The Girl In The Sand

by L. T. Vargus

  This room is empty of other life. He isn’t here.

  With that settled, the details of her surroundings begin to filter into her awareness.

  A new feeling at her wrists has replaced the bite of the plastic zip ties.

  Handcuffs.

  They attach her to what looks like a typical school desk, the kind with the desktop and chair built as one piece. The chain of the cuffs is looped around one of the steel support bars under the laminated wood tabletop.

  She jerks her arms a few times, metal rattling against metal, before all of this fully registers.

  She’s trapped.

  She takes a few breaths. Concentrates to keep the churning panic from taking over.

  She needs to focus on the room around her. Needs to learn it. Needs to find a way out.

  She finds herself in a great room almost barren of furniture. Almost. There are four more desks similar to hers, the others shoved into the corner behind her.

  A cast iron stove mans the center of the wall across the room. Between that and all the wood showing, all the rustic details, she knows it must be a cabin.

  Probably in the middle of nowhere. Somewhere up in the mountains, away from the city.

  Thick bands of what looks like stucco surround the dark planks of wood that comprise the structure, striping the wall in light and dark. The messy edges where the white touches the lumber looks like foamy toothpaste in the half-light.

  It’s dark. Is it still night? She’s not sure.

  Gray shadows fall over the floors, climb up the walls, collect into clouds of black in every corner.

  A single burning bulb in a track lighting fixture provides what little light there is, all of it angled away from her. A circle glowing on the far wall.

  Boards block out every window. Heavy wood. Nailed or screwed in tightly. She couldn’t remove it without tools and time.

  That leaves the heavy steel door off to her right as the only way out. A blue-gray thing that offers little hope of escape. The metal looks out of place among all the wood. Probably added by him. The finishing touch to complete his dream torture chamber. Really ties the room together.

  A silent laugh emits from her nostrils, more injured than joyous. The sardonic thought is too scary to be funny. She cuts it off so she won’t start crying.

  She stirs a little then, the pang of pain in her head not so bad as it was last time. Moving her feet, it occurs to her how cold they are.

  Tiles the color of brick etch a grid into the floor. The little gray seams of grout dividing everything up into boxes. Into cells.

  Appropriate, she thinks. This is her cell.

  Again she rattles her cuffs against the bar. Makes the desk hop up and down a little, metal feet scratching at the tile with angry squawks.

  But her headache flares back into blinding territory, and she gives it up.

  Rest. For now, she will rest.

  She will save her strength for the fight ahead.

  * * *

  Emily thinks of Gabby as she drifts, her thoughts half-conscious and half-dream. Somewhere in between and both at once.

  Images of her friend flicker in her head. Silent movies. Slices of life where little happens.

  Coils of dark hair bunch at each side of Gabby’s face. The cigarette perpetually dangles from her lip. She smiles. She smokes. She looks bored. The background shifts and morphs along with her expressions — rooms and cityscapes taking shape behind her in pulses.

  Some other part of Emily’s mind works at the knot of how to get out of this room, prodding at the tangle of information in hopes of finding something workable, some detail she has overlooked, some way to progress.

  Gabby would know what to do about this, how to get out of this. She always knew what to do.

  When Emily first arrived in Vegas, she had nothing but kids’ mouths to feed and trouble to hide from. That’s how she wound up on the street so quickly.

  She still remembers that first night. Waiting around outside one of the casinos. Leaning against a brick facade. Trying to look natural but unable to keep from fidgeting.

  She had wondered how anyone would know what she was selling since she was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, her hair still greasy from driving all day to get there.

  But they knew.

  Like it was a wave in the air, they knew. And they approached. Circled like vultures. Hungry for fresh meat.

  She made $90 that night.

  The details of the acts themselves are no longer sharp in her mind. Hazy. Distant. No longer quite real. The money was real, though. It helped pay for their room and a couple days’ worth of food. Kept them alive. Kept them safe.

  On the second night, she met Gabriela.

  Most of the other girls kept their distance, not that Emily blamed them. Gabby was different.

  She introduced herself. Offered advice.

  No. More than advice.

  She took Emily under her wing. Taught her. Nurtured her.

  Saved her.

  It was Gabby who made all of the connections she needed to get by for a while. Safe rooms she could use on the cheap. Amiable bouncers she might turn to if there was trouble. Clearance with the thugs who ran the area, though she had to pay for that privilege.

  Gabby had rules she lived by. A code. A way to stay safe even with danger swirling on all sides. And she’d passed all of her nuggets of wisdom onto Emily, whether she wanted them or not.

  For a little over a year they were close to inseparable. Traveling in packs was one of Gabby’s rules. One girl being the lookout while the other was with a john was another.

  But no code could keep them safe forever. Nothing could.

  Six weeks earlier, Gabby had gone missing. She’d walked Emily home late on a Thursday night. Not a trace since.

  The city reacted not at all. Nobody cared.

  It wasn’t uncommon for one of the girls to go missing in the area. Hookers vanished every day in Las Vegas with little fanfare.

  No headlines. Little if any help from the police.

