“Paddy... He was doing drugs.” Adel looked like she was going to start crying. “Don’t you remember? He kept laughing at things. He was weirded out most of the time.”
Adel had a point. Paddy would have found a gray wall hilariously funny. He just wasn’t right somehow. But he knew the difference between Alice and Adel because they looked nothing alike. Even if he was high.
“You chased him,” Gabriel reminded. “Was it to satisfy your curiosity? Self-esteem? What?”
Adel winced, tried to lift her feet out of a bucket of iced water. It must have been hard with torso and hands tied with heavy duty bungee cord and feet so cold she could hardly breathe. She left Gabriel with no answers, just silence.
He looked around the dreary space he remembered so well. Wood beams stretching the entire length of the house and a water heater that soughed on and off. There was a toilet in the far corner and as far as he recalled it never flushed.
“It’s where all the bad kids go,” Demon whispered.
Gabriel tapped the side of his head with his fingers and then with the heels of his hands. He remembered the beatings, the echo of his sobs. It was always him. Never her. Because she was perfect.
He remembered a time when she tiptoed down the basement stairs, head lowered, hoping to see him on the way down. She brought him food and she hugged him until he ran out of cry.
“What did you do?” Demon murmured.
What did I do? The cogs in Gabriel’s mind tried to search for that information and all he could come up with was one word. Steal. Hunger got the better of him when he was eight. That’s when it started. He stole food from the pantry and money from his father’s desk. There were quarters in the top drawer, a whole jar of them, and he’d bought himself a milkshake after school.
When the jar was half empty his father began to ask questions. Never scolded her and Gabriel couldn’t for the life of him understand why.
His train of thought was shattered by Adel’s hoarse voice. Her very presence startled him because she had been half dozing, half sobbing. He was irritated. Wanted to retreat into silence with his perpetual memories.
“Did you kill them?” she stammered.
Gabriel tapped out a cigarette on the arm of the chair and lit up. He studied her face, candlelight providing sharp angles and shadow, and creating a classic 1950s beauty she never really had.
“They say a killer’s motives are hidden in the psyche,” he said, watching her shudder in the cold. “A place common people can’t go. You’d be too afraid to see what I see.”
“What do you mean afraid?”
“This room...” He looked up at the beams, closed his eyes for a moment. “You can love it or you can hate it. It does have a certain charm. But I didn’t bring you here to discuss the Feng Shui. I brought you here to discuss the book.”
“I n-never had it. They did.” Adel’s face was pale, pupils large and black in the light of a sputtering candle.
“You’re lying.” Gabriel could feel it in his immortal bones. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “It’s the only way to get rid of Demon. The only way to stop it all. The hate. The lies. You do understand?”
The candle spat a gob of wax across the floor, spreading out like a comet’s tail. Gabriel thought it was beautiful. That it was a sign.
“It can’t go on forever,” Demon whispered from somewhere in the shadows. “This... this constancy of human failure. I should tell you there is an end to my patience.”
Gabriel rolled his eyes and took a long hard drag of his cigarette. He rolled his shoulders too and sat up a little straighter knowing how Demon wanted it over with, wanted to move on to the next thing. But what Demon couldn’t grasp was Gabriel’s reluctance to meet those demands. He was sick of the games, the bloodshed and the rabbit trails.
Sick, sick, sick.
Because he would go to jail if he lived, and that would be hell enough. Like the tumor in his brain.
He stubbed out the cigarette and lunged for the knife, watched Adel’s eyes as they flicked upward to his raised hand. And then her mouth dropped open and she began to scream.
FIFTY-FOUR
At eight fifteen on Thursday morning, Temeke pulled up outside the Delgado house, windshield wipers barely holding off a downpour. He could see Valerie standing on the doorstep through the rain and he could make out the hunched form of Adel wrapped in a blanket. They were talking to the responding officer.
“She’s alive,” Malin said, head thrown back against the seat rest. Then a long exhalation of breath.
