Ann hung up and went out to her desk to examine the other evidence. George swiveled in his chair to face her.
“What else did you find?” he asked.
“I have her laptop, but listen, George.” She touched her eyebrow. “I don’t think you should help me with this case. It’s too personal to you, and I don’t want your perceptions to cloud your judgment.”
He nodded along with her. “Okay, but I might be able to help you.”
“If I run into anything you can help with, I’ll ask.”
“What do you want me to do then?”
“Don’t you have other cases?”
He shrugged. “It’s Harmony.”
“Answer the phone if anyone calls. I have a feeling Rachel won’t be coming back anytime soon.”
Betty said Marcie didn’t have a cellphone, due to the crappy service, so hopefully her laptop had something to go on. Ann pulled it out of the evidence bag.
George shuffled over to Rachel’s seat and twisted back and forth in the chair.
Marcie’s laptop prompted Ann for a password.
She tried PinkysPal and BrentWinter and even combinations of George’s name, but none of them worked.
“Hey, George, do you know what Marcie might have used for a password?”
“Yeah,” he said. He’d opened Solitaire. “PV6LUV.”
Ann tried that. It worked.
“Thanks.”
“Wait, it worked?” He turned around.
“Yep,” she said.
“Our first kiss was in Pine Valley in June last year.” He sighed. “I thought she might have changed it. Why did she have to cheat on me? Why’d she have to go and get pregnant and leave the test where I’d find it?”
Ann shrugged. “She’s young, George. She doesn’t know what she wants right now.” Except Brent Winter, who Marcie also probably kissed in Pine Valley when she was there this past June, according to Betty.
Now logged into the computer, Ann opened Outlook.
Besides a whole lot of spam, there wasn’t much. She clicked through some of the folders but found nothing interesting. Nothing from Pinky’s Pal or Brent Winter. Nothing even from George.
“Marcie has an incredible lack of email,” she said. “There’s nothing in here even from you.”
“Kids these days,” he said, as if he weren’t a kid himself. “With bad cell service, they write notes on newspapers or something silly like that.” He turned to her. “I kept all the ones Marcie gave me.”
Ann picked up the bag with The Local Inquirer in it. Pinky’s Pal. There was a “contact us” address on the back. She jotted it down in her notepad, then went to the supply closet and stuffed a pair of latex gloves and some evidence bags into her pocket. Just in case.
“I’ll be back later,” she said, pulling on her coat.
George sighed. “I guess I’ll be here . . . waiting.”
“Is your radio on?”
He checked and nodded.
“I’ll call you if I need anything, and you do the same.”
Chapter 46
Ann walked past the clinic. She paused outside the door, then went inside.
“Derrick?” No answer. Ann took a few steps down the hallway. His muffled voice came from behind a closed door labeled Exam Room 1.
She sat in the waiting room and flipped through a People magazine from two months ago. Derrick came out a few minutes later, escorting a mother with her child. He gave her some instructions in a quiet voice, and the woman thanked him and left with her son.
“Ann,” Derrick said, his voice full of surprise. “Are you ill?” He lifted an eyebrow and smiled.
Ann stood. “Where were you last night, between the hours of three and four in the morning?”
“Whoa. Okay.” He rubbed the back of his neck and paced around the counter, putting the reception desk between them. “I was at home.”
“Why didn’t you answer the phone?” Ann asked.
His face turned hopeful. “Did you call me?”
Ann shook her head. “No. But Betty Berg did. No one answered.”
“What happened?”
Ann dropped her head back and thought about how much she should tell him.
“Their daughter was sick and needed help,” Ann said.
“Is she okay?” He turned around and rifled through the records behind him, pulled a chart, and opened it. “I should call them.” He picked up the phone.
“No,” Ann said. “Flight for Life came. They took her to Aspen General Hospital.”
“Flight for—shit. What happened?” The phone fell back into the cradle.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”
“She is my patient. I have the right to know.”
“Call the hospital. I’m more concerned at this point about where the hell you were. You are the only doctor in town and you didn’t answer the phone?” Ann couldn’t stop her voice from rising.
Derrick rubbed his neck again. His mark for discomfort, embarrassment. Good. His face flushed.
“I was drunk.” He slumped into the chair behind the desk. “After you left, I found a bottle of scotch in the garage and had a few.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ann said.
“Nope. Not kidding. Things have been strained at home.”
“Yeah.” Ann scoffed. “I never pegged you as a guy who’d harm your wife.” Anger boiled in her words. “What if Maggie had gotten hurt while you were sleeping it off?” Ann wondered if the End of Days would be triggered no matter how Sophia was killed, or if it had to be at Yaldabaoth’s hand.
“I’m sorry.” He didn’t meet her eyes. “I guess I just needed a night off.”
“You are a father,” Ann said through gritted teeth. She wanted to scream it, to shout at him, but it wouldn’t help anything. “You don’t get nights off from that.”
Derrick shrugged one shoulder and turned away from her. Ann bit back the response she wanted to throw at him.
His eyes landed on her. “I need to ask you a favor.”
Ann crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows.
