Sandman

by Tammy Bird

  “What’s on your mind?” Wells said. “I know it isn’t singing ‘Kumbaya’ around a campfire with the locals.”

  “Thinking about the Lullaby bust, actually. I’ve managed to find my way into the invitation-only site, but being invited in beyond the bullshit outer layer has proven to be more of a challenge.”

  “You do love a challenge. What’s the wall?” Gerald asked around the final bite of sweet local crab.

  “The person who goes by Ted who may be anyone except Ted.” Andrew placed emphasis on the word “except.” “That’s who’s keeping me out. At least out of anything worth a flying fuck.” Andrew took a deep breath. He wanted to find this man and chop his nuts off. “He let me in, but only on the fringe.” So far, Andrew knew the person behind the pictures was near a beach and had access to emergency equipment, including an ambulance.

  “It’s a sick fuck who gets off on death.” Gerald folded his napkin and laid it on his plate. “And you need to find him. Connected to this other shit or not.”

  Andrew looked across the table at Wells and then turned his gaze out the window at the Pamlico Sound. His next words were pointed away from the two men, as if he wanted to save them the ugliness of the human condition he was coming to know in ways even he hadn’t guessed. “He reached out to me recently,” he said. “He got me deeper into the onion. Not all of the way, but deeper. I’m peeling layers.”

  Gerald put his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Layers you think may reveal a connection to what’s happening on the beach?”

  “Maybe.” Andrew pulled the cloth napkin from his lap, put it over his mouth, and cleared his throat. He debated on how much to share with his boss. Gerald was the only man who knew the depths of his involvement in any undercover operation. This included the one that put Andrew in the center of darkness that now swirled around Buxton, North Carolina. Now he was here to check up on him. That didn’t sit well with Andrew.

  Andrew took a breath and moved his gaze back to Gerald. “You know my past. You know that in my purgatory-life between military and undercover, I wrote code for people who could wipe me away without a trace.” He shifted in his seat. He wasn’t scared, but he damn sure understood the risk. “I made connections between people who traded guns for drugs, drugs for absurd sexual favors, absurd sexual favors for power. You have to trust that I know what I’m doing.”

  Gerald was silent, but he offered Andrew a slight nod.

  The waiter returned and looked straight at Gerald. “Would you like dessert?”

  Gerald shook his head. “Just the check. Together, please. Thanks.”

  When the waiter was out of earshot, Andrew said, “Last night I spent hours scouring pictures and videos of some of the most sickening graphics I’ve ever seen, trying to find clues to who’s behind everything. I need more time.”

  “Time is something we may not have much of.” Gerald motioned to the scene outside the window. “Some sick motherfucker provided your sick motherfucker a candy store of picture opportunities.”

  Gerald was good at his job. But running a team wasn’t the same as working as part of the team. Andrew needed his boss to understand. “Gerald.” Andrew’s voice lowered, and he met his boss’s gaze. “My involvement just became about a lot more than whether or not a local is the sick fuck supplying the juice for our dark web, death-porn sites.”

  Gerald waited.

  “You know I’ve been watching Brent Grainger and his EMS pals for this.”

  Gerald placed his elbows on the white paper that lined the tabletop. His fingers formed a steeple that leaned against his chin. “And?”

  Gerald wanted the “So what?” of the statement. “I plan to tell him I was quite aroused at the scene, that I never saw anything like it, that situations like that are why I became an emergency worker.” Andrew leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hand on his chin. “There’s more.”

  “Figured.” Gerald tapped the tips of his fingers together.

  Andrew heard the impatient tone loud and clear. “Some of the pictures I’ve been privy to in the last week show a woman with her throat slashed wide open. She’s lying on a beach.” He paused while the waiter moved back toward the table and presented the check.

  “A man in dark-blue work pants is straddling her. Can’t make out her face or his, but she’s blonde.”

  “EMS life definitely gives him access.” Wells took a deep breath in and exhaled loudly.

  “He’s smart. Blurs his close-ups just enough to prevent recognition.”

