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

  But that reaction was momentary. With only a flicker of his glance at Mala, Janey and Lula, Darc began scanning the room. Mala had seen that intense focus enough times to know what was happening.

  “Darc, I’ve already searched…” she began, but then stopped.

  This was Darc. Of course he was going to conduct his own search. And her trying to stop him was not only futile, it was downright asinine.

  Trey showed up at the door, panting. “Hey,” he said, then did a double take… then a triple one… as he saw both Mala and Janey. “Hey!” he shouted, his tone excited. After a second his face crumpled into confusion. “Oh. Hey. Um. Is this… okay?”

  Mala shook her head, turning back to watch Darc. His gaze had gone distant, and she knew he was tracking information in his head in a way that no one else could.

  Without warning, he strode to the light switch and flipped it down, plunging the room into darkness. Trey’s voice burst into the sudden black stillness.

  “Dude! A little warning…”

  But the lack of illumination didn’t remain for long. In its place, a glow sprang up from the walls, the floor and the desk in front of them.

  Darc held a flashlight with a black light bulb in it, shining the instrument around the room, catching the organic materials that phosphoresced around them. Mala couldn’t help but shudder to realize that this had all been there during her earlier search.

  It appeared she wasn’t the only one with that response. There was a muttering from Trey’s general vicinity. “Whoa. That’s just gross.” The strange lighting made the shorter detective appear almost like photographic negative. Then he seemed to think of something and turned toward his partner. “Wait a minute. Did you steal that light from the CSI guys?”

  Darc didn’t answer, and Mala turned her attention back to what he was doing. The same depictions that they had seen before were there, and Mala had to fight the instinct to go and cover Janey’s eyes.

  Turned out she didn’t need to worry about it. Lula was already there, stepping in between the little girl and the grotesque figures. Janey’s head poked out from behind the woman’s skirt, but Lula worked to keep her from being assaulted by what shone back from every surface in the room.

  Once again, as Mala looked out across the graphic portrayals of lust corrupted even further by violence, she was shocked to see her own face. How was it that she had ended up on this killer’s agenda? Was this an indication that she was the next victim?

  A chill went up her spine as her own face stared back at her with seeming indifference. Her visage seemed to say that it didn’t matter whether or not she fought against this path.

  The outcome was inevitable.

  Then, without warning or even an inhalation of breath to preface his action, Darc sprinted out of the room. For a brief instant, Trey and Mala stared at each other. Then Trey leapt into action, following his partner out of the office. His voice called out to her from the hallway.

  “Get to your car as fast as you can! I’ll call you when I know where we’re going!”

  Mala turned to look at Janey and Lula. The old woman met her gaze and nodded.

  “I’ll take care of her. You chase after your friends.”

  There were so many reasons Mala had not to trust this woman. In terms of boundaries, Lula seemed to have none. She had taken in a young child and then assisted that child in sneaking around a governmental facility. And her reaction to the shocking spectacle of the phosphorescent display earlier had been far to laissez-faire as far as Mala was concerned.

  However, Mala didn’t have much choice. She could either sound the alarm with DSHS and risk losing Janey for good while Darc and Trey were left without her assistance. Or she could give the benefit of the doubt to the woman that, so far, had kept Janey safe. And that Janey herself appeared to trust.

  In the end, it wasn’t much of a choice.

  * * *

  “Dude!” Trey yelled as he swerved around a purple VW Bug. One of the old ones, not the new spaceship-looking kind. “Where are we going?”

  Of course there was no direct answer. Darc stared off ahead of them, no real sense of presence about him at all. His body might be here in the car, but this guy was already at the next crime scene.

  Or wherever it was that Darc was taking them.

  “Right,” the tall detective intoned.

  For a moment, Trey thought Darc was agreeing with some unheard voice, maybe one of the ones in his head. But then he realized.

  Darc meant for him to turn right.

  “Scheisse!” he swore in German, yanking hard on the steering wheel.

  His body crushed up against the side of the door, the handle digging into his side. That was going to leave a mark.

  “A little more warning next time, maybe?” he muttered at his partner. “And a final destination would be nice, seeing as how Mala needs to know.”

  Nothing.

  Of course there was nothing. For the first time since Darc clammed up again, Trey was seeing the real downside. Lately, his partner had been far more forthcoming about little unimportant tidbits of information such as the place where he was leading them.

  Crazy that Trey would want to know something like that.

  As if on cue, Trey’s cell phone rang. Mala.

  “Right,” he said into the phone before even getting out a greeting.

  “What?” her response came through the speakers of the cell. “Right, what? Where am I supposed to go?”

  “Take the freeway south, get off at Rosecrans and then take a right at the yellow warehouse. The ones with the flowers painted all over it.”

  “But what’s the final location?” came the question.

  “You have met your boyfriend, right?” Trey quipped. “Tall, dark, autistic? He’s not much of a sharer, if you’ll take a moment to recollect.”

  “So he’s gone all…?”

