Violet Darger | Book 8 | Countdown To Midnight

by Vargus, L. T.

  Staring at yourself on screen, that looking glass mounted in every living room, like Narcissus staring into the pond.

  Darger figured it was a clue of some kind but had no idea what it meant. Perhaps one of the journals he’d mentioned was hidden near a pond? That hardly narrowed it down.

  The atmosphere of the basement was becoming too much. The heat and stickiness and collective anxiety clouding her mind. Plus, the smell down here was making her stomach churn. The queasy feeling still lingering from the helicopter ride didn’t help, either.

  She backed up, retracing her steps up the basement stairs.

  The techs and analysts were still swarming the ground floor, picking through the dirty dishes stacked on the countertops, opening cabinets and cupboards, sifting through papers and magazines and mail left on the coffee table in the living room. Combing the place for information. Anything that might tell them more about Tyler Huxley and who he may have wanted to target with one of his special deliveries.

  Outside, the sun had partially hidden behind the skyscrapers along the horizon, casting a faint shade over the dumpy Jersey City street. The heat still radiated up from the asphalt the way it always did in the summer, though. No mercy.

  A pair of techs and a photographer were across the street, processing Huxley’s car. She watched the white-clad figures bagging fast food wrappers and what looked like hundreds of pages of articles printed off the internet. Another pair was tearing through the garbage cans, ripping apart the black plastic bags, and separating the trash from potential treasure.

  Darger made a beeline for the abandoned garage across the street. She ducked around the corner and pulled off her mask and gloves. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  Focus. Stop worrying about what everyone else is doing, and just focus.

  Darger brought up a photo she’d taken of the suicide note, swiping to the picture of the back.

  They say you’re not just a pretty face.

  Well that seemed obvious enough. He was targeting celebrities after all. The pretty people.

  The next line was, But I wonder what you’ll do without it.

  Images of the two faceless corpses she’d seen today flashed in her mind.

  God, maybe this wasn’t meant to be a clue at all. Maybe Huxley was just taunting them.

  Her teeth ground together as she read the words a third and fourth time. If this was all they had to go on, they were screwed.

  But then she remembered that they’d found one potential connection between Huxley and Gavin Passmore after all. Huxley would have subbed on the delivery route that served Passmore’s mansion. If they could narrow down the potential victim pool to only locations where Huxley delivered, that would be huge. They needed to get more information about the routes he drove.

  Darger inhaled, her ribcage quaking with adrenaline now that she had an idea on how to proceed.

  A hand on her shoulder startled her from her thoughts. She spun around and found Loshak standing behind her, one eyebrow raised.

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah. Just… I couldn’t think clearly in all that. It was like being in the middle of a hurricane. Too much going on.”

  “Tensions are certainly running high.”

  He checked his watch. Probably calculating how long they had until midnight.

  “Tension is exactly what he wanted.”

  Loshak ran a hand through his hair.

  “Without a doubt.”

  Agent Fredrick joined them, her round face tense with concern.

  “There’s a task force meeting set for 2100 hours. In the meantime, we still have the chopper at our disposal. Any ideas on where we might start on all this?”

  “I think we should talk to Huxley’s employer and see if we can get his route information,” Darger said. “So far that’s the closest we’ve come to a connection between him and Gavin Passmore. And if he came across one target that way, it might be how he selected the others as well.”

  “I agree,” Loshak said.

  Fredrick nodded her head once.

  “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 12

  They soared over the Hudson River, and she saw the city from an angle she’d never seen before. A bird’s-eye view of the towering skyscrapers. Instead of craning her neck to look up at the pointed spire atop the Empire State building, she was looking straight out the window at it. Down below, the streets were laid out in neat, square grids. The people reduced to dark specks on the sidewalks. Here and there a box of green that signified a park.

  “Well?” Loshak said. “Aren’t you gonna say it?”

  Darger blinked.

  “Say what?”

