Violet Darger | Book 7 | Dark Passage

by Vargus, L. T.

  “We’ve gotten bits and pieces out of her, but being down there that long did a number on her mentally, I think,” Ambrose explained. “You can talk to her if you want, but I wouldn’t expect to get anything very coherent.”

  The same nursing assistant who’d brought Cora her tray whisked past them with Lily’s meal. No sooner had the tray been set down than Lily began to wolf down the food. Her motions were frantic, using the spoon to shovel some kind of porridge into her mouth. She ate as though she was afraid the tray might be taken away from her at any moment, like she had only moments to get as much of it down as fast as she could. But what disturbed Darger more than the compulsive, panicked eating was the haunted look in the girl’s eye. The way she glanced up and around every few seconds, wary of her surroundings.

  Lily finished the porridge. Licked the bowl and spoon clean. And then stared at the empty vessel, an expression of absolute misery on her face.

  Darger had seen the tray they’d brought in for Cora. It had been full of all sorts of things: burger and fries, a cup of soup, mixed veggies, and a slice of what looked like cheesecake for dessert. It was easily twice as much food as what Lily had received.

  “Why are they giving her so little food?” Darger asked.

  Ambrose pursed his lips.

  “The way the doctor explained it to me is that after prolonged bouts of starvation, they have to be very careful reintroducing food. Something about all the electrolyte imbalances that happen as a result of not eating, and how when the body gets food again and the metabolism kicks back into gear, it throws everything out of whack. They get abnormal heart rhythms and can go into acute heart failure. It’s called refeeding syndrome.” Ambrose thrust his hands into his pockets. “So she’s on a very strict diet and will be for some time. That’s one of the things that makes talking to her so difficult. She just keeps asking for food.”

  Darger’s heart broke a little as she watched Lily pick up the spoon and began licking it again, like maybe she’d left a morsel of two.

  “I think any questions we have for her can wait for another day,” Loshak said, turning to face her. “What do you think?”

  “Yeah,” Darger agreed. “They can wait.”

  Chapter 85

  Their next stop was to interview Warren Francis Strass, AKA Worm. They followed Detective Ambrose over to the detention center, parked, and got in line to make their way through the security checkpoint.

  The jail looked like any number of similar institutions Darger had been in before. Industrial and hard and antiseptic. Every sound echoing down the cavernous, windowless hallways. It reminded her of being underground. A shudder ran up her spine, and she had to glance back the way they’d come, back at the doors that led outside.

  “So here’s another little bizarro snippet for you,” Ambrose said. “You know how Cora told us that Cowboy was the one who killed Chase and locked her in the cage?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It wasn’t Cowboy. It was Worm.”

  “But she described Cowboy to a tee. Hat. Mustache. Ponytail,” Darger said, checking the features off on her fingers.

  “That was a Worm in Cowboy clothing,” Ambrose said.

  “What? Why?”

  Ambrose shrugged.

  “We haven’t got that far in his confession, so I couldn’t tell ya. The DA is having him start at the very beginning to give us everything in detail, step by step. We’ve barely scratched the surface, to be quite honest. But if you want to ask him about it, go for it. I’d love to hear an explanation.”

  “So he is going to plead out after all?” Loshak asked. “We heard there’d been some waffling.”

  “Oh yeah. He’s gonna plead,” Ambrose said, nodding. “Once we reminded him that Pennsylvania is a death penalty state, he got real talkative. He says he’ll tell us anything, cop to anything, as long as that’s off the table. Much to his lawyer’s chagrin. Still, I don’t know how much insight he’s going to be able to offer you, at least in terms of your work in behavioral analysis.”

  “Why? Is he too nuts?”

  Ambrose only smirked.

  “You’ll see.”

  Chapter 86

  Worm was already waiting in the meeting room when they arrived — a small room with plain white walls. The only window looked out on the hallway. No natural light touched the space.

  Darger wondered if Worm felt at home in this little cell, the way he’d seemed to feel at home in the tunnels.

  She studied him as they entered the room. He wore a brownish jumpsuit with a zipper that ran from the crotch to the neck. When she saw the way the legs of the jumpsuit had been rolled up to keep them from bagging around his ankles, she realized how short he was. Shockingly so. She’d forgotten that, somehow. He’d seemed bigger in the eerie underground lighting. Bigger when she’d fought him for her life.

