by L. T. Vargus
And yet he could see his reflection on the table’s veneer, and his facial expression remained completely blank. Fixed. Unblinking. His eyes pierced the empty space before him.
He sipped his beer again. Nursing it. He wouldn’t drink enough to get drunk, he knew. He’d only have one or two depending on how long he sat here. But he didn’t want to be so slow about it that someone might notice.
The chatter picked up now that the bit about the dismembered body was over, and the bartender mashed the remote in his fist, turning the volume on the TV back down.
“Sick fuck,” Detective Porto said over his shoulder. “He kept the head. Probably defiling it right now. You know what I mean?”
The detective locked eyes with Kurt, so he nodded to answer the question.
“I mean the sicko is probably face-fucking the thing as we speak,” Porto said. “That’s what these perverts do. Like Ted Bundy and those types.”
For a long moment, the two men just stared at each other, Porto’s face as expressionless and unreadable as he knew his own to be. Neither of them blinked. The corners of the detective’s mouth curled then, and he burst out laughing.
“Sorry,” he said. “Guess I’m a sick fuck, too. Not like this monster or nothin’, but still…”
Kurt laughed as well, and Porto clapped him on the shoulder.
“Jesus,” Porto said. “What the hell is wrong with us, eh? I guess you have to be able to laugh to keep from cryin’, you know?”
He tipped his bottle of Sam Adams back and glugged the second half of it down, signaling the bartender for another with a wave of the hand.
“You gonna catch the guy?” Kurt said.
Porto’s smile vanished all at once.
“Oh, we’ll get ‘im. It might not be anytime too soon, but we’ll get the bastard. I promise you that.”
Kurt bobbed his head once.
“I’m sure you will.”
He sipped at his Budweiser and turned back to his own table, content to recede back to the edges of things. That was where he was most comfortable, he supposed. An observer. An outsider.
An Other.
He couldn’t remember for sure when the distance first opened in his head, the black seas of infinity that held him apart from everything and everyone. People had hurt him when he was young. Blurry memories — just flashes of her face twisted into a mask of hatred, the gouges in his skin where her fingernails had torn him open. A cliche story, he supposed.
The wounds became the cracks in his reality where the void seeped into him, and through the years, the little boy’s weakness became the man’s strength. The numb blossomed in him, made him invulnerable. Every one of his acts cemented this transformation. Proved it. And now he could sit among the very police looking for him and go unnoticed, totally indistinguishable from anyone else.
That was life’s great secret that only people like him could truly grasp. No one could see what was behind any of those faces in the crowd. No one.
He listened to the cops jabber on for a time, but he knew now that he had nothing to learn from these people. They were clueless. He shouldn’t be surprised.
“Way the FBI agents put it, the guy is a puss,” a flat-topped street cop said. “That’s what I heard anyhow. Said he’s a, ah, inadequate type. Too timid to get his pecker up with the girls, so he freaks out and goes on a killing spree.”
The pudgy guy next to him snorted before he replied.
“Christ, almighty. Someone tell this guy about Viagra for fuck’s sake. Might save some lives.”
He pulled the little card from his jacket pocket and looked at it, the one he’d found among the girl’s things. Violet Darger, huh? Yeah. Probably just as stuck up as she looked.
Chapter 25
Victor Loshak was suffering worse than he let on. Dizzy. Shaky. His thoughts distorted by the whims of the fever. In his loopiest fever dream moments, he even thought he might be dying.
He lay on his lumpy motel mattress, blanket pulled up to his neck, unable to stave off the occasional shiver. A grimace etched deep grooves into his face, puckered his lips. He wasn’t sweating anymore. He didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one going forward, but he was thankful to be rid of the sogginess that had plagued him off and on over the past few days.
The TV projected blue flickers onto the drop ceiling, which he watched rather than the screen itself, too weak and confused to lift his neck or sit upright. He tried to sleep, but his eyelids kept peeling open to watch the light show up there. The glow lurched and danced in never ending variations.
He’d pushed himself too hard in venturing to the latest dump site. He knew that now. He’d wanted to be there as much for Darger’s sake as his. She seemed to know her stuff, and she was more than eager enough to do a damn good job, but he was still the one with 21 years of experience. He figured he could help her one way or another, even if it was just encouragement. Of course, being there when a body was discovered had a way of bringing the behavior into sharper focus sometimes, too. And the police officers working the case always seemed to trust him more if he’d been there at the awful moment when they worked a fresh scene. In any case, he was paying the price for that choice now.
The fever had come back worse than before, and his thoughts jumbled and circled around themselves, bordering on hallucinatory much of the time. Bits of memories and dreams bobbed up into his conscious mind, movies playing that interrupted his internal monologue over and over.
He squirmed a little on the mattress, moving his arms and legs for no reason that he could figure. He had no sense of what time it might be. Had a night passed since he’d ventured out? Could it have been longer? The shades were drawn tight, offering him no clues.
