The 2nd Cycle of the Darc Murders Omnibus (the acclaimed series from #1 Police Procedural and Hard Boiled authors Carolyn McCray and Ben Hopkin)

by Carolyn McCray

  Okay, that wasn’t entirely accurate. Ever since Darc had found out that Maggie and Trey were pregnant, it seemed as if his emotional disconnect had grown, and even in moments gotten downright aggressive.

  Just as Mala didn’t have to read Darc’s expressions to know that he hadn’t really enjoyed the Family Fun Center… he was autistic, for crying out loud… she didn’t have to hear it from the detective’s lips to know that he was troubled by the new development in Trey’s life. Trey’s life with Darc’s ex-wife.

  That was a situation that had been worked through enough that Mala was confident it wouldn’t cause major issues for the two partners, but any therapist worth their salt knew that just because you’ve worked something through, it doesn’t mean it will never crop up again. And it seemed to be doing so right now in a significant way.

  Janey rushed up to Mala and Maggie, grinning as she held out the hand that wasn’t holding her bear for more tokens. Mala smiled back and gave her the last of the coins that were in the little plastic cups they’d been given when they’d ordered their pizza earlier that evening.

  “That’s it for tokens. Finish those up, and then it’ll be time to go.”

  Janey nodded and ran off to join the two friends she’d made. How she’d managed to do that without speaking a word to them was beyond Mala. And yet Janey seemed to be able to do so with little to no effort.

  Maybe it was just part of being a child at that age. Things were simple. If you were within a year or two of each other and happened to like the same kinds of toys, that was all that was required.

  Shaking her head, Mala had to acknowledge that couldn’t be the full explanation, either. Janey eschewed pretty much every stereotypical toy for a girl her age that Mala had tried to throw at her. It had started as a way to help normalize and stabilize Janey’s situation. Give her a doll to take her mind off her horrific circumstances and to help her feel more like other girls her age.

  But when Janey ignored everything Mala tried, it had become a bit of an experiment, one to assess Janey’s mental and emotional state. Now it had progressed to what Mala would almost call a game. A challenge for her as an adoptive mother.

  Stuffed animals were tossed into the closet without the smallest indicator of remorse. Not a huge shock, considering how attached to her bear Janey was, but still an interesting reaction.

  Dolls were a non-starter. Janey would barely look at them. Was that an indicator of a reluctance to play parent, the way most girls her age would?

  Looking at Janey’s background, that also wasn’t too much of a surprise. Janey’s parents had been killed by a madman right before her eyes. While Mala’s foster daughter never reacted with aversion when Mala discussed the girl’s parents with her, a constant reminder of their absence might not be all that welcome.

  Other toys and items… video games, shoes, dresses… also received lackluster responses. Until Mala brought home a board game, of all things. Clue, to be precise.

  That, Janey had loved. They played it at least three times a week, and there had been days when the girl had demanded that they play five games in a row.

  The game had to do with honing her detective skills, Mala had realized. Which was why Janey had probably enjoyed the laser tag so much. Even the games she was playing here with her newfound friends seemed to be an indicator of her interests.

  The videogames she sought out all seemed to be either first-person shooters or include some kind of team mission gameplay. All in furtherance of Janey’s goal of being more like Darc.

  “You going to eat that?” Maggie asked, intruding on Mala’s thoughts as the pregnant woman pointed with a spoon at Mala’s remaining ice cream. Mala shook her head, waving for Maggie to go ahead.

  “Please. Have all you want. I’m feeling a bit nauseated.”

  The food hadn’t been all that appetizing. Whether that was a product of the sub-par menu, the noisy environment or the animatronic band that surged to life and played at random intervals, Mala couldn’t say for certain.

  Maggie had decided to stick around for a bit, especially once Mala had ordered sundaes for the table. Is this what pregnancy looked like? Mala had never had many girlfriends in her life, so hadn’t been up close and personal with women during this time of their lives. She had no idea if this was typical behavior or not.

