by L. T. Vargus
The final resting place of a dead end girl.
Chapter 28
He waited on the stoop at his mother’s house, the echo of the doorbell still ringing in his head. The duffel bag dangled at his side. Its cargo was deceptively heavy, he thought. About the weight of a bowling ball. He adjusted his grip on the handle, trying to somehow make the bag look less like a round heavy object pulled it into an awkward shape, but nothing he did helped.
It felt wrong to bring it here. Not just dangerous. Not just morally or ethically objectionable. Wrong on some deeper level. A violation of nature itself, perhaps. And yet it filled him with an almost sexual excitement. Made his heart flutter. Made his mouth water. The impulse pounded in his skull, too strong to be denied.
He had to do this. Had to.
He’d parked the car five blocks off and walked here. He hated to do it. Missed the Buick already. But he had to. He’d seen someone this morning. He was almost sure of it. A jogger near the dump site. Someone who could’ve seen the car at the scene. So the car had to go. The risk was too high.
He swallowed, the dry flaps of his throat seeming to rise and fall in unison. For a crazy second he thought about turning and leaving the stoop. Even if he’d already rang the bell.
A silhouette took shape in the light beyond the window, the curtains ruffling a moment. Then the deadbolt clacked, and the door swung open, making that strange suction sound it always made when the metal pulled away from the rubber weather strip running around the frame.
His mother stood there in the opening, holding still for a moment, the diagonal wedge of light shining onto the back of her head so her face stayed mostly in shadow. All he could really make out was her tightly cropped gray hair and her general stature.
She was such a small person, something he always forgot until he was up close to her again. She seemed somehow more substantial in his memories. Taller. More physically imposing.
“So are you not shaving at all now?” she said.
“What?” he said, fingers shifting the weight of the handle again.
“This,” she said, cupping her fingers around her jaw to pantomime his stubble. “The scraggly hobo beard you’ve got going on. That’s your new look, eh? Well, I don’t even have to ask if you’ve met a girl, do I? Looking like that.”
It’s good to see you, too, Mom, he thought, a smirk curling his lip for a microsecond. She greeted him this way often, with a criticism rather than a hello. He didn’t really get mad about it. Not anymore.
“Oh, I just forgot to shave is all,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “I’ll get to it tomorrow morning, I figure. Anyway, I just wanted to see how you were doing and grab a few things from my room.”
She hesitated in the doorway.
“Right. Well, OK.”
She took a step back, opening the way for him to cross the threshold into the house. He slipped off his shoes on the landing and climbed six steps into the dining room.
The decor had changed little since he was a boy. Everything looked nice enough — clean and in good repair — and yet it was all strangely dated, a blend of elements from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s. This hadn’t fully occurred to him until he was much older, but now he thought about it every time he walked past the weird painting of an owl hanging over the stairway, socked feet sinking into brown shag carpet, strangely meticulous and ancient all at once, almost as though this place had been shut up for years.
“I don’t suppose you’re hungry,” she said, some distant injury clear in her voice.
He didn’t like eating here, so he rarely did. She realized it at some point, and it seemed to hurt her, though she’d never addressed it directly.
“No, I ate earlier,” he said, sliding the bag under the table and taking a seat.
She stood at the counter, partially blocked out from his vantage point. She seemed to look at him, but her eyes didn’t meet his.
Sometimes he wished she was dead. Not out of any malice, though he thought she might even deserve some. Out of some feeling that he could never really be himself with her hanging around. That there was no way for him to sever this damaged connection, no way for him to escape this relationship and move on. It wasn’t like she had any real feelings of warmth or affection for him, and the ones he had for her were conflicted and made him feel like a weakling.
Despite all of that, he couldn’t abandon her.
She didn’t know any better. That was all. Somehow it wouldn’t be right to hold it against her. And in a crazy way, she was the only person who knew what he was. Something that was true on multiple levels.
“Almost forgot. I, uh, need to borrow the car if it’s all right,” he said, raising his voice so she’d hear him in the next room. “I dropped mine at the shop and hoofed it over here. Transmission’s going, I think. This would only be for a couple of days, I’d think. A week or so at the most.”
“It’s fine. Take the Prius.”
His tongue flicked out of one corner of his mouth and glided the length of his top lip. It felt dry and segmented like an earthworm.
What could he say? He couldn’t tell her that he preferred the bigger sedan to the little hybrid, especially since the former was 25 years old. He’d pictured using the Continental the whole way over. Could see himself behind the wheel, an unconscious passenger slumped next to him, nestled safely out of view of the windows on the leather seat that was more like a plush couch than anything you’d find in a modern car.
“Are you sure? I don’t mind taking the old boat.”
“It’s not like I have places to go. The grocery store once a week. You’ll take the Prius.”
They were quiet for a while, and then he heard her digging in the drawer for the extra key fob. He tried to shift his fantasy from the lux interior of the old tank to that of the tiny Prius. Tried to imagine how he’d handle one of his projects in the smaller car. Maybe it was roomier than it looked, but he didn’t like it.
“Do you ever see the guys from school anymore?”
