by L. T. Vargus
“Agent Loshak. I don’t mind saying that I’m glad you’re here.”
“Of course,” Loshak said, then tilted his head in her direction. “This is my colleague, Special Agent Violet Darger. Darger, this is Detective Luck.”
He pulled off the hairnet, revealing a head of thick brown hair parted to one side and styled with a generous amount of mousse or pomade. Some product that kept it looking wet anyway.
“Casey,” he said, extending his hand.
She shook it briefly, looking into his brown eyes. Right. Luck. The one with the sloppy interview transcripts. Too bad he wasn’t as fussy about his paperwork as he clearly was about his hair.
“Are your guys getting video of the gawkers?” she said. “There’s a chance he’s watching this right now.”
“Roger that. I have three officers sweeping the crowd for witnesses, all outfitted with bodycams.”
Darger nodded approval.
“We can go in as soon as the techs are done. I’m trying to limit the number of people in the tent at one time. Better to not trample it any more than we have to.”
He pulled a phone from his belt and tapped the screen.
“While we wait, I can give you a quick rundown of how she was found. The call came in at 5:57 AM from one of the local residents — a Mr. Jeff Grady. Lives in the mint green number right over there.”
Luck waved a hand toward a Cape Cod house with a well-manicured row of shrubs along the front walk.
“Apparently people dumping at the dead end is a recurring issue. Not bodies, of course. Usually trash. A few larger household items, too. An old fridge. A dryer. A couple sofas. Some people can’t be bothered to wait for the city-wide bulk trash day is how he put it. So he hears the sound of a car engine followed by the slam of the trunk, he gets up, figuring he’ll take a peek, maybe snag the plate numbers in case they are dumpers — that’s his word. Guy seems like a real busybody, if you know what I mean.”
“So did he?” Darger asked, impatient to know whether he’d gotten a number off the car.
“What’s that?”
“The plates? Did he get the license plate number?”
“Oh,” Luck said. “No ma’am, that’s a negative. By the time he got to the window, the car had sped off. He decided he ought to take a closer look and then came up here and found her.”
Voices murmured from inside the tent.
“Coroner already came and went. He put time of death sometime in the last 24 hours or so.”
That got Darger’s attention, and Loshak’s too.
“And you’re sure it’s one of his?”
Loshak had been mostly silent until now, but Violet knew he was thinking what she was. Twenty-four hours wasn’t long enough for their guy.
“Oh yeah,” Luck said, and his face went a little gray. “I have no doubt about that.”
The tent rustled again and a man and woman, both clad in protective suits and carrying bins filled with evidence bags, filed out.
“We’re all set, Detective.”
“Thanks, Gertie.”
Now it was Darger and Loshak’s turn to don the white outfits. Detective Luck handed each of them a bunny suit. Elastic snapped and zippers whirred. Darger made sure to keep her phone in her hand so she’d be able to get some photos of her own.
Loshak ducked under the door flap first, and Darger made to follow when Luck caught her by the forearm. Her first thought was that he wasn’t going to let her take any pictures. He’d use the excuse that they don’t want to risk anything being leaked to the media, but that was bullshit. It was territorial nonsense.
Her lips parted. She was going to fight him on this. But he pointed a finger at her feet before she got a word out.
“Forgot your booties, ma’am.”
Violet looked down at her boots, noting that Luck’s feet were wrapped in fluffy-looking blue baggies that looked very much like the hairnets they were both wearing.
“Shit. Right,” she said, bending and grabbing two of the disposable shoe covers from a box next to the one filled with gloves. “Sorry.”
“Not a problem, ma’am.”
When she’d secured the booties, Luck held the flap out of the way for her.
“After you.”
She scooted into the interior of the tent. With the lack of direct light, it was gloomy inside, and Darger squinted while her eyes adjusted to the dimness. Already the ripe smell of decay was making itself known, and she could hear the buzzing of flies.
The girl was slightly northeast of center in the tent, sprawled in such a way that was almost inherently unnatural. Limbs akimbo, joints resting at awkward angles, shoulders frozen in an uncomfortable stoop. The corpse looked like a marionette dropped in a heap by a careless child.
She was belly down and nude. The settling of blood after death had stained her back in a mottled pattern. That meant she’d spent a stretch of time on her back postmortem before she was dumped here.
There was always an initial shock when seeing a body. Any body, whether the person died by violent means or not. Darger thought it was something about the human form, normally so full of movement and life: walking, laughing, chest perpetually expanding and contracting. Something about seeing it so still, rendered into nothing but motionless flesh and bone. It was once this shock had a chance to fade that she noticed a problem.
This girl was dead, yes. And dumped naked quite openly where someone would find her. But her arms and legs were attached.
“It’s not him,” she said, and Loshak turned toward her from where he squatted next to a bush up by the girl’s shoulders.
“What’s that?”
“Well aside from the fact that she’s only been dead 24 hours, and he always keeps them for several days… she’s not cut up,” she explained. “It’s not right. I don’t think he’s capable of straying that far from his routine at this point. It doesn’t make sense.”
