Into the Abyss

by L. T. Vargus

  The muscles along Prescott’s jawline went taut. The ice-blue eyes squinted down to fierce slits.

  “If you walk through that door, you can kiss your position with this firm goodbye.”

  Darger turned around to face her. As she pushed backward through the door, she blew Prescott a kiss.

  Epilogue

  Darger checked out of the Bellagio that afternoon and moved across town to a much cheaper (and seedier) hotel. She’d been tempted by the idea of heading directly to the airport to fly home, but ultimately she didn’t trust the District Attorney’s office to follow through with the search even after her threats to go to the press.

  That turned out to be an unnecessary worry. The next evening, Darger was halfway through a six-pack of beer in her hotel room when she got a phone call from Castellano.

  “You near a TV?”

  Darger eyed the small flat screen on the wall of her room.

  “Yeah.”

  “Turn it on. Channel 3.”

  There didn’t seem to be a remote, so she got up and manually found the channel.

  Margaret Prescott’s face filled the screen.

  “The Clark County Sheriff is in the process of locating and recovering the remains as we speak,” she said, and her cold eyes glittered in the lights.

  The headline at the bottom of the screen read, BREAKING: NEW BODIES DISCOVERED IN LEONARD STUMP CASE.

  Prescott was spilling everything on national TV.

  The camera cut to Prescott’s good pal Jillian Barrow, who squinted ever so slightly in a practiced manner.

  “What’s it like to be in a room with him? To hear him utter the names of the women he’s killed?”

  “Chilling,” Prescott said. “Absolutely chilling. There were times I wasn’t sure I could keep going. It takes an emotional toll. I had to remind myself who this was for. And that was those seven girls. And their families.”

  Jillian cocked her head to the side.

  “How does that feel? To know that without you, these seven girls would have remained missing, perhaps forever?”

  Prescott sighed.

  “It was worth every moment of doubt to be able to give the families closure,” she said. “It’s humbling, really.”

  Darger laughed at that and choked on Fat Tire foam.

  “Humbling, my ass,” Castellano said. “You know I’d been planning on contacting the families privately? So they could have a quiet moment to grieve before they got sucked up into the media whirlwind. So much for all that.”

  Darger rested the bottle in her hand on her thigh, staring down at the wet imprint it left on her jeans.

  “It’s probably my fault. I was the one that mentioned going to the press when I threatened Coonan. I bet Prescott thought I’d do it and steal her thunder. She had to get there first when the lights would be brightest.”

  With a derisive sigh, Castellano said, “What a piece of work.”

  Darger took a slug of beer.

  “Yeah.”

  “The dig site is going to be a carnival tomorrow,” Castellano warned. “We’ll have news vans lined up around the block.”

  “I know.”

  “I guess I’ll see you down there, then?”

  “I’ll be there,” Darger said, and they hung up.

  Darger leaned back against the lumpy hotel pillows and sipped her beer. She didn’t need to stay, really. There was no way the DA’s office could sweep this under the rug, not after Prescott had aired everything on Jillian Barrow’s show. She was off the hook. But still… she felt some sense of responsibility to see the effort through to the end.

  So she hung around for the next week. It wasn’t as if she had anywhere to be.

  She watched Siskin’s team carefully dig their holes in the hard red earth and wondered what she was going to do with the rest of her life. The long, hot days under the desert sun were good for that at least.

  If she was done with law enforcement and through with private consulting on criminal investigations, then what was left? Did she go back to counseling civilians? Or find a new line of work entirely?

  By the time they started to uncover the final set of remains from the dusty ground, Darger still hadn’t made a decision. She felt paralyzed, a stasis borne out of indecisiveness, out of uncertainty.

  She arrived at the third dig site on Friday morning just before noon. Dr. Siskin was confident they’d finish recovering the final set of remains by the end of the day, and then they’d have found all seven of the girls Stump had given up.

  She passed by three news vans parked on the side of the road near the site. A healthy perimeter of yellow police tape kept them at some distance from the actual graves, but that didn’t keep the media from hovering like vultures. Circling. Hungry for gore, for death, any scrap of red.

  Prescott’s interview had also brought the gawkers and lookieloos. Some of them lifted their phones to film her as she moved to retrieve something from her trunk. If they were hoping for something juicy to post on their social media accounts, they’d be disappointed with the nature of this juice, but she hoped they got a real clear shot of the dozen orders of General Tsao’s chicken she hoisted from the cargo area nevertheless. It was her day to bring lunch for the group, and she’d opted for Chinese.

  She’d always found the public’s intrigue with crimes like this a little disconcerting, but it had deepened to something more like disgust over the last few days. And it made her question everything all over again. Maybe she really should get away from all of this.

  Siskin’s team cheered when she arrived at the tent with the food, and that brightened her mood a little.

  “Food’s here!” someone shouted.

  “OK, break time,” Siskin said, peeling off her gloves and heading for the portable camp sink to wash up.

  “I’ve got iced tea in the car,” Darger told the people already forming a line in front of the bags of food. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Darger was just ducking under the yellow line with her cooler full of ice cold beverages when someone in the group of rubberneckers called out to her.

  “Excuse me. Miss Darger?”

  She paused and turned back. An older couple at the edge of the crowd took a step closer. The woman’s auburn hair was streaked with gray and pulled back in a clip. Her skin was dotted with freckles. She looked vaguely familiar, but Darger couldn’t quite place her.

  “Sorry, I can’t really talk or give details,” Darger said, then turned to go.

  “Detective Castellano called us.”

  Darger stopped.

  “Castellano?”

  “She said… do you know if they’ve found Amanda Schultz’s body yet?”

