Sandman

by Tammy Bird

  Zahra nodded. “Probably. They’re headed to her place today. May already be there.”

  Katia didn’t respond. Zahra didn’t push. Instead, she brought their discussion back to Andrew. “When did he come to this area? Do you know?”

  “Who? Andrew?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Year. Year and a half ago, I guess.” Katia continued to stare toward the alcove.

  Zahra watched Katia’s tongue as she moistened her lips between sentences, thought about the way she used it on her nipples, her neck… She shuddered, told herself what a bad person she was for remembering sex at a time like this. It kind of came with the territory, though. If death stopped a criminal investigator’s sex drive, she would never have sex. She reminded herself again that normal people couldn’t reconcile the two.

  Katia said, “Transferred from some little town over by Greensboro. Whit something, I think. I’m really not sure. I just try to avoid him. I told the guys he freaks me out. Always staring—asking questions about…” Katia’s voice trailed off as if she suddenly realized where Zahra’s line of questioning was going. “You don’t think? Fuck. He did tell us he came here for years with his parents, sometimes alone to clear his head. Zahra…”

  “I’ll do some digging. Ask around the station. I’m sure they’re looking into him. Into everyone, really. Buxton isn’t big, and even if we consider surrounding towns, there aren’t many possibilities for someone who could pull this off unnoticed, you know?”

  Katia shrugged. “I just want to know Elizabeth is okay. For now, that’s as far as I can fucking think. I’m numb. So numb.”

  Zahra pulled a buzzing phone from her pocket, looked at the screen. “I have to take this.”

  She walked slowly out of the kitchen and hit Talk. “Detective?”

  “We found Elizabeth’s apartment,” the voice on the other end reported.

  The words hung in the air. Zahra didn’t like the way that sounded, but she didn’t dare articulate her fear. She kept her voice low. “And?”

  “Elizabeth isn’t there. Neighbors say they haven’t seen her in a few days. Say she keeps to herself, though, so they can’t be sure when she was home last.”

  “Are they searching the apartment? They need to search the apartment.” Zahra was pacing back and forth in the hallway, a nervous habit she inherited from her mother. She was suddenly glad she and Katia hadn’t spent enough time together to learn one another’s quirks.

  “They will if it comes to that. There’s no outward sign of foul play.” The voice ticked off the grocery list of what she wanted to hear. “No one heard anything out of the ordinary. We have an officer stationed at her house. No one in or out without us knowing. A detective’s going to talk to the curator at Stravitz Gallery.”

  “Is that the gallery where she’s booked to showcase her work?” Zahra leaned against the staircase and nervously picked at her clothes in an attempt to stand still.

  “Indeed it is. And where she hangs out most of the time when she’s not home. I asked for an update as soon as they finish interviewing.”

  “Thanks. Let me know,” she said.

  Chapter Nine

  After his epic fail with Katia, Andrew came home, booted up his computer, and started searching. If there was one thing he learned from all of his years as an Internet recluse, it was how to find information no one else could. He had many connections to the Internet underworld, connections that surface dwellers didn’t know existed.

  Andrew moved his cursor to the seemingly harmless green-and-black icon and clicked. Never enter a site through anywhere but the true Tor door. It’s what sets the real players apart from the wannabes, the hidden from the found. Andrew Hunter was a real player.

  He thought again about what the women said regarding the disappearance of the teacher. Are you one of those buried beneath the sand, Ms. Grey? Let’s see who you’re associated with in the deep dark corners of life.

  A few keystrokes revealed Nadia Grey was at the high school that Katia, Elliot, Brent, Zahra, all of them, attended. Ms. Grey started the year Brent and Elliot were in eleventh grade. She died the year they were seniors. Andrew found that interesting enough to take a deeper look into the backgrounds of the two men.

  Since coming to the island, he forced himself to get closer to Brent than Elliot. Elliot appeared too vanilla for his tastes. Trainer. Mentor. Faithful husband. Father to twin girls. He thought about the picture that Elliot kept on his desk at the station. Cute little things. Red-haired like their mamma. He didn’t see the draw to redheads.