He closed his eyes and thought about the case, grisly crime scene photos blinking on and off in his head like Christmas bulbs. The jagged wounds. That limbless, bloody stump of a torso. The rage toward women evident here was appalling, but he’d seen its kind many times. What stuck out to him more was the incredible feeling of inadequacy it implied.
Some of the guys committing these types of lust murders were run-of-the-mill rapists who developed a taste for murder and necrophilia by way of escalation, pushing their sense of depravity and control to the limit. The murderer working in Athens County was not one of those. Loshak was certain of it. He was a member of a much smaller group: killers who think so little of themselves that they become convinced the only way they can satisfy their biological urge to reproduce is by doing so with a dead body. This twisted fantasy exists in them before they ever start killing.
All of the evidence pointed to that type. Killing a woman was, of course, an expression of rage rather than one of sexuality, but the act was still clearly entwined with this desperate desire to assert oneself. There was a damaged sense of masculinity driving these things, Loshak thought. A sense of worthlessness.
This guy in Athens had an exceptional sense of inadequacy, and what struck him as most noteworthy about that were those signs of sophistication poking through despite that. The perpetrator was confident enough in his verbal skills to talk victims into getting into his car, at least some of the time, and he was organized enough to perform the abductions, murders, and disposals of the bodies without leaving much physical evidence. So this was a capable, possibly even intelligent, person who also had such deep fears and insecurities about women that necrophilia was the only way he could even fantasize about being with one.
But that raised the money question: How could the police use that information to help solve the case? He didn’t know. Not yet.
His mind drifted for a time, nonsensical fragments of dreams rising up mercifully to erase the violent images from his head. He was in and out like that for a while, neither truly awake nor asleep. Hovering between them.
Shelly was there in some of the dream flashes, and she was OK. Just little snippets of random moments. Plopping onto the couch and pulling her laptop open on her lap. Sitting at a picnic table, eating a s
trawberry sundae at Dairy Queen. He liked seeing her in dreams now. When his daughter had first died, he couldn’t handle the misery of dreaming her back into existence only to wake up and lose her again, but now he was just happy to see her, knowing down deep that it wasn’t quite real.
In his most lucid moments, he knew that he needed help, that he should go to the doctor, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’d always been reluctant to seek medical treatment. Some phobia of the doctor’s touch. And he supposed it had only gotten worse since Shelly died.
His mind snapped back to the killer. The subject was acting out his fantasies. Waking dreams where he had total power. Total control. The human bodies were his props. Objects he could dominate to make the fantasy exist in the real world.
This guy would want to go back to the scenes, both the dump sites and the place or places where he committed the acts themselves. He was sure of it. This subject’s obsessive nature would require him to relive those moments when the fantasy played out, those fleeting segments of time when his power was real. Probably often now that his crimes were escalating.
The police were watching the scenes at all hours by his request, of course. That was what they had to go on for now, and it was being attended to by professionals. The tension in his neck seemed to release as he walked his fever-addled brain through this notion again.
Yes. Yes, that was something, wasn’t it? Something important. Arriving at this point seemed to calm him somehow, and a peace settled over him. The resting grimace on his face smoothed itself out.
He knew he wasn’t dying now. He only needed some sleep, so he closed his eyes and slipped away.
Chapter 26
The chill of the seat seeps through his jacket and t-shirt and saturates the flesh along his spine. It makes his shoulders jostle. Makes his arms convulse for a beat. He cranks up the heat. Puts his fingertips to the vent. Feels only cold air.
The duffel bag shimmers in the corner of his eye again. That heat-distortion-like haze returned to its rightful place over his passenger’s head.
Her face sticks part of the way out. Nose protruding from that zippered gap. Her skin is much colder than his. Icy. Her complexion looks strange under the yellow streetlights. The color of a lemon Starburst.
He brings his hands to his mouth. Cups them together. Blows into them. The warmth flares in his fingers. A little cloud of heat hovering in the hollow of his palms for a second before it fades. His hands feel wet after, so he wipes them on his pant legs.
Now he shifts gears. And the car moves to leave the lot.
He waves at a couple of the cops smoking on the sidewalk. They nod back. Gesture with their cigarettes. Steam and smoke coiling around them. Wafting in all directions.
Right away he brings his hand to her skin. Fingers pressing into her eyelids. So soft and so cold. The electrical jolt he feels is stronger than before. Somehow more exciting with the police right there. Just a few feet away. Utterly clueless.
The Buick declines down the mottled ramp of the driveway in slow motion. Absorbing two big bumps like a boat on a rocky sea. And then the car coils into a left turn onto the street. The sailing suddenly smooth.
He fumbles at his sleeve. Checks his watch. Eyes blinking a few times to make sure he’s reading it correctly.
Only 9:16 PM. Good. There’s still time.
When he speaks his voice is barely above a whisper.
“Gotta grab something from mom’s house.”
I know.
Finally. Finally he can imagine her responses. He can pretend. He feels his face flush. Feels his scalp tingle. Realizes that he is verging on tears. Jesus. Even he knows this is pathetic. But it is the only way. The only way. When she was alive, there was only the cold between them. Nothing there. No connection. This imagined relationship is something, though. It is something.
