The Girl In The Sand

by L. T. Vargus

  “He says the website is set up to automatically purge old listings. Anything older than seven days has to be resubmitted by the listing owner. It’s pretty standard for a Classifieds-style website, apparently. But it’s not gone. Not yet, anyway. He’s emailing an archived version of the page to you now.”

  Darger’s phone blipped, notifying her of new mail. She opened her inbox and clicked the link Malenchok sent for the archived page. It looked the same as she remembered. Her panic subsided.

  Loshak was thanking Malenchok, preparing to hang up. Darger snapped her fingers and held up her hand to stop him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Ask him if he can find other expired listings.”

  Malenchok must have heard her voice over the line, because without repeating the question, Loshak nodded.

  “He says he can. It’ll take a few minutes.”

  A rush of adrenaline flooded her system. She felt giddy.

  Loshak had it, too. She could tell by the sharp look in his eye. Like a hawk that’s spotted a shrew in the grass.

  “You think we might be able to use old listings to identify bodies from the mass grave.”

  Darger nodded.

  “It’s a good starting point for pulling dental records, in any case. And the more victims we match to the website, the more certain we can be that he’s finding them there.”

  Loshak hung up to allow Malenchok some time to do the work. He eyed her half-finished donut.

  “Let’s get some real food and head back to the hotel. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and Malenchok will have something for us by then. And in the meantime, we can think about the next step.”

  Chapter 24

  Electricity thrums in Emily’s head. Cold current coursing through her veins. It stings. Pulses on and off. Makes pins prick along the flesh of her scalp, every follicle alive and writhing.

  But she’s awake. Or on her way there, in any case. Surfacing slowly from the nowhere place.

  The medicated feeling still occupies her skull. Wooziness. Confusion.

  Right away she knows he’s not here, at least not in this room. She can feel his absence. That little disturbance in the atmosphere he creates when he’s around. Something masculine and restless and threatening. It’s not there.

  Weird how that works. How his being near casts a pall over the room, changes the feel of everything. She tumbles the notion and starts to drift a little. Sinking a little instead of rising.

  No. She can’t.

  She fights the sleepiness. Lifts her head on a wobbly neck. Forces her eyes open, even if it kills.

  The tile floor bobs before her. Swimmy along the edges. Disappearing whenever her eyelids droop into a slow blink.

  The fire has burned low on the other side of the room. Reduced to glowing chunks of orange that swell and wane rhythmically as though the coals are breathing.

  But it hasn’t burned all the way out. Time has passed since he drugged her, but not as much as he might have hoped. She is certain of this, somehow.

  It’s darker than it was, but her eyes have adjusted better than before. Her pupils open wide. Gaping. Finally able to see through the charcoal smears of shadow layered over everything. She can even make out the grout lines carving the tile floor into a grid once more, but only if she doesn’t look straight at them.

  She takes a few breaths. Rolls her neck from shoulder to shoulder, stretches, some gristly popping sound emitting from the flesh along her spine.

  Time to get out of here or die trying.

  Pushing off with her legs, she rocks the desk back and forth. Not an easy feat with her arms chained to it the way they are. Her movements are awkward. Uneven.

  Still, she gains momentum, the tabletop tipping a little further with every sway.

  The steel legs stab at the tile each time she lands. Cracking like gunshots on impact. Pounding out a jerky drum beat on the ceramic.

  The final push shifts her to her right. Rising. Rising. She hovers at the top. Weightless. Motionless like a cresting wave about to break. Her butt lifting out of the seat. A tingle crawling over the exposed flesh along her neck and arms and ankles.

  And then she crashes to the ground, desk thudding onto its side.

  This final drumbeat echoes about the room, louder than the rest. A tremendous thump.

  The collision throttles her. Jolts her head around on her neck and rattles her torso. So much force.

  Again she gets that sensation of reverberation in her head, like her skull itself screams out a high-pitched tone.

  And then everything is quiet, and the room feels different. So still.

  She holds her breath. Listens.

  The new silence offers no relief to her worries. Just more quiet that makes her skin crawl.

  The cabin’s emptiness grows uncomfortable. Creepy. Hollow. And the stillness somehow seems disturbing after all of that violent crashing about.

  Her senses seem to heighten as she holds still. That Christmas odor of burning pine, all bright and sharp and almost minty, has vanished, turned to an earthy smell. It’s not even a smoke scent so much as the smell of ash, somehow reminiscent of rich black soil in this moment.

  And it strikes her for the first time how a chill has crept into the room now that the fire is mostly gone. She feels the coolness touch the flesh of her cheeks, the bare skin along the lengths of her arms, now sheening with sweat from her efforts.

  At last, she summons the willpower to move. She lifts a hand, stretches out her fingers. A simple gesture to test this new atmosphere, to convince herself that she still can. The act sends a fresh wave of goose bumps rippling over most of her body, but it brings her back to the task at hand.

  She tugs at her restraints, and the steel bar she’s cuffed to wiggles like a loose tooth.

