by L. T. Vargus
Probably a waste of time, she thought, as she went down to the motel’s front office to print off a hard copy. She didn’t know if he’d use it. He didn’t have much reason to, given how she’d fucked everything up.
But the last thing she wanted to do was to duck out without tying up her loose ends.
Chapter 50
Again he paces in the tomb. Walks the L-shaped path from his bed to the kitchenette and back. The shade falls over everything here. The darkness.
The fridge hums in the background. A faintly wet sound like a burbling fish tank.
“I’m lonely in a way I don’t think anyone else can ever know. Not really. It’s too big to explain.”
Not anymore. You have me.
He chuckles. Looks at the head propped on the wooden chair out of the corner of his eye. Her mouth is opened wider than ever. Chin resting on the seat. Lips sagging at each corner in a way that makes her look a little like a fish.
“Nah, you know what I mean.”
There’s a pause before she answers.
I suppose so.
She surprises him sometimes. The things she says. He doesn’t know how that works. He is scripting her lines. Talking to himself. He understands this. And yet the words sometimes just appear in his head as if from nowhere.
Water pools on her skin. Even in the shade, he can see it. And he knows what it means. A sign that she’s thawing a little too much. She’ll have to go back in soon. For her own good. He doesn’t like it. Can’t stand the times when she is sealed away from him in that frigid compartment.
But not yet. Not yet. He’ll get to it in a little while.
He walks. The shoulder-high piles of books and magazines blurring past on each side.
He walks and walks. But he can’t get away from it. Can’t stop thinking about it. The wet. The condensation on her face like the sweat on a can of Pepsi.
The inevitable waits to take her. And it will. She will be gone. Maybe even soon.
He thinks back on their conversations. The talks they’ve had. More like simplistic chats, maybe.
One could call him insane for talking like that. Talking to a severed head. But it’s not like that. He knows it’s a fantasy.
If anything he’s done is insane, it’s continuing to believe. Continuing to hope that he can find satisfaction on this plane. Continuing to pursue any kind of happiness despite the void. Despite the distance between him and everything. That’s what he thinks. He’s not delusional or anything of that nature. He knows what’s real and what’s not.
Are their talks anything like conversations a real couple would have? He doesn’t know. He thinks maybe not. Maybe a real couple would exchange more complex thoughts. More nuanced points of view. He has a hard time imagining it.
He looks at her. Really looks. The open mouth. The saggy eyelids.
The face still displays a personality to some degree. He knows that. Even if her expression is clearly a dead one. But his imagination can’t conjure the intricacies of the thoughts and feelings she might have.
Maybe he is just as dead as her in a way. She just happens to be physically dead while his death is on the inside. His dead imagination can’t conceive of human thoughts or feelings outside of himself. Not really. His mind renders a childish version. A crayon scrawl of a girl that he talks to.
He knows all of this. But what can he do about it?
Maybe controlling her body is the only connection he can really hope for. Possessing her. Without that, the rest of it would fall apart. Without the head, the face, the crudely depicted personality in his fantasies would lose all meaning.
He lets the thought die away as he walks on. A few more laps back and forth. He gazes upon her.
“I don’t know what I’m gonna do without you. You know that?”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, there’s a little sound. Almost like a wax paper wrapper being peeled away from a piece of candy.
He stops walking. Watches. Listens.
The tip of her nose drops to the wooden chair. A chunk of cartilage and skin that almost looks like a strange tooth lying before her gaping maw. He stares at the little nub. Motionless. Silent.
“Aw, Christ.”
He rushes to her. Kneels. Pinches the thing between thumb and finger and pushes the puzzle piece back into place. It plugs right into the hole in her nose. He holds it. Adjusts his hand so the tip of his index finger keeps it lodged.
This is how it will end. He understands that. But he holds the fallen piece in place for a long time before he removes his finger.
He doesn’t bother with the freezer. Not tonight. He brings her to bed. Nestles her on the pillow next to him.
He can’t really see her in the dark. Just the faintest sense of shapes in the shadows. A rounded object in the darkness.
For hours he tries to sleep. Closes his eyes. Empties his mind. Drifts a little.
But then he shakes himself awake. Nervous. Frightened. Afraid he’ll somehow lose her if he goes under.
Over and over he does this.
He can’t help but check. Fingers reaching out into the dark to find her. To feel her. There. That skin still cool but warming in slow motion. Clammy and strange. Her weeping dampness presses into his palm. And fluid of some kind drains from her neck flaps into the pillow.
Despite the wetness, he can feel how she has gone dry from the freezer. Rough and mummified and leathery.
It’s not enough to preserve her, though. Not even close.
She is meat. Decomposing.
He doesn’t speak to her anymore. He knows she won’t answer.
The night stretches on and on. The melting picks up speed, and the rot follows right along with its pace. Kicked into some kind of bacterial overdrive.
Electricity sizzles in his skull. His mind flickering from thought to thought with great force. Great violence.
He realizes that sleep is impossible now. That he must wallow in this nightmare. Feel every second of it without relief.
