by L. T. Vargus
Reluctantly, Darger started the engine of Loshak’s car, slid the gearshift into Drive, and pulled away from the curb.
When she arrived back at the motel, she noticed that Loshak’s curtains were wide open. She grabbed two cups of coffee from the free breakfast table before trudging up the steps. She knocked lightly at Loshak’s door, and he answered quickly, almost as if he’d been waiting.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to keep it overnight,” she said, tossing him his keys. He caught them with one hand. The styrofoam cup she handed over more gingerly.
“Christ, you just got back? They find your car?”
“I found it.”
“All by yourself. Good for you.”
He peeked out the window.
“Where is it?”
“Still sitting outside the dealer’s house.”
“Why didn’t you call one of Donaldson’s guys and have them help you drive it back?”
“Because I still don’t have the keys.”
Loshak tried to mask his smirk by sipping at the coffee, but she wasn’t so easily fooled.
“I’m glad that everyone is getting so much amusement from this.”
“So you found the car. What else is bothering you?”
“Pardon?”
“You seem on edge.”
“There’s a serial killer on the loose and a witness stole my car.” She frowned into the steaming brown liquid. “Also I think this is decaf.”
Darger set the cup down and shoved her hands in her pockets.
“Why shouldn’t I be on edge?”
“I’m just saying, seems like something else is eating at you.”
Violet peered through the gap in the plaid curtains. She didn’t want to say it out loud. Saying it out loud would make it more real somehow. Superstitious thinking, she knew, but also one that held a lot of power to the human mind. She knew that from her years of victim counseling. People often feel that if they never utter the words, they can make them go away. Bury them deep enough, and it’s like they never existed. It wasn’t true of course. But that didn’t stop her from doing it anyway. She was only human, after all.
“I’m gonna go take a shower, maybe try to grab a quick nap.” She rolled her head around in a circle and flexed her shoulders. “I fell asleep in the car and really jacked up my neck.”
She hadn’t even finished undressing for her shower when she got the call. It was Donaldson. Assuming a patrol from his department found her car, she interrupted.
“I’m guessing your guys found the car, but it’s too late. She’s moved on.”
“I don’t… what?”
“Or did you find her?” She felt an odd mix of dread and hope. If they’d picked up Sierra, maybe she could go down to the station and get her to talk. On the other hand, if they were holding her, she’d have every reason not to talk.
There was an uncomfortable silence, and she was about to ask if Donaldson was still there when she heard the rustle of his breath in the receiver.
“I guess it depends on which ‘her’ you’re referring to, ma’am.”
“Sorry, I don’t follow.”
“We’ve got another body. Athens PD got the call twenty minutes ago, and I thought you ought to know.”
By the time she reached the balcony, Loshak was already locking the door of his room. He still looked a little under the weather, and she resisted an impulse to ask if he was feeling up to a field trip. It would only piss him off, she figured. Instead, she kept her mouth shut and followed when he spoke.
“We can take my car.”
Chapter 18
The parking lot at the airport bustles. Cars and trucks and vans shamble in and out. A line of them forming at the toll booth.
The Buick zigs and zags through the rows of vehicles. Eventually parking under a sign that reads “Employees Only” in red letters.
He hesitates a moment in the strange silence that the engine’s rumble had occupied for so long. Squirms a little in his seat. Swallows, his throat clicking.
He places a hand on the duffel bag. He swears he feels a jolt of electricity. A pulse rippling into his palm as contact is made. But he leaves his hand there for a long moment and feels nothing more. He doesn’t want to, but he plucks his fingers from the nylon canvas.
He turns from the bag. Shoulders squared to the driver’s side window. Again, he pauses.
He lets his gaze fall through the glass to the steel door that stands between him and that other world.
The hinges squawk and the door slams shut behind him a beat later. The chilly morning air swirls around him. Touches the wet places.
His thumb depresses the button on the key fob. A series of clicks issue behind him. He wills himself to not look back at the duffel bag resting on the passenger seat.
