Loshak knelt beside her and helped her roll the seizing man off his back.
His torso flexed and released from the middle out, flopping the rest of him like a salmon out of water. His skull cracked against the tile over and over, looked like it was trying to pound his ponytail into the floor.
The skin of Cowboy’s face had gone cherry red now. More and more froth spilled out of his lips. Small choked sounds coming out along with the foam now. And still his eyes strained upward so that Darger could see only the whites.
Then he stopped. Limbs slowly settling into place and holding utterly still.
No more tremors. No more foam. No more strangled sounds coming out.
All those watching hesitated. Blinking. Waiting.
Darger glanced at Loshak. He nodded, and they eased him onto his back again.
Loshak leaned over and pressed his fingers to the side of Cowboy’s neck. They looked ghostly white against the strange red skin. He held them there for what felt like a long time. Pulled them away at last.
“He’s dead.”
Chapter 51
Darger stood in the front yard and watched the EMTs through the open doorway. They hoisted Keith “Cowboy” Heider’s limp figure from the foyer floor, shifting him up and into the open flaps of the body bag. The zippered edge yawned like a mouth, curled around him like lips, the black plastic swallowing him.
His face jutted from the gap. His eyes were still open. Those exposed whites pointed up at nothing.
And then the zipper mended itself over top of him. The pull tab climbed up from his feet. Passed over his body. And finally dead-ended above his head. The black plastic closed, blotted him out for good.
“Did you see how red his skin got?” Loshak asked.
Darger blinked, startled from her thoughts.
“What?”
“His skin. Looked like a boiled lobster. It’s a sign of cyanide poisoning,” Loshak said. “The Nazis loved cyanide. The SS soldiers carried little capsules on their person. Better to commit suicide than be captured, right? Just crush the capsule between the molars, swallow the concentrated poison, and be whisked away to oblivion before the enemy could torture you for information.”
He shook his head before he went on.
“Heinrich Himmler killed himself in custody that way. Leonard Lake did the same when he was arrested. Had the capsules sewn into his clothes. Took him a few days to actually die, though.”
Darger’s palms felt icy. Fingers numb. She rubbed her hands together, but it didn’t help.
One of the paramedics tapped his shoe on the footswitch of the gurney, and then the two of them lifted the bed frame until the folding support legs extended and locked into place beneath. With the gurney at full height, they wheeled it through the door and down the walk.
It was late now. Almost dark. Thick gray hung everywhere, like the color had been drained from reality as the day gave way to night.
It wasn’t cold, but Darger shivered nevertheless. Something about seeing death up close, seeing it rip someone from the mortal plane so quickly, had shaken her, even if the victim in this case wasn’t someone who probably deserved much sympathy.
The paramedics loaded the body into the back of the ambulance and closed the doors, one after the other. Then they climbed into the front seat and slowly pulled away from the curb.
No siren. No twirling lights. They just drifted away.
A hand grabbed Darger’s shoulder, startling her. She turned to find Detective Ambrose, a grave look on his face.
“We’ve got something you should see in here.”
Chapter 52
Ambrose led Darger and Loshak to a guest bedroom at the back of the house — a small space with dark blue walls and darker wood details. There seemed a tighter cluster of crime scene techs swirling here, their vinyl bunny suits crinkling as they jockeyed around each other for position, snapping photos as always.
Darger’s eyes scanned the decor first. A mahogany dresser and similarly dark bedside table surrounded the twin-sized bed, its bedspread dominated by dark purples and reds.
Across the room, she finally saw what Ambrose wanted to show her.
A bookcase had been swung away from the wall, revealing a hidden doorway behind it. Thick darkness lay beyond that rectangular opening. Too thick, Darger thought. Utter darkness hung like a blanket on the other side of the door frame.
Then a camera flash lit up the space, and Darger understood.
“A hidden room,” Ambrose said, knifing between some techs to get to the door. Darger and Loshak followed.
