First Girl Gone: An absolutely addictive crime thriller with a twist (Detective Charlotte Winters Book 1)

by L. T. Vargus

  She’d considered bluffing that she knew the real identity of the killer, but that could motivate him to kill Kara Dawkins if he hadn’t already. Better to be cryptic. Tantalize. Try to draw him out of his hidey hole.

  It was still something of a long shot, but as Allie had once told her, that was better than no shot.

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Dusk had already faded to full dark by the time Charlie and Zoe arrived at Ramsett Park. They’d driven separately and positioned themselves at opposite ends of the L-shaped parking lot so they could keep an eye on all entrances.

  Knowing her computer had been hacked, Charlie was worried her phone may be compromised as well, and she wasn’t taking any chances. She and Zoe were keeping in touch via a pair of walkie-talkies Charlie had found in the back room of the office. She vaguely remembered her and Allie playing with them as kids, concocting make-believe spy scenarios and cop-and-bandit games.

  “Nothing doing over this way,” Zoe’s voice crackled.

  “Same,” Charlie said back, holding the button with her thumb as she spoke. In this case, “nothing doing” meant literally nothing. Not a single car had passed Charlie’s side, and she figured the same for Zoe’s watch. That made sense to a large degree, especially on a cold night in the dead of winter such as this was. The park sat all the way on the east side of the island, not really a convenient traffic route to anywhere of import. The only people they were likely to see driving out this way were the people who lived in the immediate block or two, and maybe, just maybe, their killer. If her plan worked.

  Charlie sipped hot coffee from the lid of her thermos, wanting to savor it before it cooled. Chances were they’d be here a while, she knew, and this coffee’s current temperature stood almost no chance of holding out for the duration of the stakeout. She picked up her phone, wanting to double-check the time. She knew it’d been fifteen minutes tops since she’d gotten here, but some anxious part of her needed to verify that fact with her own eyes.

  The white numbers came to life on the black screen, glowing for a beat before receding once more. It was 8:03 p.m. now, meaning they were still an hour away from the rendezvous time they’d set at the gazebo.

  Her eyes flicked to the dark structure at that thought. Found it empty, of course. A spindly silhouette of stick-like beams with a wedge of darker, thicker roof hung above, the gazebo was a well-chosen stakeout location. Rising out of a clearing at the center of the park, they should be able to see anyone approaching it, even in the dark.

  “You there, Aardvark?” Zoe’s voice crackled again.

  Charlie picked up the walkie, depressing the button on the side.

  “Aardvark?”

  “I decided we needed code names,” Zoe explained. “You’re Aardvark. I’m The Jackal.”

  “Wait a minute. Why do you get a cool code name, but mine is super nerdy?”

  “I don’t make the rules, Aardvark. You and I both know this kind of thing comes from higher up the chain. Also, please keep this channel clear unless you have pertinent information. I don’t think I need to tell you that this is neither the time nor the place for idle chatter. Over.”

  “I’m glad you’re having fun with this,” Charlie said. “I can tell you’re really taking it all very seriously.”

  In reality, Charlie was glad Zoe had agreed to follow along with her ridiculous plan. She’d done enough work like this on her own that she knew having someone to talk to made it way less boring. Especially with Allie still out of commission.

  On cue, Zoe’s voice came over the speaker again.

  “What was the name of the science class everyone had to take freshman year? It wasn’t biology or chemistry or anything like that. It had some super generic name.”

  “Physical science?”

  “Yes! I was just thinking about the time Mr. Olson had the class read this chapter about biomes out loud and then fell asleep. It wasn’t the first time it happened, and we always liked to see how long we could go before he woke up. So the reading got around to Allie, and instead of ‘organisms’ she said ‘orgasms.’ There were a few chuckles, but we were trying so hard to be quiet, and I think everyone thought it was an accident, at first. A slip of the tongue, you know? But the word was in there like eight times, and she said it every time. With a completely straight face. Nelson Wong was next up, and he kept it going. Orgasm this, orgasm that. Then it was my turn, and I couldn’t not do it. By the time the bell rang at the end of class, everyone was in on it. We were all dying.”

