FORTY-ONE
The house was exactly as Gabriel envisioned. A beautiful slice of wonderland at the end of a long drive, wraparound cottonwoods covered in snow and a dark green lawn that looked out of place against the wintry grays of the neighboring yards.
He understood there was something calming in those ancient trees, an earlier memory in a sudden gust. Of sunshine and early blooms and the distinct fragrance of honeysuckle. Another child and a woman between them. Linked like family.
Gabriel couldn’t see their faces anymore but he could feel her fingers, hear the shrill sound of a child’s giggle. The woman stooped and hooked one arm around his waist, settling him against her hip.
“Look,” she said, pointing upward. “Can you see it?”
Gabriel could if he thought hard enough. A humming bird hovering for a moment and then darting back and forth between the leaves. He kept staring at patches of blue between the branches just in case it came back to occupy the same space it once had.
“Why did it go, mommy?” he asked, no longer seeing the blur of tiny wings.
“A voice in the wind. Or maybe the change in the temperature, the season. But somehow they know.”
“Will it speak to us?”
“Yes, if you listen.” The woman turned her face upward again, sunlight bronzing her cheeks. “There... did you hear that?”
Gabriel did. A soft susurration in the gamma grass and a float of tumbleweed across the drive. A small voice that said something so quickly he couldn’t make out the exact words. But the wind was talking. Just like she said it would.
“Snow!” he shouted, pointing with a gloved finger.
Tiny flakes filtered down and then a cascade of snow that slipped through the air with a soft hiss. It was the occasional branch letting go of its load.
“What does the voice look like?” he asked.
“You know,” the girl said. “You’ve seen him.”
There was a sense the girl meant something else and Gabriel nodded. He didn’t really understand. He hadn’t really seen. “Is he big?”
“Naww,” she said, giggling in that infectious way she did. “He’s bigger than big.”
“Big as a tree?”
“Yes, silly!” she shouted.
The sound released a flurry of humming birds, hundreds and thousands of tiny brown creatures and the whispery pulse of wings. Gabriel breathed in as the flock enveloped them and the woman smiled at the girl, cooing only at her.
There was something brittle about the girl ‒ not on the outside, but on the inside ‒ something that spiked now and then, something only Gabriel could sense.
It scared him when they shared the same room. She was restless with daring, telling him there were ghosts in the closet and how the stuffed bear on the toy box came alive at night. Gabriel watched those beady eyes for hours and if he was careful he would catch them winking. Mostly, he kept his head under the covers so he couldn’t see them at all.
“You can play Prince Charming,” she would whisper. “And you can kiss me if you like.”
He liked kissing her soft cheeks and braiding her hair. She was always the princess.
A blustery wind ruffled through the trees above them, stirring a lanyard on a nearby flagpole. The girl was silent, threads of hair fluttering against her back as she navigated a channel of brown water in a pair of boots. Her jeans were wet to the ankles and she didn’t seem to care.
“C’mon, you slowpokes,” she urged, eyes and skin ablaze in a shaft of sunlight. “Last person to the front door is a jackass!”
And then she was off, streaking through the trees until she dissolved into the bark of a sycamore. The sudden separation hit Gabriel in the chest and his heart was a tight spikey thing that stung and hurt inside. He knew he would gag if he didn’t snap out of it.
The drive opened to a wide loop and he almost sobbed as he approached the house. Why did people have to die?
Sometimes he dreamed of a blackened body seen through a kitchen window, mouth wide open, teeth visible behind strands of darkened and twisted lips. Sometimes he saw the white nubs of broken fingers on a Persian carpet, a girl in a black dress, head thrown sideways and hair glistening with what had come out of the crack in her skull.
Neither had faces or voices.
The detective was bound to remember. It would all come flooding back. When he was shaving perhaps or cleaning his teeth, or vacuuming. Do detectives vacuum?
They were already bound with blood, because it was blood that first brought them together. Yes, the detective would remember.
