Past Rites

by Claire Stibbe

  The adrenalin made his back and fingertips itch. It always happened when he remembered the words. Unkind words, foul words, gnarled words, like an arthritic hand digging its nails into his brain. Nothing had ever prepared him for such cruelty.

  Slipping into a trance, he imagined the stinging cold outside the ranch home on Cornell Drive, the one he had studied for so many months. Rough-faced brick sprinkled with snow and a gray vine that covered half the structure. On that day, Demon had assured him the spare key was exactly where the girl always left it. Behind the vine and hanging on a tiny nodule to the left of the front door.

  “Make sure you get free of her afterwards,” Demon had whispered, as if he stood right there beside him now. “Otherwise she’ll follow you for the rest of your life.”

  But she broke my heart, Gabriel wanted to say. She broke my spirit.

  “Well, that doesn’t matter now, does it?” Demon said. “After all, that’s why we’re here. To make it all better. As for the book... finders keepers.”

  Gabriel snapped out of that dark place, reached up and swatted away the last of them, those leathery things with yellow eyes that ripped at his hair and cheeks. They had been hissing around all day, beating and tearing his mind to shreds, and he thought he felt blood trickling down one eye but it was only sweat. The attacks had worsened and sometimes his muscles felt as if they were on fire. If he found the book, he could destroy it and the ghastly thing that had come out of it.

  “You can’t stop me,” Demon reminded. “When will another opportunity like this ever come up? You’re losing your nerve.”

  Gabriel was losing his mind.

  He tried to detach himself from the thing that taunted him day and night, an extra mind that could never be removed, heart and mind dependent. These were only some of the vital things they shared.

  It’s not like we’re twins, Gabriel thought. We can easily be cut apart.”

  “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Demon said. “Ridding yourself of the one true friend you’ve ever had. There will never be anyone like me.”

  Gabriel nodded. There would never be anyone like Demon, although he did wonder if there was such a thing as a procedure to free him from Demon... a spiritual severing. It would end in the death of one and the survival of the other and the more he thought about it, rage flared up inside him and he braced himself for the explosion to come.

  There was one thing that set him apart, one thing that gave him the monopoly in every game. He could define a conversation across a crowded room by watching lips, tongue and face. They all told a story. They all gave so much away. It wasn’t that people hated him. It was that they felt unnerved by him. And that made Gabriel feel powerful.

  “You were pathetic at school... Pathetic,” Demon said. “Little goody two-shoes. Didn’t like socializing, didn’t like all the fun things they did. Wasn’t exactly a fit was it?”

  “I did fit.”

  “Not really. Not like a real person. Gumption, is what it’s called. You wouldn’t know what that means. To think you were such a tattletale.”

  Gabriel sensed he was on a downhill slide, sinking lower and lower into that fiery pit and each time he felt his feet burn, he’d try to scrabble out again. Tried to reach for the pills that made him feel so alive.

  “Want to have some real fun?”

  Gabriel nodded. That’s what he’d got all dressed up for, wasn’t it? That’s why he took the pills.

  “Well, then. This is going to be a glorious night.”

  What Demon didn’t mention was that everything would turn black soon and Gabriel wouldn’t remember a thing.

  FOUR

  Malin smelled the unmistakable scent of cigarette smoke as she slipped behind the wheel of the Explorer. The tailgate still rattled from a rear-ender they’d experienced on a previous case and she was reluctant to leave it in the shop. The last unit had returned without a GPS or the mobile computer mounting on the dash.

  She arrived at Northwest Area Command at a quarter to eight on Monday morning. The clouds were the color of ash and there was the unmistakable scent of wet brick. It would thunder soon.

  After swiping her card in the reader, she found Sergeant Moran behind the front desk, framed by a wide pane of bulletproof glass and shaping a bicycle from a pile of paperclips. He had an ear to the holding cells in the back where a drunk was shouting about how he’d been flying high for two days and how it kicked like a 12 gauge when it came on.

  “Is it just you and me today?” she asked.

