by L. T. Vargus
The freshly churned dirt left a dark gash in the sand, a gaping mouth etched into the ground.
“Hand me the big square brush, would you?” Dr. Siskin was saying to one of her students.
It was only when the man moved aside that Darger saw what had caused the excitement.
Nestled in the crook of the first skeleton’s knee was a second skull.
Chapter 18
Just before noon, when the two skeletons had been almost completely excavated, Dr. Siskin called out to Corby.
He glanced at the rest of their group, as if they needed encouragement to follow along. When they reached the edge of the pit, Siskin gestured at one wall of the broken earth.
“Is that…” Corby didn’t — or couldn’t — finish the sentence.
“A third skull,” Dr. Siskin said. “Yes.”
Corby swiped a palm across his brow.
“Holy hell.”
“Can you tell if it’s female, like the other two?” Castellano asked.
Siskin nodded. “From what I can see right now, I believe it is. It’s been here longer, as well. The first two skeletons still have some skin attached. A few scraps of clothing. This one is pretty clean.”
Corby sucked his teeth. His mouth quirked like he wanted to speak, but no words came.
“Our hands are more than full as it is,” Siskin said. “I’d like your permission to call in some volunteers to help with the excavation. All people with experience, naturally. People I trust.”
Corby blinked a few times before he answered.
“Right. Of course. Whatever you need.”
He took a few steps away before he spoke again, Loshak and Darger following.
“I don’t mind admitting this,” Corby said. “I’m at a bit of a loss. We’ve never dealt with something like this. Not in my time on the force.”
“I think you should call the cadaver search team back in,” Loshak said.
Darger nodded in agreement.
“There could be graves scattered all over this area if he was using it as a consistent dump site. He probably dumped them in twos. I’m guessing we’ll find a fourth skeleton in this group, and more clusters of two in the surrounding area.”
It didn’t take long to confirm her hypothesis. Twenty minutes later they found the fourth skull.
This slab of desert had become a mass grave.
* * *
Castellano strode up around 1:30 pm with a bag of Mexican food and big news. While they huddled in the shade of one of the tents to eat lunch, she shared a break in the case.
“We lucked out. One of the girls in the trunk broke her leg when she was a kid,” she said, handing out burritos in foil sleeves. “It was bad. A compound fracture. Anyway, the coroner ran a serial number check on a surgical screw. Made a few calls this morning, and we’ve got our first positive ID.”
Loshak stopped shy of biting his burrito to talk.
“Yeah?”
“Karli Reyes. Born in Bakersfield and new to town, according to the friend that reported her missing.”
“When was she reported missing?” Darger asked. “Was she taken with someone else?”
“Missing Persons got the call five days ago. She was alone, but there’s something else.” Castellano took a sip of cola from a Styrofoam cup before she went on. “She’d been working as an escort for the past couple years.”
“A prostitute?” Darger said.
Castellano nodded.
A prostitute. Abducted alone. That didn’t fit with Stump’s body of work.
“I had a feeling this might be the case,” Loshak said. “Leonard Stump has changed with the times. Evolved. He had to.”
“What does that mean?” Castellano said.
“He started killing at a time when some people would still pick up a hitchhiker or pull over to help someone with a flat tire. People are too paranoid now, on top of the fact that if he kidnapped a suburban mom and her cheerleader daughter at four o’clock, it’d be national headlines by five, with a Nancy Grace special at seven.”
Darger shook her head. She felt stupid for not considering this possibility before. Loshak obviously had.
“He’s right,” she said. “Working girls are low-hanging fruit for serial killers. They live and work under the radar, for the most part. A lot of sex workers go missing, and no one ever reports it. If you do end up with a body, then it’s No Human Involved as far as a lot of law enforcement is concerned.”
Loshak nodded, his jaw working up and down as he chewed. He wiped at the corners of his mouth with a napkin and went on.
“He’s gone on killing all this time, picking off the people no one cares about. Burying them in the desert to go undetected. He burned those girls in the trunk the other night to raise his hand. To take credit. To let the world know that Leonard Stump is still in the game. But this?”
He gestured at the digging operation in the distance.
“These are his trophies. He wanted us to find them. Needed us to find them. It’s an act of aggression. Territorial. What he’d been doing before was no longer enough. He needed to escalate the behavior, the spectacle.”
Darger stared out at the horizon, barely tasting her mouthful of burrito.
“So what are you saying?” Castellano said.
“I think he knows we’re out here, knows we’re close, and I think that makes him more dangerous than ever.”
* * *
Now the afternoon sun beat down, a sky so clear and blue and bright it almost seemed electric.
Corby stared at the group of volunteers busy in their assigned tasks. Digging, brushing, sifting, logging. A cloud of dust hung in the air.
“Two more vertebrae,” one of the volunteers said.
A tech standing nearby photographed the bones and logged them on her clipboard.
A woman digging a few feet away stood then.
“I’ve got a femur.”
Corby shook his head, lips pursed in disgust.
“Christ almighty,” he said under his breath.
