Dark Passage

Book 7: Violet Darger

by L.T. Vargus

Genres: Female Sleuths; Thrillers; Crime Fiction; series of standalones; serial killers

Synopsis

The corpse juts from the heaping bulge of the landfill. Milky white flesh laid bare by the front loader's blade. Naked. Female. Face down in the garbage.

When three bodies turn up in a landfill outside of Philadelphia, FBI profiler Violet Darger heads to Pennsylvania to investigate. Right away there's a major complication.

The emaciated corpses appear to have been starved to death.

Darger arrives in time for the autopsies. Watches withered bodies laid out on the stainless steel slabs of the morgue, their faces crusted with sandy soil, skin pulled taut around knobby cheekbones.

What kind of a person could carry out such harsh acts? Figuring out the warped psychology might be the key to solving the case.

Forensic evidence helps Darger trace the bodies to a particular dumpster in West Philadelphia. It's the first step down the long, dark passage this case leads her through.

Because the city is full of deadly secrets -- horrors waiting beneath the surface.

In her most shocking and bizarre case yet, the darkness comes for Darger in a way it never has before. Surrounds her. Envelops her. Will she find her way back to the light?

This pulse-pounding thriller will have you holding your breath until the final page. Fans of Robert Dugoni, James Patterson, Michael Connelly, and Lisa Regan should check out the Violet Darger series. Scroll up and grab it now.

Print pages: 428

Sample

Prologue

The dozer scuttled up the trash heap, shoving the bulk along, grinding its way closer to the center of the landfill. Keith jerked the wheel, felt the vehicle wobble over the uneven surface of the garbage heap, its tracks grating and churning.

He glanced at the rearview mirror. Saw the sweat glistening on the puckered skin beneath his eyes. Already he felt that itch, the little rectangle in his breast pocket calling out to him. Not yet, though. Better to get further out to sea first, well away from the office, out toward the middle of the ocean of trash where no one was looking.

The incline grew steeper beneath the bulldozer. Tilted Keith’s shoulders back in the bucket seat. He climbed the mound of garbage slowly but surely, inch by inch, like that first hill on a roller coaster.

This was his job, for better or worse. Driving a tractor over a sea of trash known as the Wissahickon Creek Landfill — a giant hole in the ground with 500 feet of mostly shredded Philadelphia County garbage floating atop it. He sailed his lonely vessel out over the mess like a makeshift raft and let the blade shove the swells of trash around so someone else could shred and then compact it all, shove it deeper into the hole.

The pay was OK, but this was a shit job, as far as he was concerned. The smell alone confirmed that. The slop was ripe today — acrid and tangy, some umami punch adding a layer of pungent earthiness. Savory, he thought. Like a few tons of rotting hamburger and mushrooms had been blended in with the usual shit smell.

Smell that rich aroma, he thought, gritting his teeth. His recurring internal joke had never been spoken aloud. It probably never would.

A giant wad of debris rolled in front of him, growing slowly like a cartoon snowball tumbling down a hill. And it was juicy. Like the sun was coaxing sweat out of the trash’s paper and plastic skin.

Keith’s eyes flicked to the rearview again. Watched the slowly scrolling ski slope of trash there. The office had become a tiny speck. That was good enough.

The box in his breast pocket thrummed with cold current. His fingers reached for it. Found it.

He plucked a Marlboro Red from the pack and attached the filtered end to his lips. His lighter flickered to life. The flame bent into the tobacco cylinder and made a faint sucking sound as it lit.

He drew in a big lungful of smoke. Could only kind of detect the flavor of it with the garbage smell so strong today. Even so, it tasted pretty goddamn good.

He’d been smoking these for twenty-seven years now, since his junior year in high school. “Cowboy killers” people called these particular cigs, presumably since multiple models from the Marlboro Man advertising campaigns had succumbed to the Big C.

What a shame it’d be if the tobacco took me down, Keith thought. Gone way too soon. He had so much shoving around of garbage left to give.

His eyes shifted to the mirror again. The office remained a tiny dot there. He didn’t know what he’d expected to see. The boss man, Mike, rocketing up the trash heap to catch him in the act? Mike would have no idea about this violation, a thought that brought the faintest smile to his lips. Sometimes he thought he only enjoyed smoking out on the garbage pile because it wasn’t allowed. Strictly verboten.

The other workers wondered how he could even stand to do it, too grossed out by the smell. He’d been working here eighteen years now, though. Had given the best years of his life to this squalid expanse of filth. And time had a way of changing you, hardening you to certain things. The stench had become part of his world, part of him. It simply was. Getting upset about the smell would be like getting upset about the wind or the stars.

He hit the cigarette hard. Felt the smoke swirling in his lungs. Held it there. Savored it.

This time when his eyes slid over to the mirror, he saw something there that made him cough. The smoke sputtered out of him. His foot jammed the brake.

He sat there a moment. Eyes fixed on the image in the mirror. Staring. Not smoking. Not breathing.

The lower half of a body jutted up from the trash heap, everything from the waist down angled awkwardly into the air. Naked. Legs limp and folded. For a second he told himself it was a mannequin, that he was overreacting, but something was wrong with it.

Too bony.

The hip bones looked skeletal. Skin drawn taut over the joints as though no muscle tissue remained. No mannequin existed like this.

And yet something about the shape reminded him of his daughter, Mia. She was scrawny and frail, just like the girl out there.

Just like her.

He stubbed his cigarette out on the Mountain Dew can he used for an ash tray. Watched the white tube of tobacco bend and crush and then disappear into the wide mouth hole.

