by L. T. Vargus
After another sip of water, she continued.
“In terms of his early home life: overbearing mother, probably violent and emotionally abusive. It wouldn’t surprise me if the family was oppressively religious. Drowning the women, depositing them in the river… it’s almost like a baptism. And that would have made Shannon Mead an ideal victim. He would have seen her as the picture of purity. The perfect woman. Pious and chaste and devoted to work, family, and God.”
She’d saved her best point for last, and she straightened as she got to it.
“We have one ambiguous tie between victims so far. Holly Green attended Sandy High School. Shannon Mead worked at Sandy Elementary and was last seen in the parking lot behind the building. Different schools, same district. It could be that our killer’s work relates to the schools. Making deliveries… something that would take him to more than one of the schools in the district.”
Darger flipped the page of the profile she’d written up and found she’d reached the end. That was it. She’d done it. And Fowles had been right. If she just focused on the information, she barely thought about the fact that she was addressing a group of people.
She set down her notes and was about to ask if there were any questions when Marcy, the secretary, took a hesitant step into the room.
“Chief Furbush?”
Furbush stood, hitching his belt up.
“What is it, Marcy?”
“I didn’t mean to be eavesdropping, honest. It’s just… the door was open.”
“If you have something to say…”
“I sort of overheard what was being said… about the girls being drowned in the bathtub.”
“We don’t know that it’s a bathtub for sure. But go on.”
“It’s just that, back in ‘99, there was a girl in town that was murdered. Christy Whitmore. And this all reminded me of it is all.”
With a sigh, Furbush propped his fists on his hips, clearly annoyed that Marcy wouldn’t just get it all out at once.
“Why is that?”
“Well because she was found drowned in the bathtub. They never caught the guy that did it.”
Chapter 22
You drive around after the body is gone. Go out on the back roads south of town. A stretch of rural flatlands pocked with crappy homes and vast expanses of grass. A few trailer parks sprinkled in for good measure.
Muddy driveways seem to dominate this area. Brown gashes leading up to every shithole house. That smooth black kind of mud that never seems to dry all the way, instead ranging from chocolate milk runny to oatmeal thick as the weather permits.
But you barely see these things along the roadside. Too sucked into that dark galaxy spiraling in your head.
You grit your teeth when you remember it. The violent encounter. The water splashing around her. The little twirls of pink drifting out of the wounds in her side.
And then the jettisoning of the spent shell. The blanketed thing thrust out in the water. The current taking her. The river doing away with her for good.
Feels like you were under a spell when it happened. So stimulated as to have moved without thought, without free will. Some unseen force gripping you around the shoulders, directing you.
It’s confusing to think back on it, to remember. You don’t know what to make of it.
The images in your head are striking, titillating, and vexing all at once. Somehow you can only replay them over and over, relive them again and again. Stare into them like the meaning might pop out of there eventually. Some explanation for any of this.
Day has broken somewhere in the midst of this internal rant, a process you recognize only vaguely from your vantage point deep within your thoughts.
A pink dawn cresting the horizon. Bars of light shooting out of that strange orb to sprawl over the asphalt before you, reaching out to vanquish the night.
You wonder, sometimes, what Callie would think if she knew. Would she disown you? Hate you? Fear you? Turn you in?
Probably. It would make a certain amount of sense.
For other people, the darkness inside themselves stays mostly covered up, maybe. Mostly blocked from their view. They can only see glimpses of it now and then.
Like when Callie saw that Channel 7 news story about a guy who let his dog freeze to death last winter, she got so upset, so disgusted, she said she hoped they put him to death. Send him to the gallows, the electric chair, the firing squad. Cut off his fucking balls first. Or shove a red hot poker up his ass.
Anything. Anything.
Make him hurt. Make him feel pain. Make his suffering last and last and last.
And you could understand that. The story was pretty pitiful. The pup had tried to crawl under its house in the end, tried to dig down into the cold, cold ground. It was the only way it could think to keep warm, to survive.
Anyway, her outburst wasn’t so different from the feelings you have sometimes, was it? The dark impulses that come over you without warning, that seem to compel you to act out in ways you don’t really understand.
Other people could never see that you are both of these things, though. The one who loves Callie and the one who goes out to kill. You are both at once. Everyone is both at once.
Gentle and violent. Light and dark. Love and hate.
Just as she is a kind and gentle person who periodically has these violent fantasies about people who abuse animals or molest children. Sweet and funny but still with that streak of darkness somewhere in there. She is both.
We all hold that inside of us, you think. That lust for violence, for vengeance. That urge to lash out, to maim, to kill. Sometimes it doesn’t quite make sense to us, and sometimes it hides where we can’t see it.
But it’s always there. Always. The darkness is always there.
You blink now, noticing how bright it’s gotten outside. The sun is fully risen, and it beams down from behind a bank of clouds.
You’ve been driving around for hours without even realizing it.
This always happens after. After a kill. You seem to lose yourself for a time. Like an unanchored boat drifting out to sea. Floating aimlessly.