  “Looks like it,” Sarge said, taking his feet off the desk. “Temeke tells me you can mimic just about any accent? Do German?”

  “US accents, Sarge. And I’m not that good at those.”

  “Great news on last night’s sweep. Makes you proud to be DCPD. We made the front page.”

  Sarge shook open a newspaper, smoothed it down against the counter and read it out aloud. “Federal, state and local law enforcement officers executed twenty arrest warrants last night, one state warrant, search warrants on eleven residences and twenty-three people in custody. All charged with racketeering conspiracy and conspiracy to murder. Of course, there’s always one who doesn’t approve of the travel plans or the destination. According to Officer Jarvis there was quite a noise in the back of the prisoner transport van. Pat ‘Yellowman’ Mendez was wondering if they could drop him off at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center for some fry bread.”

  “They got him?” Malin was jumping.

  Sarge pointed toward the holding cells where distant yells were being ignored. Sons of bitches! I’m gonna gut you. Hell, yeah! Mendez was one of the leaders of the Syndicato de Gato Negro and so thickly tattooed he was beginning to look like a political cartoon.

  “So, where’s the party?” she asked.

  “They’re all in the Fat Duck. Temeke said if you don’t want to go there are a couple of boxes on your desk that need sorting.”

  Malin thought of Temeke and his high, carved cheekbones, a big feral cat and black as midnight. She’d be lying if she pretended she hadn’t noticed.

  No fraternizing with employees, she promised herself. But if he ever asked her out, she would be hard pressed to say no. He wouldn’t, of course. He was still in love with his ex-wife.

  Temeke’s humor always focused on embracing the underdog and if he could pull Commander Hackett down a peg or two he’d do it. There was sarcasm in everything he said and a liberal sprinkling of self-deprecation which seemed to give him the license to hand it out. She was the only one in the office who understood his gags and she was also the only one who wasn’t offended by them.

  Malin rushed upstairs to the office she shared with Temeke and took off her scarf and coat. A stale waft of cigarette smoke lingered from the night before and she wondered how long it would be before Commander Hackett had another meltdown about the smell. Temeke was killing himself with all that nicotine and the worst part was he didn’t seem to care.

  She sprayed the room liberally with a can of mango tango scented air freshener, tired of tacking no smoking signs to the walls which Temeke clearly ignored. He’d torn down the last two in a fit of rage and cussed with words she’d never heard of.

  What is a wanker anyway?

  She stared out of the window where the view plunged two stories down to a snow dusted rear parking lot and an automatic gate. Three Ford Interceptors and two cruisers. One of which had a damaged front bumper from a recent PIT maneuver and Temeke’s jeep which had several tears in the fabric roof, possibly done by a squirrel.

  She didn’t feel like eating burritos and making small talk with the officers in the Fat Duck, so she opened the first of two storage boxes marked Alice Delgado. Pulled out three black binders and set them on a table under the window. Took the first one apart, page by page, typed up a fresh spreadsheet, had her own routine.

  She opened the ICRIIS database, an acronym for Integrated Criminal Investigation and Identification System, and checked for any updates on their CAPTU
RE administering program. The first incident report had been written by Detective Reynolds and according to the 911 verbatim report, Alice Delgado had been found dead in the tub, wrists slashed with a knife. Labeled a suicide.

  She flipped through the pages at a furious clip, through the autopsy report signed by Dr. Vasillion, the crime scene photographs, a forensic report from Matt Black, and court transcripts, until she found the suicide note.

  It was hard to accept that a girl could take her own life, much easier to accept someone else had done it. How deep does that stinking morass of depression have to be before you sink to the bottom, slicing yourself up good and deep?

  The doctor ruled out the use of a razor where the margins would have been more regular. Said it was a fillet knife because the wound was linear, no tissue bridging.

  Malin didn’t care how Alice did it, suicide wasn’t an option in her world. She had never been depressed, at least not close enough to taking her own life and the very thought of cutting herself made her squirm.

  The note was short, one paragraph that made no sense.

