Past Rites

by Claire Stibbe

  A young woman with long disheveled hair stood in the hallway, reading glasses perched on the end of a thin nose. He shot one hand out to shake hers, estimated about five feet eight inches and one hundred and thirty pounds under black yoga pants and a sweater. She introduced herself as Adel Martinez, make-up slightly smudged beneath one eye.

  A dead ball of mistletoe brushed the top of his head as he followed her into the first reception room, larger than he expected with a fireplace on one side and a small grand piano on the other. Both the brown leather couch and the easy chair were covered with fleece blankets, likely hiding a few holes if student housing was anything to go by.

  “It’s just not like her,” Adel said, heaving a sigh and looking at him with those pale, gray eyes. “She missed a piano recital on Tuesday night.”

  “What’s her name?” Temeke partially unzipped his jacket but didn’t take it off.

  Adel sat on the couch, legs tightly together. She offered him the chair and a recent photograph. “Asha... Asha Samadi.”

  Temeke didn’t need the photograph. He could still picture the stage, the piano, the girl, and he could still hear the piece if he thought about it. What he needed was a stiff drink and he was suddenly having trouble breathing. The name was on every tongue, every billboard, and the last place he heard it was in Los Poblanos Academy archives.

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Saturday morning.”

  “Any idea where she might have gone?”

  “There’s this guy she likes... Paddy Brody. He sent her flowers on Friday.” Adel’s eyebrows jumped a little when she mentioned the flowers.

  “Was there a card?” he asked.

  “There were two. I don’t have the first one. It said you light my life or something like that, all typewritten with handwriting on the back. I didn’t recognize it.”

  Just like any florists card, thought Temeke. The only difference was the handwriting which would signify the order was made in the store rather than over the phone.

  “Was it signed?”

  “With the letter P. That’s what made me think it was Paddy.” There was a gleam in her eyes, cold and dark. “Said he wanted to see Asha around eight o’clock.”

  “How well do you know Mr. Brody?”

  He watched the twitch in her bottom lip and she seemed to limit herself to a nod. He’d ask for the second card later.

  “He’s my ex.”

  “And you were OK with him dating your roommate?”

  “I’m over him.”

  Her voice sounded so serious Temeke had to smile. He needed a moment to digest each feature and to understand why Paddy Brody had ditched her in favor of Asha. Here was a slim young woman with eyes that tapered out to the sides, beauty of which many women could only dream. She was elegant and in a class of her own.

  “Where were you on Saturday night?”

  “Staying with a girlfriend.”

  Why not a boyfriend? he thought, watching the direction of her gaze which seemed to scoot up and down his chest. “Your friend’s name?”

  “Sarah Hughes.”

  “Description?”

  “Heavy set. Black... mixed parentage.”

  “Nothing’s ever black or white.” Temeke got a smile then and forced himself back into focus. “Address?”

  “She lives a few streets away. Columbia Drive. But I wanted to give Asha some time alone.”

  “How long have you known Sarah?” Temeke took a small pad of paper from his jacket pocket, wrote a couple of words and pretended to write a few more. She was still looking at him.

  “I met her at Gibson. So... four months.”

  Not long enough to form a strong bond, Temeke thought, and to voice any suspicions now would be premature. “And Asha?”

  “We were at school together.”

  Temeke felt a sudden rush as she said it, felt the nudge of a few questions burning in his mind. How well had she known the Delgado sisters? How jealous was she of Asha? Instead he settled on, “You didn’t think of calling the police sooner?”

  “It was this,” she said, pulling the second card out of the waistband of her pants. “I found it on the mantel the next day... in place of the other one. I thought they were pulling my leg. Run off, you know. Then Paddy called. Asked me if I’d seen Asha. That’s what made me worry.”

  “Anyone else you know with the initial P?” he said, turning the warm card over in his hand.

  “No.”

  “Any signs of a struggle when you came home? Overturned furniture, that kind of thing?”

  “No, it was the same as when I left.”

