Dead End Girl (Violet Darger Book 1) Read online

  “Oh. Yeah. Bad habit,” Darger said, studying the jagged edges.

  Sierra bounced off the bed and went over to the pile of possessions she’d scavenged from her eviction. When she came back to the bed, she had the little train case in her hands. The top unfolded, revealing two shelves with around a dozen compartments each. There were eyeshadows and lip pencils and brushes and sponges. Sierra reached for an emery board and a pair of nail scissors.

  “You were serious?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Her open palm beckoned. She started with the scissors, evening out the broken edges and trimming a few hangnails. After that, a few sweeps of the file rounded what meager tips Darger hadn’t already chewed off. Massaging a dollop of conditioning cream into each fingertip, Sierra clicked her tongue.

  “You need that stuff they have for dogs.”

  A breathy laugh puffed out of Darger’s nostrils.

  “What?”

  “It’s like sour apple or something. ‘Sposed to keep ‘em from chewing.”

  Violet laughed.

  “That might work. But I’d probably end up developing a taste for sour apple fingernails.”

  With a large wooden Q-tip, Sierra did battle with Darger’s ragged cuticles, prodding and poking them into submission. A calmness came over the girl as she worked. A focus Violet hadn’t seen before.

  Another specialty goop came out and Sierra began massaging her hands and forearms.

  Darger let her eyes fall closed.

  “All I need now is a lounge chair on a tropical beach and a cute cabana boy to bring me a margarita.”

  “Tell him to bring me one, too,” Sierra said, chuckling.

  Darger lifted her free hand and gestured to the imaginary cabana boy.

  “Make that two margaritas, Butch.”

  When it came time for the polish, Sierra selected a bottle of nail polish in a very loud shade of blue. A metal BB rattled against the glass as Sierra shook the lacquer, and Darger eyed it dubiously.

  “Are we sure about this color?”

  “Yes, we are sure about it.”

  “It’s just so… blue,” Darger said.

  “The blue of a tropical ocean.”

  “Does it come with a cabana boy named Butch?”

  “It’s called Cerulean Sea, and it is very in right now.”

  Sierra fixed her with a stare.

  “You’re the one that said I should follow my dreams.”

  “And that involves painting my nails the color of cotton candy?”

  “Cotton candy is pink.”

  “Pink! Hey, there’s an idea. A nice traditional shade.”

  “Let me do them in Cerulean Sea, and if you hate it, we can take it off.”

  Darger surrendered her left hand, still clutching a beer in her right.

  When she finished, Darger admired the glossy enamel. The girl had done a good job, and the color — while not necessarily something Darger would have chosen on her own — wasn’t quite as garish as she’d expected.

  “See?”

  Darger wiggled her fingers.

  “You do good work.”

  “Thanks,” Sierra said, beaming. She bent over her own hand, applying the same blue shade to her fingertips.

  Her face was placid. As tranquil as the tropical lagoon that the nail polish was named for.

  Darger swallowed, worrying she might ruin what rapport she’d achieved so far. Maybe she should wait.

  But again, the tick-tock of the clock counting down to the next victim demanded she do it now.

  Finished with her first hand, Sierra screwed the top back on the bottle and waited for the polish to dry before she did the other. She blew on the nails and reached for the pizza box with her dry hand.

  “So this Jimmy guy you were talking about earlier,” Darger said, even though Sierra hadn’t actually mentioned him. “Is he your boyfriend or what?”

  “God, no,” Sierra said, too quickly, and Violet realized there was almost certainly some kind of history there. She’d only intended to use the boyfriend angle as a segue.

  “Friend with benefits, then?”

  A slice of now-cold pizza hovered in front of Sierra’s mouth, and she almost choked on the bite she’d just taken.

  “Probably what he thinks,” she said.

  “And he’s someone that can get certain things that people might want. Am I right?”

