Blood Echoes by Thomas H. Cook Page A

street and give chase. Then it suddenly came to rest, its flashing light finally blinking off, leaving nothing but the lights of the small town disappearing behind the men in the green Caprice, and only the dense rural darkness up ahead.
    Once again Carl felt the exhilaration of escape, the high rapture of thumbing his nose at the law. To Wayne and George, it was an outrageous exploit that served to demonstrate not only Carl’s daring but his invulnerability. To Billy, however, it had demonstrated something else, the terrible depth of his brother’s self-destructiveness, his Bonnie-and-Clyde urge to die in a hail of gunfire, even at the cost of taking the rest of them with him. Carl, it seemed, was on a suicide mission, and as Billy watched his brother’s dark hair slapping in the wind that rushed through the car’s unlighted interior, it struck him that in all likelihood he was destined to die with him, all of them together, to pay the debt they had incurred on River Road. There was no talking to him or reasoning with him. Carl Isaacs was now on autopilot, his mind entirely propelled by its wildest and most reckless fantasies, a death ship rushing toward the rocky bar.
    And yet, as the Caprice sailed on through the thick southern night, even Billy had to admit that Carl had done it again, spit on the sheriff and lived to tell about it.
    The mythical sheriff, however, was not finished yet.

Chapter Eleven
    O n the morning of May 17, the community’s only newspaper, the Donalsonville News , a weekly published each Thursday morning, began its coverage of the murders with the bold headline:
    COMMUNITY SHOCKED BY MURDER OF
SIX MEMBERS OF THE ALDAY FAMILY
    The following story related the murders and the discovery of the bodies, along with police speculation that based on the condition of the interior of the trailer, the Alday victims had been killed without a struggle, probably immediately upon entering the trailer. Only Mary, the paper noted, appeared to have been “running from someone” at the time of her murder.
    The paper went on to quote Gil Kelley, foreman of the coroner’s jury, to the effect that Mary Alday had probably been followed home by “four or five hippie-type men” who’d been seen pulling into her yard late Monday afternoon.
    The paper noted that Governor Jimmy Carter had dispatched officials to Donalsonville to work on the case, and went on to speculate that police were searching for several escapees from a Maryland prison camp in connection with the murders. According to the director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, William Beardsley, the paper said, so much evidence linked the escapees to the murders that at the present time there was “no point in looking for anybody else.”
    *     *     *
    At about the time the people of Donalsonville were reading their first local reports of the murders, the Isaacs brothers and George Dungee stopped for breakfast at a small restaurant in northern Alabama. By then they had crossed and recrossed into Mississippi several times, moving randomly, their vision of a western escape decidedly dulled by the two near-captures in Mississippi. While Wayne went into the restaurant, Carl remained behind the wheel, glancing occasionally into the rearview mirror where he could see Billy and George staring vacantly ahead.
    Minutes later, Wayne scrambled quickly back into the car. While in the restaurant, he told the others, he’d seen a customer reading a local newspaper. “It was all about the killings,” he said excitedly. “I couldn’t see what it said, but I figured it might have our pictures in it, so I got the hell out of there.”
    Carl nodded, but said nothing. Certainly he could not have been disturbed by the newspaper story, since he could feel his criminal fame building by the second.
    Criminal fame had never been his younger brother’s life ambition, however, and