She tugged one of the drawers open and found polo shirts, jeans, khakis. Everything was organized and neatly folded. Darger couldn’t help but think the clothes seemed bland.
As she went through his things, she flashed on that tattered corpse from the basement in New Jersey. She imagined the teenage version of Tyler. Wondered if he would have ever guessed this was how his story would end.
Then again, maybe he’d fantasized about doing something violent all the way back then. It wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary — many serial killers detailed their recurring violent fantasies as having started as young as six or seven.
Darger felt around under the stacks of socks and boxers and undershirts in the various drawers, searching for anything that might have been hidden. There was nothing.
In the closet, she pushed aside sweaters and plaid button-ups and discovered a snowboard and boots tucked in the corner. Not helpful.
There was an old Adidas shoebox on the top shelf of the closet. Darger pulled it down and flipped open the top. Inside she found a Japanese manga book, a few spiral-bound notebooks, and at the bottom of the stack a DVD. Darger picked up the case and could tell from the lurid cover art and the giant “XXX” rating on the front that it was pornography. She glanced at the title — Sluts and Butts and Butts and Butts! Vol. 5 — before tossing it aside.
“You know, I think the Sluts and Butts and Butts and Butts franchise really went off the rails after the third volume,” Loshak said from the doorway.
Darger snorted, paging through one of the notebooks. Her heart started to pound when she saw the handwriting. She recognized that scrawl from the note they’d found taped to the basement wall. It was Tyler’s journal.
It was a moment before she could get the words out. Could this be the crumb he’d left behind for them to find?
Finally, she turned to Loshak and held the book aloft.
“I think I found something,” she said.
CHAPTER 23
Back in the car they’d borrowed from Loboda, Loshak wove his way through Queens while Darger kept her nose in Huxley’s childhood journal. It was sprinkling again, and the streets glistened under the streetlamps.
“Finding anything useful so far?”
“No. Lists of video games he wants. A list ranking of his favorite true crime books — he had a ton of serial killer books in his room, by the way. Another ranking list, this time of Martin Scorsese movies. It’s not much of a baring of his teenage soul.”
The entries spanned a period of time that would have represented Tyler’s junior and senior years of high school, and Darger was struggling to find a link between the mundane descriptions of his daily life eleven years ago and his current crimes.
“I can’t decide if we’re on the right track at all,” she said. “He did mention journals, but I was imagining something more… recent. I guess this could be what he meant by ‘family history.’ We did find it in his old room.”
Loshak flicked on the blinker.
“I’ve been thinking about all the different things that could mean. Family history… maybe we’re being too literal.” He trailed off for a few seconds. “Speaking of, you get anything useful from the brother?”
They wheeled around a corner, and Darger felt the faint pull of centrifugal force before the car evened out again. The late-night traffic was sparse compared to what they’d seen earlier, but there were still cars in the lanes alongside them, still headlights gleaming from the opposite side.
“According to David, his brother was the favored son. Got a lot of extra attention. And their mom kind of built up this idea of him being special, but he never really lived up to it. Didn’t really achieve anything or even try to, from the sound of it. He talked big. Had some scheme in high school about making a movie. David said it was a major obsession for Tyler, but in his estimation, his brother had never even written a single page of a script. It was all fantasy.”
“That confirms what we said in our profile. How he’s choosing his targets. Passmore probably seemed like a guy kind of living his dream. Getting to play the big celebrity.”
They fell quiet after that, and Darger went back to skimming through the journal. More lists. A few nonsensical notes to himself about strategies to try in some video game. Finally she got to a string of entries that seemed to be more like traditional journal fare — recounting his day, talking about school. The details were sparse, though a girl’s name, Emma, kept coming up.
“You got quiet over there,” Loshak said when they came to a stop at another light. He gestured at the journal. “Find something?”
“Not really.” Darger frowned. “There’s a particular girl he seemed borderline obsessed with. Notes pretty much any time he sees her and whether or not they made eye contact or if she said anything to him. Keeps fantasizing about how once he gets his movie going, he thinks she’ll take an interest.”
“He really was pinning a lot on that, huh?”
“His brother said he kind of used the movie as bait for a lot of people. Acted like he had this big important thing he was going to do and would invite people along for the ride.”
“Any chance the girl he was obsessed with is now an up-and-coming Broadway star?”
“I already looked her up online,” Darger said. “She sells real estate in Columbus, Ohio.”
“What else is in there?”
“Complaints about teachers. Complaints about the dumb, idiot jocks getting all the attention. Several pages of notes about what kind of equipment he’ll need to make his movie with prices. Lights and microphones and special effects makeup. A list of action sequences he wants to shoot and what kind of CGI software that would require. Oh, and he has what looks like the start of a class report on GG Allin.”
“The singer guy who used to roll around in glass and eat his own feces on stage?” Loshak asked.
“The one and only. It sounds like Huxley watched a documentary on him. He wrote about how the director of the documentary, Todd Phillips, is now this big Hollywood guy. And in the margin, he wrote, ‘I need to find my GG. Someone so sensational they can’t be ignored.’”
