Five Days Post Mortem

by L. T. Vargus

  Among the green, something bright blue grabbed at her. It was a bucket. One of the run-of-the-mill, five-gallon variety.

  Darger turned from the fence, took a step away, then whirled back around.

  She didn’t have a ruler handy, but the opening of the bucket sure looked to be about twelve inches in diameter, a perfect match for the impression she’d found in the dirt.

  Excited now, she jogged around to the back side of the fence, eager to get a better look at the bucket. She glanced up at the house. It was getting dark now, and they’d left a light on inside. Darger could see clear into Shannon’s house from back here. Through the sliding glass door, she watched Fowles pacing back and forth in the kitchen, phone pressed to his ear.

  He had no idea, no sense that he was being watched. A little prickle ran through Darger — half-thrill, half-guilt.

  Yes, this would have been a perfect spot for the killer to stalk Shannon Mead. And when he got comfortable, wanted more, he crept a little closer, used a bucket he’d found — or maybe brought along — as a makeshift stool.

  How many nights had he watched her? How long before watching in the dark wasn’t enough and the urge to kill overcame him?

  The bamboo leaves shivered and whispered in the breeze.

  Except there was no breeze.

  Darger froze.

  “Hello?”

  And then the bamboo hedge rattled violently, and she could tell the way the movement shifted along the fence line that the person concealed by the foliage was running away from her, trying to escape.

  “Stop!”

  She pursued, fumbling for her Glock and cursing again that it was not the trusty sidearm she was familiar with. She pulled the 9mm free, and reaching the edge of the fence before her quarry, she held the firearm out.

  “Come out with your hands in the air. I’m a federal agent.”

  Shit. She wasn’t really, though. She only had a moment to worry about the implications of not having any official authority to arrest a suspect when the person she’d been chasing stepped out from the hedge, arms raised high.

  Chapter 11

  Glasses sweat on the coffee table. Vodka and orange juice within.

  Her place is cozy. Modest. Small rooms with rounded doorways and soft, warm colors on every wall.

  Tangerine.

  Moon yellow.

  Pink seashell.

  It’s like some place an elf would live, which seems right to you. It seems just right.

  She talks, and you talk. The conversation bounces back and forth between you like a tennis ball. A thing to be tended, to be stoked, to be kept alive with constant attention, constant care.

  But you know the talk won’t last. It never can.

  The lulls in between speaking grow longer. Grow thicker in the air around you. Substantial.

  And you can feel it. The awkwardness. It’s not here. Not yet. But it’s close. Threatening. Encroaching.

  You lift your glass to your lips. Drink. The orange juice seems sour. Unpleasant. No match for the boozy warmth of the 100-proof Popov that makes your mouth pucker ever so faintly with each sip.

  And you look at her. The red flushing her cheeks. A strange look in her eyes.

  You study this last detail. Try to read the meaning held there. The eyes open wide and wet. Little flurries of blinks spasming over them but their expression unchanging.

  Fear.

  She is frightened. She is frightened of you.

  You sit back in the little loveseat. The soft cushion bearing the weight of your torso. Propping you up.

  You can’t.

  You’re doing it again. Scaring her. Creeping her out.

  You always do this. Always scare her. All of them. All of the hers.

  And your thoughts spiral again. Sucked up into your head. A vortex.

  You look down into that well of yourself. The bottomless black hole of self-observation, self-obsession.

  Watching yourself watch yourself watch yourself. Endless layers.

  Apart from her. Apart from all of them.

  An other.

  And the sweat brings you back to moment. That little trickle at your hairline. You dab at it with your sleeve. Try to look nonchalant.

  But it’s too late. You can see it on her face. It’s already over.

  After all the time you’ve waited. The hours and days you’ve spent watching her, and it’s already over. Already past.

  You know what she sees when she looks at you, and you can’t.

  You stand. Lightheaded. Excuse yourself.

  Setting your drink on the table. Moving.

  You can’t.

  You glide away from this room. Walls morphing from tangerine to cranberry. The floor seeming to slide by beneath you. No sense at all that your legs are the ones moving you along. Whole body numb.

  You stand in the bathroom mirror. Looking yourself in the face. That pouchy awful face.

  You can’t.

  Your eyes retreat. Fall back from that confrontation in the glass. Full of tears now.

  And the water spirals into the sink. Thundering out of the faucet. Slapping against the porcelain. Covering the breathy sounds coming out with your tears.

  You watch it twirl down the drain for a long while before you head to the kitchen for a knife.

  Chapter 12

  Darger’s gun arm lowered immediately.

  The person she’d been pursuing, the one she’d chased from the bamboo hedge, was only a little girl.

  Still, her heart pounded in her chest. She tucked her pistol in the holster and got down on one knee, in part so she could be eye level with the girl, but also because her bloodstream was so choked with adrenaline, she was feeling a little wobbly.

  “Geez, kid. You scared the crap out of me.”

  It was the same girl she’d seen when she was first coming out of the house. One of the kids playing hide-and-seek. She had on a red t-shirt and denim shorts, and she looked terrified.

  “I didn’t mean to. It was my turn to hide.”

