Violet Darger | Book 8 | Countdown To Midnight

by Vargus, L. T.

  Back in the hallway with the giant bird of paradise, Darger elbowed her partner.

  “You didn’t actually remember him, did you?” Darger asked.

  Loshak scoffed.

  “Of course I did.”

  “I saw you read his name off his ID, you old fraud.”

  “I was just jogging my memory.” Loshak’s voice was pure innocence. “I knew the face but wanted to make sure I got the name right.”

  “You’re so full of it,” Darger said with a snort.

  They reached the bottom of the stairs and nearly collided with several agents and techs jogging into the foyer. From the open door, Darger could hear a commotion outside: chattering voices, the slamming of vehicle doors, engines accelerating down the drive.

  “Something’s going down,” Loshak said.

  When they reached the door, they almost plowed into Agent Fredrick, who was trying her best to fight against the flow of people exiting the house.

  “Oh good,” Fredrick said, sounding out of breath. “You already heard? We’re heading to his house in Jersey City now.”

  “Wait. Heard what?”

  “We’ve identified our bomber.”

  She licked her lips.

  “His name is Tyler Huxley.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Agent Fredrick filled them in as they wove around the agents, analysts, and techs scrambling about outside.

  “The bureau has a helicopter waiting in Southampton that can take us to Jersey City in half the time it would take by car. I saved each of you a seat in the chopper.”

  “Sounds good,” Loshak said, patting at his pants pocket and coming out with the keys to their rental car. “Can someone handle returning our car to the rental lot?”

  “Absolutely.” Fredrick gestured at a tall, thin man with glasses waiting near a black Ford Explorer. “Agent Jelani here is driving us to the heliport. He can take your keys and arrange a pickup on the car.”

  “Excellent.”

  They followed Fredrick over to the SUV, and Darger and Loshak slid into the backseat and buckled up.

  “So how did they end up tracking him down?” Darger asked. “Was it the security video from the post office drop box?”

  Fredrick twisted in her seat to face them as Agent Jelani put the vehicle in gear and started down the drive.

  “It was. Because we had the footage from the house, we knew the size and shape of the package and could narrow it down from there. Anyone dropping a letter or a small envelope or one of those red, white, and blue Priority Mail boxes could be ruled out.” She pulled the tablet out of a black carry case. “I have the video, if you’d like to see it.”

  “Sure.”

  This video was a step down in quality compared to what they’d seen from the house security cameras. Grainy, black and white, with a low frame rate. The USPS drop box was on the right side of the screen. A man in a baseball hat approached from the left. The box in his hands indeed looked to be the same size and shape as the one left on Passmore’s doorstep. The man in the baseball hat opened the pull-down door of the drop box, deposited the package, and then walked back the way he’d come.

  Darger blinked.

  “They were able to ID him just from that?”

  “No. We have feed for the whole street.” Fredrick opened another video. This one was full color and much higher quality. “This is someone’s doorbell camera from maybe half a block down from the box.”

  The man in the baseball hat appeared. Darger could see now that he was wearing a camo t-shirt, black cargo shorts, yellow shoes. The hat was embroidered with the skull logo from the Punisher comic books.

  “Look at his outfit,” Darger said. “It’s like he ordered the Domestic Terrorist Starter Package from Amazon.”

  Loshak smirked.

  “Yeah. Except for the bright yellow clown shoes. Maybe combat boots irritate his bunions.”

  Passing by the stoop of the house with the camera mounted outside, the man turned a corner and disappeared from view.

  “He’s not moving very fast,” Darger said. “Doesn’t seem to be in a hurry at all. Ten seconds ago he dropped an IED in a mailbox, and he’s as calm as can be.”

  Agent Fredrick selected a third video. This one picked up where the last one left off. Captain Clown Shoes entered the frame. Crossed in front of whatever building they’d pulled the video from. Disappeared.

  Fredrick held up a finger.

  “Wait for it.”

  About ten seconds later, a car rolled by. A silver sedan. Before it exited the frame, the license plate was clearly visible for several seconds.

