by L. T. Vargus
Though they slept in the shadow of the city, Darger suspected these people thought of the recent events up north as something that might as well have happened the next state over. It was an urban problem. The kind of thing that “happened” in a place where people lived stacked on top of one another like sardines.
Shelly Webb lived in a small house with a U-shaped driveway bordered by a thicket of rose of Sharon bushes.
As soon as Darger pulled into the drive, a man came barreling down the front steps with a shotgun in hand. A woman followed behind, hollering at him to get back in the house.
Darger had her badge out already, and she did her best to appear unperturbed by the big man with the big gun.
“I’m from the FBI,” she explained. “Are you Shelly Webb?”
The woman nodded. She had sleepy brown eyes and a mass of curly hair held back from her face with a red plastic hair clip.
“Go on back inside now, Tommy,” Shelly said to the man. “You’re only makin’ a fool of yourself.”
Shelly gestured that Darger should follow her around the side of the house to the backyard.
“Tommy’s my brother. He looks mean with the gun, but he don’t got the balls to actually pull the trigger.”
“Press has been bothering you, I take it?” Darger asked.
“Yeah, they were calling so much I unplugged the house phone. I suppose it’s only a matter of time before they find my cell, too. And there’s been one or two knockin’ at the door every day since… since they showed Luke’s name and photo on the news.”
“I’m sorry. It’s unfair that you’ve been dragged into all of this.”
Shelly settled into a faux wicker chair and fumbled at a small end table. She lifted a black cylinder that Darger thought was a pen at first. When Shelly put it to her lips and exhaled a puff of smoke worthy of a fairytale dragon, she realized it was an electronic cigarette.
“I guess that’s the price you pay for gettin’ involved with Luke Foley.”
“I take it you’re not on the best terms?”
Shelly scoffed, another cloud of blue-gray haze obscuring her face for a moment. When it reappeared, she wore a frown.
“In some ways, we were never on the best of terms.”
“Meaning he was abusive?”
Shelly licked her lips.
“It wasn’t always physical. We started dating in high school, and all my friends tried to warn me about him. He was always gettin’ in fights then. Got himself kicked out of school junior year.”
Shelly paused to shake her head and expel more smoke.
“He never took responsibility for any of it. Anything he did, he’d have a list of excuses a mile long. But if you crossed him, did him wrong? Forget it. You had an enemy for life. I broke up with him one summer. It only lasted two or maybe three weeks, but he never let it go. We’d have a fight five years later, and he’d bring that up. Carryin’ on about me sleepin’ around for those three weeks, wantin’ to know who and how often. Buncha nonsense. I didn’t see anyone those three weeks. I just cried over him.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head.
“What a waste.”
“Did he ever mention doing something like this? Anything violent?”
“No. I mean, in a general way he said some things that I look at differently now that all this happened, but nothing specific.”
“Things like what?”
“Oh, that all the people that done him wrong would come to regret it. That someday they’d all get what they were owed. But he was usually threatening to kill himself in the same breath, so I always figured….”
Shelly shrugged and sighed instead of completing the sentence.
“Did he do that often? Threaten suicide?”
“When he first got back from Iraq, yeah. We were already pretty much apart by then. Separated. But things were pretty bad. He had nightmares and mood swings. Worse mood swings than before, I mean. And he was drinking a lot. He’d get rip-roarin’ drunk, and he’d start threatening to drive up to the overpass. To jump like Wade Iverson did. Levi was the only one who could ever calm him down when he got like that.”
“How well did you know Levi?”
“That’s the real surprising part for me. Luke doin’ something like this… well, I guess I find it hard to be shocked anymore at his behavior. But Levi? He was the sweetest kid. Got good grades, even had a partial scholarship for college. When things got real bad with Luke, sometimes I used to think: I chose the wrong brother.”
There was a clinking sound as Shelly tapped the e-cigarette against her teeth.
“Guess I was wrong on all accounts. It’s a horrible thing, but…”
She trailed off again, seeming to change her mind about finishing that thought.
“What?”
There was a hole in the knee of Shelly’s jeans, and she picked at the frayed edge.
“Now I think maybe everyone would have been better off if Luke had gone through with it one of those times. Just ended it and left everyone else out of it. Why’s he gotta drag everyone down with him?”
Shelly turned to look at Darger. Her eyelids fluttered a few times before her brow furrowed.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know if any of that was helpful. I kinda… went off there.”
“No, it was very enlightening,” Darger said. “Really. I had some sense of who Levi is by looking through his apartment, going through his things. But Luke has been sort of a mystery until now.”
Shelly’s face brightened. She chewed on the end of the cigarette for a moment and then gestured over her shoulder.
“You know, I have a box of Luke’s old stuff in the house.”
“You do?”
The red hair clip and the curls bounced as Shelly nodded her head.
“Can I take a look?” Darger asked, sitting forward in her chair.
A little snort of a laugh preceded Shelly’s answer.
“You can take the damn things for all I care.”
“I don’t necessarily need—”
“Let me rephrase that, then,” Shelly said. “I’d prefer it if you took them. I’d like it very much if I never had cause to think about Luke Foley for the rest of my life.”
