by a b
Tracy tottered on the edge of a silver blade, red blood trickled from a superficial wound, and she would never again see the world the through those crystal blue eyes.
Chapter 19 Futility Bay
Two days later, Wagner knew almost everything that there was to know about the male erection. She’d spoken to over a hundred specialists in E.D.D., and combed every record searching for a biker who couldn’t match rubber to road.
Yes, she picked up some bad biker lingo too.
She’d worked the angle from both sides, matching the biker groups to the specific deficiency of the lead member, and matching the patients of thousands of doctors to a single rider. It wasn’t a realistic to find that one person who matched Legacy’s description, especially in such a tight-lipped community, but it was better than doing what he did, which seemed to be simply to sit and stare.
The music was getting to her. It had been a marathon of some instrument invented in the seventies – presumably to torture the poor souls who never learned to dress properly. The player had been banging upon a clutch of strings with a mallet or perhaps his head, for fifteen hours. Wagner cursed everything in her wicked life that had brought her to this point.
Legacy had spoken in small packets since the initiation. He’d watched it, once. That’s all he needed. He told Wagner to do the same. Of course she’d watched it over and over every night when she went home. The following installments, five in all, were stacked on top of her VCR at the hotel.
Wagner put down the phone with a little more force than usual after another fruitless call. Legacy could see her make a mental note not to lose control like that again. Legacy continued to stare. Wagner flung the phone across his line of sight and it crashed into the wall. One more resolution, broken. Her scowl told him that she didn’t give a damn if it got his attention. Of course, it was moments like this when Legacy took notice and had something helpful to say.
“You’re doing your job all wrong, you know?” He said, flat as the world before Galileo.
“What?” She said, although she’d heard him clearly. If only there was another phone, a heavier phone.
“You’re acting without thought. Use your mind, narrow down all of those actions until all you have to do is call one person. Instead you call the phone book and get nothing. You weren’t second in your class at the academy because you used the phone book second best.” He continued, “Sit and think until you just have to call one number to get your result.”
“You’re asking me to sit around doing nothing?” Her tone only slightly resembled a question.
“Flinging that telephone was the most sensible thing you’ve done in days. Has your telemarketing barrage gotten you any closer to finding Blue?” He shrugged his shoulders. “I know you are anxious to interview Tracy.”
“Tracy is dead, it’s been two days, don’t act like you don’t know.” Her emotions spilled out and her eyes looked suddenly weary.
“Don’t be ridiculous. She’s fine, Blue is just giving us some time to chew on; he wants us caught off guard when she shows up. It’s not a guess, it’s a fact, and she’s fine.” He paused, watching the upswing in Wagner. She lit up almost instantly. He found a distracted part of his brain thinking about how he could produce the same effect again so that he could watch her react, Legacy had no more surprising good news so he had to settle for showing off. “The news will break later today. She’ll be home tonight. If I’m wrong, I’ll start senselessly calling hospitals asking if they had any biker patients who were capable of all manners of deviant felonies and smart enough to cover all of their tracks except the random FBI call, picking a single grain out of a sandstorm.” Legacy could barely stand the thought of producing any such conversation on the phone, but he knew it wouldn’t be necessary. Tracy was alive, the drop-off would tell more about the Vinyl Men’s location than they wanted.
Legacy leaned over the papers on his desk, and the strangest thing happened. He heard Wagner approach, and she retrieved her broken phone - that was all quite natural. But on the way back to her desk she paused near his chair. He felt her hand on his shoulder. The warmth of her grip circulated through his body in a gratifying manner that disturbed him deeply. He liked her, a bit fascinated by her irrational methods and her need to present a perfect appearance. But she intruded on his life, and nothing in that category had pressed past his rigid defenses in years. Legacy thought about his cold shoulder, the other one, and realized that the idiom “turning a cold shoulder” was really more caring than indifference. The only reason one turns a cold shoulder is if the other holds warmth. Blue killed Jamie, and everyone had supposed that she must have done something that angered or upset Blue. Legacy was beginning to believe the opposite, that she must have been the one he cared for most.
It was four in the afternoon when the information broke rattling through the rafters and settling in the basement. A young man from community affairs, later they’d find out his name was Brent, came into the office with a memo. He had a no-nonsense style that appealed to Legacy. “Half the agency has hit the ground in North Dakota - “
“Body?” Wagner fixed her gaze on Brent’s perfectly groomed hairline, not wanting to read his expression. With jet-black hair swept back meticulously, it resembled a shoreline finding a nautical prow line peak in the center of his brow. Wagner had the most remarkable way of picking out a person’s defining characteristic in a moment. Legacy followed her eyes and agreed. This guy was a straight shooter – arrow right through the forehead.
