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

In spite of the fact that every part of him wanted to reject the information his eyes were feeding his brain, Trey had to admit that there was no mistake. He knew the face of the woman who was depicted there on the young man’s chest.

  It was Mala.

  CHAPTER 7

  The silver flashed and buzzed, demanding attention.

  Darc shut it down, the internal action brutal. Tendrils of yellow logic raced to the area where the silver link vibrated with its white light, then pried apart the link and ripped it to shreds. No mourning occurred, no grief expressed itself at the passing of this parasite. An infection had been identified and destroyed, nothing more, nothing less.

  No longer would Darc allow this internal process to continue unchecked. The emotional sensitivities that had appeared as such a boon had proven to be unstable, dangerous. The uneasiness displayed by the tendrils of color at the appearance of the silver bands showed itself to be fully founded in fact.

  Minutes before his expertise had been required at a crime scene that could be the key to unlocking Carly’s disappearance, Darc had lost all semblance of control. Not only had the experience rendered him weak, he had experienced pain on a level that was unacceptable.

  The symbols that glowed in the light mirrored the radiance of the bands of logic within his mind, merging and linking together in a dance that resulted in progress. That was the order of things. Any other arrangement provided only opportunities for failure.

  Trey had been brought in to homicide as a buffer. An emotional link to the outside world that allowed Darc to operate at such a high level. The silver bands were unnecessary, extraneous appendages. An emotional appendix.

  Noise from the exterior world filtered through the threads of light, perceived and interpreted without disrupting the delicate dance of internal logic. The dance was the all. Nothing else mattered. Without the balance of logic, the prioritizing of fact, all dissolved into chaos.

  And Darc would end up sobbing helpless in Mala’s arms once more.

  But that noise is Mala speaking to you, came the solitary voice of a silver-colored band that had heretofore been overlooked. She is important. Yellow sentinels dispatched themselves to eliminate the threat, while Darc continued his scrutiny of the crime scene.

  “Is he even hearing me?” Mala asked Trey. The tendrils of light surrounded the sounds, breaking them down into their component parts. This conversation did not cross the threshold of vital importance that would demand Darc’s immediate action.

  “Who knows what’s going on in there,” came the response. “For all we know, he’s thinking about baseball.”

  “Could this be a response to… to what happened earlier?”

  Trey let out a sigh. “Maybe. But this is just Darc, you know?”

  “Is that true?” she asked, her tone sounding constricted in some strange way. “Over the past while, he’s been…” Her voice trailed off, seemingly choked by that strange tightness.

  Earlier that day, the tone would have been interpreted by silver bands working in concert with streams of colored lights. But now all was unbroken logic. The emotional grey landscape had returned, unassailable, unknowable… a remote and desert locale.

  “I don’t have any answers for you,” Trey answered. “I mean, this is the guy I’ve been partners with for years now. That guy right there. The one back in the car? I have no idea who that is.”

  There was a throb of something inside of Darc in response to the dim echoes of the conversation that filtered down to him from the webwork of colored pathways. A hidden pulse of silver that smacked of sadness and despair.

  Emotions.

  Irrelevant. All of them. What remained was the work in front of him.

  A pattern began to emerge. A reassembling of symbols and patterns, spiraling about one another, lining up in a row.

  The information crystalized.

  It was time to move.

  * * *

  “Out of the way!”

  It felt good to say those words.

  Trey saw the tightening of Darc’s jaw, the clenching of his hand, the tilting of his head. All telltale signs that meant one thing.

  Clear a pathway.

  Dr. Kelly, who was still new to the team, wasn’t quite fast enough. Darc sprang up from his crouched stance by the body and made a beeline for the exit. The M.E. happened to be standing along that route.

  The doctor was now lying facedown in the orchestra pit.

  On his way out, Darc scooped up the black light, extinguishing the glowing patterns there in the room as he flipped the power switch. What was that about? Didn’t matter. Darc was on the move.

  “Come on, come on, come on!” Trey said, rushing after Darc. “We can’t lose him when he gets like this!”

  They were back. Darc and Trey. Trey and Darc. The partnership that cleared cases like they were crates of candy on Halloween. Nothing could stop them when they were on fire.

  Well, when Darc was on fire, that was.

  A small voice in the back of Trey’s mind whispered that this wasn’t the best thing for Darc, but Trey pushed it aside. There was a girl out there who needed them. That was the important fact to keep in mind here. They could sort out all the feels later on.

  Veering off to the side, Darc pushed open a side exit door that led out into an alleyway. There appeared to be neither rhyme nor reason to his track, although it was always the shortest distance between the two points. Of course it was. This was Darc they were talking about.

  Even the apparent detour to get to the side door made sense. There had been no clear path to this exit. Only through the lobby was it accessible.

  “Where could he be headed?” Mala asked, running to keep up.

  “I don’t know,” Trey shot back. “I never know.”

  They raced around a corner behind Darc, doing what they could to narrow the gap, without much success. A run down industrial building stood just to their right, boards crossed over the windows. Before Trey could blink, Darc had disappeared inside a door that looked for all the world like it was chained shut.