Gabriel was immortal, but even as the sun rose earlier in the mornings chasing the last sprinkling of snow between the roots of trees and thawing icicles from gutters, something in his subconscious told him his luck was running out.
There was a face on the news, a face that had gone viral, a face he hardly recognized. Looked like any crack-head lowlife and it made him smile.
The picture dwindled into the crunch of gravel under his feet and the chatter of birds. There were three things he had to do today. Break into the house. Find the book. And destroy it.
Then Demon, the deceiver, would be gone.
FORTY-TWO
Temeke had fifteen minutes until he met with Adel Martinez and he wasn’t looking forward to listening to her account of slashed throats and unusual accidents with gas.
Suspect? Unlikely. Working with an accomplice... possibly. If he deprived her of sleep or bathroom facilities, he might get a name for composite-man. Besides, there was nothing like returning home with the pride of capture on his face.
A buzzing down his trouser leg. He wriggled the phone out of his pocket and swiveled in his chair. “Yes, love?”
“I’m at the hospital,” Malin said in a voice charged with significance. “Zarah Thai’s nurse said she’ll be available this afternoon at two. Want to meet me here?”
“Sounds like a date.”
“And Lily Delgado was discharged this morning. So you’re on tonight. Might want to take her for a walk out back. In the trees.”
“It’s bloody freezing out back, Marl.”
“Sometimes taking a victim back to where it all happened might help her remember.”
Temeke could tell by the tremor in her voice and the eerie silences she used after each sentence she was trying to tell him to be careful. “A jug of whisky would be quicker. Might loosen her tongue a little.”
“Oh, and Hackett wants to call a press conference to take the heat off the situation. About two o’clock.”
Temeke couldn’t resist a smile. Malin was getting too sharp-witted for her own good and talking to a key witness was the best out they could possibly have for not attending another press dominated fiasco.
“I was following the penalty trail in that creepy book,” she said, reciting a few lines from memory. The first woman to disobey 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 suffocated. We know Alice was the first in that group to die, even though hers was an apparent suicide. But what if her Lilin name was Arezo, meaning longed for. Then there’s a long gap between her death and Asha’s disappearance, but it doesn’t necessarily separate the two incidents. This would make Asha the second in these recent spree killings.”
Temeke felt a flush of hot and cold tingling behind his ears and something shuddered deep inside. It was too critical a link to ignore.
“If she is the second then the name carved on the door frame confirms it. M-A-H-T-A-B.” Malin reworked the spelling out loud. “Light of the moon. Since there was nothing left of the Voorhees house, we can assume Kohinoor was scratched on a doorframe somewhere. Mountain of light?”
“Yeah, a big-ass mountain of light,” Temeke agreed. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it, but there was a sense of urgency that raced through his veins.
“Gulshan was written on the flood gauge, sir. Garden of Roses. Ros
a? As for the last two, we can ask Adel Martinez and Zarah Thai what their Lilin names were. It’s clear the meanings defined each woman while they lived. What if the killer’s trying to connect those names to their deaths?”
Temeke couldn’t see the connection of light or moon to Asha Samadi, but it was the notion she fell into the category of being buried alive that made him itch under the skin. Wherever she was, they had to find her soon. “Or he’s trying to mislead us with amateurish post-mortem scribblings to disguise what a raving bloody nutcase he is.”
He ended the call, rushed down the stairs to Sandra’s office and hammered a fist on the closed door. Creaking and pattering came from within and the door was opened a chink. Two angry eyes surveyed him and a claw pulled the door open further.
“Come on in,” Fowler said as he walked over to Sandra’s desk and pressed his big fat ass on the corner.
There was a half-eaten box of chocolate cream puffs beside the monitor and judging by the trajectory of crumbs, Fowler had wolfed down most of them.
“Could I have a word, Sandra?” Temeke saw the exchange of looks. “In private.”