“Breathing.”
Legacy cast a sidelong glance at Wagner, who pretended not to notice how masterful he was in both practice and theory. Brent continued.
“I took the liberty of getting you two tickets on a shuttle flight tonight – “ Wagner was already on a flight of her own.
“There’s nothing sooner?” She said looking at the time.
“Sooner would be now.” He observed. “You’re up against the clock making that flight. There’s a car –”
Legacy objected “They need to bring her here.”
Wagner replied, “They’re not going to do that.”
Legacy wasn’t budging “Well, that’s what they have to do.”
Wagner paused in the middle of what Legacy guessed to be a frantic, pre-travel gathering ritual, “The first six hours are the ones that shape the testimony and consequently the entire information chain elicited from a victim. You said it.” There was a certain satisfaction in quoting Legacy back to himself.
“That is why she should be on a plane, now.”
Wagner slipped her coat on “Nothing like an abrupt change of venue in the company of federal agents to put the mind at ease. Pack up Legacy.”
“I can’t go.” Legacy shifted in his seat uncomfortably. He knew that he wasn’t going to get his way. “I shouldn’t have to, arrangements should have been made.”
“You could have made some useless calls.” The comment was lost on Brent, who completed an awkward triangle between them.
Brent backed out of the room, his pace slow, like he was holding himself hostage until he got to the door, just for his own safety. “I’ll look into bringing the entire crime scene here, but on the off chance that that requisition doesn’t go through, you have thirty minutes to make your plane.”
Legacy liked him even better. He gathered that his smartass tone was the way Brent projected confidence within the formal structure of his position. An immature but respectable way of expressing command as a young agent. Most of the agents he knew expressed confidence at the wrong time, through jargon and superior FBI speak. Brent told Legacy that he was not going to get his way and still left him with a smile. Legacy backed away from his position, like a chess master who knows he’s beaten. Conceding one piece at a time until the final gambit.
“They probably want 24 hours to process the scene.” Legacy dug a hand into his pocket.
“You have been waiting for a fresh witness, Legacy. You can see these maniacs through her eyes,
and I’m telling you it could - “ Legacy pulled out a coin and set it spinning on his desk, Wagner pulled out her most forceful and convincing tone “ - it could swing the whole case.”
Legacy watched the coin spin “I don’t see that, Blue’s refined his drop technique. She’s been drugged for the last two days.”
Wagner slapped the coin down, “So a little time has passed.”
“You’re going to be my eyes and ears up there. Keep a line of communication open –”
“All I want to hear is that you’re getting on that plane with me. We won’t be this close again until we collar them.”
“They need to draw blood and do a blood oxygen test – there’s only the slightest chance that –” Wagner’s body shook in anger. Legacy could tell that she missed a lot of what he said in the next minute, until Legacy forced the issue. “Listen, agent” Legacy’s hand came slamming down on the desk. “While everyone’s chasing around the drop spot, you hit the town. I think she spent the night there, maybe even longer.”
“Why?” Wagner asked.
Legacy was already withdrawing back into himself; he had no energy for explaining his rationale. “Do the blood test, drag the biker fleabags for a unresponsively ‘drunk’ companion, and keep me up to date.”
Wagner knew that there was one topic that would tweak him “Is there anything you want me to ask her?”
That was the question that hurt, Legacy knew that nobody would drill into her experience the way he could. He knew that he could bring it all back to the surface, and sift through her emotions, tear into them until the concrete foundation of reality that they were built upon was exposed. He could know everything that she knew in five hours, but looking into the distance at the facts he’d assembled on Blue, he doubted that much if any of the raw knowledge would lead him anywhere other than looping a victim back into their own pain.
Blue had a sick specialty, and Legacy wouldn’t put it past him to plant horrors in the background of a victim’s memory – just so the torture continued out of captivity. The other victims had long since closed their doors to those paths, and he knew that if he opened them – if he put Tracy back in that place - it would also shed light on the weapon that shredded her soul, cutting her no less than Blue’s knife had pressed into the neck of the previous victim. Wagner left in a huff as he let his mind slip around the situation like fading sunlight along a wall. It hardly mattered anyway, he couldn’t leave town, it just wasn’t an option.
Wagner threw open the door to a black Lincoln town car. Why the hell did the agency always use black Lincoln town cars? They certainly didn’t qualify as unobtrusive; everyone knew that feds were packed into every black Lincoln town car on the road.
