PAST RITES
Claire Stibbe
United States of America
Past Rites
Copyright © Claire Stibbe 2016
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing to Noble Lizard Publishing.
Published by Noble Lizard Publishing, USA
eBook ISBN: 978-0-9906004-9-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-9906004-8-0
Printed in the United States of America
Cover artwork by Author Design Studio
Other books in the Detective Temeke Series
The 9th Hour
Night Eyes
www.cmtstibbe.com
Acknowledgements
My thanks to New Mexico for providing the inspiration for the Detective Temeke series. To my mother for giving me a safe and loving home, and to my father who gave me his love of language and books. Special thanks to the Albuquerque Citizen’s Police Academy, to the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department and all the officers and detectives I have worked with. For the invaluable services of Twisted Ink Publishing, The 13th Sign and An Tig Beag Press. A huge thank you to Kingdom Writing Solutions and to editor Sandra Mangan for molding the clay into something worth reading.
As always, I owe the greatest thanks possible to Jeff for his love and support, and to Jamie for his encouragement and humor.
Claire Stibbe
Albuquerque, New Mexico
December 2016
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Thank you for reading this book
Table of Contents
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
FORTY-SIX
FORTY-SEVEN
FORTY-EIGHT
FORTY-NINE
FIFTY
FIFTY-ONE
FIFTY-TWO
FIFTY-THREE
FIFTY-FOUR
FIFTY-FIVE
FIFTY-SIX
FIFTY-SEVEN
FIFTY-EIGHT
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ONE
Gabriel dropped the poker and reached for the camera. He had planned this night for a long time. It might seem a despicable act to some but what others thought didn’t bother him in the least. He had been hounded for the greater part of his teenage years but now he was deaf to every insult, every condemnation, every dismissal of his right even to exist.
At high school there had always been whispers in the darkness, boys in the gym or on the soccer field, and girls in the corridors. They had said things, wanted things, demanded things.
Then Demon whispered to him. “You don’t have to suffer this. There are things you can do. Permanent things. I’ll help you.”
It was a harmless comment on the face of it, but there was something in the tone that let Gabriel know nothing would ever be the same. Demon was wild, exciting, insane. Right from those very first words, the life Gabriel once knew was forever gone.
They say patience is a virtue so Gabriel waited until after high school graduation. He knew the girls and boys would all go to the same college because they were the very best of the gene pool. He bided his time, watching for that special moment when the mind conjures up the worst of those memories and the body breaks loose in a perfect gush of hatred. That exquisite moment when there’s no turning back.
Catching sight of the poker on the carpet and his pale reflection in the full-length mirror made him flinch. He looked like a man who had a skin disease and who never saw the sun, chest speckled crimson, even down to the gloves and military boots.
He lifted the camera. Gabriel relished the sound of the motor drive; it reminded him of a howitzer. Fast, heart-pumping, like a model working it to the last drop. He photographed the girl on the floor, the living room, the view of the park from the window and a dangle of dead mistletoe inside the front door. The things Asha once saw, things she once felt. Precious things locked up in another head now, a head that yearned to be part of her.
There... captured and sealed.
Haunting his prey had been the fun part, until Gabriel was so pumped up with anticipation he couldn’t hold it in any longer. He sent Asha five Calla lilies in a black vase with a typewritten card that said, You light the lives of those you touch. But none as much as mine. It was funny now he thought of it, especially the quick scrawl on the back. Saturday. Eight o’clock. Your place. P.
The flowers were on the mantel with a note propped up against the vase. Asha was expecting a visit from a law student she had the hots for. Dark hair, blue eyes, everyone’s crush. Even at school.
It explained the stylish sheath dress she wore. The pearls and the burgundy lipstick. It also explained why Asha hadn’t gone out with her friends to an all-night frat party with two hundred dancing drunks, a freshman’s idea of a hot Saturday night.
Gabriel couldn’t remember how it happened, how he tore the life out of another human being or how he severed two of her fingers with a knife he’d found in the kitchen. It was the release before the blackout that worried him. He had no idea how long he had been there.
All he did remember was taking the key and letting himself in. A typical south side house, two bedrooms and a large open hall that led to a kitchen. Asha had been playing the piece she always played on a small Steinway grand. Chopin’s Prelude in E minor, fittingly depressing and suited Gabriel’s black mood.
She never heard the soft clang of the iron poker, nor did she feel the heavy thump against her skull. She may have heard a voice, excited and loud that made no sense. She may have heard nothing at all.
Blood pooled out from under her head, a dark stain on a Persian rug. Gabriel now couldn’t stand the sight of her. Those singular eyes mirroring a full image of him.
It was the Smarts that made all the difference. Tiny little pills that made him happy. Made him float on thin air. They awakened him to the book he had come to find.
Only it wasn’t there.
