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

by Claire Stibbe

  My Serena.

  He was suddenly thirsty and he opened his desk drawer. There were a few quarters in his piggy bank, just enough to buy him a drink from the vending machine. He was a coffee man himself and it was the first time in years he felt like a good cup of tea.

  A cold shiver trickled down his back and he felt uneasy. It was colder in his office than in the morgue, and all he could hear was Hackett’s voice raining down on him like a meteor shower.

  There’s no murder case without a body.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Darryl began to shake. He couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten. It was sometime yesterday, two hours before Tess disappeared. He was teetering on the edge of some dark crater and if he wasn’t careful, he’d fall in for good.

  It was no secret now that he wanted to end his life. He was tired of living the darkness, tired of the tears. Maisie had taken Sharek to stay with Pastor Razz. They were safer there. And here he was all by himself again, feeling uneasy, like he’d just woken up and found a hate-message written on his mirror in lipstick. There was something odd in the silence, something that gripped at his conscience.

  Why him? Why his girls?

  His stomach lurched into a state of panic. What if all this had somehow been his fault? The bad dreams had beaten him senseless and all he wanted now was peace. He caressed the phone with his fingers, willing the police to give him good news. Any news. And when it didn’t ring he opened the front door, heard the gentle roar of wind over the mesa. It was cold and he shivered in a flimsy button-down shirt and bare feet.

  The sun tried to break through a cloud over the Sandia mountains, peaks gray in the waning light. It was a sight he would never forget and the more he thought about it, the more he felt a sick sensation in the pit of his gut.

  He knew today was his last.

  He could hear voices beyond the courtyard, cars pulling up in the road, laughter. He looked through the speakeasy grill and he was almost blinded by a sudden flash.

  “Mr. Williams!”

  Voices shouted, cameras whirred.

  “Where’s your daughter?”

  Rattling and hammering against the garden gate.

  “Where’s Tess, Mr. Williams?”

  “Have you heard from her?”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  He ran back into the house and locked the door behind him, heart thumping like those fists at his gate. They couldn’t access the courtyard but they could climb over the back wall. He closed the patio blinds. There was no sign of them yet, but he knew their accusing voices would find their way into his home somehow.

  The phone buzzed on the kitchen table and he lurched toward it with a big gasp.

  “Mr. Williams, this is Carey Johns from Eyewitness News. Both your daughters have gone missing within a month of each other. How do you feel about that?”

  Darryl couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t take the phone away from his ear either.

  “You’ve read the article in the Journal… the one that cited you as the kidnapper? I would want to argue that if I were you. Would you like to comment?”

  The silence was longer this time and Darryl was suddenly shrouded in an emotional fog. A comment? Yes, he had a comment.

  “Do you know what it’s like to lose your little girl to a serial killer? Have you any idea what he did to her? And now he’s got my Tess. And you’re accusing me of taking her?”

  “I’m not accusing you, Mr. Williams, the people are saying―”

  “What are they saying?”

  “They’re saying if you didn’t do it, who did? And if you didn’t do it, Mr. Williams, you should be out there looking for her. You’re no longer working at the bank, right?”

  How did she know he had been fired? All he wanted to do was grieve. He muttered something into the mouthpiece, gave her a piece of his mind.

  “When you say grieve, Mr. Williams, are you saying she’s dead? Are you saying Tess is dead?”

  Darryl snapped the phone shut and threw it across the room. He walked into the living room and slumped onto the couch, listening to it ring again.

  He didn’t remember how long he sobbed, and then his whole world began to spin before it went black. He heard a faint buzzing like a dragonfly bouncing from stalk to stalk and the trees beyond the patio doors seemed to pulse with life as if something moved in the shadows.

  Snow fell in clumps from dirty gray clouds that scudded in from the west and a far-away howl suggested a coyote nearby. Narrowing his eyes to the snow, he sensed in that moment that his body was not his own and his mind was the only part functioning.

