Sandman

by Tammy Bird

  “Best friend? Are you being serious? Weren’t you two lovers?” Andrew wasn’t letting up.

  His persistence annoyed her. “You should leave.”

  Katia noticed that Frankie was now poised close to her feet, at attention. It would have been humorous if she wasn’t so tired and if she wasn’t unsure as to what Andrew’s visit was really about. Katia reached down and scratched the top of his head. What she would not do is show fear.

  Andrew stood unmoving, as if trying to decide if he should push in or leave.

  As if on cue, Frankie stood on his hind legs. Katia heard a guttural sound coming from his throat. She knew Andrew could hear it, too. “You’re not coming in, Andrew.” Katia kept her voice even. Inside, her heart pounded a little too fast. She wished she had carried her phone to the door.

  “I don’t understand you. I just want to talk about the incident,” Andrew said.

  Katia could hear the frustration in his words. She stood her ground.

  “What do you think is going to happen? You think I’m going to rape a woman I work with every day? Murder you, maybe?” His voice sounded even higher than before, a little boy’s voice. “Fuck it.” Andrew removed his foot from between the door and jamb. “Just thought you might like to hear about what I saw. Guess not.”

  ****

  Once completely uncovered, Gina’s body was easily identified, even if additional information was needed before Zahra and the others could make a positive ID. Gina Dahl sold and managed rentals all along the Outer Banks, and her face was on more than one Seaside Real Estate billboard and ad.

  “Why were you the least decomposed, Gina?” Zahra said. “Fourteen deaths. You were last. The most recent. Why? Why you?” She touched the small infinity symbol tattooed on the top of the woman’s left wrist. “Katia showed me her tattoo. She told me you took her and Elizabeth on their eighteenth birthdays. Pretty smart not to let them get each other’s names. Moms always know best, don’t they?”

  Zahra pulled up the camera and pointed it at the small symbol. She adjusted the zoom on the high-powered lens. “Thank you for being there for her. She is pretty great, you know.” The shutter clicked as she captured another image. She moved the wrist slightly to get a different angle. “She’s also stubborn as hell. Deep. Fucking dark and intense, even.” Zahra took several more shots. “But I don’t think you could have helped with that.” She laid the arm back in a more normal position and allowed the camera to fall back against her breasts.

  “Actually, I don’t know if anyone will ever be enough for her, though Lord knows I want to be.” The corner of Zahra’s mouth moved upward slightly. She couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been in lust with Katia’s slender, tight, boyish self. Her unapproachable demeanor was made more prominent by her choppy, black hair that hung in strands across the top rim of her glasses. Her contrasting sense of duty to family and community only served to make her more alluring.

  Zahra sighed and reached for the sheet that lay folded neatly at the end of the table. “Anyway, thanks for being there for her. She loved you.” Zahra pulled the sheet up over Gina’s body, leaving her face exposed for one more moment. She hated this part. It was so final.

  Gina was now clean and photographed from every angle for the third time. Zahra ran through the stages as she did every time in her head, as they were ingrained in her from school. Pictures at the crime scene before anything is touched. Photos in the light of the lab where the decedent can be turned and analyzed. Pictures after the body is rinsed of all debris. Same body. Different stories every time. I am so sorry, Ms. Dahl. So sorry. She pulled the sheet over the woman’s face and turned back to her circle of five.

  Another female lay on the next sterile table. She was a Jane Doe. Too decomposed to identify by sight, assuming they would have known her, and left in the dune with nothing to help them figure out who she was. “I’m going to leave you for now, Ms. Doe.” Zahra used her most polite voice. “Your friends here have a bit more story to tell.” Just like Dr. Webb had taught her, she talked to the bodies on the table as a way to remain calm. When people asked, she aligned it with a person talking to her cat or dog. You know they aren’t going to answer you, but you’re looking for clues as to what they want while you talk. “Right, Ms. Doe?”

  The two others, Lacey O’Donnell and Nadia Grey, were identified easily at the scene. As of yet, there was no official ID, but each was buried with a purse and each purse held the owner’s driver’s license. The lab results, she suspected, would confirm the names soon enough.