  “That you knew along it was gonna be serial.”

  Darger leaned back in her seat, trying not to smirk.

  “I’m too classy to say I told you so.”

  “Oh yeah?” Loshak scoffed. “Since when?”

  Darger returned her attention to the scenery. There was something awe-inspiring about the city. The way it just went on and on and on, the buildings and the cars and the people. They’d poured all this concrete, little by little, let it flow over the soil and harden. Now it was a vast gray shell teeming with life.

  “What do you think about this idea of him leaving us clues?” Agent Fredrick asked. “Seems kind of funny to go to all the trouble of building a bomb and picking out a target only to give us a chance to undo it all.”

  “I keep thinking about the Unabomber case,” Darger said. “How Ted Kaczynski left what seemed like clues in many of his bombs, but it became clear that the point was to confuse investigators rather than represent anything meaningful.”

  Loshak nodded.

  “Right. Several of the bombs included the initials ‘F.C.’ Kaczynski later claimed it stood for ‘Freedom Club,’ but I wouldn’t be surprised if he put it there just to set the investigators on a wild goose chase. Truth is, I don’t think he was ever going to do anything to increase his chances of being caught. He was happy as a clam, out there in that little shack, reaping destruction from a distance.”

  Darger adjusted her headset.

  “So… what if that’s Huxley’s scheme? What if we try to follow these so-called clues, and it turns out it’s all bullshit?”

  “I don’t know if we have much choice,” Loshak said. “The only thing we can do now is figure out everything we can about the guy and hope he meant it when he said we could stop it.”

  The helicopter ride was smoother this time. And shorter, which Darger appreciated. Her stomach didn’t quite have a chance to twist itself into a mess of flexing knots. Instead she experienced a slight wobbly feeling in the center of her abdomen that faded as they hopped out of the chopper and walked over to a dark-haired woman standing next to a sedan — this was their ride.

  They pulled into traffic and almost immediately came to a standstill. Darger peered out the window. It felt almost claustrophobic to be down at street level again, surrounded by all the hulking towers reaching for the heavens. Glass and steel and concrete piled into great columns until they blocked out most of the sky.

  “I always felt that one of the most frustrating things about Kaczynski was that his targets were, in many ways, random,” Loshak said, continuing the conversation from the helicopter. “When he was living in Chicago, he targeted people at Northwestern. He also sent bombs to Berkeley, where he’d taught. So maybe ‘random’ isn’t quite the right word, but he’d never met any of the people he’d targeted. It would have been difficult to draw a line directly from Kaczynski to his victims, in most cases. They simply represented something he opposed: computer technology, genetics research, the airline industry, forestry. He’d read something they’d written or spot their name mentioned in an article, and then he’d literally look them up in the phone book.”

  Loshak paused and rubbed his eyes before continuing.

  “So if you think about it, we’re way ahead here by comparison. We already know who our bomber is. He told us when
the next bomb would go off. He even kind of told us who he’d be targeting, at least in a general sense. Now it’s just a matter of finding the where.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Twenty minutes later, they arrived at the massive warehouse, passing by rows of white trucks with the brown QBF fox logo. Floodlights lit up the corrugated steel building but left most of the parking lot in dusky shadow.

  “The storefront is closed, so they said we should go around back to the loading area.”

  The driver followed these instructions, weaving through the murky lot and parking off to the side of two large semitrucks being unloaded.

  Darger, Loshak, and Fredrick climbed out of the vehicle and approached one of the open rolling doors — a gaping place where light streamed out to compete with the twilight outside.

  Darger peered into the slice of the building she could see, a glut of industrial features coming into focus. Fluorescent light glinted off smooth concrete floors. Trucks and boxes squared off in the center of the space. The steel rafters looked skeletal up above.

  As soon as they passed the doorway and stepped into the light, a guy in a QBF polo shirt holding a clipboard spotted them and walked over. He was a middle-aged man with broad shoulders and a deep tan.

