by Linda Welch
I tried a smile, but I think it ended up a grimace. “I don’t suppose you’d stop and let me out?”
He chuckled. “After all the trouble you put my partner through? I don’t think so.” His smile became a sneer. “Get comfortable. We have a long drive ahead of us.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“Does it matter?” He briefly took his eyes off the road to leer at me. “We will have such a good time.”
That did it. No demon would put his hands on me again. I groped in my right pocket.
He kept his eyes on the road and the smile on his face. “I’ll probably crash the car if you throw that in my face.”
I threw the handful at his cat’s eyes.
Chapter Five
I hobbled home. My hip was on fire and I probably had road burn all down my right leg. My right cheek was scraped and bruised and my wrist, where I stupidly slammed it down to try to break my fall, could be badly sprained. My calf stung where the black-haired demon stuck his nails in me.
When the car careened across the road, I got the door open and rolled out. It disappeared down the street, weaving back and forth all over the place and not decreasing speed for a moment.
Must have hurt the bastard. Good.
I wended through the trees with the Ruger in my hand. I didn’t know whether a bullet could kill a demon, but I hoped it would hurt him. Going back and rooting in the shrubbery till I found my pistol took everything I had in me. Instinct screamed at me the entire time: get out of here! But I couldn’t leave it for some kid to find.
I ran the last few feet to the backdoor, slammed through it and slammed it shut behind me. I threw the deadbolt then went through to the front hall and made sure the door was locked. Then back to the kitchen to sink on a chair.
“You look like shit,” from Jack.
Like I don’t know. I couldn’t even come up with a retort. I was tired and sore and winded. I slid the safety back on the Ruger and laid it on the table, then let my head fall on my crossed arms. In a peculiar state of combined exhaustion and exhilaration, I could have fallen asleep then and there, except my heart went a mile a minute and my throat felt like it wanted to close up. I wanted to cry with relief because I made it back home.
I couldn’t go to the police. What would I say? Oh, by the way, there are demons in Clarion, have been all along. I’m pretty sure they’re involved in Lawrence’s disappearance. And, oh yeah, they’re nasty, evil sonsofbitches.
I hauled myself upright and went through the house with my canister of metal filings, sprinkling a smidgen on every window ledge and on the floor at the base of front and back doors. Then I put some in the cold, empty fireplaces in the living room and my bedroom.
I let the kitchen blinds down, something I did not as a habit bother with. I was majorly freaked.
No way could I avoid telling Jack and Mel what happened, so I spent the next happy fifteen minutes doing so. Then I stripped in the bathroom and looked myself over.
My hip and leg looked like someone used a cheese grater on them, and ugly bruises marked me like decaying blossom. What felt like punctures on my calf were little more than indentations, but who knew what lurked under a demon’s fingernails, so I liberally doused them with antiseptic. My wrist hurt like hell, so I taped it with a stretchy surgical bandage.
I got in bed. I didn’t think I would sleep. I was right
I staggered downstairs to the kitchen, my eyes puffy from lack of sleep.
“And don’t you look bright and chipper,” Jack drawled.
I snarled at him, and fumbled in the cabinet for coffee. I managed to knock three packets on the counter and one on the floor, where it spilled open. What a waste of Columbian.
“And her coordination is … well, she doesn’t have any,” Mel said.
Sometimes I hate my roommates.
I saw Jack go to the backdoor out the corner of my eye. He stood looking through the side window, hands clasped behind his back. He swayed back and forth on his heels. “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” he chirped.
“Shut it, Jackson.”
Mel joined him so they stood shoulder to shoulder. “A demon in Lindy’s apartment? Why was he there?”
Yes. Why? I stepped over the spilled coffee to dump some of the good stuff in the coffeemaker. I’d need a full pot to get me up and moving.