  “I know,” Maggie said after a moment, her shoulders sagging. “I’m disgusting.”

  “No, that’s not it at--”

  “It’s true,” she continued, cutting Mala off. “I’m not myself. I scream at Trey for nothing. Well, maybe not nothing, but things that aren’t in his control.”

  “I understand that’s normal,” Mala responded, hoping to comfort Maggie.

  The relationship here was a complicated one, with the history Darc and Trey shared, but Mala liked Maggie. She was smart, strong, capable.

  Well, most of the time, anyway.

  “Nothing’s normal. I almost ripped his head off yesterday because he made me bacon.” Maggie’s forehead was resting on the table, and her voice floated up from between her arms that were wrapped around her head.

  “You don’t like bacon?”

  “I love bacon. But right now I can’t stand the smell of it, and somehow I thought he should know that.” Maggie sounded almost like she was on the verge of tears.

  Mala reached over and patted her arm, trying not to appear as awkward as she was feeling right now. It had always been part of her problem growing up. She was so worried about how she was coming across to others that she would end up retreating back behind her intelligence and competence.

  In other words, she came across as cold and condescending to anyone on the receiving end. It hadn’t gone all that well for her in high school. Being the only East Indian had only exacerbated the situation.

  Maggie lifted herself up and looked over at Mala with eyes that were red and swollen. Wrapping her arms around Mala, Maggie leaned in to wrap her in a huge hug.

  “Thanks for being such a good listener, Mala. I really appreciate it.”

  Mala patted Maggie’s back this time, staying in the embrace without any idea if she was doing it correctly. From the time she’d come out of her doctorate program, Mala had always been one of the top therapists in her field. Patients and parents of patients alike raved about her empathy and ease in the room. So why on earth was it so difficult for her to connect in real life?

  Not with everyone, she realized. Only with women.

  She’d had no issues connecting with Trey. Not even with Darc, in spite of his autism. She’d managed to make it through one social disaster after another with the tall detective. But put her in an amusement center with a hormonal woman, and Mala was doing all she could to keep from gnawing off her own arm to get out of the trap.

  Finally, Maggie seemed to calm down a bit, and Mala pulled away. There was an almost palpable sense of relief as she did so. What was wrong with her?

  “Okay, spill,” Maggie said as she leaned back. “What’s wrong?

  “What? I don’t…” Mala began, but then saw the look on Maggie’s face. She wasn’t fooled for a second. “I just… I haven’t had many girlfriends.”

  Maggie’s expression changed, turning to something that appeared to be understanding. “So, this is pretty much torture for you.”

  “No. It really isn’t. I just feel like I’m doing it all wrong.”

  Nodding, Maggie scooted in closer and whispered to her. “That’s pretty much everybody. We all think we’re doing it wrong.”

  That couldn’t be true. Maggie was so personable. Well, there were moments where she got a little snippy, late at night when Trey and Darc had some case going on that was interfering with her life. But that was understandable.

  She must have seen something in Mala’s face, as she shook her head. “Time for us to spend more time together. I need to get out of the house, and you need space to de-stress. From Janey and Darc both. We’ll go out to lunch, do some shopping.”

  Mal
a realized how good that sounded. Out of her comfort zone, certainly, but in a good way. She nodded, and Maggie gave her a grin.

  Janey rushed by with her friends, waving at them both before rushing off to the maze of tubes that was on the other side of the complex. She seemed to be having a blast.

  Maggie laughed, and Mala joined in. They were having a good time together.

  It looked like Mala had made a friend here tonight as well.

  * * *

  Janey ran around the corner, diving into the plastic tube that led into the maze. Her new friends, Cody and Jessalyn, were jabbering about how many tickets they’d earned and what they were going to get with them.

  Popeye said something smug about how none of the prizes were any good anyway, but Janey told him to hush. That bear hated it when she played with other kids. He got jealous.

