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

“Oh, he’s at the fairgrounds,” she answered.

  Fairgrounds? What, had he decided to take some time off? Go try to win her a stuffed animal by throwing balls at some target in one of those rigged games on the midway? That didn’t sound like Darc.

  Cat must have seen her confusion. “He said they were working the case. Something about Egyptian plagues or something like that. Locusts.” She gave a mock shudder of disgust.

  For Mala, the disgust would have been real enough. Something about grasshoppers gave her the creeps.

  “Hey,” she asked, realizing that she now had access to a phone. “You mind if I give him a call? Let him know we’re on our way?”

  Mala’s friend turned to give her a wry look. “I would, but it’s sitting in rice.”

  “It’s where?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” Cat groaned. “I’m a moron. I dropped it in the sink while I was washing a pan from dinner last night.”

  Now Mala was intrigued. Cat never cooked. Her idea of a fancy meal was one of those macaroni and cheese things that you got out of a box.

  “You made dinner?”

  “Hey,” came the response, “I cook!”

  “Since when?”

  Cat laughed, the sound melodic. “All right. You got me. It was Jake. He made risotto.”

  Jake. The new boyfriend. Mala had met him once, briefly, when she’d gone over to Cat’s to take her to lunch. Average looking guy, average build, kind of nerdy. Not at all the type Mala would have pegged for Cat.

  That was probably a good thing.

  “What did you say Jake did for a living?” Mala asked.

  Maybe the appeal was financial. Cat didn’t strike her as the kind who would go after a guy for his money, but she was a single mom trying to survive in Seattle. Mala certainly wouldn’t judge her for it.

  “He’s military. Works with computers or something,” Cat answered with a shrug. Then she saw something off the side of the road. “Hey! You hungry?”

  The non sequitur was almost enough to give Mala emotional whiplash. “What?”

  “You haven’t eaten, have you? We’ll grab some food. It’ll take two seconds.”

  Mala glanced over at the fast food joint Cat was pointing toward. What she really wanted to do was to get to Darc as quickly as she could. But she had to admit, the thought of food had made her mouth water and her stomach grumble. All she’d had to eat in the last twenty-four hours was a scone.

  “Fine. But fast, right?”

  Cat grinned. “You won’t even realize we stopped.”

  That was doubtful, but her friend seemed pleased with herself. Hard to fight with Cat when she got this way. Better to just ride it out.

  Besides, she’d get to see Darc and Janey soon enough.

  * * *

  “What are we doing at our precinct building?” Trey demanded, looking around at the familiar structure.

  This maybe wasn’t the last place on earth he would have imagined, but it was close. They were looking for the big cheese, the head honcho, the Master whatsit… and they were here?

  That didn’t bode well.

  And something seemed off. Trey couldn’t put his finger on it exactly, but as he looked around, there was definitely something wrong.

  They pulled up into a space in the parking lot, and Trey started to get out of the car when it hit him. He knew what was wrong.

  “Where is everybody?”

  It was spooky. Normally by midmorning, the place was bustling. People moving in and out of the main entrance like it was some kind of major thoroughfare.

  Right now there was no one. In fact, it looked like the building was completely dead. In the dim light of the cloudy Seattle morning, Trey wasn’t sure he could even see any lights on. That had to be his imagination, right?

  But as he glanced over at Darc, he could see his partner’s eyes scanning the windows. Trey wasn’t the only one who had noticed the peculiar quiet.

  As one, the two detectives pulled out their weapons, heading toward the front doors. Trey was just glad he stored extra gun clips in his Land Rover, as the encounter with the dogs had left both he and Darc drained of ammunition.

  “Darc,” he murmured to his partner, looking over at Janey. “Shouldn’t we…?” He made a motion with his head to indicate that Janey should stay in the vehicle.

  The bald detective turned to the girl. “If I order you to stay in the car, will you?”

  Janey seemed to think for a moment, then shook her head. Darc nodded and swiveled back to Trey.

  “I do not think it matters. She will accompany us whether or not we permit it. Better to have her with us than completely unprotected.”

  Damned if Trey could argue with that logic. But the thought of facing a post-op Mala bear on the other end of this thing gave him more than a little bit of pause. If her precious girl got so much as a scraped knee…

  He shuddered at the thought.

  Girding up his figurative loins, Trey moved toward the building. Whatever was about to go down, he had a feeling it would take all the girding he could manage.

  This was not going to be fun.

  * * *

  Mala watched as Cat pulled the order of breakfast sandwiches and orange juice into the car. Passing the bag of food over to Mala, Cat jostled the drink tray, almost upending the whole thing. She leaned over the drinks, trying to hold everything together with her body until everything settled down.

  “That was close,” she said, as she handed Mala one of the cups filled with sloshing liquid. “Thought for a minute that we were going to be awash in juice.”

  Mala chuckled and placed the cup in the holder in the middle console. Cat glanced at the juice, pointing her chin at it.

  “Drink up. Nothing like OJ to get the blood sugar back up.”

  “Psh,” Mala responded. “I’m liking the look of this breakfast croissant right at the moment.”

  Cat shrugged, “Suit yourself. But this place has the best OJ I’ve ever tasted.”