  He touched the keypad and slowly typed out Elliot Palmer 1999 Buxton.

  He found exactly what he expected. Elliot was from a family of six. Voted most likely to succeed and most liked. Met current wife, Josephine Baldacci-Palmer in his senior year. Every new click produced more of the same. Elliot Palmer was an all-American guy from a perfect home with professional parents. He tried various other ways to find hints of him on the dark web, but there was nothing, not even the slightest indication of his ever having loaded Tor. A real family man. Nothing else to see there. He was just as he appeared. Vanilla.

  Andrew took a sip of sweet tea and thought about his mom. He missed her sun tea, missed the way it tasted exactly the same every time. He set the glass down next to his computer and rubbed his thumb back and forth across his fingertips to absorb the condensation before putting them back against the keys.

  This time he typed faster. B-R-E-N-T. He was an only child of parents who still ran a local tourist shop. Brent wasn’t as squeaky clean, but there wasn’t a lot that looked dangerous, either. Unless you consider stealing a pack of cigarettes in the local market at thirteen dangerous. Other than a divorce and shared custody of a kid, Andrew didn’t see much at this level. He was connected to the dead teacher, but so were other children. Andrew maneuvered his mouse, clicked into Brent’s grades. Huh. Pretty fucking stellar grades in math for an average kid. He knew Brent was a deviant from the traces of him Andrew uncovered on the deep web. It was why he was nice to him at work. What he needed to know was how deviant.

  Andrew scoured two years worth of yearbooks for clues. The math club was evidently a pretty important part of the lives of several football players. Nadia Grey was quite young and quite striking. Thirty years old, but she looked younger with her shoulder-length bronze hair pulled loosely back from her long, slender face. The speckling of freckles across her nose and high cheekbones complemented her light-blue eyes and light-peach skin in a way that screamed sensual youthfulness.

  Can’t blame a guy for wanting to fuck that. And she definitely resembled the current ex-Mrs. Grainger.

  Andrew had seen the photo of the woman and a young girl on Brent’s desk when he started working for Hatteras Island Rescue. He’d met the slight, ginger-headed woman at a fundraising event. The two, Brent offered when he saw Andrew looking, were divorced, but they remained co-parenting friends to their daughter.

  “Look at you, Ms. Grey.” Andrew scrolled down to get the whole picture on the screen. “You obviously had no problem pulling the guys close.” In one yearbook, the teacher draped her arms loosely over two of the male students in a geometry club photo. “Hi, high school Brent,” he said to the photo and wiggled his fingers in a wave. His eyes moved from the smooth-faced boy’s eyes and mouth to his slim waist and hips that touched his teacher’s in a way that said, “I’m accustomed to our closeness.” In another photo, Brent glanced her way as she cheered her team to victory at a local math competition.

  “Look at that look. You were getting that, weren’t you?”

  Could she have been molesting students? Only Brent, or others, as well? He looked deeper into the pages of eleventh grade and then twelfth. In every shot of the two of them, they were looking, touching, standing close to each other.

  A thought formed in Andrew’s mind as he studied the young boy and his teacher. The Internet became all the craze in the mid-nineties. By two-thousand,
web crawlers were everywhere. New porn opportunities were everywhere, too.

  Once you enter a search on the clear web, it never goes away. I wonder what ole Brent liked to search back then? Maybe I’ve searched your background with the wrong ideas in mind. Maybe you’re not just a deviant fuck who likes to look at darkness. Maybe you like to create it, as well.

  Andrew headed into the dark web to call in a favor. By this time tomorrow, he would know all about Brent’s IP addresses, old and new, and he would have more information about him and his love of teachers, porn, children, death, killing, etc., much more than any cop on the current investigation would yet know about any one individual. Andrew’s connections to the Internet underworld were years in the making, and they were deeper, darker, bloodier, and sicker than he ever said out loud. It was a job he wouldn’t wish on anyone, and he couldn’t think of a place he’d rather be.