Loshak had a pencil in his hand, and he used it to prod at something that was covering the girl’s head. Darger hadn’t recognized it in the low light, she’d thought it was part of the bush. But it was a black garbage bag tangled in the branches of the undergrowth.
She was about to point out that a garbage bag wasn’t exactly an unusual item when it came to dumping bodies when the plastic crinkled, rising under Loshak’s pencil, revealing the horror of the raw stump at the end of the neck. The bag wasn’t covering the head after all. There was no head.
“Oh,” Darger said.
Her gaze lingered there, at the flesh torn and bloodied, before drifting down to the other features. It was like, in seeing the mutilation for the first time, she was forced to reset. The body became as strange and terrible as it had been in those first moments. Violet followed the peaks and valleys of her vertebrae. The two shallow dimples above her buttocks. The slender arms in position to catch her final fall. Pale lines marred the skin there. Impressions from the grass?
And the hands, looking like something carved in marble by an old grand master. The delicate fingers, long and white, softly folded in toward the palm. The curvature reminded her of the way a violinist might clutch their instrument. Soft but firm.
Upon closer inspection, Darger noticed that the pinkie was crooked, probably broken. Also, several of the nails were broken roughly, despite having been recently manicured. This girl had put up a struggle.
There was a strange flutter in her belly. A growing unease. What was it?
Two creases formed between her eyebrows as she mulled it over. And then it hit her.
Recently manicured.
Her eyes snapped back to the ends of the fingers. To the nails painted —
No, it couldn’t be.
Nails the color of —
Violet’s hands flew to her face, a spinal reflex beyond her control. Air sucked into her lungs in a wheezing gasp, and she felt her knees buckle underneath her, but Detective Luck caught her before she went all the way down.
“Whoa,” he said, gripping her und
er the armpits.
Darger tried to speak, to tell them she was OK, but all that came out was, “Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”
Loshak pivoted from his crouched position next to the body to see Detective Luck guiding her out of the tent.
The glare of the sun shone down on them as Luck lowered her to the curb. Violet tugged at the mask over her mouth, desperate for fresh air. A beat later, Loshak popped through the door after them.
“Ah shit, Darger,” he said. “I’m sorry. I thought you’d seen one in person before.”
“No.”
And that was all she said for a moment while she sat there on the concrete with the morning light beaming into her eyes. It was too bright and too hot and God, she thought she might throw up. She rocked back and forth, squeezing her eyes closed against the brightness and the heat and the horror under the tent lying just a few feet away. She clawed at the gloves on her hands, peeling away the hot rubber and balling them into her fist.
My name is Violet Darger.
I was born on April 13th.
Detective Luck squatted next to her and put a hand on her elbow.
My fingernails are painted Cerulean Sea.
She stared at her hands. At the cotton candy blue adorning each fingernail.
Cerulean Sea.
“Take a deep breath, that’s it,” Luck said and patted her arm.
Cerulean.
She inhaled, chest expanding.
Sea.
She let it out, forcing her lungs to empty themselves completely, feeling her ribcage squeeze in on itself.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know. I’ve seen my share of bodies, but these last few…”
He glanced at the tent flap and then away, down the street. He didn’t try to finish the sentence.
“It’s not that. It’s not the body,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s the girl.”
Violet inclined her head toward the white fabric that shivered in the breeze.
“That’s Sierra Peters.”
Chapter 20
All of the air went out of Darger and seemed to stay out. Her lungs stuck in that deflated state, in that seemingly permanent exhale like the shock of this revelation had knocked the wind out of her.
Shock. Yes. That’s just what it was, she thought. A feeling so big it left her numb. Left her empty while her brain tried to catch up.
Sierra was dead. Her body defiled. Last night they’d painted their nails together, feasted on pizza and beer, and now she was a corpse on display for all the world to see.
A dead thing. A small thing. So small.
How could this be real? How could life be so awful as this? To chew up a person and leave them on the side of the road — a real live human being with dreams and fears and hopes and flaws. All of it wiped away in a flash. Gone forever.
Sierra Peters had flitted from place to place in her life, from problem to problem. The bulk of her possessions were probably still sitting on the curb on Savannah Lane. In the end, she didn’t even have a home. Darger thought maybe she never did. Not really.
She closed her eyes against the images of the naked body flashing in her mind. Dirty. Scrawny. Bled white.
She’d wanted to be a dancer, and then she’d wanted to be a beautician. Instead, her whole life led to this. Belly down in the weeds. Head hacked off.
How could the world work that way? It didn’t make sense.
Darger gagged a little, her lungs quaking and clammy. She coughed, hacking out throaty noises like a barfing cat. It was the violence of the cough that brought the tears to her eyes at last. The wet spread down her cheeks. It seemed to bring her around some.
The numb retreated a touch, and nausea took its place. Her skin went damp all over, lukewarm and dappled with beads of sweat, and an ache balled its fist in her gut. For a second, she thought she might throw up, but she took a breath instead, the wind cool in her throat. At least she could breathe again.
She remembered then that she wasn’t alone.
Luck’s face was scrunched up in a look of utter confusion.