  “Really? A fast food place?”

  Glancing over her shoulder as she turned on the blinker to turn, Cat nodded. “I know. Sounds weird. But it’s totally legit.”

  Cat was the only grown woman Mala knew who could get away with using the word legit without sounding like a moron. The OJ did sound appealing, but Mala was hungrier right now than she was thirsty.

  Reaching into the bag to pull out her sandwich, Mala felt an idea playing around the edges of her consciousness. A nagging sense of something that seemed… off.

  She’d learned over the course of her career to listen to that tiny voice inside. The one that urged her to keep on a particular line of question when a patient clearly wanted to move on. To recommend suicide watch for a child who wasn’t exhibiting all of the signs of trouble. To check up on a parent who gave her a strange vibe.

  Her instincts had always served her well. And right now they were telling her there was something up.

  Then it struck her. She’d never once seen Cat bobble anything. Her friend was strong, that was true, but she was agile. How many times had Mala thought that even her name was apropos?

  And then there was the strange insistence on Mala drinking the orange juice. Right now. Not later.

  She picked up the OJ, noticing how Cat’s attention intensified as she did so. Holding the cup up to her nose, she took a sniff.

  An acrid scent assailed her senses. Whatever was in the drink was powerful.

  Before she could keep herself from doing so, Mala looked over at her friend, who was now staring directly at her. The look on Cat’s face was sad.

  So infinitely, infinitely sad.

  “Oh, Mala,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  Then Cat’s fist lashed out, catching Mala square in the temple. Hard. The last thing Mala saw as the car interior faded around her was Cat’s face.

  Her friend was crying.

  CHAPTER 14

  Darc moved through the empty spaces of the precinct building, the tangle of
color in his mind giving him conflicting information. This was the place. The place where Darc would find the Master. That seemed completely clear.

  But there was another line of reasoning that continued to draw him elsewhere. Most of the lines converged here. The rest of them pointed back to the cold trail that they had left back at DSHS.

  The trail that led to Mala.

  The information on that other bundle of logic threads remained incomplete, so Darc had no other options but to follow the ones in front of him. With that said, that grouping compelled his attention, taking it from the task at hand.

  The light and dark within him throbbed, their joint effort one to bring the disparate elements in Darc’s mind together. A new pattern formed from their efforts, and Darc took a sharp right turn, one that would lead them to…

  “Darc,” Trey spoke from behind. “Who are we trying to find?”

  “The Chief of Detectives.”

  “Him?” Trey’s voice came out as almost a squeak. “He’s the guy? The big bad?”

  “No.”

  “But…” Darc’s partner paused for a moment, the silence broken only by their footsteps moving forward. “Hold on. Is this one of those moments where I’m supposed to shut up and let you do your thing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, okay then.”

  Arriving at the double doors that led to the conference room, Darc pushed them open. What lay on the other side of the entrance caused Trey to gasp, then retch.

  There, all over the room, were body parts. They had been stacked neatly, a grouping of severed right arms there close to the door, left legs near the corner, upper torsos lining the walls.

  And on top of the conference table, staring back at them, were their severed heads.

  * * *

  Mala began to come to, feeling a sense of being jostled. Her vision seemed altered… strange. What she was seeing made no sense.

  A pair of legs, walking upside down. Concrete up above. What the hell?

  Her brain began to sort out the images, and she realized that she was being carried. What she was seeing was someone’s backside, as she was being hauled over someone’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

  Whoever it was, this person was strong.

  And then Mala’s memory began to return, and she knew. Cat. She was being carried by Cat. Her best friend, who had punched her so hard she’d gone unconscious.

  Movies got it wrong. They made knockout punches commonplace. In those films, not only could someone be subdued by a sharp blow to the head, the ones who had received those blows could then recover with seemingly little difficulty.

  Mala knew differently. Knock out punches were rare, and needed to be a combination of two things… brute force and precise knowledge. Or sheer luck.

  Anyone who had ever watched a boxing match could report the same thing. Those men would batter away at each other. The true KO was rare, and generally not the result of one blow.

  As she continued to be bounced around, Mala could feel her head splintering into a thousand bright bits of broken glass. Every step was a jab straight to her brain.

  Forcing herself to focus, Mala assessed her body. Hands? Zip tied. Feet? Currently unbound. That was something, at least.

  Trying to angle her head to get an idea of where they were, Mala caught a quick glimpse of a familiar structure. Darc and Trey’s precinct building.

  Hold on. Cat was taking her to the police station? That couldn’t be right. Was it possible that this whole thing was some kind of bizarre misunderstanding?

  But then Mala recalled the expression on her friend’s face. No. There was no lack of comprehension that had caused this chain of events. Mala was forced to acknowledge that Cat was working for the Master.

  Had been from the beginning, more than likely.

  That thought stabbed into her heart, causing her far more pain than the punch had. There was a reason Dante had put the betrayers in the ninth circle of hell.

  Then, she caught sight of another individual. Well, at least the lower half. From the build of the legs and the style of the shoes, she was guessing it had to be a man.