  “You’re the folks from the FBI?” he asked.

  “That’s us,” Loshak said, flashing his badge.

  “Jim Roth,” the man said, shaking their hands. “Glad to have you. Wish like hell it were under different circumstances.”

  “You were Tyler Huxley’s supervisor?”

  “That’s right. Goin’ on five years now.” He let his cheeks puff up with air and blew out a breath. “Can’t believe this… you know… stuff. Just… unimaginable. You hear people carryin’ on about it on TV all the time, sayin’ how they never would have expected it from someone they knew. Well hell, that’s all I can think of. That I never would have put somethin’ like this on Tyler, man. I mean, it’s supposed to be the postal workers who get all disgruntled and open fire on a crowd of people at a mall or whatever, right? Us here, we’re supposed to be laid back and shi—stuff.”

  Roth tried to smile, but it came across as more of a grimace. He scratched the back of his head.

  “Sorry. That was supposed to be a joke, kinda, but I guess it isn’t so funny.”

  “You knew Huxley well?” Darger asked.

  “I don’t know if I’d say that. The drivers spend so much time on the road, you know? This here is a real solitary job. Not a lot of interaction between coworkers. I’d see him every morning and evening like everyone else. But look, I got a few dozen other drivers under me, so it’s not like we had a lot of heart-to-heart talks or nothin’. Besides, Tyler was a, uh — what do you call it? A wallflower, yeah? Real quiet guy. Always staying out on the periphery of things. Fading into the damn wallpaper.”

  He held up a finger.

  “Listen, you all should really talk to Tina.” He waved over a girl in one of the QBF polos. “Hey, Tina. C’mere for a sec.”

  The girl was in her late twenties, tall and thin. Darger tried to imagine her lugging around heavy packages all day.

  “You started as a temp, right?” Roth asked. “Did the holiday run with Tyler?”

  “Yeah.” She blinked hard, had a shellshocked look about her. The term moon-eyed sprang to Darger’s mind. “I still can’t believe this is happening. So weird.”

  “What’d you think of him?” Darger asked.

  “I mean, I spent like two months riding his route with him. Never got any bad vibes or, like, an inkling that there was anything… off about him. Or whatever? I never felt unsafe, I guess you could say.”

  Darger nodded.

  “It seems like you would have gotten to know him pretty well, spending all those hours together?”

  “You’d think so, but he wasn’t a big talker,” Tina said. “At first I thought it was because he didn’t like me or something, but then I realized that was just how he was. He lived up in his head. Kind of stayed separate from the rest of the world all the time, you know? Like he’d just be sittin’ there all quiet, and he’d start laughing at something in his thoughts. Really laughing. Other times, he’d start doing these hand motions. Shrugging his shoulders and wagging his finger. Like he was debating something internally or something, going back and forth inside. He liked listening to podcasts, so that kind of filled the time more than conversation anyhow. And when we did talk, it was mostly about the stuff in the podcasts.”

  Darger raised her eyebrows.

  “What kind of podcasts did he like?”

  “Oh, all kinds, but I guess a lot of it was true crime stuff, now that I think about it. And he had, like, an almost encyclopedic knowledge of serial killers. One time he listed off the last meals of like a dozen different serial killers and mass murderers. I remember that because he said that John Wayne Gacy’s last meal was like an entire bucket of fried chicken, and we kind of laughed about that.”

  “And how would you describe him, in general?” Darger asked. “Personality-wise.”

  “He was a little awkward for sure, but I think his quietness was more from not being interested in most conversations. If you got him talking about things he was passionate about, he’d talk your ear off.” Tina cocked her head to one side. “And he had a real dry sense of humor. Witty, but… I don’t know… strange.”

  Darger had hoped they’d find someone here who’d known Tyler Huxley well, but like many domestic terrorists, he was mostly a loner, and this particular job only exacerbated that.