But move where? Where to start? My mind buzzed with questions for which I had no answer. Why was the black-haired demon in Lindy’s apartment? Why attack me? How did Caesar know my name? Was Caesar the yellow-haired man who touched Lindy as she struggled in her bathtub? I hung over the coffeemaker, one hand braced on the counter as I rubbed at my forehead with the other. What had I got myself into?
My head hurt.
I collapsed in a chair and held my face in my cupped hands. I had to tell Lindy something pretty soon and it would cause her more grief than she deserved. As if she hadn’t already been through enough.
The phone rang. I leaned back far enough to see Caller ID, then swung out of the chair to grab the phone. “Mike?”
“Tiff? We got a situation in Salt Lake. I want you down there.”
Just like that, I was wide awake. “What going on?”
“Someone went berserk in the 45th Street Mall. Gunned down fifteen people, four of them dead.”
“So - I’m filling in the blanks here, Mike - you have it under control or you wouldn’t call a civilian to the scene, so why do you need me?” I frowned at the phone. “Can any of the wounded identify the shooter?”
“Several escapees confirmed the shooter wore a mask,” Mike replied. “He could still be inside. The mall was open twenty minutes, so only a couple hundred people in there, half of them mall employees. Nearly everyone managed to get out while he was still on a rampage. He was still shooting when SWAT secured the perimeter. The shooting stopped when we went in. We found people hiding all over the place. We brought out the casualties, but now we got sixteen people in the food court and he could be one of them. He only had to take off his mask… .”
That sounded ugly. I was not thinking of my own safety, but of fifteen innocent people penned in the mall with a killer who must be undergoing a mental episode or something.
“I thought as the scene is fresh, you might pick something up,” Mike continued.
Mike thought as well as receiving messages from the recently dead, I saw ethereal images of violent criminal acts which resulted in death, like imprints on the atmosphere. And he worked that out all by himself. Clever man. I hoped I never had to disabuse him of the notion.
“Okay, I’m in. Am I driving up with you?”
“We’ll take a copter. Meet me on the roof in fifteen.”
Fifteen minutes? I groaned as the coffeemaker cheerily announced a full pot of perfectly brewed coffee.
“You okay, Tiff?”
“I’m fine,” I snapped. I took in a breath. “Just tired, Mike. I’ll be there.”
I dropped the phone in the cradle and gave the coffeemaker an evil look.
Mel stood at my shoulder, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “What, what, what?”
I gave her and Jack an abbreviated version as I got my biggest travel mug from the cabinet above the stove. Of course this wasn’t enough for either of them - they wanted me to solve the case without leaving the house. I firmed my jaw and tried to be patient, but I was not in the mood. When I stopped talking and just plain glared, they finally quit, moodily going to the west windows, leaving me in peace. It would not last.
I filled the mug with coffee and sipped it black and scalding as I went upstairs to my bedroom. Shucking my robe off, I kicked my slippers across the room, then pulled the first pair of jeans my hand fell on from the closet. One knee was ripped, but hey, it’s fashionable, isn’t it? A winter-weight T-shirt. Boots, boots, where are my boots?
I sat on the edge of the bed and organized my thoughts. If you’re wearing boots, you need socks, Tiff. One pair of socks coming right up.
More or less decently clad, I clomped down the stairs, took my green jacket and matching scarf off the coat-rack, tucked my Ruger in my back pocket, and headed out.
I looked up at the snowcapped peaks which surround Clarion, breathing in air with more than a nip to it. I pulled my collar up around my neck. The first snowfall, quickly come and gone, nonetheless surprised everyone when it arrived in mid-October, and now the gray sky seemed to hang low. More snow would fall in the next forty-eight hours. I hoped we were not going to have another bad winter. The Subaru needed new tires, but I couldn’t afford them.
The advantage of living in a small city is getting anywhere fast takes practically no time at all. Seven minutes after Mike called, I was dressed and running the electric toothbrush over my teeth. A couple of minutes later and I had the Subaru out of the garage, and after a six minute drive I pounded up the steps of the Court House, clutching my travel mug of coffee like only death could separate us.