His fingers touch the cold steel. Wrap themselves around the door handle. He steps through into—
— the office.
He strode inside and warmth enveloped him at once. As he walked the few paces over the perforated welcome mat to make his way behind the counter, a kind of reality he couldn’t quite remember in the car snapped back into place. People. This was what it was like to be around people. The muscles in his chest and jaw went strangely slack, some tension he hadn’t quite been aware of relieved all at once, and a tingle pricked along his scalp, his head going light, going faint.
The sudden shift away from isolation was disorienting to an alarming degree, filled him with some sense of teetering on the edge of things, on the edge of reality itself, poised to make that final plunge into madness. He thought it was a little like a bout of vertigo, the change in atmosphere negating his feel for direction and place. For the moment, he was nowhere. No solid ground beneath his feet. He straddled the crack between two worlds. One foot in each. It was impossible — overwhelming and strange — but it was happening.
And yet this crazed feeling came with a swell of pride. He thought it likely that it was a state most people couldn’t handle, that something this jarring would break weaker minds, shatter them like broken mirrors, but not his. This was the one way his mind was strong. He was used to weird shit.
Movement to the right caught his eye. Lucas nodded a greeting from where he worked the drive-through window, making change for an elderly black man in a Lexus SUV. As far as coworkers went, Lucas was alright. A slender, quiet guy who mostly kept to himself. His teeth were all rotten from drinking Coca-Cola all night, every night to keep himself awake during third shift.
A gravelly voice spoke up from behind him.
“Hey-y, alright. It’s the Ripper. On time and everything. For once.”
Meaty hands squeezed at the trapezius muscles on each side of his neck. Laughter hissed, and Kurt could feel breath and flecks of spit spattering his neck. This was Chip. The boss. Portly. Balding. Obnoxious.
“M-morning, Chip,” Kurt said. He turned to face the man, but his gaze fell to the ground to avoid eye contact.
“And top of the m-morning to you, good sir. You have a big weekend, Ripper? Get into any trouble?”
Ripper was the nickname Chip had come up with. Kurt Van Ryper was used to it.
His eyes darted over the floor as he searched for an answer, taking in the ankles of Chip’s ridiculous distressed jeans. His boss always stood with his legs a little more than shoulder width apart like some kind of superhero, and he could just make out the hulking torso above them. A sheet of fat swaddled a broad chest and shoulders, bolting a gut onto what must have once been a heavily muscled physique.
“Not really,” Kurt said, finally.
“That’s too bad. Me? When I was your age? I was out there tearin’ it up, man. That’s what life is all about. Carpe diem and what not.”
“Yeah.”
Now Chip shifted his position, the width of his stance tightening a little, hips rotating that beefy torso so it was no longer facing Kurt straight on.
“So listen,” the boss said. “I know you hate it, but we’ve got you over in the seco
nd booth today.”
They both turned to look across the asphalt drive. The lonesome booth’s windows stood dark for now. It was an aluminum and glass structure, three foot by four foot. Cramped. Tiny. The furnace wasn’t fully functional, either. On a chilly day like today, it was warmer than being outside but not by much. Kurt always felt trapped in there, encased in glass on four sides like he was on display in the meat department. Everyone complained about having to work the booth, though. Working the window in the office building, like Lucas was now, wasn’t so bad. It provided access to the bathroom, break room, fridge, etc. The second booth offered no such perks.
“Nobody wants to do it,” Chip said. “Nobody. It blows. I get that. But I know I can always count on ol’ Van Ripper to fly solo over there, amIright?”
Kurt spoke his reply to the denim swaddled ankles.
“Right.”
“Good man.”
Chip clapped him on the shoulder, and Kurt winced a little, which embarrassed him. His cheeks warmed right away.
“Oh, and check the traps on the way over, too, would you?” Chip said.
Kurt’s head bobbed once.
