Stumbling on the Sand

by Jenna Rae

  Del started to interject, but Lola shook her head.

  “No, wait. I felt broken. I was broken.” She stopped to swipe at her eyes. “We fell in love. And it was amazing. I thought we were happy, I thought nothing would change. But I did change. I got more confident, in part because of you. I started to see myself as a whole person, not just somebody’s property or whatever, and part of that was thanks to you loving me.” She wiped her eyes and smiled. “You made me want to be more. Smarter and stronger and more independent. To be your partner, not just your girlfriend.”

  “You are.” Del bit her lip. “You were.”

  “Not really. I lived for you. I only cared about what you thought of me and what you wanted. I was like an appendage to you, and I didn’t want to be. I could lean on you, I could trust you. And that was such a precious gift! I wanted to give that same gift to you, be the person you could lean on, the person you could trust.”

  “You are!” Del’s words burst out, and Lola’s smile was gentle. Del bristled at what felt like condescension and worked to push away her urge to defend herself. She gestured at Lola to respond.

  “No. I’m not,” Lola answered quietly. “I’m the person you protect. I’m the person you give love to. But you won’t take it back. You don’t trust me enough to tell me what you really feel, what you really want. You act like I’m some helpless child that you love, but I’m not a child. I’m a grown woman.”

  “I know that.”

  “Del.” Lola shook her head and looked away. “I love you more than anything in the whole world. I would do anything for you. But you need to be willing to trust me with your heart. You need to give up some of the control you always have to have.”

  Del decided not to argue that point. Hadn’t Janet said something about that? At the thought of Janet, Del drifted away and heard Lola as if through a brick wall.

  “I need you to decide you want a partner. I need you to lean on me. Tell me when you’re scared or unsure or insecure. I want you to drop your guard around me. I want you to let me hold you up the way you hold me up. Can you do that? Can you give up some of that power? Can you let me be your partner for real?”

  “You are.” Del swallowed, wondering if her words sounded as false to Lola as they did to her. “You are my partner. I do lean on you. I trust you more than anyone in the world. I don’t understand what you think I’m holding back.”

  Lola shook her head. “Please, just think about this. Please? I’m not trying to make you jump through hoops. I’m certainly not trying to change you into something you’re not. I don’t know how else to say what I’m feeling. I’m obviously not doing a good job of explaining it.” She looked away. “I’m tired. I think I’m going to try to sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay.” Del fought the urge to argue. “Sure.”

  Lola nodded and turned to go. Watching her walk away, following her, Del suddenly realized she was blowing it.

  “You’re getting rid of me for not knowing my lines,” she complained.

  Lola shook her head. “No. What are you talking about?”

  “It’s like, if I do what you want, fine. But when I can’t read your mind—”

  “I’m not asking you to read my mind, and I’m not—I don’t even—I just want you to talk to me. Is that so crazy?”

  “What do you see when you look at me?”

  Lola licked her lips and blinked. “The woman who means more to me than anyone.”

  “No, really.” Del grimaced. “Tell me what you see.”

  “Beauty, intelligence, kindness—”

  “Not compliments,” Del protested. “What do you see?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Del fled to her house, where she sat on her bed feeling cold and lonely.

  She felt the way her hips created a dent in the comforter. “Like a trench. Like I’m entrenched. Like Janet said.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Anton Jones, her favorite computer specialist, was waiting for Del when she showed up at work the next morning. He had folded his lanky frame into her chair and beamed at her with sparkling eyes. She bumped his toe with her boot.

  “I see you got the memo.”

  Jones looked puzzled until Del pointed out their outfits. Both wore green sweaters with brown chinos. “Hey, only the cool kids know what to wear.”

  Del laughed. “I am not now, nor have I ever been, a cool kid.”

  Jones grinned widely. “Would you believe I have? No? Well, you’re right.”

  “To what do I owe the honor of this visit, Jones? You just loitering?”

  “Heh.” He smirked at her. “Learned it from you, slacker.”

  Del smiled. “You’re in a cheerful mood.”