  A whimpering sound made him turn his head toward the chair by the fire. Huddled in her usual place was Kizzy, head thrown back in sleep. He hardly recognized her voice, faint, sweet over the crackling flames in the hearth. He was too afraid to move.

  “Daddy.” It was only a whisper but he heard it all right. His heart throbbed so hard it almost hurt. Same green blazer, same pleated skirt.

  He took his time standing, managing little more than a hobble. He could just make out two braids and a wealth of black hair, and large brown eyes that suddenly blinked to life.

  She was not a blackened corpse as he expected and he wanted to take her in his arms, to feel the grip of her fingers. He began coaxing her with a slight tug. That’s when her head wobbled from her shoulders and fell with a thud to the floor.

  He screamed himself awake, looked around the room to the same old dreary emptiness. It was love he needed, love he craved, but that love was long gone.

  Funny how the dead don’t linger, not even to say goodbye.

  Words replayed in his mind, a mind full of verse and song. They were good words, too. Something about being convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, nor the present, nor the future… What came next?

  Think, Darryl, think! Take a deep breath and recite that old verse, the first verse you ever recited at church.

  He had been nine then, the same age as Kizzy was when she died. A new beginning for him. A violent end for her. He had always believed he had a lion’s heart. Always thought he was a good father.

  Had he been a good father? Had he done enough?

  “I’m sick of crying!” he yelled. “I’m so sick of it. Please God take it away. Please.”

  When God didn’t answer he sank to his knees, both hands gripping the coffee table. His favorite black and white tie slouched over a leather bound bible, a reminder of better days. Days when he had the money to provide. Days when people looked up to him, honked their horns in the parking lot. They even opened doors for him.

  Days when his assistant told him how much she liked that tie. It looked good on him. Always turned a few heads.

  Now they turned their backs, pretended not to hear. Walked down the other side of the street, sidestepping him in the grocery store. He felt like a beggar, an outcast, a thief.

  He prayed in the bad times, asked God to show him what he should do. The only words he heard were those of his pastor.

  Open the book, son. Read. That’s how you’ll know His voice.

  How could he open the book? He couldn’t get past the first page. All that separating of light and darkness, and stuff about trees bearing fruit. Although God saw it was good, when he made man, he saw it was very good.

  Darryl wondered how he was supposed to fit into that scenario. He wasn’t very good. He wasn’t even mediocre. He’d been fired, for crying out loud.

  Although he had gone forth and multiplied.

  And look what happened. His wife was dead. His youngest daughter mutilated. His eldest daughter missing, presumed mutilated, and last but not least, the middle one with a great future ahead of her if the police didn’t find the killer.

  He snatched up that tie and walked into the garage. He had a better use for it now. That’s where the rafters were. Two sturdy beams across the roof, load bearing up to a thousand pounds. It would be brief. He wouldn’t feel a thi
ng. Would he?

  Taking the stepladder from behind the kitchen door, he climbed as far as the top step, hand out against the rafter. It was good and firm, just like he imagined. He put on that tie, that beautiful black and white tie. Carmel’s tie, the one she had given him as a gift. It takes class to know class.

  He wanted those blood-sucking journalists to see what they had done, to realize they had pushed him to an act of such horrifying consequence.

  His life began to replay itself in those final moments, a blur of faces just beyond his reach, floating in the sky. He would be floating with them in less than a minute. At least he hoped it was less than a minute.

  Wait a minute. How long did a good strangling take? He wished he’d looked it up on the Internet first. Only they probably didn’t show purple faces dangling at the end of a rope. And there was probably no such thing as a How To website.

  Unnerved to the point of shaking, he climbed back down.

  THIRTY

  Temeke wiped a trail of spittle from his mouth and stretched. It wasn’t the first time he’d slept in his office, neck stiff and trousers wrinkled. Flakes of snow and sleet began to tap against the window and he wondered if the storm would ever stop.