  A few puffs of laughter exited Charlie’s nose. The influx of warm breath made her realize how cold the tip had gotten.

  “Oh yeah. That’s classic Allie.”

  As she spoke, some part of her thought that surely Allie would take the bait, come back to bask in the glow of her accomplishments. She couldn’t resist, could she? But the lull when Charlie finished talking, the prolonged moment of quiet, did all of Allie’s speaking for her.

  “I’ve just been thinking about her a lot lately,” Zoe said. “Probably because of Kara and Amber, I guess. More missing girls on Salem Island after all this time. It has a way of dredging things up. All the old memories come flooding back… That feeling probably never really goes away for you, huh?”

  Charlie’s throat tightened when she tried to answer, that pink flesh beyond her mouth constricting as though trying to choke her. When her lips opened, no words came out. She stared at the walkie-talkie clenched in her fingers, the black segmented panel where the tiny speaker lay beyond a thin layer of mesh seeming to stare right back at her. She wanted only to press the stupid button on the side, mumble some reassuring words into the thing, be a normal human being having a normal conversation, but she couldn’t. Not now.

  When the silence stretched out for too long, Zoe piped up again.

  “Charlie? You there?”

  Charlie’s eyelids fluttered. She cleared her throat. Pressed the button on the walkie-talkie at last.

  “Yeah, I’m here. Sorry about that. Dropped my walkie there for a second and had to fumble around for it.”

  Zoe chuckled at that, and Charlie took another sip of her coffee, trying to wash that strange moment off her palate. It was starting to cool just the faintest bit, no longer the near-scalding temperature that she preferred. Hot enough to set her lips and tongue to tingling. Still, she couldn’t complain.

  Her eyes snapped back to the gazebo, the paranoid part of her once again expecting to see activity there. A shifting in the shadows. A silhouette. A flickering flashlight dancing over the snowy sidewalk. Something. Anything.

  The octagonal structure stood as empty and motionless as ever. The park was as dead as the streets out here. Vacant and lifeless. Just a quiet, peaceful night on Salem Island, save for the murderer out there somewhere, and the girl he may be holding captive even still. Charlie imagined a spider wrapping a moth in its web, saving it for later.

  She swallowed, something clicking deep in her throat. It occurred to her for the first time that she could feel the blood surging along in her neck. The veins punched at the muscles there with each beat of her heart, making the flesh twitch.

  The mounting tension made sense, Charlie thought. One way or the other, this night would play out from here, probably within the next hour or so. The guy would show at the gazebo, or he wouldn’t. They’d crack the case open like a hardboiled egg, or they’d fail.

  Now or never.

  When headlights glinted in her rearview mirror, her eyes flicked up to watch them. The car turned onto the street running alongside her end of the lot, slowing as it neared the park. Charlie held her breath.

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Charlie ducked down in her seat as the car crept past her parking spot. Heart thudding. Eyes opened so wide they stung, staring into the dark through the windshield. She held her breath and listened.

  The tires crunched over the snow in the lot, busting up the crusty stuff as they shambled forward. The engine’s growl grew stronger, deeper.
As the car drew alongside hers, the rumble rattled the floor of her car, sending strange vibrations into the meat of her feet and ankles.

  Tilting her head up, she watched the shimmer of the headlights spread their glow over her dashboard. The lights moved like liquid, lurching and spilling onto the hood, sliding past along with the passing car.

  The pitch of the grinding engine changed as the car cruised by her, and then the growl seemed to move forward no more. It held steady. Whirring along in place. Had he stopped? So close? Was he looking into the park now, studying the gazebo?

  She waited as long as she could before she lifted her head to peer over the steering wheel. The bright flare of the brake lights glinted a bloody red over the snow. He’d stopped just a couple car lengths beyond her.

  The car was a real piece of shit, she realized now. A small Toyota sedan with rusted-out fenders, old as hell. Probably a hole in the muffler, based on the sheer volume of the exhaust noise.