The smell of death surrounds him. Envelops him. Decay. Putrescence. But he doesn’t mind it anymore. It is her smell. And she is his.
For a little longer, anyway.
Chapter 51
It was almost 10 PM when Darger finished with the work. On her laptop, she glanced at a list of flights leaving Columbus the next morning. The first plane to DC was booked, but she figured she might be able to get on standby.
She slept fitfully, visions of Sierra haunting her dreams. Sometimes alive and sometimes dead.
When the first faint glow of the sun was visible on the east horizon, Darger got up. She showered, dressed, and packed.
At Loshak’s door, she lifted her fist intending to knock and stopped.
She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t face him. Leaning the packet up against his door so she’d have a flat surface to write on, Darger scrawled Loshak’s name across the front with her pen. Just as she stooped to slide the manila folder under the door, it opened. She found herself staring at Loshak’s feet, clad in black socks.
“What’re you doing?”
“Oh, I—” Darger’s mouth felt dry. She swallowed.
Goddamn it. Why was he all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning of all mornings? All she wanted to do was to slip away without further drama. She held out the folder.
“I was leaving this for you.”
“Leaving it? You headed somewhere?”
“What?” she said, wondering how he could have figured that out so quickly. “Well, yes. I was going home. Back to Quantico.”
He exhaled loudly, a mannerism that reminded Darger of a disappointed gym teacher.
“That’s it? You run into a little adversity, and you’re just going to take your ball and go home?”
“I don’t want to argue with you, Agent Loshak. I know I fucked up…”
He flapped a hand in the air.
“Come in here.”
When he’d shut the door behind her, he went and sat on the bed. He gestured to the
chair against the wall.
“Sit.”
Darger glanced at her watch.
“I have to drive all the way back to Columbus for my flight—”
“Hear me out, and then you can do whatever you want. Stay, go, whatever.”
Darger set the folder down and lowered herself into the chair.
“Who’s Zara?”
Violet reacted as if she’d been physically struck. She stared at him, unblinking, her heart already pounding in her chest.
“How do you know that name?” she asked.
“Something didn’t sit right with me last night, after our chat. So I did a little poking around into your history with the Bureau.”
Violet’s chest rose and fell with each breath.
“And?”
“And a name came up. One of your last cases in Victim Assistance. Girl named Zara. Died during an investigation. File said you were there when it happened.”
Violet had a hand on the hedgehog brooch again, squeezing it. She felt the spines digging into her flesh, but she didn’t care. A tear dropped from her eyelashes, splattering onto her pant leg.
Damn Loshak. Damn him.
“Violet,” Loshak said softly. “Tell me what happened to Zara.”
And so she told him about the girl, the sixteen-year-old orphan and victim of human trafficking she’d been assigned to handle. About how cold and distant her eyes had been the first time they met. About how, as Violet counseled the girl over a series of weeks, a spark seemed to have ignited something inside her, burning brighter and brighter all the time. She started to laugh and smile and tell jokes. She came back to life inside.
She told him about preparing the girl to testify against the man who had corrupted her. About the arguments with the lead agent and the federal prosecutor over getting the girl in witness protection.
“I should have argued harder. Been louder. I thought about going over their heads. But I already had a reputation for being difficult. My boss’s advice was that I should ‘play the game.’”
She swallowed, looking down at her palms laid out in her lap.
“So I did. I played the FBI’s game of sit down and shut up and don’t question your superiors. And I lost. Zara lost.”
Loshak sat motionless on the bed, barely breathing from what Violet could tell.
“We went through trial preparations. Forcing Zara to relive one abuse after the other. And one night, when we were walking to my car, we came face-to-face with a man with a gun. A hitman hired by the defendant.”
Zara died in her arms, as her life flowed from the wound on her neck and out into the street. A river of blood, carrying her away, carrying that spark of life away for good.
Violet still remembered everything from that night. The feeling of her wool scarf, the one she’d wrapped around Zara’s neck to try to staunch the wound, the way it got warm and sticky.
Zara’s fingers clutching at Violet’s arm, and how Violet wanted to hold her hand in hers and tell her it was going to be OK, but she couldn’t take her grip away from Zara’s neck. She had to keep applying pressure. If she just kept holding on and the ambulance got there soon…
The ambulance didn’t get there soon. It was twenty-two minutes before they arrived. Zara was long gone by then, and Violet knew it, but she kept holding the girl, kept pressure on the wound, kept rocking back and forth, telling her it was OK. By then, Zara’s flesh had already gone frigid, too much blood lost to keep the body warm now.
Violet remembered the choking, wet gasps. The feeling of Zara’s grip growing weaker. The way Zara’s blinking grew slower, more and more of the whites of her eyes showing. Her lips turning grayish under the shiny layer of lip gloss the girl always wore.
And when the paramedics finally arrived and pried the girl from her arms and dragged Violet to her feet, she remembered seeing all the blood. She’d been sitting in a pool of it herself. Black, black, black under the street lamps. That’s how it looked. Black on her pants and her hands and her face. Dark and black and drying now in a strange, sticky film.
