Temeke dressed hurriedly, shrugged on his harness and coat and made for the refrigerator. The soup would have to wait, but there was a half-eaten bean burrito and a can of Coke he could wolf down on the way.
Pushing his foot down on the gas, he shot past the Delgado turnoff and roared up the hill on 528 to Southern. He chugged down the Coke and took a few bites of the burrito, made a face. It was older than he thought.
He couldn’t reach the store fast enough. A positive ID was gold dust and someone living in a van had to yield all kinds of DNA.
“Your manager,” Temeke said, showing his badge to the store clerk.
He didn’t have to wait. A thin woman with blonde hair and dark roots wobbled toward him on four inch heels. Didn’t look like an old slapper. Didn’t look a bullshitter either.
“Graciella Fish,” she said, escorting him to the greeting card aisle. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Staff get antsy when they see guns.”
Temeke cleared his throat. “Tell me about the man you saw.”
“Looked real pale and sickly. Up from the grave he rose, know what I mean? You look like you ain’t feeling too good either,” she said, getting a little closer to make sure he wasn’t some crazy person. “What’chu detectives eat these days?”
“Tall? Short?” Temeke asked, not in the slightest bit interested in food and wondering why the bloody hell she had to remind him he hadn’t eaten a decent meal in six hours.
“Eyes like this, know what I’m’ saying?” She stretched her index and third finger out wide in front of her face. “Thought he’d had a few but his voice weren’t slurred.”
“Accent?”
“Talked normal. You get all sorts in here. But this one I’d remember. About my height, five ten,” she grinned.
Realistically more like five six, he thought, peering at a pair of metallic leather platform pumps.
“Thin-ish, white skin, black hair. Didn’t look like he were staying at the Holiday Inn. Looked more like he were sleeping rough.”
“You’ve him before?”
“Nuh-uh. But he did remind me of a picture I once saw in a spirit store.”
“How did he pay? Debit, credit?”
“Cash.”
Temeke’s mind was racing. What did white-skin-black-hair buy? What did he touch? There would be prints around here somewhere. And prints didn’t take long to run. “What food did he get?”
Graciella was sharper than he gave her credit for. “Bought some popcorn and a few Cokes. Wore black leather gloves, hon. Packing light I should say. But if he bought popcorn, he had to have a microwave to pop it in.”
“See which way he went?”
“Went that way,” she said, pointing in a vaguely northerly direction.
White-skin-black-hair was a canny drunk if he hiked out on Unser toward Northern. There was nothing much out there except sand and tumbleweeds, and row upon row of new houses, empty now after the 2008 downturn.
And model homes equipped with electricity. The thought gave him a shiver of anticipation. Anyone could break in and make themselves comfortable for a night or two.
He thanked her quickly, gave her his card and asked if she wouldn’t mind working with the composite sketch artist.
“A guy like that... slinging dope,” she said, giving him the down-turned mouth and the sorry eyes. “Might already be dead. Might have been taken up in the sky.”
Temeke made for the door, knew instinctively what was coming next. But she was right behind him in two teetering strides.
“Got Jesus?” she whispered. “He’s coming soon, and you don’t want to be giving someone a ticket and finding there’s no one in the driver’s seat ’cause they’ve been Raptured. No one knows when it’ll happen. Two men working in a field, and then one of them disappears. Two women in the hairdressers, and one of them is gone. You better hope you ain’t still pulling people over and arresting them, ’cause if you are, that means you’ve been left behind.”
Temeke made a dive for the front seat of his car, couldn’t shake her off fast enough. He was conscious of a brisk wind through the open window as he clocked fifty down 528 toward Bazan Loop.
FORTY-NINE
Temeke studied the arch of her throat, red hair cut to her jaw. Not Alice, but closer to her than he had ever been. He sat there for a long time watching Lily cry, watching those gold, glossy eyes in the candlelight.