I headed for the desk sergeant, but she saw me coming and pointed to the escalator, so I veered across the hall, trotting between groups of people who gave me funny looks, as if they thought I had a nerve, haring madly through such hallowed ground. I went up the escalator two steps at a time. A couple of patrolmen held an elevator for me at the top.
Wow. Did I feel special.
I still had to slog up a flight of steps to get to the roof. The pilot fired up the copter when he saw me step on the flattop. Mike was already belted in and waiting for me. He leaned to give me a hand, and hauled me inside.
I fastened the seatbelt and settled back. “Can you get those sixteen people near where someone died?”
The copter juddered a little and lifted off. “Half the victims were shot in the stores around the food court.”
We didn’t talk for a while. I sipped and watched the landscape sweeping beneath us. Mike finally broke the silence. “Your Coralinda had a damaged heart. From the fluid around her lungs and an enlarged liver, it looks like heart failure was an ongoing condition for quite some time. She probably had numerous minor heart attacks and didn’t realize what they were.”
I frowned. “But she was so young. How could she have heart problems?”
“The usual culprits: high blood pressure and cholesterol off the charts. Heredity was likely a factor.”
I mulled it over. So Lindy had a damaged heart and died of it, but a heart attack can be induced. I couldn’t dismiss what she told me, the man who touched her on her forehead, the jolt to her body. She lingered, I saw her, and that only happened with the violently slain. She was murdered.
He had to be a demon - the one who attacked me in Lindy’s apartment? No, not the same guy; her attacker had yellow hair. Caesar? Recalling how he looked me over in the car, I shuddered.
“Tiff?”
I blinked. “What did you find out about Lawrence?”
Mike’s voice went gruff, which meant he was embarrassed. “I got a lot on my plate, Tiff. I passed it onto Royal Mortensen. You can talk to him when we get back.”
“A little boy is missing and you passed it on?” I growled. “And who is Royal Mortensen?”
“The new guy. Transferred in from San Antonio.”
“San Antonio to Utah? Whose bad side did he get on?”
Mike glared at me. “It was voluntary. Roy’s record is impeccable.”
“When did he make detective?”
“Six years ago. He served two years in New York City, one in Seattle, three in San Antonio. Two commendations. He’s a good guy, Tiff.”
I made a derogatory noise in my throat. Why would a career cop want to leave the hustle and bustle of a big city for little old Clarion, where nothing much happened? Well, not ordinarily. “Sounds like he didn’t stay too long in one place. I give him six months.”
I pulled the folded drawing from my pocket and handed it to him
“What’s this?” he asked as he unfolded it. Next minute: “Where did you get it?”
“Under the fridge. Oh, and your guys didn’t notice the refrigerator magnets either.”
He stared at it a good long time.
He finally looked up. “Refrigerator magnets?”
“The type where each is a different word and you put together poetry or sayings. These particular ones were stuff like Mommy, cuddles, baby, hugs, etcetera.”
His mouth became a thin line. “Tiff, we had no reason to think a child lived there, and nothing obvious to clue us in on it.”
“But you didn’t go back and check after I told you about Lawrence,” I pointed out relentlessly.
Mike sighed and fished in a pocket for a plastic bag, carefully inserted the drawing, and sealed it.
“You better not give me a hard time over contaminating evidence, either.”
But he didn’t. For the rest of the brief flight he looked through the window, brow knotted, and ignored me.
Chapter Six
The copter took us over the Wasatch Range. To the north of us, the Northfork Road from Clarion wound down Fork Canyon to the Salt Lake Valley. We cleared Mount Lomond and dropped to a lower altitude, and followed Interstate 15 to Salt Lake City. The smaller cities along the path of I-15 are so close together, they could be one vast metropolis, but when you near Salt Lake you know it; pollution is a dirty orange-brown smudge over the city.
