by Tim McBain
“Is it cursed?”
“No,” he said, indignantly. “If anything, it’s the opposite. First time I drove it, I parked, got out, and boom — there’s a $20 bill just lying at my feet.”
Violet smirked.
“So it’s the Luckmobile in more ways than one?”
“Darn straight.”
It occurred to Darger, and not for the first time, that he had a curiously clean mouth for law enforcement. Well, she thought, it wasn’t so unusual for there to be a few Boy Scouts in the group.
“You’d think she would have seen it coming.”
“What’s that?”
“Him cheating. If she was psychic, she should have seen it coming.”
Luck chuckled.
“Maybe she did. I don’t know.”
“No way. She wouldn’t have gone after him with the shotgun like that if she’d known.”
“Maybe she was unprepared for how it would affect her.”
“No, I’m saying that if she knew, she would have loaded the gun with something more than birdshot.”
Luck fixed her with a look of combined amusement and awe.
“Remind me never to cross you.”
They were on one of the back roads that ran through the countryside. Twice they saw deer on the side on the road, grazing in between rows of drying field corn.
The van slowed, taking a right onto a long driveway shared by three trailers. The homes were well-kept if not dated, the lawns freshly cut. A green John Deere tractor was tucked under a carport added on to one of the trailers. Luck parked the van outside the back-most of the three buildings, and they climbed out.
Gravel skittered underfoot on their walk toward the front door. Her boots thudded up a wooden ramp, and before she had even knocked, Darger noticed movement at the curtain over the door. A moment later, it swung open. The pinched and lined face of a woman was thrust from inside.
“If I have to tell you reporters one more goddamn time not to trespass—”
She must have seen Luck over Darger’s shoulder because she stopped mid-sentence.
“Oh. You again.”
“We’re sorry to bother you, Mrs. Peters,” Violet said. “I’m Special Agent Darger. From the FBI.”
“FBI?”
Mrs. Peters’ penciled eyebrows levitated skyward.
“Fancy.”
If she were actually impressed she didn’t sound it. She struck Darger as a woman who was amazed by very little.
“Could we come in for a few minutes?” Darger asked.
The woman clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Without answering, she opened the door wide, and they entered.
Inside was about how Darger had imagined. It matched the outside in its 1980s charm. Brown shag carpet on the floors, dark wood paneling on the walls, and a garish green and yellow linoleum in the kitchen. But it was clean and cared for. They stood around a bar area between the kitchen and dining room. Mrs. Peters slid a glass ashtray from one side of the counter and picked up an already lit cigarette balanced on the edge of it.
“Did you say something about reporters?” Darger asked. “Have they been bothering you?”
“About once a day, one of ‘em comes up the drive. I tell ‘em where they can go. I got nothin’ to say about nothin’.”
“If they’re bugging you—” Luck started, but she brushed him off by shaking her head and throwing up her hands. A charm bracelet tinkled at her wrist.
“Nothin’ I can’t take care of myself.”
She held the cigarette between pursed lips for a moment, inhaling. Plucking it from her mouth, she let out a long stream of smoke.
“You need me to identify the body or whatever?”
“No, ma’am,” Luck said. “We’ve got her fingerprints on file, so that’s all been taken care of.”
“Of course you do.”
Patricia Peters ground the smoldering end of the Newport into the ashtray, black cinders smearing the glass.
Violet cleared her throat to speak.
“And when the county releases the body — probably today, but sometimes it takes a little extra time in the case of a homi— in certain cases. But when they do release it, any funeral home should be able to help you arrange everything.”
The woman’s thinly penciled-on eyebrows drifted higher up her forehead.
“Funeral home?”
“For the service.”
“I don’t got no money for a funeral.”
“There are programs to help cover some of the costs,” Violet offered.
The woman scoffed.
“Yeah, I know how that all works. Rope me in with promises of financial assistance, do a whole big to-do, and then you get the bill and it’s twice what they said it’d be, and the help I get is peanuts. No thanks.”
Violet laid a hand on the woman’s pruned fingers, which earned her a withering look. She pulled back as if she’d been burned by the woman’s touch.
“I really think you should consider it. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but taking a moment to remember Sierra with family and friends is an important part of the grieving process.”
The woman’s nostrils flared.
“Lady, have you ever had a daughter murdered by a mad man?”
“I haven’t,” Violet admitted.
“Then do me a favor and don’t be telling me how to mind my business.”
Violet resisted the urge to shoot Luck an exasperated look.
“We’re trying to get an idea of what Sierra was like. Who her friends were, what she did for fun, if she’d mentioned—”
Patricia Peters cut her off.
“Look, that girl has been acting out since she was twelve years old. You think she told me anything? When I tried to discipline her, it was in one ear and out the other. She ran off every other weekend. By the time she was in high school, I’d had enough. I kicked her out of the house when she was fourteen, and that was that. She only ever came around when she wanted something from me, and usually what she wanted was to steal something to pawn so she could buy more drugs. So I don’t know what I could possibly tell you that would help.”