  “Nice,” Darger said.

  “Gotta love the availability of security footage these days,” Loshak said. “A high-def camera in every pocket and one on every doorstep.”

  “We traced the plate, got his name and an address,” Fredrick explained. “It appears to be current. Our colleagues in New Jersey are working on a warrant. We have SWAT and a Counter-IED team on standby. They’ll be ready to go as soon as we get the green light.”

  They’d reached the heliport. Agent Jelani drove them onto the tarmac and right up to the edge of the hangar. Loshak handed Jelani the keys to their rental as they climbed out.

  The helicopter sat on a small platform that was being dollied out onto the tarmac as they arrived. The metal platform shifted slowly over the threshold of the gaping hangar door. Moved out onto the concrete, following tracks embedded into the runway.

  When it came to a stop, Agent Fredrick stepped up onto the metal surface and climbed in. Darger and Loshak followed.

  Inside the chopper, they each donned a headset and took a seat. After flipping a couple of switches, the pilot cranked his head back to welcome them aboard and inform the group it’d be approximately forty minutes to their destination.

  The door was sealed. The rotors started spinning, building speed, and within seconds they lurched off the landing pad and ascended into the air. The liftoff was a bit bumpy, the whole cabin vibrating like one of those Magic Fingers mattresses cranked all the way up. Rattling and rumbling.

  Darger jostled from side to side in her seat. She dug her fingernails into the armrests. She’d never been a big fan of helicopters.

  “Do we have any background on Huxley?” she asked, trying to distract herself by refocusing on the case instead of on the motion of the helicopter.

  “He’s got a lone prior, as far as we can tell — shoplifting from a hardware store about six months ago — so right now we only have the minimal details from that. Mugshot. A brief report by the arresting officer. It’s not much,” Fredrick said. “We’re also looking at finding a connection between Huxley and Gavin Passmore that might speak to motive.”

  Once they’d reached cruising altitude, the ride smoothed out. Darger retracted her claws from the leather armrest covering and got out her phone.

  “Let’s see if our guy is on social media.”

  After a few false starts, she found him. He had a Twitter account that seemed to have been abandoned. His last update was a retweet of a Tom Brady meme from almost two years prior. His Facebook was more promising.

  She found a few photos of Huxley — a fairly nondescript-looking Caucasian male in his late 20s. He had something of a hound dog look about his eyes, which were downturned and somewhat vacant, the flesh around them puffy and puckered. Other than that, he didn’t stand out. Dark hair that he kept short. Clear skin. Not much of a smiler from what she was seeing. Clicking around his Facebook profile, she also found his employer and where he went to high school and college.

  “According to Facebook, he went to high school in Queens. A couple years of college at Nassau Community College. No degree. And it says he’s a driver at QBF Shipping. One of those delivery start-ups trying to give UPS and the post office a run for their money.”

  “That’s interesting,” Loshak said. “I guess he’d have some insider insight into shipping — the logistics and how all of that works.”

 
Darger scrolled through Huxley’s most recent posts. Most were shared from elsewhere. Various memes. An article from The Onion. A ‘Which Reservoir Dog Are You?’ quiz. The most recent update Huxley had penned himself was innocuous and brief: “Drank two glasses of whiskey last night and got the spins. Shoooot. I’m getting old, lol.”

  Darger returned to the small collection of photos, studying the handful of selfies. In one of the photos, he was sitting next to an older woman on a sofa with an abstract printed textile that gave off a very 90s vibe. There was no caption on the photo, no one tagged but Huxley himself, but Darger thought she saw a family resemblance in the woman’s eyes. Downturned and devoid of emotion.

  She wondered if the woman was Huxley’s mother. If so, she’d be a good person to talk to. Get some early life background on the bomber. His childhood. Whether he’d had friends or been a loner. Her gut said he’d be somewhere in between. The kind of guy who can blend with the crowd, socially. Is neither popular nor a pariah. It fit with the job, too.

