by L. T. Vargus
“Are you lost?”
“I don’t know. Is this 78859 Hidden Canyon Road?”
“Yeah,” Darger said, wondering how a delivery driver would have ended up way out here.
“I have a delivery for Violet Darger?”
He pronounced her last name with a hard “g” sound, but she didn’t bother correcting him.
“That’s me,” she said, growing more confused by the second. Was this another part of Stump’s game?
“Sweet. My phone isn’t getting a signal, so I couldn’t even double-check the directions or anything. I was starting to worry I came all the way out here for nothing.”
“Do you usually deliver this far out from the city?”
“Oh, no way. But the lady that put in the order gave me a hundred bucks as a tip.”
“Do you remember her name?”
“Uh… Press-something. Preskell?”
“Prescott.”
“Prescott! That was it.”
Darger signed for the delivery on his phone and then helped unload the boxes of food. There was enough for a small army: subs, chips, cookies, plus an array of beverages.
After laying out the food on one of the folding tables Siskin’s team had brought she suggested that the anthropology crew wash up inside the house. As she held open the door for the group, she overheard two of the anthropology students whispering excitedly.
“I can’t believe I’m washing my hands in the Murder Shack!”
“I know, right? We have to take a selfie. Hashtag Murder Shack Life.”
Darger supposed they were thrilled to be on a real dig, especially one related to such a well-known case, but she couldn’t help but feel that their particular brand of eagerness was misplaced.
While they ate, the two young women turned to Darger and began peppering her with questions.
“What’s he like?” The girl’s thick black hair was pulled back in a braid.
“Who?”
“Leonard Stump,” the girl said. She fiddled with her braid. “I picture him sort of dapper and gentlemanly, like Hannibal Lecter.”
Darger considered the question for a moment. How to sum up Stump?
“In most ways, he’s like anyone else. At least on the outside. He could deliver your mail every day or sit next to you on the bus, and you’d be completely unaware of what he’s capable of,” Darger said. “Unless he chose you as a victim, of course.”
The other girl ran her hands over her arms to smooth away goosebumps.
“On the other hand, if you were around him long enough, and if you were paying attention, I think you’d start to sense that there’s something missing. An absence of some basic element of humanity. He’s… cold, for lack of a better word.”
Darger left them with that, moving away from the group to avoid further conversation. The questions they’d asked about Stump had been innocuous enough, but once that can of worms popped open, more prying questions often followed. People wanted the grisly details. The red meat, Loshak would call it.
She wadded up the paper wrapped around her half-eaten Italian sub and tossed it in one of the empty cardboard boxes the food had come in.
There was a growing sense of unease in the pit of her stomach. The knots in her guts twisting tighter and tighter. Had it been the questions the girls had been asking?
No, it had started before that.
Her eyes drifted over to the shed, at the piles of sifted dirt the anthropology team had brought out over the course of the excavation. That was when she pinpointed the source of her anxiety.
Impatience.
Doubt.
Worry.
What if Stump had sent them out here to dig knowing all along there was nothing here? What would be more frustrating than sending them all over the place digging holes that led nowhere?
The excavation resumed, and Darger grew more restless as the minutes ticked by.
She’d been so certain this was where Stump’s clues led, but she hadn’t considered the source. Wasn’t that what she’d been saying all along? That he was messing with them? Playing games?
She paced around the outside of the shed, her agitation mounting. As she passed by the open door of the shed a few minutes later, Castellano smirked over at her.
“Pretty tedious compared to most crime scenes, huh?”
Darger stopped walking and tried her best to put on a less defeated face.
“It’s not that. I’m just… starting to doubt that there’s anything here. That we’re wasting everyone’s time with this. I’ve been saying since the beginning that this is a game to Stump. Maybe I played right into it.”
“Don’t give up just yet,” Castellano insisted.
Sighing, Darger shook her head.
“When do we give up? They’ve been breaking their backs for hours in there, but we haven’t found a thing.”
She continued her circuit of the yard, trying to come up with another way to read Stump’s clues. Could she have misinterpreted them somehow?
Aren’t you curious what’s hidden beneath it all?
Her thoughts spun in circles like a dizzying carnival ride. She’d told herself she wasn’t going to play along with Stump, and here she was, puzzling over his words like there’d be a prize at the end.
Just then a clang rang out from inside the shed. The sound of a metal shovel hitting something solid in the earth.
Darger’s head snapped up, and she froze.
Dr. Siskin’s face appeared in the doorway.
“I think we’ve got something.”
Chapter 10
Darger and Castellano filed into the enclosed space, edging around the partially excavated pit.
“What is it?”
“Something metallic. A box or trunk, I think,” Dr. Siskin said.
The team continued working, and it remained a slow, methodical process. For the moment, though, Darger felt a little better. They’d found something.
In the end, they excavated three metal footlockers, identical except for the random patterns of rust adorning each.
“Boxes,” Darger said, more to herself than anyone else. “I thought we’d find bodies. Instead, he gave us boxes.”