  Still, Emily had now dreamed of Gabby every night for 23 straight nights, and in that way, they were still together.

  Having her friend back at night felt like a resurrection — somehow shocking and completely inevitable at the same time. Like she couldn’t believe it and yet she’d been waiting for just that all the while. Of course she’d come back. She had to, didn’t she?

  And every morning, she had to re-accept that Gabby really was gone.

  Maybe for good.

  Probably for good.

  Sometimes, usually in those last few moments just before she fell asleep, it felt like Gabby was there with her. In the room. Somehow.

  Chapter 7

  Neither Darger nor Loshak was in the mood to go out for food, so they ordered in. While they waited for the pizza to arrive, they went over it.

  “You seem pretty certain it’s him.”

  Loshak blinked at her. “You’re not?”

  “It’s not that. Especially not after the letter. But you usually hesitate to jump to conclusions like this. It just surprises me is all. And I worry about getting tunnel vision. Confirmation bias and all that.”

  “That’s why I wanted you out here. I need your objectivity.”

  Wrinkles formed over Darger’s brow. “I’m the objective one now?”

  “Sure,” Loshak said with one of his wry smiles.

  “What about the cops?”

  “What about them?”

  “Aren’t you worried they’re going to freak when you tell them that their personal nightmare from twenty years ago is back?”

  “You mean when we tell them.”

  She gestured with the neck of her beer bottle.

  “So you are worried.”

  “Of course I’m worried. I have sense, don’t I?”

  “You think they’ll push back?”

  “Probably at first. But at some point, they’ll have to come around. There’s too much evidence.”

 
; “So take me through it. Convince me,” she said.

  Now it was her turn to smile. This was usually Loshak’s move. The master making the apprentice prove their knowledge.

  “We have two female victims. Hands and feet bound. Coroner’s report will show they were dead before the fire was set. Found in the trunk of a car, abandoned on a remote part of the highway outside a major city where Stump committed part of his initial series of murders. The only part that doesn’t fit is the fact that he took twenty-odd years off. Aside from that, it’s his M.O., one-hundred percent.”

  There was a scratchy sound like sandpaper on rough wood as he pawed at the stubble along his jawline.

  “I’ve considered the alternatives. That it’s someone else. A coincidental set of similarities. But there’s too much going against that. I could buy the idea that some other psycho likes the idea of torching the bodies to get rid of evidence. But two female victims? In the Vegas area?”

  Loshak shook his head, and Darger waited for him to go on.

  “So then the devil’s advocate part of me says: OK, how about a copycat? Someone imitating Stump intentionally. I don’t hate that theory until I consider the little love note he sent you.”

  Darger nodded, having already considered the possibility herself.

  “It would have to be someone with enough inside information and skill to forge his handwriting,” she said.

  “Exactly. Either that or I have to accept that Leonard Stump did send you the letter but isn’t involved in the current murders. I’m afraid I can’t suspend my disbelief that far. Too complicated. Too messy. I like my explanations clean and simple.”

  Darger toyed with the cap to her beer bottle, running her thumb over the bumpy metal circumference.

  “The local guys have to have some idea,” she said. “Some inkling. That crime scene was a carbon copy of the original Stump murders.”

  “Yeah, but it was twenty years ago. Most of these guys weren’t on the force yet. I’m sure they know the name, but I doubt they know the file. It’s more likely that Stump is the starring villain in all the urban legends around here. More myth than fact.”

  “What about Corby or even the Sheriff?”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re older. Could’ve been around back then.”

  “Could have. But it doesn’t change the fact that no one knows it like we do. We see a burned-out car with two girls in the back, and we don’t have to do any mental gymnastics to get to Stump. It’s automatic.”

  Knuckles thudded against the door.

  “Mancino’s Pizza.”

  They both stood.

  “I got it,” Darger said, reaching for her wallet.

  “After my idiotic performance earlier? I think not. Sit.”

  Darger dropped back into her chair and watched Loshak exchange a handful of bills for the box of pizza.

  They didn’t have plates, so they ate the pizza straight from the box — a slice in one hand and a beer in the other.

  Darger chewed, swallowed, and washed it all down with a drink.

  “OK, so it’s Stump. Why send the letter? Just to fuck with us? As a distraction?”

  Paper rustled as Loshak wiped his greasy fingers on a napkin.

  “I think it was his way of dropping a breadcrumb for us to find. From the letter and then the car, it’s obvious he’s playing games with us. Because this is personal. He wants us paying attention. He’ll draw us into his web if he can. We have to be careful. And by we I mean you, especially.”

  Darger kept eating and watched a bead of condensation roll down the side of her beer. She felt Loshak’s eyes on her but didn’t look up.

  “You’re being uncharacteristically quiet,” he said after a moment. “Usually when I warn you to be careful, you get salty.”

  “Just thinking.”

  “About?”

  “If I hadn’t mentioned him in that Vanity Fair interview…”

  She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. Loshak could fill in the blank: If I hadn’t mentioned Stump in that interview, then maybe he wouldn’t have started killing again.

