“Paddy was like dad. Had a twinkle in his eye. Liked the excitement of it all, had to be challenged. You can’t blame Alice for loving him. But then...”
“But then she didn’t,” Temeke said, finishing the sentence for her.
“Then she cursed them... Adel, Zarah, Asha, Kenzie. And Paddy. Began cutting herself after that.”
“I don’t remember the report saying she had other cuts?”
“No, there weren’t any. She’d let the cuts heal over time and then on that last day, she asked me to get a fillet knife from the kitchens, one with a narrow blade so she could bleed the demons out. And she reopened those wounds... in exactly the same place.”
“You saw her do it?”
Lily gasped for breath. She was really crying now. “The bathroom door was locked. I shouted and shouted but she wouldn’t let me in. I ran downstairs, outside... to the fire escape, but the French doors were locked and the window... it wouldn’t budge. I pushed and pushed...”
It was all plain as day as if Temeke could see it in real time. He took a few steps forward, but her hands flew up to ward him off.
“I called her name, tried to stop it. But she couldn’t hear me.”
“You can’t blame yourself,” he said, It was a bloody lame thing to say in light of her suffering, but he couldn’t think of anything else.
“It was Demon.”
“There’s no such thing, love,” he said, feeling his mind shudder with denial.
“He killed her.”
Temeke was aware his breathing was deep and labored and he was hit with a sense of déjà vu. A girl standing a few feet away, hair clinging in wet threads, inaccessible like a masterpiece you couldn’t touch.
Then she tilted her head toward him. Something was bothering her. “Can’t you feel it? He’s here. Hunting.”
Dropping his cigarette in a puddle, Temeke watched it fizzle and die. When he looked up again she seemed to have moved closer as if she had floated toward him in those brief seconds. Her hands dropped and the coat opened a little and he could see the line of her shirt, the top of her jeans and the L-shaped buckle. He could smell faint traces of orange blossom and patchouli now.
She seemed to recognize his attention for what it was, one she might have experienced before and hated. Taking a step backwards, she wrapped the coat around her and shivered.
He sensed the formality between them, watched her eyes chase something in the darkness. The isolated sound of a car rushing by and the groan of an overhead branch. The sense they were being watched, a spider-sense so strong that he beckoned Lily behind him, reached into his jacket and drew his weapon.
His skin began to crawl with a crippling terror, eyes sweeping the shadows an inch at a time, trying to take in what he couldn’t see. No movement, no sounds, other than the steady patter of rain.
A weight seemed to push down on his head, an ancient presence that goaded his subconscious and grinned at him from a dark corner. The thing was rooted to the scene and hanging in the air like a bad smell. He had no idea what was giving him this flight-or-fight sensation. He gazed over the rim of the horizon working his way in until he was sure there was no one there.
The warmth of Lily’s cheek pressed against his back distracted him and he turned to face her. She rubbed her forearm as if to smooth away any goosebumps and her eyes seemed to look through him.
“You felt that, didn’t you?”
He felt her if that’s what she meant. She reminded him of a wild animal, ears back and hackles raised and he followed her line of vision trying to see what had caught her attention, trying to understand what had made her posture stiffen.
“A hateful, ugly thing,” she said, pointing a finger towards an insubstantial shape behind a cluster of cattails.
Now there was a description that was going to fester, Temeke thought, taking a few seconds to realize how close he came to being freaked out by a ghost. He inwardly scolded himself at the stupidity.
But there was no escaping that voice. It had taken on a low bass tone, an inflection locked in his memory, a sound so familiar it sent a cold flutter through his gut. He didn’t know what scared him more, instincts or stone cold truth.
“There’s nothing there, love,” he said, trying to keep the tremor from his hands.
“No... Can’t you see it?”
Temeke could see something stretched out in the grass with spiny ridge to its back, jagged sides and a gaping hole at one end. “It’s a tree trunk. Promise. Let’s get you home.”
