“There’s a cop car outside every night and one assigned to me during the day.” She shrugged, lips widening a little. “They won’t know I’m gone.”
Malin could see the girl now. Long hair, black sweats, about a hundred and thirty pounds at a guess. She might have been tall judging by the length of one coltish thigh crossed neatly over the other and a foot that kept bouncing in the air as if she was nervous. Malin recognized her from the photographs as Adel Martinez, recognized her voice too.
He reached over and dropped a small zippy into the palm of her hand. “It’s all I have.”
Adel’s head fell back for a few seconds and she gave a tentative sigh. “That’s it?”
“I’m not a freaking pill mill. It’ll keep you going for a while.” He leaned forward and brushed a drift of hair from Adel’s heart-shaped face, finger tracing her cheekbones and lingering on the pouty curve of her upper lip. “I want to tell you something.”
Adel’s face was stony. It gave Malin a jolt, made her feel nauseous standing under the cover of the trees, waiting for the inevitable.
“I did some bad things. Things I regret. You remember the time when you found me with Kenzie... in the Lion’s Mouth? Well, I did sleep with her.”
Adel hugged her stomach, chin quivering under the weight of that blow and there was something dark and mysterious swimming about her eyes. “You two-timing low-life―”
“I made one mistake. I know it was wrong. But after Alice died... it changed me. I tried to fight it. But it got worse.”
Adel seemed to fill her lungs greedily, chin raised. There was nothing flexible or negotiable about her; she was simply looking for a way to snare him. “This isn’t you, Paddy.”
“OK, so maybe I deluded myself into thinking I was something special. Maybe I took things too far. I’m sorry.”
There was several seconds of silence and Malin felt an inexplicable chill running down her spine, a dizzy sense of certainty. Paddy was milking the moment for all it was worth.
“You did something terrible, Paddy.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“You cheated. You stole, lied, hated. All because of these.” She slipped the pills into her jacket pocket. “All because you never had the guts to stand up to her. Does that make you happy?”
Paddy’s face was impassive, but there was an underlying tension Malin sensed, a suspended moment when his mood could have shifted either way.
“We all got what we wanted. What’s wrong with that?”
“You got what you wanted. All I see is black now. And I can’t sleep.”
“It’ll all be over soon. Asha will come home.”
“She’s not coming home. She said there was this guy following her weeks before she disappeared. Some guy dressed in black. Had eyes like―”
“She was hallucinating. It happens to me all the time.”
“What about Rosa and Kenzie? Don’t you think it’s because of what we did? And now there’s only two of us. There’s nothing you can do.”
“There is something.” Using his foot, he pushed the bag on the ground toward her.
“You think a few wigs and a girl playing dress-up is going to fool anyone?”
“You’ve done it before.”
“You want me to disappear, is that it? Surely you’re going to come with me?”
“I’m not going anywhere. Except to the police.”
“Go ahead. Because you know what? You don’t have one ounce of credibility. You’re finished. I might go down with you, Paddy, but you’re going to fall a hell of a lot harder.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“You’re facing twenty years.” Her voice drifted now and then, and when she spoke, her words seemed distant, as if she was going back to her past if only to torture herself. “You want to make it all better, don’t you? But it’s too late.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
Thoughts swirled in Malin’s head, spinning and dancing. What was too late? The silence grew thick and heavy and she gulped audibly.
Adel stared into Paddy’s eyes as if she was trying to find an explanation. “You’re not talking to anyone about this, OK?”
“That’s not my problem.”
“No, it’s not your problem, Paddy. It was never your problem. Even when it destroyed her.” A tear ran down the side of Adel’s nose, chin bouncing with every sob. “Don’t you care?”
Malin noticed a twitch at the corner of Paddy’s eye, as if he had received some invisible communication right on cue. He leapt to his feet, kicked back the chair and started walking toward the tree Malin was standing under.
“Where are you going?” Adel said.