  Most delivery jobs were fairly stressful. A lot of accountability. The workers had to be motivated to run those routes day after day, keeping to a tight schedule. It wasn’t a job for a slacker. And yet it would be quite solitary. There might be some time at the beginning or end of a shift where you saw the other drivers, the coworkers who did the sorting. But for the majority of his workday, Tyler Huxley would be alone. Plotting. Scheming. Is that where the fantasy started? Somewhere along one of his monotonous routes?

  Fredrick leaned out of her seat to get a better look at the photos.

  “He looks so… normal. One could even call him handsome, though he’s not my type.” She frowned. “But it’s more than that. He looks… kind of gentle. Not the aggressive type, you know?”

  “That kind of fits with the bomber profile, in a lot of ways,” Loshak said. “Not that there’s a type so much when it comes to physical features. But they lack some of the direct aggression that someone who uses a knife or even a gun might possess. A bomber’s rage is almost… academic. A philosophy more than the visceral, immediate anger you get from a mass shooter. Look at the Unabomber. By all accounts, Ted Kaczynski was reserved and shy. Timothy McVeigh was the same.”

  Loshak sat back and stared up at the ceiling.

  “Although, maybe it would be more accurate to say that they’re better at keeping the fury under wraps. Better at hiding it. In any case, I can almost guarantee we’ll find some kind of manifesto.”

  “I was hoping there’d be something on his Facebook,” Darger said, shaking her head. “But this stuff is as normal as his photo. Some selfies. Some silly Buzzfeed quizzes. Some memes. I’m with Fredrick on this one. I was expecting to get at least a minor creepy vibe from Huxley, but his Facebook is so… sanitary. Sterile. I know you can’t judge a book by its cover and how easily someone can manipulate or craft their image on social media, but so far this guy is just… boring.”

  Loshak shrugged.

  “And maybe that’s the scariest part of all. That they look like a hundred strangers you pass on the sidewalk and never give a second look. Indistinguishable from the rest of the crowd.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Darger spotted the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island as they swooped over the city — choppy blue water surrounding the landmarks — before they finally landed at the heliport in Jersey City.

  They hustled out of the chopper, everyone instinctively ducking under the still whooshing propellers, and Darger couldn’t help but remember a news article she’d read. A man in a public park in Queens had lopped off the top of his skull with the props of his own RC helicopter in front of dozens of horrified bystanders. Just a relaxing afternoon of recreation.

  Agent Fredrick moved out in front of the pack and pointed at a dark sedan parked at an angle beside the helipad. They ran for it. A metallic blue Chevy Impala waited for them, driven by a local Jersey field agent by the name of Laboda.

  Through either a smile or gritted teeth, Laboda clucked out a greeting Darger couldn’t understand, though the inflection somehow got across the gist. Then he wheeled them out of the heliport and into traffic, wasting no time.

  “We’ve got a bit more background on Huxley,” Laboda said, enunciating this time. “My partner emailed each of you the newest addition to the file we’re assembling on him.”

  Darger opened her phone and found the updates on Tyler Huxley pretty light, considering she’d dug up some of it on her own. Like the fact that he worked at QBF Shipping and grew up in Queens. The only new information she saw was that he had a silver Ford Fiesta registered in his name.

  “We put in a call to his supervisor at the QBF distribution center. Huxley took the week off. Had a bunch of PTO saved up.” Laboda took a hard right turn without using his blinker. “And get this. QBF serves the greater Long Island area.”

  Darger tensed.

  “Was Passmore’s house on his route?”

  “Not his usual route, no. But sometimes the drivers end up covering part of another driver’s route, like when they’re on vacation. He would have delivered there a handful of times over the years.”

  “So that could be his connection to Passmore,” Loshak said, his brow furrowing, eyes darting back and forth like that computer nestled inside his skull was already busy at work processing the new data. “That’s huge.”

  Darger glanced back at the information on Huxley and noted that they’d tracked down his family — his mother and a brother — who still lived in Queens. Darger was anxious to talk to them. To dig into Huxley’s history. But that would come after. First… they needed to catch their guy. Make sure he couldn’t hurt anyone else.

