Past Rites

by Claire Stibbe

  Temeke invited him to come in to see the composite artist as soon as he could, ended the call and ransacked his memory about the van.

  He had a detective’s memory, never forgot faces, dates, the sound of a person’s voice, car models, license numbers, case numbers, all filed away in his brain never to be erased. A gray van had been parked next to his car at Los Poblanos Academy. High-tailed it out of the parking lot when Temeke saw him. It was a long shot, but what if it was the same van?

  There was a telephone message from Malin. Adel Martinez had been prescribed Omeprazole for a peptic ulcer about a year ago, but the capsules Temeke took from Adel’s house were Adderall, usually prescribed for ADHD. Explained the empty blister packs in the trash, he thought.

  There were no messages from Hackett or Luis and he began to wonder if he had been purposely excluded from another secret meeting.

  He balanced a fresh cigarette on the top of his computer. Googled the word witchcraft and got a number of hits; Wicca, spells, ancient history, a definition by Merriam-Webster and an article from the New York Post about spiritual deception ‒ most of which seemed to focus on making a person richer, stronger, smarter. But this didn’t appear to resemble any of these.

  He paused at the last paragraph, wiping his hands down his trousers as if something hideous had leeched into his skin.

  If a girl is excluded from the sisterhood she will experience rejection and isolation, and she will come to believe she is truly possessed.

  EIGHTEEN

  While the rest of the department and their guests were sucking down the dregs of stewed coffee and chewing on the last of the bagels in the boardroom, Temeke was debating on reading that sodding awful book. It was so cold in the office and every time the rotten door opened a blast of air gave him the shivers.

  New Mexico. Sand and wind, where nothing grows. He’d begun to hate it almost as much as he loved it.

  His finger absentmindedly caressed the grip of the desk drawer. The book was in there, had to be read, had to be examined, and his mind was shouting obscenities if he didn’t hurry up and get on with it.

  It’s like a novel, for crying out loud. A thriller. You like those.

  Temeke slipped the book out of the evidence bag and opened it, frantic to sidestep the yawning pit of nightmares that threatened to suck him in if he let it. There was an elusive scent, not sweet, rather salty like brine on the ocean bed and the pages had turned a nicotine yellow. Beneath the title on the first page was a logo of a lion holding a sword with the sun behind it, reminiscent of the ancient Persian symbol of royalty. The publisher name was obscured by a date stamp where the ink had turned green with age.

  Verron’s Bookstore, it said. November 11, 2007.

  Temeke googled the book and found eighty-two mixed reviews since publication. He then called the bookstore in Old Town Plaza, heard three rings before a voice with a Slovakian accent answered.

  Romanian, the man assured him. “I’m a citizen, detective. Been here for fifty years.”

  “It’s not about your citizenship, Mr. Verron.” Temeke cleared his throat, hoping the thick accent hadn’t seeped into his response. “I have a book you sold several years ago. The Lilin Esoterica. I wonder if you remember it?”

  “Brown leather. Yes... I remember the book. Hard to shift something like that. I told all my customers it came from Transylvania. To make a sale, you understand. Cash buyer.”

  A good hearty laugh and the phone vibrated against Temeke’s ear. He wasn’t keen to listen to the rantings of an old man or a bleeding vampire story from another century. He could easily have lunch with Hackett for that.

  “Any chance you kept a record of who you sold it to?”

  “So long ago.”

  “Yet you remember the person paid cash.”

  “A young woman. That’s all I remember.”

  Just like Adel Martinez had said, Temeke thought and ended the call.

  He had one of those bad feelings, the same damn feeling that had him spooked. He’d been a detective long enough to read the subtle warning signs and the words so long ago triggered all kinds of possibilities and sadly, no leads. It also triggered a sense of time. Mr. Verron knew roughly when it was sold, even if he didn’t have a name.

  The mysterious book lay open on his desk, ancient and tired, like an old man you wanted to help across a busy street. A man who wandered home alone, if he even had a home.