The copter set down on the mall’s parking lot, which was cordoned off. A gaggle of reporters hung over the ropes. I turned up my collar and ducked my head as I hopped to the tarmac. Bulbs popped in an explosion of light, but we were around the copter and headed inside the mall, and I didn’t think they got a good picture of any of us.
The mall was empty and eerily silent, the only sound the creak of police-issue leather shoes and holsters. Dazzled by the reporter’s flashbulbs, the place seemed darker than it should as my eyes tried to adjust. We walked down a long corridor to get to the food court. Every store was lit up, but empty, sending out glittering temptation for shoppers who would not be coming in.
Sixteen people of varying ages and both sexes sat on plastic chairs at plastic tables in the food court. Some held cups of coffee or soda. SWAT stood around the perimeter. I didn’t give them more than a quick glance; I looked around at the stores.
I immediately spotted them. Obviously bewildered, a middle-aged woman with a thick waist and short, curly brown hair, and a brown-haired teen girl, maybe fifteen-years-old, stood just inside a teen boutique. The girl had a chest wound which bled a lot before she died. A tacky red swath of browning blood ran from just inside the entrance out into the food court.
Mike talked to a SWAT guy. He nodded at the man and walked over to me. “We found his arsenal and mask where he dumped them.”
“He could still be out there.”
Mike looked at the tired-looking people at the tables. “If he is, we’ll find him, but he could be one of them. As a precaution, we frisked them, told them it’s standard procedure. It was cursory, but we would have found a weapon.”
He laid his hand on my shoulder. “Anything here you can use?”
I eyed the woman and girl. “Oh, yes.”
I walked over to them. Mike stayed where he was, letting me do my thing without interference.
They watched me coming and the way I looked right at them, and straightened up. The woman wore an expression of utter terror. The girl’s eyes were glazed, her mouth slightly open as if in a tiny pop. She was already in shock when she died. Mother and daughter?
He shot the woman first. He pulled her away from her daughter, into the food court, pushed her to the ground and shot her in the back of the head. He went back in for the girl. She stood in the boutique with her mouth open, not believing what she saw. He shot her in the chest, and when she crumpled, dragged her out to die beside her mother. Both died just outside the store, but their shades could evidently go back inside if they wanted to. The killer wore a ski-mask, and his thin mouth smiled through the slit as he slaughtered two innocent people. I closed my eyes and sucked in
several deep breaths before I could continue.
I stopped just inside the entrance, standing clear of the blood trail and shielded from outside view by a display of Prom dresses.
“Can you see us?” the woman asked.
I nodded. They needed time to ask their questions and adjust to the fact I could see them.
The teen still clutched a pair of bloodstained, embroidered jeans with a price tag. I’ve always found it interesting how the dead keep what they held when they died, like my friend Brenda Lithgow, who stands in downtown Clarion with her loaded shopping cart.
With fingers clenched in the material, the girl hugged the jeans to her chest. “We thought they were ignoring us, but they’re not, are they.”
I shook my head.
The mother’s voice was almost a wail. “We can’t get out!”
“You’ll get out, but not for a while.”
As if she didn’t hear me, she went on, “We tried, but we can’t leave the food court!”
The girl looked at the court. “I keep telling her we’re dead. She won’t listen.”
I stuck my hands in my pants pockets and explained everything to them, but although the teen had already come to terms with what happened to her and her mom, the woman couldn’t accept the truth. So I stepped up to them and did the one thing which always convinces the dead: I stroked my hand through the woman’s shoulder. Then I did the same to the teen.
They moved closer together. They wanted to cry, but they no longer possessed the ability. They wanted to hold each other, but it was no longer an option. For the umpteenth time, I wished I could say something to make it all better, but I couldn’t. They were dead.
They looked at my hand dumbly. I looked back at Mike over my shoulder. He made a discrete hurry-up motion with one hand.
I spoke to the teen: “What’s your name?”
“Amy.”
“And you?” I asked the mom.
“June Pollock. Amy and I … .” Slapping one hand over her mouth, she lost it again.
