The Coworker: The First Nate Castle

by Vernon Rush

  He looked down to his paper to pretend to write, just to buy time to deal with his reaction. He hadn’t paid attention previously, but the paper he had pinched from Daria’s bag had been the back of something, a pleading. Nate was about to turn it over when his eyes narrowed. The name on the pleading caption he did recognize. Weston & Hale.

  Nate glanced around as covertly as he could for Daria’s messenger bag. The pen in his fingers rattled against the cookie sheet. Suddenly the moment was awkward. The atmosphere in the room changed as an unspoken revelation was made to both of them. Nate knew and Daria knew he knew.

  Jack sent another text. Nate was too disturbed to look at it. As he hesitated, Daria easily slipped the phone from his paralyzed clutches. “Let’s see what he sent now,” she said, pressing the cookie sheet steady so that she could read the paper flat against the cookie sheet. “Oh, someone went into my bag, I see,” she remarked coolly, as she opened up the second picture Jack had sent. Another picture of her. “Not my best shot and not my favorite name, I gotta say.” She stood up, her messenger bag strapped across her shoulder.

  Nate was terrified of his friend as facts about her fell into place neatly and clearly, once and for all. His friend, who as a paralegal had been employed under various names, undetected at the firm of Weston & Hale and likely Dublin & Myers, had connection to both venues and all victims. She would have been completely trusted by anyone who needed a ride. She would have had access to their schedules, their comings and goings. And as an assistant to him in the investigations, she would have been ahead of the game, every step of the way. She’d also tried her best to run interference with his connecting with Emily. No wonder Emily didn’t know her name. Daria never went by it.

  Besides that, she had his phone. His fear-paralysis had put him at a major disadvantage. He knew, just from a psychological vista, that Daria, as a hoarder, probably knew every inch of the waste-strewn house. He could try his best to run for the door but he would likely fall on his face. Any place he looked, with piles and piles of stuff everywhere, he could fall into a potential tomb. Daria could just push stuff onto him and he would be buried alive. Claustrophobia rose in him like a flash flood and he became wet from head to toe with the sweat of terror.

  “Jesus Christ, Daria!” he cried out in a panic. “You knew I was investigating. We would figure it out sooner or later. Is that why you invited me here?”

  “Calm down,” she said coolly.

  “He’s going to be here,” he sputtered, shaking to a jelly more and more by the second.

  “Who’s that? Wilcox?” Daria smiled. “Oh, I will handle him.”

  “Don’t handle him, for shit’s sake. He has children.”

  “Yeah and I don’t!” she torqued. “I don’t. I deserve to have children! I deserve to be a lawyer or whatever I wanted to be! I wouldn’t have squandered any of it by being average. I wouldn’t have squandered the advantages they had.”

  Nate couldn’t let that one go, no matter. “Yvonne Winters was working class. She got where she was because she—”

  “She didn’t deserve where she was. Blond. That’s how come.” It was not a good sign that Daria’s sentences were degenerating to make less sense. She laughed with her faded red lipstick sinister smile and bugged her eyes out wide. “How many times can a person get hired in this one-hour town before she gets noticed? How can she go under the radar like that? I mean, she kills people in what might as well be the smallest town around and no one thinks of her. She had to tell on herself.”

  Confused by her third person, Nate asked, “Which ‘she’ are we talking about?”

  “Daria, dumbass!” she snapped. “She was blond too, by the way.”

  “Still is,” he answered meekly.

  Daria cut her eyes at him with wild expression.

  He was witnessing a psychotic split for sure. “Daria, it’s done. ‘She’ didn’t have to tell on herself to figure things out. She was found out.” Nate knew that countering her would likely agitate her and throw her off her game. It worked.

  “I was not found out! I had to tell you!” she screamed. “All that bullshit about peripheral and coworker murders and solving the case by looking at the people next to the stupid, dumb-dumb victims. Oh, goodness, were they dumb! What was wrong with Daria? She was blond. She was cute. She was smart. Why didn’t her mother love her? She didn’t make any daddy go away!”

  “You can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell us we never noticed you and then get pissed at us for finally finding you,” he argued.

  “Noticed ‘her’! Not me. Get it right.” Daria was vehement. “Not me. Get the shit right!”

  “I always had to kiss ass and hide behind a fake ass smile and personality, I seem to master it well she smirked.” Thinking she was his friend, only to know she was disguise by a mask of deception and hidden rage.

  “Where do we go from here?” Nate asked quietly.

  “Well,” Daria chuckled. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Survival mode kicked in full blast with him. But he started feeling a little woozy, from the coffee.

  “I didn’t poison you,” she said. “I put a sedative, just to weaken you.”

  He sensed she didn’t have any weapon against him at the moment, except for fear and maybe the messenger bag. And his phone. He began to stagger and his speech slurred, a feeling he was accustomed to from getting drunk. He was going to rush her and if, somehow, she got the better of him, his plan B—and really his best bet—was to talk her into killing herself and letting him go.

  Trying not to give any tells, he plowed into her at the midsection. Daria was not exactly average height. As his body hit hers, he was trying to figure out how in the world someone had missed her. He was hoping he wouldn’t miss her now.

  Alas, she whipped out a heavy iron chain from the confines of her bag. She pressed it around the back of his neck and, on reflex, he stood. With him doing that, she could continue wrapping it around to choke him. The woman had a strong grip and a being psychopath didn’t help.