  “Yeah. He has.” Trey glanced over at his partner, who was still peering through the front windshield at some point in the far, far distance. “I’ll text you the address once we get there.”

  “Fine, but don’t let him get out of the car until I’m there.”

  “Again, have you met your boyfriend?” The line went dead.

  Either they were going through a dead patch, or Trey had managed to piss Mala off. One way or the other, there was no one on the other end of the line.

  And just in time.

  “Left.”

  Sonofa…

  “Warning, Darc! I need a warning!” Trey yelled as he whipped the wheel as hard as he could to the left.

  He felt his butt sliding over toward his partner, but there was no way he was letting that happen. No freaking way.

  To be honest, this automaton that sat at Trey’s side wasn’t behaving at all like what Darc had before he’d met Mala. This was worse. More shut down, less accessible.

  This was the man that had managed to go through more partners than anyone in the history of the Seattle PD. The man that had forced Captain Merle to promote a total screw up like Trey to homicide, just so Darc had someone to make sure he didn’t kill anybody. Or the other way around.

  “What kind of a weird map are you following, anyway?” he asked, knowing full well that no answer would be forthcoming. So he almost swallowed his own tongue when Darc actually responded.

  “The positions of the bodies engaged in coitus created the points on the x-axis. The gouts of blood pouring from their bodies formed the y. Mala represented the geographic middle of Seattle.”

  Shocking. Trey, for the first time in possibly ever, had not only received an answer from the Man Who Said Too Little over there, but he thought he might even be able to understand what his partner had just said.

  This was one for the history books.

  “Stop.”

  Trey slammed on the brakes and looked around. “Um… Darc? There’s nothing around here.”

  They had passed a warehouse about a half a block back, but right now they were in the m
iddle of construction. Several buildings had been razed and were now just empty lots. Well, empty except for the rubble scattered about everywhere.

  There weren’t even any workers around. A few large bulldozers and other equipment that Trey couldn’t identify signified that demolition units had been there in the past and would more than likely be back at some point in the future. But for the moment, the place felt like a graveyard.

  Graveyard? Really? Why had his mind decided to go there? Sometimes Trey thought his subconscious was a real prick.

  But in spite of the fact that this couldn’t be their destination, Darc opened the passenger door of the Land Rover and stepped out, carrying something in his hand that Trey couldn’t quite identify. Heaving a big sigh, Trey got out of the car as well, watching as his partner strode toward the side of the street.

  There, set into the asphalt, was a manhole. Darc leaned down, wedging the crowbar he was holding under the heavy metal lid. A quick thrust downward, and the cover groaned and shifted to the side, where Darc was able to manhandle it sideways, exposing the emptiness below.

  And throughout the entire process, Trey’s partner didn’t even seem to struggle. Those covers were heavy. Like 250 pounds heavy. And Darc had just removed it without so much as a grunt.

  A much more salient point at this juncture, however, was the fact that the bald detective was peering down into the darkness below. That didn’t bode well for where they were headed.

  “You want me to go down there?” Trey asked, trying to keep his voice from squeaking. “No thank you.”

  The last time he had gone down underneath the Seattle streets, Trey had ended up getting a bloody corpse dropped on his head. From far enough up that it had knocked him out completely.

  Of course, knowing what he did now about what had taken place while he had been unconscious, perhaps that had been a good thing. But getting hit in the head by a body falling from a great height wasn’t the most touchy-feely experience of his life.

  Darc didn’t answer, because, well… it was Darc. Instead, he began climbing down into the hole in the ground.

  Trey stood above in indecision. It wasn’t like Darc had asked him to follow, right? No need to go down into the creepy sewer. Who knew what they would find down there, in addition to mutant alligators and giant rats.

  Then again, it was his partner. Trey groaned and pulled out his phone, dialing Mala’s number. Time to let her know where they were going to be.

  “I don’t have an address,” he said as she picked up, “but you’re never going to guess where we’re headed…”

  * * *

  It hadn’t taken long for Janey to convince Lula that they needed to follow after Mala. All that she had to do was stare up at the older woman with big eyes.

  Less than a minute later, they’d been on their way to Lula’s car.

  It was an old Lincoln Continental that smelled like Lula, the old peppermint gum scent even stronger here than it had been back at the store. Janey had to sit on her feet to be able to see over the dashboard, and Lula herself was just barely able to reach the wheel to be able to drive.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, little missy,” Lula grumbled. “We’re too far behind to be able to follow them, and I have no idea where they’re headed.”

  But Janey did.

  Even though Lula had tried to keep her from seeing all the pictures, the old woman wasn’t very fast, and Janey was sneaky. She’d been able to see everything that was there. And even though there was lots of stuff that she didn’t understand… grown up stuff… the colored bands inside her head had seen the pattern.

  She knew where they needed to go.

  It was scary, because the pictures said they would need to go underground again. Janey’s memories of being underground were a blur of fear and anger.

  Her fear hadn’t been about dying. That wasn’t so frightening. Dying meant seeing Mommy and Daddy again.