  To become a true sister a woman must make herself mistress of everything in the world, evil as well as good, pain as well as pleasure, cruelty as well as mercy. Only then will she be in perfect balance to the power of infinity.

  It indicated an evil force, a blood pact Alice may have been part of, something that had contributed to her death.

  It also brought back a memory from Malin’s time at the Camden County Police Department in New Jersey, a drug the high school students used. Methylphenidate, a central nervous system stimulant used as a study aid, dangerous, life-threatening and highly addictive. They called it Smarts.

  Malin thought about a dozen things, but settled on the simplest. There was evidence to prove Alice had indeed taken her own life, but there was nothing to prove she had been alone at the time.

  Malin called Suicide Prevention, asked them if Alice Delgado had ever made any calls before she died. There were none recorded and no one remembered her name. And worse, there was no mention of a psychiatrist on Alice’s file.

  Malin turned on the computer and scanned her email. Temeke had been most thorough. Not only had he left the Delgado files on her desk, he’d emailed two old press releases. Told her to print them out and put them in Alice’s file.

  May 13, 2006. American Champion Racing Driver, Alan Delgado was killed today while racing on NAPA Speedway. He was hit in the rear fender by fellow driver, Tony Aimes at Turn 2. Delgado’s car burst into flames on impact. Although emergency personnel quickly reached Delgado, he died an hour later in hospital. Alan Delgado is survived by his wife Valerie and two daughters, Alice and Lily.

  May 13, 2007. Alice Delgado, daughter of former American Champion Racing driver, Alan Delgado, has been found dead, aged nineteen, in an apparent suicide. Duke City Police said she was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after officials responded to an emergency call around eight p.m. local time.

  The dates were the same, only one year apart. Malin tried to be disciplined in her thinking and hit print.

  As the printer whirred to life, she took a magnifying glass from the top drawer and scanned the faces at the graveside on the first photograph. There wasn’t anyone she could single out, no one who gave her that unexplainable feeling of being out of place. Eyes downcast, likely tracing the movement of the casket as it descended gracefully on a lowering frame. If she hoped for a glimpse of a killer, it wasn’t there.

  A short strawberry blonde in a veil, eight men in suits, seven teenagers of both sexes and a teenage girl sitting beside her mother, hands clenched. Both faces were fixed on an antique blue casket and Malin could almost hear muffled sobbing, the very picture of pain and grief.

  She leaned back and stretched her legs. There was something, though, something that burrowed under her skin and made her stomach roll. It felt as if she had swallowed a particularly gristly piece of chicken and she pushed the photograph away.

  The second photograph was the same, so were the third and fourth. The fifth showed a different expression on Lily’s face, eyes down this time as if she turned slightly to acknowledge the hand on her shoulder. A young man, seventeen, eighteen. Kind eyes. Malin checked each photograph for variations, all labelled from one to forty-seven, copyright to the Duke City Journal.

  A few weeks ago, she and Temeke had watched another funeral through a rain speckled windshield and just as the casket was lowered into a muddy hole, Temeke had said something about killers returning to admire their handiwork.

  Slipping the printed press releases into the file, she took the cell phone out of her pocket and laid it on the desk. If Temeke called, the thing would rattle louder than a beer can. She couldn’t remember a day when the sun shone as brightly as it had in the summer, or a day where she felt less hopeful. But this year things were different. They were starting to feel different too.

  FIVE

  Sun shone through the office blinds, casting diagonal shadows on the walls, strange shapes Malin tried to analyze, even in that zoned out state.

  She heard Fowler’s nervous, grunting laugh from next door, a vulgar gumshoe, the type that made you feel dirty inside. The gap under the door had a way of filtering out the worst of Hackett’s fits and by the aggressive pitch it was Fowler who was in the stocks today.