Chip pulled a large key ring from his pocket and pawed at it with his plump sausage fingers. He unlocked a cupboard under the counter with a snap of the wrist, and Kurt ducked to pull out a tray for the cash register. Nickels and dimes tinkled in the cupped spots.
“OK, well…” Chip said, no longer looking Kurt in the face. “I’ll, uh, get out of your hair.”
Again Kurt’s head moved up and down one time. Chip mirrored the gesture and retreated to his office.
Kurt backed his way out the steel door to head outside, returning to the cold, the gray, the tray for the register balanced in his hands in front of him, little metal arms pressing down stacks of dollar bills. His eyes flicked to the car, to the spot where the duffel bag must be, though the glare on the windows blotted it out. And in the light of day, in the presence of Chip and Lucas, this all felt quite bewildering. What transpired in the car, what sat in the car even now, seemed unthinkable. A lump shifted in his throat, threatened to gag him.
Jesus, what had he been thinking? He needed to ditch it. As soon as he got out of here, he’d dump it somewhere. Toss it over the bridge into the river, maybe — bag and all. He had to be rid of the whole lot of it.
He sidled between two cars in the drive-through line to draw near to the tiny booth, stooping a second to check the live mouse traps along the curb there. Rats occupied both, the hunch-backed creatures recoiling a little as he drew near, scrabbling with no place to go, those disgusting pink tails dragging along behind them like tiny, segmented hot dogs. Unlike the humans forced to work it, the rodents seemed to love the little booth. They nested in the insulation in the walls, chewed the wires that connected it to the office, shat little black pellets everywhere. Hence the traps they’d set on the concrete around it.
Anyway, he wasn’t the only one trapped in a little box today.
He stood, moved to the door, struggling to unlock it without spilling the tray of coins everywhere, but he managed it. Again reality seemed to shift as he stepped into the new space. The air was dry in this tiny building, and it smelled vaguely of mildew and rat shit. He set up the register, the tray of money disappearing into its little shelf like it had never existed. After that, he sat, holding totally motionless for a beat.
He looked at the grid pattern formed in the wire that ran through the safety glass surrounding him. Chicken wire or something like it, he thought. A perfect cage, indeed. He flipped on the wall unit furnace and the green light overhead so drivers would know the booth was open.
He gazed across the lane to the other window. Lucas had been replaced, third shift now complete. A feminine figure lurked there now, slightly obscured by the glare and the touch of fog clouding the glass, but after a second, he could make her out.
It was Candice.
She wasn’t like the others. All of the other girls who worked here were stuck-up types. They loved sucking up to Chip, flirting with him and prattling on about nothing. They never shut their stupid traps, but not Candice. She was quiet and kind. She said hello and smiled at him whenever she saw him. A genuine smile, each and every one of them. She didn’t have to be kind to Kurt like that, he knew, but she was.
A feeling came over him like he was floating in those moments when she smiled at him, all of his weight lifting off of the ground as though pulled by a puppeteer’s strings. And in those flashes, he thought maybe it could all work out. Maybe he could meet someone, date someone — Candice or someone else. Maybe it really was possible.
Even now, seeing her as a dark smudge in a glass case in the distance, the feeling came over him. Maybe he could be part of it all. Maybe all of the voices in his head running him down all the time were wrong. Maybe it was just fear, insecurity, doubt. A mirage that would disappear if he got over the hump of getting to know someone. Maybe.
And then he remembered the duffel bag in the passenger seat of the Buick, and the weightless feeling left him.
His gaze drifted away from the office building across the way, coasting downward. Falling. He lifted his hands, looking down at the soft flesh of the palms, at the lines and whorls etched there.
He knew it could never be. Not with Candice or any other girl. Not with his crooked eye. Not with his chinless pig face. Not with the awkwardness he seemed to spread to all those around him like an infectious disease. Not with the general repulsion he created in women with both his physical presence and personality.
Not with the things he’d done.