  ****

  According to the cable box in the space underneath the television, it was three in the morning. A solid five hours. Sandman stretched and reached for his phone. Holding his thumb down on the sensor brought it to life. He blinked, waited for his eyes to adjust, and tapped on the Calculator app on the second page.

  Good morning, beautiful Elizabeth. He wished her blonde hair hadn’t become matted so quickly. He’d have to make her wash it today, brush it. He wanted her to feel pretty before he killed her. So young. A pity she had to die. She could have made a name for herself. She could have done a lot of things, but her mother ruined that for her when she refused to stay buried.

  Sandman stretched, muscular arms high above his head, the blanket falling down around his midsection. “Let’s see,” he said out loud and brought the phone screen back to eye level. “It used the bucket,” he said, amusing himself by playing off of a line from his favorite movie, Silence of the Lambs. “Buffalo Bill, you have nothing on me.”

  He looked back at the dirty, tear-streaked face on his phone screen.

  She stirred. Did she know she was being watched? People like her, like him, knew when they were being watched. It was something you learned. Sandman wanted to talk to her, to swap stories about their past. Did she hurt you, Elizabeth? Make you like the touches at night? Make you feel like you had to?

  He hoped she wouldn’t be like the others, but it was no use to hope. Hope helped no one. Agitation rose from his gut. He ran his finger across the picture on the screen.

  He turned on his side, holding the phone with one hand, elbow pushing an indent into the mattress. With the other hand he reached for the glass of water from the bedside and took several long drinks. Elizabeth continued to be restless but still not fully awake. He supposed she would have quite a headache from the heavy doses of sleeping medication he administered over the last few days to keep her comfortable. It would be a couple of hours before she was able to talk to him.

  “Your mom planned on bringing Katia to your opening,” Sandman said to the screen. “Did you know that, Elizabeth? Did you? She told me she did. She actually thought it would be a good idea.”

  Thinking about Buxton’s lifetime resident being pulled back into that web of disgusting homosexual filth made him cringe. He reached down and pulled the covers under his armpits. He wondered again what vile things Elizabeth’s mom did to her daughter to make her think the only way she could be happy was to be with another girl.

  “She should never have told me. She didn’t have to. She could have left Katia alone. I wouldn’t have had to kill again so soon.” His voice was a deep whisper, full of pain and longing, like a little boy reporting to his mother he had to hit another child for trying to take his toy. “Will you tell me if you knew, Elizabeth? Will you tell me to save your own life?”

  He could hear the seconds ticking by on the bedside clock. He laid the phone on the bed beside him and rotated both wrists until they cracked. He moved his head from side to side, rotated his ankles, and moved his toes up and down, prompting cracks from all his joints.

  He touched the screen again and sent Elizabeth back into the dark corners of his phone. The Calculator icon appeared, innocent, uninviting. He swung the covers away and moved to the edge of his bed in one motion. Shit. Shower. Shave. Words of his father. Words from another life, a life where he was an innocent little boy, and his parents could still protect him.

  Easing his feet onto the hardwood floor sent a shiver throughout his body. The air outside of the covers was a perfect sixty-eight degrees, exactly where he wanted it for sleeping, but cool enough to make goose bumps appear on his naked skin as soon as the covers were cast aside. Not innocent anymore, he thought. Never again. Auntie took care of that.

  He stood, took the first steps toward the bathroom, and stopped. He looked at his own reflection in the dresser mirror. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the greatest of them all?”

  He thought of all of the women who hurt children, about all of the women who thought they were getting away with their crimes, who would have gotten away with their crimes had he not crossed their path. Laughter exploded from his lips.

  When he stepped into the shower, he was still thinking about all of the child-abusing mothers and aunts and teachers he stopped over the years. Women can convince you you need them, that you like it, and that you’re being a baby if you complain about it. They were all the same, these women who prey on children and make them do things, terrible things, until they’re no longer normal, can no longer be normal.