  The weld must have cracked upon landing, and her fingers verify this by finding the wounded spot and tracing along its jagged edge. It’s just barely hanging on to the underside of the desk. This is better than she could have hoped.

  She works the bar back and forth, straining at the end of each swing. The smudged bead of solder creaks a little, but holds.

  Damn. She stops working at it. Takes a breath. Needs to change tactics, maybe.

  She climbs up onto her knees, the short leash of the handcuffs making this much trickier than it should be.

  Now she leans back as she pulls on the bar, lets her body weight do some of the work. The bar bends further than it did before, a weird angle like a broken limb. It trembles in her hands, shaking, shaking, and then it pops and all the tension dies right away.

  She flops onto her back, the slap a little wet from the sweat, the tiles so cold against her, and she’s free.

  She is free.

  Chapter 25

  The key members of the task force sat in the meeting room once more, the oblong expanse of table laid out before them. They all agreed that the Sin City Bliss site was the common thread between victims they’d been looking for. Now they only needed to figure out how to weave that thread into the net that would snare Leonard Stump.

  After a little conversational throat-clearing, the room settled into a thoughtful quiet that reminded Darger of a hospital waiting room. Tense. Everyone fidgeting, compulsively reviewing files and legal pads with notes from interviews. Every mind drifted out into the abstract, pondering what their next move might be.

  Castellano bounced a racquet ball on the floor, a mindless exercise she said helped her think. The carpet muffled the beat some, kept it from getting too obnoxious, but the steady rhythm pounded away nonetheless. A metronome for their brainstorming session. While the beat droned on, the detective threw out a thought.

  “OK. How about this? I’ve been thinking about something the Newell girl’s roommate said… that she only took dates in hotel rooms. How does that work when it comes to the abduction? He knocks them out in the room and carries them out to his vehicle?”

  Loshak frowned.

  “I don’t know. The old Stump
would never take that risk. Too many potential witnesses that way. Even if he had the means and the confidence to take them down quickly and quietly, something could go wrong. Just one of these girls starts screaming her head off, or someone sees him in the hallway? He’s fucked.”

  “That was my instinct as well,” Castellano said. “Even so, we could ask around at the hotels. See if guests have reported anything suspicious that might fit an abduction scenario. If we got any hits, we could check security footage. Keep an eye on the place.”

  “Yeah but how many hotels are there in this town?” Loshak asked. “Three hundred? Four? He could pick a different one every night without hitting the same place twice for months.”

  “He’d favor places off the Strip. Less security. Less foot traffic.”

  Loshak shook his head.

  “That’s still a shitload of hotels. Too many to surveil all at once, and then it’s just a crapshoot.”

  The group chewed on this idea for a while, eyeballing each other while they considered their options.

  “What about using the website?” Corby said.

  “Please don’t suggest we bait the website,” Darger said.

  Without missing a beat, he said, “What if we bait the website?”

  Darger scoffed.

  “What? Makes sense to me. There’s a high probability he’s picking girls from these listings. We plant a few profiles of our own, undercover cops or whatever.”

  “And then we cross our fingers and hope he takes the bait, right? Meanwhile he kills again and again.”

  “It’s better than doing nothing, isn’t it?”

  Loshak sighed.

  “I think we can do better, but if we don’t come up with anything else… it’s better than nothing.”

  Darger’s thoughts got ahead of her, not fully revealing themselves until they were already out of her mouth.

  “Maybe we don’t need to bait the website or surveil the hotels.”

  “OK…”

  She hesitated for a moment, and Loshak rotated his hand, gesturing for her to continue.

  “Maybe we surveil the girls.”

  “How do you propose we do that?”

  “Reverse ride-alongs. Instead of girls riding with cops, the cops ride with the girls.”

  Castellano, still bouncing away, chimed in.

  “That’s not going to work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because no hooker is going to willingly let a cop ride around with her while she works. It’s like a wolf asking a sheep if it would mind sharing a cab.”

  “These girls know each other,” Darger said. “Some would have known victims or girls who went missing. I think they’ll want to help their own. Some of them, anyway. And I’m sure you have plenty of working girls you use as informants. This isn’t so different.”

  Corby tilted his head to the side as he spoke.

  “With Leonard Stump stalking through their territory, having police around might be more welcome than usual. We may need to convince the girls of that, but Stump makes our case pretty compelling, you ask me.”

  The regular beat kept by Castellano’s ball cut out suddenly.

  “I think I know a way we can convince them.”

  The intensity Darger noted when they first met was back in the detective’s eye. They all waited in silence while she laid it out.

  “There’s this community outreach group in town. It’s called The Iris Project, run by former sex workers. They offer stuff like free condoms, access to low cost STD screening, and employment opportunities for girls that want to get out of the trade. They also monitor the community for signs of sex trafficking.”

  Castellano put up a hand, interrupting herself.

  “I’m getting off track, though. My point is, I know one of the women that runs it, back from when I was on patrol. Maybe if the call came from someone these girls know, someone they trust, they’d be more receptive.”

  “And you think she’d be willing to help us contact some of them?” Darger asked.