  Closing her eyes to maintain the illusion she was still passed out, Mala strained her ears, hoping for a clue to what might be going on here. It didn’t take long before Cat spoke, but what she said left Mala even more in the dark.

  “Hey, babe,” Cat purred, the sarcasm thick in her tone.

  “Back atcha, sweetie,” came the response from the man.

  Was that Jake? Mala hadn’t spent much time around him, but she thought that it could be.

  “You ready?” Cat asked.

  “To be able to stop pretending to be a couple? Absolutely.”

  So it was Jake. And they weren’t really dating.

  What the hell was going on here?

  * * *

  “Oh… man… no… that… just, no.”

  Trey knew he was babbling incoherently, but at this point, he just didn’t care. All he could think of was the heads resting on top of the table. Stacked up, like a gory sort of pyramid or something.

  What was worse than the fact that there were severed heads on the table was the fact that Trey knew them. All of them.

  Okay, some of them he only knew by sight. Those guys down in accounting barely left their offices. And when they did, they didn’t talk much. Just a lot of blinking.

  He shook his head, trying to reconcile his memories with what he was seeing in front of him right now. This was nowhere close to being okay. Okay was a distant memory of a time long past.

  But as he stared, there was movement at the far end of the conference room. A figure stood up from where he had been hidden behind the table.

  Chief of Detectives Hardin.

  His face was set and pale, streaked with gore, and blood dripped down his arms, where his white dress shirt had been pushed up. He looked up at Trey and smiled.

  “Good of you to finally arrive,” he said, wiping his bloody hand across his face, streaking even more blood there. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  The statement hit Trey, a blow right between the eyes.

  Darc had been wrong. It was the first time Trey could remember it happening. Darc had missed things before, sure. There had been confusion or misunderstandings.

  But for him to make a declarative statement and have that be incorrect? Never. Not once in all the time Trey had worked with him.

  And yet, Darc had said that Hardin wasn’t the big bad. But here he was, standing in front of them, covered in the viscera of Trey’s coworkers.

  His vision went red, then dark, then cleared again. And before he could truly consider his options, Trey raised his gun and fired at the man.

  Three bullets straight to the chest. Grouped in a cluster that would have made his police academy instructors proud.

  Hardin staggered back, then stopped and tore open his shirt. Bulletproof vest.

  Trey felt a guttural sound rip its way out of his mouth as he hurled himself across the room. The Chief of Ds was huge. Like the Incredible Hulk huge. But Trey didn’t care.

  He was going to rip Hardin’s throat out.

  * * *

  Janey watched, horrified, as Trey leapt across the room to engage the muscular Chief. The man had already killed so many people, and Janey knew that she would not be able to handle it when he started hurting Trey.

  She covered Popeye’s eyes. As much as her bear pretended to be crusty and not to like anyone but her or Mala, she knew better. As bad as it would be for her, it would be worse for her bear.

  Even as Trey moved, Darc called out after him, commanding him to stop. But Trey didn’t seem to be able to hear.

  Then something happened that Janey hadn’t expected. The big man turned around and ran away, making it out of a door at the far end of the room.

  Why was someone that strong running away from Trey? Janey wasn’t trying to be rude, but her second favorite detective wasn’t exactly scary.

  The bands o
f color swirled around Hardin’s exit, whispering to Janey’s mind of secret plots and plans within plans. This was a trap.

  She looked up and saw Darc staring down at her. He looked deep into her eyes, and the streams of light swirled around his head, telling her what to do.

  Trey needed her help. Darc had to go find the one they really were after. Both of them had their jobs to do, and those jobs were in two different places.

  Janey reached up and pulled on Darc’s arm, forcing him to bend over. Even though she knew that Darc wouldn’t like it, she reached up and kissed his cheek.

  But then her bald detective surprised her by wrapping his arms around her and pulling her in for a big hug. He moved his mouth close to her ear.

  “Stay safe, little one.”

  And then he was gone, and Janey was off, chasing after Trey.

  But the warm feeling from Darc’s arms stayed with her.

  * * *

  “Come on, Jake,” Mala heard Cat say, as she pointed at the nearest computer terminal. “Time to earn your keep.”

  The woman Mala had thought of as her best friend then bent at the waist, depositing Mala down next to the wall. The hard floor rose to meet her in a rush.

  The feeling of being tossed to the ground like a discarded sack of trash was a new experience for Mala, and not one she wanted to repeat any time soon. The motion tore at her incision once more, and she felt the trickle of blood running down her torso.

  Mala had struggled against the pain, trying to remain silent, so neither Cat nor Jake would know that she had recovered from the earlier blow. Mala still had her hands bound, but if she could keep these two from knowing that she was aware of what was going on…

  Mala’s mind still reeled from the revelation that Cat had been working for the Master this entire time. So much made sense, now. Intimate details of Mala’s life, of Janey’s and Darc’s and Trey’s and Maggie’s… all fed to the Master from this woman who had seemed to be such a good friend.

  But for right now, she had to know what these two were planning. There had to be a reason that they had come here to the police precinct station, and Mala could not for the life of her think of what it might be.

  “Do you have control of it yet?” Cat demanded, looking over Jake’s shoulder as he typed away at the computer.