“I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind watching Maggie tonight.”
“Why?” She relaxed her arms.
“It’s . . . private.”
“If you’re going to ask me a favor of this magnitude, I need to know why. It’s my right, don’t you think? I mean, since I cleaned up your mess last night and all.”
Derrick looked from her left eye to her right, then down at the desk. He took a deep breath.
“I need to take Teresa to Mountain View.” He looked up at her again. “For analysis. She’s been acting strange.”
“You did take away her coping mechanism.”
A puzzled expression crossed his face.
“The furniture?” Ann prompted. “You took away her special room. What does she have left?”
Derrick’s eyes went to the desk again. “Oh. Right.” He sighed.
An uncomfortable silence settled on them. Ann didn’t know what to say, so she waited. Silence made people talk.
Derrick gazed at the space between them. “I’ve come to accept that Teresa will never be the woman I married ever again, but at the same time, every day that goes by I can’t help but hope maybe today she’ll smile again, maybe today she’ll give Maggie the same motherly affection as she did our Tiffany.” He let out a short, mirthless laugh. “The more I hope and the more I wish she would, the further away she seems to go. I don’t know what to do.” His pleading eyes darted up to Ann’s.
She let him sweat for a few seconds. “I’ll watch Maggie,” she said. “But not so you can deposit your wife at a mental health facility. I’ll do it so you can take the time to sort things out with her.”
And to keep Maggie safe.
Derrick nodded. His lips tightened into a single line bordering on a frown. Ann shook her head. The asshole just wanted to get rid of his wife. He didn’t want to deal with her. Ann hoped it wasn’t because she was back in town.
“There will never be anything between us,” she said, to be certain. “I just want to put that out there in case you think there will be.”
His mouth opened.
Ann held up her hand. “You need to work things out with Teresa.”
He closed his mouth and nodded. “Maggie gets out of school at three. I’ll go home and get some of her things together.” He frowned. “Can I drop her off at your house? In case Teresa’s home?”
Ann nodded and left before he could say anything else.
Outside, she took in a long pull of crisp air before turning toward Brent’s house. An unsettled feeling drifted down on her. On the one hand, Maggie was the person Ann needed to protect. What better way to protect her than to babysit? On the other hand, she didn’t know the first thing about the care and feeding of small children.
She’d have to go to the grocery store. While Ann could live on a sixer of her favorite brew and a frozen entree, a seven-year-old child could not. They needed nutritious stuff. Like fresh vegetables.
Ann rounded the corner and peered at the house numbers. Brent’s was on the left. She went up on the porch and raised her hand to knock.
The door wasn’t latched.
“Hello?” she called. “Castle County Sheriff’s Department. Is anyone home?”
A dog—big by the sound of it—barked and lumbered out of a room down a main hallway to greet her.
Don’t show fear. Ann stood her ground. The dog trotted to her and sat at her feet. It looked up at her, pawing the air near her leg. Dried blood and small cuts marred the top of its head.
“Pinky?” Ann said, crouching down. The dog’s ears perked, and she cocked her head to the side. So, Pinky wasn’t a victim after all.
Why did Maggie draw—
Ann stood so abruptly Pinky barked and went on high alert. Then she relaxed and looked up at Ann with a big, pink-mouthed grin.
“Where’s Brent?” Ann asked the dog. “Why do you have blood on your nose?”
Pinky ran down the hall. Ann grabbed a poker from the fireplace and cleared the living room and the dining room.
In the kitchen, the glass on the sliding door was shattered, which coincided with the cuts on Pinky’s head. The poor dog had been left outside.
She crept down the hallway, where she cleared a bathroom, an exercise room, and master bedroom. The last room was the one Pinky had come out of. It reeked of stale pot, despite the cracked window. Pinky was licking the carpet. Ann pushed her away, but the dog was persistent. Ann shoved the beast out of the room and closed the door.
A brownish mark stained the rug. Ann wondered if the dog had defecated there. She’d heard of some dogs eating their own feces and grimaced. The room didn’t smell like shit, though. It smelled like rancid meat.
She crouched down for a closer look.
The indescribable and distinct scent of death came from the carpet.
To the side of the stain, nestled among the thick pile, sat a molar.
Chapter 47
Teresa sprinted to the abandoned house. Inside, the walls melted into the cave. She let out a relieved breath.
“Yaldabaoth,” she said, “I need to speak with you.”
The walls swirled and the nursery he’d constructed for her appeared. He sat in the rocker with his fingers tented before his face—his eyes, as always, full of sexual malice.
“My dear, dear Teresa.” He stood, and a wicked grin slithered onto his lips. “Back for more so soon?”
She backed away from him. “I need to discuss speeding up the process.”
He gasped in mock surprise. “Just last night you were over this whole charade.”
“I’m over your charade. Your deception.” Teresa peered into the empty crib. “Where is my Tiffany? Let me see her.”
Yaldabaoth approached her. “You don’t need her right now.” He slid the back of his fingers down her cheek. Teresa took in a gasp of air at his touch but pushed his hand away.
“How can I get this done faster? Can I take more than one a night?”
