She was watching to see if he would slow as he passed, or turn in after her.

“Smart girl.”

She waited until he went by. John watched in his rear view mirror as her headlights came back on. Judging him as harmless, some idiot with poor judgment to be driving without lights, she drove another three miles several car-lengths behind him before turning up a steep hill.

John made a u-turn at his first opportunity. As he passed the drive on his way back to town, he glanced up at the apartment building on the crest of the hill overlooking the river. He was home free now. The rest would be, at worst, a matter of waiting for the madman to close on his uncooperative victim a second time. Dimitri had made himself scarce for the moment, but John was willing to bet that Jennifer’s turn into the driveway had been witnessed by more than just himself. No matter how clever the girl, she was far out of her league crossing swords with the likes of Dimitri Carvelli.

Home  Table of Contents  Next