  But as Trey and Mala arrived at the entrance, it became clear that the chain was only there for show. It connected to nothing, allowing easy access to a building that should have been off limits.

  The ammonia-laced scent of urine hit Trey’s nostrils as he entered, the stench powerful enough to make him gag. Just once, he’d like to go into a run down space and smell nothing but the scent of mold and decay. Would that be so wrong?

  Trey caught a glimpse of Darc’s bald head, just as it vanished down a flight of stairs. Lungs burning, legs dead logs, he rushed after his companion, hearing Mala’s labored breathing at his side.

  Good to know he wasn’t the only one that had trouble keeping up with Darc.

  Bracing himself for the smell that was sure only to grow worse as they descended, Trey perched at the top of the staircase, peering down into the darkened space below. Here, the light that filtered through the dirty, mostly obscured window panes grew less frequent. Night reigned supreme here below.

  As he ran down the steps, doing what he could to keep his balance, Trey was surprised to find that the scents grew more pleasant as he descended. How was that possible? Things always got worse the farther down you went, didn’t they? That’s how urban decay worked, as far as Trey knew.

  But the lightening of the smells continued, getting to the point where he thought he could pick out wafts of something downright pleasing. Was that some kind of perfume? Incense? Trey was sure he had smelled it before.

  Then they burst into an underground space that stretched out before them, and Trey came to an abrupt stop. This couldn’t exist down here. It just couldn’t.

  Scented candles.

  That’s what he’d been smelling.

  Maggie loved scented candles, had lit them up all the time in their old place. Darc didn’t seem to share her delight in the strong scents, so she hadn’t used them since they’d moved in with her ex-husband.

  And h
ere, they were burning by the hundreds.

  Everywhere he looked, there was a candle, adding up to illuminate the entire room. A room that was filled with opulence.

  Rugs, pillows, tables, furniture… all of what appeared to be the highest quality. Bookshelves filled to overflowing with books old and new. And makeshift beds created from larger pillows scattered about the floor, covered in sumptuous bedspreads.

  What was this?

  But Darc hadn’t stopped. After arriving in the space, he’d walked straight to the middle and turned on the battery-powered black light he had taken that had been used back at the crime scene.

  The entire room was bathed in phosphorescence.

  Trey cringed, wanting to creep back out of the room. According to the black light, there was no safe place to touch. Anywhere.

  How many people doing how many ungodly acts had this one room contained? From all appearances, this place had contained an ocean of seminal and vaginal fluids… amongst possible others.

  Trey shuddered.

  Okay, it might not be that much different than Trey’s college dorm room, to be fair. But at least most of that had been his. This was just… unsanitary.

  Mala’s reaction surprised Trey. Where his had been just this side of freak out, good old Dr. Charan’s response had been one small step down from Darc’s. Clinical, focused, direct.

  And there, in the middle of all of the glowing-ness, was an area that seemed to have been kept mostly pristine. A place of dark amidst the glowing evidence of perversion, all centered around a table.

  Trey tried not to sprint as he headed for the semen-free area. After stepping inside the dome of cleanliness, he looked around.

  On that table rested tomes and parchments. Some of them appeared to be quite old. And… surprise, surprise… the ancient texts were covered in depictions of every kind of sexual act imaginable.

  Trey’s mind blanked out as he studied some of what was there.

  Strange… he would have thought that something like this would be a real turn-on. But his reaction turned in another direction. There was something so extreme about all of this. Like the healthy desire for intimacy had been corrupted in a desperate, clutching search for pleasure above all else.

  Seeing the depictions, a memory came to Trey. Maggie and he had gone out to dinner. Afterward, they came back to her old apartment… the one that had been destroyed in the explosion… and started to get busy.

  Maybe it had been the third glass of wine, maybe he’d been under extra stress at work, but Trey hadn’t been able to… rouse himself. He’d felt embarrassed, ashamed. On another level, he hadn’t wanted Maggie to think that it had something to do with her.

  But her reaction had surprised him. After laughing the incident off as something that happened all the time, Maggie had taken Trey in her arms and they’d held each other.

  Most of the time, there wasn’t a whole lot of touching between the two of them when it was time for sleep. Neither one enjoyed excessive togetherness during the night. But that evening, they’d fallen asleep wrapped up together, as close as they’d ever been.

  And in that moment, Trey had known that his heart was forever hers.

  The peace and love that had filled his heart for that amazing woman might have waxed and waned from time to time since then. Hard to maintain that same rush of warmth when you were getting accused of purposefully replacing the toilet paper roll in such a way that it would dispense underhand instead of overhand. How was that even a thing? But somewhere deep in his soul, Trey could feel that warmth still there.

  That warmth existed in direct opposition to what these tomes portrayed.

  And then, a gasp from Mala brought Trey back to the present moment. Darc swept the entire priceless collection of erotica from the top of the table onto the ground.

  Even with his negative reaction to the materials, Trey understood Mala’s response. These articles were ancient, precious. These old books and parchments demanded more respect that what Darc gave them right now, even if they were covered in more perversions that you could find in an adult bookstore.