  The kid’s eyes were wide and wet with soon-to-be tears.

  “Hey, it’s OK. You’re not in any trouble. I just… thought you were someone else.”

  Surprisingly, the girl’s face turned serious.

  “The litterbug.”

  “The who?”

  “The man I saw hiding here before. He left a bunch of wrappers. Did you know it takes 20 to 30 years for candy wrappers to decompose?”

  “Uhh, no. I didn’t. What’s your name?”

  “Nora.”

  “I’m Violet,” Darger said, aiming a thumb at her own chest. “Can you show me the wrappers?”

  Nora led Darger into the natural little pathway between the bamboo hedge and the fence. It was the perfect place for a kid’s secret lair… and also for a stalker to lie in wait. They reached the bucket, and the girl pointed at the crumpled bits of cellophane and foil littering the ground.

  Pulling on a glove, Darger plucked up one of the wrappers. It was for a Quaker Chewy Granola Bar. Chocolate Chip.

  Nora gestured to a dented Red Bull can near the bucket.

  “That’ll take over two hundred years to biodegrade.”

  “Really?” Darger said, eyes scanning all the trash left behind in the little area.

  How long had he been watching Shannon? Weeks? Months? However long it had been, she prayed this was his trash. Prayed he’d left a print or two behind.

  “And that water bottle,” the girl said, “that’ll take 450 years.”

  Darger crossed her arms.

  “So you’re some kind of environmental expert?”

  Nora blushed and shrugged.

  “I want to be a marine biologist, and my teacher, Mrs. Potts, showed us a video of a mama sea turtle trying to lay her eggs on a beach covered in a bunch of trash. And one time, I watched a documentary on TV with my parents, where a dead whale washed up on shore and when they cut it open, it was filled with garbage.”

  “Yeah, we’re not
always the best at taking care of our planet, are we?”

  The girl’s hair whipped at the sides of her face as she shook her head.

  “Can you tell me about when you saw the man hiding back here?”

  Nora scratched her belly, thinking.

  “It was a while ago. Right in the middle of summer, when it’s still light out at bedtime.”

  “What time is bedtime?” Darger asked.

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “OK, and you saw the man then?”

  Nora didn’t answer right away, and Darger saw some emotion flit across her face. Fear? Uneasiness?

  She crouched down so they were eye-to-eye again and let her mouth spread into a disarming smile.

  “It’s alright. You can tell me.”

  Nora’s tiny lips pressed together in a tight line, like she was trying to force the words to stay locked inside. But finally she relented, sagging a little like a deflated balloon.

  “I like looking at the stars before I go to sleep. So I can say my wishes. But it was too light out. So I waited until everyone else went to bed. And then I got up and went to the window. And that’s when I saw him.”

  “Was it someone you recognized? Someone you’ve seen before?”

  Nora’s brow furrowed into an exaggerated frown.

  “I couldn’t really see his face. It was too dark. I think he was wearing a hat. Like a winter ski hat. But other than that, it was really just a shadow blob.”

  “A shadow blob. OK. Could you tell if he was young or old? Anything like that?”

  “Not really.”

  “Is there anything else you remember about him?”

  “What about his height? Would you say he seemed taller or shorter than me?”

  The girl studied her.

  “About the same, I think. Maybe a little taller.”

  “And how big was he? Skinny? Fat? Muscular?”

  “Skinny-ish.”

  Darger pondered this.

  It was the opposite of the conclusion she’d come to at the Shannon Mead crime scene, when she’d determined the killer would have had to be fairly powerful. Could the kid be mistaken? Or was Darger missing something?

  “Well, if you ever change your mind about the marine biologist thing, you’d make a great detective.”

  The kid pursed her lips, all seriousness.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Darger chuckled and waved a hand at her.

  “I bet you won this round of hide-and-seek. You should go find your friends, and let them know you didn’t turn invisible.”

  Nora bid her farewell and scampered out of the hedge, leaving Darger alone in the hideout. She got out her phone and put in a call to the local police department, telling them what she’d found and asking that a crew of crime scene techs come out to collect the evidence she’d found.

  After she hung up, she glanced up at the Mead house. Fowles wasn’t visible in the window any longer, and he’d turned the lights out. He was probably out front, wondering where she’d disappeared to. She turned away from the fence, ready to leave the confines of the bamboo sanctum when something caught her eye.

  Right next to the broken slat in the fence Darger had peered through earlier, something was scrawled onto the wood in what looked like black ballpoint pen.

  The symbol seemed to be an upside-down heart with a cross through it. Had the killer made this mark? Or had it been one of the dozens of kids that had probably used this place as a hiding spot for games or a retreat from annoying siblings over the years?

  Whatever it was, Darger pulled her phone from her pocket and snapped a photo of it. She’d make sure to mention it to the crime scene techs once they arrived.

  She found Fowles seated on the front steps. She could tell by the way he perked up when she appeared from around the side of the house that he had something.

  “I have something, too,” she said, amused at his eagerness. “But you first.”

  He stood, brushing the back of his pants as he did.