Paddy turned, long enough for Malin to creep back into the shadows behind the east wall of the restaurant.
“I’m going to find Lily. I think I know where she is.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
He felt it even through the coveralls, hands braced, cheek inches from a hole in the drywall. Gabriel couldn’t see through the bones of the house, it was too dark for that, but he could hear the sudden intake of breath, the snap of a twig outside the back door.
A presence.
It was earlier than the appointed time. Couldn’t have been the dealer. Must have been someone else.
Demon began cackling and saying how much fun it would be to watch, how the blood was already pumping through Gabriel’s thick, mortal veins. “You are a brilliant host,” he said. “And I am a patient witness.”
“It’s a novelty to you,” Gabriel whispered, trying to focus on the threat. “A world teeming with life you want to destroy.”
“Not destroy. Educate. I want them to know how powerful they can be. Lords of their own manors. Imagine!”
Gabriel had imagined. That’s what had lured him away from a stifled existence in the first place, the in-your-face philosophies of how to be and what to say. He wanted to be king in his own world, wanted full control. It would be so much easier, wouldn’t it?
Focus.
He pressed a fingertip against the wall between him and the intruder, gauging the quiet but heavy sound of a boot, shuffling now to cover his approach. It had to be a male, Gabriel thought, and that made him mad.
He wasn’t aware he was being followed, should have been more careful, should have doused the single candle on the floor. It was the detective and he didn’t want to do it.
Pulling the hood up over his head, he waited, senses prickling as he held his breath. He knew exactly when the curtain would go up before the show, because it was more dangerous inside the house than out, and whoever it was stood no chance at all.
“You’ll cut him,” Demon said. “And cut him good.”
“He might have a gun.”
“He doesn’t.”
What cop doesn’t carry a gun?
Gabriel took the knife from the kitchen countertop, an antique slider his father once used for hunting. Thumb hovering over the button on the sheath, he estimated the detective was right outside the back door now, feet noiseless in the dirt and crouched behind the lower panel, eyes level with the keyhole.
Demon chuckled and the sound was flat. “Now, unlock the door and let him in.”
Gabriel twisted the lock silently, hearing only the continual chunter of Demon’s voice.
“By all accounts my kind should have been miserable when we were cast out. But we weren’t. Not at the beginning. Now I just watch, wonder what it’s like to be filled with hunger and desire. Man is one lucky―”
Shut up! Gabriel thought, flattening himself against the wall behind the back door. He realized the knife wasn’t enough. He would need something to bring the man down, knock him out. He looked around blindly and that’s when he saw the antique iron on the bathroom floor, metal, heavy, and leaning up against the baseboard. He padded only a few feet and lunged for it.
A scuffling sound.
He enjoyed the mounting fear the detective must have felt as he saw a flicker of amber through that key-
filled cavity. Even so Gabriel stiffened and bit the inside of his cheek, anticipated the drop of the door lever, the thin shriek of metal hinges as the door eased open no more than a hand’s width.
The ice on the wind made Gabriel blink a few times and there was an odor of cologne, sickly, invasive. He waited, visualized the size of the man by the sound of his tread. Could only see one side of his face as he walked toward the center of the room.
Gabriel was behind him now. Saw a cloud of breath snaking through thin lips, sensed the detective was taking in the small space in front of him through an unfocused eye, the mattress, the black leather gym bag.
How foolish to enter a house without a weapon, no reason to be there in the first place. Unless he was looking for cash.
Detectives always carry weapons, fool! And they don’t steal cash.
The detective must have smelled shampoo and a faint residue of steam, but he never felt the terrible weight against the back of his head. Knees slammed into the floor and perhaps... just perhaps he felt Gabriel’s gloved hand at his cheek, the sudden jerk of his head and a cold blade that sliced through the large artery at his throat.