  Sierra’s eyes flicked up to meet hers for a moment, then focused back on her pizza. She pinched a piece of pepperoni between her fingers and pulled it free, depositing it in her mouth.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Is that why you’re protecting him?”

  Sierra’s jaw moved up and down.

  “Sierra.” Violet’s tone was gentle but insistent.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because no one’s interested in whatever goes on at Jimmy’s house. At least I’m not. All I care about is catching the guy who took you. If he’s the same guy who killed those girls, Sierra, he’s going to do it again. Soon. You know it, and I know it.”

  The chewing stopped. A faraway look entered the girl’s eyes. Darger thought she could see tears forming, but she wasn’t certain.

  “I know.”

  The girl’s voice was barely a whisper.

  Violet didn’t dare move. She held very still, and very quietly she spoke.

  “So tell me what happened.”

  She had been at Jimmy’s for most of the day. Getting high, watching TV, playing video games.

  “Mostly him and his friends play, and I watch. I’m not really into that stuff.”

  At around 2 AM, she left Jimmy’s to go home.

  “You were going to walk home? It’s kind of a hike, isn’t it?”

  Sierra shrugged.

  “Jimmy wouldn’t give me a ride, and he said I couldn’t stay because he had to get up early the next morning, so what was I supposed to do?”

  Violet tried to think if she’d ever met any drug dealer that had to “get up early in the morning.” More likely, she was too naive — or in too much denial — to recognize when she was being blown off.

  She’d only gone about a block when she heard the car. And that was where Sierra’s story got interesting.

  “He said…” Sierra said and then seemed to stop herself.

  Violet waited. The last thing she wanted to do was interrupt.

  After a long pause, Sierra started again.

  “He stopped the car, and I…”

  Again her words faltered, and Sierra covered her face with her hands.

  “Sierra,” Violet said softly, “I’m not going to judge you. I’m only interested in finding the man who tried to kill you. I need to make sure he never hurts anyone else, and I need your help to do that.”

  “I know, but… what if it was my fault a little bit? What if I got into the car with him?”

  “That doesn’t make it your fault. Is that what happened?”

  An almost imperceptible nod of Sierra’s head told her it was.

  “What did he say to you?”

  “He asked me… he asked if I wanted to party.”

  Darger could almost hear Janssen’s accusatory tone in her head, And do you make it a habit of getting into cars with strange men like that?

  A sniffle escaped the girl’s hands, and Violet scooted closer so she could rub Sierra’s back.

  “I know this is hard. And I’m sorry you have to keep going over it again and again. But I promise you, it will help us find him. You’re the key, Sierra.”

  The girl took her hands away at that, wiping at her cheek with the collar of her t-shirt. Violet leaned over and snatched a tissue from the box near the bed, and then handed it to Sierra.

  “What do you mean?”

  Darger licked her lips and tried to figure out how to explain it.

  “In most homicides, the way we solve it is by tying the murderer to the victim. It was someone they knew. A family member, a co-worker, a spous
e, a rival gang member. We can usually narrow things down by determining whether or not it was a crime of passion or something that seemed planned. If it was a crime of a passion — a husband catches his wife in an affair, or two people have an argument and one pulls a gun — then we knew where to start looking. Likewise, if it seems planned, then we start checking out people who would have benefited from the death, whether it’s about money or drugs or a custody disagreement.

  “But serial killers don’t fit into the normal way of solving a homicide. And usually that means we have to get lucky. Or clever. Or both. In this case, I think it’s both.

  “We got lucky,” Darger said pointing at herself, “because you were clever enough to escape.”

  Now she aimed her finger at Sierra.

  “I still don’t see how it helps that much.”

  “Sierra, believe me. This…” she waved her phone in the air, which had been recording their talk, “this whole conversation is everything. We are going to find him because of you. Because of the things you’ve told me here tonight. I know it.”

  Sierra had stopped crying now. She looked down at the wadded up tissue in her fist.

  “Do you think you can tell me what happened after you got in the car?”

