There was no way Mala wanted Carly around during her meeting with the crotchety social worker. That was a recipe for disaster. And leaving Carly at Mala’s apartment had proven okay up to a point, but every time Mala headed back it was with a vague fear of having the place a charred husk.
But this time there had been no awkward conversations, no beating around the bush to suggest to Carly that another arrangement needed to be made. Janey’s older half-sister would spend the day reading, and Mala wouldn’t have to feel guilty about it. No need to look a gift horse in the mouth.
And after the sideways looks Mala had received over the last couple of days, that would be a much-needed respite. Teenagers weren’t known for their tact, and Carly wasn’t much of an exception.
It had been an unbelievable weekend, though. After Mala had spent Saturday night with Darc, they had managed to sneak off three other times to be together between then and now. And Mala was thinking about… and looking forward to… the next time.
She had thought it through. It wasn’t just a reaction to having the first attempt go so poorly, although there had been some fear about that for her after their experience together that evening. It was like eating a saltine cracker after fasting for an entire day. That ordinary cracker was going to taste a whole lot better than at any other time you might eat it.
But there was a connection between Darc and her that had been unexpected. For the moments that they were together, they were together. In a way that she had thought would never be possible for Darc.
He was present when they made love. Attentive, intuitive, understanding. That hadn’t seemed to change anything outside of the bedroom, at least not yet. But in their private, sexual lives together, Darc had become the perfect boyfriend.
After confessing that he’d memorized the text to several how-to books on sex, Darc had seemed almost embarrassed. Another first. Mala had to admit that his technique had improved, but that couldn’t explain the deeper level of sensitivity he’d exhibited.
Or did it?
Was Mala so shallow that his improved sexual skills made her feel that Darc was understanding her on a deeper level? That couldn’t be it, could it?
Then she thought of the way Darc had held her afterward, and her doubts vanished. A smile spread over her face, and no matter what she did, it seemed that it was there to stay for quite a while.
She turned the corner to the bullpen, and Darc was there, facing away from her. As she neared his desk, he turned to look at her. How had he known she was coming?
Maggie seemed to notice Darc’s reaction as well, and a look of something strange appeared in her eye. It was a combination of what looked like humor, mischief and possibly something a bit sadder.
“I just wanted to come in for a bit. Hang out while Trey had his coffee.”
“Just Trey?” Mala asked.
“I do not consume caffeine,” Darc inserted from his desk, his tone flat.
Mala compared that inflection to what she had experienced when they had been together. It wasn’t her imagination. Darc was different when they were intimate.
And the thought of the hyper-intelligent detective hopped up on coffee was so unexpectedly humorous that Mala had to choke back laughter. Maggie seemed to catch the reaction, as she grinned and nodded at Mala.
“It happened once,” Maggie whispered. “Just once. It was bad. And now I have to go to the bathroom for the fifth time this morning.”
And with that statement and a wink, Darc’s ex-wife and Trey’s current girlfriend was out the door, her gait altered slightly from what it had been before her pregnancy. She wasn’t waddling… again, another description of pregnant women Mala found vaguely offensive… but that verb wasn’t too far off.
“Where are we on the case?” Mala asked, turning her attention back to the two detectives.
She made eye contact with Darc and had to avert her gaze to keep from either grinning her head off or blushing furiously. What was maddening about it was that Darc didn’t seem to have any reaction at all.
“Not a whole lot,” Trey answered. “Other than the fact that the victims are all dead as doorknobs, they don’t seem to connect at any other point.”
“They connect,” Darc said.
“Yeah, yeah. I know.” Trey made a face at Mala. “They always connect. I’m just saying that if you can’t find the connection, there’s not much of a chance that I can.”
He had a point. Finding connections where they weren’t evident was what Darc did. Mala wasn’t going to have much more of a chance of figuring it out than Trey would.
Unless…
“Maybe there is some sort of emotional or psychological tie that Darc might not recognize,” she said. “That’s an avenue that might be blocked to his normal process.”
“That sounds like your area of expertise,” Trey muttered. “So that means more sitting back and listening to the smart people jabber at each other.”
Mala made a face at Trey and then turned to Darc. “I have that appointment with Janey’s social worker, but maybe after we can get together and discuss this new angle?” Her eyes met Darc’s again, and she felt her face flush once more.
“That sounds satisfactory,” Darc said with little inflection. “I will walk you to your car.” He stood and motioned for her to proceed him.
That was new. Mala couldn’t recall Darc ever doing that for her. Not once.
She waved a goodbye to Trey and headed down the hallway toward the parking lot. They were passing by a storage closet, when Darc stopped her, opened up the closet and shoved her inside. He pushed himself in after her and locked the door behind them.
“Darc, what the hell…?” she began, but Darc held up a hand, listening at the door.
After a moment, he dropped his hand and moved in closer to her, bending his head down and the same time he encircled her neck with his hand, urging her mouth up towards his. The kiss… hell, the entire scenario… was so outside of what Mala had come to expect from Darc that she didn’t even have a moment to protest.