Blood arced as far as the mattress, a warm spray against Gabriel’s cheek and the taste of it on his lips made him retch. The detective attempted a wet gurgle, dropped to his knees, right shoulder hitting the floor with a hard thud. Then came the shudder and the spasms, hands clutching both sides of his neck as a dark pool collected beneath him. Slick and shiny, black as tar.
The man was slipping away. He would never see the cottonwoods in the Bosque again, or the copper skies of New Mexico in the summertime. He would never know what was in that black gym bag.
“There,” Gabriel murmured, wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Are you pleased now?”
There was no reply. No round of applause. Gabriel expected Demon to crow his knowledge of life and death, regale him with stories of how he fell to earth in a blaze of lightning, wings scorched even before he touched the ground.
“Did I fail?” Gabriel hated to ask, but imagined the killing to be a death worthy of Demon’s expectations, a mark he had earlier fallen short of.
The silence was unnerving.
Gabriel studied the corpse, squinted at it for a second or two. He re-sheathed the knife and slipped it in his pocket, didn’t want to ask any more questions, wanted to save himself the indignity of another lecture.
The eyes were bulbous and there was no life in them. It suddenly struck him as odd that there had been a living, moving body less than a few minutes ago and now it was a limp mass on his kitchen floor. Something in Gabriel’s dreams resonated with this scene, not so much the death itself, but the helplessness of the intruder.
Where Gabriel had extraordinary discernment, the type that Demon called near-divine, this man had not been able to sense anything at all. Certainly not death at the end of another passing day.
A tear collected in the corner of Gabriel’s eye and he was aware he had not been this emotional for years. He studied the man’s face, the curve of the body, the wavy hair, and through a haze of tears he could see the man was morphing into someone else.
“You knew!” he cried, hearing the deafening pulse in his ears. “Why didn’t you tell me!”
Demon was up there in that suffocating silence, spiraling higher and higher in the endless void of space. A flying gargoyle banking first to the left and then to the right, picking up speed and shrieking in an ear-piercing crescendo.
Gabriel pressed two hands against his ears, rocking back and forth at a heralding din of trumpets that seemed to phrase an impending finale. A sudden burst of light and the pain in his skull ebbed like the surge of an ocean upon a rocky shore.
“Wake up,” he said, stabbing dead flesh with a knuckle. He lifted himself off the bloody floor and staggered about in a viscous pool.
“Don’t torture yourself,” Demon whispered, voice drifting in and out. “Death... life, none of it matters.”
But it did matter. Like it mattered the first time Gabriel stepped on a sleepy butterfly on the lawn. He had been six then.
“Everything has to die,” Demon whispered on a downward spiral, coming to land on the kitchen counter as if he had burst through a roof that wasn’t there. “You just gave it a leg up.”
Gabriel closed his eyes and when he opened them again the man looked like he was homeless or a drunk looking for money to feed his craving. But the thoughts were empty this time as if Gabriel was trying to confirm something he knew to be false. Had no right.
“Of course you have rights,” Demon muttered. “All people have rights. You are the king of your own castle, the lord of all you survey. Isn’t that right, Gabriel? Isn’t that the truth?”
Gabriel shook his head and backed away from the scene as if it had taken on a filthy stench. “Get me out of these clothes,” he whimpered, scratching at his chest, his arms, his legs. “Get me out of here.”
“Just as I thought,” Demon said. “Feeble. Like all manflesh. You’re no better than the dirt you came from.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
The Emergency Response Teams pulled out of San Rafael Avenue just after midnight, ambulance shrieking down University Boulevard toward Lomas. The scene was owned by the police now, front yard barred by a yellow ribbon of tape, warning: CRIME SCENE‒DO NOT CROSS.
Two officers flanked the front door eyeing the curious public and the responding officer was jotting down a few statements and making a witness list. An Asian woman was barely able to choke out a statement, said Zarah had not been seen for two days and the dog was a mess. No food, no water. Could have been three days for all she knew.