  Running the license numbers through the database brought forth old case files on both women.

  Lacey O’Donnell. Missing from Manteo, North Carolina, since 2014. Reported missing by her husband when she failed to return from a work conference. The conference was across the state line in Virginia. Because of proximity and reported marital problems, the husband was a prime suspect. Friends and neighbors reported the woman as dedicated to her children above all else. Both children, a boy, age ten, and a girl, age eight, were currently with their father. The case was ongoing, though leads had long since dried up, and the case was stale.

  Nadia Grey. A local teacher. Abducted in 2001. Presumably with a boy. Seventeen.

  Zahra swallowed hard and looked between the computer screen at the two remaining decedents, one of whom was a male presumed to be in his late teens to early twenties. “Are you that boy?”

  The boy and Nadia Grey were found buried at opposite ends of the defined kill zone. “If you are Roger Townsend,” she said in the direction of the only male victim in the room, “Why in the hell did he bury the two of you so far apart?”

  Each of the five in her current circle were photographed from every possible angle while still on the beach with the sea lapping against the dunes around them. Now they waited to provide their own set of clues through samples. They waited for their turn to pose for pictures in the bright light of the lab, for their turn to be cleaned, and for their turn under the scalpel of Dr. Webb.

  Zahra picked Lacey next. She’d been working on collecting samples and entering information into the database for close to an hour when Dr. Webb joined her from wherever he had gone. He was a private man. She knew he would tell her what he thought she needed to know and nothing more. “Anything promising out there, Doc?”

  “Meetings,” he replied. “Everyone is a bit whopperjawed, you know? They want miracles. We need to provide them. We told them to get us some more help. Sooner, not later.”

  Zahra felt like he was staring right through her. He looked exhausted, old suddenly, which was a word she would not have applied to him until today. “Dahl is ready for you. O’Donnell will be shortly.” She motioned toward the as-of-yet officially unidentified woman. She waited. He should have corrected her. Dr. Webb was proper, by the book. Facts, Zahra. Our job is not to guess. No matter how likely we are to be correct in those assumptions. But the words didn’t come. She held her tongue. Turned back to the job at hand.

  They spent the next few hours working side by side, the silence broken only occasionally by a question or a beep from a machine. Every fiber of Zahra’s being hurt. Together they processed four of the five decedents, completed sample collecting from the fifth, and learned from the beeping machines somewhere along the way they indeed had Gina Dahl and Lacey O’Donnell in the room.

  “These two are interesting,” Dr. Webb said. He pointed to the remains of the decedent assumed to be Nadia Grey and then to the one presumed to be Roger Townsend. Zahra nodded. “The boy especially. Appears he was wrapped carefully before burial and placed center of the dune so as to slow decay immensely. I’ll begin with him again tomorrow.” He made eye contact with her and nodded down to the table. “While you finish processing Jane Doe.”

  The day had just ended, and Zahra was being released. “It’s only three o’clock, Doc. Do you need anything else from me before I leave?” She met his tired eyes with her own.

  “No
. You did well today, Zahra. This is a tough one.”

  Zahra watched for a moment as he turned the woman’s right hand palm up. His movements were gentle and fluid, like the man. She started to argue, to insist on staying, but she knew she would lose in the end anyway. Besides, every muscle ached. They had begun processing bodies at five o’clock this morning and had even ordered in their lunch to keep an eye on the computer for lab results and updates. She reached behind her back and pulled the string that would allow her to slip from the pale blue gown. “Thank you, sir. It is. It is indeed.”

  Before she even reached the sliding door that separated her and the stench of death from the fresh air of the rest of the world, Zahra decided to take a ride over to talk to Katia. She had learned a great deal today and she wanted to share with her.

  Elizabeth’s address in Virginia had been located, and patrol cars were headed to her apartment. This would be a relief to Katia but might also bring additional pain. Telling Katia face-to-face was much better than sending text messages. Selfishly, Zahra also knew seeing Katia would make her happy at the end of a very unhappy day.

