The 9th Hour (The Detective Temeke Crime Series Book 1)

by Claire Stibbe

  Silence.

  “And where’s your passport? Don’t have one, do you? And as for your driving license, I hope it didn’t get into the wrong hands.”

  More silence.

  “You’re no reindeer roast. Lived on the beach for most of your life, shacking up with women old enough to be your mother. Come to think of it, you were shacked up with Patti’s mother when you moved to Albuquerque. That’s how it all started, wasn’t it? Only you fancied a bit of calf after you’d had the cow.”

  Morgan chewed his lower lip, as if a nagging doubt rose to the surface.

  “It was all about money,” Temeke continued. “Or was it the sex? Could have been both, I suppose.” He watched the pursed lips, the slow skankish smile. The type of smile that stroked the pit of his stomach. “Before you answer that, Hardangervidda has no trees. It’s about as sterile as your lunch pack.”

  Temeke saw Morgan’s puzzled look and beamed at him, he also felt the earpiece vibrate with angry static. It wasn’t quite true about the trees, but why was Morgan the only one allowed to lie?

  “You liked Kizzy, didn’t you, Morgan?”

  “She was brave.”

  Kizzy was a great talker according to her dad. It had kept her alive longer than the others, two days longer if Temeke had calculated right. The others were all dead within nine hours of their kidnapping, although Morgan never admitted to killing them. He likely just stood there and watched.

  There were body parts in that commercial fridge. Fingers, hair clippings, souvenirs of those he killed. The defense psychologist ruled that Morgan had acute distress disorder and PTSD, both of which would be thrown out by any jury since he’d never been in the military or suffered trauma of any kind. He was a liar. A very good one.

  “She was worried her father would miss her,” Morgan said, eyes burning with a rekindled fire.

  Temeke studied Morgan a little more closely. He wasn’t dirty-looking like a vagrant, not even when they picked him up. He had been freshly shaved with a pressed white shirt covered in Kizzy’s blood. There was a smell of soap about him and if it wasn’t for an armful of tattoos peeking beneath his sleeves, you would have thought he was a resting actor.

  “She wanted me to believe she wasn’t afraid.”

  “Wasn’t afraid of what, Morgan?”

  “Me.”

  The last word was chilling. Kizzy had to have been terrified of Morgan because he was her abductor. The one thing she’d been warned against. Talking to strangers.

  “Did you believe her?” Temeke asked.

  “Yes, until Wednesday morning.”

  Three days after the kidnap, Temeke thought.

  “You think I killed her, don’t you?”

  “I’d like to rule you out.”

  Morgan nodded slowly. “Heads speak wisdom. That’s what Odin says. So here I am accused of this crime.”

  “First degree murder and kidnap to mention a few.”

  “What if I didn’t do it?”

  “Then you’ll stay here until we find out who did.”

  Morgan caught his breath and his eyes widened as if a thought had suddenly come to him. “You’ll find your man of interest. Two priors for solicitation, breaking and entering, and a restraining order. Not much. But it’s the restraining order you need to focus on.”

  “I’d like to point out there are a few class felonies in that list.” Temeke grimaced.

  “Yeah, real class.”

  Temeke wanted to reach over and grab Morgan by the collar. What was the point of having laws when they were blatantly ignored? “Well, that shouldn’t be too hard to find amongst the several million we have on file. Better get to it.”

  Temeke scraped his chair back against the vinyl floor, snatched up the file and left the room. He almost hurled the earpiece into Stu’s outstretched hand. “We’re wasting our time. He’s not our man.”

  NINE

  Ole knew he was being followed, knew he was being watched. But just to be sure, a glass of wine yesterday had been a novel idea. He saw the cop in the lobby of The Press Club with a cell phone pressed against one ear. That’s when he wiped the glass with his napkin and slipped out through the kitchens. In those few precious moments he’d lost the cop. But he never forgot a face.

  Now he stood in an empty house on the south side of town, Smith Street, far away from the spotlessness of his Tuscan estate. This is where he disposed of the girls. There was only one thing he was truly sorry for. And that was shooting Patti in the leg. That soft sallow thigh was bruised and swollen and he’d done the best he could to clean it.