He knew it wasn’t her. Knew it. He’d seen her this morning. It couldn’t be her.

Nevertheless, he climbed out of the vehicle. Felt his boots sink ankle-deep into the sludgy garbage. The smell assailed his nostrils, sharper out here in the open. The stench seemed to cook in the sunlight, some oily vapor that changed in the heat and hung in the air.

He waded over to where the corpse projected from the garbage. Knelt down beside it.

His gloved hands dipped into the trash, went to work digging the girl out. The heavy work gloves disappeared into the junk and reemerged over and over, flinging bits away. Excavating.

The blazing June sun baked the back of his neck. Beaded fresh sweat along his hairline. And the wind blew in haphazard bursts, touched the wet bits of his skin and cooled them some.

Part of him knew he shouldn’t be doing this, shouldn’t be messing with a likely crime scene. But he needed to see her. Needed to know.

He shoveled away crumpled popcorn bags and crushed paper Pepsi cups from a movie theater. Then he pulled out a tattered blanket, faded blue, scratchy material damp with garbage juice. Next came empty Heineken cans in various states of dented-ness.

His hands kept working, kept digging. He watched them in a daze. Watched the pale skin of the girl’s upper body slowly come clear until he reached the milky white flesh of her face.

Purple surrounded her sunken eyes, breaking up the pale sheet of skin. Dainty elfin features formed her nose and lips.

Ghostly.

Angelic.

Beautiful.

Even with her face emaciated so the cheekbones protruded like doorknobs set beneath her skin, she was beautiful.

He stood and stumbled back a step. Choked. Coughed. Felt hot tears in his eyes.

Not Mia. Not his daughter. He’d known it wouldn’t be, and yet he found no relief in the revelation.

For this girl — a daughter to someone — had been plucked from this life. Taken. Set afloat in the sea of trash, launched into his reeking world, like another used up plastic object to be doused with piss and shit and garbage juice.

And he knew that this moment had changed everything again, that this world would be forever different for him now. For both of them. She was part of it. Eternally. Like the smell. Like the wind and the stars.

He dug back through the trash he’d thrown. Draped the rough blue blanket over her. He knew it was silly, this overwhelming urge to cover her, protect her. It was far too late for that. But if it had been Mia… well, that’s what he would have wanted for her. Someone to give her one last bit of dignity, at least.

Then he hustled back to the tractor to call the office and tell them what he’d found.

 

 

Chapter 1

 

 

The road sliced a clean charcoal line through the forest. Hemlock trees formed a wall on either side of the asphalt, with a sliver of pale gray sky visible overhead. Violet Darger’s rental car rocketed through the cleft in the foliage.

She fidgeted in her seat. Shifted from one butt cheek to the other. She’d been driving for almost four hours straight, and she was antsy for the journey to be over.

Her finger found the power button for the radio and turned it on. The chorus of “Take It Easy” by the Eagles blared from the speakers, and just as soon as she’d turned the music on, she turned it back off.

It’s been a long drive, and I hate the fucking Eagles.

Darger’s gaze slid over to the navigation app on her phone. She was nearly there, anyway. Might as well settle in for the last stretch in silence.

But the quiet had a strange way of amplifying her anticipation. Snake-like tendrils of anxiety squirmed in her belly.

Her mind flashed on the photographs in the file Loshak had sent. Three emaciated bodies found in a garbage dump in Pennsylvania. Two women and a man. One of the women had been wearing a thin tank top and panties. The other had been completely nude. The man was fully clothed in all black and covered in a layer of what looked like dirt or soot unrelated to the trash around him.

The first question was how three people could go missing without any fanfare until they turned up in the garbage heap.

The second question, the more troubling question, was how they’d become so thin.

Darger lifted her travel cup from the drink holder and took a sip. Her nose wrinkled involuntarily. The barista had been a bit too heavy-handed with the vanilla syrup in her latte. It was a touch over the line in a way that made the sweetness stick to the back of her tongue and throat.

The car rounded a corner, and an ending to the dense cluster of trees appeared in her windshield at last, taking shape in the distance. The opening in the hemlocks grew larger as she sped down the two-lane road. When the trees finally parted for good, the land opened up, spreading out to the horizon on either side. And then she saw it.

Two immense heaps of garbage jutted up from the earth, towering peaks with smaller crests surrounding them that sprawled in all directions like foothills. A breath sucked into Darger’s throat and held still there as she took in the display, eyes dancing over the hulking bulges, almost awe-inspiring in their sheer size. A virtual mountain range of trash.

 This was the Wissahickon Creek Landfill, one of many large dumps serving the Philadelphia metropolitan area. It was also the location where the bodies had been found.

Small black shapes circled above the two big mounds, swooping and diving. Darger’s first thought was flies, but then she realized they must be seagulls, swirling everywhere in the sky in search of fresh meals.

Chain link fence traced the perimeter of the compound, the barrier complete with faint coils of barbed wire spiraling around the top, as though the precious piles of garbage must be protected at all costs.

Darger pulled to the gate and wrestled her ID from her pocket. With a quick glance at her FBI badge, the attendant lifted the arm of the boom gate and waved her through. It wasn’t until she was moving again that Darger realized she’d held her breath as soon as she’d rolled the window down to show her badge.

Even still, she hesitated to inhale, worried about what kind of stink might have snuck inside when she’d had the window open. As the seconds wore on, her lungs began to protest.

She finally relented. Took a test sniff. Detected nothing.

Well, that was a surprise.

