Serial
Authors: Jack Kilborn and Blake Crouch
This eBook is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
First edition published as an eBook, May 2009.
Copyright © 2009 Jack Kilborn and Blake Crouch
All rights reserved.
For more information about the authors and their publications, please visit
www.jakonrath.com
www.blakecrouch.com
Illustrations and graphic design copyright © 2009 Jeroen ten Berge.
All rights reserved.
For more information, please visit
www.jeroentenberge.com
The authors would like to thank Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., and Minotaur Books, a division of St. Martin’s Press, for their help in making this eBook available to readers.
In which Joe and Blake interview each other about the experience of writing “Serial”
The hardest thing about killing a hitchhiker is finding one to pick up.
Donaldson could remember just ten years ago, when interstates boasted a hitcher every ten miles, and a discriminating killer could pick and choose who looked the easiest, the most fun, the juiciest. These days, cops kept the expressways clear of easy marks, and Donaldson was forced to cruise off-ramps, underpasses, and rest areas, prowl back roads, take one hour coffee breaks at oases. Recreational murder was becoming more trouble than it was worth.
He’d found this one standing in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. The kid had been obvious, leaning against the cement ashtray near the entrance, an oversize hiking pack strapped to his back. He was approaching every patron leaving the restaurant, practicing his grin between rejections.
A ripe plum, ready to pluck.
Donaldson didn’t even have to initiate contact. He walked in to use the bathroom and strolled out car keys in hand, letting them jingle a bit. The kid solicited him almost immediately.
“Excuse me, sir. Are you heading up north?”
Donaldson stopped, pretending to notice the man for the first time. He was young, maybe mid-twenties. Short, reddish hair, a few freckles on his face, mostly hidden by glasses. His clothing looked worn but of good quality. Donaldson was twice his age, and damn near twice his weight.
Donaldson rubbed his chin, which he knew softened his harsh features.
“In fact I am, son.”
The boy’s eyes lit up, but he kept a lid on his excitement. Any hitcher worth his salt knew to test the waters before sealing the deal.
“I am, too. If you’d like some company, I can chip in for gas.” He hooded his eyes and quickly added, “No funny stuff. I’m just looking for a ride. I was hoping to get to Ogden by midnight. Got family up there. My name’s Brett, by the way.”
Well played, Donaldson thought. Friendly, a little desperate, making clear this wasn’t a sexual hookup and that he had people waiting for him.
As if any of that would keep him safe.
“How do I know you’re not some psycho?” Donaldson asked. He knew that was pushing it, but he liked the irony.
“There’s a gas station across the street. I can top off the tank, pay with a credit card. All gas stations have cameras these days. Credit card is a paper trail. If anything happens to you, that would link me to your car, and I’d get caught.”
Smart kid. But not that smart.
The really smart ones don’t hitchhike.
“Won’t need gas for a few hundred miles.” Donaldson took off his Cubs baseball hat, running a hand over his gray, thinning hair. Another way to disarm the victim. No one feared grandfatherly types. “Until then, if you promise not to sing any show tunes, you got yourself a ride.”
Brett smiled, hefted his pack onto his shoulders, and followed his ride into the parking lot. Donaldson unlocked the doors and the kid loaded his pack into the backseat of Donaldson’s 2006 black Honda Accord, pausing when he saw the clear plastic covers on the front seats.
“My dog, Neil, usually rides up front with me,” Donaldson said, shrugging. “I don’t like him messing up the upholstery.”
Brett flashed skepticism until he noticed the picture taped to the dash: Donaldson and a long-haired dachshund.
“Sheds like crazy,” Donaldson said. “If you buy a dog, stick with short-haired breads.”
That was apparently reassurance enough, because Brett climbed in.
Donaldson heaved himself into the driver’s seat, the car bouncing on its shocks.
“Buckle up for safety.” Donaldson resisted the urge to lick his lips, then released the brake, started the car, and pulled onto the highway.
The first ten miles were awkward. Always were. Strangers tended to stay strangers. How often did a person initiate conversation on a plane or while waiting in line? People kept to themselves. It made them feel safe.
Donaldson broke the tension by asking the standard questions. Where’d you go to school? What do you do for a living? Where you headed? When’d you start hitchhiking? Invariably, the conversation turned to him.
“So what’s your name?” Brett asked.
“Donaldson.” No point in lying. Brett wouldn’t be alive long enough to tell anyone.
“What do you do, Donaldson?”
“I’m a courier.”
Donaldson sipped from the Big Gulp container in the cup holder, taking a hit of caffeinated sugar water. He offered the cup to Brett, who shook his head. Probably worried about germs. Donaldson smiled. That should have been the least of his worries.
“So you mean you deliver packages?”
“I deliver anything. Sometimes overnight delivery isn’t fast enough, and people are willing to pay a premium to get it same day.”
“What sort of things?”
“Things people need right away. Legal documents. Car parts for repairs. A diabetic forgets his insulin, guy loses his glasses and can’t drive home without them, kid needs his cello for a recital. Or a kidney needs to get to a transplant location on time. That’s the run I’m on right now.”
Donaldson jerked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing to the backseat floorboard. Brett glanced back, saw a cooler sitting there, a biohazard sticker on the lid.