“I’m sorry you had to hear it from me,” he said, knowing the wound had been reopened, making it all fresh again.
Temeke hadn’t thought how Paddy must have felt in those last moments. Whether he panicked as he lay there bleeding out, whether he tried to cry out. There was nothing he could say to make those tears go away and the red eyes she kept rubbing.
There was always a steady patter of questions in his head and the more he thought about the killer, the more he wanted to hunt him down, push him up against a wall, make him talk. He wondered where all this pent up hatred was coming from.
“You heard Zarah Thai pulled through?” he said, wondering why they had to sit in the dining room with a five-tapered candelabra on the table for light.
“Mom told me.”
“And Adel Martinez?” He studied her face, reading the eagerness to see what he would say next. “She’s home now.”
It was a lie. Crack-head Adel was out there in the boonies sharpening her next knife or whatever it was she had up her sleeve. He had no wish to frighten Lily.
“Ever done drugs?” He asked, writing the words, blood test in his notebook.
“No, sir.”
He believed her. Cheeks and hands had a rosy tinge, fingernails white and neatly filed. The bruising on her eye was concealed with make-up and her lip was no longer an angry red. She was easy to read, eyes grazing over him and calculating how strong he was, how single. All women did it, no matter their age.
“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” he asked, wanting her to remember another time, another case.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
But she should have remembered a large living room, impressive now he thought of it. There was blood on the carpet, a line of spatters that had arced from the couch where the victim had been shot at close range. When Temeke arrived on the scene he saw Pauline Bailey and a female intern. Lily was her name.
He grunted and opened the manila folder he’d brought. Took out a photograph of a man with a phone pressed to his ear outside Clemency Baptist Church, a photo Malin had taken with her cell phone. “Is this Paddy Brody?”
“That’s him.”
“Where did he park his car that day?”
Her eyes slipped past him to the window and the driveway beyond. “Down the road so mom wouldn’t see it.”
“She wouldn’t approve?”
Lily nodded.
“Not very gentlemanly to take a lady into the woods and then leave her there,” Temeke said. Not a question.
He saw the confusion in her eyes, the shrug, the glint of a white tooth behind an attempted smile. He knew the woods Lily described were less than thirty feet from the house, but he wanted to see where Paddy had taken her, wanted to see that secret place for himself.
“Let’s go back to our last conversation, shall we? The one where you described the incident before the kidnap. You said you and Paddy were together under the trees, drinking and talking. What was the last thing you remember?”
“The sound of the zipper on his bag. The smell of wine. How he told me not to feel lonely because he promised he’d always be there. I put my head on his shoulder and when I woke up he was gone.”
“How did you feel?”
“Sore, especially here,” Lily said, tapping the top of her arm.
An interesting comment, he thought, going for the physical rather than the emotional. Most would have described the feeling as abandoned or afraid. Better still, she might have been angry after he had promised never to leave her.
Temeke could see the faint outline of a pu
ncture wound, a neat little red dot. He hoped the bastard hadn’t stuck her while she was asleep.
“I didn’t wake up under the trees. It was a basement,” she said.
“Can you explain how you got there?”
She traced the outline of a drip of wax with one finger, watching it turn a cloudy white. “No.”
“How big was the basement?”
“Long... narrow. Wine racks and stone walls.”
“You said it was dark,” he reminded, feeling the knot of a scowl between his eyes.
“There was a candle at the far end. It flickered sometimes, so there must have been air coming from a vent. I couldn’t see the door.”
The room was likely L-shaped, door concealed around the corner at the short end, or the wine racks covered the only exit there was. Temeke stared down at the photo on the table, pulse a little faster now. “Were you attracted to Paddy?”
“No, we’re just friends.”
He noted the use of the present tense. “Ever seen him use a syringe? Diabetic, that kind of thing?”
“No, sir, never.”