Maybe it was a wind direction thing. Or maybe the stench would only hit her once she stepped outside. In any case, she kept a steady stream of oxygen moving to her lungs for the moment.

She wheeled into the dirt parking lot, passing dumpsters of various sizes and colors arranged in rows. The tires of her rental gushed through the muddy sand, sizzling over the wetness.

Darger slid into an empty space next to a shitty little office building. The once-white corrugated metal exterior of the place was stained brown like a tooth, smudged with black streaks emanating from the corner of each window. A gull squatted on the roof eating something it had harvested from the massive smorgasbord of trash surrounding them.

Darger’s eyes slid back to the massive garbage peaks as she pulled the key from the ignition. A bulldozer scurried up the pile, the yellow vehicle bumping up and down as if it were tottering atop the trash instead of rolling over it. For a moment, she could only marvel at how small the machine looked next to the heaps of refuse.

And then her stomach churned a little at the thought of what other secrets might be buried in all that garbage.

 

 

Chapter 2

 

 

The moment Darger stepped out of the car, the wave of garbage smell hit her — an odor somehow rich and sour at the same time. It seemed to rise into the air like a filmy vapor and cook there in the sun. She wrinkled her nose.

She’d only taken a few steps in the muddy lot when a man in a hazmat suit approached. He was very tall and thin, and the white coveralls fit him awkwardly. Tight in the crotch but baggy everywhere else.

“Agent Darger?”

“That’s me.”

“I’m Officer Primanti,” he said, shaking her hand. “I’ve got a suit for you right over here. Detective Ambrose and Agent Loshak are already inside the search grid.”

Darger followed Primanti over to a canvas tent where he handed her the various pieces of PPE gear. She stepped into the suit first, zipping the Tyvek coveralls up to her neck, and then donning a bright yellow reflective safety vest. Next she traded her regular boots for a pair in black rubber. Primanti helped her fit a respirator over her nose and mouth before pointing to a row of hardhats.

“The helmets are a facility requirement. Anyone going past the crime scene barrier has to wear one.”

“They get a lot of trash falling from the sky around here?” Darger asked, her voice muffled by the mask.

Primanti chuckled, shrugging.

“Liability and all that, I guess.”

Darger smoothed her hair back and snugged up the strap on the hardhat.

After they each squeezed into a pair of gloves, Officer Primanti lowered his respirator and put his hands on his hips.

“Ready?”

Darger gave him a thumbs up. Primanti nodded once and led her out of the tent and through a gap in a row of police saw horses.

“We have to sort of edge around this ridge here,” he said, gesturing to the angled slope of one of the trash mounds. “And you’re gonna wanna watch your step. The garbage is awkward to walk on.”

That was an understatement in Darger’s opinion. Each step was a fresh gamble as she moved up the slope, shuffling from a section that felt like stable ground to another area that buckled and shifted under her weight.

Her arms splayed out to her sides, working to maintain her balance through the rough stuff, and she kept her eyes on the ground as she walked, trying to determine by sight whether her next step would be mushy or firm. She was still watching her boots when she heard a shrill whistle.

She glanced up and realized they’d rounded the far side of the garbage mountain. A cluster of figures huddled in the distance, all matching in their white coveralls and yellow hardhats. One of the suits put up a gloved hand and waved.

And even though the suits made the figures look identical from this distance, Darger knew by the whistle that it was Loshak.

Primanti turned back to face her.

“You think you can make it over there on your own? I have to get back to my post.”

“I’m good,” she said. “Thank you, Officer Primanti.”

Darger picked her way closer to the group. The inside of her respirator was warm and humid from her breath. She’d been breathing through her mouth since she got out of her car, not sure if the filters in the mask were capable of blocking out the smell or not. The stench was strong enough in the parking lot. She could imagine how much more intense it would be when she was standing on the ragged slopes of Mount Dung.

She trudged through more slop. Feet sinking and squishing. Eyes drifting up now and then to watch the seagulls above as they zipped around, squawking like crazy.

When Darger finally reached the group, Loshak clapped her on the shoulder.

“Hope the traffic wasn’t too rough,” Loshak said.

“Not as rough as the walk over here,” she said. “Less smelly, too.”

Loshak chuckled.

“Detective Ambrose, this is my partner, Agent Darger.”

The detective lowered his mask to greet her. He was an older black man with a shaved head and a graying goatee.

“We appreciate you coming up,” he said.

Their gloves made a faint squeaking sound as the two rubbery surfaces made contact.

“I was just telling Agent Loshak, I’ve never seen anything quite like this. To have three bodies that we can’t even officially label as homicide victims? But then the state of the bodies…” He blew out a breath. “The medical examiner is conducting the autopsies right now, so I’ve got my fingers crossed he can give us something to work with.”

“Any luck pinpointing where the bodies might have come from?” Darger almost had to yell to be heard over the sounds of a nearby bulldozer.

“We’re working on it now. Sorting everything in the immediate vicinity of the bodies.” Ambrose wagged a finger in the direction of a group of techs in an area marked off by red string. “The techs are all divided into pairs. One person sorts, the other person logs what they find. We’re tracking any addresses on mail or paper receipts.”

“And you can use that information to track the vicinity the trash came from?”

“That’s what they tell me,” Ambrose said with a shrug.

“They?”

Ambrose pointed out another suited figure with hair dyed a dark mahogany red about twenty yards away and held up a hand. The woman caught sight of this gesture and approached.

The closer she got, the more Darger realized how tiny she was. Not an inch over five feet, if she had to guess.