  “But…”

  “Yeah. I know. We may be looking for more than one person on this little bitty island.”

  ****

  Katia stood behind Marco, watching Yogi Bear trying to steal a picnic basket. She allowed him to have a large glass of thick, sweet horchata de chufa while he watched, hoping the tiger nut cinnamon milk would call forth thoughts of their mother and help him to re-center. The beverage was their mother’s favorite. It was also Marco’s. The tiger nuts needed for the drink demanded a twenty-four-hour soak before the process of grinding and sweetening could even begin. Katia hated the chore but loved the memory of her mom’s stories of grinding the nuts and cinnamon by hand back in her home country when she was a young girl. She looked down at her now still brother with his milky mustache. His camera sat next to his right knee. She whispered, “I wish she was here with us, Monkey Head.”

  In response, her not-so-little brother lifted his empty glass over his head and said, “More sweet?”

  “Hmm. Taking advantage of your distraught sister, are you?” She took the glass.

  Marco dropped his hand back into his lap without another word.

  Katia was handing her brother a second glass of the feel-good beverage when her phone buzzed. The text was from Zahra.

  How’s Marco?

  Katia typed, Calmer. Took every pic on cam.

  Want 2 talk.

  Katia looked at the time. 1:00. There was that punctuality thing again. She assumed it was part of being a cop. She didn’t want to take her brother to the school, but she wanted time to talk to Zahra without fear of Marco’s reaction. Perhaps Mrs. Ellington, their neighbor, would look after him. She was widowed a few years back and never turned away a chance to care for someone.

  Katia’s phone buzzed with another text. No worries if you can’t. I get it.

  The corners of Katia’s mouth turned upward. She visualized a worrywart Zahra on the other end of the texts. She genuinely cared and never wanted to cause undue stress. It was one of the things Katia found herself drawn to these days. Also the hugs. Katia wasn’t a hugger, but when Zahra hugged, she hugged with her whole body. Her hugs told a story. It was a perfect depiction of how she approached life. Katia liked that, too.

  Katia put an end to Zahra’s suffering and responded. No. Thinking. Give me 5.

  Roger that. Zahra followed her words with lots of symbols—a smiley face, yellow heart, blue heart, red heart, and green heart.

  Katia dismissed the text box and hit the little phone icon on her screen. “Mrs. Ellington,” she said when the line was answered. “This is Katia.”

  “Oh, honey,” Mrs. Ellington said before Katia could finish. “I heard about our Gina.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Katia made sure her words were even and slow. She knew Mrs. Ellington would have it no other way.

  “Can’t say it’s too big a shock. You know, with all of those houses she takes people in and out of.”

  Katia ran her fingers through her hair and walked toward the kitchen. “That’s what I’m calling about, Mrs. Ellington. I need to meet with the criminal investigator.”

  “That sweet Knots girl? What’s her name? Saw her momma just last week in town.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Zahra. Can Marco hang out with you?” She hoped the woman wouldn’t ask about the school.

  “The world isn’t like it used to be. Real pity about Gina. Such a nice woman.”

  “
She was, Mrs. Ellington.”

  “You bring Marco right on over, honey. I was just about to whip up some lunch. I’ll turn on his channel.”

  ****

  Katia sat sideways on one end of the big beige sofa. Her shoulder pushed into the softness of the back cushion, and her legs, tucked up under her body, pushed into the seat. All of the beige made Katia feel like she was in a cocoon. She faced Zahra, who sat cross-legged on the other end, an overstuffed beige-and-burgundy pillow hugged tightly in her lap. “So, our killer is someone we know.”

  Zahra corrected Katia. “Likely someone from the island. Harper didn’t say someone we know. Xavier didn’t say someone we know. Not directly.”

  “Zahra. Seriously.” Katia adjusted her posture so she was sitting away from the back of the couch and opened her hands, palms facing each other. “We fucking know everyone on the island.”

  “Touché.” Zahra played with the edges of the pillow.