“Any ideas?” Castellano asked, voicing the unspoken question on all of their minds as she snapped on a pair of latex gloves.
Boxes filled with what?
Darger shook her head.
“I try not to guess when Leonard Stump is involved.”
A cloud of dust plumed in the air as Detective Castellano opened the lid of the first box.
“Oh, Jesus.”
Darger stepped closer to peer around the detective’s shoulder. Inside was a mummified body, folded tightly to fit within the metal walls.
Its skin was dry and leathery, almost black. Sections of yellowed bone shone through in places, and the way the lips had retracted made the beef jerky face look frozen in a snarl.
Darger covered her nose to try to block the smell. It wasn’t the same cloying stench as fresh decay, but it was foul just the same.
“Judging by the clothing and the length of the hair, I’d say it’s a female,” Castellano said,
Eyeballing the places where the filthy-looking floral nightgown could still be discerned clinging to the corpse, Darger nodded.
Castellano moved to the second box. She lifted the lid, revealing another set of skeletal remains. This one was in similar condition to the first, but wore a plaid shirt, khaki shorts, and a pair of leather loafers with dirty white socks.
“I’m thinking we found the original owners of the cabin,” Castellano said.
“Yeah,” Darger said, but she was too lost in her own thoughts to say much more.
This was not what she’d expected when she’d come out here. She’d expected what, then? An extra Stump flourish, she supposed. This was a game, after all. Where was the surprise?
Or was the surprise in the anti-climax? Finally finding the remains of these two victims was something, of course, but Stump
had promised more than that. They’d had a pretty good idea that the couple who had owned this house had met an untimely demise at Stump’s hands, so this was not quite what he’d promised when he’d said there were more victims. Unknown victims.
Was that the surprise? That he’d tricked them again? Given them only half of what he said he would?
As Castellano knelt over the third box, Darger realized she’d almost forgotten about it.
If the first two boxes were the missing homeowners, who was in the third box?
The lid stuck when the detective tried to flip it open the first time. She squatted down for better leverage, grasped the latch, and gave a good tug. It didn’t budge.
Darger bent to help her, but no matter how they wrenched at it, the lid wouldn’t open.
“I think we’re going to have to pry the sucker,” Castellano said.
One of Dr. Siskin’s students handed over a crowbar from their pile of tools, and Castellano snapped a few extra photos of the unopened box before lodging the bar in the space between the lid and the base of the box.
The rusted hinges let out a shriek before finally popping off completely.
Everyone fell silent. Still. They all peered into the box, wordless.
Inside they found not another body, but a jumble of junk.
Darger spotted a Swiss Army knife, an old faded bandanna, a silver and turquoise bracelet. Castellano plucked a pair of sunglasses studded with rhinestones from the pile.
“What the hell is all this stuff?”
Darger stared down at the pile of ephemera, wondering if each individual item represented one of Stump’s victims.
“Trophies.”
Chapter 11
“We found the bodies. And your box of treasures,” Darger said.
Outside the prison interview room, the heavy footsteps of a guard echoed down the hallway.
She couldn’t believe she was back in this place, talking to Stump again. Beside her, Prescott held absolutely still, her sharp eyes studying Stump like a hawk waiting for a pair of robins to leave their nest — and eggs — unattended.
Stump’s mouth twitched. The closest thing to a smile he could likely muster.
“You understood my clues, then? See, I knew you’d puzzle it out. I believed in you.”
“Do I get a gold star?” Darger asked dryly.
Again, his lips quirked ever-so-slightly upward.
“I have to say, I expected more of a reaction. You got what you wanted, didn’t you?”
“Who are they?”
“The bodies? You’re not that stupid, Violet. You know who they are.”
“I’d like to hear you say their names.”
“Terrence and Marcia Haslett. Salt of the earth types. She taught Sunday School for the little ones, you know.”
It was as they’d suspected then, Darger thought. The set of remains found under the shed were the former owners of the home Stump had squatted in for years.
“That’s two more counts of first-degree murder for Coonan to add to your list.”
“Oh, but I didn’t kill them. The Hasletts died of natural causes.”
“Both of them? How convenient.”
“Mmm, I think it was cancer for old Terrence. He refused treatment. One of those stiff-upper-lip types. An army man. He pretended to be such a tough guy, but near the end, when the pain got bad, he begged for it to end.”
Finally a scrap of truth. Stump bragging about making the man beg as he killed him.
“And Marcia?”
“So sad, but she wasn’t equipped to carry on without her better half. I’d dare to say that she died of a broken heart — at least in part, you know. Just couldn’t bear having watched poor Terrence go the way he did.”
Darger’s fingers tightened into a fist beneath the table.
She thought of Stump’s comment about the doctors speculating that the stab wound to his eye had caused brain damage. But now she wondered if maybe she was the one that was brain damaged. Because this was fucked up. Sitting here, letting Leonard Stump brag about his crimes like this. Thinking he was so clever as he twisted the truth into his warped, nightmare version of reality.