“This is Agent Ana Zaragoza from the state crime lab,” Ambrose said. “She’s really the one running the show.”

Zaragoza reached up to adjust a pair of teal cat eye glasses and nodded at Darger.

“Detective Ambrose was telling me you can sort and log the trash to narrow down where the bodies might have originally been dumped?”

“That’s right. According to the manager of the facility, they’re able to identify the original source down to a single city block in some cases.” Zaragoza tapped and swiped at the screen of an iPad as she spoke.

“And that’s something they do often?” Darger asked. “Track where their garbage comes from?”

“It’s a post-9/11 thing. All municipal waste facilities in the country are required to monitor the incoming loads for the presence of radiation. And when they do detect it, they have to be able to figure out where it came from. So they already have a system in place. I’m just… improving upon it.”

Ambrose propped his fists on his hips.

“She’s a machine. When I got here after the first body was discovered, I wanted to get down on my knees and weep.”

Agent Zaragoza finally glanced up from the screen long enough to roll her eyes.

“I told you already, Clark. Kissing my ass isn’t going to get the job done any faster.”

“I’m not kissing anything. Just telling it like it is.”

“Anyway,” Zaragoza said, “If you’ll excuse me, I’ve gotta get back to it.”

After the small woman had stalked back over to the bustling techs sorting through the refuse, Detective Ambrose swiveled to face Darger.

“Zaragoza doesn’t mean to be rude. She’s one of those people with such a laser-like focus that she sometimes forgets the niceties.”

“No offense taken,” Darger said. “I’ll take competence over politeness any day.”

Loshak snorted.

“You can say that again.”

“Shut it,” Darger said, glaring at him.

“Case in point.”

The sound of an old rotary phone jangled from somewhere, and Ambrose pulled a phone from his pocket and glanced at the screen.

“This asshole again,” Ambrose muttered, scowling. “Captain thought it would appease the mayor to give him my direct number for updates, but now he thinks he’s got permission to call me every half hour. Every time I tell him we’re still working on it, he gets a little more frantic.”

Detective Ambrose stepped away to take the call, leaving Darger and Loshak to stand near the corner of one of the three rectangular areas marked off by red string.

“I’m assuming each marked section represents where they found one of the three bodies?” Darger asked.

“That’s right,” Loshak said.

“But the assumption right now is that the bodies were dumped together in the same dumpster.”

“Right again. I guess the garbage gets spread around quite a bit after dumping. They bring in the bulldozers to situate everything to their liking. So that’s how waste from one dumpster can end up spread out over a larger area. At least that’s how it was explained to me.”

Two screeching seagulls swooped overhead, one chasing the other. Darger squinted at the shapes wheeling around in the air above them.

“I wonder what this looks like to them. All of us down here bustling around in our coveralls.”

Loshak craned his neck to look at the two birds.

“Oh I doubt we’re much more than small specks of white in a vast sea of trash to them,” Loshak said. “Tiny and insignificant.”

 

 

Chapter 3

 

 

After several minutes of watching the crew work as an idle bystander, Darger grew impatient. She was beginning to sweat beneath the suit and mask.

“I feel kinda guilty just standing here,” she said. “Should we offer to help? This seems like an all-hands-on-deck kind of scenario.”

“I offered several times, but Agent Zaragoza was adamant that her people do the sorting, and Detective Ambrose concurred.” Loshak shrugged. “Their crime scene, their decision.”

“Yeah,” Darger muttered, though she wasn’t sure what the fuss was all about. This crime scene was already cross-contaminated to hell and back. She didn’t see how having a few extra hands aiding in the sorting could possibly make things worse. But the local jurisdictions were always a bit sensitive about the feds horning in on their cases, so she and Loshak generally did what they could to avoid conflict.

Darger watched the crime lab techs sift through the trash and marveled at the full array of colors represented there. A red Dixie cup. An empty jug of Tide detergent in orange. Yellow and green on a crushed two-liter of Squirt. A blue laundry basket. A rainbow of plastic that would never biodegrade.

“Seeing all this stuff kinda makes me tempted to become one of those zero-waste nuts,” Darger said. “You know, the people who start using rags instead of toilet paper and refuse to buy anything packaged in plastic?”

Loshak scoffed.

“Rags? Ass rags? Have these people not heard of a bidet?”

Darger chewed her bottom lip.

“I had an apartment with a bidet once, but I was too afraid to use it.”

“Afraid? What’s so scary about a little bit of water?”

“I turned it on once to see how it worked, and it shot out a jet of water that went all the way up to the ceiling. Seemed like too much power for my comfort.”

Loshak wheezed out a laugh.

“Jan and I got into an argument once. She was real particular about recycling everything. Every bottle. Every can. The thing is, you can’t just empty a tub of yogurt and toss it in the bin. You have to wash it out. Get rid of all the food residue. A real pain in the ass, right? I went along with it for a while, but at some point, I wondered how many hours of my life I’d already spent washing the garbage and how many more I was willing to give. Was every other family in town washing their garbage so diligently? Not likely. I guess it was around that time I started having my doubts about the recycling industry as a whole. Whole thing doesn’t add up.”

Darger squinted.

“So what I’m hearing is that you’re a terrible person who hates the environment and the children.”

“That’s pretty much what Jan said when she caught me chucking an empty peanut butter jar. She went off. Told me I obviously didn’t give a shit about the environment and was no better than a common litterbug.”

“She told you,” Darger said, smirking.

