Violet Darger (Book 4): Bad Blood

by Vargus, L. T.

  “Paperwork,” Loshak muttered. “My favorite.”

  Darger realized that if Loshak was going off with Price, she was about to be stuck with someone else for the day. She crossed her fingers under the table that it’d be Blankenship. He seemed helpful, at least. Shit. She’d settle for grumpy Costello at this point.

  But as soon as Price pointed a finger at her, she knew that her fate had been sealed.

  “Let’s have Agent Darger and my man Casey go talk to the widow Howard.”

  Oh. Good.

  That wouldn’t be awkward at all.

  Darger’s head tingled, and she heard nothing else that was said for those final few minutes before the meeting wound down.

  When it was adjourned, Luck caught her eye. She held up a finger to indicate she needed a minute and dragged Loshak into a quiet corner.

  “You knew about this, didn’t you?”

  “Knew about what?”

  “Agent Luck.”

  Loshak pretended to look surprised.

  “Oh that. Yeah, well… I wrote him a letter of recommendation when he applied to the Academy.”

  “You dick.”

  “What? He asked me. I thought he was a good detective who’d make a solid addition to the Bureau.”

  Darger continued to glare at her partner.

  “If you’re mad about me keeping it from you, it doesn’t count. This was from before I promised to tell you everything.”

  “Always a loophole.”

  “Or is there another reason you’re bothered by Luck being here?”

  Darger felt her cheeks flush.

  “I’m not bothered by it. It just would have been nice to have a heads-up.”

  “Well if it’s any consolation, I didn’t know he’d be here. I mean, I kept tabs enough to know that he’d graduated from the Academy, but I hadn’t heard where they’d assigned him.”

  Darger rubbed at her temples. Her headache was coming back.

  One of Loshak’s paws landed on her shoulder and gave what she assumed was supposed to be a consoling pat.

  “This is why you don’t shit where you eat, kiddo.”

  Chapter 4

  Awkward turned out to be an understatement. After agreeing that Luck would drive, they’d barely uttered two words as they walked over to the parking garage, footsteps echoing between the rows of parked cars. Not even a Nice to see you or Hey, how are ya?

  Luck pointed the key fob in his hand at a dark gray Lexus sedan. It was quite an upgrade from the Luckmobile — the nickname he’d given the P.O.S. van he’d been assigned to drive back in Ohio.

  Darger considered making a quip about his improved ride, then decided against it. The tension made joking seem strange and inappropriate.

  She tried to think of something to say that would break the ice. But everything she thought of seemed to be weighed down with the baggage between them.

  The discomfort only increased once they were in the tight quarters of the car. Studying him from the corner of her eye, she noticed the car wasn’t the only thing that had been upgraded. Luck had always been a sharp dresser, and even though Darger didn’t know dick when it came to fashion, she could tell the black suit he was wearing was an expensive one. He looked like a real fed.

  The one thing ruining the image was the preposterous mustache he’d grown. It wasn’t even a standard law enforcement ‘stache, but more of a hipster deal with waxed tips and all. Utterly ridiculous.

  A splotch of dried milkshake splatter on her jacket caught her eye, and it occurred to her that even with the stupid mustache, he looked the part of a federal agent more than she did.

  Luck guided the car around and down through the spiraling path of the parking structure, tires thumping over the regularly spaced speed bumps. As a means of distracting herself from the heavy atmosphere in the car, Darger scrolled through the notes she’d jotted down during the meeting.

  Her eyes fell on one line, which she’d emphasized with bold text and an underline.

  Check out abandoned building.

  Her eyes swung nervously over at Luck. The overhead lights flickered over his face in a steady pattern.

  She swallowed, trying to will the words out. What was her problem? She just wanted to check out the other crime scene. It wasn’t like she was asking for some huge favor.

  A rectangle of daylight appeared ahead as they approached the street level access.

  This was ridiculous. What did she have to feel awkward about anyway? They were adults. So they’d had a relationship, however brief. Big fucking deal. Darger had a job to do, and the last thing she needed was to let ancient personal history get in the way.

  “Is there any way we could drive over to the Angelo Battaglia crime scene at some point?”

  Luck squinted as he processed the question.

  “The abandoned building?”

  They made direct eye contact for the first time. Darger nodded once.

  Luck’s gaze swiveled back to the road, and he shrugged.

  “We can go now, if you want. It’s on the way.”

  “OK. Good.”

  Silence settled over them again like a wet blanket. Well, she might as well get used to it.

  But then Luck cleared his throat.

  “Have you been here before? Michigan, I mean.”

  “We visited family friends once when I was a kid, but we didn’t come to the city.”

  That exchange seemed to ease the tension, but the conversation died then and there. Do not resuscitate.

  As they left the downtown area behind, Darger started to notice the desolation. Boarded up industrial buildings and shops. Empty parking lots with knee-high weeds growing in the cracks of the pavement. Large swaths of grass and concrete where the buildings had already been demolished and cleared. Some of the vacant buildings sported real estate signs. Others appeared to be just plain abandoned.