  A gray twist of ash landed on the keyboard and Temeke brushed it away with a hand, stubbed the cigarette out on the corner of his desk and threw it in the trash. He read the first chapter.

  In women, there is a powerful drive which emerges in the instinct to survive, to procreate, even in grueling and desperate conditions.

  There are impulses which move women ‒ love, lust, hate, and the urge of marriage and motherhood. This is the destiny of a sister.

  Temeke sensed a sudden rush of wind, the sound of breath against his ear, forging past him as if born on cloven hoofs. He slapped the side of his head and began to mutter the word hogwash, as if by repeating it he could encase himself in a tall hedge nothing could penetrate.

  If any sister does not obey she must be cut out from the Lilin and left to perish.

  For it is said the first shall be buried alive, the second shall have her limbs severed, the third shall be cast into a fire, the fourth shall be drowned, the fifth shall be poisoned and the sixth shall be starved of air.

  For woman is cracked and tarnished, just as the last light on a dying world.

  If Alice had held séances in the school attic, brewed belladonna, and started a cult, she might also have been coerced into a spiritual marriage with a few of her friends.

  Just as a nun enters a religious order, a Lilin must take a new name. This name will reveal her character and her destiny and it will also signify a new beginning and a new end. It will transform the woman who acquires it by making her a sharer in the sisterhood.

  Temeke’s thoughts seemed to have run their course, ebbing into gray bars as his eyes narrowed and he saw only the faint outline of his eyelashes. He sank deep into his chair and tried to ward off an unexpected surge of nausea.

  There were only two options in his opinion. The shrewd one, which was to talk to Malin about the occult, only he’d be forced to listen to a rant on the evils of witchcraft. Or the reckless one, which was to go it alone.

  The phone rattled on his desk and a voice introduced himself as Matt Black. It was the initial report on the Samadi house Temeke had been waiting for.

  “There were blood spatters on the carpet and on the piano, namely the key slip and bed,” Matt said. “The keys were old and yellowed with age and some chipped at the corners. Looks like they had been wiped with a cloth, but not enough to clean the side grain. Basswood. Very porous. Same blood type as on the carpet. We’ll let you know when we have a name.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Whoever it was wore gloves.”

  “Consistent bastard.”

  “But there was a strand of hair. Scale patterns indicate it’s human not animal, very coarse and bone straight, possibly Asian. The follicular tag was intact meaning it could have been pulled out in a struggle, but we’ll run nuclear DNA on the root pulp. Another thing, there were traces of skin and bone inside the piano. Dr. Vasillion said they belonged to the third and fourth right distal phalange.”

  “A what?”

  “Two fingertips.”

  NINETEEN

  Temeke couldn’t help thinking the Esoterica had some association to the deaths in the Albuquerque area and he certainly couldn’t rule out the possibility that the killer was copying the format.

  As for Cornell Drive, it was riddled with K-9s tracking scents through clumps of tumbleweed in the back yard, handlers going through rubble and trash in the alleyways. So far, the small tract of land had yielded nothing.

  A photograph of Asha Samadi had gone out to all law enforcement agencies and the surrounding states, and a hefty $3
50,000 reward had been offered by her father. Unfortunately, the same photo had ended up on Jennifer Danes’ desk at the Duke City Journal promising an exaggerated and highly erroneous article.

  It was the next call that unnerved Temeke as he sat there trying to understand the phalange nonsense. Luis had a car he wanted Temeke to look at. A gray Mazda RX7 found bobbing like a champagne cork under Alameda Bridge.

  “When it rains, it bloody well pours,” Temeke said into the phone.

  “Jarvis called it in. Said there was a woman inside.”

  “I’ll be there. Seen Malin this morning?”

  “She’s at Minerd’s Scrap N’ Haul. Told me to tell you she’ll be back before lunch.”

  “Thanks,” Temeke muttered before ending the call.

  He would have liked to have gone with her, but she was doing everything she could to keep up with the case, watching tapes of the late Alan Delgado, interviews, phone calls, reporting. He was proud of her.