Malin stood on the curb hugging a notepad, eyes drawn to a sprinkle of rain in the beam of a street lamp. She turned her mind to the victim, Zarah Thai, a young woman who lived alone with her dog, ordered a pizza like she did every Friday night. She was found tied to a chair and gagged and had somehow managed to chew through the brown packing tape in her mouth. She had been vomiting on and off for twenty-four hours. This wasn’t the work of a street thug, a gang, or a sophisticated assassin. It was too personal for that.
Malin’s mind returned to Paddy Brody because to her he was showing all the classic signs of restlessness. She had likely shaken him up a little, made him nervous, made him look in his rearview mirror a little more often than he used to. Tried calling him a few times, but he never answered, and the word transparent kept buzzing around in her head.
A cackling laugh brought Malin’s mind back to the present, Unit Commander Roach was sharing a joke with an agent. It wasn’t until Roach raised his voice to officer Maynard, who was hunched over the roof of his unit and shaking his head vigorously, that she realized what had happened. Surveillance had failed. Her belly was already smoldering with hot needles of dread.
She took a gulp of fresh air and then another. Every crime scene stayed in her head, blinking in and out until the next one came along. In this case, there were ribbons of twisted cord hanging from the back of a chair and a puckered area rug spattered with dried blood and vomit. Tiny heels had hammered and hammered on that hardwood floor in the vain hope someone would hear her.
All the other rooms appeared undisturbed, no sign of a struggle, and one window had been smashed by the responding officer. Most of the other windows wouldn’t budge, wood frames warped from the recent rains or painted shut some years before.
Make-up was scattered about on the dressing table and there was an open pot of moisturizer with a deep indentation in the cream. All bagged and taken, including a fluorescent green tennis racket Malin had found behind the bedroom door. Then there had been the inevitable disagreement between the police officers and detectives as to how the perp got in and subtle whispers about Maynard.
Malin watched the Field Investigators and a group of Crime Scene Specialists as they emptied trash cans and nodded to each other in a silent language only they knew. Matt Black brought out a pizza box sealed in a plastic
bag and swinging from two fingers. Dark hair in a schoolboy cut and a cheeky grin, he stood beside her silently for a few moments, lips forming words around a stutter. He clearly read the wretchedness on her face and went off on one of his little-known-facts rampage.
“Lucky she wasn’t gagged with duct tape,” he said. “Wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
Malin thought about that for a moment. It meant the crime hadn’t been well thought through. Meant the killer was getting sloppy.
“Sugar cane, almonds, wheat... they all contain a little cyanide,” he said. “Green potatoes contain glycol alkaloid. Too much of that and you’d be in a polished mahogany casket with a cream interior.”
“And how does that have anything to do with a pizza?” Malin asked.
“I’ve seen pizza sprinkled with Romano and Parmesan. But I can’t say I’ve ever seen one powdered with Rodenticide. Nor have I ever heard of anyone eating such a high dose.”
“She must have been hungry.”
“I think what you meant to say was, why didn’t she notice anything odd about the taste before she polished off three quarters of it? Thing is, they usually come in pellets, only this was ground down and mixed with extra mature cheddar. Of course we’ll run tests, but that’s my gut feeling.”
Malin felt her stomach contract. Matt would have stuck a nose and a finger in it if he had to.
“We had rats in the stables when I was a kid,” he said with a sad smile this time. “No amount of sign language could have coaxed my mom’s deaf pug out of those feed bins. Ate over three pounds of it right there in front of her. Took a few teaspoons of hydrogen peroxide before he threw up. Then came the activated charcoal, the plasma transfusion and treatments of vitamin K. But he survived.”
Malin loved dogs, couldn’t abide the thought of one dying from rat poison. “I hope Zarah will be OK.”
Matt gave a brief nod and then walked toward the criminalistics motor home. He paused in the middle of the street in front of Commander Roach, then turned and stared at her with a lopsided grin. “Want to go out for lunch sometime?”
Past Rites Page 15