“I want to be clear about something: I do give a shit about the environment. I give a pretty big shit, as a matter of fact. But it wasn’t only about the time wasted washing trash. I’d thought about the logistics of a residential recycling program and realized there was no way they were really recycling everything they picked up. There was too much of it, and they didn’t even make us sort it. So you know that for every Jan out there washing each lid and jar, there’s two or three jagoffs tossing in empty cans of baked beans without rinsing at all, right?”

“Probably,” Darger agreed.

“We were living in Fredericksburg at the time. That’s a town of about ten thousand households. And every two weeks the city is picking up sixty to a hundred gallons of unsorted recycling from each one. I should mention that the recycling pickup was built into the contract the city negotiated with the waste company. You could opt-out and arrange your own service from an alternate company, but it was more expensive. I doubt anyone did that.” Loshak paused for a moment, adjusting his face mask. “So I did some math. I know not everyone is as diligent as Jan, so let’s say only half of those households are actually recycling anything. That’s still 300,000 gallons of recycling to sort through every two weeks. And I’m supposed to believe that the waste management company is hiring people to stand around and pick through our nasty garbage just so they can be good little tree-huggers? Not happening.”

“You know there’s a chance you’ve thought about this way too much?” Darger asked.

Loshak held up a finger.

“I’m just saying, I knew it wasn’t feasible. Not in any way, shape, or form. Even if we were all Jans, they’d still have to go through the process of sorting the various plastics, removing labels, and on and on. So I’d been thinking for a while that this had to be a big scam to make us all feel like we’re doing our part to save the environment and all that. Anyway, Jan and I got in a big fight over it. She’s yelling about me destroying the planet, and I’m hollering about how I’d love to save the planet, but washing out a peanut butter jar wasn’t doing shit in that arena.”

“I bet that went over well.”

Loshak raised his eyebrows and sighed.

“I should probably mention that this was when Shelly first got sick, so I think the fight was more about venting some of the pent up pressure surrounding all of that. Because when your kid is sick, you gotta put on a brave face. You have to smile when you tell everyone how positive things are looking with treatment, even when inside, you’re scared shitless. Anyway, I was so mad after our argument that I halfway considered following one of the trucks after a pickup to see where they went. I could just imagine tailing them back to the landfill and watching them dump the garbage and the recycling right in the same pile.”

“Did you?”

“No,” Loshak said, shrugging. “I told you, the fight was more about Shelly than anything else. But the point I’m getting to is that a story came out a month or two back about how the whole idea of recycling plastic was a marketing ploy. A lot of what we turn into the recycling places ends up buried at the landfill. See, they knew the public felt kinda guilty about buying all this plastic crap that we just end up throwing out. Because we all know the math. It takes something like a thousand years for a plastic bag to break down. Four hundred years for that Mountain Dew bottle over there. Even the least granola among us don’t like that idea. Seems wrong. Wasteful. Stupid. So they sold us this pretty fairytale about how we could recycle the plastic and reuse it over and over. But it’s bullshit. They’ve known since the seventies that recycling plastic would never be viable. For starters, every time they melt it down to reuse, it degrades, so they can only do that once or twice before it’s toast. So all in all, less than ten percent of plastic gets recycled. The whole idea of recycling plastic is a PR sham concocted by the petroleum industry.”

“Less than ten percent?” Darger asked, gritting her teeth. “Jesus. That’s pitiful.”

“No kidding.” Loshak frowned. “There’s probably a special place in hell for the petroleum industry executives. Right next to the people that don’t pick up dog shit in public places.”

Darger looked out over the expanse of trash and wondered how many tons of plastic were here in this one landfill alone. She felt her blood pressure rise at the idea that people could get away with lying on such a massive scale. It was infuriating. Eventually, though, her mind returned to Loshak’s original story.

She glanced over at him.

“So have you told her yet?”

“Told who what?” Loshak asked.

“Told Jan that you were right about recycling being a load of crap.”

“No,” Loshak said, crossing his arms.

“Good.” Darger nodded once. “Don’t.”

Loshak smiled.

“Not my first rodeo, kid.”

 

 

Chapter 4

 

 

Darger scanned the area for Detective Ambrose and found that he’d moved some distance away, standing a little farther down the slop, his feet and ankles submerged in what looked like reams of soggy paper. His phone still pressed tightly to the ear with the rumple of the hazmat suit’s hood bunched behind it, and Darger figured he’d been trying to get as far from the sound of the bulldozer as he could.

“Well, I was going to wait for Detective Ambrose to get back before we started talking shop, but you know I can only be patient for so long,” she said. “What the hell is going on here? You ever seen anything like it?”

“Can’t say that I have,” Loshak said.

“Any theories?”

“Nothing solid. And even though we can’t say with absolute certainty that we’re dealing with homicides, I think we’re all thinking it’s gonna tip that way eventually. People wouldn’t dispose of bodies, multiple bodies, like this unless there was something to hide.”

“Right. So, let’s assume for now that this is, in fact, a homicide case.”

“OK.” Loshak pursed his lips. “Well, the fact that we’ve got a mix of male and female victims kind of skews things away from a serial killer. It doesn’t rule it out of course. There are examples.”

“Richard Ramirez, Dennis Rader, the Zodiac,” Darger said. “But they were always primarily fixated on and motivated by the female victims. The male victims were generally someone who stood in their way.”

“Exactly,” Loshak agreed. “Multiple victims could also point to a mass killing of some kind. But I don’t know if I can think of an example of a mass murderer that killed his victims and then disposed of the bodies. They tend to kill them in an outburst and leave them where they fall, so to speak. More akin to smash and grab robberies. In and out. The higher the body count the better.”