“By the way,” Fowler said, giving in to an eye-roll on the way out. “Hackett wants to see you. He was in earlier, screaming blue murder because someone left a cigarette butt in the elevator.”
Temeke had to raise his voice over a slamming door and the loud hammering of keys. “One cream puff and you’ve bought my soul. Do me a favor, love. Call all the mortuaries in Albuquerque and ask them for a list of burials from say February 3rd to the 8th.”
“Righto. There’s well over twenty mortuaries in Albuquerque and, while I’m at it, at least fourteen cemeteries. It might take a while, sir. Which victim?”
“Asha Samadi,” he said between chews and keeping his tone as drab as he was feeling.
“She could have been buried in the woods.”
Temeke didn’t want to consider that option, but Sandra was right. There were other places besides cemeteries to bury the dead. Walls, dumpsters, barrels...
“What exactly am I looking for, sir?” she asked.
“I’m hoping for a name that might point to where Asha is. I’m sick of speculating, sick of not having any facts to report and sick of making a complete balls-up of everything I do.”
The phone on Sandra’s desk gave a long drawn-out wail and she pressed the intercom. “Go ahead, Sarge.”
“Can you tell Temeke his nooner’s just cancelled.”
FORTY-THREE
Temeke forced himself to stop pacing and to sit down in Hackett’s office. It never felt good to be summoned for an audience and to cap it all, the bastard was always late. Made his victims wait forty minutes at a trot and stare out of that big rectangular window.
At night it was like a motherboard of sparkling circuitry, something Hackett thought was pleasing and reminded him of his responsibility to the city of Albuquerque. He was proud of his substation, proud of his officers. When thirteen of his best were out paddling in the Rio Grande searching for guns tossed out of a car after a crime had been committed, he stood on the Alameda bridge and cheered them on. Became the Commander the police department deemed their best role model.
Temeke had spent his afternoon searching public records nationwide for current and past addresses for Adel Martinez, including any bankruptcy listings and liens. He was surprised to find she had been pulled over in the University campus a month ago for DUI.
Dozy cow.
Hackett’s assistant, Cat Spears brought in a large tray of coffee and biscottis and set them down on the desk. Before she could offer Temeke a cup Hackett breezed in, sweeping the coat from his shoulders like Zorro.
“I’ve put officer Watts in charge of the Delgado house tonight.”
“Why’s that, sir?”
“Because I need you to look into something. I got your report,” he said, collapsing in his chair and pulling off his glasses. “Names on door posts... the killer’s possible MO. But the trouble is, we still haven’t found Asha Samadi. Time’s running out.”
Good job Hackett didn’t need reminding most cases take years to solve, Temeke thought. He would have yelled his bloody lungs off then. “I’m afraid so, sir.”
“Have you seen the headlines?” There was a threatening note in his voice.
“I haven’t had that privilege, sir.”
“It says, All The Officers And All Hackett’s Men, Couldn’t Put Samadi Together Again. Who’s leaking all this classified and humiliating information to the Press!”
Temeke tensed at the sound of a fist on the desk and a filing tray jumped in response. “Jennifer Danes. It’s about time someone filed an injunction.”
“Listen,” Hackett said, blowing his nose loudly and dabbing the corners of his eyes with the same handkerchief. “Asha Samadi’s father wants her found before he returns to Riyadh ‒” the lip quivered, “‒ or he’ll sue.”
“Bit unrealistic, isn’t it? We’ve got no idea where she is!”
“I know that. But he’s sick of all the I’ll keep you updated nonsense.”
“I’m being as creative as I can, sir.”
“The only thing creative about you is your version of the truth. If I wasn’t so busy with my health and other important matters, I’d go out and look for her myself.”
“Relax, sir. Have a cookie.”
Cat poured two steaming cups of coffee and balanced a caramel drizzled biscotti on each saucer before busying herself with the filing cabinet.
“All this stress,” Hackett said. “Julie says I’m twitching in my sleep.”
“Quite normal, sir. All dogs do that.”