Darger had years of practice reserving judgment from her time as a counselor. But reserving the judgment didn’t always mean it wasn’t there. She felt an intense anger at Patricia Peters. At the kind of parent who would throw their own child out on their own at the age of fourteen. She wanted to grab the woman by the shoulders and shake her and scream in her face. Her only daughter was dead.
“OK,” was all she said.
Violet took a breath and gathered herself.
“And when was the last time you talked to her?”
Patricia Peters rolled her eyes and picked up her lighter so she could light another cigarette.
“I already told this one,” she said, gesturing at Luck. “How many times are we going to have this same conversation?”
“Just one more time, if you don’t mind,” Darger said, pasting a weak smile on her face.
The Bic clattered to the table, and Patricia took a long drag.
“The day before, I guess it was,” she said, smoke billowing from her nose and mouth as she spoke.
“And what did you talk about?”
“She wanted—”
Patricia hesitated. Her forehead twitched into a matrix of lines, but only for a moment. She lifted the cigarette, and her mask of detachment returned.
“She wanted to come stay here, I think.”
Something familiar tugged at Darger’s memory.
“Did you have an argument?”
Patricia stared her down with a defiant look in her eyes like she thought Darger was accusing her of something.
“Yes.”
“Do you mind telling me what it was about?”
Patricia sucked at the cigarette.
“She came by last week. When I wasn’t home. And she ain’t supposed to come in here when I’m not at home because things have a tendency to go missing. But she managed to get by Terry
, that’s my husband. He don’t know how to handle her. Anyway, I get off my shift and come back here to find that she stole a ring. It was her daddy’s mama’s ring, but he gave it to me. That is my ring.”
Darger could still hear Sierra screaming into the phone, telling her mother she hated her, blaming her for taking her stepfather’s side of the story over hers.
“Was it a moonstone ring?”
Patricia’s head snapped up at that.
“Yeah. Why? You find it?”
“No, but we’re on the lookout for it, in case it shows up at any area pawn shops,” Violet said.
“Well if you do find it, I want it back. It belongs to me.”
“Would you happen to have a picture of it?” Violet asked.
Bony fingers stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray.
“No. Why would I? Who takes pictures of their jewelry? Is that a rich person thing?”
“I meant that maybe you had a photograph of someone wearing the ring.”
“Oh,” Patricia said, pursing her lips like she had a bad taste in her mouth. “Not that I know of.”
Darger glanced at Luck. He shrugged at her like, Don’t ask me. This is your show.
“I guess that’s about it,” Darger said with a sigh.
She took out a card and placed it on the table, writing her hotel room and phone number on the back, just in case.
“I think we’ve taken enough of your time. If you think of anything—”
“Yeah, yeah. I know the drill. Give you a call.”
On the porch, before Patricia closed the door on them, Violet turned back.
“Mrs. Peters, would you… mind if I set up a small service for her?”
Patricia leaned through the door frame, one hand on the handle, ready to pull it closed.
“Do whatever the hell you want. Don’t matter to me. And it definitely don’t matter to my girl. She’s dead.”
The door shut with a thud and a rattle. It had started raining while they were in the house, and for a moment Violet paused there, listening to the patter. Without giving it much thought, she put her palm out to feel the cool sprinkle of the droplets against her skin. Some kind of habit left over from childhood, she supposed.
“You coming?”
Luck’s voice broke the spell, and she crunched over the gravel and into the van.
“Christ,” Darger said as her door thumped shut.
He started back down the driveway.
“I told you.”
“Yeah. You did.”
A somber quiet fell over them for some time. The steady drumming on the roof seemed to lull Violet into a kind of trance. She stared through the rain-streaked glass of her window. As they sped through an intersection, the green light from a traffic signal lit up each droplet.
Life was always ten thousand times more complicated than it seemed. In pitying Sierra, it was easy to blame her mother, but Darger had gotten her own taste of the mood swings and the treachery. Sierra would have tested the patience of any parent. She had likely been abused, had problems with addiction, and even if she’d had the resources to treat that and the underlying mental illness Darger suspected was there, life still wouldn’t have been easy for her. It would have been marked by chaotic relationships and emotional struggle.
Her brow wrinkled as she thought of Deputy Donaldson’s term for Sierra: dead end girl.
Violet thought of all the other dead end girls she’d come across. She thought about the men who preyed on them, and how even if they managed to catch one, to catch this one, there would always be someone else to take his place. Another killer. Another abuser. Another rapist.
She had the same thought she came to often after a bad day as a victim specialist.
The world is fucked.
She didn’t know how long they rode in silence, but Luck must have been feeling the bleakness as well. Or maybe her cynicism was contagious, because he asked, “Feel like a drink?”
“God, yes.”
Chapter 35
Judging solely by looks, The Elbow Room was a standard college town dive bar. The classiest thing in the place was probably the tin ceiling, which Violet figured was probably original to the building anyway. Icicle-style Christmas lights hung over the bar, and the brick walls were adorned with local sports memorabilia and neon signs for Budweiser, Heineken, and Jack Daniels.