  It was seven forty-two in the morning according to the clock on the wall. He fired up his computer and found an email from Hackett. The poor old sod was at home with a bad case of the flu. With any luck he’d be off for a month.

  No news on Luis.

  Attached to the email was a video file confirmed to be the voice and face of Patti Lucero. It had been emailed by an anonymous subscriber yesterday whose IP address Stu Andersen described as anywhere between Roswell and outer space.

  The video showed Patti sitting on a couch with a sandwich in her lap and leaning against a pink quilt. The background was different. Not the house on Smith and Walter. Somewhere else.

  The other party’s voice had been edited out so it could not be traced and she appeared to be giggling, as if the question she had been asked was uncomfortable and funny at the same time. Then she went quiet, eyes dazed, head slumping against her chest.

  The picture faded after that.

  Behind her was a small window, blackened by the darkness. There was something on the sill that caught his eye. A small wooden figure of a chubby Santa smoking a pipe like the one in the house on Smith and Walter. When incense was placed inside, the figure blew out smoke rings. It was German if he could bet on it.

  To take away the stench.

  His mind was trapped by the medical report which confirmed the wooden block had traces of Patti’s blood and so did the axe. A luminol sweep had been done of the back yard at the house on Smith street and the concrete apron lit up like a beacon. Cause of death was manual strangulation which seemed almost redundant in Temeke’s opinion. But what caught his eye was the pink quilt.

  Just as Knife Wing had said.

  Patti had been drugged and killed at the house and the rest of her might well be lying behind a boulder. A flicker of heat arced through his body as he expounded Knife Wing’s theory in his head.

  I saw a dead body wrapped in a pink quilt. Behind a boulder… beneath Turtle Rock.

  Temeke looked at his watch to see he had just enough time to get a burrito before ferreting about in the foothills. Grabbing his leather jacket, he raced out into the corridor and ran down the stairs.

  “Sir? Where you going?”

  “Oh, there you are, Marl,” he said. “I was just going out for a smoke.”

  “I’m coming,” she shouted, sprinting down the stairs and dragging a padded ski jacket. Her woolen scarf was already wrapped around her neck, pockets spilling with latex gloves. She knew where he was going.

  “You feeling better,” he said as they headed for the door.

  “Need some fresh air.”

  “Might not be that fresh where we’re going.”

  “Anything’s fresher than a can of coughing cops.”

  He was inclined to agree. The office was beginning to fill with crumpled tissues, all stinking of snot.

  They reached the upper parking lot of the Peak Tram at eight-thirty in the morning and there was a tram waiting at the gate already filling with passengers.

  Temeke stuffed a few evidence bags in his jacket pocket and grabbed two bottles of water.

  “Vicks?” he said, throwing her a small container and smiling as he did it. “Wrap that scarf round your nose,” he warned.

  They walked beneath the tram cables, showing their badges to an official before striding off into the foothills. It was hard work steaming up a narrow path between boulders and sagebrush. Clumps of snow nested between grass stems and, occasionally, the wind would blow a spray into the air.

  “Ever been up in one of those?” Malin said, surveying the tram as it sailed over a ridge.

  “Not bloody likely.”

  “Don’t like heights, do you?”

  “Don’t like nosy parkers much either. Get a move on.”

  The first tower rose up out of the sand, a blue painted frame that held the cables between the terminals. There was no disturbed soil beneath it, except the unmistakable tracks of bear and fox pressed into the sand and snow. Mountain lion were scarce and were rarely seen so close to the city limits.

  As Temeke stared at the scene, he saw something flapping in the wind like a tiny pennant. He took the pen out of his jacket pocket and stabbed at a soiled wipe that had hooked itself to a clump of grass. He lifted it up to the sun, hoping there were traces of the killer somewhere deep down in the weave of that fabric. A distant memory began to crank to life in his mind, playing out like a sequel to the Kizzy Williams murder.