  “Okay. So someone who blends in, leads a seemingly stable life.” Katia needed to do something, and building a profile from the information gathered seemed the only way to add to the investigation while they waited for the specialty teams to do their work. “Someone methodical and intelligent. Someone who can leave their home in the fucking middle of the night to go bury a body.” Katia rubbed the back of her neck. She ached all over. Not the ache of someone with a fever or an overused joint, but a deep ache in the bones. This was personal.

  She made eye contact with Zahra, looked away, and then back again. In the middle of everything, this woman made her warm inside. She didn’t have many friends, at least not the kind who you want to be around all of the time. But in the last week, she found herself wanting to be around two people in particular, Zahra and Paige. Mostly Zahra.

  She didn’t want Zahra to think she was nonsensical in any way, so she kept those thoughts to herself. “Do you think the storms have anything to do with it?”

  “Like, does he kill and bury them during a storm?” Zahra’s fingers quit pulling at the pillow fringe.

  Zahra looked like she was thinking about that, about how it might line up with what she, Dr. Webb, and the others were finding in the lab.

  “Something like that, I guess. I mean, Harper told you there’s a pattern we haven’t seen yet, right?” Katia tried to think back on storm dates. She, her dad, and brother tracked them on the storm boards at home. Her mom had tracked them, too. Some town folk were addicted to storm-tracking like poker players were addicted to poker. There were storm boards all over town. Heck, Katia had one at her house. “It would create a good cover. No one would be out in a storm.” She paused. “No one would be watching or hanging out that close to the beach. They would be across the bridge, or at least hanging out farther in. It would make perfect sense.”

  Zahra was quiet.

  Katia wished she could read her mind. “It’s stupid, isn’t it?” Katia was supposed to be listening to the profile Harper constructed from Zahra’s information, not play junior detective.

  “It’s possible, I guess.” Zahra’s brows were pulled in at the center, creating a crease in her forehead. “Let’s think about this. Think about Anna. Here’s what we know.” Zahra held up one finger. “She was sitting well off the coast.” She held up a second finger. “We almost drowned trying to work the beach.”

  Katia watched her fingers.

  Zahra lowered her fingers and picked up Katia’s hand. She brought it to her mouth and kissed it gently before lowering it to her own lap. She looked at Katia. “If it’s that bad out, do you think someone could get the tools and a body out to the dunes, dig, bury, and clean up, without being hurt or noticed? Fourteen times? I don’t know.”

  “What then?” Katia dropped the topic of the storm for now. She didn’t want Zahra to move their hands. She’d look at the boards on her own when she got home.

  “Maybe let’s look from a different angle and see what connects. Harper said the killer may be killing a pseudo-someone. Someone who harmed him. There was the teacher, the one who was rumored to have fondled more than a few male students, and the woman who gave piano lessons to kids in town to make money in the winter. Who else do we know something specific about? Oh, yes. There’s the recluse who was reported missing by the boy who mowed her grass.”

  Katia heard the words—boy, harmed, women, kill. She thought about her dream. More of the pieces were coming into view. She could remember Marco. The ambulance was racing toward him. It was Zahra who stepped in front of him. Marco’s face turned into a face without a name, featureless, dark, blurred around the edges. Marco was trying to get away from the Sandman. And then it hit her. What if Marco saw something related to this case? The idea that her brother might have seen something brought the bile from her stomach into her esophagus. She swallowed hard.

  Zahra continued to run through what they knew. She seemed oblivious to the fact that Katia was no longer listening.

  Katia thought Marco’s breakdown was over something minor. A teacher who wanted him to sit in a hard chair or turn off the television for therapy time, perhaps. But what if he knew something? She bit her lip. Marco used a camera at school after a previous episode. He calmed quickly, though, and the camera was stuck in the drawer until this morning.

  Katia dropped the two cameras off for the pictures to be developed before she came to Zahra’s house. Until this moment, she didn’t believe they would find anything of value when she picked them up. What if Marco captured something on the first camera? What if there was a clue buried in the pictures of teachers and playthings?

