The assistant held up a finger and bounced into an office behind the reception desk. He pulled open the drawer of a filing cabinet, finger tapping row after row of plastic labels until he found the one he wanted.
“The deceased’s full name is Poonam Eva Kapoor. Burial February 12th. Row five at the west end of the plot.”
“So, she wasn’t cremated?” Temeke felt his spirits lift.
“Oddly enough, no. Her mother wasn’t Hindu.”
Temeke walked alone to the site, counting seven people gathered by the columbarium niches in the center of the gardens and a lone man praying over a stone cross in the far northwest corner. The city seemed to stretch languidly around the cemetery, houses a pale gold in the distance and further out there was downtown Albuquerque tingling with life.
Poonam Kapoor’s headstone stood in a secluded place beneath a large cottonwood tree where the wind keened softly through the upper branches, scattering the last of the winter leaves on the ground. He gazed at a patch of raw dirt about six feet long where a lizard scurried between the rocks.
“It may be nothing,” Temeke muttered, standing about five feet from the grave, “but it’s all we’ve got.”
He lowered himself to a crouch, not knowing what to expect. Twelve roses slouched in a green memorial vase, petals scattered over the base of the headstone.
He looked up between the branches of the tree at a clear blue sky. Could Poonam hear the rustling leaves? Could she even see the sky? If Malin had been there she would have said no. The dead are dead. They can neither see nor hear.
It was a bit terminal in his opinion, a bit harsh. How come our forefathers said they’d watch over us from the sky if it was a load of cobblers?
Temeke had an uncomfortable relationship with religion, having been raised by a mother who was confirmed Church of England, a woman who spent her last days wittering on about Revelation and the beast, and how important it was to know where you were going after death. And then there was his dad who never gave a toss about where he was headed after death. As long as it wasn’t Key West. Too bloody hot.
Temeke looked out at a row of headstones that ran toward the southern boundaries to gauge the shadows until a cloud blocked out the sun for a moment. He looked up again, unaware of any clouds in the sky on his last examination. There was always one that snuck up behind you and it took a few seconds to work out where it had come from.
He began a soft-footed prowl of the periphery, winding his way cautiously inward, sometimes crouching with his head to one side. From certain angles, you could discern things by a freshly mown lawn, especially one where each blade of grass held a single droplet of water. It was strangely hypnotic. He could see no recent footprints, just the wide cutting path left by a four-wheeled mower.
The other two deceased names were listed at Calvary Cemetery on Southern. It was about a fifteen minute drive and Temeke knew he had barely enough time to make it before his meeting with Malin.
He felt vulnerable standing there on his own, as if someone was sighting him from forty yards. He could almost feel the heat of a bead on the back of his neck and turned a half circle, giving the parking lot a cursory glance. His eyes then swung to his right where a row of gravestones gave off short shadows at that time of day.
He didn’t like the silence, wondering if there was something he had overlooked and he didn’t want his titanic reputation as a badass detective thrown to the wind. The whole unit would be in a turmoil, especially if he couldn’t close this case.
Voices were muffled near the columbarium niches, branches groaned, things scuttled. Temeke looked around, visualizing the place at night... seeing a young woman struggling at the edge of the gravesite until she hung motionless in the arms of her attacker.
Long, dark hair and brown pleading eyes. Temeke couldn’t get past the violence, the cruelty, the terrible thing he knew he would find. So much talent wasted in a single, vicious moment.
He felt a dry wind against his scalp, heard the gentle pulse of crickets and closed his eyes. Held his breath.
Oh, God, Asha... I hope you were already dead.
Sealed in the earth unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to shout for help. Seeing only black and asking yourself... is this a dream I’ll wake from in a few seconds?
Temeke opened his eyes. His head was already invaded by dark images, leafy shadows and silence, and yet here was a neat landscape with spurting sprinklers that threatened to give him an enema if he didn’t get moving.
Get a grip. Forget the emotion. There’s no time for it.
