“I’m good,” she said. “Thank you, Officer Primanti.”
Darger picked her way closer to the group. The inside of her respirator was warm and humid from her breath. She’d been breathing through her mouth since she got out of her car, not sure if the filters in the mask were capable of blocking out the smell or not. The stench was strong enough in the parking lot. She could imagine how much more intense it would be when she was standing on the ragged slopes of Mount Dung.
She trudged through more slop. Feet sinking and squishing. Eyes drifting up now and then to watch the seagulls above as they zipped around, squawking like crazy.
When Darger finally reached the group, Loshak clapped her on the shoulder
“Hope the traffic wasn’t too rough,” Loshak said.
“Not as rough as the walk over here,” she said. “Less smelly, too.”
Loshak chuckled.
“Detective Ambrose, this is my partner, Agent Darger.”
The detective lowered his mask to greet her. He was an older black man with a shaved head and a graying goatee.
“We appreciate you coming up,” he said.
Their gloves made a faint squeaking sound as the two rubbery surfaces made contact.
“I was just telling Agent Loshak, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. To have three bodies that we can’t even officially label as homicide victims? But then the state of the bodies…” He blew out a breath. “The medical examiner is conducting the autopsies right now, so I’ve got my fingers crossed he can give us something to work with.”
“Any luck pinpointing where the bodies might have come from?” Darger almost had to yell to be heard over the sounds of a nearby bulldozer.
“We’re working on it now. Sorting everything in the immediate vicinity of the bodies.” Ambrose wagged a finger in the direction of a group of techs in an area marked off by red string. “The techs are all divided into pairs. One person sorts, the other person logs what they find. We’re tracking any addresses on mail or paper receipts.”
“And you can use that information to track the vicinity the trash came from?”
“That’s what they tell me,” Ambrose said with a shrug.
“They?”
Ambrose pointed out another suited figure with hair dyed a dark mahogany red about twenty yards away and held up a hand. The woman caught sight of this gesture and approached.
The closer she got, the more Darger realized how tiny she was. Not an inch over five feet, if she had to guess.
“This is Agent Ana Zaragoza from the state crime lab,” Ambrose said. “She’s really the one running the show.”
Zaragoza reached up to adjust a pair of teal cat eye glasses and nodded at Darger.
“Detective Ambrose was telling me you can sort and log the trash to narrow down where the bodies might have originally been dumped?”
“That’s right. According to the manager of the facility, they’re able to identify the original source down to a single city block in some cases.” Zaragoza tapped and swiped at the screen of an iPad as she spoke.
“And that’s something they do often?” Darger asked. “Track where their garbage comes from?”
“It’s a post-9/11 thing. All municipal waste facilities in the country are required to monitor the incoming loads for the presence of radiation. And when they do detect it, they have to be able to figure where it came from. So they already have a system in place. I’m just… improving upon it.”
Ambrose propped his fists on his hips.
“She’s a machine. When I got here after the first body was discovered, I wanted to get down on my knees and weep.”
Agent Zaragoza finally glanced up from the screen long enough to roll her eyes.
“I told you already, Clark. Kissing my ass isn’t going to get the job done any faster.”
“I’m not kissing anything. Just telling it like it is.”
“Anyway,” Zaragoza said, “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta get back to it.”
After the small woman had stalked back over to the bustling techs sorting through the refuse, Detective Ambrose swiveled to face Darger.
“Zaragoza doesn’t mean to be rude. She’s one of those people with such a laser-like focus that she sometimes forgets the niceties.”
“No offense taken,” Darger said. “I’ll take competence over politeness any day.”
Loshak snorted.
“You can say that again.”
“Shut it,” Darger said, glaring at him.
“Case in point.”
The sound of an old rotary phone jangled from somewhere, and Ambrose pulled a phone from his pocket and glanced at the screen.
“This asshole again,” Ambrose muttered, scowling. “Captain thought it would appease the mayor to give him my direct number for updates, but now he thinks he’s got permission to call me every half hour. Every time I tell him we’re still working on it, he gets a little more frantic.”
Detective Ambrose stepped away to take the call, leaving Darger and Loshak to stand near the corner of one of the three rectangular areas marked off by red string.
“I’m assuming each marked section represents where they found one of the three bodies?” Darger asked.
“That’s right,” Loshak said.
“But the assumption right now is that the bodies were dumped together in the same dumpster.”
“Right again. I guess the garbage gets spread around quite a bit after dumping. They bring in the bulldozers to situate everything to their liking. So that’s how waste from one dumpster can end up spread out over a larger area. At least that’s how it was explained to me.”
Two screeching seagulls swooped overhead, one chasing the other. Darger squinted at the shapes wheeling around in the air above them.
“I wonder what this looks like to them. All of us down here bustling around in our coveralls.”
Loshak craned his neck to look at the two birds.
“Oh I doubt we’re much more than small specks of white in a vast sea of trash to them,” Loshak said. “Tiny and insignificant.”
Chapter 3
After several minutes of watching the crew work as an idle bystander, Darger grew impatient. She was beginning to sweat beneath the suit and mask.