  She wasn’t perfect any more. She wasn’t the happy dancing Patti, the light-as-a-cinder-on-the-wind Patti. A girl worth having. She stiffened when he held her in her sleep, murmuring for Morgan until the early hours. But snooping girls were stupid girls and he was tired of telling her what to do.

  There was no way out of the bedroom. The door was bolted from the outside, windows locked. She could have screamed all day if she wanted to and nobody would have heard her. Now there was a four-day-old stench in his nostrils and a corpse on the kitchen floor.

  He showered in the hottest water he could bear, scrubbed his nails and then smeared his skin with a good dosing of hand sanitizer. It was the burn he was after. Made him feel refreshed and alert.

  Time to call the detective.

  “Who is this?” Ole heard him say.

  “It doesn’t really matter, does it? Not when you don’t have any evidence.”

  “Well, that’s where you’re wrong. I just got lucky. Can’t be too careful during these last days. You’re leaving too many crumbs out for the birds.”

  Birds? Ole tapped the side of his head with the phone and then squeezed it against his ear. His mind was beginning to blur. “I’ll give you Patti for Morgan,” he offered.

  “Put her on.”

  “I won’t do that.”

  “How do I know she’s still alive?”

  “Ask me anything and I’ll ask her.”

  “What’s her cat called.”

  Ole covered the mouthpiece and hesitated for a moment, enjoying a sense of the ridiculous. “She doesn’t have a cat.”

  “A dog then?”

  Ole hesitated again. “Yes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Buster.”

  The detective actually laughed. “She’s dead, isn’t she. You know how I know? Because she doesn’t have a dog.”

  Ole shouted into a dead phone, heard the drone of the dialing tone. It was no use hurling curses at deaf ears. Patti had lied to him.

  He saw faceless images of her. Smart, glittering Patti, nothing like the lone, staring thing slumped on the floor at his feet.

  Then he shrugged and turned his attention to another girl he had followed two days ago. He thought of her now through the cloudy lens of his mind. A rare specimen with spotless, waxen skin and eyes sweeping with black eyeliner. Quite perfect.

  Quite breathtaking.

  And then came the provocative moment when he fell in behind her, so close he could smell the scent of her hair. His mind was a riot of madness and that’s when he braced himself for that heart-grinding shiver before the downhill plunge.

  This was a new girl whose infatuation was too good to pass up. He’d spoken to her a few times after that, asked her for directions from his nice black car, dropped his wallet in the mall right in front of her. She picked it up, of course, smiled shyly at him when he thanked her. He even sat right next to her in the dental office a few days later staring off in the distance and watching her out of the corner of his eye. You’d think she would have wondered if he was stalking her, wondered if he was just a little dangerous.

  Asking her out was easy. Especially after he told her he was a cop.

  She said yes a little too quickly, running her tongue along those generous red lips of hers. He took her to a Mexican restaurant for lunch, nothing pretentious. The white bustier she wore was laced low enough to reveal two mounds as shee
r as a pair of stockings. He could hardly keep his eyes off them.

  He promised to call her in a few days. It had been much more than that.

  The stench from the cardboard box at his feet brought him back to the present. His most recent kill―one of Odin’s darlings. This one would have to be disposed of on higher ground where bear and fox wouldn’t make a meal of it.

  He kept a container of her blood in the fridge, only he might need to take some of it where he was going. It would fool the police. It would fool everyone. That’s why he kept Morgan’s driving license and a few strands of his hair. That’s why he used Morgan’s identity now he was inside.

  Morgan’s face was on every newsstand in Albuquerque. The 9th Hour Killer. Ole loved the description, loved the attention. He was almost famous now.

  He walked into the front room and saw the axe. It was dirty, so dirty. And so was the mattress. Fire was a cleansing thing and besides, he couldn’t stay in the same place for too long.