  He had to find it in his nature to hurt her bad. To divest the friend he had from the murderer who was trying her best to see him dead. Blind from complete disorientation, he grappled for her head to break her neck. He fumbled, was less than efficient, and she bit him hard. She swept his feet and if she got him down, he feared, she would finish him.

  He knocked the chain out her hand, but somehow she reached for the bag and pulled out a bloodstained butcher knife. He stepped back into something gushy. He flinched and that was all that she need to get him down. He fell against a bed of trash, mercifully causing her hold to slack off.

  Nate blithered.

  Daria laughed.

  Still woozy and holding both of her wrists, as the stained knife point and with her cold vindictive eyes staring right at him, he heard the shot.

  Her body slumped over his.

  ***

  Daria was dead.

  And that’s how it ended. It was like there was a bang and Daria fell through a trap door. Only her costume remained in a crumple on the floor. Daria was gone forever.

  “Hey,” a soft voice said above him. “Dr. Castle, you can let go now.”

  Nate still clutched the iron chain that had been meant to be his murder weapon. He feared if he let go he would lose the control he had over it. He wanted to be sure to keep it at bay. He opened his eyes and saw Det. Dan Klein hovering above him.

  He wept, not from relief but from fear. He didn’t have it in him to fend off one psycho; he certainly had nothing left against this one. “Just do what you gotta do right now,” he sobbed.

  There was a din of voices, a bustling, and sirens filling the air. Soon enough, Jack Wilcox joined Dan Klein’s face above his. Nate was thoroughly confused now, but no matter; if Jack was there, Nate knew he would not die.

  “It’s over, my friend,” Jack said. “It’s over. You did it. You worked the case. You solved it.”

  It was not solved. Nate had figu
red out what had been killing the women of Frederick, but he would never fully understand who and why the Coworker Murderer was. Peripheral. Hidden in Plain Sight and yet he absolutely could not see the connection. Not then and not now. He added one more reason why serial killers hide themselves in plain sight. He thought, for a hair of a split second, it was because they wanted—for once—to feel that connection to a human being. To have someone care enough to see them. Nate had failed his friend miserably.

  Nate closed his eyes. He pretended he was sinking into the same abyss, following his friend for as long as he could, wherever she went, so she wouldn’t be alone. And still, he could not see her.

  Epilogue

  Much to Dr. Nate Castle’s surprise, Jerry’s of Frederick was not a place just for getting royally drunk. It also offered a five star menu and served an unforgettable, butter-soft filet mignon. As a practicing drunk, Nate relied on his recollection of menu options, usually consisting of whatever was quickest to slow down his recession into a horrid blackout. Many a time, he awoke with parts of a burger on his person, coming to on a lawn with a to-go container not far off. And he was always finding an errant fry in his clothing. As hungry as he thought he got while drinking, he could never stomach more than a few bites of anything. Who could be that alcoholic in a small town with few choices, and not know the tremendous pleasures in store? It was one in a series of many things right in front of him for such a long time that Nate had missed completely.

  He sat on his front porch, fresh from dinner with Jack Wilcox and Dan Klein. His stomach had not been bloated for quite some time and he was actually able to eat a regular sized meal. He was full and sleepy. Ordinarily, he would have earphones in, listening to something or other, but he was too sensitive for any sort of stimulation at all. Silence was his serenity blanket. He would be, for a long time, emotionally frail from learning that his best—and for the longest time, only—friend had been the murderer he had been searching for, for years. He was plagued with guilt that more women had died because he just couldn’t see then what was so obvious now. He could have saved Daria.

  Jack Wilcox said she was made up. There was nothing to save. A mass of emotional scars of a loveless life. Jack said Nate had loved her too late. She was just an idea, not a real person. But Nate knew she had been real.

  The character who was not real was Dan Klein. Jack had orchestrated the whole stalking thing after learning that Dan had actually read Nate’s book. Jack noticed that after Nate’s life involved more people than Daria, Daria started whacking out. Jack also realized that throughout the investigation of each crime, Nate was a common denominator. He made the word “peripheral’ his guide. Jack had detailed Klein to tail Daria and it made sense for the integrity of the investigation to do so under cover. Klein followed anyone around, including Nate. That was the real reason Nate had been arrested the second he used his cellphone in the car. Jack had apologized for the zealous nature of his colleague.

  When Jack had confessed that Det. Dan Klein was not, in fact, Nate’s stalker, Nate had replied, “It seems we have to lie about who we are.”

  As for being true to himself, Nate quit teaching. Once the favorable press came out that Nate was a huge part of the success in the solving of the Coworker Murders, Bill Merit tucked tail and offered him his position back. Nate did not accept, but with no hard feelings. He wasn’t even sure that he would ever use his academic credentials or his P.I. license ever again. Jack and Dan even suggested that once this wore off—and they assured him it would—he should consider a position with the police. It might not matter if he moved or quit, he would take it with him.the knowledge.

  Emily Fabian’s black and white cat, Daria, seemed extraordinarily at home on the porch of the rooming house, and now on Nate’s lap. Daria. That made one of them. Just as Nate was about to sleep in the warmth of the burgeoning summer, his phone buzzed his pocket. Jack. What had he forgotten to tell him?

  What Nate read made him sat up straight in his chair, jolting him alert as though he’d had ten ice teas.

  Not again.

  Perhaps Nate wouldn’t be making any sudden changes after all.