Sandman

by Tammy Bird

  “One more thing,” Xavier said.

  She swore she heard his male ego inflating his chest.

  “The killer may have been absent from his employment for several days before and after each kill. The time around a kill is usually significant to a serial killer. So significant, they often remove themselves from their usual routine both before and after.”

  “Thanks, Xavier. I owe you.” Zahra disconnected the call just as she rounded the corner onto Katia’s street. She passed the light-blue VW parked several hundred feet from the pale-green Victorian beach house. The blond hair of the tanned driver was situated just shy of center in the driver’s seat. She wouldn’t have noticed him at all if she didn’t already know he was there. He blended in with the sand against the turquoise of the sea. Zahra hoped her nonchalant speed and body movements would convince Andrew she wasn’t here because they knew he was outside. It was imperative she not hand him any power or control over the situation.

  Zahra pulled as far up in the driveway as she dared do without causing suspicion. Her hand went to the bulge under her jacket. The gun gave her a sense of freedom she never took lightly.

  She reached for the door handle. Being in proximity of harm never came easy to her. She wasn’t afraid, but she wasn’t comfortable, either.

  ****

  Andrew sat alone in his van. He thought Katia saw him from an upstairs window earlier in the evening, but there was no sudden burst through the door, no screaming into his cell phone by the irate teammate. Did she have his cell number? He doubted it. She could have gotten it easily enough from the directory, or her buddy Elliot, but she wouldn’t. She didn’t like him. After this afternoon, she probably hated him. Andrew wished he could let them know he wasn’t a bad guy, that he was on their side. He knew nothing he could say would matter. He was the odd man out, and it was going to stay that way. And it was best that way.

  He rolled his neck, sat up straight, and thought about streaming some music on his phone. Probably not a great idea. A bright screen might bring attention, even if only for a few minutes.

  Instead, he contemplated his first days in Buxton. When he started with the Hatteras Island crew, he was in awe of Katia. He thought about her all of the time. He wanted to talk to her; he wanted to get to know her. He was mesmerized by her strange beauty, by her soft golden-brown skin hued like a page in one of those adult coloring books. The woman was a walking tattoo. He loved the way the reds and blues swirled with the greens and yellows to form pictures. When Katia caught him staring the first time, she didn’t ignore it like other women he met. She pushed her perfectly chopped, black hair away from the edge of her glasses, stepped into his space, and smiled. It wasn’t a smile that said, “Aw, thanks for noticing.” It was a smile that said, “Not in a million years, asshole.”

  In that moment, Andrew knew he had zero chance with her. He wasn’t stupid. He was a man nearing thirty-five with an Ichabod Crane nose and a bit of a belly. He was also a man. Elliot warned him about that long before Katia caught him staring.

  What Andrew could do was make sure Katia and those around her stayed safe. It was his goal to make sure she stayed alive while they sorted out these murders on the island.

  He looked back at the house. There was movement at the upstairs window. Was Katia watching him again? He thought she was downstairs with Zahra. He looked closer. It wasn’t Katia. It was Marco, Katia’s autistic little brother.

  Not autistic, he corrected himself. Little brother with autism spectrum disorder. Marco was waving. Andrew waved back.

  ****

  He sat silently, staring at her, willing her to break through the fog of her drug-induced sleep. Open your eyes, Elizabeth. Realize what fate your mother has sealed for you. When he learned the storm uncovered Gina Dahl, he knew he must retrieve her daughter and kill her, not only because she was a deviant soul, but because she knew too much about him and her mom.

  Sandman looked down at the blade in his hand. Even in the dim, windowless room, the edge created starbursts of light as he moved it from side to side. He watched it, tilted it to catch the light from above in a way that made the starbursts play along Elizabeth’s cheek and down her throat.

  Elizabeth’s eyes flew open. Her head jerked away from the starburst.

  There we are. “Hi, Elizabeth.” Wide eyes, so wild and afraid. He could see her chest heave, feel her fear as it climbed up her throat. She surveyed her surroundings, probably making mental notes, feeling her chains, testing her limbs. She moved her arms, yanked hard. He watched her eyes travel over her legs.