  With that nice black car in the garage he had already become an overnight sensation in the neighborhood. He only went out at night. So did the hoodlums in their low-riders desperate for weed, desperate to be noticed.

  So incredibly ghetto.

  He’d pay one to burn the house and then there would be nothing left. No evidence.

  The rest of her was wrapped in a quilt, pink, flowery. Cold. Heaving the bundle over one shoulder, he took it out through the kitchen door into the garage where the sleek Camaro beckoned. The trunk was already open. He was practical like that. Once the car was packed with all his precious things he drove east along Central, following the silvery track of the moon, following it north on Tramway and then east again to where the road gave way to sand and green-gray sage.

  He lugged the bundle as far as the foothills, propping her against a boulder so she could see what he saw― Albuquerque, the winking city with its legendary lights. Only she couldn’t see anything now.

  “Quite marvelous,” he said, pulling out a packet of antiseptic wipes from his pocket. “So close to home. You used to live up this way with your mom. In fact, I think I can see your house from here.”

  He’d never be able to sleep. Not after climbing a hill in a cold December wind. No, he’d need to drive around for a bit. Need to clear the fog from his mind.

  Two minutes later, he found himself heading west on Alameda, listening to the fastest violin performance he had ever heard. It made his heart pump. It made the car go faster than a bullet all the way to the apartments at Puerta de Corrales. It was dawn when he got there, when he turned off the engine and watched the front entrance.

  To the left, a cop car sat idle outside a ground floor apartment. He had a ripe young thing for a daughter who never drew her blinds. Like she knew someone was watching.

  He thought about what he would do. How it would be. Sat there watching the vertical blinds behind the patio doors twitching in a warm draft of air. That’s when a light flickered inside the bedroom and where a young girl swung olive legs from her bed, running fingers through a bob of black hair.

  She was so beautiful.

  The dark ones might be beautiful, he warned himself, but they were the tricksters, the seducers. He was used to them now, the black painted eyes, the moist lips, all there to invite a look. He had come to see it as part of the game.

  It struck him suddenly that he ought to have left a single white rose on her door step, something to light up those smoky dark eyes, something to make that cop-of-a-pop all jittery and suspicious. There was something particularly enticing about tormenting those who hated him. Those who made him an outcast.

  And so it was his commission to come back every night just to sit and wait. Until the natural rhythm of things told him when the time was right.

  TEN

  The sky was gray and heavy with snow. Malin squinted through the windshield trying to steer against a driving wind. She sensed Temeke’s despair, his anger.

  “She’s dead, probably been dead for days,” he said, finger soothing his upper lip. “I asked him the name of Patti’s dog. You know what he said? Buster. Her mother said she didn’t have a dog. They’ve never had a dog. He was lying. That disgusting cesspool of a man was lying!”

  Malin couldn’t stop wondering if Temeke was a liar. She’d seen him hugging Becky in the lobby, seen her tearstained face. Something about a man she liked, how he had stood her up after school yesterday. Even though Becky tried to hug him, Malin still wondered if he broke away because he thought he was being watched.

  She watched him. All the time. Behind the bathroom door near the drinking fountain, through her make-up mirror when he sat at his desk. She tried not to look at him now out of the corner of her eye, tried to concentrate on the road. He was silent for a time before his hand flicked directions. On the left-hand side of the road she could see the serried ranks of Spanish style buildings, one of which was the Old Town post office.

  “Want to know the real kicker?” he said as they parked. “Patti outwitted him even at the end. You wait until the results come back from Forensics. We’ve got a wine glass with his sodding spit all over it.”

  Malin couldn’t scrape up even the tiniest whimper of a comment. She merely opened the door, glad to breathe in a blast of cold clean air.

  Andrew Knife Wing was sitting on the bottom of the stairs leading to an upper terrace, thumbs dancing over a bright red phone. He looked normal to her and nothing like a psychic. But what did psychics look like anyway?

  “Ma’iitsoh,” Knife Wing said, waving one hand over his head as if wafting smoke from burning sage.

  “What did he say,” Malin whispered to Temeke as they approached.

  “It means big coyote or wolf.”