  Laboda drove them to a rundown neighborhood near a railyard. The house on the corner had a huge “Condemned” sign posted out front, a yellow plastic rectangle adhered to the front door printed with big black letters. The lower windows had been boarded up and all of the glass in the upper windows had been busted out. That set the tone for the rest of the street.

  Broken-down cars in various states of rusty erosion occupied one vacant lot. Overgrown weeds sprouted up around the vehicles, their stalks swaying gently from the breeze of the traffic rushing past, leaves brushing at crushed fenders and shattered windshields.

  Around the dumpy houses, the small yards were unkempt and strewn with junk — random cinder blocks nestled in the grass and other shards of concrete poked up from the yards and gutters. Bits of broken glass glittered along the sidewalks. An old top-loading washing machine huddled in one yard with the lid hanging open to the heavens.

  Here and there pedestrians wove through all of the decay. Hard faces. Narrowed eyes. So many people packed into this small area. The concrete teemed with them.

  Laboda made another turn and then pointed out Huxley’s house.

  “Second from the last on this side. The little ramshackle one.”

  They parked along the curb, finding a spot a few houses down across the street. The steel slats of the roll-up garage doors alongside them were covered in layers of graffiti — a rainbow of jagged lettering scrawling countless obscenities on top of each other.

  A few piles of tattered garbage bags were wedged into the corner of the lot, orange juice containers and piles of sodden cigarette butts leaking out of the torn places. The trash spilled down into watery potholes, cellophane bits floating around atop the mud puddles.

  Law enforcement vehicles crowded the area, and Darger noticed the officers still occupied the vehicles, matching silhouettes visible behind the steering wheels and in all the passenger seats.

  “Took us a little extra time to get the warrant given that it’s a weekend.” Laboda checked his watch. “Should be any minute now.”

  Agent Fredrick pulled a pair of binoculars from her bag to try to get a look in the windows. She stared toward the building for what felt like a long time, her mouth a grim line beneath the black bulk pressed to her eyes. Then she passed the binoculars around for the others.

  When it was Dar
ger’s turn, she trained the lenses on the place and used the focus wheel to sharpen the view. It was one of the smaller homes on the street. A narrow shoebox of a house. She counted at least three different types and colors of siding. The windows were sparse and small. A blue tarp stretched over one of the upstairs windows on the side closest to them.

  A tangle of vines crawled up the wrought iron posts on the porch. The shingles on the roof were crumbling and covered in patches of moss. The sidewalk out front was bordered by a chain-link fence with a gate that sat crooked on its hinges.

  Darger counted four small satellite dishes jutting from the roof, the DirecTV logo visible on one.

  “Why do you think he needs four dishes?”

  “Too lazy to remove the old ones?” Loshak suggested.

  “Probably.”

  Darger handed the binoculars to Loshak but kept her gaze on the house. She spotted the silver Ford Fiesta registered to Tyler Huxley parked in front of a pile of trash and old wooden pallets, which suggested he was home. But she detected no movement from inside.

  Her anxiety built as they waited. She readjusted her position in her seat as if that might ease some of the tension.

  “How is this going to work?” she asked. “I assume the SWAT team has been told our guy is into explosives?”

  “They are under strict instructions not to touch anything. They’ll do a rapid clear out and apprehend our suspect, if he’s here. Then we’ll take the bomb-sniffing dogs through. If we find any evidence of an IED on the premises, we’ll send one of the bomb techs inside in the blast suit and bust out the MECV.”

  “That’s the doohickey they use to safely detonate the bomb in?”

  “Right. Stands for Mobile Explosive Containment Vessel.”

  Laboda’s phone rang, and he answered.

  “You got it? Beautiful. I’ll let everyone know.” Laboda hung up. “We just got our warrant, and we are officially sanctioned to rock.”

  He snatched a walkie-talkie from the dash.

  “Agent Fitch, this is Laboda speaking. We’ve got the green light. I repeat, we are good to go.”