“Did you have to pull on one of the books to get it to open?” Loshak said, but Ambrose didn’t respond to his joke.
“Seems our boy — our recently deceased Cowboy, I should say — was big into amateur photography,” the detective said. “An enthusiast, you could say.”
They stepped into a darkroom for developing analog photographs. An acrid chemical smell filled Darger’s nostrils right away, the fumes stinging faintly in her eyes. Ambrose dismissed the tech snapping photos and flipped a light switch just inside the door.
Red light lit the space. A dark glow like wine illuminating all that stood before them.
Various trays of liquid lay in front of them. Shallow sinks, more or less, indented into a workbench. Photos hung on a clothesline in the opposite corner of the room, but they were faced away from Darger, forming four white rectangles from her point of view. Blank.
Ambrose moved to the line. Reached up with a nitrile-gloved hand and plucked one of the photos free. Then he turned it for Darger and Loshak to see, not quite offering it to them.
In the photograph, a naked woman posed on all fours, perched on what looked like a cheap motel room bed. The gaudy floral print of the blanket beneath her combined with the wood-paneled wall seemed to suggest it was taken years ago, but the fact that it was recently developed seemed to suggest otherwise.
“Alas, he was more of a pornographer than an artist,” Ambrose said, clipping the photo back on the line. “He had a sensitive aesthetic eye for, you know, boobs. Quite prolific, too.”
Ambrose shot a pair of finger guns at a stack of something in the corner of the room. Darger turned. It took her eyes a second to make sense of what she was seeing.
Photo albums. It was a stack of photo albums slightly taller than her. It had to be thousands of pictures.
She picked one up and riffled through a few pages. Naked flesh gleamed up from the glossy photo paper, all of it tinted blood-red by the darkroom light.
Fresh faces made eye contact with the camera lens, seemed to stare right into the viewer’s gaze. A new face adorned every page or two. So many different girls.
Not just thousands of pictures, Darger realized. Thousands of girls.
“There were even more,” Ambrose said. “A whole ‘nother stack of photo albums just like those. The techs are processing a big batch of them now.”
Darger’s eyes drifted from face to face. Tried to read the expressions. Some of the girls looked nervous, but others didn’t.
“Do we think these were taken consensually?” she said, turning her head to Loshak.
Her partner crinkled his brow.
“Some of them maybe,” he said. He gestured to the stack of photo albums. “But this level of output speaks to intense compulsion. Obsession. I would expect the behavior to escalate. What starts as an amateur porn habit grows into something else, right? Into whatever led to those bodies in the landfill. Into whatever we’ll find in the tunnels, I suspect.”
Commotion outside the darkroom pulled all eyes to the doorway.
Agent Zaragoza materialized in the strange red light of the room, her face positively glowing under the bunny suit hood.
“He left something for you, Ambrose.” She handed Ambrose a manila envelope. “Found it in a locked drawer in the big oak desk in the office.”
The detective ran a gloved finger over the sealed flap, then turned the thing over.
Black sharpie ink scrawled spiky text on the front of the envelope.
Open in the event of my death. -K. Heider
Chapter 53
Ambrose carefully sliced open the envelope with a box cutter. The angular blade made a zipping sound where it slit through the manila paper.
He parted the flaps, and they all peered into that gaping yellow maw.
Inside was a single DVD-R. The gray Memorex label looked matte silver and speckled on one side, and the bottom of the disc gleamed little rainbows where the light touched it.
Ambrose dumped it into his hand and turned it over. The disc itself had no writing on it.
“Is there a DVD player where we could watch this?” he said, his eyebrows lifting as he regarded Agent Zaragoza.
The hood of the bunny suit wrinkled as she nodded.
“Out by the flat screen in the living room.”
They all filed out to the front of the house then. The group of law enforcement seemed to grow into a crowd following along behind them, whispering and gesticulating. Everyone wanted to see.
Agent Zaragoza knelt before the TV and fingered the button to turn it on. The blank screen turned red, and the Roku logo flared in the center of the screen.