She walked beside him, head occasionally turning back to the secret place, eyes scanning the undergrowth as if she didn’t believe a word.
FIFTY-ONE
Gabriel sat in the dining room, staring down into a plate of enchiladas surrounded by a moat of green chile. He tried to get his thoughts to behave in a logical way, mind focusing on how he had climbed into the house on Guadalupe Trail yesterday. Or was it the day before?
Easy with a screwdriver. Not so easy to sidestep a cat, tail lashing and fangs bared.
On that day, Gabriel left his shoes under the window behind a clump of juniper. He hadn’t found what he came for. In all that rooting around he made sure everything was put back in its proper place. The books on the shelf, the pillows on the bed and the mattress under it. Until he heard the crunch of tires on gravel.
Instincts were as clear to a hunter as they were to the hunted. But there was always one place hunters never looked. Somewhere so obvious they’d only smack themselves. Somewhere they could see a tiny part of you if they looked hard enough.
The slow squeak of the front door told him the detective was alert and likely had a weapon. Must have seen the window unlatched. There weren’t any footprints, Gabriel had taken care of that. Used his sleeve to wipe down the windowsill and the carpet to dry his feet.
He followed the detective through the house, waited until all hiding places had been checked. Mimicked every hitch of breath so precisely that the detective could only hear his own.
Gabriel slipped into an upstairs closet and gazed through angled slats at the bathroom door, open wide enough to see a figure behind frosted glass. Colored tiles added a touch of whimsy to a bland design ‒ fitting, he thought, for a family home.
The shower, the drumming of water on glass and the crisp scent of soap. The detective must have sensed something, must have felt the air trickle along his flanks just as a shark feels the distress signals of its prey.
He didn’t flinch. Not until the cell phone clattered on the sink. Then he lunged for it, faster than a snake. Naked and dripping. Muscles tense.
Gabriel had already touched that sink, the door, the towels, and he sensed the bond and fed off the adrenalin the detective had. He would have enjoyed soaking up more of that view if Adel’s whiny telephone voice hadn’t interrupted the trance, putting him right back in front of the plate of enchiladas he couldn’t eat.
She swore she didn’t have the book, but it was a lie. He could tell she was being careful with her words as if someone else was listening. And that someone else had called him later, feigned an accent so close to Adel’s it took him by surprise.
Demon suddenly sputtered into life as if Gabriel’s thoughts had automatically turned the dial on a mental transmitter.
“Wasn’t expecting that, were you?” Demon said. “Better pop a few more of your favorite things before you have any more bad dreams. What was it last time? Oh, yes. You wait beside the railroad tracks to die. Your life, which should have been full of promise, is a bitter disappointment. You’re a slave to drugs. You’re a slave to everything. It is your birthright to suffer prejudice until your dying breath. But there’s no alternative. Better step in front of that speeding train...”
Gabriel wouldn’t allow himself to feel polluted and inferior. He wouldn’t allow himself to be bombarded with a pack of lies.
“Lies? Oh, no, these aren’t lies. You’ve been sold into bonded labor, my friend. No better than dirty rags. Human waste. The lowes
t of the low. University is a distant dream in your grubby little world because forty-five percent of students have no hope of graduating and the rest can’t even write their own names.”
“We’re not stupid.”
“All humans are stupid. I mean it. They fail every time. Of course, we revel in every failure and wonder why Master puts up with it, why his patience hasn’t cracked. Why he hasn’t cut them off entirely. Why he didn’t crush that unworkable, wanton piece of clay into a tight little ball and throw it away. He should have. But they’re his precious little mud people. You are his precious little mud heir.”
Demon always pulled the jealousy card. He tried to compare himself to humans, kept pushing it further and further to see how far he could bring Gabriel down. It was excruciating to watch.
But in all the mind games Demon played, all the bloodletting, the gory acts of murder, even when Gabriel felt himself walking on a thin layer of ice that seemed to crack under every step, he was somehow fused to him. His dear and despised familiar.
