by L. T. Vargus
“So,” the standing figure said, finally, not turning from the window. “Did you do it? Like we talked about?”
Levi’s gaze drifted up the wall toward the ceiling, and his tongue clucked against the roof of his mouth. He tried to say “yes,” but nothing came out.
The wallpaper peeled everywhere above him, flaps hanging down, weird sticky lines and grooves of dried glue the color of snot peeking out from behind. The humidity was relentless out here, he supposed. Corrosive. A destructive force.
When he looked back toward the window, his brother was looking at him.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Luke said, flicking ashes onto the carpet.
Levi shrugged, bobbed his head once.
“Well, you did good. You did the right thing.”
The pregnant silhouette flashed in Levi’s mind. He closed his eyes, but he knew there was no escape. The movie played on, projected onto the insides of his eyelids.
The snort of flames exhaled from the barrel. The weapon jerking and cracking. The blood. The tattered flesh. The yellow light. All of it.
Luke walked to the edge of the bed, and when Levi sat up, his older brother clapped him on the shoulder.
“You set everything up, you know? And now? Now we can finish it together.”
By design, Levi had carried out the first wave of attacks on his own. That way if he did get caught — either in the act or fleeing — the mission could still go on, with Luke taking over. It was all part of Luke’s master plan, and whenever he talked about it, it all started to make sense. A lot of sense. Hate — genuine, passionate hatred — was pretty infectious, maybe.
“I been watching on TV. You went national after the grocery store, of course. Not only cable news, either. ABC and CBS interrupted their regularly scheduled morning programming and everything. Pretty nuts.”
“So they connected them?”
“Yep. Told you they would, didn’t I? You’re the active shooter that’ll be the top story coming up on the 11 o’clock news here in a minute.”
They both looked at the TV screen. A commercial for a hearing aid played, a cartoon of the little flesh-toned device being inserted into an ear. The animation dissolved into old people standing in a studio, their mouths moving, their smiles all coming off that much more saccharine with the sound muted.
“The next step is the big ‘en,” Luke said. “It locks everything into place.”
Levi let his head drop back onto the bedspread.
“I know.”
Long after Luke’s breathing slowed, Levi lay awake in the dark, twisting and turning in bed. He’d been up for 42 hours or so, and his eyes stung like someone had flung sand in them. Even still, sleep would not take him.
Some pit opened in his gut now that he felt alone. An emptiness. A vacancy. It quivered inside of him. Throbbed. He knew it was some physical manifestation of anxiety or guilt or dread. Trauma. Stress. Some combination of all of the above, probably. He’d never experienced anything like it before.
How empty can someone feel? Is this as far as it goes? This he wondered as he stared at those flaps of wallpaper, the places where the room itself was sliding apart, coming unglued.
But they hadn’t hit bottom yet, had they? Luke’s plan was only beginning. It would rage on and on and on. Until one of them was dead, perhaps.
No.
Until both of them were dead.
He adjusted his limbs, sliding a leg to open up his hips, to stretch his sore quads and abductors a little. It offered no comfort, no relief for that roiling in his belly.
Maybe all stories end in death. He’d heard that somewhere, and it was true, one way or another.
When Luke first got back from Iraq, he was in pretty bad shape. Physically, he seemed fine — if anything, a little leaner and meaner than when he’d left. His wounds were mental.
PTSD grew in him like cancer. What started as a little twitchiness and social anxiety blossomed into a crippling condition. By the time he’d been back for six months, Shelly had kicked him out of the house. After that, he barely got out of bed, barely would let anyone into his apartment. He just sat alone in the dark, in the silence, wasting away.
Levi would go there to be with him whenever he wasn’t working, would sit on the foot of the bed and play video games while his brother rotated between chain smoking and sleeping. Even when he was awake, Luke often didn’t talk for hours. It was hard to imagine he’d be alive much longer.
As the weeks went by, the apartment felt more and more funereal. The body laid out on the bed, wrapped in dark sheets. The stale smell. The creeping gray stillness that settled over everything within its walls.
Levi was playing The Last of Us when his brother said it.
“You know I’m going to kill myself, right?”
The words croaked out of him, thick with sleep, barely louder than a whisper.
Levi didn’t say anything. What could he say? He stared into the TV screen like any other day, kept right on killing video game zombies.
But he was there. He was present. It was all he could do, and so he did.
He sat in the room.
What seemed to bring Luke back to himself was talking about what he’d seen. The horror stories about IEDs blowing off legs and late nights storming into civilian homes and making everyone lay flat on their bellies based on tips of terrorist locations. The clatter of distant assault rifles most every night. The tension of riding out on patrol in total silence, riding out of the calm and into the storm over and over and over.
Luke seemed to wake up when he recapped those moments of conflict, those moments of violence. His voice sounded fuller, clearer, more solid.
Levi couldn’t remember anymore when the talk transitioned from memories to plans, when his brother started turning his pain outward. But that revitalized him even more. It was a goal. A dream. Even if it was more of a nightmare.
And when he talked about it, it made sense. Even still, there were moments when it made perfect sense.
