by L. T. Vargus
“Oh, he’s in the area, alright,” Milton said with a decisive nod.
Darger sat up a little straighter. “Yeah?”
“He’s got a place out at Fir Hill.”
“Shit,” Furbush muttered, then glanced at Darger. “Pardon my French.”
“I don’t understand. What’s the problem?”
“Fir Hill is a cemetery,” he explained.
“Bradley Wright is dead?”
Darger’s glance drifted over to Milton, who nodded.
“Died a little over five years ago, if memory serves. Got drunk and smashed his F150 and himself into smithereens out by Milham Park.”
Darger swallowed into an empty stomach. She’d sensed something, a lead, and now it was snatched away.
He must have picked up her disappointment.
“I’m sorry I don’t have more for you. I mean it when I say that the Whitmore murder has been stuck in my craw since the day I walked into that bathroom and found her all bruised and battered in the tub. I know how it is to want to find a lead, a suspect, anything and to come up empty-handed.”
As they bid Milton and Daisy farewell, Darger clenched her jaw. She felt the unanswered questions spinning in her mind like a cyclone. More confusion. More frustration. This case didn’t want to cooperate, that was for sure. She trudged back to the car on Furbush’s heels, lost in her own thoughts.
Her door shut with a dull thud. She reached for her seatbelt and drew it over her chest and lap.
The engine rumbled awake, and just as Furbush shifted into reverse, his phone rang. He plucked it from the holder on the dash and answered.
“Chief Furbush,” he said, then paused. “Yeah. OK. Great. We’re heading back there now.”
Ending the call with a swipe of his thumb, he returned his phone to its dock on the dashboard and turned to Darger.
“That was Marcy. They found the file.”
“Good. Now we just have to hope there’s something worthwhile in it.”
Chapter 24
Darger, Fowles, and Furbush huddled over the Christy Whitmore file, going over it piece by piece.
First they laid out the dozens of photographs of the crime scene. Christy’s body slumped in the tub. A puddle of water on the floor next to a sodden bathmat. A razor and can of shaving foam that had been knocked across the room.
Obvious signs of a struggle.
Then there was Christy’s skin, a map of welts and scratches and bruises that stood out against her dead white pallor. The girl had put up a fight.
It was just like Milton had described.
And it was different from the other murders in so many ways. Christy had been found soon after death, so despite the bruises and marks, she mostly looked peaceful. There was still a wrongness to her, if you really looked. The way all corpses looked off. But she wasn’t rotting and falling apart. There was no bloating. If they hadn’t made the leap that the new drownings were likely occurring in a bathtub, Darger never would have assumed this case was related to the others.
“Take a look at this,” Fowles said. “It’s from an interview with Christy’s mother.”
Darger took a step closer, and he pointed out the section of interest.
WHITMORE: Dustin is the one you should be looking at. He’s the one. I know it.
DETECTIVE BLAKE: What makes you think that?
WHITMORE: It’s not rocket science. He’s spoiled. Used to getting anything he wants. So when Christy broke up with him, he couldn’t just let it go. Not without making her pay the price.
DETECTIVE BLAKE: But do you have any evidence to that effect?
WHITMORE: Isn’t that your job, detective? I’m telling you, he’s no good. He’s the one that took my baby girl from me.
Even though it was only black ink on white paper, Darger could practically hear the fury in the words.
“So who’s this Dustin guy the mother keeps bringing up?”
Marcy was in the midst of preparing a fresh pot of coffee across the room. She paused mid-scoop.
“Dustin Reynolds. He was Christy’s boyfriend.”
“OK. Yeah, Chief Milton mentioned looking at a boyfriend,” Furbush said.
“Do we have an interview with Dustin in the file?”
Furbush paged through his stack of papers.
“I’ve got it here.”
He passed Darger a few pages stapled together.
She skimmed through the interview, which had been conducted with an attorney present. Apparently Dustin’s parents weren’t taking any chances, and Darger probably would’ve done the same if it were her kid in the hot seat. Especially with Christy’s mother gunning for him.
Still, the fact that all questions went through a lawyer made for a sterile interview. Just clean, hard facts. Where Dustin was the day of the murder (skateboarding with friends at a local park and then to Subway). When he’d last spoken to Christy (at school the previous day). If he could think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt Christy (No way).
Darger set the interview aside and paged through the remaining contents of the Whitmore file.
“Marcy?” Darger called, and the woman poked her head into the conference room. “Do you know if Christy’s family is still in town?”
The wheels of Marcy’s office chair squealed as she rolled herself into the conference room.
“Her mother still lives in the same house. Not sure how. I don’t think I’d be able to stay in my home knowing something like that happened there.”
But Darger knew that for many people, it was all of the good memories that kept them in the same place. Especially for a parent. The marks on the doorway that showed how their children had grown or the spaghetti-stained handprint on the kitchen wall.
“I think I should go talk to her,” Darger said.
Furbush took a long pull from his coffee mug and made to stand up.
“Great idea. I’ll come with.”
“I think maybe I should go alone,” Darger said, chewing her lip.
Frowning, Furbush crossed his arms over his broad chest.