“There’s also the publicity factor,” Darger added.

“Yep. Most mass murderers have an interest in creating a spectacle. You could say the same for the guys you mentioned before. Ramirez, Rader, and Zodiac. They, too, wanted their crimes to be public. They wanted people scared. That was part of the draw for them. But whoever did this was obviously trying to cover it up.”

They were silent for a moment.

“I tried the gang angle,” he said. “The drug cartels sometimes dump bodies like this, in groups. But we’re right outside Philadelphia. Not exactly a hot cartel area.”

“And why would a cartel choose a dumpster when there are a thousand remote wooded areas they could have hidden the bodies?” Darger asked.

Loshak scratched under the edge of his mask.

“There’s definitely a disorganized feel to all of it. On the one hand, this guy wanted to get rid of the bodies, but then it seems like he didn’t do a whole lot of thinking as to the best way to do it. I mean, it seems like dumping them was almost an afterthought.”

“Or panic.”

“Yeah. Could be that.”

“Then there’s the condition of the bodies,” Darger said. “I know we’re still waiting on the full report from the medical examiner, but they sure looked like people who’d been starved to me.”

“Me too.”

“My first thought when I saw the photographs of the bodies was that case out in California where the parents had tied up and starved their thirteen kids.”

“Oh right, I remember that.” Loshak removed his hard hat and ran his fingers through his hair a few times before replacing it. “I assumed they must have had a compound out in the boonies or something when I heard the story. And then I saw the pictures. It was a big house in the middle of an upper-middle-class subdivision. Neighbors all around. I couldn’t believe the parents had gotten away with the abuse for so long. I mean, some of the kids were adults, right?”

“Several of them were over eighteen, yeah. But they were so malnourished that all the neighbors thought they were much younger. The oldest was twenty-nine and weighed eighty-two pounds. The one who escaped and called 911 was seventeen, but when the police first arrived, they thought she was twelve.”

Loshak’s mouth was a grim line.

“Almost unimaginable. But I’m glad you brought that case up. It might actually give us some insight into what we’re dealing with here. Because honestly, I’ve been stumped up until now.”

“The problem with trying to draw comparisons between that case and this one, of course, is that those were kids being abused by their parents,” Darger said. “Even though some of them were adults, there was probably a sort of natural Stockholm syndrome inherent in the situation. The parents could use their power to perpetuate the abuse and get away with it for years. I’m struggling to imagine how you might achieve the same with adults. Maybe you could do it with one, but with several? At the same time?”

Loshak got a sudden gleam in his eye.

“What about some sort of religious cult?” he said. “There’s a lot of that going around these days. Cults. The starvation could be a ritualistic activity, a fast, either done willingly as an act of penance or forcibly as punishment.”

“Maybe…” Darger trailed off, nodding.

“It could explain the attempt to cover up the deaths. No cult would want it known that three of their members had met rather sudden demises.” Loshak heaved a sigh. “But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s see what the autopsies tell us, and then we’ll piece that together with where the bodies came from, once Zaragoza’s team has answers.”

Detective Ambrose stalked over, finally finished with his phone call.

“God damn politicians. I got three unidentified bodies and a mountain of trash to sift through, and the mayor wants to bitch to me about optics. What the fuck are optics anyway?”

Ambrose crossed his arms and surveyed the techs bustling back and forth inside the marked grids.

“I’ll tell you what, when I was a young detective, I envied the older guys. The ones with seniority got all the respect. All the good cases. The headline cases.” He scoffed and shook his head. “Well, now I’m the detective with the most seniority, and you know what? I could happily go the rest of my career only getting the vanilla assignments. None of this weird shit. Trudging around in garbage. Emaciated bodies showing up in landfills three at a time. It’s a shit show, and I’m perched ankle-deep in it.”

No one spoke for several seconds. They watched the techs dig and sort and log, working hard but barely making a dent in the mountain of trash.

“Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I appreciate the FBI lending a hand. I figure with everything you’ve seen, weird shit must be kind of your specialty.”

“Yeah… weird is par for the course. But this… this is weird even for us,” Loshak said.

“I have to tell you, that is not a comforting thought.”

There was a sudden commotion from the far end of the search area. An urgent shout that sounded female.

Everyone froze, all the white-suited figures going rigid at the same time. Except for one. A willowy woman toward the back quadrant of the furthest search grid was waving one arm and yelling something at Agent Zaragoza, but her mask muffled the words too much for Darger to make them out.

Loshak and Detective Ambrose exchanged a meaningful glance.

“Sheeeeit,” Ambrose said.

“What is it?” Darger asked. “What did she say?”

Loshak inhaled. It was several seconds before he answered.

“They found another body.”

 

 

Chapter 5

 

 

Darger and Loshak followed Detective Ambrose toward the commotion, slogging up the slope. Darger’s foot sank into a sludgy section that gripped her up to the mid-calf, her boot coming out slick with what she could only think of as “garbage juice.”

As they got close to the tech crew, Agent Zaragoza put her hands up and addressed the gathering crowd of law enforcement. Pretty much everyone working the scene had stopped working and were now huddled along the edge of one of the search grids, trying to get a look at the new discovery.

“I need everyone but Detective Ambrose and myself to stay back so we can keep the integrity of the scene intact.”

There was some shuffling and muttering, and then a path opened up for Ambrose, the swells of bunny suits parting. Darger stood on her tiptoes as the people around her shifted, trying to get a glimpse of the body. She was curious whether the newest victim was male or female, but there were too many people for Darger to see anything but more trash.