“Sounds like he decided to become that himself, instead.”
“Yeah,” Darger agreed.
She squinched her eyes shut, giving them a few seconds’ rest from examining the journal.
“Did you get a sort of narcissistic vibe from mom?” she asked.
“Like the way she kept referring to him as ‘my son,’ as if he’s an object that belonged to her?”
“That was part of it, for sure,” Darger said. “It got me thinking… it’s not uncommon for that type of parent to sort of split the family, especially their kids, into golden children and scapegoats.”
Loshak licked his lips.
“She did seem to heap a lot of praise on Tyler. Less so with the son still there, living and breathing,” he said. “In fact, she almost acted like he was a burden or something, despite the fact that he was there to try to comfort her.”
Darger went on.
“Well, a lot of times, the golden child will respond to the parent in one of two ways: they either sort of achieve to please the parent, in which case they’re accepting the parent’s worldview and values, or they sabotage their own achievements to rebel against the parent.”
“You think that’s why he never tried to get his movie thing off the ground? He was sabotaging himself?”
“Maybe,” Darger said. “It’s all academic at this point, really. I certainly can’t diagnose her with anything. And I doubt it’d do much for the case to fixate on it. There are plenty of awful parents in the world, yet most of their children don’t send homemade bombs to people they saw on TV.”
Loshak swerved to miss a pedestrian, though he didn’t seem too perturbed by it. He kept the conversation going like nothing had happened.
“It gives us some insight on his psyche, though. Imagine a kid who’s told all his life that he’s a talented genius. Entitled to special treatmen
t. Destined for greatness. And then he ends up having a fairly mundane, simple life. No fame. No fortune. No paparazzi waiting outside his door to catch a glimpse of him in his bathrobe. No awards lining his shelves. How do you think a person like that might react to realizing everything he’s been told and dreamed of never came to fruition?”
There was a sticker on the cover of the notebook. The Star Wars Galactic Empire logo. Darger ran a finger around it.
“Well, a normal person would get over it, I’d think. Realize their dreams of great importance were a fantasy. But this guy? I guess we’re seeing his response, aren’t we?”
They were quiet for a few seconds, the squeak of the windshield wipers against the glass seeming to fill the car.
Darger looked down at the notebook in her lap and felt a fist clench in her gut. She found herself not wanting to go back to the high school journal. Something about it felt wrong, like they’d gone down the wrong track.
Forget all the family stuff for a second. Forget the journal. Clear your head. Go back to the note.
She pictured the black ink on the page. Spiky lettering. Aggressive.
Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. What a clever sheep you must be.
The words repeated over and over in Darger’s mind as she stared out the window. Fat flecks of rain struck the glass in a diagonal spatter. She watched the way the droplets reflected the lights of the glowing signs behind them. Glowing jewels in red and blue. Rubies and sapphires.
“Sheep and piggies,” Darger said idly, a line from the first note coming into her head. You piggies have a chance, however, to stop some of the carnage. “He also mentions cats and sparrows. Could the repeated use of animal phrases be pointing to something?”
“Like a zoo?” Loshak suggested.
“Maybe.”
Something struck Darger then.
“Didn’t Manson use the term ‘piggies’ when referring to the police?”
“Yeah.” Loshak scratched his chin. “And members of the Manson Family finger-painted stuff about pigs on the walls, scrawling it in the victims’ blood at two of the crime scenes.”
On an August night in 1969, Charles Manson’s followers broke into the Hollywood Hills mansion of actress Sharon Tate and butchered five people. The next night they killed two more in a house in Los Feliz.
Darger put a hand to her head, making another connection.
“So he makes what could be a Manson Family reference in his first note with piggies, after a crime involving an actor best known for a series of coffee commercials. The Manson Family famously killed coffee heiress Abigail Folger. The note is supposed to give us clues to Huxley’s next victim, who happens to be a model-turned-actress,” she said.
Loshak’s head began bobbing up and down.
“Just like Sharon Tate.”
“So maybe we were thinking of the wrong family all along. Family history could be an allusion to the Manson Family.”
Goosebumps rippled over the backs of Darger’s arms. Cold feelings shuddering through her.
“That makes sense,” Loshak said. “His movie dreams couldn’t come to fruition. But his true crime obsession showed him another way to get famous. A way he might actually be able to pull off.”
The stacks of books in Tyler’s room suddenly flashed in Darger’s mind. Adrenaline sizzled in her veins now. This was starting to make sense.
“And maybe these references point to who he sees as his chosen family — the serial killers he worships.”
Darger swiped through her photos to look at the newest note, reading it again. Her eyes went to the final line of the short poem he’d written. And the sparrows still sing in the morning. There was something about it that seemed strangely familiar. She typed the eight words into her phone and hit the Search button.
“David Berkowitz,” she said, the pieces finally sliding into place. “That was his poem. Huxley just changed a few of the words to make it fit an acid bomb instead of bullets. And look at this. One of his letters started with, ‘Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C.’ — another Berkowitz quote. Half of the second note is plagiarized from the Son of Sam letters.”