“Damn lucky, I should say.”
“You knew about the basement?”
Temeke reeled in a conversation they had had after visiting Valerie Delgado for the first time. The layout of the house and how he had latterly compared the floor plan to others in the street with a listing agent.
“You said something about a locked door near the pantry. Thought it was broom closet? Let’s take a look at it, shall we?”
The ambulance pulled in after them, two cruisers, three SUVs and the paparazzi ‒ camera crew oozing out from behind the sliding door of a van. Then came that daft old cow Jennifer Danes kissing a bleeding tape recorder and holding a pink umbrella. It was a zoo.
“I’m so sorry,” Valerie said to Temeke as she handed Adel off to a paramedic. “I had no idea―”
“That your basement was being used as a torture chamber?” Temeke lifted the tape and ushered Malin through.
The door to the basement was open, staircase leading down into a dimly lit room. Long... narrow. Wine racks and stone walls. Just as Lily had described.
The stench was musty and acrid, and there was a miserable feel about the place Temeke didn’t like. They kept to one side of the room, going no further than the bottom stair.
Malin took out a tape recorder and recorded all that they saw. Bungee cords, a chair saturated with urine, a pot of salt, six candles on the floor, each burned down to the wick and dried wax which had pooled onto the floorboards. Belts hung from the wall, buckles crusted with dried blood and a collection of birch switches in one corner.
“I can feel the force of your anger across the room,” Malin said over her shoulder.
Temeke had no words. He winced at the sound of a soft tread on the stairs, knew who it was without looking up. He felt nothing for her when she told him about the beatings, how her husband would lock the door so she couldn’t get in.
“I hated what he did,” Valerie said, standing half-way down the stairs, hand steadying herself against the wall. “I begged him to stop. Tried to file for divorce―”
“But you didn’t call the police,” he said, turning to face her.
Valerie’s eyes seemed to plead with him to understand. She was clearly groping with her thoughts like a blind man in the dark. “Alan was in every newspaper. He was New Mexico’s star. It would have ruined him.”
“It ruined them.” Temeke looked up at a tear-stained face. She was more of a criminal than her own daughter. “How long have you known?”
“About Lily? Alan’s father was the same. Beating and drilling until it was habit. I didn’t realize how much he wanted a boy. Even treated her like one.”
Hit her harder, no doubt, when he flogged her, Temeke thought, blinking at a single light bulb that hung above the staircase.
“I was never allowed in this room when Alan was alive. Not to clean, not even to get a bottle of wine.” She paused and rubbed her arms. “I was outside raking leaves last Christmas, saw a crack in the casement window. That’s how the wind got in. There was a chair and what looked like a star on the floor. Lily was down here talking to herself in different voices. Sometimes a man. Sometimes a woman. That’s when I knew.”
It explained the voices in the cornfield, the reason why Temeke saw only one person. “Did she have counseling?”
“Twice a week, but the sessions went nowhere. You asked if she had a boyfriend? Well, she did in a way. She had Paddy. They weren’t intimate,
but he wanted to be. Tried to make her jealous when she refused him, tried dating all the others. I could see what it was doing to her. She despised her own femininity and it didn’t help that Paddy loved her.”
Temeke wasn’t convinced Paddy loved Lily any more than he loved the rest. He was a horny bastard, out for what he could get. Love? He loved himself. “Did you tell Miss Baca... the pastor?”
“She begged me not to, detective. She said it would only make things worse. Kenzie and Rosa would only get her alone and do things like they had before.”
“What things?”
“Drugs. Bullying. They didn’t understand her any more than she understood them.” Valerie sobbed a little and wiped a tissue under her nose. “Baca didn’t believe any of it.”
No, she wouldn’t, Temeke thought, because incidents like that went viral and schools closed down for losing their ratings.
“When the girls found out,” Valerie continued, “they tied her to a chair, told her she was weird because she wouldn’t take drugs, wouldn’t wear dresses. She was different after that.”