  She squinted. Focused on the silhouette seated behind the wheel. Shadows flitted and fluttered like twisting smoke within the dark on the driver’s side, but she couldn’t make out what she was seeing.

  The window slowly rolled down, buzzing a little as the pane of glass disappeared between the rubber lips there. He was putting his window down, trying to get a better look into the park. This was it. It had to be him.

  Charlie held her breath again. Watching. Waiting. Knowing in her heart that something was about to happen here.

  A half-wadded McDonald’s bag flew out of the car window. It rolled like tumbleweed, skittering into the gutter. Based on the slight bulge to the thing, she could tell it was full of garbage. Probably your standard fry sleeve, burger wrapper, and waxed paper cup. Perhaps a cardboard nugget tray. The tip of a straw poked out of the top.

  A couple of empty Sprite bottles followed that, making hollow thunking sounds that reminded her of ping-pong balls as they bounced along the asphalt and settled in the low spot near the bag. Then the window whirred to life again, this time going up.

  It took Charlie several seconds to process what she was seeing. Littering. He was littering.

  It wasn’t the killer, she realized. This wasn’t significant to their stakeout at all. It was just some dirtbag cleaning out his piece of shit car.

  The driver’s door cracked open, an ashtray appearing there in the opening, tipping over. Cigarette butts plummeted to the asphalt like raindrops, clouds of wispy ash mushrooming all around them.

  Littering. Unbelievable, and somehow very offensive. So selfish. So vulgar. She could spot two garbage bins on the park premises without even turning her head, and this guy was just dumping his trash on the ground.

  Charlie’s mind raced to think of an insult. This guy was a… a… a litterbug. The insult felt anticlimactic. It didn’t seem strong enough to describe how she felt about him just now. Too cutesy. She thought maybe Allie would have thought of something better. Probably something dirty and borderline inappropriate and awesome.

  Charlie thought about confronting the guy. The car was still sitting there, brake lights shooting that red glare over everything. She couldn’t risk it, though. She had to stay hidden.

  Instead, she lifted her walkie to her mouth, felt the tremor in her hand from the spike of adrenaline she’d gotten when the car had first rolled up.

  “Jackal, this is Aardvark. I just had some action over this way,” she said. “A bit of a false alarm, really.”

  “I have to say, Aardvark, I appreciate your commitment to the code names. But go ahead. Whaddya got?”

  “Oh, just some scumbag in a beat-up Toyota dumping his fast-food wrappers all over the street. The jerkoff is still sitting here now. Bold as brass. Probably trying to think of what other trash he can throw out his window.”

  “Nice. Well, give me his plate number, and we’ll be sure he gets a little participation trophy for his efforts. Our lucky winner’s ticket carries up to a $500 fine.”

  Charlie chuckled as she read off the plate number. That’d be a nice surprise for her new friend here.

  The junky Toyota lurched to life at last, shuffling forward. The engine revved and popped, picking up speed before it veered out of the lot and disappeared.

  “He just took off, so I’m back on my lonesome over here,” Charlie said. “I’m so excited for him to get his ticket, though.”

  “Oh yeah. Nothing doing over here still,” Zoe said. “I heard a car go by one of the side streets a while back, but it didn’t come within viewing distance. Other than that, I’ve eaten like half a box of Cheese Nips.”

  Charlie smiled and leaned back in her seat, letting the headrest cradle her skull.

  “Remember that time we snuck into the cemetery at night and tried to do a séance?” she asked. “You found some how-to thing online that suggested bringing along some kind of food or drink as an offering to the spirits, so we spent forever ransacking your parents’ kitchen, trying to find just the right thing.”

  A bark of laughter came over the walkie-talkie.

  “What’d we end up taking? I don’t remember,” Zoe said.

  “Mountain Dew, gummy bears, and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.”

  “Nice. What about when Kyle Polarski shat on the skylight over the school cafeteria?”

  “That was Kyle?” Charlie asked. “I thought it was Scott Bauman.”

  “Scott might have been there, but I think Kyle did the deed. You know, he’s a gym teacher at the middle school now. I’ll ask him next time I see him.”