  And then Darger realized why the woman looked familiar. Castellano had put together a collage of photographs of the seven girls Stump had named. Faces to match up with the piles of bones and moldering fabric they pulled from the ground. Proof that these had once been living, breathing girls. And Amanda Schultz had the same auburn hair, brown eyes, and freckles as her mother.

  “You’re her parents.”

  The woman nodded.

  “They should be finishing up today, but it may be a while before we know who’s who.”

  Mr. Schultz reached for his wife’s hand, squeezed. The woman’s eyes filled with tears, and Darger felt a lump form in her own throat.

  “At our age, we know other parents who have lost children. We’ve been to the funerals. And I know this probably sounds crazy, but I actually envied them. I envied that they had a chance to say goodbye. To know where their babies were. To have a grave to visit or an urn to place on the mantle. Of course, after this long, we figured Amanda was dead. But you can’t help but hold out hope anyway. Just in case.”

  Her eyes slid over to meet her husband’s.

  “I’d say it’s a relief, but I’m not sure that’s what it is. It’s more like… it’s like we can finally get out from underneath a shadow that’s been hanging over us for a very long time.” T
he woman swallowed. “Anyway Detective Castellano told us you were the one responsible. And we wanted to thank you. Personally.”

  Darger didn’t trust herself to speak, so she only nodded. She took a breath and looked over her shoulder at the dig site.

  “Do you want to come see where we found them? It’s not too… graphic at this stage, but it is still a grave. There are bones, so if that sounds too upsetting…”

  Amanda Schultz’s parents exchanged a glance.

  “No, I think we can handle it. I’d like to see where she’s been all this time.”

  Darger held the tape up for them to pass under, and then led them out to the grave site. She dropped the cooler in the tent and then showed the Schultz family what they’d found.

  “The first girl was here,” she said, pointing to the main trench. “And you can see they’ve started uncovering the second girl there.”

  “She looks so small,” Mrs. Schultz whispered, and then she clung to her husband and wept.

  Darger stepped away, giving them a few minutes to mourn their daughter in peace. When she reached the shade of the tent where Dr. Siskin and her team were eating lunch, she turned back and watched the grieving parents standing arm in arm next to their daughter’s grave. And she knew what she had to do.

  * * *

  They pulled the final set of remains from the dusty ground just before the sun fell behind the mountains off to the west. Darger said her farewells, hopped in her rental, and drove straight to the airport.

  She got a seat on a flight heading for Virginia in three hours. With nothing left to do but wait for boarding, she settled in near a window with a view of the runway. Planes landed and took off, lights glittering against the velvet dusk sky.

  Was she sure about where she was headed?

  As sure as she could be.

  She got out her phone and called Loshak. He answered after two rings.

  “She lives.”

  “Yeah,” she said and tried to figure out how to broach the subject of what she’d been up to the past few days. “Seen anything interesting on the news lately?”

  “Oh, you mean Prescott’s little Jillian Barrow confessional? I thought that had your stank all over it,” he said. “You’ve been a busy bee, haven’t you? Traipsing around Leonard Stump territory without me.”

  All this time, she’d imagined his reaction would be one of anger, but if anything, he sounded slightly amused.

  Darger filled her lungs with air, gathering courage. She blurted the question as she exhaled so she couldn’t chicken out.

  “Do you still have those friends in high places?” she asked.

  “Depends on who’s asking. And for what.”

  Darger closed her eyes and breathed.

  “I’m ready to come back to the BAU.”

  Author's Note

  Thanks so much for reading Into the Abyss! Want more Darger books? Leave a review, and let us know.

  - A Note From the Authors -

  In a way, I've been on the path toward writing this series since 1995 when I read Red Dragon by Thomas Harris. It not only scarred my impressionable psyche, it also made me want to spend the rest of my life writing creepy stuff.

  So this is our delve into the murky waters of the serial killer thriller. Not many books do the genre justice, I'm afraid, but I can promise you that we put our hearts into it. I can't wait to hear what you think.

  I'm excited to report that we've got a lot more Violet Darger headed your way. More Loshak, too.

  But that's where you come in.

  Unfortunately, Amazon won't automatically flag you down when there's a new book in the series. Don't miss out!

  Take one of the following actions to make sure you're always among the first to know what Darger and Loshak are up to:

  1) Sign up for the Vargus/McBain email list here, and get a free copy of the Darger short, Image in a Cracked Mirror. More details follow below.

  2) Follow us on Amazon. Just click the FOLLOW button under my picture on my author page, and Amazon will send you an email every time we have a new release.

  3) Join our Facebook Fan group and chat with us about books and movies. We'll let you know when we have something new.

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  Click the link to get your FREE copy of Image in a Cracked Mirror:

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  - The Violet Darger series -

  Dead End Girl (Book 1)

  Image in a Cracked Mirror (A Violet Darger Novella)

  Killing Season (Book 2)

  The Last Victim (A Violet Darger Novella)

  The Girl in the Sand (Book 3)

  Bad Blood (Book 4)

  Five Days Post Mortem (Book 5)

  Into the Abyss (A Violet Darger Novella)

  Book 6 coming soon…

  - More Books by Tim McBain & L.T. Vargus -

  The Victor Loshak series

  The Scattered and the Dead series

  Casting Shadows Everywhere

  The Clowns

  The Awake in the Dark series

  - About the Authors -

  L.T. Vargus grew up in Hell, Michigan, which is a lot smaller, quieter, and less fiery than one might imagine. When not glued to her computer, she can be found sewing, fantasizing about food, and rotting her brain in front of the TV.

  If you want to wax poetic about pizza or cats, you can contact L.T. (the L is for Lex) at ltvargus9@gmail.com or on Twitter @ltvargus.

  Tim McBain writes because life is short, and he wants to make something awesome before he dies. Additionally, he likes to move it, move it.

  You can connect with Tim on Facebook or via email at tim@timmcbain.com.

  LTVargus.com