A Ford Focus pulled up to the window then. Dark gray. The booth’s window swung open, and the wind snuffled at the opening, a whoosh of cold air blasting him in the eyes. An older woman grimaced at him from the driver’s seat. He took her ticket, took her money, made change.
This was how it went for him. The people came and went. The ticket and the money exchange accounting for the depth of their connections. Fingers almost, but never quite, touching. He sat in his box, an endless line of people just outside. He seemed to be surrounded by them, and yet he remained alone.
He looked across the lane of traffic again at Candice — at what he could see of her, anyway. She was locked behind glass from him like all the rest. She was something precious. Something important to be protected and kept in a special display case. Not him. He was one of the rats in the traps out by the curb. A loathsome creature. A wretched thing squirming in his own filth. All he needed was the hot dog tail to complete the picture.
Another vehicle approached the window — a Mazda 3, he thought. Red. Four college-aged males gibbered away within, their conversation not pausing as the ticket and money exchange repeated itself. When it was done, the window swung closed, and all was quiet again.
It occurred to him, not for the first time, that sitting in the booth was a lot like sitting in the car. When he closed the door, he closed himself off from people once more. All of humanity was locked behind glass from his vantage point. His isolation was complete. The feel of it — the feel of the void — would come back to him little by little. It had already started.
Chapter 19
The dead end street looked more like a street fair than a crime scene. Two police cruisers were parked horizontally across the entrance of the block to bar any traffic from coming in. A traffic jam of law enforcement personnel, news vans, and civilian vehicles prevented them from parking anywhere near the actual street.
Loshak eased the car up to the curb in front of a peach-colored Victorian house with a mansard roof. Behind them, Darger noticed an SUV pull up and park. The side was marked with the logo of the Columbus CBS affiliate.
“It’s only been a week since the last one,” Darger said.
“Yeah,” was all Loshak said in response.
She supposed he didn’t need to say more. She knew they were both thinking it. If this was the work of their killer, the time between kills was getting shorter. Was it because th
e last one had been unsatisfying somehow? She sensed that Loshak wasn’t in a chatty mood, though, and kept the rest of her thoughts to herself.
The closer they got to the crime scene, the thicker the groups of neighborhood folk and other gawkers. They congregated on the sidewalks and in yards, a nervous chatter passing between them.
“They think it’s him, the Doll Parts Killer from the news.”
“Bill said he heard it was a hit and run.”
“Oh my goodness gracious! I let my kids ride their skateboards up and down that cul-de-sac!”
“I tell you what, I got my daddy’s old 12-gauge out when the killings first started. I keep it loaded and tucked under my bed, just in case.”
The tension was palpable. A creeping, itchy feeling Darger felt along her spine and scalp.
She glanced over at Loshak, wondering if he sensed the fear coming off the mob as well. His mouth pressed into a taut line and his penny-colored eyes seemed to bore straight ahead.
“Worse than a goddamn circus,” he muttered to himself as they rounded the corner that led to the dead end.
The bustle thinned a bit as the line of yellow crime scene tape came into view. A group of uniformed officers were doing their best to keep anyone unauthorized as far as possible from the line. One of the boys in blue approached, ready to tell them to scram when a familiar voice called out.
“They’re OK, Pat. Let ‘em through.”
Donaldson pinched the brim of his hat at them as they passed.
A white and yellow tent had been erected at the end of the street. It functioned as much to keep the media from sticking their cameras where they didn’t belong as it did to cut down on foreign contamination. Swarming around the tent were more police and crime scene techs, all decked out in white protective suits — another layer to prevent evidence contamination.
The polyester fabric shuddered and then the flap opened. A tall man in one of the white suits stepped out. He removed the blue gloves on his hands and the respirator-style dust mask over his mouth, but he left his hairnet in place. Adjusting the belt at his waist that held a walkie-talkie and some other gear, he looked up and saw them coming. He raised one hand in a greeting.