  “Please do. I’m sure he’ll love that.”

  Time seemed to speed up some as Charlie and Zoe reminisced. Was there something about conversing over these walkie-talkies that spurred the memories along? Charlie thought so. It was as though the little communication devices thrust them right back into childhood, set them jetting backward in time, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past and all that F. Scott Fitzgerald stuff.

  The creeping gray of nostalgia snuck up on her, enveloped her, shook her out of that tense feeling she’d had when the litterbug had gone past, and shifted her into something of a wistful mood. Some longing feeling she didn’t quite understand.

  In any case, the clock moved faster. The coffee grew colder. But Charlie didn’t mind any of it, even if this particular nostalgia maintained a distinctly bittersweet flavor. It was better to talk, to remember, to share these feelings with someone outside herself. Much better than facing it all alone, she thought.

  She poured out the last of the coffee, the runnel of black growing thin as it descended from the thermos, receding into a few dark droplets. She sipped it. Just faintly warm now. Better than nothing.

  She checked the time on her phone. The white letters glowed back 8:44 p.m. That made her lick her lips. Only sixteen minutes left on the countdown clock. Would he not show after all? She hadn’t anticipated that possible ending, not truly.

  But maybe it made sense. Nothing instead of something.

  We never contemplate the empty spaces in life, she thought. We see the walls and furniture and think of those as the room instead of all the space around them—the vast expanse of nothing that lies within the borders. Scientifically speaking, most of the universe is composed of nothing, right down to each of the cells that constructed our bodies. Why is that notion so hard to hold onto? We lack some kind of spatial awareness for it. So often we behave as though the objects around us comprise reality when most of the universe is empty. Nothing. Infinite black space flecked with relatively tiny stars.

  She swallowed the last of her coffee, feeling that little bit of grit in her throat, the sludge that had collected at the bottom of the thermos. As soon as the cup went all the way empty, a pang of regret welled in her, some grave concern that she’d have none left to sip at while she waited.

  She lifted the phone again. Waited for the glowing numbers to appear. The time changed from 8:46 to 8:47 as she looked upon it.

  Lights gleamed in the rearview mirror, and Char
lie sat up straighter to watch. Headlights shining out from a dark sedan. This one seemed nicer than the litterbug’s vehicle, even from a distance. It was newer and bigger—one of those boats that old, upper-middle-class people drove. A Cadillac or Buick, maybe. She couldn’t quite tell with the clusters of snow hugging parts of the car.

  The beams swiveled around the corner behind her and rolled right past. Charlie ducked again as it got close—watching, waiting for it to turn into the lot—but this car didn’t slow. It zoomed on by. She tried to get a look at the license plate, but that too was largely tucked behind a crust of snow.

  Oh, well. More nothing, she thought. Probably a resident of the area heading home.

  “Just had a dark sedan zoom by,” Charlie said into the walkie-talkie. “Didn’t slow down or anything, so I figure it was nothing.”

  Zoe didn’t respond right away.

  “Yep. Yep. I’ve got eyes on him now,” she said finally. “He just turned down this way.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, this is interesting. He just took another right. I think he’s heading back in your direction.”

  Another right. That didn’t sound like someone who lived here. That sounded like someone circling the park.

  She watched the mirror. Waited. Tried not to get her hopes up. Not yet.

  A moment later, headlights flared in the corner of the mirror. As the vehicle got closer, she saw that it was indeed the same car.

  “He’s coming back,” Charlie said.

  This time he slowed and pulled into the park entrance. Charlie crouched down, trying to keep the car in view. Her heart punched at the walls of her chest like it was knocking on a door, asking to be let out.

  The reflection of the brake lights tinted the snow scarlet. And then a bright white glow mixed in with the red—he had put the car in reverse.

  Charlie whispered into the walkie-talkie, “He’s parking. I think… I think it’s really him.”

  The car’s engine changed to a higher pitch and cut out then. The sudden quiet had an empty feeling to it. After a second, the red glow from the brake lights went dark.