  Zahra’s voice took on a surreal quality. She sounded far away. Sounds of Marco’s distress the night before mixed in and then her father’s words: “He was like this when I picked him up. I can’t calm him. Get home.” And Marco, rocking, tapping. His panic at the thought of her taking him back to the center that morning. Could one of Marco’s caregivers do this?

  She thought through details of each teacher and each administrator in the school for disabled children.

  Zahra shook her leg. “You’re zoning again. You okay?”

  “Yeah. Just thinking about Marco’s pictures.”

  “Did you put them in?”

  “On my way here. What if someone at his school…” She couldn’t finish the thought out loud. Marco was her responsibility. Her dad made that clear years ago. She accepted that responsibility. Now someone had hurt him or scared him. Her breath came harder. She couldn’t stand the thought of her brother in a bad situation.

  Zahra stretched her arms toward Katia. “I don’t know about you, but I could use a minute of quiet. Please?”

  Katia hesitated. It felt like a sign of weakness. She wanted to be strong for Zahra, for Marco, not the other way around.

  “Please?” Zahra repeated. “I need you.”

  Katia gave in and let her body turn and fall forward until her head was on Zahra’s shoulder and their bodies were side by side.

  Zahra rubbed Katia’s back in a circular motion.

  The women were still, their breath coming in synch. In and out. Smell the flowers. Blow out the candles.

  “Do you think I’m weak?” Katia asked into Zahra’s shoulder. “I should have gone back to work. Everyone else went back to work.”

  “Weak?” Zahra’s voice was soft in Katia’s ear. “Are you fucking serious? No. You’re strong. Actually amazing. I don’t know how you’re doing this. As for work, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Zahra’s shoulder moved from beneath her cheek, and hands moved to either side of her face, holding her up and bringing their faces close. “We will find him, Katia. We will find Elizabeth. You have to believe that.”

  “You think Elizabeth is okay?” Katia leaned into Zahra’s hands. She trusted her to hold her up. Her lip was shaking, but she didn’t shed a tear. The officers who went to Elizabeth’s apartment in Virginia reported no signs of foul play, but Elizabeth was nowhere to be found.

  “
Honestly,” Zahra said softly, “I don’t know.”

  Katia felt puffs of Zahra’s breath on her own cheek. It was warm and soft. In this moment, she trusted this woman more than she trusted any other person in the world.

  “The FBI seems to think it’s unlikely he would take the risk of going to Virginia to try to find her.” Zahra kissed Katia’s nose. “Let’s hope she’s with a friend.”

  “I think Marco knows.” She couldn’t believe she was saying the words out loud, even in a whisper against Zahra’s skin.

  “Knows what, Katia? Whether or not Elizabeth is safe?”

  Katia swallowed hard, licked her lips. “Knows something about who is doing all of this.”

  ****

  Brent looked at the pictures on his computer screen. He was alone in his small, white-brick home. His mom said it looked more suited to a little Podunk town than to the beach at Buxton. It was one of the reasons he bought it. No one paid attention to it. It sat on a tiny side street no one travelled. It was plain and uninviting, just like him.

  Brent liked being alone. The only person whom he liked being with more than he liked being alone was Savannah, his twelve-year-old daughter. She used to spend every other weekend here. As she aged, it became less and less. Her friends were all in Corolla, where she and her momma now lived. Savanah’s picture hung on every wall, sat on surfaces in elaborate frames that proclaimed, “World’s Best Daughter,” and “A Family Makes A Home.”

  Savannah lived on in every room except the one he now occupied. No one lived in that room except Brent and his clients, those men and women who, like him, lived two lives. In that room, the walls were bare except for a large, round clock, the kind you would find in a classroom. It hung over a file cabinet that blended into the tan paint. Brent sat in an old, wooden chair at a large, and equally old, wooden desk, both of which were handed down to him by his grandfather. In front of him, a laptop computer, folded into the closed position, sat atop a docking station. Two large monitors, both alive with color, consumed all but the smallest part of the top of the desk. In the area were an ashtray, a pack of Marlboro Menthol, and an old flint lighter, also a gift from his grandfather. Two leather chairs separated by a round table completed the room. It was his favorite place to be when he was home alone.