  The drive over was filled with thoughts that swung like Newton’s Cradle in her head. On one end of the five-ball structure was the morgue filled with dead bodies. Pull back and release. Gina, Nadia, Lacey, Roger, and Jane Doe. Clack.

  The names hit the balls at rest in the middle of the Cradle. The beach, life before the Sandman. Sandman. That’s what the media was calling him. It didn’t seem right to grant such a horrific person a name that conjured up pictures of children snuggled tight under their covers waiting for sleepy dust to be sprinkled in their eyes. She could feel the momentum and energy heading for the other side, the colliding surfaces, the variables in play.

  On the other end of the cradle was her relationship with Katia. The silky, caramel-colored skin and pouty lips of an adorable but angry boi covered in tattoos. A white crescent moon and four stars outlined in black ran the length of her long torso, and a tiny red heart nestled on the inside of her right thigh. She presumed the heart was for Elizabeth. Clack.

  Elizabeth. Her mom, dead, poking out from the dune, her purple shoe a reminder of what was. Clack.

  A watercolor owl resting on a small white breast. Katia’s mom loved owls. She learned this the first time they fucked, half toasted from a night at the bar. The silver ball arching out and back toward the center. Like Katia’s back when she climaxed. The future unknowable. Clack.

  Katia’s three-story, pale-yellow beach house came into view. In the driveway, there was a vehicle Zahra didn’t recognize. Maybe I should have called. She slowed down, trying to decide what to do. She didn’t want to interrupt Katia’s time unannounced if she was busy. There was the pendulum again, swinging to the side that wanted what wasn’t hers to have.

  That’s dumb, Zahra Kate. You are an investigator doing your job, not some stupid love-sick kid trying to get closer to a crush. This is your job.

  She cracked her knuckles, a nervous habit her mom said would make her knuckles huge. It didn’t. Her hands were small, her knuckles proportionate. She straightened in her seat and eased her car around the curve and into the driveway of Katia’s home.

  Zahra’s brain immediately started processing the scene on the porch. Andrew? What’s he doing here? His posture was off. Katia looked annoyed. There was a small dog at Katia’s feet, just behind her right leg, poking forward, at an attack stance. Zahra knew from their late-night conversations that Andrew gave Katia the creeps. She also knew Katia would say that about most men who gave her more than a passing glance, especially if they were outsiders. But something was definitely not right with the situation in front of her. Her cop senses were on fire.

  She pushed the car door open and looked up at the lemon- sherbet-colored house with white trim. Two raspberry-colored flower troughs hung perfectly spaced between white, square pillars on the porch. Katia’s father built it for his bride thirty years ago. It was one of the biggest single-family homes on the beach and one of the beachiest and most beautiful with its two-level, wraparound porch and white, scalloped trim.

  “That house is what would happen if you crossed an old, wooden, beach house with a big, old, southern, Savannah, Georgia, Queen Anne,” her dad used to say. As a kid of a Buxton native, Zahra often heard her dad tell stories of how Mr. Billings spent months making everything perfect for a wife he loved desperately. “He would have done anything for Rosario,” her dad said. “Pity that drunk boy killed her before her time.” After Rosario died, Mr. Billings used the home as a show house for clients who needed design ideas for their own homes. Katia hated that, too.

  Zahra stepped out of the car without taking her eyes off of what was going on at the door to the house. Andrew pulled his leg backward and strode away, eyes looking at the ground, toward his car. He turned back for a brief moment. Did he expect her to call him back? Zahra watched him closely and nodded when he looked over and caught her gaze. He quickly got into his car, slammed the door, and turned over the engine. Their eyes met again as he backed past her. He’s creepy as hell. She looked at Katia and tried to give her a reassuring smile.

  “Fuck. I’m glad you’re here,” Katia said. “That dickhead was trying to push his way into the house.”

  “You want to file a report?” Zahra asked. “I know an investigator who isn’t afraid to throw her weight around.” She did her best to lighten the mood a little. “At least talk to El on Sunday. See what he thinks. It’s probably nothing. He freakin’ works with you. Certainly, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to try anything.”