  Sierra’s head went up and down.

  The story from there on out was similar to what she’d told Janssen. Almost as soon as she got in and closed the door, he hit her on the side of the head and clapped a rag over her mouth.

  “It smelled kind of… sweet, but also like alcohol. Like really rotten bananas. But it made my nose so cold.”

  She woke some time later on a cold floor. She still wasn’t certain about it being a garage or not. When she got to the part about running into the woods, Darger stopped her.

  “How long do you think you ran through the woods?”

  Sierra scratched under her chin.

  “I don’t know. It seemed like a long time. An hour? Maybe two?”

  Darger knew from the timeline that it couldn’t have been two hours. Sierra was picked up around 2 AM, and her 911 call was noted in the file as occurring at 3:16 AM. An hour was possible. Then again, it could have been more like fifteen minutes and felt like much longer in the dark, terrified, with her brain addled from chloroform.

  Suddenly the girl’s back straightened.

  “I threw up.”

  “In the woods?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe in his car? I just know that when I was talking to the 911 operator, I could taste it in my mouth.”

  She made a face, the memory of the taste eliciting fresh disgust.

  “Could you see the payphone you used when you first came out of the woods?”

  Sierra shook her head.

  “No, the first thing I saw was lights, way up high. Streetlights. And maybe the lights on a billboard. It’s all kind of blurry. Once I saw the road, I kept walking along the edge of the woods until I saw a place with a phone. I was afraid that if I went to the road and tried to get someone to stop, that it would be him. Like in scary movies.”

  Violet exhaled when they were through, pleased with herself. Pleased with the girl. Turning off the recording app on her phone, she looked Sierra in the eye.

  “Thank you, Sierra. Really.”

  Sierra nodded once.

  Even if the girl didn’t believe it, Darger could feel its presence — the little glimmer of light shining on this case, even if they didn’t fully understand it yet.

  Their beer buzzes had faded out to exhaustion, so they prepared for bed after that. Teeth were brushed. The taste of the beer washed away with Aquafresh and Scope. Darger rinsed her face, the cold of the water somehow dull against her cheeks which felt almost bloated with heat.

  Sierra already looked unconscious by the time Violet closed the curtains and reached for the switch.

  When the lights went out, the darkness once more surrounded them.

  Chapter 11

  McAdoo shambled into the Shell station restroom, his gut gurgling like a washing machine. He’d known the gas station microwave burritos would be a mistake, and Novotny had tried to caution him on top of that, but these warnings failed to stop him from slathering the damn things in the hottest salsa he could find and inhaling them, chewing sparingly, and washing them down with 20 fluid ounces of Dr. Pepper.

  He stumbled into the stall, fingers scrabbling at his belt. Mentally, he focused on nothing, instinctively falling into some attempt at a state of zen that he hoped may prevent a pants-shitting nightmare right here on the cusp of relief. He thought about his boat, the one he’d buy some day, the one he’d been dreaming of owning since he was a kid. He didn’t picture himself on it physically, but he imagined what it’d feel like to finally have it. It seemed to help a little. After much flubbing about with his hands, his pants came undone, the weight of the gun dragging them straight to the tile floor with a clank.

  It wasn’t where he expected to be at 2:32 AM, but here he was.

  McAdoo’s middle flexed and cramped and shuddered as he vacated the vile mixture of beans and peppers. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead, visible in his reflection on the chrome toilet paper dispenser. If the salsa had been hot upon entry, it was liquid fire on the way out. A form of torture that was surely a major human rights violation. He gripped the bar meant for handicap assistance to help brace himself, wished like hell he had something to bite down on.

  The door into the men’s room swished open, and his squirming atop the toilet seat cut out all at once. He listened.

  Footsteps. Coming closer. The door swished again, closing this time.

  Silence. Someone was in here with him. Someone holding perfectly still on the other side of the stall door.