  “Speaking of, I heard you and Davies are sweet on each other.” Jones made a face.

  “Yeah, he’s just trying to pull on my pigtails.”

  Jones waved away the subject of Davies. “How’s Lola?”

  “Fine. How’s your mom, she feeling better?”

  “Actually, she’s good. Sugar’s stable most of the time, and she’s doing an exercise class at the senior center. Listen, since you were too lazy to show up until the day was half over, I had to do your job for you.”

  Del smiled. Jones must have something good to offer or he wouldn’t be teasing her. She reached into her desk and pulled out a candy bar, knowing Jones was a sucker for sweets. She waggled it in front of him and put it behind her back. “Want it? Spill.”

  “Nuh-uh.” He swung his head from side to side and held out his hand. “Candy first.”

  “Nice try, smartass. Spill.”

  At that moment, Phan walked in and reached behind Del to grab the candy from her and wave it at the computer expert. “Jones, you don’t have shit. If you did, Bradley would be here.”

  “Oh, really? Our fearless leader already did your job, and all before eight in the morning.”

  Del raised an eyebrow. “Tell me more.”

  “Warrants for Teager’s place, his car? Remember that? Or did you forget all about working for a living?”

  “Teager? Nobody thought he was good for either—well?” Del was tired of playing and let her tone show it. “How did it go down? What did you find on his computer?”

  “Okay, boys and girls, preacher’s gonna preach. Sit up and pay attention, ’cause I just made your lives very easy. Or at least very interesting.”

  He stood, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Del had trouble containing her excitement. They wouldn’t have gotten warrants without something good.

  “A couple weeks ago, Mason here—” Jones gestured at Del, “sent out an informal request for everybody’s perv-on-the-loose files.”

  Phan nodded impatiently. “And submitted a formal request for info as well. We know.”

  “Because of that,” Jones continued, shooting Phan a look, “a couple things happened. A few of our guys followed up on their guys who’d never been charged, guys they liked for sex crimes but they didn’t have any evidence on.”

  “Jones—”

  “So, one of them’s retired—Garibaldi?”

  Del nodded, recognizing the name of a retired officer she’d spoken with a few times. She kept her smiling mouth pressed in a thin line so she wouldn’t interrupt Jones’s circuitous progress.

  “Thirty years ago, he served in the Marine Corps with a guy named Johnson, who was a Fed until he retired. His brother’s kid followed in his footsteps. Johnson’s nephew just happened to be one of the Feds assigned to this case after the second kidnapping. Johnson and Garibaldi are catching up one day, and they chat about the case. Follow all that, my congregation of two?” Jones took a deep breath. “Okay, the Patriot Act? Heard of it?”

  Both detectives nodded, exchanging glances. Del had a flash of her dining room, an Ernie White-themed testament to her willingness to exploit the Patriot Act and invade the privacy of a citizen who wasn’t actually under investigation.


  “So Garibaldi talks to his fellow jarhead about this sweet lady at Mission Station who’s curious about all these bad guys who never got charged. They talk about how nice it would be to know what those bad guys are looking at online.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes.” Jones nodded. “Garibaldi’s buddy calls his nephew and tells him about their conversation. Something happens, who knows what, and some Fed boss we’ve never seen sends Bradley a long, formal email offering a ‘higher level of assistance and interagency cooperation’ without actually specifying what that will entail. What that ends up being is a data dump comprised of nine banker boxes of paperwork delivered an hour after the email was sent. Bradley thinks they’re fucking with him, naturally. He’s going to put some flunky on it. He thinks it’s probably nothing but of course can’t ignore these boxes stacked up in his office. The request goes out in a group email we all get.”

  “I don’t remember anything like that,” Phan interjected, frowning.

  “Maybe because,” Jones said, “Bradley forwarded the attached message the Fed told him to send the officers. The subject line said ‘Redundant Data Overview Review.’ Nobody read it. Bradley assigned some rookies to sort through the information. They’re rookies, so they created a ridiculously complicated spreadsheet no one could understand. Bradley asked me if I could look at it, and—”

  “What did you find?” Del forced herself to breathe normally.