  He stuck his tongue out at her and said that kids just smelled bad and that’s why. But that didn’t make any sense. If he didn’t like the way kids smelled then he wouldn’t like Janey either. That shut him up.

  Playing at the Family Fun Center had been fun enough, even though she’d mostly come because she thought that Mala needed to get out of the apartment. Sometimes grown-ups acted so weird. It was like she thought that she had to be around Janey all the time. But Janey had Popeye. Mala didn’t really have anybody.

  Well, she had Darc, but that wasn’t really the same. It didn’t matter how much Janey loved Darc, she knew he wasn’t very good at talking to people. That’s why Darc and Janey got along so well. They could talk to each other without really talking.

  Popeye snorted and said that didn’t make any sense at all.

  He was kind of right, but then again he had no idea what he was saying. But she just ignored him this time. Every once in a while, Popeye needed to know that he wasn’t the most important bear on the planet.

  But then, because she was ignoring him, Popeye started making fun of Jessalyn’s lisp and Janey told him that she’d throw him into the ball pit and leave him there if he didn’t stop. He didn’t say much after that.

  Janey was having fun, even though that wasn’t why she’d come here tonight. Her new friends were silly, but it was fun to listen to them yelling back and forth, and they didn’t make Janey feel dumb for not talking. But there was something else happening.

  Underneath all of the good stuff, Janey was feeling something that she didn’t understand. When she wasn’t playing or listening to her friends or talking to Popeye, she would start to feel strange. Her heart would beat fast and the walls would feel like they were moving in and out and she would feel like she wanted to cry.

  Maybe that was another reason she had wanted to come here tonight.

  Popeye said that was dumb and that she was a crybaby, but Janey was upset enough that she didn’t even answer him back.

  When she’d seen Darc and Trey leave, she’d known they were going out on a case. And there were other things about it that she knew from the traces of light that sometimes showed up inside her eyelids. She couldn’t explain why, but she was scared.

  Mala would protect her. Trey and Maggie would protect her. And Darc. Darc was the golden badge that would send away the bad things in the night.

  But sometimes when Janey would draw the gold badges lately, she would still be scared.

  That was it. She was scared.

  She wasn’t sure why she was, but she was. And then there was another part of her that whispered things to her. And what it was whispering to her now was that she did know why she was frightened.

  And that she should be.

  CHAPTER 2

  “This is just freaky.”

  Trey stared down at the carcass of the bull that the ME had pointed out to them as soon as he and Darc had stepped onto the scene. Dr. Hutchinson might be a prickly pear, but the guy knew where to point, at least.

  It was late enough in the evening that only the faintest of glows appeared on the horizon, and most of the illumination was coming from a bunch of lamps that had been connected to a big rechargeable battery. No more generators for the Seattle P.D. They were going green.

  Crime scene guys were swarming around, doing what they always did, except in the place of where there was usually some vic, there was the carcass of a big old cow. Trey glanced in between its legs. Okay. Not a cow. A big old bull.

  This wasn’t just any carcass, however. The bull had been killed with one blow delivered right in between the eyes. A perfect killing shot.

  That either indicated a lot of luck, or some level of skill and knowledge. And one of those cow-killing thingamabobs that shot a bolt into the brain of the poor animal.

  A tech that Trey didn’t recognize stomped over toward them. The man was huge. Like six foot five or six, it looked like, and heavy like a football linebacker. He gave Trey a lopsided smile as he stuck out a hand that looked like it was the size of a dinner plate.

  “Jeff Fischer,” he introduced himself. “Just came on the crew.” Trey felt his hand get swallowed up inside the man’s fist like it was some kind of black hole.

  “Um. Hey. Detective Keane,” he answered.

  “Nice to meet you.” The C.S.U. tech waved to the field around them. “From what we can tell from the surroundings, it looks like the bull was in motion when the blow was delivered.”

  So that killing move was even more of a long shot. Luck didn’t usually shine quite that brightly on anyone, as far as Trey’d been able to observe. And certainly there wasn’t much shining happening at all during this time of year in Washington, where there was cloud cover enough to keep things nice and moody even in the middle of summer.