“OK. Why?”
“Did you take a look at those?” she asked and pointed to a pile of pink sheets tacked in the back of the Whitmore file.
“Not really. What is it?”
“Complaints. Filed by Mrs. Whitmore against this department.”
“Complaints about what?”
“Corruption. Incompetence. It looks like she wasn’t happy with how the investigation was being handled. They go on for quite some time after Christy’s death. I think she held a bit of a grudge.”
Hands on his hips, Furbush frowned and pursed his lips.
“I didn’t even work here then.”
“I know. It’s just that… emotions like grief and anger don’t usually bring out logical behavior. If she holds this department accountable, it won’t matter to her that you weren’t part of the investigation. Just showing up on her doorstep in that uniform might be enough for her to slam the door in our faces.”
His mouth worked like he was chewing on something.
Darger prayed he would see reason. This wasn’t about egos. She only wanted what was best for the investigation. But she also couldn’t force him to sit the interview out. It was still his investigation. His jurisdiction.
Finally, he sighed.
“No. You’re right. I’d be pretty pissed off if my daughter was killed, and we never found who did it. Can’t be an easy thing to live through.” He rapped his knuckles against the table. “If you think my presence might disrupt things, or upset her, then you should go alone.”
Relieved, Darger got to her feet. As she pushed in her chair, an idea came to her.
“Actually I’d like to bring Fowles along with me,” Darger said. “Assuming she’s got an axe to grind with law enforcement types, having a genuine civilian with me might make her less cagey.”
Fowles frowned in mock disappointment as he followed Darger to the door.
“You mean you didn’t
choose me for my effervescent personality?”
Chapter 25
The house Christy Whitmore had died in — and the house her mother still lived in — stood in a small subdivision next to a Christmas tree farm. A quiet area, Darger thought. Quaint.
Beside the little beige ranch-style home was an expanse of green lawn with a large brush pile at one end. Toward the back of the yard, a row of immense larch trees cast swaying shadows over a yellow playhouse.
“How’d she sound on the phone?” Fowles asked as they rolled up the gravel driveway.
“Mrs. Whitmore, you mean?”
Fowles nodded.
“Not thrilled. She made some comment about it being a waste of time. But ultimately she agreed.”
“And you think she can tell you something? Something they missed twenty years ago?”
Darger shook her head.
“Maybe. My job is to get all the details and give an analysis. To make intuitive leaps. If Christy Whitmore was killed by the same person, she might have been his first victim. Finding out more about who Christy was might tell me something new about him.”
She glanced over at Fowles. His mouth was quirked to one side, and he had one of his pensive, but hard-to-read expressions on his face.
“As a scientist, that probably makes profiling sound like a bunch of woo-woo nonsense to you.”
His eyes opened wider.
“Not at all. It was reminding me of being at the body farm during my study. In the lab, we can control most of the variables with such precision — lighting, temperature, humidity. In the field? Not so much. You think that as a scientist, I can’t understand or appreciate the intuitive nature of your work, but that’s not true. A good scientist has to have intuition to go along with our observation and analysis. Every new scientific discovery is born out of an intuitive leap.”
She smiled when he was finished.
“I’m sorry for assuming.”
“That’s OK. I take it you’ve come across a few critics who doubted the credibility of criminal profiling as a science?”
Darger snorted. “A few.”
“I know several colleagues who absolutely loathe being in the field. There are so many variables to consider outside the lab. A good field study endeavors to keep track of as many as possible, but so much is out of our hands. I had a colleague that was studying the foraging habits of bumblebees. On the third night of her study, a family of raccoons happened across the hive she was watching and decimated it.”
“What does that mean?”
“They ate it. The little bandits dug up the hive and devoured it like candy.”
Stifling a shocked chuckle, Darger asked, “What did she do? Your colleague, I mean?”
Fowles scratched the side of his head.
“She almost quit. In the end, she only swore off field studies. Said she preferred the lab, where there are rules and boundaries and nothing eats your study unless it’s supposed to.”
Darger glanced through the windshield at the Whitmore house. Paint faded and peeling in a few places. A rectangle two shades darker than the rest, where a missing shutter had once clung. Bushes on either side of the front step, so overgrown that their scraggly branches reached across the cracked sidewalk like arms trying to trip unwary visitors.
“Well, it’s time we headed into the field, so to speak,” Darger said. “Let’s just hope there aren’t any hungry raccoons waiting for us on the other side of that door.”
Darger exited the vehicle and strode to the front door with Fowles close behind. She knocked three times and waited, spinning around to get a view of the place from the entrance. Nothing struck her as out of the ordinary. Another quiet, suburban neighborhood. There were thousands more like it across the country. But a young girl had died here. Murdered. Darger’s scalp prickled at the thought.
Behind her, the sound of a rusty door hinge squealed like a pig. She turned back, found the pinched face of a woman staring back.
“Carole Whitmore?”
Mrs. Whitmore squinted at her through the warped screen of the door.
“You’re the consultants or whatever?”
“That’s us,” Darger said, trying on a friendly smile. “My name is Violet Darger. This is Ted Fowles.”