  Ten minutes later, he swung the jeep into the Alameda Bridge parking lot, choosing a spot away from the secured scene, the ambulance and the fire truck. It was a crying shame there was no video cam fixed to the only light fixture in situ. He gave the river a long, hard stare, higher than usual due to all the recent rain and swirling with red mud.

  One Field Investigator was taking photographs of the front of the car, another was drawing sketches of the river and embankment, and Matt Black was tagging, logging and packaging. It must have been their third walk-through.

  A videographer was shadowing Stan Stockard from Channel 4 News to get in on the best of the pictures, until Stan swatted him with a hand and took his camera crew down to the river. It was funny enough for a few loud cackles.

  Officer Jarvis stood beside the ambulance, drenched to his waist. He walked toward Temeke, wiping his hands on a fluffy white towel someone had given him.

  “Found the car after seven this morning. Driver’s dead, sir.”

  Temeke could see that. One of the men in the medical response team that he recognized as Lauren De Paul, assistant to Dr. Vasillion, gave him a terse nod and pointed at the body bag. Temeke held up three fingers and nodded back. He turned back to Jarvis.

  “When you got here, what was the first thing you saw?”

  They both stared at the car which stood in the parking lot now, dripping water and sediment through the open passenger door, windows intact.

  “When I drove over the bridge,” Jarvis said, “I could see a woman down there in the driver’s seat. She had her seat belt on, looked like she’d overshot the slope. I waded in and tried to open the driver’s door, but it was locked. The passenger door was open slightly. She could have got out if she wanted to, sir. Might have been a suicide.”

  “We’ll leave all the science to forensics, shall we? Automatic or stick?”

  “Automatic.”

  “Was the car in drive?”

  Jarvis’ eyes swept from side to side as if the question was obvious. “Yes, sir.”

  “When you drove into the parking lot, which way was the car pointing?”

  “The hood was down, front side facing the trees. All I could see was the underside, sir.”

  Sounded exactly like a straight shot from the parking lot, thought Temeke, judging by the tire marks in the grass leading down to the water. Although he would have liked to have seen it for himself. There was another set nearer the bridge where the car had been pulled out, but it was the open passenger door that bothered him.

  The victim could have climbed out unless she was intoxicated or rendered incapable before the car went under. Heart attacks could do that to a person, so could drugs. But a passenger door couldn’t have opened by itself. It meant only one thing. The passenger had jumped clear just as the car went in and if that someone hadn’t been found, it left another option, one Temeke wasn’t willing to consider yet.

  “Purse? Cell phone?”

  Jarvis jutted his chin at the crime scene specialists. “All bagged, sir. They also found a blanket and a shoelace with some hair on it. Probably nothing.”

  “Everything’s something at a crime scene, son.”

  Temeke reckoned the slope was roughly a twenty-five percent grade and there was no knowing how fast the vehicle had been going. Probably fifteen at a stretch, he imagined. Might have raced in from the road, only a sharp left-hand turn would have prevented any antics of that nature, unless she was being chased.

  The temperatures had been in the low thirties at night and it made sense the car windows were closed. The sun had already burned through the dampness that had settled overnight and there was an eerie orange light through the trees.

  He walked over to Lauren and stared down at the head of a young woman, hair matted against her cheeks and almost unrecognizable.

  “Name?”

  “Rosa Belmonte. Twenty-one, five feet, six inches tall, one hundred and twenty-eight pounds. All there on her driver’s license. Take a look at this,” Lauren said, unzipping the bag a little further and pointing at a prominent deep mark around her neck. “There are abrasions along the ligature furrow, pattern overlapping. Means she may have struggled a bit.”

  Temeke curled his toes in his boots, felt his mind swim in cyberspace for a second without sound or color. “She was strangled?”

  “Looks that way.” Lauren seemed to sense the question on Temeke’s face. “She was probably taken by surprise. Lost consciousness fairly quickly.”

  “Any other marks, cuts, tattoos?”

  “Didn’t see any.”