  The second thing she noticed was the pack of cookies in front of him. The kind Sandy had mentioned when they’d interviewed her. The small elf-shaped sandwich cookies. As they sat down across the table from him, Worm pried the two cookies comprising the sandwich apart and scraped the chocolate filling off with his front teeth. When he’d swallowed that, he stuck the two cookies back together and shoved the whole lot into his mouth.

  Loshak gave her a look that indicated she should take the lead.

  “Hello, Warren,” Darger said.

  “Warren.” He snorted. “Call me Worm, man. Everyone does.”

  “OK, Worm. Let’s talk about what you and Cowboy were up to.”

  “It was all Cowboy’s idea. The whole thing.” Worm paused with a cookie halfway to his mouth and looked thoughtful. “Always was kind of obsessed with digging, now that I think about it. Like this one winter, way back, we got all this snow. So much that it drifted all the way up on the tall side of his deck. Then we had an ice storm, so it sort of coated the whole thing with a shell. We dug it out into a sort of igloo. It was pretty rad.”

  Darger thought this sounded like something children would do.

  “When was this?” she asked.

  “Oh, a long time ago. I think I was ten, so Cowboy woulda been fifteen or sixteen.”

  “You’ve known Cowboy since you were ten?”

  “No.” Worm’s gold tooth glinted when he grinned. “I’ve known Cowboy since I was born. He’s my cousin. Shit. Was my cousin now, I guess.”

  That was interesting. Serial killing cousins, like the Hillside Stranglers.

  “Anyway, Cowboy always did like girls. Had a way with the ladies, I suppose you could say. Sometimes had two or three girlfriends at once, though I don’t think any of them ever knew that. I envied him for it. Looked up to him, you know? He was, like, the coolest dude I knew.” Worm crunched a cookie between his molars. “But he got kinda weird after he left the Marines. Was convinced we were heading for Armageddon, which I thought was just the name of a movie, to be honest. But he said that we had all the tools to survive it. And that it was the responsibility of someone like him, who sees the world for what it is, to remake the next version of civilization.”

  “And that would entail what, exactly?” Darger asked.

  “Well he said that everything really got messed up when we let women, like, start doing man stuff. Said we never should have allowed women to be soldiers or doctors or cops.” He gave her a pointed look as he swallowed another cookie. “Said that men were made to be the ones in control. Making decisions. Having the power. That women were supposed to have the babies and take care of the men. That’s how it works in nature right? It’s the order of the natural world. What we have now? That’s unnatural.”

  Darger wanted to ask if he was familiar with the order of the natural world when it came to the praying mantis but let him talk instead. His eyes flicked over to Ambrose.

  “Hey, can I get another thing of cookies?” he asked, flicking at the empty package on the table.

  “Maybe later,” Ambrose said. “How about something from the vending machine?”

 
“Is there candy?”

  “Sure. I think it’s got Skittles, peanut M&Ms, Starburst.”

  Worm’s head bobbed once.

  “OK.”

  “Which one?” Ambrose asked. “Starburst?”

  “All of them.”

  Ambrose raised an eyebrow.

  “You want something to drink with that?”

  “More Hawaiian Punch.”

  Darger caught an expression of mixed disgust and disbelief as Ambrose exited the room. A surge of anger rose in her chest at the notion of Worm sitting here stuffing his face, while Lily could barely eat more than a few morsels without running the risk of dying.

  “Anyway, I’m not always the best at explaining it,” Worm went on. “But the way Cowboy would say it, always made sense.”

  “So you were preparing for Armageddon? How did the girls fit into that?”

  Worm lifted his arm and scratched his armpit.

  “Well… that’s how it started. The apocalypse or whatever. But Cowboy could be kind of an impatient dude. Especially when it came to putting his plan into action. So after we were digging for a while, he said we needed to test it out.”

  Ambrose came back in, dumping an armload of candy and a can of punch in front of Worm.

  “Test it out, how?”

  Worm ripped open the bag of Skittles.