  The field investigators had combed a two mile stretch of the trails and forest, and found twenty-eight bloodstained wipes, evidence that someone had tried to remove all essence of Kizzy from his skin. They ran the DNA evidence against the CODIS database and found no match.

  “I know you’re here,” Temeke whispered under his breath as he bagged the wipe. The killing field was now more widespread and frequent.

  He kept seeing Kizzy’s wholesome face staring back at him, in his dreams, in his thoughts. He never told anyone, never took her picture down from beside his desk. There was Patti with her long brown hair and pale blue eyes, and Mikaela May with her heart-shaped face and dimples. They were all there on his wall. All in his heart.

  He no longer cared when Malin signaled for lunch. He shook his head and crouched amongst the boulders, searching, sniffing. For four more long hours.

  A tram car trundled above him, inquisitive faces pressed against the glass. Temeke watched it disappear behind a steep knoll where a turtle-shaped boulder jutted out against a pale blue sky. He almost ran toward it, hearing the crunch of gravel under Malin’s feet behind him. Crouching in the dirt, he felt a mix of sand and wet snow between his fingers. He must have searched for two more hours before he found a shard of denim stained with blood.

  He snapped on a pair of latex gloves before bagging the item and waving it at Malin. The last flush of sunlight would soon give way to dusk, leaving behind a hazy moon to light up the deep tones of a New Mexico sky.

  “Higher,” he shouted, nodding at the path.

  The chill was internal, a sense there was something out there, a dark shadow flitting about in the trees. If a bear was as inquisitive as the tourists, he’d have a problem.

  He glanced at where the path curled upwards around a steep knoll, coming to a head at the foot of a boulder and a piñon sapling. Listening to a whisper of wind from the crevices above, his forehead began to prickle with sweat and his hands were damp. Surely, there were no bears up there. He would have seen one by now.

  In spite of the feeling that continued to plague him, he tried to stop his ragged breathing and his pounding heart. There was a sour taste in his mouth. Something had spooked him.

  “She was dragged up there,” he heard Malin say, teeth chattering in the night air. “There’s broken twigs and stuff. We’re clos
e. She’s got to be here somewhere.”

  The higher they went, Temeke began to see more broken branches, as if something had been hauled at least fifteen feet to a natural gulley bristling with stickers.

  “… Temeke…”

  The whisper was irrefutably clear.

  “… left a little…”

  Something about the voice was otherworldly, familiar.

  “… there now…”

  He turned to the sound, aware of a sensation like a thousand insects trailing down his spine. He watched Malin poking around in the dirt, occasionally stopping to look up at the mountain and back at the horizon. Not like she had a masculine voice. Nor was she prone to whispering.

  It was his voice and he knew it.

  He turned his collar up against the damp chill and picked his way through waist-high sage flowering on each side of the path. What he did find odd was a downy drift along the path, some of which stuck to his lips and tasted of cotton. The worst of it was the stench, strong now as they climbed around the knoll.

  “Blimey, Malin, what’s that stink,” he said, sniffing what seemed like the sour breath of the city’s worst dumpsters. “Not you, I hope.”

  “This way, sir.” Malin led him off the path, trampling through a tangle of weeds that clung to his calves.

  Winding his scarf around his face and nose, Temeke began to take shorter breaths. It was warmer that way, only he’d be hard pressed to fit a smoke through thick layers of wool. Night was creeping across the mesa now and above it was a sky stippled with stars. To the east a large orange moon lounged above the Sandias and to the west a single slash of sunlight, bloody like a hunter’s blade cleaving the sky from the desert.

  He turned on his flashlight, training the beam on the hard-packed earth, looking for anything that might be peaking between tufts of sagebrush. It amazed him how strong that smell was, even over the fresh air. From here it reminded him of a teenager’s bedsit, sickly and stale.

  Temeke snapped his fingers when he saw the bundle tied with rope and partially covered with a pink quilt. It was propped up against a boulder, a torso of a young girl, young he assumed by the angel charm bracelet wrapped around the wrist. He prodded it with a foot.