Her response only added another gallon of creepy to a case Temeke couldn’t get to grips with. Although, contrary to Hackett’s whining about finding Asha Samadi, he didn’t think he’d done too badly. “Like to show me where you last saw Paddy?”
Lily pulled a coat from a hanger in the hall closet, brown sheepskin with wide lapels. She was slender, jeans hugging her hips and thighs and a concave belly tucked neatly behind a brown leather belt. When she bent over to do up a shoelace, it was the small rectangle of flesh peeking out between her jeans and her shirt that bothered him. Irregular strips like fleshy Braille and timeworn welts that could only have been done by a birch.
Temeke wondered if she knew how hard he studied her, whether she even sensed what he was looking for.
“It’s cold outside,” Valerie said, padding to the front door in a pair of slippers.
“I’ll look after her.” He pulled on his coat and checking the pocket for his flashlight. “Won’t be long, love. About ten... fifteen minutes?”
They followed the lane to where it curved around the loop, cutting west between the trees to a small bridge. There was a light patter of rain against the leaves, not enough to force them back around again. Temeke was conscious of the creeping sense of a presence, an animal perhaps? He’d seen a coyote once, drinking at the water’s edge and nosing for eggs in the reeds.
A bitter odor of wet detritus stung his nostrils as they neared the bridge, horse droppings visible in the beam of a street lamp and silence jarred by the shriek of an owl.
Lily’s arms were buried in the pockets of her jacket, shoulders slightly hunched. She was nervous alright, kept looking over her shoulder to check Temeke was still there.
But Temeke didn’t catch up, felt like he was wading through mud, listening to the silence of the cold and the wind tearing through long-needled pines. He wanted to watch from a distance, examine what Lily would do when she saw the place, gauge the level of torment. Because there would be torment after a nightmare like that.
Lily jerked her chin to where the brown limbs of a cottonwood stretched to the sky and beneath it a huddle of young coyote willow.
“There,” she said, sleeves pulled down to her fingertips and pointing. “That’s the secret place.”
Temeke swept the flashlight beam across the grass. Yellow tape drooped between three trees, a large boundary preserved by Officer Watts for processing. It had yielded a rotten mattress, the frame of a child’s stroller caught in the lower branch of a tree, a plastic doll and a pair of size eight tennis shoes wrapped around an overhead powerline. No dried blood or other fluids that might explain the cuts and bruises to Lily’s face.
The grass was flat where two people might have lounged in the shadows and a rough tree trunk to lean against. Moonlight filtered between the branches, reminding Temeke the street lamps were the only light they had. He scanned the ground, looking for depressions, unusual clearings where dirt had been scratched away and where a surrounding tree trunk might offer up a single word scratched in the bark. But it was too dark to see.
“Did you meet here all the time?”
“We used to meet after school. Talked about Alice. How it used to be.”
“The past has a way of catching up with us, doesn’t it?”
Lily must have noticed the subtle change in Temeke’s voice, took two steps toward him, blinking in the sharp strobe lighting from the restaurant. It fell on the pale angles of her face and he could see her eyes now, as clearly as if they were engraved on every tree.
So beautiful, he thought. Someone should paint her. But there was something she wasn’t saying and Temeke searched feverishly for a loose thread, anything to force her to unravel.
“Did Paddy look out for you?” he asked, keeping it personal.
“Oh, yes,” she said, eyes skimming over the grass toward the river. “He was afraid of what Adel might do.”
FIFTY
Temeke had no idea why the words stayed with him, why all of his training begged at him to dig deeper. He slipped the flashlight into his coat pocket, stuffed his hands in there too. It wasn’t cold, more of a chill that came and went with every gust. He rolled his shoulders and asked Lily if she was cold. Whether she wanted to go home.
“I’m OK,” she said.
A drop of rain smacked against his head, then another and another. He offered her a smoke and struck a match on a nearby tree, cupping his hands around the flame. He caught a sweet fragrance as she leaned toward him, oranges, he thought, but he couldn’t be sure.