  “Did Tyler ever mention being a fan of any celebrities? Any actor or musician he talked about, maybe?” she asked.

  “Uh… I remember him talking about one of the Marvel movies once,” Tina said. “I don’t remember which one, just that he’d asked if I’d seen it yet. I said I hadn’t, and he told me I really had to see it in the theater to get the full experience. With any other guy, that would have been sort of a set-up to asking me out, right? But not Tyler. He just went on and on about how the effects sequences aren’t the same if you watch it at home on DVD.”

  The supervisor’s face lit up at that.

  “I’m glad you brought up movies. It reminds me of something,” Roth said. “I caught Tyler in a lie once.”

  “What kind of lie?” Loshak asked.

  “He called in sick one time. Coughing. Hoarse voice. All that garbage, yeah? Anyway, that night, I took my wife out for dinner and a movie — no special occasion, it’s just the kind of guy I am. Well, who the hell do we run into but Tyler Huxley. At the theater. Buying a box of peanut M&M’s at the concession stand.”

  “Did you confront him?” Darger asked, curious as to what kind of excuse Tyler might have offered for his phony sick day.

  But Roth shook his head.

  “I figure about half the time people call in sick it’s bull.” His eyes slid over to Tina. “No offense. I mean, it’s not like I never done it when I was young and dumb. Anyway, he almost never called in, so I guess I felt like maybe he’d earned a day here or there. This job ain’t easy. We don’t like to lose people.”

  “Did he ever mention anything about the people on his route?” Darger asked. “People he might have had issues with?”

  “Not that I can remember. We get complaints from time to time. A driver dings a mailbox or something like that, but Tyler’s record was spotless.”

  “Can we see a map of his route?” Loshak asked.

  “Sure can. Tyler did most of the deliveries for Bridgehampton and Southampton.”

  He led them over to a computer where he pulled up the next day’s delivery schedule.

  Darger stared at the number of stops listed on the screen.

  “One-hundred and eight stops. That’s for one day?”

  Roth nodded.

  Darger’s hopes deflated a little. One-hundred and eight stops and that was only the packages being delivered tomorrow. There had to be a thousand addresses making up the entire route, if not more. And there
were a lot of the type of people Tyler Huxley seemed to hate living up there. If his next target was buried somewhere in the pages and pages of addresses, it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. And they only had until midnight to find it.

  “Do you want to see his previous route, too?” Roth asked.

  Loshak cleared his throat.

  “His what?”

  “Well, he switched routes about four months ago. Before he started doing Bridgehampton-Southampton, he was doing the Sag Harbor route.”

  “How many routes has he driven since he’s been here?”

  Roth tapped a few keys.

  “This’ll be his third route, matter of fact. He started out driving in Eastport.”

  Darger and Loshak looked at each other. They’d just tripled their search area.

  And the clock kept ticking.

  CHAPTER 14

  It was almost full dark out as they rode to the Jacob K. Javits building located at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan. The task force would assemble on the 23rd floor, which served as the FBI field office in New York.

  Lights glittered everywhere in this part of the city. The tiny squares of the windows glowing up and down the various towers, beating back the encroaching darkness one little slice at a time.

  Darger stared down at her phone, at the map showing the three routes Huxley had run over his years as a delivery driver. Any of these might contain potential victims — but only if he stayed in his delivery area. The reality was, he could strike anywhere. He’d already used the mail once. He could target anyone that way. He could go global if he wanted to.

  In hindsight, she felt stupid for pinning so much hope on the QBF angle. It was too easy. Too obvious. Huxley had called it a game, which implied they had a chance to win. But he’d stacked the odds in his favor.

  Her nerves fizzled with frustration, anticipation. Heartbeat steadily increasing. Something horrible was going to happen, and for now they couldn’t do anything about it. Nothing at all.

  Darger’s eyes went to the clock again. Measured out the countdown to midnight. Just over three hours left. How could they possibly find the next potential victim in that amount of time?