  It wasn’t his fault Elizabeth was here. It was hers. If Gina hadn’t told him she was going to Virginia next month to see Elizabeth’s paintings in a real gallery; if she hadn’t told him she was going to invite Katia. If only. He couldn’t let her warp Katia any further. Katia could still be saved. He knew she could. He hadn’t seen Katia with another woman since Elizabeth left. Gina wanted to jeopardize her renewed strength. He would save her. He thought about another young person he tried to save. How long ago? 2000? 2001? He was the youngest of his kills. He was also the hardest. He almost hadn’t seen it through, almost let him live.

  Missing: Seventeen-year-old Roger Townsend. He remembered the local headline. The article briefly attached him to his teacher. Model student. Geometry club. Parents indicate a love of school and no outward reason for him to leave. Geometry teacher, Nadia Grey, is also missing… The article went on to say the two were often seen together after school practicing for the competitions Roger competed in and the two may have been abducted together.

  Abducted. They went right to abducted. Back then, he thought they would certainly assume the teacher convinced the boy to run off with her. But no. The idea he ran off with a teacher who convinced him she loved him and the disgusting things she made him do were normal wasn’t even mentioned. No one entertained the idea the two were connected in that way, at least not for more than a gossiping moment.

  A young girl and a male instructor would have changed things…

  The thought returned to him over and over again through the years. Be a woman. Smile. Act innocent. Say the right things. It made him sick.

  He tried to save Nadia Grey’s newest victim. He wanted to let him live. When he walked in on the boy and Nadia in her classroom, his stomach lurched. The teacher had her hand flat against the chalkboard, her face inches from the face of the young man whose back lightly brushed the black slate.

  He’d been told by another of the teacher’s victims she would be alone. “Normally, I would be with her,” he had sobbed. “I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to do it anymore.” The boy confessed to him sitting in the diner high atop the dune. The brand new diner built to appear old, nostalgic, with its silver and turquoise interior and old-fashioned jukebox. The diner of lies where the townspeople congregated during the long, winter months of inactivity, where so many abusers sat in all of their duality, putting dollars in the jukebox, lipping the words to old love songs, and intertwining their lives with the others waiting patiently for the return of summer.

  He could
still see the boy, now a man, legs dangling on either side of the silver leg of the turquoise-topped barstool, his lanky arms folded on the white-and-turquoise-swirled Formica countertop, the reflection of his wavy, light-brown hair against his red cheeks and those long, tear-stained eyelashes in the mirror behind the counter, his head hung in shame and heartbreak. He promised that boy he would handle it, and he had.

  He told Roger to leave that day, to go home, but he wouldn’t. Are you okay, Nadia? Do you want me to stay? He heard the boy in his head. Thought about the look on his teenage face. Like a little boy about to have his puppy taken away.

  Roger called her Nadia, not Ms. Grey. He knew in that second Roger was another victim. Refusing to leave sealed his sentence of being with her in death as he was in life.

  Several men, including himself, were questioned extensively when the pair disappeared. “You were seen chatting with Ms. Grey on multiple occasions,” the police spat at him in that tiny interrogation room. “You seemed to have a relationship with her. Did the boy walk in on you harming her? Try to stop you? Did you hurt them both?”

  He almost laughed out loud. They needed to blame a man, any man, and they needed it to be the woman who was the victim, always the woman. When no clues were found as to Roger’s whereabouts, or hers, people went on with their lives. Fewer and fewer remembered.

  But he remembered. For two weeks, he kept the two of them in the cell. For two weeks, they clung to one another. For two weeks, that bitch stroked and purred as she held Roger close. Roger wanted to let Ms. Grey have her way with him. That became obvious to him while he watched them wait for death. Every day, Roger begged him to let his Geometry teacher go, begged him to take him instead. Every day, that perverted bitch whined and cried and stroked and kissed her student. Every day, she begged for him to release them. But never once did the teacher beg to trade her own life for that of the child. Not once.