“There is something else,” Demon said, tapping long nails against the tabletop with the rapid staccato of a stopwatch. “You still have a monkey to catch.”
FIFTY-TWO
“You know what they say, don’t monkey with someone else’s monkey,” Temeke said, backing out of Hackett’s office.
“We can’t hold a suspect! Not when there’s no proof. And before you go,” Hackett said, lifting a hand and peering over his glasses. “Suzi Cornwell has accepted my offer. She’ll be joining us in two weeks.”
Temeke didn’t hesitate. “Corpses always smell better in the winter, sir.”
It wasn’t the first time Malin had hovered in the corridor using Temeke as a human shield, coat on and arms pressed against her body. Hackett was hard to read and she couldn’t decide if he processed information at a slower rate or if he was simply a nitpicker.
“Good, then you can take her to Jack’s for a celebratory meal.”
A roar of protest from Malin’s stomach ‒ the food at the local drive-thru was notoriously rich in green chile.
“I’m not sure Jack In The Crack is quite her thing, sir.”
“Then use your imagination, Temeke. And listen. I don’t want any more girls turning up dead, do you hear?”
“Right, sir. But if this is a serial killer, then it’s quite likely to happen again.”
Hackett rubbed a hand over his forehead. “Take one of the new cars if that’ll speed things up a bit.”
A heart-thudding pause while Temeke seemed to be mulling the offer over. Knowing his suspicious nature, he was likely waiting for the blade of the guillotine to come down and Malin wondered if the car was offered in the same way a prison governor would break bad news to a condemned man.
“We have a car, sir. It goes... what? Sixty? When the wind’s behind us.”
Hackett was standing now. “Solve stats―”
“Are very important, sir. I wouldn’t dream of taking the glory away from DCPD. But should things go wrong no doubt we’ll get the blame and you’ll cop the praise. Daft old world we live in.”
Malin felt the electric tension in the air as Temeke closed Hackett’s door. She followed him downstairs to the lobby.
“I know you’re fed up with Detective Cornwell but you can’t talk about her like that, sir.”
“That sneaky cow was trying to undermine you, Marl. She thought you were incompetent letting Adel go like that.”
A prickle of annoyance and Malin felt her voice slide up a few notes. “She said that?”
“Anyway, they don’t want us on their side of town where we don’t belong. So I thought you and I would do a little catch-up in the Fat Mule on 4th, because there’s a waitress who’d like a word. On our side of town.”
They pulled into the restaurant parking lot where a few of the Outlaw clan were chewing tobacco and sitting on bikes near the adobe wall.
“What’s her name?” Malin opened a gate covered in flakey blue paint and made for the front desk.
“Melody Lane. Said she saw something hokey. Mentioned a young guy who comes in sometimes, sits by the window and talks to himself.”
Temeke asked for Melody at the front desk and they were led to an orange booth at the back of the restaurant. A woman sat drinking Coke through a straw, small and bent with a smoky rasp to her voice. Malin estimated late fifties, early sixties, blonde hair cascading down from a badly tied bun and cheeks powdered with makeup.
“We want to thank you for calling,” Temeke said, shuffling next to Malin on the bench.
“After I saw this,” Melody said, hand patting the front page of the Duke City Journal where the composite sketch was the lead article. “I knew it was him. He always sits over there. Black hair. Shifty-like.”
Malin turned to where Melody pointed, saw a booth about fifteen feet away. It was a clear shot to the cash register and the coffee station.
“Shifty?” Malin asked. The stench of sweat and cigarette smoke was stronger now.
“Kept looking around like he was hiding from it all. Didn’t look like he was all there, arguing with himself. Tweaking more like. Two bikers were watching him real hard, that’s what got my attention.”
Malin would bet money the guy wasn’t scoping the place to see who he could pick up and it wasn’t a drug deal. They didn’t go down in places like this. The Fat Mule was a DEA preferred hangout at lunchtime.