Agent Zaragoza began issuing orders to her people.

“Mike, can I use your camera to document?” Agent Zaragoza asked a thin man whose head bobbed once. “Thank you. Heather, I need you to mark off this new area, starting from the southwest corner of the previous grid and extending to just past where I’m standing right now. Where’s Luis? Come over by me so you can record video with an unobstructed view, please.”

Ambrose glanced around until he found Darger and Loshak in the cluster of white suits and waved them closer.

“I’d like the Feds to see this.”

Zaragoza only nodded and continued snapping photos of the body.

Loshak shouldered his way through the crowd and Darger followed closely behind him until they’d reached an edge marked by red string. Finally, she could see what all the upheaval was about.

A man’s body sprawled there, lying face down, his black-clad figure still partially buried by trash bags, water bottles, and what looked like crumpled balls of newspaper. The garbage covered up the sides of the body and most of the limbs, the head wedged down in the trash, leaving only his back exposed — the image reminded Darger of something she might see at the beach, kids partially burying each other in the sand before running out into the water to wash the grit away.

While they watched, Agent Zaragoza instructed her people as to which pieces of garbage to remove. They worked piece by piece, excavating in meticulous fashion, with Zaragoza snapping photographs at each interval until he was mostly uncovered.

Plastic sheeting swathed his legs, and Darger wondered if he might have been wrapped in it at the time he was dumped. None of the other bodies had been covered or wrapped in anything. She supposed this one could be different, but she doubted it. Everything about these body dumps suggested a lack of planning. Rushed and disorganized.

The techs continued working, revealing a little more at a time. Now Darger could see that the dead man’s face was pressed against the side of a crumpled KFC bucket, the folded up red and white cardboard concealing his features.

Like the others, the man was horrifically thin. His clothes — a pair of black pants and a black shirt — looked far too big on the stick-like frame of the body. Spiky bits of skeleton poked against the fabric. Again Darger tried to make sense of the emaciated condition of the bodies and came up with no simple, logical explanation.

“Dressed in all black again,” Loshak said from beside her, his voice low and gravelly. “Just like the other male victim.”

Darger nodded. She’d been thinking the same thing.

“But not identical,” she said. “I think the other guy was in a black t-shirt. This guy’s shirt has a collar. Maybe a polo style. And the pants look like they might be black work pants versus black jeans. Still, could be some kind of uniform.”

Agent Zaragoza was at the far side of the new grid, crouching down low to get a photograph of the body at a new angle.

“I’m ready for him to be flipped if that’s OK with you, Detective Ambrose,” she said, straightening to her full height of approximately five feet.

“Ready when you are,” Ambrose said.

Zaragoza gave a signal to the two techs who’d been clearing each piece of trash under her guidance. They stooped, each one taking hold, one gripping a shoulder and one clutching at the thigh and hip.

Darger didn’t envy them. This body looked more decayed than the others. The skin was splotchy and flecked. Dark gray patches shone here and there where the outer layer of dermis was missing. Even standing a few yards away made her skin crawl.

Flies buzzed around the remains, spiraling, spiraling, a miniature rendition of the seagulls circling the landfill. Their fizzy sounds seemed frantic, excited, a bunch of tiny zippers being pulled endlessly.

On the count of three, the two men heaved the body onto its back. As the face rolled into view, maggots spilled from a hole in the cheek. Darger could sense the crowd around her recoil at the sight, the mob wincing and rolling a step back as one.

It wasn’t just the maggots. The face cast an appalling picture even without the insects.

Skin mottled and torn. Lips pulling back from the mouth, exposing all the teeth in a grimace. Nose mashed and sunken in. The whole face looked shrunken and gray and wrong.

There were gasps from the onlookers, and Darger heard someone behind her gag.

“You know it’s a bad one when the pros start blowing grits,” Loshak muttered.

Darger stared at the body, thinking that it wasn’t only the maggots and decay that turned the stomach. It was the obscenity of finding human remains here, in this heap of refuse.

There was a reason death had so many rituals and traditions attached, Darger thought. Embalming. Funeral rites. Eulogies.

Death demanded reverence, demanded awe. Each passing person was a singularity, a unique individual ceasing to exist. Their body was to be honored. Washed. Preserved. Buried or cremated with great care. The various death ceremonies dated back thousands of years, to the roots of human history.

To throw someone out, to literally dump them like trash, was worse than cruel. It was inhuman.

 

 

Chapter 6

 

 

Back in the canvas tent outside the crime scene, a numbness came over Darger as she stripped off her gear in reverse: first the gloves, then the hardhat, the boots, and finally the coveralls. Loshak did the same next to her, neither of them talking. Maybe that cold, blank feeling had gotten a hold of him, too.

After, they stood a moment in the parking lot. A white van from the M.E.’s office was parked with its rear doors open to the curb so the two assistants could more easily load the body bag into the back. In it went, and then the doors folded shut to close the body off from them, the rear of the cargo van feeling very much like an internment chamber in a mausoleum.

Darger and Loshak split up then, each heading to their respective vehicles. Ambrose had spoken to the Medical Examiner, a Dr. Fausch, who would be fast-tracking the next autopsy, and Darger wanted to be there to observe that. She and Loshak had agreed to meet up at the morgue, in the university district, where the examination would take place.

Alone in her car, Darger couldn’t help but picture the body again in her mind’s eye. So skinny that the elbows and knees seemed to bulge. Limbs looking stretched out and distorted. And then she saw the maggots spilling from the John Doe’s face.