  “I do.”

  Darger’s gaze fell on her partner. She raised an eyebrow.

  “What do you think?”

  “Hell. Let’s do it,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”

  Chapter 26

  With a few phone calls, the plan lurched into motion. While Castellano spoke with her friend at The Iris Project and assembled a list of girls they might reach out to, Darger, Loshak, and Corby started recruiting volunteers for the law enforcement side of the plan.

  From there, it expanded exponentially.

  The LVMPD vice squad reached out to contacts and informants. The local FBI office made similar calls on a smaller scale. Each new link in the chain offered what information they could, made suggestions, reached out to others.

  Every possible resource was contacted. Leverage was applied where necessary. Favors were called in.

  Castellano’s initial doubts were proven correct. At first, most of the girls were spooked by the prospect of working with the police, and it took some convincing by the liaisons at The Iris Project. Assurances that the girls weren’t walking into a trap. Promises that they’d all be safer when Leonard Stump was off the streets.

  Soon, some of the girls were engaging their own networks — making calls within the community. And while some weren’t comfortable accepting rides from law enforcement, they at least agreed to take the night off — to stay out of the operation’s way.

  Many girls turned them down, of course. Some politely declined. Some evaded. Many hung up before even hearing them out.

  Corby headed home for a shower and some rest, but Darger, Loshak, and Castellano sat in the meeting room while this burst of networking took place all over the city — fielding the occasional call, fidgeting, scratching out names and figures on the whiteboard as the plan’s possibilities turned into logistics.

  All told, the task force managed to cobble together 27 girls willing to accept police escorts for the next evening or two. Not great, compared to the hundreds of listings on the Sin City Bliss site, but it was better than nothing.

  The LVMPD authorized ten officers to do the driving, and the other seventeen would come by way of off-duty volunteers from a mix of local and federal agencies — Darger and Loshak among them.

  All told, it was a whirlwind effort, and Darger’s head felt tingly as she and Loshak walked out of the meeting room, their organizing complete for the day. She cast one final glance at the list of names they’d compiled on the whiteboard.

  “Do you actually think this could work?”

  “It seems like a long shot,” Loshak said. “But that’s better than no shot.”

  Chapter 27

  Emily stands on wobbly legs. The weight of her torso teeters forward and then back, like a boat at risk of capsizing.

  She steadies herself and brings her hands to her face. Rubs her eyes. Chest inflating and deflating with stuttering breaths that slowly even themselves out. The handcuffs still bind her wrists together, but it feels good to be able to lift her arms like this, to be free.

  With her breathing under control, she gets moving. Staggers to the door. She leans and reaches for it with such eagerness she loses her balance, almost falls face-first into it, but her hand finds the knob, clutches it, hesitates a beat. Her heart hammers away in her core.

  At last her wrist comes unfrozen. It rotates. Twists the knob.

  Locked. The deadbolt, of course.

  Turning the knob the other way and yanking also does nothing, so her hands move to the steel itself. Fingers trace along the seam where the door butts up against the frame. Palms glide over the tapered cylinder protruding from the flat surface, brushing at the keyhole etched into the brass.

  So close.

  Freedom sprawls just on the other side of this steel. How far away could it be? A couple of inches?

  But it is no good. Without the key, it is impossible.

  She leans forward. Lets her head
rest on the door for a moment and breathes. Breathes. Eyes closed.

  A lump lifts higher in her throat, and no amount of swallowing seems to help.

  It’s hard to keep the feeling of defeat away, the feeling that all hope is lost.

  All of the soreness in her head and shoulders seems to return as she stands there. Her forehead absorbs the metal’s chill.

  She opens her eyes. Stares at the tiny crack between the door and the frame. Even as minuscule as the opening is, she can see it. The darker place where the bolt extends into its hole. This is what keeps her here: a piece of metal about the size of a baby carrot.

  Gabby’s voice speaks from somewhere behind her.

  “Windows.”

  It’s different now. Not just in her head.

  “Check the windows.”

  She wheels around to face the rest of the room. Empty. Of course.

  Auditory hallucinations? Nice.

  She hesitates a moment, eyes squinted to look for any subtle movement in the stillness even if she knows no one is there. She listens. Hears the faint snuffle of the coals breathing in the stove. Nothing more.

  Well, hallucination or not, checking the windows is a good idea.

  She walks to the nearest boarded up rectangle, runs her hands over the lumber. It’s nailed down pretty good. She’d need tools and a lot of time to make any progress toward exiting via a window. Not really an option in her circumstances.

  She steps back. Contemplates the windows one last time. Hoping to see any potential there at all. Even up close, there’s no hint of light, nothing shining through. Of course, it could be night now. She has no clue.

  Time has lost most of its meaning. Days. Hours. Minutes. They lack any context, any use.

  The only time that matters is when he’ll come back, and she has no way to even make a guess at that. It could be two minutes or two days from now.

  Gabby’s voice speaks up again.

  “So get ready.”

  Emily doesn’t look around this time. Doesn’t even turn her head. She answers the disembodied voice.