Her voice startled him. It was close. He looked up to see her standing in the doorway, that hard look etched into her face seeming to have softened. She dangled the little black rectangle with the Toyota logo on it, and he took it.
“What?” he said.
“You know. Nate, Matt, and Kurt and everybody.”
“Not really. I talked to Matt on Facebook a while back. He has a kid now.”
“Oh, wow. I still remember him showing up at the door that day he’d colored his hair Bozo-the-clown orange. I had to bite the insides of my lips to keep from laughing.”
She was quiet a moment, a faraway look in her eye, and then she went on.
“Seems strange, doesn’t it? The way everybody grows up so fast.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it does.”
“I guess I’ll never get to have grandkids, though. Not that it’s any surprise.”
She drifted out of the dining area, floating up the three steps into the living room. He sat at the table a moment, letting his leg lean into the duffel bag. No electricity, but it felt exciting somehow to touch it in this place.
Another memory flashed in his head, a picture and a feeling seared into his brain, into his memory, no matter how much he may have wanted to forget.
In third grade, he’d found a sky blue Bic lighter on the sidewalk a couple of blocks from school. Naturally he pocketed it, showing it around during classes. Word got around, and by the time recess hit, he was the talk of the playground. A group gathered near the merry go round to witness it, watching his thumb descend onto the flint wheel and flick and flick until the little flame hovered above his fist. They oohed and ahhed like cave-children seeing fire for the first time. He burned a few leaves and a box elder bug, its legs squirming furiously until they vanished.
As far as he could remember, it was the most positive attention he’d ever received at school. Maybe, he thought, that was what it was like to win the spelling bee or become a star athlete. It was something like
love.
When he got home from school, he showed his mom his new toy. He stood in this very dining room, back to the table. She stood in the doorway to the kitchen.
He flicked it just once before she ripped it from his hand and clubbed him in the temple with the heel of her hand. Her face twisted into that Halloween mask again.
She said that little boys who play with fire wet the bed. And that she needed to teach him to never do it again. To teach him in a way he wouldn’t forget.
He waited. Swallowed. A lump flexing in his throat. His hair in his eyes from when she’d knocked him.
She came back into the dining room with a wire coat hanger, had him take off his shirt.
Bright bolts of pain flashed through his tiny torso, the flesh of his back torn open in strips from the sheer force of the wire. Each impact poked like an electric shock down the length of his spine, went numb for a split second and then burned like he’d been peeled open and had salt flung into the wound. He grit his teeth. Clamped his eyes shut as tight as they’d go. All he could picture was blood weeping down from his shoulder blades, sluicing over that expanse of torso, the skin peeling away in sheets to reveal all of the muscle on the backside of his body.
He tried so hard to hold still, to not let her have the satisfaction of seeing him squirm, seeing him suffer by her hand, but he couldn’t. He knew, somehow, that she enjoyed that power. Had seen it in her wet lips, in the way her eyelids smiled even though the rest of her face grimaced. His spine twisted, flailed, arched back, unable to wiggle away from the hurt.
And then the rain of blows cut out, and everything stopped. Went dead quiet. Both of their chests heaving for a time.
She stormed off after a beat, and he stood there for a long time. His t-shirt killed every inch of the way down when he slid it back on.
Later that evening, when he hoisted himself to sit on the vanity and look at the damage in the bathroom mirror, it looked bad, but not nearly as dramatic as he’d imagined during the act. It looked like a cat had scratched him a few times. Scabbed up lines with purpled and yellowed bruising faintly visible around them.
Years later, he thought of this scene, of his mother towering over him with a coat hanger, when he killed her cat in the backyard.
His childhood bedroom smelled like a blend of Altoids and Right Guard, an odor that brought back another wave of memories, of dreams, of a visceral sense of the time gone by — the faintest tingle in his chest and head. All of the people he used to be, from the frightened child to the awkward high school kid to the serial killer on the news, they were all here with him now, all jockeying for control in his head. A head full of spirits, full of ghosts.
He stood still for a moment, looking upon this time capsule of a space. The same tattered bedspread still sprawled on the bed, a limp thing sporting faded blue and white stripes. Pale lines gouged the dark wood of the dresser where it’d scraped the banister upon being moved in. The vertical blinds looked like jail cell bars with a couple of pieces missing. Snagged threads puckered up from the pond scum green carpet. It looked like it was installed in 1976, and it probably was.
The room was pocked and scarred and flawed the same way his skin was. All these years later, all the old injuries still showed.
He dug in the drawers in the desk, pulling free a couple of passports tucked in back. He hoped he wouldn’t need either of them anytime soon, but it was better to have them at the ready now. It might come to that.
He unzipped the duffel bag, peered between those zippered lips into the dark. He pulled the gap open wide enough to see her, a sliver of the forehead and hair becoming visible. He felt his pulse quicken as he looked upon that image, his hand descending into the bag in slow motion.
He ran his fingers through the girl’s hair. She was cold, but a strange warmth flushed his face and torso as his hand made contact. The heat in him welled just to touch her in this place, to feel her against his skin and know that she was his.