  “I’ve been waiting,” he said. “I cleaned you up as best I could and changed your clothes. I attempted to comb your hair. You wouldn’t think it would be so tangled. It’s short enough. It’s thick, though, isn’t it?”

  Elizabeth remained silent, but her eyes spoke to him loud and clear.

  “I know it still smells like piss in here. I’m sorry about that.” He could see her repulsion, her attempt to breathe through her mouth. “Can you taste the smell?” He leaned his head back against the concrete wall and closed his eyes. “I can.” He took a deep breath. He enjoyed the realness of being a human that repulsed others. “I like it, the way it sits in your mouth and clings to the inside of your cheeks. Would you like to shower, Elizabeth? Would you like to feel clean?”

  “Why am I here?” Her voice sounded raspy from four days of drugs and a lack of water.

  He opened his eyes and looked across the small space between them. “You’ll feel better if you shower and put on clean clothes. I brought you some. And when you’re ready, I’ll tell you a story.”

  “I’m not a three-year-old. Just tell me why.” Her tone indicated anger and impatience, but the rising intonation at the end of her sentence told him she was failing at being strong.

  “Suit yourself.” Sandman was tired of her voice. He didn’t have time between Gina and Elizabeth to rejuvenate and prepare. He told her about the bathroom like a steward would announce exits on a plane. “If you change your mind, your restraints will allow you access to the toilet and shower area. I won’t bother you in the room—unless you don’t respond, or come when told. I’m not a pervert.”

  Her words were gruff. “Fuck. You.”

  “That’s not why we’re here,” he said. He heard more force in her voice that time. It gave him strength. He stretched his legs out in front of him and moved his head from side to side until a loud pop filled the gray air. “Although fucking you can be arranged. I’ve fucked others, Elizabeth. Fucked them while I waited for the perfect moment. Would you like to cum while you die, Elizabeth?”

  “Why?” she asked again. She yanked at the chains, held them forward. “I’ve done nothing to you, to any…”

  And back to whiny. Her voice droned on in his head. He hated their voices, the way they pretended they were innocent and he was somehow to blame for their fate. “Your mother, Elizabeth. That’s why you’re here. She did this to you. Her laissez faire attitude about women and sex. Your attempt to do to Katia what your vile mother did to you. I would have let you live if your mother hadn’t come back. I would have. But she did, and here we are.”

  Sandman thought about Gina. He wanted to take the time to relive the beautiful moment when her breath left her body and she gave in completely to his touch. Elizabeth was like a younger version of her mother, like a living trophy. He felt himself harden under the constraints of his jeans. Not now, he scolded himself. You promised Elizabeth a story, didn’t you? He closed his eyes, breathed in the smell of fear and sweat and piss and darkness. He would save that memory for later.

  “Did you know,” he said, looking directly into Elizabeth’s eyes for the first time, “from birth to age six or seven is when a child learns what love is? They…” He paused, letting the thought sink into his own psyche as much as that of his guest. “Who are the infamous they, anyway? Stupid, whoever they are.”

  Elizabeth’s breathing was rapid, shallow.
He liked that. He also liked that she was now quiet. He pulled his legs back up from the floor and rested his arms across his knees. “They say children deprived of love end up paying for the deprivation for the rest of their lives, that serial killers tend to fall into this group. But you know what, Elizabeth? I wasn’t deprived.” He tilted the knife in his hand, watched the dim light dance off of the sharp silver. “I wasn’t left alone in my crib or banished to my room. I wasn’t an unwanted boarder in my home. No. I was quite loved. Like you were loved. You were loved, weren’t you, Elizabeth?”

  He knew she was loved. Her mom and dad doted on her as a baby, as a young child. People in a small town talked. Everyone knew everyone. Stories were told and retold. “Yes. You were loved. And then everything changed. Didn’t it, Elizabeth?” He felt for her, knew she was used as a pawn in her parent’s divorce.

  Elizabeth pulled at the restraints again. “Undo these,” she said. “Let me go. I won’t tell anyone I was here.”