  “The Feds created a list of seventeen likely subjects, and Ronald Teager was one of them. For each likely subject there was a data set, and there was a lot of data on Teager. Two years ago, when he bought a new laptop, our man Teager was spending two or three hours a day online, looking at porn. He liked all kinds for a while, and then he got into the specialty stuff. That’s what porn addicts do, they need more and more intense stimulation. Bondage, girls asleep or drunk or high, gang bangs, animals, torture, shit like that. He spent hour after hour watching and downloading really weird shit. Pretty soon all of it was freaky.”

  “How does this help us?” Phan sounded more irritated than curious, and Del shot him a look. Jones had been working all night, obviously. He clearly had something good to offer.

  “Sit tight. Soon the porn was all one theme. Girls asleep, girls asleep and tied up. Girls passed out or drugged or whatever. I mean, he watched hours and hours of this. He’s looking at porn just at night for a while, but then it’s all the time. Twelve, fourteen hours a day or more. I don’t know when the fucker sleeps or works or anything. He’s saving shit on several external hard drives, he watches things over and over. He starts looking up criminal cases involving women and girls being kidnapped, drugged and raped. He downloads all kinds of info on rapes. He downloads books describing forensic science and investigative procedures, true-crime books.”

  “He studied.” Phan’s voice was flat.

  “Our boy’s a regular fucking scholar. His history tells the whole tale. Teager’s watching the same shit over and over, he’s reading the same shit over and over. He has three laptops and two tablets. He even has a desktop. He’s taking notes, making plans and to-do lists. He’s got a menu. Recipes for drug cocktails. He writes a journal detailing his hopes and fears. He starts hanging out in chat rooms, calls himself Prince Charming. He’s cagey at first, asking guys if they like sleeping beauties.”

  “There are two of them.” Del felt her mouth drop open. “That’s why he has an alibi for some of the incidents. He has a partner. We talked about that—”

  She saw Phan’s gaze dart to her face. She chucked her chin at Jones so he’d continue.

  “Ding, ding, ding, a prize for the little lady. About eight months ago, Teager finds a buddy. Guy calls himself The Sandman. Both capitals, you know? And they get to chatting about how nice it is when a girl is just a little sleepy. How it makes things so much better if she’ll just close her eyes and go limp and let him play.”

  “Nice.” Del pressed her lips together.

  Jones’s expression reflected a mixture of disgust at his topic and glee at whatever prize his work had netted. “Right? And, man, they go off! Teager and The Sandman spend a few weeks in a private chat room talking about all the shit they wanna do. How society is so judgmental and prudish. Women use sex to manipulate men, women are bitches and users and whores, a man ain’t a man unless he can take what he wants. A man deserves all the pu—sex he wants, and any woman who denies him deserves to be punished. Our boys work each other up into a big, pervy lather. They exchange personal emails, start sending each other pictures, videos, links to websites. They swap tips about avoiding detection. Prince Charming—Teager—tells Sandman bad weather makes it easier to sneak up on a house. Sandman explains how important it is to establish plausible deniability. They’re excellent collaborators.”

  “Gross.” Del grimaced. “Like minds.”

  “Jones,” Phan asked, “the videos, the pictures—are they useful to us?”

  “Step off and wait for it.” Jones dropped the candy onto the desk. “At that point, all the media is from websites. But then something happens. Teager is offline for four days, and Sandman starts freaking out. He wants to know where Teager is. Then Prince Charming—that’s Teager—comes back and says his mom died. They go on for a while about how she was a whore like all women.”

  Phan made a face. “Do the dates line up with when Teager’s mother died?”

  Jones grinned widely. “Yes they do. Teager offers Sandman a present. It’s a .jpg—that’s a picture for you children of the dinosaur age—and it’s crap. Blurry, dark, grainy—a woman in a nightgown, lying in her bed, under the covers, sleeping. The pic was taken through the window, looks like. Sandman asks who it is, and Teager says it’s his neighbor.”