Like meth, Temeke thought. One toke and you were floating. This was a group of women who bonded, not by demographic chance, but by way of a spiritual sisterhood. It made separation impossible.
“Have you ever used a psychic?” he asked.
“Yes. She said Lily had been kidnapped by someone she was familiar with.”
Familiar. The word kept cropping up like a bad stench.
“I called everyone. No one had seen her. That’s when I called the police.”
“Ma’am, did you have any idea she had moved out, got her own place? Taken ten grand out of her bank account?”
“No.”
“Do you know why she would need such a large sum of money?”
“Medical perhaps?”
It was a good try and Temeke actually believed her. No face could possibly feign draining itself of blood in quite the same way.
“Medical?”
“She had headaches, detective. Took Oxycodone, I think.”
Fatal in large doses, Temeke thought, feeling his stomach contracting. There was a market out there for drugs like that.
“I remember seeing her on a former case, ma’am,” he said, summarizing the particulars of the case more for Malin’s benefit than hers. “She was studying forensic science at Gibson. Did her internship with Pauline Bailey, if you recall. My point is this. On the night Kenzie Voorhees died, there was a witness. He saw a young man outside Kenzie’s house before the gas explosion. Said he was wearing baggy pants, a black jacket and a white hoodie. I’m guessing what he actually saw were coveralls. All our technicians wear them. It would explain why there was no DNA at the scene until we found the van your daughter was driving. There was a cell phone under the driver’s seat. Had a picture of Ms. Voorhees drinking wine the night she died. We also found the spare key to Asha Samadi’s house and a knife with traces of Mr. Brody’s blood, the same knife she used to slit his throat. There were more red hairs on those seats than on an Irish Setter.”
Valerie shrank as if she had been hit by cold gust of wind. Two tears clung to her lashes and she brushed them away with a fingernail. “She’s sick, detective. Possessed. Gave herself all those bruises. Made the whole thing up.”
Temeke nodded. He already knew. There was no man who picked her up, no savior. Just a figment like all the rest.
For Valerie Delgado the pain had been going on for months, years, and it would continue as long as she let it. For Temeke it was a book you closed at the end of each case, not because he had an armored heart, but because life had to go on.
The Crisis Intervention Team would have called it MPD, multiple personality disorder, where Lily had disassociated and split into parts. Hatred of women? More than being one herself, she would have hated her mother for not protecting her.
Temeke heard the scuffling of footsteps at the top of the stairs. Luis, Fowler, Maggie, Jarvis and three homicide detectives, all standing there with gloved hands in front of their mouths.
Climbing out of that hell-hole was more fresh air than his lungs could deal with and he gasped as he staggered outside.
“Good work, Temeke,” one of the homicide detectives said, patting him on the shoulder.
Temeke ignored their laughs, their cheering, their self-indulgent banter. It wasn’t over yet.
Bluish-black clouds swept over the west side and a rainbow broke through. It formed a vivid bridge between the mountains and the distant high-rise downtown.
FIFTY-FIVE
It was the day of the Spring Arts & Crafts Fair and Gabriel’s heart was thumping in his ears. He felt more alive than he had been in days, especially with the gun nestled in his jacket pocket. It had been months since he attracted ‘normal’ attention, the type where a man appreciates a woman, gives her the eye, does a double take and strikes up a conversation.
He was tired of wearing dark clothes and opted instead for faded jeans and a khaki sweater. A beige baseball cap kept the sun off and flaxen hair fell to his shoulders.
He followed the woman with her languorous stride, body weaving among the crowds. Twice she looked over one shoulder and twice she frowned at him. A cop. She carried a small backpack over one shoulder, one hand nudging aviator style sunglasses up her nose. She was watching him.
There were several fiction sections on the book stand, all labeled alphabetically. Occult was third from the end, next to Vampires and Werewolves. Was this where she would leave the book?