  Temeke read the card. It was a vulgar rendition of the William Tell Overture ‒ typewritten ‒ only this time larger than the standard and without a florist’s logo.

  A possible scenario shot through his mind. Worst case, the first card had been left to bait Asha into believing she had a date. The second card was a ploy to keep Adel from calling the police. It would certainly buy the kidnapper a few more days.

  “Mind if I have this?” He waited for her to say yes, would have taken it anyway even if she hadn’t.

  He pulled out an evidence bag from a stack of several in his jacket pocket, logged the chain of possession, name and description and then bagged the card.

  “Did you call her. Text her?”

  “She left her phone in her room. So I emailed. Haven’t heard anything. Called her dad too and now he’s worried.”

  “Anything missing?”

  “Her laptop, a hand towel and the shower curtain. We didn’t bring much. So I’d notice if there was anything else. These houses are so run down. Old neighborhoods, you know,” she said, as if that explained everything. “I was hoping she’d be back in time for the funeral. She doesn’t even know.”

  “Funeral?”

  “A school friend of ours died in an accident. The funeral’s this weekend.”

  Temeke was about to give his condolences when she got up abruptly and disappeared into the kitchen. She came back with an iPad, placed it on the coffee table and swiveled it toward him.

  “She sent this email yesterday.”

  Temeke gave the message a cursory glance.

  Hey Dello, just wanted you to be the first to know. I’m in heaven. Love’s a dream. Lost my key so took the spare. Can you pay the rent until I get back?

  “Does she always call you Dello?” He saw the quick nod.

  “I told her I was worried about the recital and I asked her when she was coming back.”

  “You also told her she was a bitch. That’s what it says here.” He pointed at the one word response before the second email about the recital.

  “What am I supposed to do? Pay for everything until she gets back? It’s a scam.”

  Temeke saw the frown, the sudden flinch. He continued to check the most recent incoming and outgoing emails. Two one-liners from Asha asking Adel not to forget to put out the trash and to keep an eye on her car.

  He wanted to shrug it off as a young woman’s desire to be alone, to escape the humdrum of everyday life, but it was the final email that made his skin prickle.

  If you need anything, ask Detective Temeke.

  Temeke wondered why Asha would have singled him out and he began to pant slightly through a half-open mouth. They had never met.

  “Taking her laptop’s a good thing though, isn’t it?” Adel said. “It means she knew she was going away for a while?”

  Temeke felt his head bouncing on the stem of his neck, if only to reassure her. Said he’d have to take the iPad so they could monitor the emails.

  “Music’s her life.” Adel stared at her feet, hands tucked under both thighs. “There’s no way she would have missed that recital, not with a scholarship.”

  “So you’re saying this email isn’t from her?”

  “It just doesn’t sound like her.”

  All Temeke could do was read it again, sensing a faint nudge of unease. Unless Adel could come up with anything else, h
e wasn’t entirely convinced. “Sometimes people want to be alone.”

  “She left her car. You can’t be serious?”

  As a heart attack, Temeke wanted to say, but glanced instead at the email. He was aware she was studying him from head to toe and assessing if he was going to linger too long or leave abruptly. He decided on the latter.

  “Just one more thing. Can I look at her room?”

  Adel nodded and showed him to a small room with a queen sized bed, a single sash window to the front street and another window that looked out on the east side.

  A black cell phone lay on the desk, red light blinking from two incoming texts.

  “Those are from me,” Adel said. “That’s how I knew she’d left her phone.”

  Asha’s purse was on the chair, music stand by the wall, a closet full of clothes. Evening dresses mostly. No signs of a struggle, nothing extraordinary except for a hint of jasmine that hung in the air as if she had only just left.

  “Music scores,” he said. “Where does she keep those?”

  “In here.” Adel retrieved an open leather case from behind the door bulging with sheet music.

  Temeke gave a curt nod and peered out of the east window at the house next door. “Clothes, make-up... money?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything missing.”