  “He said we needed to get a couple of girls as like, guinea pigs.”

  Darger felt nausea roiling in her gut as Worm poured Skittles into his mouth. The small candy-coated spheres rattled against his teeth.

  “Because part of his plan was that eventually the girls, well, they would kinda be into it. He had a theory that if you kept ‘em down in the dark long enough, isolated like that, that they’d want to come out and do stuff. Cook and clean and well… other things.”

  Darger squeezed her hands into fists. Stay calm, she thought. Let him keep yapping himself into a life sentence.

  “So we got the cages set up down in the tunnels, and we grabbed Trinity and Amaranth one night when Bo and Puck were working down in the tunnels.”

  “They were the,” Darger swallowed back her revulsion, “guinea pigs?”

  “Yeah. And that part was easy enough. Drugged their wine, loaded them into the truck, and took them over to the test site.”

  “That would be the house on Finch Lane?”

  “Yup. Cowboy decided that would be our beta testing grounds.” Worm pawed at the bandage that concealed the remnants of his ear. “Put the girls in the cages. Easy peasy. That part anyway. The thing was, it didn’t go exactly as Cowboy thought it would. He was dead wrong about how they’d react. He thought they’d be dying to be let out of those cages, so that they’d basically do anything we wanted. But it didn’t work that way, see? They were pissed. I think maybe it was the dark. Made them kinda crazy. They fought.”

  Worm tugged at the neck of his jumpsuit, revealing a nasty looking bite wound on his chest.

  “One of them did that?”

  “Fucking Amaranth. Not sure what it is with you bitches and the biting. But then Cowboy says that’s part of the current insanity with the world situation. Makes all the women a little crazy.”

  Darger felt a strange pang of pride that Bailey Harmon had fought back. Good for you, Bailey.

  “Why did you starve them?”

  “Well, Cowboy said we needed another variable. A way to show them who had the power. And he was right. It made them more docile. It was easier too. Not having to haul food up and down the damn ladder all the time. We’d give them just a little bit, if they were good. A fresh jug of water and some crumbs, basically. And they’d lap it up. And beg for more. And we’d tell them there was much more where that came from, if they did exactly what we said.”

  Darger felt ill again.

  “What about Stephen Mayhew and Bo Cooke,” she asked. “Why starve them?”

  “Well they were the betas for the betas. Cowboy said we wouldn’t know how far we could push it with the girls, so we used the guys as experiments. Had them in a different section of the tunnels altogether. Man you shoulda seen how the fight went outta them. Bo, see, I knew he didn’t like me on account that me and Amaranth had kind of a thing going on. But three days without food, and he was a different man. ‘Please, Worm. Please, man. Just give me something to eat. I’ll do anything.’”

  Worm’s imitation of Bo was high pitched, whiny.

  “I used to go down there with a sandwich or some chips, and I’d eat it right in front of him.” He cackled and ate another handful of candy. “Drove him fucking crazy.”

  Darger waited for him to go on. He tore into the bag of M&Ms, glancing around.

  “I probably shouldn’t admit this because it would piss Cowboy off, but I guess he’s dead so it hardly matters. But I let Bo out, eventually. When he was real weak. Could barely move. I opened his cage and let him crawl out on his hands and knees. Told him I was taking him to a big feast.” Worm snickered. “I led him all around the caves like that until he collapsed. Just kinda keeled over. Ended up being kind of a pain because then I had to drag his ass all the way back to the cage so Cowboy wouldn’t figure out what I’d done. He was kind of a dictator that way. Always wanted things done his way.”

  “And Stephen Mayhew?”

  Worm scratched at one of the scabbed over places on his cheek.

  “Eh, he just kinda faded away. He was always cool to me so I had no interest in messing with him. He was a means to a end. Wrong place and shit.”

  “Is that what ultimately happened with Bailey and Courtney?” Darger asked. “Or Amaranth and Trinity, as you knew them? Did they just fade away like Stephen?”

  “Yeah. We thought we had it worked out. Exactly how much food to give the girls to keep them going but not to ever, like, give them enough energy to fight. But I guess we took it too far. Cowboy was pissed. Raged for like a full hour. Kicking those dumb ass boots against the cages. He broke his toe doing that. Hobbled around for a few days.”

