by L. T. Vargus
It was rougher than one might expect, for starters. Cutting through ribs and sawing open skulls were not delicate tasks.
It reminded her a little of the first time she’d seen someone administer CPR in real life. She’d witnessed a car accident her first year in college, and she still remembered how violent it seemed when the paramedic began chest compressions on a man pulled from the wreckage. The woman threw her whole upper body into the effort, and the unconscious man convulsed with each thrust. It hadn’t been a shock when she’d learned that recipients of CPR often sustained fractured ribs or a broken sternum.
She glanced over at her two male associates. Ever the scientist, Fowles appeared both completely at ease and rapt with the examination. Furbush, on the other hand, had a decidedly green tint.
“That’s what I thought,” the doctor said, talking to himself it seemed, but then he pointed out various landmarks in the abdominal cavity.
“See the lacerations here, on the left lobe of the liver?” he asked, gesturing at a large dark blob.
He moved a gloved finger to a paler organ Darger recognized as the stomach.
“And another here near the pyloric ring.”
Glancing up at them through the thick lenses of his glasses, he frowned.
“It’s always difficult to tell at the on-scene examination whether these types of wounds are ante or postmortem. Anytime they’re in the water for any period of time, there’s the potential for animal activity or dragging on rough surfaces. You’d be surprised the amount of damage a corpse can sustain just being pulled out by the divers. The skin is so delicate after being in the water for a few hours. It tears quite easily.”
Dr. Kole pressed his lips together and gazed down at the body.
“However, looking at them now, the lacerations are very clean.”
He drew their attention to a monitor nearby displaying close-up photographs his assistant had been busy taking all the while.
“You can see here, under magnification, there’s almost no tearing of the tissue. These are neat cuts. And the depth of each wound, too, is quite consistent.”
“Meaning?” Furbush asked.
“I believe she was stabbed to death.”
“Not drowned?”
“That is correct.”
“Could she have been stabbed as a means for the killer to subdue her before drowning?” Darger asked. “We theorized that might have been the case with some of the other victims, based on their wounds.”
Dr. Kole made something like a grunt.
“The key word there is ‘theorized.’ All of the previous victims were in such an advanced state of decomposition that I couldn’t say definitively whether the wounds had occurred before or after death. But the point is moot, when it comes to this particular victim. I’ve checked for other signs of drowning. There is no water in the lungs. No hemolysis.”
Darger was still trying to make sense of this as he continued.
“There’s more,” he said and now he and his assistant removed the stomach and liver.
He pointed to a thick pink tube toward the back of the cavity.
“The abdominal aorta was severed. She would have bled out in a matter of minutes,” he said, crossing his arms. “I’m certain this girl was dead before she hit the water.”
As the doctor continued his examination, Furbush and Fowles fell into conversation, but Darger was too deep in her own thoughts to follow it.
Was the killer changing his M.O.? Or could it have been an accident? Maybe he’d stabbed her to incapacitate her, hit the aorta, and she died too quickly to do the bathtub ritual. That could explain why he’d skipped it. He’d messed it up. Given up when things went wrong.
Something about the whole case still felt wrong to Darger. Off. Right in the middle of everything they knew, there was a big gaping hole in the shape of a question mark.
A hand on her shoulder sent these thoughts scattering. She blinked at Fowles questioningly.
“Are you OK?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Just thinking.”
Furbush cleared his throat.
“So she wasn’t drowned. And Fowles says the insect evidence suggests she was put in the water almost immediately right after death… are we sure this is even the same killer? I thought the drowning was integral to his little ceremony of whatever.”
“It’s him,” Darger said. “It’s too coincidental. Someone else stabs this girl and decides to dump her in a pond? There are a thousand places you could hide a body around here. Places where the body would stay hidden.”
She rubbed her eyes.
“Regardless of whether he stabbed any of the previous victims, there was something different about this girl. It was more personal. He lost control here for some reason. Took things too far. It’s like… this was more of a crime of passion than his usual meticulous ritual.”
Furbush remained unconvinced.
“What if it was staged to make us think it was our killer?”
Weighing this in her mind, Darger wrapped her arms around herself. She had the sense that Furbush was growing just as impatient with the case as she was.
“Maybe,” she said finally, studying the woman laid out on the cold metal table just a few feet away. “But she feels like one of ours. I don’t know why, but she does.”
Chapter 51
Sweat smears your palms. No matter how many times you swipe them at the knees of your pants, the moisture remains. Fresh blooms of it seeping out to slick your skin as fast as you can dry it.
You walk through the dark. Through a gutted section of town where tall grass grows to shroud the empty factories.
The buildings watch you passing by. Busted out windows peer out at you like swollen pupils.
Otherwise you are alone. As alone as you’ve ever been. Cold and empty and useless.
When you close your eyes, you can still see the black and white of the newsprint. They’ve found Reynolds.
Callie, too.
It’s close now. The end looms closer than ever.
They will know what you’ve done, will know who you are. Everyone will know.
And then what? Then what happens?
You wrinkle your brow. Ponder it a moment.