And you know that you should get home, get cleaned up, but you’re not ready. Not ready for your thoughts to slow down, not ready for this to be over.
You want to understand it first. Even if you know you can’t, you want to keep moving. Keep going until you understand.
Chapter 23
Darger sat forward in her seat, staring at Furbush’s secretary with intensity. She wanted to hear more about this cold case.
“When was this?”
Marcy’s eyes shifted between Darger and Furbush now, bright with nerves and perhaps a little excitement at finding herself the center of attention.
“1999. May, I think.”
Wrinkles of disbelief lined the Chief’s forehead.
“You remember it down to the month?”
“It was just before we… before I graduated. Christy and I were in the same class. It was all everyone talked about for the rest of school through commencement. Our class planted a Crape Myrtle in front of the auditorium and dedicated it to her. There’s a plaque and everything.”
Darger turned to face Furbush, feeling a growing excitement in her gut. Finding a connection to a cold case was just the kind of thing that could break an investigation like this wide open. But they’d need to see the files first.
“Do you have the old case files here?” Darger asked.
“It was before my time, but I’m sure we do. The thing is, 1999 would still have been mostly paper. This department only went fully digital in 2007, but not all the old stuff has been transferred over,” Furbush said, then paused and exchanged a glance with Marcy. “We’ll have to check the records room.”
Picking up on the hesitation, Darger crossed her arms.
“Is that a problem?”
“Well, we just moved into this building about six months ago. The records room is still in need of… a bit of organization.”
“It’s in total disarray,” Marcy interjected. “It’ll take me some time to locate the file in that mess.”
Fowles had been so quiet for the last several minutes that Darger had nearly forgotten he was there. When he spoke from just behind her right shoulder, she jumped a little, startled.
“I can help look,” he offered.
Furbush clapped his hands together.
“Excellent.”
As Fowles followed Marcy out of the conference room, the Chief assigned various tasks to the rest of his men until only Darger and the two detectives remained.
“What’s the status on the evidence recovered from the Mead place? The candy wrappers and whatnot?”
Portnoy, an older detective with a large, coffee-colored birthmark on his cheek, answered.
“I know they recovered a partial thumbprint from one of the bottles. They’re still working through all of it.”
“We swabbed everything for DNA,” Kwan added. “It’ll be a few weeks before we hear back from the lab on whether there’s anything to analyze.”
“I know I’m playing catch-up here,” Darger said, “so forgive me if I’m rehashing work you’ve already done.”
“Go ahead.”
“I was wondering if there was anything noteworthy on the school surveillance cameras the night Shannon Mead disappeared.”
Detective Kwan was already shaking his head.
“The only outdoor cameras are mounted at the entrances and exits of the school. Neither parking lot is visible in any of the footage, so we can’t see the car that picked her up. But we do have Shannon Mead on camera leaving the school at 6:47 PM.”
“What about the witness? Kathryn Porter?”
“She’s on there, too. She comes out about ten or fifteen minutes after Ms. Mead.”
Darger nodded, satisfied that they’d been thorough on this front.
“Any chance she called a cab that night?”
“We checked her credit cards. No record of paying for a ride,” Furbush explained.
“What about talking to the cab companies directly? See if any of their drivers remember a pick-up at the school?”
Furbush pawed at his chin with a thick-fingered hand.
“Wouldn’t hurt. There are only two local cab services in town, and I can’t imagine they routinely get called out to the school.”
He waggled a finger at Kwan and Portnoy.
“Why don’t you two explore that avenue?” he said, the turned to Darger. “And while we wait for Marcy and Fowles to unearth that old case file, I think there’s someone you and I can talk to. Someone who would know the Christy Whitmore case intimately.”
* * *
Chief Furbush’s predecessor, Bart Milton, had been on the force at the time of the Whitmore murder. He’d retired six years ago, but he still lived in town. Furbush found Milton’s phone number in one of the old department contact sheets and gave him a call. The former Chief of Police said he’d be happy to fill them in on the case, so as Marcy and Fowles headed up to sift through the files in the records room, Darger and Furbush climbed into his Explorer and drove out to Milton’s house.
Milton lived in a small cottage in the outskirts of town, with a nice view of the Sandy River out his back door. An elderly golden retriever lounging on the porch got slowly to its feet as they exited Furbush’s SUV.
An old man with a pair of hairy caterpillars for eyebrows and a waxed handlebar mustache greeted them at the door.
“Come on inside. I’ll make some coffee.”
He pointed to a mat near the door where they could leave their muddy boots. Darger slid hers off and set them beside the orderly row of items already there: rubber galoshes, Reeboks, loafers, and a pair of polished black boots of the same type Milton had probably worn with his police uniform when he was still Chief.
In socked feet, Darger and Furbush padded after Milton into the kitchen of the small cottage. Like the rest of what Darger had seen of the place, it was clean and sparse. There was a sort of military efficiency to the way things were organized. There were no dirty dishes to be found on the counter or in the sink. A single bowl, mug, spoon, and saucepan dried on a rack nearby. The remnants of a bachelor’s breakfast, which he promptly cleaned up as soon as he was finished.