Ambrose popped the disc into the DVD tray beneath the flat screen. Then he fished the remote off the coffee table and hit play.
The screen went black for a second, and everyone in the room held still and silent. Darger could hear her own pulse.
And then Cowboy’s face filled the screen, an arrogant smirk curling beneath the horseshoe mustache.
The image of foam frothing from his mouth and wetting that very mustache flashed in Darger’s head right away, making her faintly queasy. Her hand clutched at the front of her jacket just beneath the collar. Pinched it closed.
Cowboy scooted back from the camera, his arm falling away from where he’d clicked it on. The grin on his lips bloomed into a full-blown smile, big bleached teeth exposed.
Then he looked into the viewfinder a second. Straightened his hat and sunglasses. Ran his fingers over his mustache as though smoothing it down.
“Look, here’s the deal,” he said into the camera. “My name is Keith Heider, and if you’re watching this, then I’m probably dead. Pretty bad case of chomping on a couple cyanide capsules, right? This here video is, uh… Shoot, this is my damn manifesto, I guess you could say.”
He turned his head. Took a deep breath. Then he looked back to the camera and went on.
“I got family, right? A sister. Nieces and a nephew. I just want to explain myself here. Lay out the whole, uh, explanation. Maybe that’ll absolve my family of some future suffering. I hope so. They deserve no blame for what I done. No blame at all.”
Cowboy lit a cigarette. Leaned back in his chair.
“We’ve built something. Dug something. Excavated. I’m sure that’s been discovered by now. I won’t belabor the engineering feat of it all.”
He licked his lips. Breathed smoke.
“I have a certain taste in women. A certain… uh… fetish, I guess you’d call it. I’ve never had a lot of trouble getting girls. Even before all my crypto investments went cuckoo-bananas, I could go out to a bar and get a girl to spread her legs for me, you know? Not a problem, bucko. Wasn’t always the prettiest girl in the place, but good enough…”
He ashed his cigarette, the smoldering tube pounding against a grooved spot in the ashtray next to him.
“But over time, and I don’t know exactly when it happened, I started wanting something more. I mean, there was something missing, I guess. The satisfaction was fleeting. No fulfillment. Getting a girl is one thing, you know? But keeping her? Keeping her is something else altogether.”
He smiled again. Pushed his sunglasses back up onto the bridge of his nose.
“See, I wanted to keep a girl. Not like a relationship where she chatters my ear off and tries to get me to go shopping for window treatments or on family outings or some such nonsense. No, no. I wanted to bring her out when I wanted her. Put her away when I didn’t. Not a relationship. Possession. It became like the ultimate desire. The most erotic thing I could think of. I get that it’s, like, a control freak type of deal or whatever. Wanting to keep a girl in a little cage down in a damn tunnel or whatever.”
He shook his head.
“But a man don’t decide what he wants. He just wants it.”
He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another.
“And then it grew from there, I guess. Wanting to keep a girl has a way of turning into wanting to keep two. Or three. Or eight.”
Little puffs of laughter jetted from his nostrils, bringing smoke with them.
“When you want something bad enough, long enough, hard enough, pursuing it stops feeling like a choice. Starts feeling like a goddamn crusade. Manifest destiny and whatever the hell. Every beat of your heart thrums with it. Every breath you take is only to get you one step closer to that edge. The point of no return, you know?”
He thumped his cig against the ashtray again.
“So I guess I’ve been willing to lose everything for this all along. Willing to risk it all. To the point that I carry around little poison pills on my person, OK? We all die, though. Every single one of us. Death was always part of the equation, always part of the deal. Better to accept it quickly than to rot in prison. So I promise you, I’ll have no regrets right up until that final breath.”
He fell silent for a few seconds.
“Better to chase a dream, man. Better to live a while.”
Abruptly he moved to the camera, lifted his hand into the frame, and shut it off.
The screen went black.