“I try to imagine what Alice would look like now,” Lily said, hair beaded with rain. “Whether she would have been married to Paddy or someone else.”
Temeke’s mind had been tracking on the kidnap rather than Alice, and the comment came as a surprise.
“Tell me about her,” he said, estimating when they would get back to the house and how many hours of sleep he might get. The unexpected topic of conversation had snapped his focus back to the routine necessities of life, no matter how empty his was.
“She was the most exciting person I have ever known. As much as people resented her, they were drawn to her. Sure, the craziness was entertaining, none of us ever got tired of it. Alice was beautiful. She was brilliant, something you desperately wanted to be. I remember the first time Paddy ever saw her. It was like his eyes were opened. He was so sure of himself, talking about literature, art, spirituality. I was the only one who could see how alike they were. But Adel was like a spider on the edge of a web, watching until the time was right. I saw that too.”
“Did you like Adel?”
“I did at first. Then I saw why she wanted to be friends with me. A sprat to catch a mackerel, isn’t that what they call it? The others were just as bad. Flirting and carrying on. Adel tried to take Paddy away from us. But we were family. She shouldn’t have interfered.”
“Us?”
Lily hooked an arm through his, took a few steps north along the path. It was an oddly familiar gesture, possessive even. “Alice was more than a sister. She was my best friend. We shared everything.”
Temeke felt his brows arch and he turned his head sideways to study her. From the psychological reports he had read, both girls had been raised in a calm, stress-free environment. Alice was articulate, considered advanced for her age, and at the age of six her IQ was somewhere in the 140s. Her school grades were exceptional until her father died, then her whole world became a dark world of antidepressants, weight gain and detentions.
“Want to know a secret?” Lily said.
Temeke did.
“Paddy asked me out first. But I was scared. Never had a boyfriend before.” She made a face and then braved a smiled. “But I think he liked that.”
“The fact that you weren’t interested?”
“The fact that I was a virgin.”
Was, he thought. And was she still? Or had she been lured into
Paddy’s web like all the others? Then there was the breath of an answer, so soft he could have dreamed it.
“No, Paddy never touched me,” she said, turning to face him. “I wouldn’t let him. Is that so bad?”
“No. It’s admirable.”
“I hated what he did. All those lies. I didn’t think he was like that.”
“Some people change.”
He noticed how cool her voice had become, how intense her gaze. She was so like her sister he had to look away.
“He betrayed Alice, going off like that,” she said. “And it wasn’t just Adel.”
“Nobody’s perfect.”
“But she was. Alice made me feel safe. And sometimes it wasn’t safe.”
“At school?” He had often wondered about the discipline.
“Dad was raised Pentecostal. When he was a kid they weren’t allowed to dance or sing in the house. It was forbidden. That’s why mom sent us to boarding school. It was better that way.”
“Were you happy there?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s where you met Paddy,” said Temeke. Paddy the player. High-on-drugs Paddy.
Something flickered behind those eyes. She nodded slightly, not speaking. The cigarette slipped out of her fingers, sparks flying in the undergrowth and then a hiss as it sputtered against the wet grass.
“I knew Adel had the hots for him. Eyes following him everywhere and then she’d pretend not to look. I told Alice. Told her not to trust her.” Placing a hand against her chest, she took a deep breath and straightened. “We had tea in the Pepper Pot one afternoon. Fall I think it was. I remember Alice saying, ‘when all the excitement of the chase dies away, there’s only regret and the overpowering sensation of loss.’ She was crying when she said it. I think that’s what started all the rituals.”
“So she could prolong the fantasy?”
“So she could control it.”
Lily continued to walk a ways and then stopped in front of him, face tilted upward to catch the rain. The wind cut through the trees, rattling the leaves and sending ripples across the water. She stood there for a while, face quite still and childlike, and a little afraid.
Past Rites Page 25