  She counted six boarded-up buildings in a row. The seventh was a liquor store.

  “It’s like a ghost town,” she said, half to herself.

  “Some areas, that’s literally what they are. This is a city built for almost 2 million people at its peak in 1950. Now it's home to less than 700,000. A few years back, they started this whole Detroit Future City thing. One of the issues is that people are so spread out, it cost too much money to police it all, provide public services. So they designated a bunch of what they called ‘Traditional Residential’ neighborhoods, meaning they’d actually maintain the infrastructure in those areas. Started encouraging people to abandon the rest of the city.”

  The tires bumped over potholes and crisscrossing tar lines.

  “The thing is,” Luck continued, “they can’t force anyone to move. And a lot of these people have lived in the same place their whole lives. They don’t want to leave.”

  Darger felt the car slow, and Luck steered down a residential street lined with old brick houses. A handful of the homes had been well-cared for. Fresh paint adorning the woodwork. Lawns recently mowed. Many more showed their age with peeling paint, missing shingles, rusty window awnings. And then smack in the middle of all of it were two homes that were only piles of rubble. Scorched marks on some of the visible building material told Darger the destruction had been the result of fire. Had one caught fire, and then the other? Or were they separate disasters? Was it arson or accidental? Were they abandoned at the time, or had someone been living there when it happened? Whatever the scenario, the ruined homes had been in their current state for some time judging by the number of vines growing over the broken structures.

  They passed a main cross street, slowing in front of a six-story building. Different shades of brick at the top of the building had been worked into an art deco design of zig-zags and diamond shapes. An engraved lintel over the main entrance read: Ravenwood Estates. The windows on the ground floor were boarded up, but the frames on higher floors were open wide, barely a shred of glass to be found. Even today, looking almost like it had been bombed, it was a striking piece
of architecture.

  Luck shifted into Park.

  “We’re here.”

  Chapter 5

  Darger stood and took in the surrounding area for a moment. The building was bordered by an empty lot of overgrown grass on one side and another smaller abandoned building on the other. Across the street, in the direction of the residential neighborhood they’d driven through, another stretch of vacant land was being reclaimed by nature.

  “I’ve never been in a city and felt so much like I was in the middle of nowhere,” she said.

  “Probably two-thirds of the city feels that way. It’s an odd thing for sure.”

  Luck led the way around the side of the structure. The blank expanse of brick had been spray-painted with giant hot pink letters that spelled out NUGZ in all caps. A dozen other smaller tags in various colors surrounded the larger piece.

  “I saw what happened on the news,” Luck said. “In Vegas, I mean.”

  Darger almost froze but forced herself to keep moving.

  “I guess all that crap about what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas is a bunch of bullshit.”

  She felt him watching her, eyes roaming her face. Was he looking for scars? Or maybe the subtler signs of a traumatic event.

  “Yeah well… I’m glad you’re OK,” he said finally.

  Darger stared at the ground. Nodded a wordless thanks.

  But was she OK? The phony bottle of Tylenol in her bag suggested otherwise, didn’t it?

  A gate made of wire fence blocked a back entrance that must have been some kind of maintenance access when the building was still in use. There was a length of chain secured by a padlock strung between the two halves of the gate.

  Luck stopped in front of the gate and fiddled with a lockbox she assumed contained the key for the lock. Darger swept past him, ducking low and slipping between the gap in the gate.

  “Hey,” Luck said, a scolding tone to his voice.

  He held a key in his hand.

  “You’re supposed to let me unlock it first.”

  Darger shrugged as he undid the lock and let himself in. He could have maneuvered through the way she had, but aside from being a chronic rule-follower, he probably didn’t want to risk mussing his suit.

  “My way was easier,” she said.

  They entered through an empty doorway in back and followed a narrow corridor to the front of the building where the main staircase was located. The smell hit her first. It wasn’t decay. Angelo Battaglia’s body was found six months ago, and the lingering odor of death even then had been long gone.

  But there were other smells. Piss and shit and mildew. It was obvious that whoever dumped the body hadn’t been the only person to use the place. Old syringes and other assorted drug paraphernalia were scattered about.

  Every surface was filthy and water damaged. The walls featured layers of graffiti crusted over with soot. It was almost hard to picture that it was ever habitable.

  The next thing that struck her was the feeling inside the place. Her skin almost crawled a little from the quiet. It was like she could physically sense the abandonment.

  Luck led the way up a flight of winding stairs to the third floor. It was a large open staircase. Darger peered down over the handrail and saw the patterned tile floor of the foyer. Glancing upward revealed a stretch of ceiling pocked with water stains and cracked plaster. It grew progressively wetter as they ascended, and Darger worried about the structural integrity of the place, imagining her foot sinking into a spot where the moisture had rotted through.

  She followed Luck down a hallway to the last door on the right. A set of brass numbers on the door proclaimed this to be apartment 307. Someone with a macabre sense of humor had scrawled “REDRUM” across the door in red paint.

  Remnants of the sticker used by police to seal a crime scene whispered against the doorframe as they pushed inside. Darger wondered why, of the dozens in the building, this particular apartment had been chosen as the site of the murder.