  He glanced into the Jack-and-Jill bathroom, saw the medicine cabinet and an empty blister pack of pills in the trash can. “Couldn’t get me a glass of water, could you?”

  When Adel sauntered into the kitchen Temeke took a photo of that blister pack with his cell phone. He then opened the medicine cabinet. Makeup, toothpaste, floss, skin cream, Omeprazole, 20 milligram capsule, yellow and white. Name, Adel Martinez. Eleven refills before 9/9/12.

  Out of date, he thought, popping off the cap and pocketing a few. He heard the light thud of Adel’s footsteps and stepped back into Asha’s bedroom.

  “Your room untouched?” he asked, taking the glass she offered him. Two sips of tepid water and he left the rest on the dressing table.

  “Yes. Everything looks the same.”

  Temeke took her word for it. He wasn’t about to go rooting around in the girl’s drawers, but he advised a female officer would come back later and that’s what she’d do.

  “Let me know if Asha contacts you,” he said, making a point of looking at his watch. He handed her his card and took the iPad. “The school you attended. Was it here in Albuquerque?”

  “Los Poblanos Academy. It’s on Rio Grande.”

  Temeke turned his back on her, zipped the jacket up to his chin and headed for the front door. He began digging around in the various compartments of his brain for a motive for Asha’s disappearance. Ditching a piano recital was hardly the most efficient way to raise a grade and Asha didn’t seem like the quitting kind.

  The spongy rise beneath his feet caused him to look down at a Persian rug, a plush pattern of red, white and black. “Nice carpet.”

  “It’s a prayer mat,” Adel corrected. “Asha’s father bought it for her.”

  “Does she use it?”

  “No,” Adel shook her head and gave a half laugh.

  His eyes followed the weave where he noticed a slight fault in one of the florals on the short axis. It was red instead of white.

  Stopping in the narrow hallway, he examined pale eyes behind square rimmed glasses. “You might remember the Delgado sisters at school. Alice and Lily.”

  Adel grimaced it seemed with sad recollection. “You know Alice died?”

  Temeke nodded, said that he did. He told her Lily was missing, had been for weeks.

  Adel’s frown was sudden, eyes wide. “But I only saw her last week. In the library on Wednesday night, I think. And then the Frontier for lunch the next day. We didn’t speak. We never do.”

  Temeke felt the goosebumps prickle. “Any idea where she might have gone? Who she hangs out with?”

  “No. She’s always alone.”

  Temeke’s mind began to race, blood pumping in his ears. Bloody hell, was this possible? A missing girl eating lunch and reading books in a public place? He gathered his senses as he opened the front door, realizing he didn’t have anything yet. Nothing concrete at least.

  “I’ll send officer Watts over in the morning. She’ll need a list of all the items missing.” He turned back to face her. “Ever heard of a book called The Lilin Esoterica?”

  The eyes were no longer heavy-lidded, quite the opposite. They were alert and the comment had ignited a spark.

  “A book that empowers women,” she said.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Alice bought it. Said we should try it.”

  Temeke wanted to ask her if she believed in it, but he decided to leave it for another day. Wanted to see if she would be quite as accommodating the next time he called.

  “If you think of anything else, you’ll let me know?”

  Her eyes suddenly widened and she snapped her fingers. “I forgot! The poker... the one by the fireplace. It’s missing.”

  FOURTEEN

  Gabriel shrugged on his jacket and snapped the fasteners of his black leather gloves. Cradling an oblong object wrapped in a plastic bag, he walked toward the back entrance of the café on Fourth Street.

  The Fat Mule was his usual haunt and it would do as long as the ape hangers didn’t give him sideways looks, mouthing obscenities and squeezing empty beer cans with one hand. He threw the object in the flatbed of a nearby truck and grinned as he did it.

  Collapsing with a big sigh on a hard bench, he couldn’t feel his legs and all he could hear was a drone of conversation on the far side of the room. Looking around, his senses began to soak up every atom. Five aging bikers at a corner table, two of them stroking handlebar moustaches and staring at him as if he had no clothes on.