From the summer of 1976 until August 1977, the self-proclaimed Son of Sam terrorized New York. He shot couples in cars, the eight attacks leaving six dead and seven wounded, and his letters to both the police and press taunted the public and whipped them deeper and deeper into a terrified frenzy.
“High caliber,” Loshak said, quoting another part of the clue. “Before the Son of Sam nickname emerged, the papers had called Berkowitz the .44 Caliber Killer as it was such an uncommon — and large — caliber of bullet committing all the crimes. It’s how they figured out the murders were linked.”
Loshak’s fingers drummed against his knee.
“OK… so where is he telling us to go?” he asked. “To the site of one of the shootings? And if so, which one?”
Darger searched for a map of the Son of Sam murders and found one. Jesus. The internet had everything these days. Studying the map, she inhaled.
“Look at this. Half of the attacks took place in Queens. Just blocks from here. Just blocks from…”
She and Loshak stared at each other.
“Huxley’s old stomping grounds.”
CHAPTER 24
Flashlights sliced through the dark of night, lighting up sidewalks and benches, trees and bushes. Fredrick had called in reinforcements, and now they had five groups with K-9 units searching the various former Son of Sam crime scenes located on Huxley’s home turf.
Loshak and Darger were with Group 3, assigned to comb the area around Bowne Park — a nearly 12-acre slab of green east of downtown Flushing, Queens. Gone dark for the day hours ago, the park consisted of a playground, basketball courts, a bocce court, and a kettle pond — an oval-shaped 2-acre aerated lagoon with two fountains, surrounded by a concrete retaining wall.
On the night of October 23, 1976, Carl Denaro and Rosemary Keenan were sitting in a car near the park when David Berkowitz opened fire into the vehicle. Keenan escaped with only superficial injuries from the broken glass of the car’s shattered windows, but Denaro had taken a .44 caliber bullet to the head. He survived the attack, but part of his skull had to be replaced with a metal plate.
Darger felt a twinge of sympathy pain along the part of her scalp that covered her own metal plate.
“What did Fredrick say again?” Darger said. “That we’re like ten blocks from Huxley’s mother’s house?”
Loshak nodded.
“This has to be it, then,” she said, swinging the beam of her flashlight over the drooping branches of a willow tree. “This is the closest of the Son of Sam crime scenes to where he grew up. Family history could have a double meaning.”
“If there’s something here, the dogs will find it,” Loshak said, gesturing at a bloodhound sniffing around the edge of the nearby pond.
Each search party had been paired with two K-9 search teams, and then they’d parceled out dirty laundry from Huxley’s house and given each of the dogs his scent in hopes of achieving faster results.
Darger checked her phone again, and her stomach clenched at how much time had passed since they’d solved the Son of Sam clue. It had taken a while to arrange the search parties, to call in the K-9 units, to collect the clothing from Huxley’s home, and to issue instructions to each group. They had a little under five hours remaining to figure out where the next attack would take place.
She and Loshak spent several minutes carefully sweeping the area beneath a willow tree. Around the trunk. Up in the branches. Finding nothing of interest, they moved on.
“I wish we knew what exactly we were looking for,” Darger grumbled. “I mean, this isn’t a huge park, but the number of places you could hide something here… we don’t even know how big it is.”
“Or whether it’s out in the open,” Loshak added. “Or hidden in a bush or a trash can. Or shit… buried.”
Darger checked the clock again. Seven minutes had passe
d since she’d last looked.
Too much time. We’re moving too slow.
She felt her heart rate quicken at the thought that they might solve the clue and still run out of time. What a sick joke that would be.
From somewhere off to her left, someone’s radio let out a burst of static. She heard a rustle of leaves as an NYPD officer tromped through a nearby hedge in an awkward squat-walk, swinging his flashlight around like a cutlass. Another policeman flipped open the lid of a trashcan and peered inside before replacing the top and moving on.
Someone would find something. They had to.
She and Loshak reached the edge of a pond situated at one side of the park. There was a semicircular ring of benches and a concrete drinking fountain in the center.
Darger got down on her hands and knees and aimed the beam of her light under the first bench.
“This one’s clear,” she said, crawling forward to the next bench.
The rough surface of the concrete dug into her knees, and tiny pebbles stuck to the palms of her hand.
She focused the beam of her light on the underside of the next bench. The light glinted as it touched something there.
She froze. There was something metallic tucked behind the back left leg of the bench.
“You got something?”
“Maybe,” she said, scooting closer.
“Don’t touch it,” Loshak said.
Darger squinted, studying the object. Her shoulders slumped.
“False alarm,” she said. “It’s just one of those juice pouches with the silvery packaging. Capri-Sun, or whatever. When my light hit it, I thought it was something made of metal at first.”
She leaned back on her knees and dusted the dirt and bits of gravel from her hands.
“How come I’m always the one that ends up crawling around in the muck?” she asked.
Violet Darger | Book 8 | Countdown To Midnight Page 12