“I feel kinda guilty just standing here,” she said. “Should we offer to help? This seems like an all-hands-on-deck kind of scenario.”
“I offered several times, but Agent Zaragoza was adamant that her people do the sorting, and Detective Ambrose concurred.” Loshak shrugged. “Their crime scene, their decision.”
“Yeah,” Darger muttered, though she wasn’t sure what the fuss was all about. This crime scene was already cross-contaminated to hell and back. She didn’t see how having a few extra hands aiding in the sorting could possibly make things worse. But the local jurisdictions were always a bit sensitive about the feds horning in on their cases, so she and Loshak generally did what they could to avoid conflict.
Darger watched the crime lab techs sift through the trash and marveled at the full array of colors represented there. A red Dixie cup. An empty jug of Tide detergent in orange. Yellow and green on a crushed two-liter of Squirt. A blue laundry basket. A rainbow of plastic that would never biodegrade.
“Seeing all this stuff kinda makes me tempted to become one of those zero-waste nuts,” Darger said. “You know, the people who start using rags instead of toilet paper and refuse to buy anything packaged in plastic?”
Loshak scoffed.
“Rags? Ass rags? Have these people not heard of a bidet?”
Darger chewed her bottom lip.
“I had an apartment with a bidet once, but I was too afraid to use it.”
“Afraid? What’s so scary about a little bit of water?”
“I turned it on once to see how it worked, and it shot out a jet of water that went all the way up to the ceiling. Seemed like too much power for my comfort.”
Loshak wheezed out a laugh.
“Jan
and I got into an argument once. She was real particular about recycling everything. Every bottle. Every can. The thing is, you can’t just empty a tub of yogurt and toss it in the bin. You have to wash it out. Get rid of all the food residue. A real pain in the ass, right? I went along with it for a while, but at some point, I wondered how many hours of my life I’d already spent washing the garbage and how many more I was willing to give. Was every other family in town washing their garbage so diligently? Not likely. I guess it was around that time I started having my doubts about the recycling industry as a whole. Whole thing doesn’t add up.”
Darger squinted.
“So what I’m hearing is that you’re a terrible person who hates the environment and the children.”
“That’s pretty much what Jan said when she caught me chucking an empty peanut butter jar. She went off. Told me I obviously didn’t give a shit about the environment and was no better than a common litterbug.”
“She told you,” Darger said, smirking.
“I want to be clear about something: I do give a shit about the environment. I give a pretty big shit, as a matter of fact. But it wasn’t only about the time wasted washing trash. I’d thought about the logistics of a residential recycling program and realized there was no way they were really recycling everything they picked up. There was too much of it, and they didn’t even make us sort it. So you know that for every Jan out there washing each lid and jar, there’s two or three jagoffs tossing in empty cans of baked beans without rinsing at all, right?”
“Probably,” Darger agreed.
“We were living in Fredericksburg at the time. That’s a town of about ten thousand households. And every two weeks the city is picking up sixty to a hundred gallons of unsorted recycling from each one. I should mention that the recycling pickup was built into the contract the city negotiated with the waste company. You could opt-out and arrange your own service from an alternate company, but it was more expensive. I doubt anyone did that.” Loshak paused for a moment, adjusting his face mask. “So I did some math. I know not everyone is as diligent as Jan, so let’s say only half of those households are actually recycling anything. That’s still 300,000 gallons of recycling to sort through every two weeks. And I’m supposed to believe that the waste management company is hiring people to stand around and pick through our nasty garbage just so they can be good little tree-huggers? Not happening.”
“You know there’s a chance you’ve thought about this way too much?” Darger asked.
Loshak held up a finger.
“I’m just saying, I knew it wasn’t feasible. Not in any way, shape, or form. Even if we were all Jans, they’d still have to go through the process of sorting the various plastics, removing labels, and on and on. So I’d been thinking for a while that this had to be a big scam to make us all feel like we’re doing our part to save the environment and all that. Anyway, Jan and I got in a big fight over it. She’s yelling about me destroying the planet, and I’m hollering about how I’d love to save the planet but washing out a peanut butter jar wasn’t doing shit in that arena.”
“I bet that went over well.”
Loshak raised his eyebrows and sighed.
“I should probably mention that this was when Shelly first got sick, so I think the fight was more about venting some of the pent up pressure surrounding all of that. Because when your kid is sick, you gotta put on a brave face. You have to smile when you tell everyone how positive things are looking with treatment, even when inside, you’re scared shitless. Anyway, I was so mad after our argument that I halfway considered following one of the trucks after a pickup to see where they went. I could just imagine tailing them back to the landfill and watching them dump the garbage and the recycling right in the same pile.”
“Did you?”