And then she found after another moment that she had no desire to.
They moved against each other in the darkened storage closet, the kiss long and passionate enough that Mala felt like she was being consumed. After quite a while, she came up for breath and had just enough presence of mind left to whisper.
“What… what was that about?”
Darc’s voice was husky as he breathed his response. “I read that spontaneous acts of desire could be stimulating. I desired you. Therefore, I planned this spontaneous moment.”
And really, what could Mala possibly say to that?
So rather than respond, she pulled Darc’s head back down to hers for another kiss.
* * *
Die Masken. The masks.
Pry off the mask and what appeared?
The amount of layers that one could strip away from the animals masquerading as human were almost infinite. Tug them off one by one, peeling away skin, fat, muscle… It was as delicate a process as any work of art.
And that’s what was being created here. A work of art.
The woman stopped screaming after she choked on her own blood. It was, perhaps, regrettable. But that was an almost inevitable result from severing her tongue so close to the root.
Close to the root because there was not much chance of removing the entire tongue from a live creature.
Dead? It would be child’s play.
But alive? Oh, that was so much trickier. So much less precise. Biting and snapping teeth, clenched jaw. This one’s stubborn refusal to stop squirming.
Her fate had been clear. And now her animal status was also obvious. They could never hide their true natures for long. And up to this point, there had been no mistakes made. All that had perished had proven themselves animals in the end.
A human would have waited it out. Looked for an opening. Fought the blade? Assuredly. But once it was clear there was no escape, a human would have looked for the moment of
weakness. The moment hidden within the triumph.
That’s almost always where it was.
That moment to which even this precise instrument, called by the universe to cull out the animals from the humans, could falter. That brief instant of ecstasy that wormed its way to the surface in extremis.
For death was akin to orgasm. The climb to the brink, the momentary hold at the apex of the curve, then the plunge down into oblivion.
And even this sharpened blade, this human that had been honed to near-perfection, was susceptible. The exquisite pleasure of that moment was almost too much to bear at times.
But it was necessary.
Bending back to the work, the human blade pried open the woman’s gaping mouth. Blood had pooled in her throat, choking her to death, poor thing.
Sad, sad, sad.
Not her death.
The necessity of her death.
If she had proven herself human. Worthy. Acceptable. None of this would ever have happened.
The blade picked up a needle and began suturing, fingers aching. How many was this now? The count seemed endless.
It had been a busy morning. But a productive one.
Ein guter Tag. A good day.
CHAPTER 12
No amount of pathway-building seemed to be able to penetrate the fog that was this case. The lines of light separated themselves out from the problem, quivering in their helplessness. There seemed to be no connection to be found between the victims.
Darc worked at his desk, looking through file after file that related to the victims and their families. Trey, opposite Darc at his own desk and monitor, did the same.
Ostensibly.
“I mean, somebody was shooting at us, lit my apartment on fire, is trying to kill me… us. That much is crystal clear, right?” Trey asked, the timbre of his voice setting the strands of logic trembling with even greater paroxysms. “I didn’t imagine that, right?”
“The incidents occurred,” Darc confirmed, even though he suspected this might be one of Trey’s rhetorical questions. It was difficult to tell at times, with Trey’s lack of higher cognitive abilities making the distinctions impossible to nail down with certainty.
“And the killer has medical training?”
“Or something akin to it. Taxidermy, as one possibility.”
Trey pursed his lips, an action that had never seemed to match up with a specific emotion with any consistency. Perhaps he should ask Trey to never make that expression again, as it did not seem to further their communication.
“Captain thinks we have a leak, too.”
The threads of logic had long since picked up these pieces of information and dissected them for content. There was nothing here.
Trey continued with the line of reasoning. “So we just need to find out who was missing from the crime scene while we were being shot at, right?”
“No, that is not correct.”
“But--”
Darc listed some of the reasons. Not all, as that would have overwhelmed Trey. But enough to keep him from pursuing this line of reasoning.
“The killer’s knowledge of the human body may not be readily apparent. The killer could have been waiting near the crime scene, rather than acting on inside information. And I have already made inquiries amongst the crime scene investigators. No one remembers a team member leaving.”
“But we were out searching around where we got shot at and then the crop circles, dude. The shooter totally could’ve snuck back to the crime scene. It was late and dark.”
It was a possibility, and one that Darc had assessed and deemed less than likely. The men and women from the crime scene unit were observant, as well as being a tight-knit group. Although Darc might not understand the intricacies of such a relationship, he could observe the fact of its existence in their efficiency around one another.
But just at that point a splashing of grey entered into the computational data. A grey smudge of emotional corruption that set the entire web of glowing fibers abuzz with anxiety. Darc was about to brush aside the grey intrusion when he realized that the silver links were back, readjusting the relationship between the two, smoothing over the tension that existed there.
Where before there had been disjointed groupings of data regarding the possible leak in the department, as well as the medical knowledge and the apparent strength of the killer, now the grey was linking those groupings to one another with a thread spun of its own substance, mingling with the colors of the data.