Shelly Webb, Darger decided, had been through enough. Not wanting to intrude any further, she thanked her and carried the box of Luke’s things out to her car before she poked through them.
It looked like it was mostly junk: some old, yellowing copies of Rolling Stone magazine. An ancient iPod with a shattered screen. A pair of beat up Converse sneakers.
She sighed, not feeling like she’d made any real progress. Levi was the good boy. Luke was the naughty one. And she still had absolutely no idea if the investigation was heading in the right direction. She hated the idea of waiting around for the brothers to show up at a baseball game. Or somewhere else.
They’d been blindsided over and over, hadn’t they? What if they were looking in the wrong place yet again?
Darger pressed her knuckles to her temples and massaged the flesh there for a moment. A persistent dull pain in her head had plagued her all day. She glanced at the clock on the dash and figured she ought to get back to her hotel and do what Loshak had recommended earlier. Get some damn sleep.
It was after ten when Darger got back to her room. She carried the box up with her, not willing to leave the evidence in her car overnight. She dropped it on the end of the bed and went to the bathroom to get cleaned up.
Teeth brushed and pajamas donned, Darger hoisted the box. It smelled faintly of stale cigarette smoke. Something metallic caught the bedside lamp and her curiosity.
It was a thick, hardcover book. A yearbook from Fort McPherson High. Darger did the math and figured it would have been Luke’s Junior year, but Shelly had said he’d been expelled that year. Would he have wanted a keepsake like this, even after being kicked out? Darger thought not.
She flipped open the front cover, and among the scrawled messages wishing
a “kickass summer vacation” and “see you in the fall!” was Shelly’s name spelled out on the fly page in sparkly silver alphabet stickers. Shelly’s yearbook, not Luke’s. So why was it in the box?
That became clear as Darger continued paging through it.
On the first page, the name of the school was crossed out and changed to “Fart McQueerson High.”
The margins in the next few pages were filled with drawings of skulls, guns, snakes, and knives. She recognized the style of the doodles from the video where Luke had been decorating Levi’s cast with a marker.
As she’d noted then, the kid possessed some artistic talent even if he had no taste at all.
Most of the photos of teachers were scrawled over. Some were silly: an eye patch, hoop earring, beard, and parrot added to the photo of Mr. Pitkin. Mrs. Franco had been given the hinged jaw and vacant eyes of a porcelain doll. Others were pornographic in nature: the vice principal performing fellatio on a horse, for example.
Most of the Varsity Dance Team had been defaced. Huge block letters scrawled across the top labeled the girls “WHORES.”
On the next page, he’d rendered an elaborate Nazi imperial eagle.
Further in, Darger noticed that Luke had gone through and labeled many of the students with racist or homophobic slurs.
So much anger, she thought and then yawned.
She needed sleep. Analyzing Luke Foley’s adolescent scribbles could wait until morning.
Snapping the cover shut, she replaced the yearbook in the box and shut off the lamp.
Chapter 62
The warmth of sleep still clung to Levi’s flesh. He felt it deep in the meat of his cheeks, in the faint itch plaguing the folds of his eyelids.
The morning of.
That phrase kept turning over and over in his head. This was the morning of.
Morning it may be, but the sun hadn’t shown yet. Darkness still shrouded all things.
It was before dawn, and the brothers sat in the beat up Ford Focus. Waiting. Watching. The engine was off. They were parked on a dead end street, looking at an overgrown lot through the windshield. They paused here, Levi supposed, to collect themselves before the next of Luke’s nightmares transformed into a reality, this time with the help of the 70 pounds of C4 stacked neatly in the trunk.
He swallowed, his throat clicking. He took a drink of watery gas station coffee. It wasn’t enough to help wake him up. Not yet.
The morning of.
He thought about the roof of the El Camino thrust into the air, the doors thrown out of their frames, the flash and incredible bang that rattled his bones and made the earth quake beneath his feet. He thought of these things, and he swallowed again.
Levi read the name tag on Luke’s jumpsuit. Leroy. The name on his own jumpsuit was David. Janitors. That was the ruse. The costume. That was what would get them through the door. Luke had apparently tested it multiple times without issue.
“Remember, if anything happens, we meet at the Jeep. It’s parked a couple blocks from the old house. Behind the vacant Blockbuster on Mosel Street. OK?”
Levi hesitated a moment, then nodded.
Luke squinted at him, demonic wrinkles spreading over his face.
“Tell me where it is.”
“Behind the Blockbuster. On Mosel.”
“Good.”
The muscles in Luke’s face relaxed, a little at first, then all the way, and he looked like himself again.
“I showed you the backup detonation method, right?”
Levi nodded.
Luke placed a cigarette in his lips and took his zippo to it. The burnt butane smell of the lighter seemed sharper than usual somehow. Levi thought maybe his senses were heightened from the adrenaline.
“If something goes wrong with the detonator at the first location, I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it. There’ll be too many people around to go in and wire it. We ditch it and move on. But we’ll be able to wire the detonators up at the second location, if it comes to that.”
Levi closed his eyes.
“Second location?” he said.
Luke scoffed, smoke shooting out of his mouth and nose.