  What had once certainly been a luxurious apartment with high ceilings and herringbone patterned floors was now an urban ruin. Wallpaper hung in flaccid, peeling sheets. Crumbs from the flaking walls and ceiling littered the floor.

  Passing by the bathroom, Darger saw that the sink had been ripped from the wall and heaved to the floor. The toilet was in even worse shape, shattered into shards of porcelain as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it. Only a sliver of the bowl and the portion of the base that was bolted to the floor remained.

  “People just love to destroy things, I guess,” Luck said. “For no good reason.”

  He was talking about the house, she knew, but Darger thought the statement applied in a broader sense.

  They trudged into what had once been the living room. Angelo Battaglia’s body had been found near the window, barely more than a pile of bones and scraps of clothing by then.

  Damp carpet squished beneath Darger’s feet. She supposed it was the result of rain getting in through the open window, but she couldn’t help but imagine the fluids leftover from Battaglia’s decaying corpse. She took a step backward onto less moist ground.

  This side of the building faced a section of freeway, and Darger gazed down at it through the empty frame of the window. The vehicles zipped past like buzzing metal insects, and Darger wondered if this view had been the last thing Angelo Battaglia had seen before someone put two bullets into his skull. One thing was for sure: she doubted anyone would have heard a thing.

  And even though it was obvious other people had been inside the building, the killer probably thought it would be quite some time before anyone stumbled on just the right room and were in the right frame of mind to notice a body. And indeed that was exactly what had happened. How long had Price said Angelo Battaglia had been missing before the body was discovered? Two years?

  She doubted the killer thought he’d get away with it for that long. But then he’d gotten lucky.

  Her eyes fell to the place where Angelo Battaglia’s desiccated corpse had once lain. Fortune hadn’t smiled on him quite so much.

  Darger turned away from the window and found Luck studying her with a curious look on his face. She raised an eyebrow.

  “So… you seeing anybody?”

  Darger scoffed. “You’re fucking joking, right?”

  After all this time, and the long awkwardness earlier in the day, he was going to poke that hornets’ nest?

  But before she could say more, something thumped directly overhead. They both froze, staring at the ceiling. Distinct footsteps could be heard now, and the sound of something heavy being dragged over the floor above.

  Darger glanced at Luck just long enough to see that his face reflected her own shock, and then she took off in the direction of the stairs.

  Chapter 6

  “Violet, wait!” Luck hissed.

  She didn’t wait.

  Darger wound her way up the stairs, bounding past a mangled pile of broken wood, torn and soiled foam, and misshapen furniture springs. The corpse of a La-Z-boy, she figured.

  Her chest was heaving by the time she reached the fourth-floor landing, but she didn’t slow down. Luck’s feet thudded up the steps behind her. When she reached the apartment door, she paused, listening to the sound coming from within. More thumping. Muffled voices. A grating noise.

  Her arm stretched out, fingers reaching for the door handle. But before she could open it, someone grabbed her from behind. It was Luck, finally catching up with her. He spun her around, pushed her against the wall, and held her there with one hand on her chest.

  He had his gun out. SWAT instincts, she thought, batting his hand away.

  He gave her a reproachful look, then indicated that he would go through the door first. She should follow, providing cover.

  She nodded and made an impatient gesture with her left hand while her right reached for her weapon.

  He counted silently, mouthing the words for her benefit.

  On three, he burst through the
door.

  “FBI! Stay where you are!”

  From over his shoulder, Darger saw three small figures skitter in opposite directions, trying to flee.

  It took a beat for the significance of their size to register for her.

  Kids. The oldest was probably no more than twelve.

  Luck immediately lowered his gun. With his free hand, he darted out and grabbed the slowest of the scattering children by the sleeve of his baggy Raiders jersey.

  “Hold up there, little man.”

  “Lemme go!”

  The kid was probably eight, but he had some fight in him. When Luck didn’t relinquish his hold on him, the kid twisted around and slid out of the jersey.

  “Hey, come on!” Luck called after him as the kid scampered away, half-naked.

  Darger couldn’t help but snort out a laugh.

  Luck turned back to her, the jersey still clutched in his hand.

  “You think this is funny?”

  She nodded, not bothering to hide her amusement.

  Luck sighed and tucked his pistol back into its holster. The shirtless kid had disappeared down a hallway off the main room, and Luck took a few steps toward the corridor.

  “Come on out, guys,” he said. “We just want to talk.”

  When nothing happened, he glanced down at the jersey wadded up in his fist. He let out a low whistle.

  “This is one of the good ones. Stitched on twill letters and everything. I don’t expect mom is gonna be happy when you come home without it.”

  Hushed whispers emanated from deeper in the apartment followed by a shrill squeal of a hinge and creaking floorboards.

  Three boys appeared, brothers judging by the fact that they all sported the same curly-top mohawk haircut.

  Luck tossed the jersey to the youngest kid, who caught it against his chest, then hurried to pull it over his head.

  “Marshawn Lynch, huh?” Luck commented, studying the jersey. “Where’s your hometown pride?”