“Any CCTV?”
“Nah. You’ve only got my word.”
“You live around here?” Temeke asked.
“I live with my old man, Joe. Only see him once every two months now.” Melody’s eyes took on a hard stare, like she knew she wasn’t the only chick he had. “I guess that’s how it is when you’re an Outlaw, always on the road.”
Malin suspected Joe wasn’t on the road, probably shacked up with his bike in an old Winnebago behind the Walmart on Southern. Anything to get away from it all.
“Clothes, birthmark, tattoo?”
Melody shook her head slowly. “Kid had black hair and make-up. Course they all wear make-up now. I only said a few words, but I could see he was all knotted up inside. I don’t know why they torture themselves. It’s so much easier these days.”
It was the second time Malin heard the word kid and she hung on to that image in her head. Junkyard Charlie had also alluded to the hair and that’s why the young man caught Melody’s eye.
There was the overnight bag Paddy had given Adel, the clothes, the wigs. That train of thought unnerved Malin and her mind lingered on it all.
“How many times has he been here?” she asked.
Melody looked up at the ceiling and closed one eye. “Five, six times. Always on his own. Stays as long as it takes to drink a cup of coffee.”
“Does he talk to anyone?”
“Only me. The good news is he usually comes in twice a week. Bad news is he hasn’t been here this week.”
“Think he might be staying near here?”
“Hard to say. Come to think of it he always leaves on foot.”
Malin shot Temeke a look, saw the faint tremor of an eyebrow. She knew what he was thinking, that these sightings weren’t accidental, that the killer was getting restless and the rising publicity was making him more so. He was indulging himself with a fake identity for a time, but it would be over soon enough.
“Did you get a name?” Malin gave a little smile.
“Nah. This one’s closed off, like there’s nothing behind the eyes. But he did leave something on the bench.”
Melody pulled a flyer from the inside of her jacket. Photographs of tractors and hay rides and the words Corrales Spring Arts & Crafts Fair, Saturday, March 18.
Four days’ time.
“Well, you can’t say sir or ma’am these days without offending someone,” Melody rasped. “So I don’t say it all. But I ain’t no bad judge of character, hon, not after thirty years working in a place like this. That was no man. But then, of course, you already knew that.”
>
FIFTY-THREE
Gabriel fought to stay awake, drifting in a rolling lull where there was nothing but a blank space between dusk and dawn. Just the way he liked it.
A six point star lay on the floor and six candles flickering at each corner, and there a drift of bitter incense that reminded him of piñon resin. All he needed was the book to give him the words, the long, repetitive mantra he once knew by heart.
After luring Adel Martinez from her house with the offer of a shoulder to cry on, Gabriel was exhausted. Eight hours it took to prize the information out of her were eight hours he might have spent sleeping.
He sat on the only other chair in the room and tried to process what she had just said.
“Did you say I was a freak?” he asked, swiveling a knife on the surface of an upturned crate.
Hands tied behind her back, who could blame Adel for not responding. Her head had flopped forward like a rag doll, eyes fluttering as if she was trying to stay awake.
It was a setup. Adel never had the book. The detective did. The square-jawed, sullen-looking black man who had hunted him one night in a cornfield and along a narrow lane all the way to the main road.
Lawmen were never far behind.
Had the detective seen Gabriel on other occasions? Did DCPD’s swarming network of agencies have prior knowledge of his entire life? While he knew it to be true, he found the reality of it disturbing.
“The van, you fool,” Demon whispered. “All those tell-tale signs. You’re dead now.”
And yet, Demon had promised he would keep the van working.
Every day upon opening the front door or going about his business, Gabriel wondered if law enforcement crows would be standing outside with their all-too-familiar smiles.
Yes, disturbing.
He expelled a loud sigh and raked a hand through his hair. The basement was getting colder and both of them were shivering. It all seemed pointless until Adel lifted her head.
Past Rites Page 26