She could tell he was struggling with something outside the parameters of the case, and she couldn’t care less. This case wasn’t about him, it was about the life of a girl who lived in Wagner’s dormitory, and if it didn’t stop it would be about the girl after her who lived on a different street somewhere in another town. She didn’t have an ounce of respect for him in that moment. “Why am I here?” She thought as the brightly lit, drab stone buildings of Civil War era construction swept across the tinted windows. For all of her anger, she was aware that the act of leaving that office, his office, actually lifted a weight off of her. She pulled out her cell phone and made a call. “Federal Bureau of Investigation, Alexandria office.” The car swung onto the interstate highway. This was the fork in the road where Wagner’s loyalty divided. “Chief Bailey please.”
*****
Darci stood in front of a two-for-one snack rack at the Pump and Go, debating what to steal.
She let her mind create a fantasy around the cookies that cost fifty cents more than the other cookies, which cost fifty cents less.
There must be something special that comes with that price tag, something that would fulfill her more, give her fifty cents more inner worth than she had before consuming them. She definitely wasn’t a bargain shoplifter, and a quick grab and tuck had the package inside her oversized front sweatshirt pocket. Utah fashion was the best for shoplifting. They should call it the shoplifting state, she thought. A crafty smile passed her lips – for a moment the crime was her life - and it was going well. She looked up at the clerk, an older lady with thick rimmed glasses and hair that stood on end with lift from some beauty product that really should have been recalled. Something on a fuzzy black and white TV above her shoulder caught Darci’s attention. It wasn’t the checker-box surveillance camera monitor that had certainly just caught her master crime on tape – it was the news report. A girl was being led through a crowd of reporters, blankets wrapped around her body. She babbled in a language incoherent to almost all of the listeners, save Darci.
“It was Blue, and his eyes. Blue eyes – bleeding on tile. There wasn’t sex – pain is Blue. Sky Blue.”
Her sluggish steps through the crowd of reporters were also familiar to Darci, except in her memory there were no crowds and no blankets. Darci read the name below the video image, but the letters were out of place, all wrong. Darci knew something about the girl that no one else did. Tracy didn’t notice the crowds and she couldn’t feel the blankets. The chill that froze her mind and body couldn’t be seen, or warmed from the outside.
“That girl, that girl was me.” She approached the cashier, leaned over the counter, getting as close as she could to the screen. “It should say Darci.” It was at that moment that the broadcast cut to commercial and it was like the strings of a puppet were cut. Darci staggered backward, no longer drawn toward the image on screen. A trained eye would have seen the anguish and loss in her stare. An expert might have diagnosed the situation as significant and delicate.
The clerk was not a trained eye, “What you been drinking?”
Darci dug into her stuffed pockets and offered up a bribe. “I’ll give you back these cookies if you let me use the phone. I need to call the FBI.”
The cry for help was met with the unending compassion of a convenience store clerk. Actually compassion overstates the sentiment, tough love without the love. “Put those on the counter and if I see you in here again I’ll call the cops, they might have the number for the FBI.”
There were at least two people in the world that could have entered the shop that would have made the standoff between Darci and the clerk even worse. And in one of life’s shit-cannon moments, they happened to walk through the door at that moment.
Darren and Bone Pike were brothers, stoners and founders of the Ski Bikini Appreciation Society of Greater Utah. Their father, a former federal prosecutor, was a partner in the most prosperous firm in the state. They looked like the standard-issue, youth culture shit heads, but in reality they were a caricature drawn in green ink, dripping money.
Bone burst in the door holding his breath. The game was called Convenience Store Gauntlet. He was going to try to keep it held until he’d bought four different items from four different rows of the store. This test of skill and speed was the fresh brainchild of Darren who expected his brother to yack before making it to the counter.
The frantic ransacking of the shelves broke the silent standoff between the clerk and Darci. Whatever might have been said was now buried. In the time it took Bone to hit the counter with four items and unload a sustained rancid burp fueled by the gush of air leaving his lungs, Darci found her legs and began to back her way to the door where she intersected precise spot where Darren was doubled over in laughter.
“Tha- that was awesome dude. Whoah.” Darci bumped into him. She turned and was face to face with nervous, pale shale gray eyes. Darren flipped his long stringy hair out of his face and some of it tangled in with hers. It was like their hair had an idea that neither of them had the time to follow up on at that moment. She was losing her balance and Darren reached out an arm to steady her. “Sorry babe.”
Darci snarled, “Get off of me.” and shrugged off his hand. A package of cookies fell out of her front pocket.
The cl
erk trumpeted behind them. “She’s stealing, stop her.”
He knelt down and picked up the broken cookie, it might have been her skewed impression, but he seemed impressed that she was stealing the expensive ones. Darren made no move to restrain Darci; rather, he gave her a nod of appreciation and returned the cookie to her pocket. A wink said that finding out she was a thief was cool.
Darci said, “Pay for these and I’ll find a way to get you back. I’m around.” She didn’t wait for an answer pushing her way past him out into the cold.