“I want the girl found, do you hear?” Hackett’s finger sawed away at an itch under his nose. “Every bit of her.”
“I hope she hasn’t been packed into three difference suitcases and tossed into the river, sir. You know how strong those currents are. Part of her could be in Mexico by Christmas.”
Hackett looked shaken rigid and had to grip onto the edge of the desk. “It must be awful to be a father. Of course, you wouldn’t know a thing about that. You... with your sick jokes and disgusting sense of humor.”
“Just trying to take the edge off, sir.”
“My blood pressure’s up in the two hundreds, Temeke. Can’t have Julie knowing. She can be very protective.”
“Wouldn’t tell a soul.”
“I hope it’s not cancer.”
“You don’t have cancer, not with all that great food you keep eating. Where was it last week? The Rancher’s Club?”
Hackett’s eye’s flicked up. “You watching me?”
“Listen. Officer Dempsey ‒ you must remember her ‒ got a pair like two Christmas puddings.”
The culinary allusion gave Hackett the necessary mental picture and he appeared to brightened up.
“Well, she was told she had breast cancer three years ago, sir. Refused chemo, wasn’t going to pump more poison into her bloodstream. Decided to drink vegetables instead. Not a trace of cancer left in that tight little body. All went down the toilet.”
Hackett seemed to nod in appreciation. He was the type of man who cost a fortune, running up restaurant bills and cholesterol levels and trawling The Mayo Clinic for a particularly elusive type of disease he thought he had. Retirement wasn’t far in the future, but Temeke knew if Hackett could swing it earlier and at full pay he’d be a very happy man.
“Sandra asked me to give this to you.” Hackett fished two pieces of paper from a landfill on his desk. “Recent burials. And what’s all this witchcraft stuff Alvarez keeps alluding to? Says he’s been studying it in a book.”
“I heard he was a bit eccentric, sir, but I didn’t know in which direction.”
“I used to make fun of all that spiritual stuff in the old days, but now...”
“It’s quite the thing these days. And now we have information that implies Asha might have been buried in a cemetery. Yeah, go on, sir, have a good laugh.”
“It’
s not a laughing matter, Temeke. And what makes you think she’s buried in a cemetery?”
“Because no one would think of looking there.” Temeke hoped his theory wasn’t about to be booted up the ass. “A name on a headstone, an object... anything might be significant in locating her. Just a feeling.”
“Been smoking in the elevator?”
Temeke raised his rear off the seat and shook his head. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
He slipped out into the corridor, smelling fresh air for the first time in twenty minutes. His office was more sanitary than walking through a wall of sneeze and he settled in his chair.
The pages he had been given showed a list of names, church affiliation and places of burial, all in date order. On the fourth page there were two names that intrigued him and the burial dates were within three days of each other.
Roger Lightfoot and Marie-Claire Santos, both recent burials at Calvary Cemetery on Southern.
Apart from the reference to light in the first name, the second was a closer bet. The eighteenth century French folk song, Au Clair de la Lune was translated as ‘By the Light of the Moon’. The name itself meant clear or bright and Temeke wondered if it was close enough.
There was a third option listed at Vista Bella Memory Gardens on Sara Road. Poonam Kapoor. Burial date, February 12.
Hunching forward he tapped the keys, clicking through several links that gave the same mind-numbing meaning.
Poonam, a Hindu/Sanskrit name meaning, full moon.
FORTY-FOUR
Every bloody graveyard was like a junkyard, Temeke thought, discarded scrap spreading out toward the boundaries as if it would soon take over the city. He stared out of the mortuary window at a row of granite tiles sparkling under a harsh sun.
“Peaceful, isn’t it?” said a voice.
Temeke turned to see a pasty-faced funeral assistant dressed in a black jacket and a bow tie. He extended his hand and his badge, knowing the elusive peace the assistant hoped for was short-lived.
“I’m looking for Poonam Kapoor,” Temeke said. “Recently deceased?”
Past Rites Page 22