An icy shiver ran up her spine, the inside of the car suddenly feeling cool and dank, almost cavernous. It felt striking and strange after all that time out in the open atop the trash heap — the sea gulls swooping and shrieking, the bulldozer engines grating in some off-key harmony. The chill gripped her arms and didn’t let go.

It suddenly struck her as very odd that her job was to make sense of these crimes. They would work this case. Gather and examine the evidence, search out the meaning behind these deaths.

But what explanation could possibly make sense of it all?

At a red light several miles from the dump, Darger realized she was still breathing through her mouth. She inhaled through her nose and instantly detected the odor of garbage. The question now was whether she smelled like a dumpster or whether the interior of the car had some residual stink from being parked a few hundred yards from Mount Garbage. She hoped it was the latter. This case was going to be taxing enough without having to trot around for the rest of the day reeking of rotten kitchen scraps.

These thoughts were interrupted by the ringtone of her phone. It was the opening riff of a Black Sabbath song, which told her immediately the caller was Casey Luck.

“What’s up, Iron Man?” she asked. She’d given him the nickname after he’d had ten screws inserted into his ankle after an arson case they’d worked together the previous year.

“Oh, just having a crappy day and wanted to commiserate with someone who understands the special hell that is desk duty.”

“But filing requisition forms and processing background checks is so fulfilling,” Darger said with a flat affect.

Luck scoffed.

“At this point, that might be all that’s left for me. I don’t know if they’re ever going to let me get back to field work.”

“That’s bullshit,” Darger said. “If I can claw my way back in, then you have no excuse with your measly injuries.”

 In reality, his injuries had been anything but measly — aside from the broken ankle, he’d suffered a concussion, smoke inhalation, and severe burns — but Darger had figured out by now that offering Luck sympathy was the opposite of effective. He seemed to interpret attempts to comfort him as pity and responded much better when she took a slightly antagonistic angle.

“It’s not the injuries. It’s the way everyone looks at me. Like I’m something fragile and pathetic.” Luck sighed. “Every time I bring up requalifying for fieldwork, Slevin gets this patronizing smile on her face, and her eyes go straight to my cane.”

Darger switched the phone to her other ear so she could adjust the rearview mirror. There’d been a lot of pep talks like this over the last few months. Luck’s recovery had been slow and not always steady. She didn’t mind, though. They shared a certain bond now that they’d faced a brush with death together.

“Well, who gives a shit what Slevin thinks or how she looks at you?” Darger said.

“She’s my supervisor, Violet.”

“So what? You think I asked anyone for their permission or their blessing before I came back?”

Luck snorted.

“No.”

“It’s not Slevin’s decision anyway. You don’t need her approval to retake the fieldwork exams, so fuck her. After my head injury, the more people looked at me like I was some pitiful charity case, the more I wanted to prove them wrong. Rub their stupid faces in it. You gotta do this the Violet Darger way: Take all the anger and frustration flowing through you and use it as motivation.”

“You sound like a sith lord from Star Wars,” Luck said.

“Good. Jedis are pussies.”

Luck laughed.

“Anyway, what you have to do now is focus on what you can do, not what you can’t do. How’s rehab going?”

“It’s going. Irma thinks I’m making great progress. She has me doing this exercise where I have to write out the alphabet with my foot.”

“Like, with a pen?” Darger asked, imagining Luck clutching a ballpoint Bic between his toes.

“No, just in the air,” he said, chuckling. “And it sounds easy, but it hurts like hell. I had tears in my eyes yesterday.”

“That means it’s working,” Darger said. “If your physical therapist isn’t making you cry, they aren’t doing a good job.”

“I’m going to tell Irma you said that. The woman is a sadist. She’ll love it.” Darger heard the telltale creak of a cheap FBI office chair over the line. “Oh, I almost forgot to thank you for the care package. Jill already tore into the giant bag of gummy bears. Not sure if there are any left.”

“Tell her I said hi.”

“I will.”

In front of her, the right-hand turn signal of Loshak’s rental car blinked on and off. They pulled into the parking lot for the Joseph W. Spelman Medical Examiner’s Building, a large brick structure across the street from the sprawling VA Medical Center.

Darger pulled into the empty parking space next to the one Loshak had taken.

“So as much as I’d love to keep talking, I have a date at the Philadelphia morgue with a decaying corpse. We just pulled him out of the town dump,” Darger said, putting the car in park and pocketing the keys.

“Well, it would be rude to keep him waiting,” Luck said. “My break’s about over anyway. But thanks for the kick in the pants, Violet.”

“Anytime,” Darger said as she opened her door and climbed out of the car.

Loshak raised his eyebrows, a wordless inquiry as to who’d been on the other end of the phone call.

“Luck,” Darger said, tucking the phone into her bag.

“How’s he doing?”

“Oh, he wanted to whine about desk duty and physical therapy.”

“Still struggling, eh?”

“Yeah, well, I told him to quit wallowing and do the work so he can get back in the field.”

Loshak wheezed out a laugh.

“You must have made such a great counselor when you worked in Victim Services, what with your gentle ways and wealth of empathy.”

“Hey, sometimes you need someone to hold your hand, and sometimes you need to get slapped upside the head and told to quit feeling sorry for yourself. Self-pity never did anyone any good.”

They’d reached the public entrance of the building, and Loshak paused in front of the door.

“You ready?” he asked.

“No, but we might as well get it over with.”

“That’s the spirit,” Loshak said, holding the door open and gesturing for her to go in first.