  Del exchanged glances with Phan. “So Teager sent Sandman, whoever that is, a picture taken from outside the window of his neighbor’s bedroom? And this is just after his mother died?”

  Jones nodded vigorously. “Yeah. And over the next couple weeks he sends dozens of .jpgs to Sandman. All taken from outside windows. They’re grainy, distorted. Some of them, you can see bird shit on the glass, streaks, stuff like that. Women and girls, dressing, undressing, just standing there. Sleeping. At first, all ages, all races, all types. But after a few weeks, it’s all skinny brunettes. Twenty to forty. Lots of them asleep.”

  Del smiled. “So Teager is the peeper?”

  “Most of our peeper’s victims are in there.” Jones grimaced. “There are a lot more we didn’t know about.”

  Phan jumped in. “Let me guess. Sandman likes the pictures, keeps egging Teager on. He wants him to do something besides take pictures. He keeps trying to get Teager to rape one of them.”

  “Right.” Jones continued, “Teager isn’t too sure, he’s worried about getting caught. He says he just wants to look at them. He doesn’t want to go to jail. So Sandman starts teasing him. Asks if he’s a man or bitch. And Teager gets mad.”

  Del points at Jones. “He asks what Sandman’s ever done.”

  “Bingo! And there’s radio silence.” Jones shrugs. “But after a week or so, Teager and Sandman start kind of reaching out to each other.” Jones stretched out his long, thin arm and waggled his fingers toward Phan. “Like to make sure they’re both still alive and not jailed. They’re worried. I mean, they’re porn buddies.”

  “Porn buddies?” Del frowned.

  Phan laughed and mirrored Jones’s gesture. “Yeah, you know, if I die suddenly, my porn buddy is supposed to go to my house and clean out all my nasty stuff so my wife or my mom or whoever doesn’t find it. I do the same for him.”

  Del looked from Phan to Jones. “Is that a real thing? Do you guys have porn buddies?”

  Jones laughed. “I’m a guy, remember?”

  Phan raised his hands in a wordless protestation of innocence.

  “Anyway,” Jones continued, “Sandman sends Teager a movie. He’s got a woman in a van. She’s out. I mean, totally out of it. And he undresses her, messes arou
nd with her.”

  “Is it our first kidnapping victim?”

  Jones nodded impatiently. “Teager gets it, he’s shitting his pants. He thinks it was awesome. Sandman wants Teager to step up his game, but he’s still scared.”

  “Let me guess,” Del said, “Sandman keeps pushing him.”

  “Yup.” Jones continued, perching on the edge of the desk, “Sends him a second video—yes, it’s the second victim.”

  Del and Phan exchanged a glance.

  “They take a vow,” Jones said. “They’re brothers. They’ll alibi each other. They’ll stick together no matter what. Sandman promises Teager he can help him get a girl and they can share her. Teager’s eager but scared. Keeps backing out of the deal. They talk about how to keep from leaving any physical evidence. They make a plan. They—”

  “So Teager was there with Leslie Thorne?” Phan rapped his fingers on the desk. “He helped?”

  “He watched. Sandman messed around with her, and Teager freaked. He left and went to the station to file his phony report, and he didn’t even realize she was dead until the next day.”

  Del touched Jones on the arm. “Question is, can we use this, keep Teager locked up?”

  “They should both be locked up for a while.” Phan grimaced. “If we can find out who Sandman is.” He gestured a question at Jones.

  “Yeah. Well, Teager’s really been freaking out since he found out the girl died.”

  “Leslie Thorne,” Del inserted, exchanging glances with Phan.

  “Yeah, he’s erasing stuff, warning Sandman. But as you know I’m a genius—archived everything related to Teager.”

  “Thank God,” Del and Phan said in unison.

  “See,” Jones said, stretching arms up and out. “Preacher preached, and the heathens got religion.”

  “Hallelujah.” Del put her hand over her heart. “Jones, I think I love you. Any chance you’ll be able to figure out who Sandman is?”

  “Who, me?”

  “Who else?” Phan offered a sycophantic grin.