“No kidding, there’s a kidney in there?”
“There will be, once I get it.” Donaldson winked at the kid. “By the way, what’s your blood type?”
The kid chuckled nervously. Donaldson joined in.
A long stretch of road approaching. No cars in either direction.
“Sounds like an interesting job,” Brett said.
“It is. Perfect for a loner like me. That’s why it’s nice to have company every so often. Gets lonely on the road.”
“What about Neil?”
“Neil?”
Brett pointed at the photograph on the dashboard. “Your dog. You said he rode with you sometimes.”
“Oh, yeah. Neil. Of course. But it isn’t the same as having a human companion. Know what I mean?”
Brett nodded, then glanced at the fuel gauge.
“You’re down to a quarter tank,” he said.
“Really? I thought I just filled up. Next place we see, I’ll take you up on that offer to pay.”
It was a bright, sunny late afternoon, clean country air blowing in through the inch of window Donaldson had open. A perfect day for a drive. The road ahead was clear, no one behind them.
“So seriously,” Donaldson asked, “What’s your blood type?”
Brett’s chuckle sounded forced this time, and Donaldson didn’t join in. Brett put his hand in his pocket. Going for a weapon, or holding one for reassurance, Donaldson figured. Not many hitchers traveled without some form of reassurance.
But Donaldson had something better than a knife, or a gun. His weapon weighed thirty-six hundred pounds and was barreling down the road at eighty miles per hour.
Checking once more for traffic, Donaldson gripped the wheel, braced himself, and stood on the brake.
The car screeched toward a skidding halt, Brett’s seatbelt popping open exactly the way Donaldson had rigged it to, and the kid launched headfirst into the dashboard. The spongy plastic had, beneath the veneer, been reinforced with unforgiving steel.
The car shuddered to a stop, the stench of scorched rubber in the air. Brett was in bad shape. With no seatbelt and one hand in his pocket, he’d banged his nose up pretty good. Donaldson grasped his hair, rammed his face into the dashboard two more times, then opened the glove compartment. He grabbed a plastic zip tie, checked again for oncoming traffic, and quickly secured the kid’s hands behind his back. In Brett’s coat pocket, he found a tiny Swiss Army knife. Donaldson barked out a laugh.
If memory served, and it usually did, there was an off ramp less than a mile ahead, and then a remote stretch of farmland. Donaldson pulled back onto the highway and headed for it, whistling as he drove.
The farm stood just where he remembered it. Donaldson pulled off the road into a cornfield and drove through the dead stalks until he could no longer see the road. He killed the engine, set the parking brake—the Accord had transmission issues—then tugged out the keys to ensure it wouldn’t roll away.
His passenger whimpered as Donaldson muscled him out of the car and dragged him into the stalks.
He whimpered even more when Donaldson jerked his pants down around his ankles, got him loosened up with an ear of corn, and then forced himself inside.
“Gonna stab me with your little knife?” he whispered in Brett’s ear between grunts. “Think that was going to save you?”
When he’d finished, Donaldson sat on the kid’s chest and tried out all the attachments on the Swiss Army knife for himself. The tiny scissors worked well on eyelids. The nail file just reached the eardrums. The little two inch blade was surprisingly sharp and adept at whittling the nose down to the cartilage. And the corkscrew did a fine job on Brett’s Adam’s apple, popping it out in one piece and leaving a gaping hole that poured blood bright as a young cabernet.
Apple was a misnomer. It tasted more like a peach pit. Sweet and stringy.
He shoved another ear of corn into Brett’s neck hole, then stood up to watch.
Donaldson had killed a lot of people in a lot of different ways, but suffocation especially tickled his funnybone. When people bled to death they just got sleepy. It was tough to see their expression when they were on fire, with all the thrashing and flames. Damaging internal organs, depending on the organ, was either too fast, too slow, or too loud.
But a human being deprived of oxygen would panic for several minutes, providing quite a show. This kid lasted almost five, his eyes bulging out, wrenching his neck side to side in futile attempts to remove the cob, and turning all the colors of the rainbow before finally giving up the ghost. It got Donaldson so excited he almost raped him again. But the rest of the condoms were in the car, and befitting a man his age, once he got them and returned to the scene of death, his ardor probably would have waned.
He didn’t bother trying to take Brett’s kidney, or any of his other parts. What the heck could he do with his organs anyway? Sell them on eBay?
Cleanup was the part Donaldson hated most, but he always followed a strict procedure. First, he bagged everything associated with the crime. The rubber, the zip tie, the Swiss Army knife, and the two corn cobs, which might have his prints on them. Then he took a spray bottle of bleach solution and a roll of paper towels and cleaned out the interior of his car. He used baby wipes on himself, paying special attention to his fingernails. Everything went into the white plastic garbage bag, along with a full can of gasoline and more bleach spray.
He took the money from Brett’s wallet—forty lousy bucks—and found nothing of interest in his backpack. These went into the bag as well, and then he soaked that and the body with lighter fluid.
The fire started easily. Donaldson knew from experience that he had about five minutes before the gas can exploded. He drove out of the cornfield at a fast clip, part of him disappointed he couldn’t stay to watch the fireworks.