  What had scared her was that Darc and Trey would get hurt. That everyone else in the city would die in the big explosion that Father John had tried to set off.

  And the anger was because she had been too small to keep that man from doing any of it. Just because she was little. It hadn’t been fair.

  It wasn’t fair now.

  They were all going to leave her behind because she was a kid. She knew it was just because they wanted to keep her safe, but Janey knew she could help. She wanted to be able to help.

  Popeye muttered that she was nuts. As much as Janey didn’t like going underground, Popeye hated it. More than he hated washing machines.

  Didn’t matter. They were going.

  She pointed to the right, letting Lula know it was time to turn. Janey had to get down there before the bad thing happened.

  Because there was something here that Janey had seen. Something that she was pretty sure Darc hadn’t.

  She had been the shortest one in that room. And because of that, she had been able to see underneath the desk.

  It had only been for a second, and at first Janey hadn’t realized what it had been. A flash of glowing stuff. Just enough to get part of it.

  But that small little fragment had floated around in her head, only coming to rest once everyone else had gone. And it told her that Darc didn’t have all the information.

  And without that information, he might die.

  Janey was not about to let that happen.

  CHAPTER 13

  Mala felt the darkness enfold her as she climbed down the hole toward the sewers. The smell was not nearly as bad as she would have expected. Perhaps this area wasn’t as heavily populated and therefore was less in use.

  Or maybe there was another explanation. This would have been a good time to be next to Darc, so that he could detail what was going on.

  Not that he would.

  Something was happening with the man she loved. She could pretend that it wasn’t true, but being back in Templeton’s office had shown her just how stark the difference was between the man who had cried in her arms and the one who hadn’t even acknowledged her presence.

  Much as she would like to claim that it had just been the exigencies of the case, Mala could feel him slipping away from her. Erecting the steel wall that had kept him separate from the world for so long, but that had finally started to erode with her.

  Then she reached the bottom of the metal ladder, and it was time to figure out where the hell she was supposed to go. It wasn’t like Trey’s instructions had been all that specific after “go down the manhole” had been uttered.

  Turning on the flashlight she had brought down with her, Mala shone the light down the tunnel. Then she spotted an arrow scratched into the concrete wall. It looked like Trey must have found a rock or something and then used it to help her find her way.

  Sad that she knew it must have been Trey. Only a day or two ago, she might have suspected Darc, although it would still be a bit of a stretch. But there was no way her boyfriend had taken the time to leave her a carved message for her to follow in the dark.

  Her footsteps echoed through the tunnel, the layer of water at the bottom reflecting her flashlight’s beam back up at her. As she moved through the pipe, Mala watched the sides, looking for additional clues that would point her toward Trey and Darc. She could call out for them, but somehow that seemed like not such a great idea.

  Darc had made a beeline for this location, which meant that something was set to go down here. Whether it was a stop along the path to their ultimate showdown or the place itself, she had no way of knowing. Better to treat it as hostile territory.

  She checked her phone. No reception. Because of course there wasn’t.

  On her own, underneath the city, in the dark. Not Mala’s first choice as far as vacation destinations went. She sighed and forced her shaking limbs to move. One foot in front of the other. One step. Two steps.

  Then she heard something. A clang with what sounded like a muffled cry. Holding still, Mala did what she could to keep fro
m even breathing. Where had those sounds come from?

  There.

  Off to her left, there was a metal grate that appeared to be askew. Moving toward it, Mala heard that same noise. What was it? A scrape of metal across concrete? Another grate being pulled back.

  It could be Trey and Darc. There was no arrow, but that first one could have been some worker who had been down here weeks ago. There was no way to know for sure.

  Moving into the dark, Mala felt a breath of air to her side. Then there was a screech of what sounded like rage. She scrabbled backward, every instinct firing, as a body lunged toward her in the dark.

  Her flashlight beam sliced across the form in front of her, and Mala had to fight her instinct to scream. The visage revealed in the light, the mouth pulled to the sides in a fierce grimace, was one that she knew well.

  It was the face of Richard Templeton.

  * * *

  Janey felt… small.

  Lula stood above her, looking down and shaking her head. Janey hadn’t thought of Lula as being a big person. To be honest, the old woman wasn’t much taller than Janey herself. But right now, it seemed like the lady was almost a giant. Or would that be giantess? Janey wasn’t sure.

  “Go down there?” Lula demanded, her voice going all shrill and crackly. “That’s… that’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  But Janey wasn’t going to argue. She was going down that manhole, and no one would be able to stop her.

  Popeye, of course, thought it was an even worse idea than Lula did. Silly bear. He kept saying that underground wasn’t a good place for bears.

  It wasn’t a great place for little girls, either. She reminded Popeye what had happened to her the last time they’d gone down below, and for a second the bear didn’t have much to say.

  But then he started talking about how long it had taken to get the blood out of his fur, and Janey knew she would have to figure this whole thing out on her own. Maybe she could just outrun Lula.