  “Was she wearing shoes?”

  “Training shoes. They’re badly scuffed at the heel and sole.” Lauren handed Temeke the bag and let him take a look.

  “Bloody waste.”

  Temeke saw the shoes were a mixture of white leather and mesh, but a series of deep scores along the heel revealed Rosa had been dragged, possibly across the parking lot. He noted both shoelaces were intact and handed the bag back.

  “Officer Jarvis said someone found a shoelace. Could it have been used on the victim?”

  “It’s possible,” Lauren said. “The doc will have a better handle on it when we get her to OMI.”

  The last time Temeke had visited the office of the medical investigator he had asked Vasillion what he thought the victim might have seen or felt in those final hours. The doctor responded, “I’ve often imagined it. I think they beg internally for someone to come and rescue them, and then their minds scream, my God, I don’t want to die.”

  The bland-faced doc took pride in his work, tidying up the remains other people had destroyed. He cut and sliced, sometimes humming a tune. And all this time, Temeke assumed Vasillion was hardened by it, no longer able to feel like he once had.

  What Temeke couldn’t stomach in this case was the demonic component which had crept in through a sodding witch book. Someone thought they had an unholy mandate to snuff out innocent lives and take precious resources away from other investigations.

  “Anyone else in the car?” he asked.

  “Didn’t look like it. But there’s frogmen north of here, following the current.”

  Temeke studied the open space where the teams were beginning to pull out, leaving a tow truck for the deceased’s car. He noticed one light on the south side of the parking lot, a metal halide fixture with a rectangular head. It would have shed some light on the area but certainly not enough to alert a passing car on the main road. Most drivers clocked fifty-five over Alamada bridge when no one was looking.

  Temeke gave Lauren a slight wave of his hand and walked back towards the river. He heard the conclusive rasp of the zipper as he reached the summit of the slope, an eerie sound he had come to terms with over the years.

  He crouched and squinted sideways at the wide imprint of tire tracks along the embankment. There were no scuff marks on the asphalt below, nothing to indicate the victim had been dragged in any direction. All he could hear was the breeze and voices bubbling from the emergency teams, and his gaze was brie
fly locked by a dragonfly caught in a strip of sunlight on the surface of the water, wings a twilight blue as it hovered over a wooden post. It was lucky to be alive.

  Temeke stood, reached in his pocket for his cell phone to call Malin... and then paused. He was jarred from his thoughts by a scrawl of graffiti on that wooden post and the closer he got he could make out a word.

  Gulshan.

  As to its meaning he had no idea, but words near a crime scene deserved to be photographed. He took a picture with his cell phone for good measure and flicked his fingers at the videographer.

  “Better snag that before the water level rises.”

  TWENTY

  Minerd’s Scrap N’ Haul was on Broadway, a large lot with tier-upon-tier of rusted out car parts without a gap of light between them. A few old sedans graced that dismal graveyard and the only thing that brightened the parking lot was a pimped out Chevrolet Caprice with forty inch chrome rims parked outside the office door.

  Malin studied the manager, unable to determine the gender even as he came closer.

  “Like your sunglasses,” he said. “Aviators, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You look like a pilot.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Name’s Charlie Miller,” he said, holding out a hand. “I was Charlotte in the old days. Course, the state assumed I was sex starved and picking up women in bars.”

  “Were you?” Malin showed her badge, feeling the phone vibrate in her pocket. She chose to ignore it.

  “Yeah, I was actually. But what I do in my spare time’s got nothing to do with applying for a business license, has it?”

  “No it hasn’t, sir.”

  There wasn’t a vestige of femininity in that body now, arms etched with tattoos and chest flattened by a snug button-down shirt.

  Charlie began pacing in a wide circle, probably felt a tad uncomfortable after dishing out a whole pile of redundant info Malin couldn’t care less about. Unless he was running a closet drug business, which would explain the pursed lips and a foot that quickly pressed a half-smoked joint into the sand, he expressed the typical behavior of a person confronted by uniform.