Detective Castellano folded her arms over her chest and turned to face Darger.
“So you really think it’s him?”
Darger didn’t need clarification on which him she was referring to.
“I do,” Darger said, then nodded at her partner. “We do.”
“What about the race issue? I’m no expert at the profiling business, but I know enough to understand that most serial killers choose victims from their own race. According to Siskin, we seem to have a whole mix of races here. And we know Karli Reyes was Latina.”
Loshak shrugged and looked out at the horizon before he answered.
“Serial killing has changed along with society. It used to be lust murders happened almost exclusively within the same race as the perpetrator, but not anymore. There’s some debate as to why that is. Some psychologists argue that it’s because our culture has changed. We don’t see race as a dividing line as much as we used to. We’re less segregated as a society. Others believe that it’s more about the availability of victims. People don’t hitchhike anymore or let door-to-door salesmen into their homes. We’re more paranoid as a society. Serial killers can’t be choosy, so they take what they can get.”
Corby squinted.
“Which do you think it is, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Me? I think it’s probably a little of both, but I fall a little heavier on the side of opportunity. Same reason he’s switched over to sex workers.”
“Uh-huh.”
One of the uniformed cops on site approached Corby. He was a younger officer with sandy hair and narrow lips that pressed into a frown.
“Can I talk to you, sir?” he said, before clarifying after a second. “Alone.”
Corby nodded, and the two of them wandered out of earshot of the agents. Darger turned to look back on the digging, and Loshak followed her lead.
“Feel any better?” he said.
Darger crossed her arms. “Better?”
<
br /> “Well, I think this will turn out to be pretty undeniable evidence that Leonard Stump has been killing all along. Dr. Siskin has already guessed that some of the remains have been here for a decade or more. All your Vanity Fair interview did was rekindle his desire for attention. You’re off the hook.”
Darger’s eyes scanned from one excavated gravesite to the next. A cluster of finger bones. A femur and pelvis. And the skulls. So many skulls. They were up to twelve now and still hadn’t started digging at some of the places marked by the cadaver dog.
She felt a touch nauseous from standing in the sun and the lack of sleep and the horror of what they’d discovered.
“Oh yeah. Better is exactly the word I’d use to describe finding a mass grave,” she said with a scoff. “It’s a real relief.”
Loshak clapped her on the shoulder.
“That’s the spirit.”
Corby returned, hustling over the sand to rejoin Darger and Loshak.
“Just wanted to give you a heads up. We got a call about a possible ID from last night.”
Loshak stood up a little straighter.
“The other girl in the trunk?” he said.
“Better. The girl in the gas station surveillance footage. The girl in the truck.”
Chapter 19
A heavy thump jolts Emily awake. Solid objects colliding. Scraping.
Again, she can feel his presence in the room. A restless stirring somewhere nearby.
Her head snaps up.
It’s darker now. Like the shadows have encroached. The creeping blackness swallowing the floor entirely, claiming more and more of the walls.
The light is gone. The lone bulb extinguished.
But one small square glows on the far wall. Orange flickers that don’t make sense at first.
A fire.
Her mind leaps to an image of burned girls. Naked bodies shoved into car trunks. Torched. Reduced to charred meat and bone. Puddles of melted upholstery fused with the flesh.
That’s who he is. His story about the cabins. She recognizes him at last. It’s Leonard Stump.
She blinks. Frightened. Confused.
What’s burning?
It’s the stove. The little wood burning stove. Cast iron. The black tube of the chimney reaching up through the ceiling.
And then he comes into focus. His silhouette shifting. A flutter of darkness next to the flames.
Stump throws another wedge of wood into the stove, and the source of the thump that woke her is revealed.
He pokes at the fire with a stick a few times. Shifting branches scrape and thud.
Somehow this is a relief. Seeing him there before her. Knowing what he’s doing. She doesn’t know why, but it eases the tension.
Maybe knowing what’s going on is always better, even when it’s bad.
“Nah. It’s called Stockholm syndrome,” Gabby says in her head.
Maybe she’s right. But Emily feels like there’s something she’s forgetting. Something important.
A deep breath inflates her torso, pulls her upright. She lets it out slowly. Sinking, sinking, sinking until her chin rests on her chest again.
The jolt of pain that accompanies her movements is distant now. More of a dull ache in her temple than the throbbing stab of an ice pick from before. It’s the exhaustion she can’t quite shake. The weakness in her arms, neck, eyelids.
She forces her head up, though. Forces herself to watch the dark figure who seems to float over the black nothing where the floor should be.
The flame flutters in the little metal chamber next to him. Orange wisps licking around the edges of split spruce and pinyon boughs. The haggard look of the wood makes her think that he has gathered this himself.
He sets his poking stick down. She thinks he’ll close the stove door, shut out the light, wrap the darkness around both of them, but he doesn’t.
Instead he starts talking again, his face angled toward the floor.
“That first time was the only spiritual experience I’ve ever had. In some ways I think I’ve been trying to recreate it ever since. Over and over. Trying to set up the circumstances that led to that woman asking God to forgive me. Trying to catch that passing feeling so I could hold onto it this time. Keep it.”