  “Is that what he calls you?”

  “No, it’s what he calls the spirit he sees in his dreams.” Temeke looked down at a fresh-faced man in his early thirties. “You said you wanted to see me.”

  Knife Wing gave a lazy smile, hesitating for a moment. “I had another dream. Well, it was a vision really. You got a light? Might need a cigarette for that light.”

  Malin studied the glossy-haired youth, five foot nine inches tall when he stood up, hair in a long ponytail, turquoise earrings. He was charismatic like the users she had interviewed in the county jail and she was aware of a small tremor of sadness in those laughing eyes. Temeke handed him a cigarette and pointed up the stairs.

  The balcony looked out on a restaurant and a colonnade of art galleries. Navajo blankets were draped over the banisters and wind chimes clanging from the vigas.

  “You said you had a dream,” Temeke said. “You also said you had a name.”

  Knife Wing drew hard on his cigarette and blew out a thick cloud of smoke. “I said I had an address.”

  “But you did say a name.”

  Knife Wing slipped the phone in his shirt pocket and took another drag of his cigarette. “Bought a truck from him a month ago.”

  “That’s a stroke of luck. His name will be on the paperwork,” Temeke said, peering over the bannister at a metallic gray truck with front fog lamps and alloy wheels.

  “I don’t keep paperwork.”

  “Clean title was it?”

  Knife Wing shrugged. “Great price.”

  “I’m guessing that’s a 2008 Chevy Colorado. Probably got the word salvage on that title. So what did this guy look like?”

  “Thickset, braided hair, tattoos. Same man in my dream. Only that one had a bloody axe in one hand and a severed head in the other. Girl with pale blue eyes.”

  Temeke seemed to think about that for a moment, mouth twitching. “Any particular tattoos?”

  “A snake round his arm, a sun and moon on his neck. He was saying stuff about the girl. Said a god had taken her. I just laughed. Thought he was crazy. But he grabbed me by the throat and said, ‘She’s a gift. A sacrifice for the father of victory.’ I wasn’t laughing much after that.”

  “When was this?”

  “I said a mon
th ago.”

  “And you didn’t tell anyone?”

  Knife Wing shook his head, treating Malin to a wink. “No one to tell.”

  “Have you seen him since?”

  “Couldn’t get hold of him after my truck died. But I remember where I bought it. Cream house on the corner of Smith and Walter, the only two story house in the street. There was a black Camaro parked behind the gate. Reckon it’s his.”

  “Anything else you remember?”

  Knife Wing shrugged and thought for a moment, eyes grazing over Malin’s face. “It had a crime-stoppers sticker in the window.”

  Temeke handed Knife Wing the pack of cigarettes and a yellow Bic lighter and started down the steps to the road. “You’ll call me if you hear anything else?”

  “Ma’iitsoh,” Knife Wing said again. “Watch out for the spirit.”

  He saluted and grinned, eyes flicking toward Malin in that deliberate way of his. “Always best to watch your back. But then you cops know all about that, don’t you?”

  Malin couldn’t help shivering all the way to the car. “Are the tattoos the same as Eriksen’s?” she asked Temeke as she slammed the door and locked it.

  “Not quite. And I doubt it was a snake round his arm. More like a Celtic knot. He did mention the man he saw had a shaved head and braids,” Temeke said, sniffing. “Take Kathryn and I’ll give you directions from there.”

  Malin pulled out sharply into oncoming traffic and skillfully steered into the right-hand lane. They were speeding along Kathryn Avenue, past Arno and Edith before Temeke told her to slow down.

  “Didn’t much like him, did you?” he said.

  “I don’t believe in psychics. They can see in the past. Not in the future.”

  “He’s a shaman’s son. Uses his eyes and sense of smell. He’s an artist. Means he’s got an eye for detail.”

  “Why do you think he wanted to talk to us?” Malin said, hearing the irritation in his voice.

  “The visions won’t go away unless he tells someone. He’s got his ear to the ground. Watches people. Knows people. He might go off the grid for a while but he always calls me.”