  “I guess.” Katia made a gesture with her hand and pulled the door fully open. “Said something about me wanting to know what he knew. Guess he watched the extraction of the remains.”

  Zahra put her hand on Katia’s face as she crossed the threshold. “More importantly, how are you?”

  Katia didn’t move.

  Zahra let her hand linger for the briefest moment, let it slide gently forward toward Katia’s mouth and down across her chin. Tenderness was not what she and this woman were about. Their encounters were anything but, and yet, in that moment, it was what she wanted more than anything else. Zahra let out a breath that lasted a full five seconds, not wanting to say too much or too little. “I can come back and stay tonight if you’d like.”

  “Not that I wouldn’t mind the company, Zee. I would like it. You know that. But we’ll be fine.”

  Zee. I love it when she calls me that, Zahra thought. Her heart beat against her temple. The woman created a physical reaction with a smile and a word. Her heart hurt for Katia, for Gina, for Elizabeth, and selfishly, for herself.

  “Don’t look at me like that.” Katia rotated the door lock and peeked out the window. “As much as I would like to fuck this away, I just need to process. You know?”

  Zahra kept her voice low to match Katia’s. “Okay. Brave heart. But don’t say I didn’t offer. And I said nothing about fucking, though that’s certainly on the table if you need it.”

  Frankie followed the two down the wide hall and into the large kitchen. Zahra decided turning the attention to him might lessen the tension in the room. “Where’d the mutt come from? Thought your dad didn’t allow them.”

  “El and Brent seem to think Andrew’s okay.” Katia glanced slightly back over her shoulder. “Just socially awkward as a bitch. I was a bit thrown by the whole foot-in-the-door shit. I’ll admit that.”

  “Got it. You didn’t answer the mutt question.” It took a second, but Zahra realized why. “Katia. That’s Gina’s dog, isn’t it?”

  “Brilliant detective skills, my friend.”

  “If that’s your attempt at deflection, it’s failing miserably. You know I’m not happy about you going to Gina’s house at all, much less alone. Seriously. That’s a crime scene. You could get into trouble for that shit.”

  “One, it wasn’t a crime scene when I went. Gina hasn’t even been officially identified. Two, I did
n’t touch any surfaces with my bare hands. I used gloves. And three, Frankie here would still be curled in a corner scared to death and hungry and thirsty if I hadn’t gone over.”

  Zahra stopped next to the center island. It was only the second time she was in Katia’s home, and it was the first time she’d seen her in any room on the first floor. Her eyes traveled up from Katia’s bare feet to her camo-colored pants that hung loosely from her slender hips. “The dog would have been fine until detectives arrived.” She tried to focus on the task at hand. It was a struggle between her brain and her heart, as her eyes rested on the soft, caramel-colored skin between the band of the pants and the hem of the fade- black tank top. “They identified her today. That’s part of why I’m here.”

  Katia’s voice pulled Zahra’s eyes the rest of the way up to her face. “Figured. The detectives arrived a few hours ago. I watched them through the living room window.” She gestured with her head in the direction of a large opening between the kitchen and living room. “I knew they were officially looking for clues.”

  Zahra temporarily forgot about the dog who took up residence on a patch of sunlight on the hardwood floor next to the back door. Katia pushed off from the countertop behind her and padded toward the opening.

  Zahra followed her into the other room, and the two of them stood shoulder to shoulder and looked out of the large picture window.

  Zahra spoke first. “They’re bringing Paige and Bob back with another dog tomorrow. Just to be sure.” She didn’t know why she said it, she hadn’t meant to. She rarely shared what she learned with anyone on the outside until it was public knowledge. In the middle of a serial murder investigation or not, that was the kind of hold Katia had on her.

  After several minutes, Katia pointed to an alcove behind a large dune. “We used to kiss down there. We had no idea back then our parents could likely see us from up here if the moon was bright enough.” She laughed. “Stupid young love.”