His voice grinds out of him. Gravelly. Hushed. It sounds a little hollow now that he’s so far away, speaking into the tile floor.
“It always happens the same way. One drains out from the neck. Stains the bathtub bright red. Then I take the gag out of the other’s mouth and see what she has to say. And it’s this quiet moment. This reverent moment. We’re right on the edge of something huge, and we can both feel it.”
He lifts his head, but he still doesn’t look at Emily. His eyes stare off into space.
“Not much, as it turns out. That’s what they have to say, I mean. Maybe once you see that up close — that kind of brutality, naked violence without purpose, a human being killed for no good reason — it takes something out of most people. Changes them. Breaks them. That’s what I figure anyhow.”
The silence holds for a beat, and Emily feels the way her chest has gone taut, reminds herself to breathe.
“I suppose I can understand it. It brings the meaninglessness right up to your face. Presses your nose in it so you can’t look any other way. Can’t pretend it’s not real. And that sucks some kind of feeling out of you. Some softness is gone for good. It changes who you are.”
He scratches at his jaw.
“I tried it with a gun once, but it wasn’t right. Too quick, I think. Don’t get me wrong, guns are great for protection, but something like this… it has to feel right, has to evoke something, and that takes time.”
She’s certain now that this speech is more for himself than for her. It has the feeling of a monologue. Something he’s said before. To other girls, maybe. Other girls he’s killed. Emily feels a prickle of fear run up her spine.
“It’s like I was starting to say before: We’re all products of our culture. We’re all whatever the world makes of us. For better or worse.”
He stays crouched next to the stove while he talks, sitting on his haunches like some kind of beast.
“Just look at the story of humanity over the past 50 or 60 years. The picture painted in our culture. In the 60s, there was this big rejection of the way things had been. The hippies led this charge to change the rules, to change the world. We didn’t need the old rules. Didn’t need conformity and repression and, Gee Wally, that’s swell. And for a little while it seemed like anything was possible. But look what we made of it.”
His hands float before him, palms upturned.
“All that love and freedom and idealism turned into horror. Riots. Assassinations. Drug overdoses. Mass suicide in Jonestown. We had sensed that the materialistic, 1950s world we’d received had been empty, and we rejected it, but we still had nothing to put in its place. No meaning. Just more emptiness. New kinds of emptiness.”
He smiles a little at this. Amused with his observations.
“All that free love got aborted. All the hippie couples grew up and got divorced.”
She can see the white of his teeth reflecting the fire’s light, the shine of it, but the grin fades as another flood of words pours out of him.
“Spirituality used to be the church. These traditions and rituals that kept us safe from evil, but they were empty like all the rest. No longer to be trusted. And now that anything was possible, spirituality’s meaning was up for grabs. It morphed from the simplest protection, our safety net, into this terrifying unknowable chasm that could swallow reality out from under us. You can see these anxieties looking at the culture from that time. The horror genre was booming. We wanted answers about the supernatural, about the spiritual, wanted to know how to deal with the new darkness.”
He pauses to swallow and then goes on.
“And then some time in the 80s, all of that died off almost overnight. Instead of fearing the afterlife, we simply rejected it as well. We�
�d somehow circled back to that original materialism we’d refused. No more dreams of peace and love. Everyone wanted to be wealthy, vying for some spot in a big corporation, snorting Tony Montana’s mountain of cocaine. Greedy. Selfish. Painless. Like if you could just get rich enough, your life could become a blissful dream. You didn’t have to worry about any of this other junk, didn’t have to be scared or confused or feel pain at all. Disney World and commercials and all those blockbuster movies where the good guy wins, they were selling us this new vision. They were building a material dream world, and you could live there forever so long as you had the cash to pay for it.”
Stump’s tongue snaked out of his mouth to moisten his lips.
“Our collective idea of horror shifted from ghosts and vampires to slasher movies. We weren’t scared of what might lurk in the great beyond so much as we were scared of really big knives, scared of the killer creeping in our window at night, the one who might take us out of this material dream world once and for all.”
Again, a half-smile curls the corners of his lips as he stokes the fire.
“The one like me, I guess.”
He falls quiet after that. Staring at the wall. His jaw churning some.
The warmth of the fire seems to swell then, and tranquility accompanies the silence this time. A stillness that spreads over the room like a puddle.
The firewood pops now and again. Little snaps like breaking twigs.
And the smell of the burning spruce fills the space. A pine odor reminiscent of Christmas. It is not unpleasant.
Sleepiness heavies her eyelids, and the heat flushes her face. She is nodding off as he speaks again.
“Wait.”
He clears his throat, though he still doesn’t look at her.
“You should eat.”
Again she isn’t sure if he’s talking to her or himself. The words seem to be about her, but his tone sounds more like he’s thinking out loud.
He stands. Moves to that big steel door. Fiddles with the lock.
The color leaches out of him now that he’s away from the fire’s glow, turning him gray and indistinct. More shadow than man.