Darger tapped the stack of photos she’d brought. An itemized accounting of every item recovered from the trunk.
“And the rest of this? Are you going to tell me who these things belong to, or are you going to keep playing games?”
“Games? I’m not playing games. These will refresh my mind’s eye. In my experience, memories can be so tricky to call up without some concrete stimulus. Language is so abstract. So empty. Pictures, though... Seeing each item pulls some trigger in the brain, brings everything flooding right back. Touching and smelling would be even better, of course. I’ve always been very tactile that way. I bet you are too, aren’t you, Violet?”
Stump flipped through the pile of photographs slowly. It was somewhat of an awkward process because of the shackles on his wrists, but he managed.
He flicked one of the pictures to the side and continued sifting. Another photo was set aside and then another. When he was finished shuffling through the entire stack, there were seven photos in the new pile. He laid them out in a single row. From left to right, the photographs depicted a pair of gold hoop earrings, a fake leather watch, a piece of sea glass, a feathered hair clip, a tube of cherry cola-flavored lip gloss, a miniature harmonica on a keychain, and a lighter engraved with a tattoo-style devil face.
He went down the line, poking at the photos with a fingertip and listing off a series of names.
“Charlene Matheson. Inez Ramos. Courtney Bollard. Heather Phillips. Amanda Schultz. Lisa Marquez,” he said, pausing before he moved on to the final picture of the lighter. “And Faith Shaughnessy.”
“You killed all of these women?”
His lips twitched.
“Of course not. I told you. I’ve never killed anyone. I only disposed of the bodies.”
“So when you shot me in the head, what was that?”
“That was self-preservation, Violet,” he said and cocked his head to the side. “I would hope you’d know by now that it was nothing personal.”
Darger wanted to spit on him.
She’d like to hear him tell Emily Kessler that locking her in a box wasn’t personal, but she knew he’d do it without batting an eye. And he’d have that reptilian almost-smirk on his face the whole time.
“You said you’d tell us where.”
She expected resistance. Another excuse.
But the brow over Stump’s good eye arched a little higher and he said, “For my next trick, I’ll require a map.”
“I have one right here,” Prescott said, pulling a folded piece of paper from a manila folder.
She laid out a map of the greater Las Vegas area on the table and tried to hand Stump a Sharpie. He ignored the marker in Prescott’s fist, eyes zig-zagging over the scrawling lines on the map.
Finally Prescott gave up and set the marker down. Stump reached for it then, uncapping the end and marking the first X on the map near a spot labeled ‘Wells Trailhead.’
He marked two more X’s near the first.
“Charlene, Inez, and Faith are here,” he said. “You’ll probably want to use the dogs to find the exact location, but it’s close to where I’ve marked.”
Another two X’s appeared near a service road for a solar farm north of the city.
“Courtney Bollard and Lisa Marquez are here.”
Lastly, he placed a pair of X’s side by side along a scenic road through the Mojave desert.
“And the final two are there.”
Darger wanted to ask about the others. The crime scene techs from the Sheriff’s Department logged forty-seven items from the box, and she was certain they all belonged to victims. Who else was he keeping from them?
But she knew by now he wouldn’t give her more. He only gave when there was something in it for him.
She still wasn’t sure what he was getting out of this, but may
be they’d find that out when they started digging up the girls.
She got up to leave without any sort of farewell.
Behind her, Darger heard Prescott thanking Stump for his cooperation. As she slid through the door, she caught a glimpse of Prescott putting a hand out to shake, but Stump ignored the gesture.
“We’ll be in touch,” Prescott said, then hurried to catch up with Darger.
Her heels clicked out an echoing rhythm as they made their way back to the central control room.
“I wonder if he has an eidetic memory,” Prescott asked. “The way he recalled those names and locations was incredible, but I suspect the bit about needing the tactile reminders is bullshit. I’ll bet he had it up there all along.”
Fucking obviously, Darger thought and somehow kept herself from saying it aloud.
Prescott’s penchant for oohing and ahhing over serial murderers was starting to get old, and Darger wasn’t sure how much longer she’d be able to hold her tongue.
But for now, she had something else to focus on. They had names. Places. They needed to call in the cadaver dogs and Dr. Siskin’s dig team and get to work.
Chapter 12
When Darger arrived at the parking area for the Wells Trailhead, there were two vehicles already in the lot. She spotted two women chatting near the cars. Both were familiar to her. One was Detective Castellano. The other was Tara, the head of the local K-9 search team that worked with the Sheriff’s office.
As Darger pulled in and shut the engine off, Tara walked around to the rear hatch of her dark blue RAV4 and released someone else Darger recognized. Hiro, the cadaver-sniffing black lab, leaped down beside his handler and waited patiently to be hooked up to his lead.
Darger greeted the pair — a handshake for Tara and a few scratches behind the ears for Hiro. Dr. Siskin’s minivan entered the lot a moment later.
“Now it’s a proper reunion,” Darger said, feeling a sense of déjà vu. The only person missing was Loshak. “The Sheriff brought out the big guns, huh?”