Chapter 54
Cowboy’s voice played in Darger’s head as she strapped on her Kevlar vest and slid on her helmet. Little snippets of what he’d said echoed in her skull, sounding close. Intimate.
“Not a relationship. Possession.”
His words made her hands go icy. Made her flesh crawl.
“A man don’t decide what he wants. He just wants it.”
With her body going cold and numb, she didn’t feel like she was still here, in this suburban home swarming with law enforcement. Didn’t feel like she was just around the corner from where a man had ridden a couple of cyanide pills into oblivion, limbs flailing, mouth foaming.
Instead, she felt alone and hollow, sucked inside herself. Ghostly. Held still somewhere cavernous and cold, somewhere far from any road.
She had to shake herself out of that state, she knew. Like right now.
She glanced over to see Loshak adjusting the chin strap of his helmet. The black vest already swathed his torso, the same as hers.
They were gearing up to follow the SWAT team into the tunnel, bringing up the rear of the underground rescue raid. She needed to stay sharp, needed to be ready for whatever might be down there.
The primary hope of everyone involved was that they’d find the girls he kept down there, and that they’d find them alive. Darger swallowed a lump when she thought about the alternatives, her eyelids fluttering.
Please let them be alive.
Darger watched two of the SWAT team members as she got ready. One of them took off his helmet and tucked it under his arm, a movie star haircut spilling out from beneath the hard shell as he did — hair so blond it almost looked yellow. He looked remarkably like the actor who’d played Jamie Lannister on Game of Thrones.
“What do you think the holdup is this time, DeBarge?” he said to the officer standing next to him.
His friend was adjusting his vest, loosening the straps and pulling the shoulders of the thing back, then re-tightening everything. He was doing this more out of boredom than anything, Darger suspected. All the SWAT guys had been geared up and ready since before any of them had stepped foot off the truck.
“You know how it works. They need to yell at us for fifteen minutes before they send us in there. Standard operating procedure.”
Jamie Lannister turned his head to
ward Darger then. Squinted his eyes down to slits. A smile slowly spread over the bottom half of his face. He whacked his buddy on the shoulder.
“That’s Violet damn Darger over there, DeBarge.”
“Who?”
“Violet. Darger. The profiler who helped catch the Doll Parts Killer in Ohio. Read a newspaper once in a while.”
“Oh yeah,” DeBarge said, nodding and smiling.
The Kingslayer stuck his large hand out to Darger, and she shook it.
“I’m Hendrix. This is DeBarge. We’re big fans of your work.”
Loshak came closer then.
“Oh, hey,” Hendrix said, his movie star hair twitching back from his eyes as he saw the second agent. “You must be, uh, Agent Lorshak.”
Loshak, too, shook his oversized hand, smiling. Darger thought he would correct the officer’s pronunciation of his name, but he didn’t.
“You ever heard of a little someone called Zakarian the Barbarian, DeBarge? Cause this guy singlehandedly took him down. Shot him right in the face.”
Hendrix retracted his hand from Loshak’s and proceed to pantomime a dramatic execution with a finger gun, complete with mouth sound effects, his arm whipping back from the imaginary recoil.
“Jesus, Hendrix. Give it a rest,” DeBarge said. He turned to Darger as he went on. “He’s always like this before a raid. Obnoxious, I mean. And it’s not all that different from how he is on a normal day, but I think the adrenaline makes him extra annoying.”
Hendrix scoffed.
“Someone has to keep things loose around here. We can’t all be as uptight as you are, DeBarge. He’s a real professional. You want me to tell ‘em how constipated these raids make you? Guy gets all dried out from it. As soon as we’re done, like clockwork, he rockets toward the nearest toilet, lifting his legs like Usain Bolt, sweatin’, but he can’t go. Sits there for like 45 minutes at a stretch. Said it’s like trying to shit petrified wood for the next few days.” He rubbed at his belly. “Thick oak branches turned to stone in the gulliver.”
Violet Darger | Book 7 | Dark Passage Page 23