She uttered a single word before she died. It was barely a whisper, no real intonation to it since her vocal chords had been damaged by the bullet. But Violet could read her lips.
“Mommy.”
When Violet finished, she held very still. Her eyes were dry now. She felt empty of tears and everything else. Like a strange, hollow shell.
“Jesus,” Loshak said, swiping a hand down his face like he might be able to squeegee away whatever feelings he was having. He hooked a finger at her hands that she held cupped in front of her.
“And that was hers, I take it?”
Violet stared down into her palms. She held the hedgehog brooch there. She must have pulled it off her jacket while she talked, in a daze.
“No. Well, yes,” she said, swallowing. Her throat was dry and felt like sandpaper. “I bought it for her. It was going to be a gift. A surprise. Right before the trial started. So she’d have something to look down at. Something to hold in her hands when she was on the stand. When she had to face him.”
Violet ran a finger over the green gemstone eyes.
“I found it in an antique shop. She loved hedgehogs. Wanted one for a pet, she said. When she got her own place. She talked about it all the time.”
“So when I asked you why you left OVA before…” he said. “That BS about the limelight?”
She squeezed her eyelids together.
“I thought becoming an agent would mean I might actually be able to save lives instead of only doing damage control after the fact. Waiting around to pick up the tattered remains. Broken lives. But so far it looks like I’m better at screwing up investigations and getting people killed.”
Loshak blew a raspberry.
“Who got killed?”
She looked up and met his coppery eyes.
“Sierra Peters.”
He held up a finger.
“That wasn’t your fault. She was marked long before you showed up. It never occurred to us that he would go after her again, and you know that’s the truth.”
“I should have figured it out.”
“If anyone missed something… if someone’s to blame, that person is me.”
She barely heard him.
“I could have kept her safe, but I didn’t. I messed up. Just like with—”
Loshak’s voice was hard when he cut in.
“Quit it with the self-pity crap. We don’t have time for it.”
“We?” Darger asked.
“Yeah. We. You think I’m gonna let you skedaddle on outta here after you rubbed your stink all over my investigation?” He shook his head. “Oh no, Darger. You’re going to finish what you started. I don’t suffer quitters. And let me tell you something else. You gotta wise up. You’re like a wounded dog, covering up and pretending everything’s fine because you don’t want the rest of the pack to know you’re hurt.”
“Don’t profile me,” she said, more angrily than she’d intended.
He ignored her.
“You think you can hide your true feelings and emotions, pushing away anything negative and refusing to deal with it because — you think — it’ll only slow you down. But the real reason is that you’re afraid that if you do confront your feelings, that if you face the truth straight on, maybe you won’t be strong enough to survive it. So you put on a smirk like a suit of armor.”
Violet held her breath.
“Burying the truth is what will break you. You stack up layer after layer of denial, and eventually, you buckle under the weight of it.”
The silence stretched out before them, and then he said, more softly, “Neither of those girls dying was your fault. The world is a fucked up place, and we do what we can to stem the tide, but sometimes…”
His eyes went to the ceiling and then swung down to fix her with an unwavering gaze.
“Sometimes you get caught in a tsunami of shit, and it’s all you can do to keep from drowning in it yourself.”
A knock came at the door, and they both seemed to rouse from some kind of trance. With a grunt, Loshak hoisted himself to his feet. The girl from the front desk had a stack of newspapers in her arms.
“Here are those papers you wanted,” she said.
“Thank you, kindly,” Loshak said, removing a battered leather wallet from his back pants pocket. “What do I owe ya?”
“Three dollars and fifty cents,” the girl said.
Loshak handed her a five-dollar bill.
“Keep the change.”
The girl thanked him and retreated back to her post in the office downstairs.
“What are those for?” Darger asked
“Assessing the local damage,” Loshak said, laying out the papers on the bed. “I wanna know what details the area newspapers used when they ran their version of the story.”
“You know all that’s online now, right?”
“Can’t clip an online newspaper,” Loshak said, thumbing through a copy of The Columbus Dispatch.
“Putting together a scrapbook of shame for me?”
“Believe it or not,” Loshak paused to lick his thumb, “not everything is about you. I’m trying to think what our killer might do with his newfound fame, and I bet he’s reveling in it.”
The paper slapped onto the bedspread as he traded it for another. Paper rustled as he paged through, and then he stopped, eyes glued to a story buried deep in The Athens News.
“What is it?” Darger asked.
Loshak’s eyes flicked back and forth over the black and white newsprint.
“I know what we’re going to do.”
Chapter 52
Darger scanned the article announcing a candlelight vigil for Fiona Worthington being organized at the local college. Her right leg bounced up and down, a nervous habit she sometimes had when she wasn’t letting herself shred her nails.
“So after two accidental tabloid disasters, your idea is to engineer a third? On purpose?”
Loshak’s face scrunched up like he’d just sucked on a wedge of lemon.
“Fuck the tabloids. I wouldn’t throw them a life vest if they were drowning.”