  Sandman nodded. He pointed the knife in her direction. “From eight to twelve, negative predispositions are exacerbated and reinforced.”

  “Listen to me.”

  He didn’t. “Wrong again, they.” He smiled at her. “My parents didn’t divorce. My father didn’t drink or disappear. Hell, he didn’t even drift away emotionally. He did love his sister, though.” Saying the words out loud made him so angry. Your auntie loves you. She loves being near you. “My dad trusted my aunt. Believed her. While she was pulling me close late at night, running her sweaty palms across my stomach and around my young-boy-sized dick, making me grow hard against her fingers and against my will, my dad trusted her. He trusted her, and she used that trust to manipulate him into leaving me with her. A lot.”

  “Your aunt and my mom are not alike.” She spit the words at him from her place on the filthy mattress.

  “I killed her, you know,” Sandman said. His voice was steady and calm. “My aunt. Just like I killed your mother. I made her trust me, and I yanked her head back and killed her.”

  He looked at Elizabeth, sitting there, just looking forward, as if she was looking through him. Bitch. He could feel the anger growing from a dark place inside. “I was right to bring you here. You would never have left her alone. Now you will die for your disgusting ways.” He knew she would die. He didn’t know where he would have her buried. He needed a new graveyard. It came to him then. Ocracoke. Plenty of quiet, deserted real estate in Ocracoke.

  Having decided that piece of the plan, he felt a renewed sense of purpose. He returned to his story. “Proper socialization,” he said. His head nodded slowly up and down. “That’s key. I know what your mom did to you, Elizabeth. I know she made you sleep with her for comfort.”

  “What are you talking about? She is—” Her jaws clenched.

  “Was, Elizabeth. Was.”

  “You sick fuck.” Elizabeth’s hands formed into fists. She lunged against her restraints until they pulled tight against her wrists and ankles. The red moving up her neck and taking over her face was obvious even in the dim light. “My mom never touched me in any way that was inappropriate.”

  He was impressed she still had so much spunk. Her mom was far less fun. All she did was cry. Criers were the worst. “That’s what I told myself about my aunt, too. Until I couldn’t pretend anymore. You don’t have to pretend, Elizabeth. I can help you. Sexually stressful events. That’s what shrinks call them. Sexually stressful events. My sweet, lovely, auntie liked for me to masturbate into her clean panties while she touched herself. What did your mom like, Elizabeth? What things did she ask you to do to help her make it through the night? Tell me. And perhaps I’ll let you live.”

  “You won’t let me live, asshole,” Elizabeth said. “I already know that.” Her rise in pitch at the end of each sentence hinted at sarcasm. Otherwise her voice remained flat, resigned. Her body shook. “Fuck you.”

  “Suit yourself.” He shrugged and shifted his position against the wall. “You’re right, you know. I can’t let you live.”

  Neither spoke for several minutes. Elizabeth, chained, in a T-shirt and soiled underwear, sat on the mattress he laid on the concrete floor, while Sandman, clad in an ironed, button-down shirt, a few shades lighter than his dark-blue jeans, sat with his back against the wall, feet flat, knees bent by his chest. The five feet between them was dim. A light fixture shone overhead, but it never burned more than a twenty-five-watt bulb while they were alive. He liked it dim. Until cleanup. They were nowhere near that yet. He wanted her alive, wanted to enjoy her fear and sweat, wanted her to know what happened to women who tried to force their sick fantasies onto children. Katia isn’t a child, the voice in his head reminded him. But she can still be saved. She isn’t one of us. She’s unharmed from within.

  “That painting you were working on,” he said. “That was Katia, wasn’t it?”

  Elizabeth didn’t respond. She stared at the wall behind him. She held her hands together, one in a fist and the other wrapped tightly around it. He assumed she was trying to stop the shaking.