Gabriel began to laugh hysterically, tried to put his hand in front of his mouth to mask the noise but it caught the attention of a group of school kids and a frowning teacher. His body flinched in response and he side-stepped the small group, edging his way behind a booth selling baseball hats and shirts. He smiled at the vendor and bought a red hat.
The cop may have already sensed who he was. She may have asked herself, is this the one who witnessed it all, even as Alice took her last breath? Grotesque, like the third act of Puccini’s Madam Butterfly. Suicide by knife. At least that’s how Gabriel remembered it.
A curtain had come down on that last ovation and the memory was all but a red haze. When he gazed at the stage he could still see a wall of steam, a porcelain tub and a beautiful red-haired girl. Had he done it? Or had she?
He could never really be sure.
It wasn’t an accident, any more than walking right behind the woman toward a table of old books be accidental. No one could resist a good deal and a craft fair was a great place to mingle, eat local food, listen to local music. There were a few tractor rides, not quite as many as the Harvest Festival, but there were art shows and a growers' market, plenty to keep you busy. And there was law enforcement. Everywhere. Gabriel could pick them out in a crowd.
Corrales wasn’t usually alive at this time of year and this impromptu festival offered assorted vendors that sold lavender, southwestern cuisine, old books, antiques, and a car show at the upper end of the street. All in the name of making money for Corrales Elementary School.
The cop’s head turned suddenly at the happy shriek of a child. Dark glasses couldn’t blot out those searching eyes, nor could jeans cover the tight musculature of her thighs.
She was damned, for one thing.
Gabriel felt excitement at that. Even Demon said he was damned for one single misdemeanor where humans, having a God willing to offer them second chances over and over again, were forgiven. There wasn’t a dancing modicum of hope he would escape the fire.
Sometime in the past few years, Gabriel had resigned himself to the fact that he had been lied to, manipulated and used, and he fought to stay ahead of the game. Moving unseen through the university, watching the students as they drifted from class to class, oblivious to the predator who dressed as a homeless person and pretended to root for food in the trash cans. He hated the word bullied because it was always wrapped in a shroud of pity and he didn’t pity himself in the least.
He had grown strong. Dif
ferent somehow. Better. And no one could change that.
“We all have choices,” he murmured, recalling the scene as clearly as the one in front of him.
Alice’s choice was to destroy the book because the Lilin had destroyed her, taken the love of her life. She had also chosen to take her own life, and no part of that was accidental. And so a piece of her could live on to torment the rest.
In a way, Alice had won.
Sometimes he fragmented from his true self and became Gabriel ‒ his safe place. The place where there were no canes, no foul words, no shunning. A place where he was accepted and made whole again.
He continued to stalk the cop, weaving ahead of him now, dodging people and skirting around the slow moving cars. There was a metallic taste in his mouth and a hissing in his ears, the pronouncement of something far more exciting than just watching. The knowing that this woman knew she was being followed as she casually browsed the stalls, hands caressing jewelry and paintings.
The Fair was buzzing. Just how Gabriel liked it.
Until he tensed, inner radar registering a lone male about sixty yards to his left, another muscular build and a focused expression.
There was no mistaking the disciplined product of boot camp. A black man who left that training completely different than when he arrived. Forced to encounter the unknown without showing fear, physically toned to perfection and mind ready to face the enemy head on. How men like him learned to survive in the crucible of intense law enforcement training, Gabriel would never know. Proud and proven. That’s what they were.
When he compared the man to the woman he followed, the metallic taste was replaced with something sour. A stirring inside his head, a deep, dark thing that had been sleeping until it opened its yellow eye, looked around and reminded him that men were the greater species.
“Time to do what Alice did,” Demon said. “To move beyond a life shuttered in darkness and soar into a starless sky. You’ll like it there. She does.”
Excitement climbed in Gabriel’s chest and the blood roared through his body. “See Alice?”
Past Rites Page 27