  Fall and winter? Not even a glimmer, most of the time.

  “There are also some… anomalies… out in the alfalfa field to the west of this one,” Dr. Hutchinson said, stepping back into the conversation, but Trey’s attention was only half on what the doc was saying. Most of it was riveted on the form in front of him.

  But the way the beast had been killed wasn’t the strangest thing about this. Trey glanced down at the cow’s middle again. Once more the bile rose up in his throat. You’d think that after this long working the freak-a-deek cases with Darc, there wouldn’t be much that would faze him.

  But here was evidence to the contrary.

  The entire mid area of the bull had been opened up, and intestines were everywhere. Blood soaked into the already wet ground around the animal, making the mud appear like some kind of reddish-black paste. And the smell was terrible.

  Darc was busy doing his savant-trance-thing, so of course Trey had taken the unenviable position of having to be the one that Dr. Hutchinson interacted with. Did this guy have any real friends anywhere? Trey strained his mind trying to picture it for a minute, but couldn’t for the life of him form an image of what that would look like.

  As he tried in vain to kick-start his imagination, the words Dr. Hutchinson had spoken filtered into his awareness. “Did you say there was something weird out in the field?”

  The M.E. coughed into his hand, almost seeming like he was avoiding Trey’s question, but the new crime tech guy… Jeff… perked right up. He moved in closer to speak to Trey in hushed tones.

  “They look like crop--”

  Dr. Hutchinson pointed down at the bull on the ground and started speaking, cutting off whatever it was the new guy was saying. Trey tried to fix it in his head that he wanted to get Jeff alone later. Whatever he was saying seemed important to him. And interesting.

  “I haven’t had long to study this, but there is something… off… about the viscera here,” the M.E. was saying, just as Darc stepped out of his coma or stupor or whatever you wanted to call it.

  “The internal organs are misplaced and too many,” Darc intoned. “Also, the small intestines are too short for this animal’s size.”

  “That’s what was so strange about it,” Hutchinson said, his expression turning sour. The guy really didn’t like to be shown up by anyone, but he hated getting schooled by
Darc the most.

  “The intestines are shorter, but they also seem to be… stitched together,” the doctor murmured, pointing to the squiggly things as if he had been the first one to point it out. “And of course, the stomach couldn’t possibly belong to anything bovine.”

  “Of course,” Trey echoed, trying to keep any sarcasm out of his tone. Hutchinson might hate getting called out by Darc, but he would tolerate no mockery. Especially not from someone like Trey.

  “There’s more,” the doctor breathed, sticking his nose even closer to the bloody mess than before. Didn’t that smell bother him? Hutchinson continued his examination, using a pen to poke some of the slimy guts to the side. Trey pushed down a wave of rising nausea.

  “I think there are three different stomachs in here,” the doctor murmured. “Not the four we might expect from a cow. And they’re oddly shaped. Not bovine.”

  Then Trey realized what both these men were saying. “Wait. You… They…” He cleared his throat and began again. “If these… whatchamacallits… aren’t from the cow, then where are they from?”

  There was a cow here, with the insides of another animal stuck inside of it? This was more than just freaky. This, combined with whatever was happening out in the other field…

  This was downright… awesome.

  This case could be what Trey’d been looking for since he was five. A sense of anticipation caused his gut to tighten up, making him want to either throw up or go lift weights or something. That was weird. Trey couldn’t remember the last time he’d had the urge to work out. This was turning out to be one amazing case.

  Darc again went into that slack-jawed, googly-eyed state, then moments later started walking away from the crime scene, a flashlight appearing in his hands. It took a minute for Trey to clue in to what was happening, but he knew his partner well enough to recognize that the bald man had figured something out.

  He scurried off after the detective, waving at Jeff and the M.E. to stay where they were. Like Hutchinson would ever wander off into a mist-filled field at night. The thought was laughable.