This strand of silver pulled the colored pathways together, breaching the black space in between. The process was both horrifying and exhilarating, in much the same way that his experiences with Mala had been. Bonds forged themselves before the sight of his inner eye.
And they came back with something obvious enough to make Darc start.
“Whoa,” Trey said, leaning back in his chair and studying Darc’s face. “Something just happened over there.”
“The new C.S.U. tech.”
“You mean Jeff? Yeah, you were staring at him over in that warehouse.”
Darc nodded his head once in assent. “I dismissed him due to the fact that the crime scene investigators work well together.”
Trey scrunched up his face. “Yeah, I’m not following that one, buddy.”
The phone receiver was already in Darc’s hand. Relationships were all grey to Darc. The efficiency of the C.S.U. had been attributed to the entire team, rather than to many individuals who were working well together from well-established rapport built over much time together.
But there was one member who was still not attuned to that network. One that might go unnoticed as team members accustomed to one another did their jobs in perfect synchronization.
“Can you connect me with the C.S.U.?” Darc asked dispatch when the woman picked up. “I need to speak with Jeff Fischer.”
“Detective Darcmel, I was just about to call you. The team has been sent out to another crime scene. I would guess he’s with them. And from the sound of the call, this is definitely one of yours.” She then gave Darc the address, which was close by.
Strange. There were not many warehouses or out-of-the way locales nearby. The lines of color congregated around the address, extrapolating and providing additional information. An office building, with multiple businesses sharing space within.
This was falling outside the realm of what the killer’s pattern had been so far.
Colors bent and bled together, forming their matrices. But this time, the patterns were shored up with silver bindings, leaps of intuition and emotion.
Darc pulled at the silver, distrustful of its usefulness and accuracy, but the links were strong. For every silver tie he extracted, another took its place. It was like some kind of virus.
And if he did not determine how to root it out, it might end up scuttling this case.
* * *
The office building of DSHS made so little impression that Mala sometimes almost got lost, no matter how many times she had to make the trip in to see Richard Templeton. And those visits seemed to be getting more and more frequent.
How it had become Templeton’s mission in life to get Janey removed from Mala’s care, Mala would never know. Perhaps she reminded the sad social worker of his mother or something. Actually, a bad relationship with his mommy would explain a lot.
That was an angle she had considered before. Out-shrinking a shrink was tricky business, but social workers, while trained, didn’t have the extensive schooling or experience of someone like Mala.
But there was a part of her that rebelled at the thought. Her talents weren’t something she viewed as weapons. She could wield them that way when circumstances demanded… like when she was tied up in a bizarre replica of her own apartment by a madman… but using them here seemed a bit of a stretch.
She rounded the corner to the social worker’s office, noticing that once again he wasn’t there. Glancing at her watch, Mala saw that she was five minutes early, a margin she h
ad cut from her typical fifteen.
That promptness had changed early on in the process. Richard always made her wait until their appointment time on the dot, no matter whether or not he was working with another client.
There were all sorts of tricks he had used, including frivolous phone calls, random paperwork that had to be done right in that moment, even an urgent bathroom break. Anything he could seem to think of to keep her waiting as long as possible.
Once she had decided to show up precisely at the appointment time, to avoid the entire rigmarole. That hadn’t worked, either. He had refused to see her, saying that she was late to their meeting. Even though Mala’s cell had shown that she was on time, Templeton had claimed she was late, and had therefore forfeited her slot. By the time Mala had finished trying to convince him otherwise, she couldn’t even make a formal complaint, as enough time had passed to make the man’s claim appear accurate.
She settled into one of the chairs in front of the man’s desk. It was immaculate to the point of being anal retentive. More mother issues?
To Mala’s surprise, Richard walked into the office within a minute of Mala’s arrival. That was almost unheard of.
Even more unsettling, he seemed… chipper.
An internal alarm bell sounded in Mala’s head. This was wrong. This was very, very wrong.
“Ms. Charan,” he began, then corrected himself. This was another part of his pattern. “Oh, sorry. Dr. Charan. Good to see you.”
Mala eyed him for a moment before responding. “You too, Mr. Templeton.”
The social worker grimaced for a second before resuming his fox-head grin. Mala suppressed a shudder. There were way too many teeth in that mouth of his.
“So…” Richard drew out the word as he pulled out Janey’s file. “What has our Caitlyn been up to this month?”
Another deliberate emphasis. He had clued in to the fact that Mala’s charge now went by a different name. Her legal name couldn’t be changed until the adoption was finalized, and in order for that to happen, Templeton had to sign off.
The whole adoption process always took time, but this had been dragged out to the point that it was ridiculous. In the name of due diligence, Richard had gone through multiple searches for any remaining relatives that Janey might have, publishing in newspapers around the nation.
3rd Body: Just try to keep your head (Book 1 in the 2nd Darc Murders Collection) Page 20