Anything is better than nothing.
He controls his voice when he speaks. Maintains a deadpan so she won’t detect the emotion.
“I’m sorry to say that you won’t get to meet her. Not directly. My mom, I mean.”
I know that, too.
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess you would.”
What he hears isn’t really her voice. Not the person she was. It is someone new. A girl he invents as he goes along. This voice is a little thinner. A knowing delivery. Deadpan. She could be anything. Could be everything. Every possible girl.
They drive on. His breathing going a little ragged as the emotions well in him again.
“I’m so glad, you know? Glad that you’re mine, I mean.”
Me too.
The voice in his head doesn’t sound convincing. He tries it again. Changing the inflection.
Me too.
No. It’s still not right. He knows she doesn’t mean it. Of course she doesn’t. Why would she?
He adjusts his grip on the steering wheel. Fingers squeaking against the polyurethane.
It’s OK. I understand that you’re glad.
“OK. Just… You don’t have to lie to me. You don’t have to do that. I know how things really are.”
OK.
The conversation trails off. The sounds of the night and the road rising up to take its place.
Fast food logos flit by on the side of the road. Red and orange and yellow lights. The only things out this way that keep the dark away.
Chapter 27
Violet lurched awake. The scratchy hotel sheets clung to her bare arms and legs. She was sweaty and breathing hard from a nightmare.
The dream’s final image flashed in her head again: Sierra Peters’ severed head in Darger’s suitcase. The girl’s mouth was open, swollen tongue protruding between her teeth. Her eyes were milky white, the same cloudy shade of the moonstone ring.
She kicked the stifling heat of the covers away from her and rolled over to check the alarm clock.
The red digits read 9:28 PM. Through the window, she could see the stars burning white against the blackened sky.
Great. Now she’d be up all night for sure.
After a cool shower and a change of clothes, she felt a bit more refreshed. Sleeping during the day always left her feeling groggy, though. She made a pot of coffee. What the hell? She might as well.
While the coffee brewed, she paced around the room. It still felt too warm, and the air was stuffy, so she opened the door to let the night in.
The grief welled in her again, brought stinging tears to her eyes. But she had to push it away. She knew that. Oh, it would torture her more. There’d be more tears. More nightmares. More panic attacks that made her knees buckle. Probably enough to last a lifetime.
But not now. Now, she had to work. That was the best way to honor Sierra. To do what she came here to do. To do her job.
To find this monster and stop him.
He’d make a mistake. That’s what she’d told the task force. What she hadn’t said was that she thought he had already made a mistake. Two, really. And the name of both mistakes was the same: Sierra Peters.
The first mistake was taking her at all. She’d proven that when she got away. Whether it was sheer luck on her part or was bound to happen because he’d chosen a girl who wouldn’t go down without a fight, it hardly mattered. She’d escaped. And while she’d given them one hell of a knot to untie when it came to her conflicting statements, Darger was certain the answer existed somewhere in there.
The second mistake the killer made was taking Sierra again. Darger may have come to believe the girl, but she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to convince the rest of the investigators working the case. Now that he’d killed her, there was no doubting her story, so long as they could figure out which detail would ultimately lead to his undoing.
The answer was right there. She knew it was.
Two cups of coffee later, and she was practically jogging back and forth in the room. She wanted to take a walk, but it was dark. She used to take evening strolls all the time. She liked the feel of the air growing heavy with the coolness
of night. The sounds of the crickets and cicadas. But she didn’t walk at night anymore. The light from the streetlights and the sounds of footsteps echoing over the pavement in the dark brought back too many familiar feelings.
She wished they were in a nicer hotel, one with a gym and treadmill. She needed to move.
If she had a car, she’d take a drive. At least that would be something. She crept to the door and peeked over at the neighboring room. Loshak’s light was on.
She begged his keys off him, and a few minutes later she was behind the wheel with the windows down and the wind tangling her loose hair.
She drove past Vine Street gazing at the spot where Sierra said she’d been grabbed the first time. The second time she must not have even made it back to where she’d parked Violet’s car. How long had he waited? Had he been waiting since his first attempt failed, hoping to see her again, desperately needing to tie up the loose end? Had he killed Fiona Worthington as a stand-in for the one that got away, only to find that the darkness inside him wouldn’t accept substitutions?
Darger parked the car and sat, watching traffic roll by, though there wasn’t much. The windows at Jimmy’s were all dark. Not even so much as the blue flicker of someone watching TV or playing video games. She hadn’t yet heard whether or not he was arrested, but perhaps the lack of illumination suggested that Luck had gone through with it after all.
After a long time staring into the dark, Darger started the car again. She had one last place to visit before she headed back to the motel.
She did not turn up the dead end street when she reached it. She just rolled by slowly, letting her eyes gaze into the balmy night. She could see very little in the dark, but it didn’t matter. It was there in her mind and always would be, long after the white tent was taken down and the last shreds of yellow police tape tore loose from the branches where they were tied.