  He tried to stop himself from considering it, but it was too late: Could it be the Trash Bag Killer? He was, supposedly, likely to revisit the Burger King a half a block down after all.

  His eyes snapped to the holstered handgun resting on the bathroom floor. Jesus. Anyone could peak under the stall door and see straight away that he was essentially unarmed. It’d take him a beat to get hold of the weapon and unsnap the button on the leather strap to free it from its sheath, more than enough time for a damn psychopath to end him in some grotesque fashion.

  Blood beat through his temples, seconds trickling past like hours. He thought about his options, coming up with three.

  He could either go to scoop the gun now, he could try to say something, or he could opt for the church mouse method and sit here as quietly as possible. Each came with risks and rewards. He had no damn idea which to go for.

  Think, McAdoo, think!

  His gut convulsed endlessly, oblivious to the life and death situation transpiring around it. Stupid gut!

  His lips parted, seemingly of their own accord. That settled it. He’d say something. That’s what he’d do.

  The urinal flushed. A hiss and spray that caught him off guard, killed the words in his throat.

  “You all right in there?” a voice said. It took him a second to realize that it was Novotny.

  Of course.

  “Yeah,” McAdoo said, his voice cracking a little. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “OK. Seems like it’s taking a long time is all.”

  “Yeah. Well, it might be a while yet. My belly kinda rejected those burritos. Violently. Like how you said it would.”

  “’K.”

  “Hey listen. I want to apologize for the horrendous smell I’m creating in here. I know it’s especially hard for you on account of that tremendous nose of yours.”

  In the ensuing scuff of shoes on tile, he couldn’t tell whether Novotny had laughed or not. Then he heard water in the sink, and the door swished opened and closed once more. It almost seemed funny now, how scared he’d been just seconds ago. Almost. Having stared into a garbage bag full of human limbs recently, he guessed it didn’t take much to frighten him. Too many damn serial killer stories from Novotny lately, too. Between the two of them, maybe being terrifie
d was understandable.

  Jesus. This was all so morbid.

  McAdoo’s gut lurched again. He looked at his watch. It was 2:36 AM. He did a little mental math. Figured he’d be lucky to be out of here by 3:00.

  Shortly after he finally exited the gas station restroom, McAdoo fell asleep in the car, his chin slumped down onto his chest, little snuffling sounds coming out of his mouth and nose on occasion.

  Novotny didn’t wake him. There’d be no point in it, he thought.

  He could watch the Burger King parking lot on his own, and he didn’t mind being the one to actually do the job. McAdoo was good company — a good sidekick and a great guy. But Novotny simply felt most comfortable doing things himself and knowing they were done right, felt better with the responsibility in his grip alone. It wasn’t out of selfishness, just a genuine sense that things were simpler and more efficient when he carried the load. He had always been that way, maybe.

  He was an all-state football player as a freshman and sophomore in high school. In fact, he still held the Division V record for kickoff returns for touchdowns, both single-season and career. He wasn’t big — only 5’8”, 165 pounds at his brawniest — but he could run away from everyone. One of those little waterbug types nobody could hit cleanly.

  All the big schools came calling after the regional quarterfinal game when he returned two kicks and a punt for TDs. Even the wide receivers coach from Ohio State came around a couple times that summer. Novotny’s grades were in sad shape. Even with two years to work on it, he was unlikely to qualify for the NCAA minimum standards, but all the coaches told him that was no problem. A year in a prep school or a junior college would get everything straight academically, and he was gifted enough to be worth the wait they all said.

  Every door in the world was wide open. For a little while.

  He tore up his knee in the first game of his junior year, however. No one even touched him. He just pushed off wrong making a cut to get out and cover a back in the flat. He knew it was bad right away. The pop in his knee reminded him of a cork jettisoned from a bottle by a spray of champagne. He felt the bones shift, and the pain was incredible for a split second. Then the endorphins kicked in, and he felt almost nothing at all from his mid-thigh down.