In some ways, Levi thought, maybe that’s how all of this got started. His brother needed him.
Chapter 14
The thin strings of morning light threaded their way between the gaps in the curtain. It woke Violet a little after dawn.
She stretched and yawned. She’d had a surprisingly restful sleep. In fact, she couldn’t remember waking even once during the night.
Her bare feet stomped over the carpeting on her way to the shower. She soaped up, rinsed off, and wrapped herself in a towel.
Brushing her teeth, she padded to the window and threw the curtains wide. Looked like it was setting up to be another scorcher judging by the clear horizon.
From the vantage point of the eighth floor, Violet gazed down at the city. Her room overlooked a park, and she watched the specks of people moving on the brick paths. Was that how he saw them, looking down through the crosshairs of his gun sight? As moving targets, barely more than an ant crawling over the floor?
The first time — along the highway — it would have felt that way, maybe. But that hadn’t been enough, it seemed.
She passed the TV and flipped it on, craving something to disrupt the silence.
“The community remains absolutely shaken by what appears to be a string of random violence perpetrated by one man on a rampage. A man some are calling the Georgia Sniper,” a newscaster was saying.
Violet rolled her eyes as she wiped toothpaste foam from the corner of her mouth. The media just couldn’t resist coming up with a nickname, could they? They just couldn’t fucking help themselves.
Bunch of hacks, she thought and spat into the drain.
“Police are saying this murder may be related to both the sniper attack on Interstate 20 on Tuesday and the massacre in a crowded Publix parking lot yesterday morning, making it the third such attack in two days. Many residents of the city are in a state of dread, fearing where and when the madman might strike next.”
Violet’s head snapped up from the sink
in the bathroom, and she stared at her reflection with wide-eyed bewilderment.
Third attack?
She leaned around the bathroom wall to get a look at the screen. The reporter stood in front of a green sign with gold lettering that spelled out Pheasant Brook.
“The latest episode in this ongoing nightmare played out right here, in the quiet subdivision of Pheasant Brook. Last night at a little before 10:30 PM, Carol Jones was shot at point blank range while standing in her own front doorway.”
Darger tuned out, eyes staring at the wall above the TV but seeing none of it. How could this happen without her knowing? Had she slept through a call?
She reached for her phone, scrolling through the recent calls. Nothing.
Was this Baxter’s doing? Trying to cut them out? She wondered what Loshak would have to say about that.
Then it occurred to her.
Loshak.
That son of a bitch.
She dressed hurriedly, the anchor on TV still yammering on.
“Over the next hour, we’ll be bringing you live team coverage from every possible angle—”
Darger jabbed the power button on the remote and the voice cut out.
Loshak stretched his arm across the seats as he backed out of the parking space.
“Hopefully Rodney will have his stuff installed by the time we get there. The sooner we get the tip line set up, the better.”
She didn’t respond.
“You listening, Violet?”
“I heard you.”
“Aww, come on. You’re not still pouting about last night, are you?”
“Pouting, huh? Interesting choice of words. I suppose last night you felt I needed my nap, and that’s why you didn’t call?”
He smirked.
“So you’re not mad about last night?”
“Of course I’m mad. I’m pissed. I wouldn’t leave you behind like that, you…”
For some reason, she hesitated to actually swear at Loshak. Out of respect or intimidation, she wasn’t sure.
“You poophead,” she finally finished.
That got a laugh out of him.
“Look, I had my reasons, OK? You needed the sleep more than I did.”
He rubbed a bloodshot eye and yawned.
“This tip line detail is going to be as close to a round-the-clock thing as we can muster. With the twelve trainees we have coming in, we can easily divide them up into standard eight-hour shifts. Same with the analysts. As for the two of us… probably makes the most sense if we split up and take different shifts. After we get things set up down there, I’ll take the first shift. You can take off. If you want, go take a look at the new scene. But you should also try to get some more sleep. If we do it that way, it’ll mean you’re on the night shift for now.”
She considered it for a time, then nodded. It made sense.
“I can handle that. Twelve-hour shifts?”
“Or close to it,” he said, adjusting the sun visor to cut the glare. “I hate to do it, really. Longer shifts are inefficient. You can’t help but get sloppy toward the end. But I don’t anticipate either one of us being happy with the idea of an eight-hour stretch where we don’t have eyes and ears on what’s coming in. Let’s be honest, Darger. We’re both control freaks.”
She didn’t deny it. No matter how good their team of analysts might be, Darger wanted to know that either she or Loshak were skimming the majority of the tips.
In the DC sniper case, she knew that one of the shooters had called in weeks before they were caught, but the operators on the tip line had written it off as a crank call. And there were other tips that had been ignored. There were those that said the shooters could have been caught sooner, had the tip line been better managed. Darger wasn’t about to let mistakes like that happen on her watch. And Loshak was pretty much the only other person she trusted enough to do the same.
“What if we rotated eight-hour shifts instead?” she suggested. “Eight on the tip line, eight for sleep. If we’re being honest, you know neither one of us is going to be taking any extra time for R&R.”
“True,” he said.