“Wait. What?” Luck said.
Loshak sniffled, the corners of his mouth turned down. He also looked doubtful.
“Yeah. How can you tell? She doesn’t exactly… you know… have a head.”
Violet held up a hand, showing off her own fresh manicure in Cerulean Sea.
Loshak was still standing at the entrance of the tent. He glanced back at the slit in the fabric that marked the doorway but didn’t go back in. He didn’t need to. Violet knew he’d probably already recorded every detail of the crime scene. Snapshots etched in his mind.
“Manicures,” she said, by way of explanation. “She took a cosmetology course in high school.”
“Holy hell,” Detective Luck said.
“She has a record,” Darger said. “We can run the prints against the ones in her file to make an official ID. But it’s her. No doubt.”
She explained her most recent interview with Sierra, followed by the stolen car debacle, and then she brushed grit from her palms and made to stand. Luck scrambled to his feet and put out a hand. She waved it away.
“I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
Gritting her teeth together, she bobbed her head up and down. She was angry for letting herself get shaken like that. And embarrassed that the two men had witnessed it. They’d think she was weak now. A delicate flower that needed to be shielded and protected.
“I’m ready to go back,” she said, tugging at her mask.
A series of wrinkles formed over Loshak’s raised eyebrow.
“To the motel?”
“No,” she said and pushed past him on her way through the tent entrance.
Violet was aware of them taking surreptitious glances her way when they thought she wasn’t looking. She ignored them, getting out her phone and preparing to take some photographs. The bright white of the flash lit the tent in a strobe-like glare.
“Ligature marks look different this time,” she said, noting the wider bands of irritated tissue at the wrists and ankles. The girls before had thinner, deeper wounds consistent with a thinner rope or twine. “Duct tape?”
“Looks like it,” Loshak agreed.
Another burst of light from the camera punctured the dimness under the tent. Darger was about to mention the bands of lighter flesh over the buttocks and shoulder blades — when she caught another glimpse of the grisly remnants of her neck. The hand gripping her phone fell to her side as she suddenly remembered something Loshak had said about the killer not taking any souvenirs. So far.
“You knew he was going to keep the head.”
She’d barely said it out loud, more muttering it to herself than anything. But Luck’s head snapped up, oscillating between her and Loshak.
“I had a hunch,” he admitted.
She was aware of her jaw muscles clenching.
“Why didn’t you say so?”
A knuckle gloved in blue ran itself over Loshak’s chin. He pursed his lips.
“Kinda thought you’d figure it out.”
Darger pressed her fingernails into her palms, feeling the little crescent-shaped claws dig into her skin. Goddamn it.
She was angry at herself for not figuring it out. Especially when she ran through their conversation again and remembered that Loshak had prefaced his half-prediction with a comment about the partial decapitation. He’d practically spelled it out.
“Sorry,” the detective piped up. “Are you saying he kept the head? He didn’t just… dump it somewhere else?”
Darger and Loshak nodded in unison.
“Geez,” Luck said, tugging at the neck of his white jumpsuit. “Why?”
Loshak gave an almost imperceptible tick of his head to indicate that Darger should go ahead with the explanation. Testing her again, she figured. Damn him.
“You may have heard the terms process and product when it comes to serial killers. A process killer is interested in just that — the pr
ocess. They are torturers. Stalkers. Hunters. They get pleasure from the ritual, the violent act itself, the inflicting of pain. But this guy,” Darger said, raising her palms, “he has all the signs of a product killer. He kills them quickly and moves on to his actual interest. The product. The body. Like Bundy and many others, he’s a necrophiliac. But the bodies don’t keep, and they present logistical problems for concealment and transportation. It’s tough to hide 140 pounds of rotting human flesh in your apartment. So they tend to dump them quickly, but a lot of times they keep… parts.”
She tilted her head, squinting at a bare white wall of the tent.
“They progress to that point. They have to push things further and further to satisfy the control fantasy, to make it last longer. So…”
“So he takes her head,” Luck said.
His gaze fell to the body lying in the weeds.
“And believe me, if he could keep the whole thing, he would,” Loshak said.
A voice called out for Detective Luck from outside the tent, and one of the uniformed officers poked his head into the flap.
“Now don’t come stamping in here without a suit on, Bobby,” Luck said, shooing the officer back out the door.
When he returned, he held an evidence baggie in his hands. Inside was a brown leather wallet, printed with the Louis Vuitton pattern in gold. Darger suspected it was a knock-off.
“Found this with a bag and some clothes dumped on the shoulder a few blocks away,” Luck explained. “Contains the driver’s license of one Sierra Marie Peters.”
As they drove away from the scene, a cameraman stepped into the street ahead of Darger’s bumper. He held up a finger, indicating he just needed a moment to get his shot. Darger laid on the horn until he picked his tripod back up and scampered away with a scowl.
“Fucking hyenas,” Loshak said, slumped in the passenger seat.
The silence that followed felt oppressive. Adrenaline had helped carry her through the time in the tent. But here in the quiet in the car, the extent of the emotional toll began to lay itself bare.