  Gabriel continued to look out of the restaurant window at a cornfield with rolling ruts and red dirt. He could hardly see it in the dark, only as far as the light from the windows would allow. But he could imagine the endless rows of brittle stalks and the secret trails that ran between them. A meeting place. A hiding place.

  He almost smiled at the attention he received, watching the old men from the corner of his eye, knowing with half a chance they’d beat him up in the bathrooms. He combed a hand through his hair, black and shiny and almost down to his shoulder. Except for light brown eyes, he could easily pass for Hispanic.

  He saw the detective three days ago in the school parking lot. Studied him from the confines of his van. The same man who caused a lump in Gabriel’s throat and a heart that threatened to stop beating. Saw him on TV a few times, and then followed him to a white house bordered with cottonwoods on Guadalupe Trail. Found a derelict house nearby so he could breathe in the same air. There wasn’t much Gabriel could determine from under that tree in the darkness and he assumed the detective lived alone like he did.

  “You can’t be loved by everyone,” Demon whispered.

  Gabriel took no notice. Instead, he couldn’t stop thinking about the detective framed behind that window, a dark silhouette in front of a reading lamp. He wanted to take a photograph to keep the memory locked on paper, but there hadn’t been enough light. The house was wired for movement, two strobe lights flashing on the closer he got, not to mention the incessant barking from next door’s dog.

  There would be other times, other ways to get the book. And besides, Demon had wings. Why couldn’t he just fly in there and get it himself?

  “Don’t be stupid. The Hierarchy don’t have wings,” Demon muttered.

  No, the Hierarchy had bodies like humans, spoke like them too. You could pass one in the street, sit next to one on an airplane and never know it. It was the Inferus, the lesser kind, that fluttered about over rooftops and perched in trees.

  A sudden prick of sadness when Gabriel remembered Los Poblanos Academy and the familiar scents of a place he once called home. Alice Delgado, suicide girl, was still there, somewhere. Her spirit wandered along t
hose trails where trees arched overhead like a series of spiny tunnels and where crickets pulsed in the summertime. It would have been green and fragrant with honeysuckle then. But it was winter now and everything was dead.

  “Coffee?”

  Gabriel bit the inside of his cheek as he looked up at the waitress. Late fifties, blonde hair tied up in a messy do, flabby cheeks and a little too much makeup. He mumbled a yes.

  “Looks like you’re in love,” the waitress said, leaning forward a little and flashing those deep brown eyes. “It’s one thing when they’re good to you. It’s another when the world’s full of trash like mine.”

  She didn’t wait for a response. Just shuffled off to the other tables, smiled, poured more coffee and then brought him a cup. The air in the room suddenly turned gray and it was difficult to breathe.

  Gabriel wiped his hands on his jeans, wrapped them around the coffee mug and leaned back against a vinyl bench. It was nicest thing anyone had said to him in a long while. The waitress was right. The world was full of trash. Except the detective. Simply put, he was magic.

  “Take your time,” Demon said, interrupting his thoughts. “Watch for signs.”

  “What signs?” Gabriel whispered, eyes restlessly wandering over the heads of the people in the coffee shop.

  “See those men? Who do you think they’re staring at?”

  The floor seemed to open up and Gabriel felt he was falling, spinning, heat rising in his face. He jerked back against the bench, unconsciously shaking his head as if trying to dismiss the stares.

  He began to enjoy that bitter tasting coffee, wondering if it was worth asking the heavily jowled lady behind the counter to give him a fresh cup. Only he’d have to stand then, walk in front of the gawking bikers and watch them size him up out of the corner of his eye.

  He was fit, but he wasn’t overly muscular. No matter how many weights he lifted, how many sets, how many repetitions, his body would never be like theirs, stocky and well fed. He hadn’t the stomach for it.

  He fumbled through his pockets and retrieved a wad of crumpled toilet paper, gave his nose a loud blow and coughed a few times. The two staring bikers resumed their friendly chatter, hands instinctively covering their mouths.