“We’ll split the nights evenly that way. For all we know, the calls will slow way down then, and it’ll be a chance to get some extra rest. I don’t want to hog that all to myself.”
Loshak smirked.
“More like you don’t want to miss out on the peak hours during the day.”
She grinned back, the picture of innocence.
“Who, me?”
The turn signal beat out a rhythm like a metronome as Loshak steered the car into the lot of a Dunkin Donuts.
“Breakfast of champions,” he said. He unbuckled his seatbelt and climbed out. Darger followed.
It was busy inside, and Darger picked up bits of chatter relating to the shootings.
“When I woke up this morning and saw the news, saw about that poor girl last night,” a woman was saying, “I almost couldn’t get myself out the door. I stood in the foyer, peeking out the window, looking for anything suspicious. Any cars on the street I didn’t know. Finally, I got up the nerve to make a run for my car. I felt foolish, but… I can’t help it. I don’t feel safe in my own front yard.”
“Makes me glad I park in the garage. You know, I told my wife, don’t be opening the door for anybody. Don’t get the mail, I’ll do it when I get home,” he said, then leaned a little closer to the woman. “And you can be damn sure I’ll be bringing my friend Mr. Sig Sauer along for the trip.”
The woman clutched her styrofoam cup with both hands.
“I don’t understand how he hasn’t been caught yet. Are the police even trying?”
“Probably too busy eating donuts,” the man responded, and the two of them chuckled.
While they waited in line, Loshak glanced over at her.
“Take a look at the Stump journal yet?”
Violet didn’t want to admit that she’d already read it through twice and was working on the third pass, so she said, “A few glances, yeah.”
“Was it what you expected?”
“He really loves his animal analogies. Probably could have been a good veterinarian if he wasn’t, you know, a sadistic serial killer.”
Loshak chuckled.
“Yeah, I think he fancies himself some kind of philosopher. I also don’t think he left the journal behind by accident. Probably still eatin’ away at him that it never got out. If that little manifesto of his had been published he probably would have turned himself in and confessed to everything, just to get the credit he’d think was due. The interviews. Documentaries.”
“You really think so?” she asked.
“Maybe. But nah. Not really. He’s an egomaniac and a narcissist, so as much as he loves the attention, his sense of self-preservation is still number one on his list of priorities.”
When they reached the counter, Loshak smiled at the girl in the Dunkin Donuts hat and apron.
“I called in an order. Should be under the name Victor Loshak.”
The girl nodded and grabbed a receipt from next to the register.
“Four boxes of Munchkins and two Box o’ Joes, one dark roast, one decaf?”
“That’s it,” Loshak said, reaching for his wallet.
The girl finished ringing up the order and then disappeared into a back room to retrieve it.
“Someone’s hungry,” Darger said.
“It’s a very delicate management technique I’ve picked up over the years.”
“Oh yeah?”
“If you want the undivided attention of a group of rowdy greenhorn trainees, arrive bearing baked goods and hot coffee.”
Chapter 15
In a large room on the fourth floor of the Atlanta field office, Loshak stood front and center and addressed the crew of agent trainees and analysts that would staff the tip line. Behind him, Darger added a list of words and phrases to a white board. If any of the calls contained these keywords, they would immediately be marked as the highest prio
rity. That had been Darger’s idea, her hope being that if the shooter called, they wouldn’t miss it. If he called, he would inevitably leave clues that would, at the very least, improve their profile.
As the marker in Darger’s hand squeaked over the board, Loshak gave the group a Cliff Notes version of the crimes thus far. He used the same map she’d seen in the meeting the day before to highlight where the shootings had taken place.
“The sniper attack took place here, on this hill,” Loshak said, using a laser pointer to pinpoint the spot. “The hill can only be reached by this unmarked access road. Chief Hogaboom of Atlanta PD is holding a press conference this morning. He’ll be releasing the attack location, so be especially vigilant for any callers reporting they were near that area around the time of the shooting. We’re waiting on tire track analysis from the lab, but we might be able to get a vehicle description more quickly if there are any eye witnesses.”
He ran through summarized versions of the Publix shooting and the Pheasant Brook murder, pointing out locations on the map and giving time frames for each incident. When he finished with that, he pocketed his laser pointer and picked up a sheaf of paper.
“Has anyone here ever worked a tip line before?” Loshak asked.
Two trainees raised their hands, and Loshak raised the pages in the air.
“Then you’re probably familiar with this.”
It was one of the standard forms the FBI used to log tip line calls. It had a simple questionnaire on the front and several sheets of carbon paper to make copies on the back. The two trainees nodded.
“For the rest of you, I’ll explain. The standard procedure for a tip line organized by the FBI is for each operator to take down the calls by hand onto one of these forms. You can imagine how efficient that is.”
A few of the trainees chuckled.
“Here’s what we’re doing with the standard procedure,” Loshak said.
He wadded the paper into a ball and made a free throw shot at the garbage can. He made the basket.
“Now I’d like to introduce you all to Rodney Malenchuck, who’s going to take you through the newest innovation in tip line technology.”