  “I just spoke with the lab down in Berkeley. I have some colleagues there that have been developing a system for determining the age of blow fly larvae using gene expression. It allows for a much more precise timeline. They can estimate an age within two hours of the actual.”

  “That’s pretty impressive.”

  He nodded.

  “It seemed the sensible thing to do, given the paradoxical nature of my own findings. And the lab guys were thrilled with the opportunity to aid in an official investigation. They rarely get out in the field.”

  “What’d they find?”

  “They confirmed it. The larvae on Shannon Mead were 34 hours old. Around a day a half. Factoring in the five-day delay introduced by the water, that would put the time of death around 6.5 days before discovery.”

  Darger rubbed at her brow, suddenly frustrated. It didn’t make sense with the timeline of Shannon’s disappearance. And yet, there it was.

  She glanced up at Fowles. The constant wonky smile he usually wore had been replaced by a grim line.

  “Why do you look so down? I would think you’d be glad to be proven right.”

  He sighed.

  “I have to admit to being relieved to know that my original estimation wasn’t far off. But it seems a little selfish to feel good about it,” he said, glancing back at Shannon Mead’s door. “Considering.”

  “We can’t control all of the craziness in the world,” Darger said. “We can only do our jobs. Nothing wrong with feeling good about a job well done.”

  “I guess I’ll feel better when it leads to something tangible for the sake of the case.”

  “True. We’re still missing something,” she said, clenching her jaw. “The timelines don’t quite match up. I hate that.”

  They didn’t speak for a moment, both lost in their thoughts. Eventually, Fowles broke the silence.

  “You said you found something?”

  “I’ll show you,” she said.

  She led him to the fence behind the house and pointed out the bucket, the food wrappers, the scribbled symbol.

  “How long do you think he watched her for?”

  Shaking her head, Darger crossed her arms over her chest.

  “The kid I talked to said she saw him back in the middle of summer, when the days were longest. That would make it around 3 months before her death, so… at least that long. Probably longer than that.”

  Her eyes drifted up to the house again, the dark windows looking like vacant eyes.

  She imagined Shannon Mead going about her daily routines. Grading homework and watching Netflix. Baking bread. Never having an inkling that a pair of predatory eyes was watching all the while.

  Waiting.

  Chapter 13

  You move. Flee. Leave her behind.

  Brisk air surrounds you. Touches you with crooked fingers. Cold and dry.

  And the world outside smears together. Bright and strange and bustling. An endless sprawl of concrete and asphalt, of cars and pedestrians.

  All of those moving pieces seem to come together now. To writhe as one being.

  Society. The world. A wretched thing that spasms there before you. Shudders. Pulses. Like a fly with its wings ripped off.

  Squares of sidewalk roll past underfoot. Looks like that broken TV you had as a kid. Like you need to adjust the vertical hold knob to steady the picture somehow.

  And your head thrums. Buzzes. White noise like radio static.

  Confusion bangs about in your skull. Confusion tinged with the last thrill of the hunt, the last twinge of gratification if that’s even what a kill brings you.

  The final image of her still burns in your skull. Seared there for always.

  Face down in the bathtub. Hair all flat and soggy. Fresh holes perforating her left side where you pressed the steak knife as though to ventilate her torso.

  It felt hot in your hand, the knife. And it wanted to hurt her. Wanted to bite and rip and penetrate.

  You pee
led her sweater off halfway, the waistband pulled up over her left shoulder, the fabric all bunched against that side of her neck. Skin and bra strap exposed. You don’t remember doing this, don’t remember touching her shirt at all, but you must have. You must have.

  And you still feel the struggle in your skin, in the muscles of your arms and shoulders and neck. Hot and jittery. The violence still twitches inside of you. It wants only to lurch forward again and again. To take control and express itself with your limbs, with your fists, with your blade.

  And you need to move her. Need to dispose of her. The spent shell that’s left of her must be concealed. Destroyed.

  But you can’t bring her out. Not here. Not like this.

  The daylight still shines down from the heavens. Glints off the mud puddles. Brilliant light glittering everywhere. Lighting up this shithole of a city, of a world.

  No. You’ll have to come back after dark. Move the body when the shadows will aid you. Protect you.

  You walk. Try to focus on the concrete cells still rolling along below. Try to block the ugliness of the city out.

  It makes you sick sometimes to walk around in this place. To smell the mud smell, the acrid smoke of the industrial areas, the animal musk of all of these people stacked up on top of each other like crabs climbing over one another to get out of the bucket.

  Sometimes you can’t take it. Can’t stand to breathe it in. To let even the vapor of this world touch your nostrils, crawl inside of you, waft its stench in the vacancy of your chest. It assails you whenever you’re on the street like this.

  You.

  You.

  You.

  It is always “you” in your head. Never “I.” You don’t know why.

  And it’s there. Your building. Another brick heap stacked high into the heavens indistinguishable from any of the rest, all those apartment windows like portals into a hundred separate lives, a hundred separate worlds. People living in the same structure yet forever segregated. Strange to each other.

  The bricks must have been red once, but the sun has bleached them to a pale pink over the decades. The color of Pepto-Bismol. The lines of mortar look strange etched into that shade. All pink and gray like an aging human body stripped naked.