  Loshak made a chopping motion with his hand.

  “That’s a bunch of hooey. Guys like Stump don’t just quit.”

  “BTK quit.”

  “Yeah, but he’d never really given it up. Dennis Rader may have played the family man and kept his real self all bottled up for a few decades, but eventually something set him off. It wasn’t like he suddenly grew a conscience and decided what he’d done was wrong. I guarantee he fantasized about the murders every day. Still played little games in his head, how he’d do the next one. He never actually started killing again before he got himself caught, but he wanted to.”

  Loshak paused and took a long pull from the bottle in his fist. He swallowed then shook his head.

  “He didn’t change. He just managed to sustain a little more impulse control than most of these guys usually can.”

  “But there was still something… the proverbial straw that broke the serial killing camel’s back,” Darger insisted. “Something that made him want to start up again. Maybe that’s what my Vanity Fair interview was for Stump. A catalyst.”

  “Look, you can sit there and feel culpable all you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that Leonard Stump was a serial killer long before you’d ever heard of him.”

  Darger knew he was right, but that didn’t make the guilt any easier to swallow. She tipped back her beer in an effort to wash it down a little more quickly.

  “So what’s in the folder?” Darger gestured to the manila file Loshak had set on the floor.

  “Right. I almost forgot.”

  He nudged it with the toe of his shoe, sending it sliding over the carpet to her. Darger found a pinkie finger unstained by cheese grease or pizza sauce and used the fingernail to flick the folder open.

  The mouthful of half-chewed food caught in her throat when she saw what was inside. She coughed twice, tears springing to her eyes.

  “Sorry, I should have prepared you for that,” Loshak said.

  With her airway finally clear, Darger took a shaky breath and let it out.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Had a couple of the composite artists at Quantico put it together.”

  Darger stared down at the artist’s rendition of Leonard Stump. Even in a drawing, the cold, calculating eyes were recognizable. The angular cheekbones. The square chin. It was a face some had dared to call handsome, though Darger couldn’t agree. If anything, she’d always considered Leonard Stump plain. Maybe it was the assumption that someone capable of such hideous crimes should have the literal appearance of a monster that made people mistake his normalcy for good looks. But Violet Darger knew that monsters came in all shapes and sizes: tall and short, fat and skinny, beautiful and ugly.

  As familiar as the face was, there were details in the sketch Darger hadn’t noticed in any of the photographs or video footage she’d seen of Leonard Stump over the years: crow’s feet around his eyes, frown lines on either side of his mouth. Stump was young in all the known pictures of him, but this version was middle-aged.

  “I had them do a full composite and then run it through the aging software,” Loshak explained.

  She stared at it a while longer. There were variations around the main sketch. One with glasses, another with a full beard, and a third depicting Stump with male pattern baldness.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s… freaky,” she said, finally closing the folder. “And it makes it seem more real, him being out there.”

  A chill ran down her spine, and she shook it off.

  If he was out there, they needed to find him. Soon.

  Chapter 8

  The Clark County Sheriff’s Office was located in a large complex a few miles off the Strip. The drive up to the building was lined with rows of date palms dramatically lit from below.

  “Pretty swanky for a police department,” Darge
r said.

  Loshak slid the gearshift into park and turned off the ignition.

  “That’s Vegas, baby.”

  It was late, and the parking lot was mostly empty. Their footsteps echoed over the blacktop as they made for the front entrance, lonely claps ringing out in the night.

  Something Darger had forgotten after the other events of the evening suddenly surfaced.

  “So how did you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “That it could be Stump. You were out here days before they found that car.”

  Loshak nodded.

  “Right. It was Malenchok.”

  “Malenchok? He was the tech nerd we worked with in Atlanta, right? The tip line guy.”

  “The very same. One of his other pet projects at the Bureau is the use of machine learning to track and analyze violent crime statistics across the country. The idea is that we can use it to identify potential hot spots: gang and organized crime activity, threats to homeland security, but also serial killers. It’s still in the beginning stages, but I wanted to see how it worked. So I had him run the serial killer data.”

  They pushed through the first set of double doors into the LVMPD building.

  “Half a dozen locations lit up as having homicides and missing persons cases that would suggest possible serial killer activity in the past five years.”

  “And Vegas was one of those locations.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Naturally your mind went directly to Leonard Stump,” Darger continued, finishing the thought. “Which explains why you immediately jumped on a plane. And just so you know, that pizza and beer from earlier doesn’t mean we’re even. I’m still pissed that you lied to me.”

  “Oh, I know. I figured it’d take at least three pizzas.”

  The inside of the building was just as luxe as the outside, with marble floors and potted plants. Signs for the various bureaus and sections of the building featured casino-themed clip art: a royal flush or a pair of dice. It was as if the entire city was focused on keeping their branding consistent.

  “This place is something else,” Darger muttered.

  “It’s not a town that’s shy about which side of their bread is buttered.”

  A secretary at the front desk directed them to a small meeting room on the second floor. As they entered, a dark-haired woman got up from her seat and approached.