Shame. That’s what will happen. Shame without end, without any chance of release, relief, redemption.
And maybe that makes sense. Maybe.
That’s what happens to the monster people, right? They cease to exist. Once we know the darkness inside of them, we erase them somehow. Render them less than human. Cast them out. Forget them.
We lock them up in the dark somewhere where our eyes don’t have to go. It makes us feel safe.
But it’s not real, is it? The safety we feel isn’t real.
Because the darkness is always there, always part of humanity, always part of us. It cannot be defeated. More and more and more of it. No matter what we do.
You walk past the last of the buildings, past a few park benches and rotting picnic tables set off in the strip of grass along the roadside, some half-assed park where the factory workers could go for lunch, probably.
And that’s it. You’ve arrived at the end of this industrial neighborhood. The end of the city.
You reach the place where the streetlights end, that strange point where the city’s glow shears off into black nothing. Feels like moving toward the mouth of a cave. An enclosed blackness you must enter.
You press forward into the gloom. Let the shadows swallow you whole. Let the darkness have you. And the strangest thrum vibrates in your chest.
Your hand balls into a fist. Presses itself to that fleshy spot just left of your sternum. You remember reading somewhere that a kid’s heart is the size of a fist and an adult’s is the size of two fists.
You can feel it in there now. That crooked ball of muscle squishing along, beating against your ribcage.
And now the dark closes around you. Total. Complete.
Everything and nothing spiral in your
head, your brain intent on holding onto both at once, trying to wrap its wrinkles around them, use either/or to explain the universe, to explain existence. Some paradox. A loop that repeats and repeats and repeats, feeds back into itself eternally like those layers of self-consciousness that plague you. Watching yourself watch yourself watch yourself and on and on.
You push each foot forward into the black, and the soles of your shoes scuffing on the blacktop seem to be the only evidence left that you are real, that you exist at all in a physical sense. The dark somehow seems more real than you now, bigger than you.
And you love it and hate it at the same time. Tingling. Overwhelmed with the strange power of the night touching you like this. It’s too much. Too much to hold in one heart, in one skull.
Sickness creeps over you in waves. A wriggling nag in the abdomen. Squishing liquid in your gut that wants to loose itself up, up, and away.
The darkness in your head seems to seep out into physical reality. Your internal world coming out to play in the dark.
And images flare there in the emptiness. The figments in your head projected outward, made real.
You see the Channel 7 news report about Reynolds again as though the reporter and B-roll footage of the cabin lay before you, the pictures somehow blossoming from the asphalt in 3-D.
Interviewed faces congeal and shift and morph. People connected to the case.
What did that bitch tell the police? How bad is it? You wish you could go to her. Show her your side of the story with the tip of your blade. But you can’t. You can’t.
The anger swells, a seething fever that tints the dark with the slightest red hue, but you push it down. Move deeper into the dark, into the black.
Snippets of the report play again and again, broadcast into the night out of order, the pictures perpetually in front of you, bobbing a little along with the rise and fall of your gait.
The cabin. The director seems to dwell on the cabin. Those shots of the ramshackle building holding longer and longer as the loop plays on. Sunlight glinting on the worn shingles of the roof.
Yes. The cabin. It makes sense.
The cabin has become something of a beacon now, you think. A place of great energy after being still for so long. A wound that people will be drawn to. Everyone wants to go to that torn open place and gaze down into the hole, try to make sense of it. The dark energy will pull them to it like a magnet. Will draw them right to you.
You can wait out at the cabin like a spider. Ready. Lying in wait for them to move into the sticky strings of your web.
You smile in the dark.
Chapter 52
Night was falling by the time they left the medical examiner’s office. It wasn’t raining anymore, though everything still glistened with moisture and the air felt thick and cool.
The floodlights that lit the parking lot buzzed overhead as the three investigators trudged out to their vehicles.
Furbush paused next to his Explorer and rested a hand on the roof. He looked dog-tired, with heavy bags under his bloodshot eyes.
“I’ll call everyone in for a meeting tomorrow morning so we can try to… I don’t know…. Figure something out. You know the State Police offered to take this all off our hands after we found the Mead girl. But I was a stubborn old boar and said no. I thought we could handle it. Thought I could handle it. Maybe that was a mistake.”
“I wouldn’t have joined the investigation if I thought that was the case,” Darger said, not wanting him to give up.
She reached out and patted his arm.
“Go home, and get some rest. You’re exhausted. We all are. Tomorrow we can take a look at everything with fresh eyes.”
He nodded, only seeming half-convinced, and climbed into his car.
Darger’s stomach grumbled as she followed Fowles across the lot to where they’d parked earlier that evening. She went over the events since the morning interview with Kathryn Porter, somehow not believing it had all occurred in a single day. It felt like a week had passed since yesterday.
She glanced over at Fowles as he started the car, knowing that if she was feeling exhausted, he was probably doubly so. He’d been on his feet for most of the hours spent at the crime scene. As much as she hungered for a home-cooked meal, she couldn’t imagine allowing him cook for her on a night like tonight.
