The Brotherhood of the Wheel Read Free

and spilling the files he had fallen asleep reading.
    â€œWha…” he muttered, wiping drool from the side of his mouth. The phone rang again. “That’s not even my ringtone.”
    Dann’s hair was salt-and-pepper, and it made him look more like a college professor than a federal agent. He had played CIAA baseball through school, had almost gone on to the major leagues before the FBI recruited him straight out of North Carolina A&T. He still had the build and the gait of a pitcher. Dann was the assistant special agent in charge of a division of the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program called the Highway Serial Killings Initiative. It was a program established by the FBI back in 2009 to track unsolved murders that occurred near interstate highways and to look for the patterns that might indicate the signature of a serial murderer. There was a map of the United States on Dann’s office wall. Each red dot on the map was an unsolved murder on or near the highways. The map bled red—over five hundred cases reported, with more coming in every day. The rough estimate was that, at any given time, HSKI had about two hundred suspects committing serial murder across the roadways, a nightmarish circuit of pain, loss, and death. HSKI had cleared twenty-five cases during its first year in business, but, as the stack of files Dann brought home with him every night indicated, the FBI was bailing water with a teaspoon.
    Dann blinked and looked down at the screen of his ringing smartphone. Where the number of the incoming call should be there was a line of text instead: “Answer it Cecil.”
    He answered the call with a swipe of his finger. “How the hell do you do that?” he said into the phone. “Do you have any idea what time it is you’re calling? Because I don’t, but it’s late, I know that!”
    â€œListen carefully, Agent Dann. The I-70 Torturer is a long-haul truck driver named Wayne Ray Rhodes.” The voice was automated, the kind you got when you received a spam phone call. “You have just received an email with DMV and GPS information on Rhodes’s truck, a mug shot of Rhodes when he was arrested for assaulting a prostitute in 2010 in Illinois, and a link to his information in your suspect database.”
    Dann shook his head, “ Our database? Really? I don’t suppose you gift-wrapped him for us, too, did you?”
    â€œRhodes should be in the custody of the Missouri State Police shortly in St. Louis,” the stilted electronic voice continued. “Jimmie Aussapile is pursuing him as we speak.”
    â€œAussapile,” Dann said. “Again. Busy fella.” Dann climbed out of his recliner and knocked over his tower of files in the process. Oscar the dog, his meal disturbed, scampered away. Dann looked around for his shoes. Quietly, Jenna descended the stairs, pulling on a robe over her nightgown. She mouthed the word “Work?” to him, and Dunn nodded as he continued to look for his shoes while quickly trying to jot down notes on a pad of paper.
    â€œListen, I don’t know who you people are,” Dann said to the voice on the phone, “where you get your information or how the hell you do what you do, but you are interfering with multiple federal, state, and local investigations, and you can’t just keep doing this.…”
    Dann looked down at the floor, covered with his scattered files. Black-and-white crime-scene photos looked back at him. Women, girls, torn to shreds and worse, so much worse; many still had no names, so many unavenged. He tried to gather them up so that his wife wouldn’t have to see.
    â€œBut thank you,” he said, “for this one.”
    â€œYour shoes are under the coffee table,” the automated voice said before it hung up. Dann looked at the screen of his phone. It now said, “The wheel turns.” Beneath the words was a stylized circle with a central