  “No need to answer. I know it was. I can’t risk you trying to expose her to our kind of sickness. You can understand that, can’t you, Elizabeth? Your mom was going to bring her to you. Did you know that? She was going to bring her to your little art exhibit.” He leaned forward against his legs. His face contorted. His mouth felt dry. “It wasn’t enough she turned you into a lesbian with her coddling. She was trying to do the same to Katia.”

  A single tear made its way down Elizabeth’s cheek. “You killed my mom because I’m a lesbian? You think my mom was a child molester?”

  He leaned back. He hit a nerve.

  Elizabeth managed to get herself into a kneeling position on the mattress. “You sit there with your back against the wall, contemplating your next words. You’re not taking a lunch break on a job, sitting with friends, chatting about life.” She moved forward until she reached the end of her chain. Her head was slightly above his level. She lowered her gaze. Meeting his eyes with her own. “You know nothing.” This time the pitch was on the first word in the sentence. “My mother was a kind and gentle soul.”

  Sandman heard Elizabeth, but she sounded far away. Her voice became background noise to his own thoughts. He started to talk over the sounds of her. “I knew long before I started killing that I would kill, that it was going to end up that way. The more she touched me. The more I responded. The fantasies of her death just became too strong. It felt good. Really good.” He ran his finger over the blade of the knife he still held in his hand. His breathing slowed.

  Elizabeth stopped talking and sank back onto the mattress.

  “After the first time, you want to get better. Your fantasies become more elaborate. You play the moment over in your head as you drift off to sleep at night.” His voice was soft, as if his words were a bedtime story he had read a thousand times. “What needs to be changed next time? Done more slowly? What went well? Could I hold my hand differently for a cleaner slice, a faster death, less mess? What if I toyed with her longer, let her climax? And the next time, what if I take something to hold before I bury her, something to help me relive the moment?” He paused. In his silence, he licked his lips, remembered tucking Gina into her sandy grave. “It’s all about choices, Elizabeth. Choices and control. Did you ever fantasize about killing her, Elizabeth? When she pulled your young, nightgown-clad body into hers? Did you want to hurt her?”

  “Sick bastard. Who are you to presume because Katia and I were in a relationship my mother molested me?”

  He felt betrayed by her words. He wasn’t sick. The world was sick. The men and women who assumed women were kind and good were sick. He only wanted to save them. “Don’t. Ever.”

  “Don’t ever what?” Her body shook so hard her words came out in a vibrating tone. “Why don’t you just kill me?”

  For a full ten seconds, he was silent. Breathe in. Breathe out. It’s all about control. My control. In. Out. “
I was fifteen when I killed her, Elizabeth. My aunt. They found her bones in a dune on the beach. They don’t know it yet. Maybe they never will. Can’t be much of them left to go on.”

  She shook her head from side to side, her eyes closed. Tears streamed across dirt-crusted cheeks. “You killed her when you were fifteen?”

  “I was frightened. And thrilled. And aroused. I expected to get caught. Arrested.” He moved his index finger across the blade of the knife, stopping at the tip. “Open your eyes, Elizabeth.”

  She did.

  Her chest heaved with silent sobs. “People like you deserve to die.” He pushed the blade against his fingertip until one drop of blood formed on his skin. He met Elizabeth’s eyes and smiled. “The arrest never came. Perhaps it was God’s plan. I don’t know. What I do know, Elizabeth, is the universe accepted my gifts of sinful flesh for more than thirty years. The beach kept my secrets.”

  He looked again at the blade in his hand and then toward Elizabeth. He moved forward and placed the tip of the blade against Elizabeth’s neck. He swiveled the blade ever so slightly until it produced a blood-red starburst in the exact spot he chose as he watched her sleep in the wee hours of that morning. The exact spot he planned to return to when the time was right.

  ****

  Elizabeth loved walking into the white of her art room. It was like living in the middle of a clean canvas full of opportunity. Her palette of colors called to her, beautiful in their rainbow of possibilities. Only recently did she choose the bright primary colors again, after a long time of being drawn to grays and blacks. Katia’s colors. Elizabeth didn’t want to live in the dark anymore. She needed to feel colors again. Moving to Virginia and using disposable phones and keeping a low profile had given her back her life.