Mission Road Page 0,44

Stand.

The wind picked up. Maia shivered again. Too many tragedies, too many lives ended here on Mission Road.

Somewhere along this stretch of blacktop, in the Sixties, Guy White had allegedly raped a twenty-two-year-old named Delia Montoya. The old newspaper article had been discreetly vague about the facts, but Maia got the idea. Delia and Guy had met at a bar. They left together. Delia was a fiery woman, a civil rights activist. She considered herself liberated. She could date anyone she damn well pleased, but she hadn't planned on being beaten up and raped by Piedras Creek. She filed a report with the police, but two weeks later, she abruptly withdrew the charges. She appeared at the police station, shaken and wild-eyed, and gave a new statement. She claimed she'd made up the whole rape story to get attention. Guy White was off the hook.

A similar story, five months later - a Latina secretary at a local law firm accused White of raping her at Mission Park. White produced an alibi for the night in question. He hired a private investigator to prove that the young woman had a sordid past with men. She was mentally unstable. Charges went nowhere. One month later, the young woman lost her job.

Twenty years later, in the 1980s, all of Franklin White's victims had been found within a square mile of this spot. Six young women, just as Jaime Santos had said - all six sweet and pretty, just entering college with bright futures. All of them strangled to death and abandoned in the woods.

Like father like son? Maia was tempted to think so, but Frankie's victims were so different from his father's, as were the ways the two men had destroyed those women . . .

Maia looked down the dark stretch of road. She imagined roadside memorials that might've decorated this barbed wire fence over the years - crosses made of flowers, bleached memorials moldering in the darkness.

A glint of metal drew her attention. To the north, at the very edge of the streetlight's glow, a car made a U-turn and headed away.

Maia tried to convince herself that the mist and gloom were playing tricks on her eyes.

It looked like a gray Volvo had pulled out from the shoulder of the road, as if the driver had been parked there, watching her.

TITUS ROE FOCUSED HIS BINOCULARS.

The Lee woman had nice legs.

Concentrating on that helped keep his mind off the pain in his hand - his first stupid mistake of the night.

Damn meat cleaver.

He'd assumed Lee would be at the San Antonio address. If she was making trouble for Hernandez, he figured, she was probably in town. Besides, the house was right down the street. Titus had started his search there.

For his trouble, he'd gotten squirted in the eyes and hacked.

He never even got a shot at the gray-haired woman, but he hoped the old Latino was dead. Titus was pretty sure he'd nailed that bastard.

Good trick, though, he had to admit - the old guy yelling FBI! and pulling a water gun.

Probably been pretending for years, rehearsing in front of the mirror. Old man sounded so convincing he threw Titus off balance.

The water smacked Titus right between the eyes and the old lady jumped at him with the meat cleaver, chopping his left hand as he tried to defend himself. Nursing Home of the Living Dead.

Titus had felt lucky to get off one shot and get the hell out of there.

Now, he watched the Lee woman standing in the middle of Mission Road. She turned a slow circle, hesitating as she looked in his direction. No way could she see him, but her eyes seemed to stare straight into the binocular lenses.

She was clever. He'd already decided that.

He'd been heading out of Southtown, feeling sick from blood loss, when he spotted Lee's BMW cruising slowly down Presa Street like she was looking for an address. At first he didn't understand what she was doing. Then he spotted the policeman in the Acura.

Titus couldn't help but smile. If Lee hadn't been wandering around the neighborhood, trying to lose her tail, Titus never would've caught her.

He'd watched with admiration as she pulled the parking lot trick and disappeared. The cop was history, but Titus had killed half a dozen people here in the King William neighborhood, back in his glory days. He picked up Lee on South Guenther and gave her plenty of room.

Now that she'd stopped, he could shoot her. Mission Road was nice