Chapter 29
Loshak woke to loud knocks on the door. Confused, he sat up. His eyes danced over a foreign carpet to find a crappy TV playing an infomercial for super sharp knives. The sound was all the way down. He felt the muscles in his brow tighten. After a beat of total disorientation, he remembered where he was in the universe.
Athens, Ohio.
He looked at the door, noticed that he’d left it unlocked.
“Come in,” he said, feeling very strange to raise his voice after so long in the stillness of sleep.
The knocking stopped, and after a long moment, the doorknob turned in slow motion. The rectangle of wood seemed to stick in the frame for a second, coming free with a scrape, and then the light poured in where the door had stood.
Deputy Donaldson stepped into the room, took off his hat and held it in front of his chest. His smile faded as he sized up Loshak’s state.
“Oh, hey. I ain’t disturbing you, am I?”
“Nah. I’ve just been a little sick. Rest and fluids and all that.”
“Right. Of course. How you feeling?”
“I’m getting better. What do you need?”
“Well, I, uh, wanted to give you a heads up. It’s about Special Agent Darger.”
“Oh?”
“It’s nothing serious. Just… I’m privy to a lot of talk. A lot of it. Around our department and around other local precincts and what have you. Now, I know Agent Darger means well. I’ve talked to her. She… Well, she has some gumption, that one. Lotta gumption. A real gung-ho lady. But this talk I’m hearing… It’s just that some of the others don’t see it the same way I do.”
Loshak smoothed his hair down the side of his head before he responded.
“And how do they see it?”
“Well, she’s stirring the, uh, the pot, you know? She goes cavorting around with the Peters girl who turns up dead the next morning. She got in a big fight in the meeting last night. It was a bad scene. Now I got a call this morning and hear that she plans to go poking around again, bothering the families of the victims. These are people still reeling from family tragedies. People the local authorities have already interviewed. She’s stirring the pot for no good reason. Is how they see it, I mean.”
“Stirring the pot. I do see what you mean.”
The Deputy cleared his throat, his hat twitching in his hands in front of him.
“Well, it’s not me that’s saying this, you understand. I mean, the stirring’s not how I see it. She’s trying to solve homicides. She has a passion for it.”
“No, I understand what you’re saying. Thanks for coming to me, Deputy. I’ll talk to her about it.”
“OK. Great. I felt like something should be said is all.”
Loshak nodded, expecting that was the end of it, but the deputy only stood there. The agent turned his head, looked at Donaldson out of the corner of his eye.
“Anything else on your mind, deputy?”
“I kind of was wondering your thoughts on the Steelers this week. Four point favorites at home? Seems low to me.”
Loshak shrugged.
“Could be. I don’t have a strong opinion on that one. Not sure I’m comfortable laying more than a field goal with that offensive line, but…”
“Uh-huh. I see. Anything you like on Sunday?”
“Ravens-Browns under 44 and a half. Supposedly that’s the sharp play. Might want to lock it in now. The number’s likely to move.”
Donaldson pulled a small notepad out of his breast pocket and jotted the note.
“Thank you, sir,” the deputy said, licking his lips. “Ravens under. Anything else?”
“Not sure. I’m always tempted to bet the over on Cincinnati with that secondary. Not ready to make it official just yet.”
The deputy rolled his eyes.
“Good lord. The Bengals secondary? Don’t even get me started.”
Chapter 30
The day dawned overcast, with milky gray clouds that reminded Violet of Sierra’s eyes in her dream. A haze hung i
n the air, obscuring the sunlight and blotting out the color in the day. Everything was monochrome. A photograph in black and white.
Darger had tried to sleep after her night drive, but she’d only managed a prolonged session of tossing and turning. Eventually she crawled from the bed, made a couple of phone calls, and got out her laptop. She checked her email, and the new rental voucher from Cal’s office was there. On the rental company’s website, she arranged for the earliest possible time to have a new car dropped off at the motel.
When Darger went over to drop off Loshak’s keys, she’d already formulated a plan for the day. After she got her new wheels, of course. She checked her watch. Any minute now.
“Have you talked to any of the families? Of the victims, I mean?” she said.
“I met the Worthingtons very briefly. But it was still pretty fresh, and they were a mess.”
She could tell by the look he was giving her that he wanted to say more. Like maybe he wasn’t sold on her idea of talking to the families.
“You do say in your book, we’re profiling the victims just as much as the killer.”
“It’s not that,” he said, eyes searching the room like maybe he’d find the answer somewhere on the ceiling. “Just… tread lightly.”
That raised an eyebrow. She didn’t need anyone to remind her how to handle victims or the families of victims. She had plenty of experience in that department, thank you very much.
He must have read the irritation on her face, because he added, “It’s not the families I’m worried about as much as the feeling some might have that you’re stepping on toes.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I’m only saying, it might be wise to have the blessing of the locals, so to speak.”
“You’re saying I should call and get permission to talk to their witnesses.”
Loshak shrugged. “Sometimes it’s best to seem like one of the guys.”