His eyes took in two burgeoning roots at the base of the tree and between them a flake of bark and a pile of wood shavings. A chipmunk or a squirrel perhaps. His eyes raced up the trunk to where a name had been scored in the smooth undercoat. His pulse spiked.
Mahtab.
Slipping the phone out of his pocket he got Luis on the first ring, told him what he’d found, careful not to betray the excitement in his voice.
“She’s here, Luis. I can feel it.”
He was lightheaded, felt a prickling in the back of his neck, wanted to kneel down and scoop all the topsoil off the grave right down to the casket itself. He didn’t care how dark that place was or what he might see. He just wanted Asha.
Luis didn’t comment for a long time and then he finally spoke. “We’ll need a court order, Temeke. It won’t be today.”
FORTY-FIVE
Malin glanced over the pristine waiting room, feeling the sense of a presence. Any watcher would be obvious among gray walls and black upholstery, and everyone in the hospital seemed to be reading. Her eyes took in four men slouched on the tandem seating against the wall, one gave her an approving once-over and then lowered his eyes. It wasn’t him.
She focused down the hallway to a large potted parlor palm where a flash of black moved behind the wall. A triage nurse perhaps? Some wore black scrubs and gray lanyards and those who worked with the surgeons wore disposable pony caps in sky blue.
Temeke sat beside her on a chair that was two sizes too small, fingers drumming against his thighs like an expectant father. “How’s Adel?” he said.
“She’s a good cook. Pasta and veal tonight.”
“Take a sandwich, will you, love? Save us both a sleepless night.” He rubbed a hand over his head where beads of sweat sparkled under recessed lighting. “What’s taking so long? You’ll say a prayer to hurry things up?”
Malin could always read the humor past those faint laugh lines. She knew he believed in the power of prayer just as long as he didn’t have to say one himself.
He popped a knuckle and gazed down at the parking lot through a floor-to-ceiling window and muttered something about where could he find some handy earth digging equipment to open that grave.
“Stop whining,” Malin said.
“I hate hospitals.” His eyes raced over the contents of the room and paused at Once-Over. “What’s he bloody staring at?”
Malin shifted slightly as a willowy figure in blue scrubs walked down the hall toward them and gave a tentative smile.
“Detective Santiago?”
Malin showed her badge and introduced Temeke, hoping the interview had not been cancelled.
“You can go ahead and see Zarah now. But I do advise short visits to start with. About ten minutes?”
They both nodded and followed her down the hall to where an officer sat outside a large room with an ensuite bathroom. It reminded Malin of an earlier visit she and Temeke had made over a month ago. The Mayor of Albuquerque had suffered from a gunshot wound during a home invasion.
Zarah was in bed, propped up against a stack of pillows, slender arms resting on the sheet. She was alone, but the sight of two empty chairs on the other side of the bed indicated to Malin that her parents had tactfully left.
Malin took the chair nearest to the bed, reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a micro-recorder. Her questions had to count given the unrealistic timeframe they’d been given. She ga
ve names, time and date.
“We’d like to talk to you about what happened that night, what you saw. Is that OK, Zarah?”
“You want to talk about the man,” Zarah said, small eyes following Temeke as he sat on the couch under the window.
“If you like.”
Zarah’s mouth was a thin line that turned down a little at the corners, as if the fine layer of skin that stretched over her square cheekbones prevented a full smile.
“Tell us what happened.”
“I don’t know how he got in. But he was right there,” Zarah murmured. “I-I saw him. It was horrible.”
Malin realized it must have been and said how sorry she was. She needed a face, a positive ID. “What did he look like?”
“Dark. And his skin was... s-so white. That’s how I knew it was him.”
“Who?”
Zarah sobbed for a while and then said something so quietly Malin almost missed it. “Demon.”
Malin tried to imagine what a demon looked like, but it was like trying to summon a hideous version of Mr. Tumnus. She pulled out the composite sketch and got a resounding yes, from Zarah.
