Death Trap Read Online Free Page A

distinctive odor. Very potent. Very gamey.
    To the sheriff, there was no mistaking what it was.
    He walked over to the trunk. The plastic light housings on the rear end of the vehicle were gone, melted like candle wax, sponged into the black soil below his feet. The trunk was propped open with a halogen tool, a fireman’s crowbar. The car’s license plate had fallen off, but was on the ground, still intact, upside down. That was good to see. Identifying whose vehicle it was would be easy enough.
    The sheriff went in for a closer look.
    The backseat of the car had burned into ash, spring coils popping up. This gave the sheriff a clear view from the inside of the trunk into the hub of the vehicle’s backseat. There was definitely something bulky and large, all burned up, inside the trunk. There looked to be a blanket, or comforter of some type, underneath.
    Williams leaned in for an even closer look. He knew right away what he was dealing with now. It was not going to be an uncomplicated night, after all.
    The fire chief was off—but not too far.
    “These are human beings,” Williams said to the fire chief, “not an animal.”
    Both men stared at the mound of charred remains before them. It was hard to make out, but the cop was right. If you focused on the bulky entanglement of what looked to be two large animals coiled up together, you could clearly see the outline of two dead human beings, and what was left of the arm of one person. Williams believed, he said later, he was looking at a male and a female, or a man and a child. He didn’t know which.
    “I knew one was a male,” he recalled, “but I couldn’t tell if the other one was a female or a child. [It was] much smaller.”
    Either way, Williams was looking at the remnants of a heinous crime. A double murder. The vehicle was, obviously, the cover-up.
    The crime scene.
    Williams needed to clear the area. With help from several fire officials, he ran yellow crime-scene tape in a circular pattern extending to about thirty-five feet in diameter around the vehicle. He warned that nothing was to be moved or removed from the scene. Nobody should touch anything. Williams said he needed to get the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) out to start investigating. They needed to sift through what were the charred remains of two badly burned bodies and find out what had happened. It appeared a double homicide had been committed.
    Williams went back to his car and got on the radio.

4
    Philip and Joan Bates did not find much sleep throughout the night of February 15, 2002. Alan’s parents spent long periods staring at the ceiling. Wondering. Waiting. Counting sheep. Their stomachs in knots. When was the phone going to ring? When was that news coming? Joan knew it wasn’t going to be good.
    A mother’s instinct.
    “I had done all I knew how to do,” Philip said later, recalling that hectic night, “and went to bed for a few hours.”
    That morning Philip made coffee. The clock on the wall in the kitchen said 6:00 A.M . They had not heard from Alan since Friday afternoon. Not a word from anyone, for that matter. Philip called his son’s cell phone again, same with Terra’s. But he got the same voice message.
    He put the phone down, he said later, and thought about it: Darn . Those kids are in trouble.
    It was time to file a missing persons report, Philip knew. It was the only way to get law enforcement out and about, looking for Alan, Terra and the kids.
    Sipping his coffee, Philip knew the first question law enforcement would ask was a question he did not have the answer to. He needed to get some information first. Be prepared. Have what they need. Don’t sound desperate. Appear organized. An engineer thinks through every contingency, every possible problem before it happens.
    The worried father took out a pad. Sat down and called rental car agencies inside the Birmingham Airport terminal to see which company had rented Alan and Terra a car. Philip knew Alan always