  “Is that when you decided to get rid of the bodies?”

  “Yeah. I said we should just bury ‘em somewhere in the tunnels. Lotta hidey holes down there. But Cowboy said he didn’t want that rotting corpse stench. Or to run the risk of any of the other workers stumbling across any of it. So he had me take them into the city and dump them.”

  “Let’s back up. Before that, you grabbed Lily?”

  “Well yeah. Cowboy was determined to make this work.” Worm shook his head. “It’d become his life’s work. That’s what he called it. Lily, she was a trooper.”

  “Where’d you find her?”

  “Oh she was a friend of Eddie’s girl.”

  “Edward Swensen?” Darger asked. “He’s the one currently missing a face?”

  Worm tittered. A raspy, high-pitched sound that made the hair on Darger’s neck stand on end.

  “Yeah. Man. That was so crazy! Have you ever seen the Hostel movies? They show a guy getting his face peeled off. And it comes off like… like an orange peel, you know? Just kinda—“ Worm made a suctioning noise with his mouth “—pops off in one piece. I always wanted to know if it was really like that, in real life. It’s not quite so clean. Like it kinda sticks to the skull a little. But it still did come off mostly in one full piece with a little knife work on my part. So crazy!”

  Darger had the sense that none of this was quite real to Worm. That the things he’d done, the atrocities he’d committed and taken part in, were not much different than the fictional version he’d once seen on TV.

  “And Cora and Chase,” Darger asked. “Was selling him drugs just a ploy to get her?”

  “Well yeah. We were running low on workers, and Cowboy wanted a second girl, like, pronto. Took us a while to find someone to come up and happen to have a girl with him, but it worked eventually.”

  “And it was you who killed Chase? Dressed as Cowboy?”

  Worm’s eyes were alight with intrigue.

  “Yeah. Did she buy it? I bet she did. I look
ed good. Got that idea from The Usual Suspects.” He nodded his head and shoveled more candy into his mouth. “Great movie.”

  “But why?” Darger asked. “Why dress as Cowboy to fool a girl you were going to lock in a cage?”

  “Well, to be honest, I think Cowboy was starting to lose it a little. He started getting paranoid. Convinced you all was onto us. Which I guess was sorta true. He kept talking about going on the run.”

  Darger shook her head.

  “I thought you said he wanted to continue the experiments. His life’s work or whatever.”

  “That’s the thing. He was back and forth. One minute we had to start packing. Figure out where we were gonna go. What we were gonna do. And then he’d calm down and say that we’d worked too hard. Gotten too far. And we had to see it through. So then we’d start making plans again. I started having to slip him some of the sleeping pills we kept around in his bourbon. A little nightcap to calm him the fuck down. Anyway, he was kinda conked out when Chase came over with his girl. And I figured it was up to me to see the plan through.”

  “You weren’t perhaps trying to tie up loose ends?”

  Worm chewed and stared at her blankly.

  “In what way?”

  “Set it up to make it look like cowboy did it all.”

  Worm pursed his lips.

  “Now why would you think that?”

  “Why else mutilate Edward Swensen? Because you wanted us to think he was you, and that you were dead — at least for a while. It wouldn’t work for long, but probably long enough for you to get out. Meanwhile, Cowboy would be left holding the bag.”

  “I appreciate that you think I’m some kind of mastermind, but the truth is, Cowboy was always the brains behind everything.” Worm shrugged. “He was the one with the big ideas.”

  Darger decided to move on.

  “Do you know what remorse means?”

  “Do I know what remorse means?” he scoffed. “Jesus, lady, I’m not a idiot.”

  Darger said nothing.

  “You wanna know if I feel bad?” Worm emptied the last of the peanut M&Ms into his mouth, chewing as he spoke. “Cowboy said that guilt and shame are for suckers. But I seen some of the families on the news. They seemed sad. And that made me feel kinda bad. Like if I coulda waved a magic wand and brought their daughter back, I woulda. But I can’t right? Like that happens in movies sometimes, but it ain’t real life. Cowboy always said we shouldn’t fret about what we can’t control. And I can’t control that, right? Life goes on.”