“How did he get in?” Malin asked.
“Like the trail of sand through a keyhole. A draft under the door. You can’t stop him.”
Malin pondered this without reacting, waited a moment for the twitch in Zarah’s mouth to formulate the next words.
“I wanted to run but my stomach hurt so bad. I couldn’t move my arms.”
“Did he say anything?”
Zarah’s sobs turned into a moue of unease. “He said Asha was dead and buried, that s-she didn’t suffer.”
“Did he say where she was?”
“No. But he knew I kissed Paddy in the parking lot at school. We’d been so careful.” Zarah wiped her eyes with a wrist and stared at the bowl of soup. “He said there was poison in my pizza. He told me I was going to die.”
“Why... why would he do that to you?”
“He accused me of saying he was evil. But I never said that.”
“Were you scared?”
“Yes, I was scared. What do you think I was feeling? You don’t understand. He’ll never stop. Not until he’s killed all of us... all the sisterhood.”
“Tell me about the sisterhood. Tell me how it all started.”
“Nobility. The chosen ones. That’s how it started.”
“Who chose them?”
“Alice.”
“Alice wasn’t born into the aristocracy. She was a racing driver’s daughter.”
“Her name means Nobility.”
“Can you explain how Alice became the leader of this group? Majority vote?”
Zarah frowned then and began picking at the blanket, fingers toying with a tail of wool. She was gaunt, thinner than Malin expected and the lavender blanket almost matched the shadows under her eyes. Despite Zarah’s faded appearance, Malin had a hard time rousing any compassion for her.
“Alice was a Lilin. She read the book, knew how it all worked.”
It struck Malin as comical in a frenzied, high-pitched giggling kind of way. She could imagine six girls spending entire nights cavorting naked with demons. But a suspicion soon drowned out the humor. It was the sense that all six girls believed Alice had the necessary powers to summon this Demon and the necessary powers to dismiss him. Weren’t even Lilin subject to an unholy background check?
“What made you want to be a Lilin?” Malin asked.
“Alice said if I joined I could have anything I wanted.”
“And you believed her?”
“Sometimes we played out our fantasies on each other. Sometimes we played them out on someone else.”
Malin felt her stomach tighten, saw Temeke’s motionless face and realized he had sensed it too. “But something happened, didn’t it?”
“We thought it would make everything better... but it doesn’t. Makes you empty inside. Even Alice questioned what Demon meant when he said she was marked for greater things. They were vile things. When she refused to be part of his... collection, he threw it back in her face. Told her she was damned.”
The nurse came in and took a seat at the computer beside the bed. Malin realized they were running out of time.
“That’s when she stopped believing him.” Zarah lowered her eyes and began to inspect the thread of wool wrapped around her finger. “And so did we.”
FORTY-SIX
They drove through winding backstreets toward the junction of 19th and Pat D’Arco Highway. Temeke felt a twitch of impatience as Luis turned north, doing fifty-eight in that nice black charger to cut through the Friday night traffic.
If it wasn’t the smoke stack from the semiconductor factory or the stench from a nearby sewage plant, it was the chimney of the bloody crematorium. Lucky for the pine tree air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, Temeke only caught a whiff now and then.
“Would have been five days prior to exhumation according to the Environmental Health Office,” Luis said as he made a sharp right on Sarah Road. “Someone’s at the site now checking the nameplate on the casket corresponds to the one on the license. I hope we’re right about this one. Miss Kapoor’s parents are understandably upset. Gave us permission to exhume their daughter on the condition we don’t tamper with her casket.”
“Can’t the DA override that?”
“If we need to take a look inside, then, yes.”
It was that once yawning pit that bothered Temeke, the notion that Malin’s nightmares had been fueled by a girl running blindly in the night. It was where she was running to that interested him. “The Kapoors... what type of people are they?”