“No,” Loshak said, shrugging. “I told you, the fight was more about Shelly than anything else. But the point I’m getting to is that a story came out a month or two back about how the whole idea of recycling plastic was a marketing ploy. A lot of what we turn into the recycling places ends up buried at the landfill. See, they knew the public felt kinda guilty about buying all this plastic crap that we just end up throwing out. Because we all know the math. It takes something like a thousand years for a plastic bag to break down. Four hundred years for that Mountain Dew bottle over there. Even the least granola among us don’t like that idea. Seems wrong. Wasteful. Stupid. So they sold us this pretty fairytale about how we could recycle the plastic and reuse it over and over. But it’s bullshit. They’ve known since the seventies that recycling plastic would never be viable. For starters, every time they melt it down to reuse, it degrades, so they can only do that once or twice before it’s toast. So all in all, less than ten percent of plastic gets recycled. The whole idea of recycling plastic is a PR sham concocted by the petroleum industry.”
“Less than ten percent?” Darger asked, gritting her teeth. “Jesus. That’s pitiful.”
“No kidding.” Loshak frowned. “There’s probably a special place in hell for the petroleum industry executives. Right next to the people that don’t pick up dog shit in public places.”
Darger looked out over the expanse of trash and wondered how many tons of plastic were here in this one landfill alone. She felt her blood pressure rise at the idea that people could get away with lying on such a massive scale. It was infuriating. Eventually, though, her mind returned to Loshak’s original story.
She glanced over at him.
“So have you told her yet?”
“Told who what?” Loshak asked.
“Told Jan that you were right about recycling being a load of crap.”
“No,” Loshak said, crossing his arms.
“Good.” Darger nodded once. “Don’t.”
Loshak smiled.
“Not my first rodeo, kid.”
Chapter 4
Darger scanned the area for Detective Ambrose and found that he’d moved some distance away, standing a little farther down the slop, his feet and ankles submerged in what looked like reams of soggy paper. His phone still pressed tightly to the ear with the rumple of the hazmat suit’s hood bunched behind it, and Darger figured he’d been trying to get as far from the sound of the bulldozer as he could.
“Well, I was going to wait for Detective Ambrose to get back before we started talking shop, but you know I can only be patient for so long,” she said. “What the hell is going on here? You ever seen anything like it?”
“Can’t say that I have,” Loshak said.
“Any theories?”
“Nothing solid. And even though we can’t say with absolute certainty that we’re dealing with homicides, I think we’re all thinking it’s gonna tip that way eventually. People wouldn’t dispose of bodies, multiple bodies, like this unless there was something to hide.”
“Right. So, let’s assume for now that this is, in fact, a homicide case.”
“OK.” Loshak pursed his lips. “Well, the fact that we’ve got a mix of male and female victims kind of skews things away from a serial killer. It doesn’t rule it out of course. There are examples.”
“Richard Ramirez, Dennis Rader, the Zodiac,” Darger said. “But they were always primarily fixated on and motivated by the female victims. The male victims were generally someone who stood in their way.”
“Exactly,” Loshak agreed. “Multiple victims could also point to a mass killing of some kind. But I don’t know if I can think of an example of a mass murderer that killed his victims and then disposed of the bodies. They tend to kill them in an outburst and leave them where they fall, so to speak. More akin to smash and grab robberies. In and out. The higher the body count the better.”
“There’s also the publicity factor,” Darger added.
“Yep. Most mass murderers have an interest in creating a spectacle. You could say the same for the guys you mentioned before. Ramirez, Rader, and Zodiac. They, too, wanted their crimes to be public. They wanted people scared. That was part of the dr
aw for them. But whoever did this was obviously trying to cover it up.”
They were silent for a moment.
“I tried the gang angle,” he said. “The drug cartels sometimes dump bodies like this, in groups. But we’re right outside Philadelphia. Not exactly a hot cartel area.”
“And why would a cartel choose a dumpster when there are a thousand remote wooded areas they could have hidden the bodies?” Darger asked.
Loshak scratched under the edge of his mask.
“There’s definitely a disorganized feel to all of it. On the one hand, this guy wanted to get rid of the bodies, but then it seems like he didn’t do a whole lot of thinking as to the best way to do it. I mean, it seems like dumping them was almost an afterthought.”
“Or panic.”
“Yeah. Could be that.”
“Then there’s the condition of the bodies,” Darger said. “I know we’re still waiting on the full report from the medical examiner, but they sure looked like people who’d been starved to me.”
“Me too.”
“My first thought when I saw the photographs of the bodies was that case out in California where the parents had tied up and starved their thirteen kids.”
“Oh right, I remember that.” Loshak removed his hard hat and ran his fingers through his hair a few times before replacing it. “I assumed they must have had a compound out in the boonies or something when I heard the story. And then I saw the pictures. It was a big house in the middle of an upper-middle-class subdivision. Neighbors all around. I couldn’t believe the parents had gotten away with the abuse for so long. I mean, some of the kids were adults, right?”
“Several of them were over eighteen, yeah. But they were so malnourished that all the neighbors thought they were much younger. The oldest was twenty-nine and weighed eighty-two pounds. The one who escaped and called 911 was seventeen, but when the police first arrived, they thought she was twelve.”
Loshak’s mouth was a grim line.
“Almost unimaginable. But I’m glad you brought that case up. It might actually give us some insight into what we’re dealing with here. Because honestly, I’ve been stumped up until now.”
Violet Darger | Book 7 | Dark Passage Page 2