Milton pressed the button on an electric kettle. Almost instantly, it began to rumble and gurgle. His eyes flicked over to Darger.
“You a Fed?” he asked.
“Uh, sort of. I’m a consultant at the moment,” she said. “Is it that obvious?”
“For me, it is. Just something you get a feel for after a few decades in law enforcement. I can walk into a crowded room and the cops stick out at me like a porcupine on a nude beach.”
Darger snorted at the colorful analogy.
Milton turned and gestured at the dog, who had followed them inside and now stood watching them from the kitchen doorway, tail swaying back and forth in slow arcs.
“Daisy don’t show it much, but she’s happy as a clam you’re here. We don’t get too many visitors.”
Darger wondered if he was voicing his own loneliness through the dog. Daisy’s muzzle was upturned into a lazy canine smile, sure, but she looked happy the way a lot of dogs always looked happy.
“Anyway. The Whitmore case,” he said. “I remember it well. Never sits right when a case goes unsolved, but there are always a handful that really stick with you. Christy Whitmore was one of those, for me. I think about her probably once a week. I’ll drive past her mother’s house or the tree they planted out at the school. Can’t help but feel like I missed something.”
The kettle came to a full boil, hissing and spitting. Milton switched it off, opened the cabinet, and plucked three mugs from the shelf.
He filled each cup three-quarters of the way with hot water, then added a generous spoonful of instant coffee from a jar, stirring to dissolve the brown crystals. He handed one of the mugs of murky brown liquid to Darger and another to Furbush.
“Dress it up how you like it,” he said, gesturing to a half-gallon of 2% milk and a jar of sugar he’d set out on the table.
Darger added a splash of milk and took a sip.
About the best thing she could say about it was that it was hot. It looked like coffee, and even kind of smelled like coffee, but the texture was all wrong. It was watery, with a strange chemical sweetness and powdery mouth-feel she always noted with instant coffee.
“Why don’t we go sit in the sunroom and talk?”
He led them to a room on the back of the house with wall-to-wall windows offering the best view of the river out back. It was furnished with a set of wicker furniture — a sofa and two chairs. Milton took one of the chairs while Darger and Furbush shared the couch.
“I imagine the Whitmore murder was a big shock in a small town like this,” Darger said. “The violent crime rate must be pretty low.”
Both men nodded. Milton blew over the top of his cup, took a sip, and then spoke.
“I was a detective up in Spokane before I came out here. And you’re right. This place was a cakewalk by comparison. The kind of town where no one locks their doors. Where they add stoplights less due to heavy traffic and more as a conversation piece. But the Whitmore murder got people scared. I had a sense that everything changed after that.”
Daisy plodded into the room and plopped down by Milton’s side, chin resting on her paws.
“Happened at the Whitmore place. Upstairs bathroom off the guest room, one that didn’t get much use. They found her face down in one of those big clawfoot tubs that’ll probably outlive all of us. Hair all fanned out in the water. Body bruised up pretty good. Best we could tell it’d happened in the afternoon — the water temp made the time of death tricky to pin down to anything more specific than an 18-hour window — but nobody found her until the following evening. Her mother, of course.”
Eyes on the ceiling, Milton went on.
“I still remember her 911 call. Hysterical. A shrill sound in
my ear, gurgling out syllables that didn’t seem to be forming words. Took me more than a full minute to make out what she was saying.”
His lips twitched after that, but he said no more.
“Did you like anyone for it? Back then, I mean?”
Milton reached down to pat Daisy’s head, stroking the red-blonde fur.
“All dead ends. We looked at the family first, given the nature of the crime. The father was out of the picture from a young age, living in New Zealand. Or maybe it was Fiji. Somewhere out there in the South Pacific. We ruled the mother out right away because she’d been at work at the time of the murder. She was a nurse. Pulled a double-shift at the nursing home she worked at the day Christy died, otherwise she would have been discovered sooner. No siblings or other family in the area.”
The former Chief took a long pull from his coffee cup and swallowed with a satisfied sigh.
“There was an ex-boyfriend, some other classmates we gave a once over. Nothing came of it. We gave one other fella a look-see, name of Bradley Wright. He was known around the neighborhood as someone to hire for odd jobs. Cleaning gutters, fixing leaky toilets, and so on. He’d done a little roof repair for Ms. Whitmore the year before the murder. We did a little digging, turns out he was a registered sex offender. Gross Sexual Imposition was the actual charge, from back in Ohio, which was apparently where he hailed from. The prior was twenty years old at that point, but we gave him a good look anyway. Thought we had our guy for hot minute, too, but he ended up with a pretty solid alibi. And then everything just seemed to dry up.”
Darger turned to Chief Furbush.
“Might be worth a shot to see if Bradley Wright is still in the area.”
“Oh, he’s in the area, alright,” Milton said with a decisive nod.
Darger sat up a little straighter. “Yeah?”
“He’s got a place out at Fir Hill.”