  Three major cases in the course of four months. Not unusual in a city with one of the highest crime rates in the United States. A city with Spanish heritage, a city beyond the ordinary. Old Town, the gleaming walls of the Bernalillo County Court House, The Anderson-Abruzzo Balloon Museum, San Felipe de Neri Church and so many architectural triumphs she associated with home. But there was a mood in the weather, the landscape, the people. As if the whole earth had been zipped up in a body bag.

  “Bored?”

  The voice almost made her jump. Captain Fowler’s face peered around the door frame, a vision of brass and black, and cologne that echoed the iconic scent of Pine-Sol.

  “Thought you might need some company,” he said, shutting the door and sitting in Temeke’s chair.

  Malin pursed her lips, slid the cell phone closer to the keyboard and turned on the recorder ap. She had to force herself to think, force herself not to look Fowler in the eye.

  “Since your office is within walking distance of mine, I thought I’d drop in,” he said.

  Malin shuffled the photographs in a neat little stack and put them back into the file. She searched a list of modeling agencies on the computer, selected the fourth on the list and finally scored a hit. Lily Delgado, second from the left. She ignored the sound of a cleared throat.

  “You look nervous. Know how I can tell?”

  Malin didn’t. Nor did she care. She was waiting for Temeke to take her to the Delgado residence and she wasn’t about to let Fowler in on her case.

  The sound of cracking knuckles set her teeth on edge and her heart began to beat a little faster. He tipped back in his chair, a subtle move to disguise his defensiveness – he was well on the way to pissed.

  “I can tell, because you get all red and rattled when I’m around,” he said, leaning forward suddenly. “Interested in lunch?”

  “Yes I am. But not with you, I’m afraid.” Malin studied the redhead on the computer, the arched eyebrows and a hint of resentment behind those watery eyes. If it hadn’t been a headshot against a cream stucco wall she would have guessed the girl’s hands were curled into two tight fists. She was rather attractive.

  “What’s that stink?” Fowler said, snapping open a Swiss army knife to clean his nails. “Perfume?”

  Malin nearly rolled her eyes. How like Fowler to think a short squirt of air freshener was all about him. She kept tapping the keys as if she wasn’t listening, hoping he’d disintegrate into thin air.

  “Ever had kids?” Fowler asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Ever been married?”

  “Are you married?” Naturally, Malin assumed he was.

  “My perso
nal life is none of your business.”

  “Ditto.”

  “Your personal life has gone viral. What was it a New Jersey captain once said? Oh, yeah, sleeping with you was like humping a tranquilized carthorse.”

  “The captain you’re referring to never had the pleasure.” The words gushed out of her mouth like water through a cracked dam and she almost snarled as she said them.

  It was the sudden laughter that caught her by surprise. Deep and guttural as if there was a glob of spit lodged in the back of his throat.

  “Got a thing for Temeke, haven’t you. Course, you should know he’ll be canned before long. Homicide’s running bets he can’t solve this case in nine weeks. All that drinking and smoking. Think I don’t know what else he’s doing? But nobody comes a close second, do they? Nice sense of rhythm these black people.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me.”

  Again the eddy, the cramping stomach. She was suddenly angry, the type of angry when you’re looking around for a spare telephone cord and wondering how long death by asphyxiation takes. A few minutes, she thought, which was a long time when every cell in your body is gasping for air.

  “Someone’s helping you, aren’t they? Giving you a bit of extra tuition after hours. Be careful on that computer, Santiago. Never know who you’re talking to.”

  Malin gave him a long hard look. “Do you use chat rooms?”

  “What?”

  “Chat rooms... do you use them?” Malin studied a brow creasing with three deep lines.

  “Why would I use a chat room?”

  “Because eighty-five percent of all police work is searching on the internet and the other fifteen is searching in all the wrong places. You’re in the wrong place.”

  “What are you talking about?” The Swiss army knife snapped shut.

  “Women are like speeding tickets to you.” Malin narrowed her eyes and logged out of her computer. “You come up behind, flash your lights, pull them over, take more than their license and registration, and then tell them to have a nice day. Talking of viral, the girls at the Journal call you Jack Flash. Nothing like a pistolino going off when you least expect it.”