Desperation clawed at her insides at the very thought of returning to Mountain View. She couldn’t go back there. She wouldn’t. She would rather die.
“You send Tiffany to me. What drives your decision to send her?”
He didn’t answer but watched her thoughtfully. He seemed to be enjoying her desperation.
“Some were at night, one during the day. What makes you decide when?”
“That is hardly important,” Yaldabaoth said. “I am impressed by your desire to succeed, to finish. Please, come.” He guided her to the door, and they stepped out of the nursery into her own formal dining room, complete with the table and chairs she’d picked out back when they first moved in.
He pulled a chair out for her to sit. She accepted, and he sat across from her.
“You need not know the ins and outs of this,” Yaldabaoth said. “You only need to know that every time you give me a soul I am that much closer to the powerful being I once was, that much closer to giving you what you seek.”
“What happened to you?”
“My mother. She cast me from her. She sent me here, to Tartaros. It was a misunderstanding. I took some of her light. I needed it to live.” He leaned forward and clasped his hands on the table. “When my mother sent me away, I was but a shred of my former self. A wisp. A fragment. A fractioned soul.” His voice had grown distant.
“But then, I used her small amount of light and multiplied it. With each creation, I gained more power. First, I created seven heavens. Next, seven sons and daughters, then they too multiplied by seven more. I took my power outside of the seven heavens and formed the material world.”
Teresa knew better than to yell blasphemy like she had with Louise.
She met his eyes, and for once, she saw more than evil. There was a sad hope. She leaned forward and almost touched his hand, but she pulled back before the motion carried her away.
“My mother has always been so much more powerful than I.” He looked away from Teresa. She could relate. His jaw twitched, and when he looked at her again, the hope and sadness were replaced by rage. “She will pay.”
“The sooner to bring you to power, then?” Teresa ventured.
“Yes. Yes, of course.” He flipped a hand. “But you must understand.” He stood and pulled her to her feet. “The zoe is strong. It takes time for me to absorb it. To truly revel in the ecstasy.” He pulled her close to him and tilted her chin. “You understand—don’t you?” He lowered his lips toward hers but didn’t kiss her.
She closed her eyes and yearned for him to close the small gap, but at the same time her mind screamed in terror.
“Yes,” she whispered. He released her.
“Tiffany will appear when the time is right.”
The cave reappeared, and he pointed toward the doorway.
Outside, she bent over and gripped her knees. Her body, heated by Yaldabaoth’s touch, shook with pleasure and fear. He was right. He had so much power over her.
With no way to speed up the process, Teresa returned home. Derrick’s threat of taking her back to Mountain View loomed in the forefront of her mind.
“I can’t live that way.” She picked up the pace and made it home in less than ten minutes.
In the kitchen, she picked up the phone and called her mother. It rang three times before her mom answered.
“Hello, Teresa. What have you gotten yourself into now?”
Teresa ignored her mother’s snide remark.
“Derrick wants me to go back to Mountain View for analysis. I can’t go back there, Mom. I don’t know what to do.”
“You’ve angered your husband. You need to make things right with him. He is your topmost priority. A happy husband is a happy home.” Recycled advice. She’d heard the same so many times in her life and on the phone these past few days.
“Yes, but . . .”
The front door opened, and Derrick walked in. “Oh, hey. I forgot my lunch—w
ho are you talking to?”
“I have to go.” Teresa hung up.
“Who was that?” Derrick asked.
“None of your business.” She crossed her arms.
“Tell me who you were talking to.”
Teresa lifted her chin and tightened her lips.
“Was it your new friend? Who is she?” Funny he would assume her new friend was female.
Teresa relented. “I was talking to my mother, if you must know. I called her earlier in the week, after you took the baby’s furniture, and apologized for the years of silence. I had to talk to someone. Since you seem to believe I have no friends.”
Derrick’s face turned white and his mouth dropped open. Was it that much of a shock that she would call her mom? He closed his mouth and swallowed. Teresa actually saw and heard his Adam’s apple bob up and down.
“What’s wrong? You look like someone danced on your grave.”
“Teresa.” Derrick’s voice was low and soft. It was his doctor’s voice. She hated when he used that voice on her. “You can’t have called your mother.”
Teresa tightened her crossed arms. “And why not? I have every right to call my family if I want to.”
“No, it’s not that you’re not allowed . . . It’s just . . . Teresa . . . your mother is . . .” He swallowed. “She’s dead.”
Chapter 48
Ann pulled the gloves on and collected the tooth. In the bathroom, she grabbed a couple of cotton swabs from a glass jar on the counter. She used them to collect a few samples of the stain in the carpet, specifically a chunk Pinky had missed. Ann didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but it resembled subcutaneous fat.
The dog whined and pawed at the door. Ann examined the cotton swab samples. It could be blood. Blood mixed with dog saliva.
A guttural lurching sound came from the other side of the door. Ann opened it just as Pinky threw up the contents of her stomach. Swimming among the pieces of bloated kibble and clumps of undigested grass were more teeth and gobs of other unrecognizable substances.
The Blood of Seven Page 24