“It wouldn’t be much of a project if we only struck once, now would it? Shock and awe, baby bro. A spectacle is all about the element of surprise. The magnitude. The sense of grandeur. You hit ‘em, get ‘em lookin’ one way, then you blindside ‘em even harder from the other direction. Harder than they could have dreamed. The first blast is the shock, and the second is the awe.”
He puffed on his cigarette and chuckled to himself before he went on.
“And I have to say — me, personally? I like the awe. I really do. Always have.”
Even when he laughed he looked devilish in the green glow of the dash lights. His mouth looked too big, and his eyes looked dead as always.
The faint smell of the plastic explosive filled the car. It seemed to arrive just then, to make itself known all at once. Luke must have noticed it as well.
“Stuff’s supposed to be odorless, but when it’s hot and humid out like this, there’s a smell.”
He dropped his stubby cigarette into the paper coffee cup from the gas station, and the cherry hissed as the backwash extinguished it.
“They say it smells like tar, but to me, it always smells like vinyl.”
“Vinyl?”
“Yeah, like a new shower curtain, you know?”
Levi concentrated on the smell for a beat, the image of an off-white shower curtain conjured in his head.
“Yeah, I get that. Maybe with some Play-Doh mixed in or something.”
Chapter 63
A door slammed somewhere down the hall. Darger blinked at the hazy gray light seeping through the gap in the curtains. Not quite dawn.
She settled back against the pillow, finding the indentation her head had made in the night. Her eyelids slid closed.
Her mind played over the previous day. Images and sounds coming to her clearly now. She was in that strange half-dream state that often came in the early morning. She’d always thought of it as the intuitive part of her brain being in charge while the rational part stumbled around still partially asleep.
Leonard Stump called it the Sensate State. The way he waxed poetic about it, Darger felt it was almost a sacred time to him.
In his journal, he’d written, “There is a clarity upon waking in the morning that can not be matched by meditation, psychotropic drugs, or any alignment of the supposed chakras. It is a time when our right brain is given free rein to explore and expound after a night spent conjuring dreams.
“I spend at least one hour each morning in the Sensate State, and I inevitably come out of it feeling razor-sharp and reinvigorated. If I do not take this time, the day is never quite right. My mind is foggy. My body seems weighed down by some invisible force.
“My mother thought me lazy. To her I was ‘lying about in there.’ But she was a fool and an idiot, so it is no wonder she did not appreciate my commitment to this ritual.”
And so, Darger willed herself to lie there and let her mind explore and expound. She wondered what Loshak would think if he knew that she was taking advice from a serial killer.
Her mind wandered to Levi Foley’s closet, to the school newspapers they’d found. Each article he’d written had been carefully outlined. He’d been a kid with dreams and ambitions. Pride in his work. How had it come to this?
Images flashed in her mind’s eye. The newspapers. The letter jacket. The yearbook.
Darger sat up.
The box was close enough that she could lean out of bed and pluck the book off the top of the pile. She pawed it closer and skipped to the index of student names in the back. Her finger ran down the alphabetized list of people in the Junior class until she found “Foley, Luke … page 78.”
The glossy paper swished as she flicked to the correct page and found Luke’s class photo among the rest. She swallowed.
He’d used an eraser or so
mething else to remove the rectangle of ink from the page. All that was left of his face was a hazy blur. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. Only the faint outline of shoulders, ears, and hair.
So much anger… that’s what she’d thought the night before. But it was more than that. He’d felt invisible. Unwanted. Unappreciated. Marginalized.
His hatred for that place was more than just leftover adolescent angst. It was more than unpleasant memories of youth. More than a lack of nostalgia. The defacement of Shelly’s yearbook was a personal vendetta, not only against Shelly, but against the school. The people in it. His classmates, his teachers.
That was it, she thought. She slammed the cover closed and read the name of the school again. Fort McPherson High.
She jumped out of bed so quickly her head pounded and swam. She grasped the dresser to steady herself until the dizziness and little bolts of pain subsided, and then she got herself dressed.
The fuchsia and turquoise carpet muffled her footfalls as she jogged down the hallway. She stopped past Loshak’s door. She’d never hear the end of it if she ran off without him.
She hopped the few steps backward and knocked. Waited. Knocked again. Growing impatient, she tried his phone. There was no answer, and she didn’t hear it ringing from inside the room. She gave up on him and proceeded to the elevator at the end of the hall.
As soon as the polished aluminum doors snicked shut, Darger wished she would have taken the stairs. On the third floor, she had to wait as an elderly couple shuffled in. On the second floor, a middle-aged woman in workout gear joined them. It was all she could do to keep herself from jumping up and down with nervous energy.
Her phone trilled as she reached her car. It was Loshak.
She didn’t bother with pleasantries and cut right to it.
“I think it’s the high school.”
“What about it?”
“The next target. If you think about it, every crime scene so far has had a personal connection. The bridge, the Publix lot, Pheasant Brook. I know we saw that Atlanta Braves pennant in Levi’s apartment, but that’s not enough. Hell, I liked the Braves when I was a kid. But the high school… Levi still had his letter jacket in his closet. The newspaper articles he’d written.”