Mrs. Whitmore’s already furrowed brow scrunched up even further.
“You a local?”
“No,” Darger said, wondering if Mrs. Whitmore would change her mind about talking to them if she knew they were working with Sandy PD.
Instead, Darger thought she saw a flicker of disappointment flash across the woman’s face.
“Huh. Thought you looked familiar. Guess not, though.”
With an impatient wave of her hand, she beckoned them inside and pulled the door closed. She shuffled into a living room and slumped into a saggy leather recliner. The upholstery had probably once been a rich cognac brown but was worn down to a drab beige. The yellow-tinged lighting was dim and gave the place a sad, used up feel.
Darger studied the row of photographs over the mantel and noted that even Mrs. Whitmore seemed like a faded version of her former self.
“Not sure what all you’re hoping to learn,” Mrs. Whitmore said in a hollow voice, picking absently at one of the buttons on the bulky sweater she wore. “I saw the news. About the girls they found in the river. Figure you must be thinking it might be related to what happened to Christy. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. I don’t know why you need to talk to me.”
She had a look Darger had seen before. The look of a woman whose life had ceased the moment she found her daughter’s lifeless body. All her hopes and dreams had stopped there like a broken clock, never to tick again.
It wasn’t coldness in her eyes but emptiness.
“Well, I’m hoping to get a more complete picture of what happened to your daughter. To Christy.”
The woman’s expression didn’t change.
“If you’re expecting me to tell you something new, you’re apt to be disappointed. What I’ve got to say is the same shit I told the cops all them years ago. Or tried to tell. They weren’t too much interested in hearing me out.”
“I know it probably seems like too little, too late, but I want to hear it,” Darger said, moving to a dusty-looking sofa where Fowles already sat.
“Too little, too late sounds about right,” Mrs. Whitmore said and crossed her arms over her chest. “Maybe if that Chief Milton didn’t have his head up his ass, he might have done something. Found who took my baby girl away from me.”
“You know Milton isn’t Chief anymore?”
“What’s it matter? They’re all the same.” Mrs. Whitmore scoffed. “It was obvious from the get-go that they weren’t going to find who did it. The cops around here, they give speeding tickets and collect money for the stupid fundraising raffle they hold every year. There’s no real police work being done. And it’s an Old Boys’ Club, from the top all the way to the bottom. They never wanted to listen what I had to say, because it was ugly business, and I wasn’t one of them. They’re only interested in taking care of their own.”
“Well, I’m interested. And I’m here to listen,” Darger said, wondering how she was going to break through this woman’s defenses. Maybe it would be better to be blunt.
Darger took a breath.
“Can you tell me about the day your daughter died?” she asked.
Mrs. Whitmore’s mouth pinched tighter for a beat. A little twitch of pain at remembering.
“Sure. I came home from work. Found my baby girl stark naked and all bruised up. Dead,” the woman said, Darger’s own bluntness thrown right back in her face. “It had always been just me and her. She was all I had.”
Darger glanced over at Fowles, hoping he’d have another one of his moments where he seemed to say exactly the right thing at the right time. But he was staring into his hands, clearly uncomfortable with the contentious atmosphere.
Darger’s eyes swept over the photographs above the mantel again, and she was stru
ck by an idea. If she steered the conversation away from the investigation, perhaps then Mrs. Whitmore would open up.
“Maybe you could give me a sense of what kind of person Christy was. The things she liked to do,” Darger said.
There was only silence for a moment, and Darger was beginning to think Mrs. Whitmore wasn’t going to respond. Then she spoke.
“Some days I still think I’ll walk into her room and find her there, painting her nails on her bed, like I told her not to do a hundred times.”
She closed her eyes, shaking her head slowly.
“All those little fights. Little squabbles. Such a waste of the time we had together. You only realize it when you lose them. That you wasted it all. Pissed it away like you had forever. But you didn’t. You don’t. No one has forever.”
Darger stared at a photo of Christy and her mother in matching sequined dresses, fully made up with their hair teased out. It had the look of the glamour portraits girls used to have done when Darger was a teenager. Mrs. Whitmore was like a broken record of despair, and Darger needed a way to jump the needle past this looping section of self-pity. But how?
Beside the glamour portrait was a trophy and a snapshot of Christy in a softball uniform. Another photograph showed Mrs. Whitmore and a group of young girls grinning at the camera, all wearing matching t-shirts printed with the team logo.
“How long did Christy play softball?” Darger asked.
“Oh, I started her in tee-ball when she was four. Coached her all the way through elementary and middle school.”
Darger thought she sensed something new in Mrs. Whitmore’s voice. A tiny spark of life. Of the love she’d felt for her daughter.
And just as quickly, it vanished, the woman’s shoulder’s slumping like an ice cream cone melting in the July heat.
“She quit her Freshman year. Another one of our big blow-ups. I was thinking scholarships.”
There was a hitch in Mrs. Whitmore’s voice.
“Of course she never even graduated, so what was the point? What did any of it matter?”
Darger felt herself being sucked into the despair. Why shouldn’t Mrs. Whitmore be angry? Her daughter was killed. And to make matters worse, the person who did it was never punished.