But looks didn’t tell the whole story. The clientele did. This was the cop bar Donaldson had mentioned. Most of the guys were in civvies, but that didn’t matter. Once you learned to sniff out a cop, you could smell them a mile away. Crew cuts, mustaches, t-shirts with logos for the local Police & Fire softball league, those telltale bulges of firearms holstered to belts.
All of the seats facing the door were taken. Cops, even when they’re supposed to be unwinding, can’t get rid of the paranoia they experience day-to-day in their jobs. The habit of watching entrances and exits sticks with them whether they are busting a meth lab in some apartment downtown or having a basket of cheese sticks at the local Applebee’s.
Those who stood did so in the bladed position: instead of standing square, one foot was in front, always the non-shooting side, so for most that meant their left. It kept their gun hip away from a potential suspect and provided more room should they need to go for their weapon.
All things considered, a cop bar was the last place Darger really wanted to be. First, because Luck was likely to have plenty of chums who would want to come chat, and all Violet really wanted was to have a drink or two while blending into the upholstery. And second, all talk would likely be about the murders, and she’d had about as much of that as she could handle for the day. Her nerves were fried. She could practically hear the sizzle of the electricity as the overworked synapses fired in her brain.
She kept her mouth shut, though. The last thing she needed was to offer Luck more ammo to use against her. Too good for a cop bar? she could almost hear him ask.
They found a table at the back, in a corner dim enough that Violet felt at least marginally invisible. A willowy older woman with a black bob came by and took their order. She returned quickly with a Blue Moon — in the bottle, no glass — for Luck and a whiskey-ginger for Darger. Beads of condensation glistened on the glass, and the cold felt good under Violet’s fingers. She brought it to her lips, wanting nothing more than to guzzle the whole thing down in a single gulp, but she restrained herself, sipping demurely at the little straw instead.
Detective Luck frowned down at his bottle, spinning it back and forth in between drinks. Darger took the moment to study him. His hair was long enough that he wore it parted to one side, and he didn’t have a mustache. He also lacked the stereotypical coffee-and-donuts physique, but part of that was that he still had youth on his side. What he did have was the rigid, upright posture and the wandering eyes, constantly searching for potential danger.
“Luck!”
The voice rang out from a few tables away, and then a paunchy, middle-aged man was approaching their booth. He dragged an empty chair to the edge of the table and squatted over it with seemingly little concern for having his back to the exit. But Darger still marked him as a cop by the high and tight haircut and the way he held out his elbows when he walked.
“Heard you caught the latest Code 99 for the Doll Parts scumbag. Detective Lucky-fucker, am I right?”
“Yeah. Right,” Luck said sarcastically.
He glanced sideways at Darger, looking markedly uncomfortable by this intrusion.
“Tell the truth, now. You shit in your pants a little when you realized he took the head, right?”
“We’re not really supposed to talk about the details of the case,” Luck said, and the man clapped him on the shoulder.
“Oh Jesus, Dee-tective! Lighten up. I’m just messin’ with ya.”
The man’s eyes swiveled over to Violet, whose presence had thus far gone unnoticed. It was a circumstance she’d savored while it lasted.
“Who’s yer lady friend, Lucky
Boy?”
Luck scratched at his eyebrow.
“This is Special Agent Darger of the FBI.”
“Well dip me in shit and roll me in breadcrumbs,” the man said. “They make a lady version now?”
Violet set down her glass and stared into the man’s bloodshot eyes.
“Only for about 40 years.”
The man’s jaw went slack for a moment, and then he threw back his head with a harsh cackle.
“Scrappy as all git out, aren’t ya? Detective John Wayne Porto, pleased ta’ meecha.”
He didn’t reach out to shake Darger’s hand so much as grab it from off the table, pumping it up and down. His fingers were warm and fleshy, and she was glad when he let go.
The waitress returned and Porto insisted on buying them another round. Darger took it as an excuse to drain the rest of her highball. She needed the comfortable cushion of booze if she was going to put up with this one much longer. When the woman bent to place fresh napkins on the table for the second round of drinks (or perhaps twenty-second round, for Porto), she caught Darger’s eye, giving her a quick wink. Darger wasn’t sure what that was all about until she took a mouthful of her whiskey-ginger and realized it was about 90% whiskey and 10% ginger ale. The next time the waitress passed their table, Darger lifted her glass with a smile and a nod. Apparently she wasn’t the only one that found Porto hard to stomach.
Detective Porto pulled another cop sitting nearby into the conversation, and Darger took his distraction as an opportunity to mostly tune out. The Jameson helped, for sure, but being in the Worthingtons’ house and then dealing with Sierra’s mother had brought on feelings she hadn’t anticipated. Dark thoughts and ugly memories created a fog in her mind as thick as the mist that had clung to the city all day.
Some time must have passed, and then Porto’s voice broke through.
“I mean, I been with plenty of women that did a little too mucha this,” he pantomimed a duck-like talking motion with his hand. “Now I mighta considered a gag or maybe some duct tape, but I never considered taking off the whole head!”
With this he erupted in laughter, his face splotchy from the alcohol and elation.
Darger’s glass slammed into the table so loudly it startled her a bit, and she stood to get in Porto’s face.