The car glided out of the parking lot, headed for Portland. Darger spoke up over the sound of the tires humming on the asphalt, and suggested they order takeout.
“You’re not holding me to my promise?”
“You’re off the hook,” she said. “For now. But you can’t just throw around labels like ‘world famous’ and not expect to have to prove yourself, you understand. I will expect a make-up lasagna.”
“Fair enough. There’s a great Chinese place not far from my house."
Darger’s nose wrinkled. Normally she was a big fan of Chinese, but she had rules about what she could and could not stomach after a crime scene.
“Nope. Can’t do rice. Or noodles. Haven’t you ever seen The Lost Boys? Nothing that looks like maggots or worms, thank you.”
“But there weren’t any maggots today.”
“Doesn’t matter. The mere possibility of maggots is enough to put me off all maggot-like foods for at least two days. Maybe that makes me particularly maggot-suggestible. So be it.”
Fowles shook his head, amused.
“Pizza?” he suggested. “Or does that look too much like viscera?”
“Pizza is fine. As long as you don’t say ‘viscera’ again.”
When they got back to Fowles’ apartment, she was surprised just how hungry she was. After devouring four slices, she sat back against the couch. She felt satiated and also totally drained. Her feet hurt, and the dampness from the weather seemed to have seeped into her bones, making them feel creaky and ancient. Her back and shoulders ached from the long hours of standing.
The corner of her phone dug into her hip, so she pulled it from her pocket and tossed it on the coffee table. She caught sight of Fowles, who was also leaning back against the cushions, eyes closed. Here she was cataloguing her list of bodily complaints when he’d actually been in work mode the whole time. Analyzing, collecting samples, brain no doubt working a mile a minute.
She scooted closer and reached out for his neck and shoulders. He let out a groan of satisfaction as she rubbed at the tired muscles.
While she massaged, her mind wandered over the details of the case. That sense that they were missing something big had become stronger and stronger over the last few days. And today, finding this new body, with the method of killing suddenly changing, seemed to solidify that concept in her mind.
Something was wrong. The profile was off. She’d known it all along somehow, but she still didn’t know why.
It was like Fowles with his conflicting insect evidence. Larvae where there shouldn’t be larvae.
The killer’s basic shape writhed and shifted in her mind, never keeping still. She knew that if she could only pinpoint what felt so dissonant about all of it, the mixed up pieces of the puzzle would fall together, show her the big picture.
Fowles reached out and brushed her cheek lightly with the back of his fingers.
She realized she’d stopped massaging and was just sitting there with her hands resting on his shoulders.
“What’s the matter?”
“Hm?” Darger said, the fog of her thoughts dissipating slowly. “Oh, it’s nothing. I mean, it’s not. Just… something isn’t right.”
“With us?”
He’d gone rigid then, his face all concern. He looked so serious, Darger couldn’t help but chuckle.
“No.” She watched him relax. “It’s this case. More specifically, my profile. Something is off. I’ve felt it for a while now, but I can’t put my finger on it. I constantly feel like I’m being pulled in two directions.”
She shook her head.
“It’s like the stuff you found with the insects. You knew someth
ing didn’t add up. The bugs didn’t match up with what the medical examiner was telling you.”
“Which you solved, by the way,” he reminded her. “You’ll figure this out, too.”
“Eventually. Maybe. But what if it’s too late?” She rubbed at her eyes. “What am I saying? It’s already too late. He’s killed two more. If he does it again, and I haven’t figured it out…”
Fowles pulled her closer and kissed her, and then his hands were in her hair and on her body, and Darger tried to let go of the worry, of the anxious thoughts scratching at the dark corners of her mind, but even as they made love, and after, when she started to drift off to sleep, there was a part of her mind still occupied with unease.
* * *
Darger’s phone was ringing. Her eyes snapped open, glanced at the clock on the bedside table. She’d only dozed off for about half an hour, dusk now hitting its full stride out the windows, but the brief nap left her feeling groggy and confused. By the time she kicked out from under the sheets and stumbled out into the living room to retrieve her phone, she’d missed the call. Her eyes squinted into slits as she read the number from the call log. She didn’t recognize it.
She left it and went into the kitchen to chug a glass of water and snag a cold piece of pizza.
Halfway through the slice, Darger perched on the sofa and checked her voicemail. There was one new message. It was from Kathryn Porter.
The woman’s tone of voice sounded even stranger than usual, and Darger thought her detached demeanor and flat way of speaking would make her the kind of person her mother referred to as a “space cadet.”
“Hi. It’s Kathryn Porter, and um…. I guess after we talked, I got to thinking about Dustin and the cabin. And I thought and thought until this urge to go out there overtook me. I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to see it. For… closure, I guess. Something to make his death feel more real to me. Something like that. We were together for so many years, even if we didn’t get along most of the time. It’s hard… hard to wrap your head around something like that. So I’m driving out there now, just to peek in the windows, I guess, before it’s all the way dark, anyway. I don’t know. I guess I thought maybe I should let someone know.”