  Trey continued thinking that until he saw what his partner had uncovered.

  It was a diagram that they’d seen before, but never with this kind of phosphorescence. A circle similar to the Vitruvian Man. The pentagram or pentacle or whatever the hell it was called.

  But this one contained a man and woman intertwined.

  Face to face they stood, engaged in an unholy act. Two heads pressed together, with arms and legs connected to the point that they couldn’t be discerned from one another without a lot of study.

  The man’s face turned away from them, but the woman peered out from the picture, her face contorted in agony or ecstasy. And once more, the face, while roughly drawn, was clearly Mala’s.

  The man was just as clearly not Darc.

  Trey’s partner studied the depiction with an intensity that he hadn’t demonstrated in a long time. A raw quality suffused his face that spoke of deep inner turmoil covered by a mask of indifference. Trey felt that he was witness to a battle that had been building up since the time Darc first met Mala and Janey.

  It could all be traced back to that moment.

  Janey had opened Darc up in a way that no one else could. And Mala had built upon that newfound vulnerability, accepting the man and his oddities in a manner Trey had never seen.

  But from that point on, the bald detective had been a ticking time bomb. Looking back, the progression shone with clarity. Darc’s deductive acumen could not exist in the face of that kind of emotional connection.

  In order to become human, the superhero had to relinquish his powers.

  Trey could feel a prickling in the backs of his eyes. An emotion that struggled to the surface. Seattle needed this man, but in order to rise to that call, Darc had to become less human.

  It wasn’t fair.

  Mala placed a hand on Darc’s arm. For all the reaction he showed, she might as well have been touching a statue. After a long moment, her hand fell away.

  She knew.

  There were many words Trey could use to describe Dr. Mala Charan. Idiot didn’t make the list. She knew Darc as well or better than anyone other than Trey.

  Mala could see what was happening.

  Her face working, she stepped away from the detective, giving him the space he needed to complete his task. Not that he seemed to need it. Darc’s expression hadn’t changed since he’d cleared the tabletop.

  Trey felt like they were held in an eternal moment. The tension in the room seemed unbearable, but movement might generate complete collapse. And the aftermath of that destruction could tear their group apart at the seams.

  Opening his mouth to speak, Trey realized he had nothing to say. What could he do? As always, Trey remained the class clown, the joker, the idiot. There were no words of wisdom he could impart to these intellectual giants. Why should he even try?

  He looked back and forth between his two friends, each precious to him in their own right. No solution presented itself. No new information to break the stalemate that no one would acknowledge.

  Then, just when it felt that something had to give, all hell broke loose.

  * * *

  Janey knew that she needed to get away from Lula. Sooner rather than later.

  But it was hard. She had awesome snacks.

  Even Popeye had been impressed, and that didn’t happen very often. In fact, Janey couldn’t remember the last time that Popeye had said anything positive at all.

  He tolerated Darc, thought Trey was dumb, and pretended to hate Mala. Of course, that was usually right after she’d thrown him in the washing machine. And that wasn’t really a fair time to ask him anything.

  Of course, that might have just been the berries. Lula had not only found one or two, she’d uncovered a mountain of them. Blueberries, strawberries and blackberries, all covered in heavy whipped cream.

  Popeye hadn’t known what to do with himself. Janey had
been forced to help him out. And those berries had been good.

  Lula had mixed them with sugar and orange juice and a little bit of mint, so that they made this yummy sweet juice that blended with the whipped cream. It was so good Janey had thought her head would explode.

  In a good way.

  But now that her tummy was full, Janey started to feel guilty.

  There were bad things happening out there. And Richard and the judge were two of them that nobody knew about but Janey.

  Darc and Trey were busy solving the case they were working on. And Mala probably was too, when she wasn’t worrying about where Janey was.

  That was the part that was the hardest. Janey wanted to let her know that she was okay. But if she did that, people would find out where she was.

  And the lines in her head told her that was a terrible idea. Like, the worst ever.

  She trusted those lines almost as much as she trusted Darc and Mala and Trey and Maggie. Almost. And if the lines had been telling her that she couldn’t rely on those four, she would have stopped listening a long time ago.

  But that wasn’t what they were saying.

  People were watching. Bad people. People that knew lots of other people who would help without knowing they were doing something wrong.

  “Well, whatever you’ve got going on in your head must be a real doozy,” Lula said as she sank down into a chair with a groan. “Wish you could tell me about it.”

  Janey shrugged.

  “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I think you not talking is about the best thing I’ve not heard in a long time. I always said that children should be seen but silent.”

  Lula wasn’t being serious. The lines said so. Janey wrinkled her face up and stuck out her tongue.

  Holding her chest with her hand, Lula gasped in what looked like pretend shock. “You would talk to an old woman that way? Shameless!”

  Janey giggled.

  “All right,” she grunted. “I’m not supposed to call the police. I can’t call your mother. And I can’t let you wander around Seattle all by yourself. So…”

  Cringing, Janey waited for her to finish her thought. This was where everything would turn bad. Lula would turn her over to the cops, or worse, her social worker.