“Father was a landowner and a trader. Married an American Caucasian in 1972 which threw any kids outside the Indian caste system. He was a Viasya, third tier if that’s what you call it. They won’t be present.”
It explained why the girl was buried in a conventional plot. A single thought gnawed away at Temeke. What if Asha Samadi’s remains weren’t there?
“You and I haven’t talked in a while,” Luis said, seeming to hesitate for a moment. “About personal stuff. Is there anything you need?”
Temeke wanted to talk about Serena but he knew it was off limits. Do you miss me? he asked her in his head. And then he thought, to hell with it. “I’d like my wife back.”
Luis brushed one hand over the dash at a pile of dust only he could see. Tidy squirrel.
“Last time I saw her was Thursday,” he said. “I remember it was Thursday because there was a two dollops for the price of one at Cold Stone Creamery. So I got in line. She was a few cars ahead shaking a fist at the talking menu board. I love my sister, bro, but I’m not sure you want her back. She’s put on at least fifty pounds and the back tires of that little Scion are flatter than a gunny sack.”
Temeke felt the tremor in his gut, rubbed his mouth to hide a smile. He gazed at Luis without blinking and before he could explore that disturbing thought he realized the big guy was serious. “I like big girls, Luis. Always have.”
“Give it time.”
They pulled in past two flag poles on an emerald hill, turning right at the split in the road where four parking spaces had been allotted to invalid drivers. The main parking lot was devoid of visitors, taken over now by the criminalistics motorhome, an environmental health minivan, a fleet of law enforcement and Dr. Vasillion’s team.
Temeke felt a rush of hope as he got out of the car, glancing up the hill at a forensics tent. The sun streamed red and gold through a billow of massing clouds on the horizon and the sound of screeching pulleys from the crane-lift announced the start of the exhumation. He switched off his phone.
Making his way up the hill, he wondered how Malin was doing at Adel Martinez’s house, whether she was watching her back. While here he was staring at silent mounds of earth, headstones connected by green paths; an idyllic setting. He noticed a dust devil spiraling between two stone angels in the rising wind and a soft keening as if he could
almost hear the trumpets they were playing.
He suited up in coveralls while listening to an eerie silence as the rig shut down. Temeke tensed as he walked into the tent, saw the casket and clods of dirt spilling from the lid. The glimmer of a brass nameplate coupled with a bilious stench almost made him gag.
“Nothing in the topsoil,” cried a voice from behind a hazmat mask. “Checking underneath.”
Temeke stepped forward a few paces, suddenly floodlit by inspection lamps and feeling as if he was standing on a dangerous precipice. An overpowering burn-your-hair-off odor wafted up from the pit and he slapped a hand over his mouth.
The photographer began shooting overviews and close-ups, and two field examiners descended in protective suits to begin their careful examination. It was ten agonizing minutes before the sight of blue vinyl burst through the earth in the shape of a seventy-two inch shower curtain.
They laid it on a stretcher and Dr. Vasillion unwrapped the gruesome package, verbalizing each tiny observation for his assistant to record. Temeke felt the whump of blood from his head as he staggered against Luis.
“It’s her,” Temeke said, voicing her full name, date of birth and last known address.
What he saw was a young woman in a black sheath dress, head turned sideways from the weight of the casket. Her neck was draped with pearls and there was a smear of dried blood at her throat. White nubs of cartilage peeked out from the right third and fourth finger. Made Temeke tremble, made him nauseous. Her hair had been tied in a chignon and the wind tugged at a lock above her forehead, giving the impression of life for one false second.
She didn’t deserve to be dumped.
“Was she already...?” Temeke’s mind hesitated at finishing the sentence. He recalled the amount of blood at the primary scene on Cornell Drive, but he had to know for sure.
“I’ll send the report over tomorrow,” Dr. Vasillion said.
The first woman to disobey shall be buried alive... The sight of her lying there called to mind the recital at Popejoy Hall, ten fingers flitting gracefully over the piano keys where now there were eight.
Past Rites Page 23