There was a blue shower curtain in the bathroom. Rolling one hundred and twenty some pounds of dead flesh in the
vinyl wrap wasn’t a problem. Dragging it out to the van was exhausting.
He went back inside, took the poker and wrapped it in a towel, wiped the piano, walls and furniture with a damp cloth. The blood had soaked into the deep pile carpet, camouflaged within a red medallion design, and as for her fingers, they were safely hidden where no one could find them.
With the knife, he carved a name on the kitchen door frame, one inch beneath the first hinge. Mahtab. It would mean nothing to the finder. But it meant everything to him.
Taking the typewritten note from the mantel, he replaced it with another. Come away, come away with William Tell, stick an arrow up his ass and run like hell.
Asha’s mentally incompetent roommate would think she had gone on a long vacation and would likely celebrate her absence with a round of applause.
She would hear from Asha of course, because Gabriel took that smart-looking Mac from Asha’s bedroom and made it his own. He would pretend to be Asha, out-of-town Asha, party-animal Asha, Paddy-mad Asha.
Gabriel was good at manipulating the system. It was probably why he had so many enemies. If he hadn’t been a scholarly stick insect, he might have been popular at school.
No, he would never be one of the elite. They made that plain enough. It wasn’t about what he’d done or what he hadn’t done. It was about luck, about uncertainty, about the cards a person was dealt.
Gabriel would do whatever possible to prolong the fantasy. Because luck, uncertainty and cards were not enough.
TWO
A few minutes past four o’clock on a bitter Sunday evening and outside, the day had prematurely aged into night. Detective Temeke lay on his couch, feet resting on a weight bench, smoking a cigarette. He stared through the window at the sunset, now a pale streak on the horizon. On a clear night, he could see as far as the computer factory on 528 and the smoke stack that spilled into a gray sky. But not tonight.
A snow-heralding wind prowled along the driveway, blowing the last of the winter leaves into the neighbor’s yard. The forecast had issued a storm warning, alerting drivers of the possible closedown of I-40 and I-25 in the event of severe blizzards. Fortunately, Temeke didn’t use either. It was up Alameda all the way to Ellison, provided his car didn’t trace another counter turn in the ice before Northwest Area Command.
He was glad he didn’t have to drive downtown to those cracked pavements, dirty sidewalks and old fashioned slot boxes for parking. Where old newspapers got caught up in dirt devils, gyrated down the middle of Lomas and snaked onto Fourth Street. The old folk who read them peered between the net curtains of their derelict houses, living proof that not all of Albuquerque had been transformed by gentrification.
The good news was, he would be reviewing cold cases starting tomorrow and reporting directly to his brother-in-law, Luis Alvarez. At least he had the autonomy of pursuing his own cases without the usual red tape. But if he was honest, leaving Homicide was like being catapulted into space with only thirty minutes of oxygen. He’d felt the dread then. He felt it now.
Put the old bugger in a closet and lock the door ‒ wasn’t that the whisper on the streets?
His partner, Malin, told him he needed a support group, told him he couldn’t be in law enforcement if he was going to drink and smoke. Especially in the office. What kind of example was that?
He’d kicked the booze all right. Well... almost. Bought a cat, an outcast British Blue he’d picked up at the pound. He and Dodger were two of a kind.
Cocking his head sideways, he listened to the crackle of flames in the fireplace and the soft chime of Dodger’s identity disk. It was the rattling he couldn’t work out until his cell phone skidded sideways between the ashtray and a potted cactus. The cat bounced off the couch in a fit of rage, got as far as the fireplace before collapsing in an exhausted heap.
Temeke grabbed the phone, fingers fumbled with the buttons.
“Got a moment?” a voice muttered.
It was Captain Fowler, treacherously smooth with hot lava bubbling beneath the surface. In a word, he was a sod.
“Your commander wants you in at nine o’clock if you still want a job. Got a cold case he wants to discuss.”
Temeke consulted the view outside his window. It was pitch black out there, temperatures in the low twenties. “When you say cold, how cold?”
“Delgado. 2007.” Temeke had to press the phone closer to his ear to catch what Fowler was saying. “Mrs. Delgado called this afternoon. Said her younger daughter didn’t come home last night. Found a note in the pocket of a pair of jeans when she was doing the laundry. After what happened to Alice a few years back, she wanted us to take a look.”
“Any idea what it said?” Temeke studied the glowing end of his cigarette.
“She didn’t say. Wanted to talk to you.”
It didn’t surprise Temeke that Mrs. Delgado wouldn’t talk to an insensitive git like Fowler, but she must have given him a reason. “And she asked for me because...?”
“Read your name in the newspaper. The Oliver case.”
That was the trouble with being a well-known detective in the Duke City Police Department. Everyone wanted a big part of your life. The time-off part. “Girl’s name?”
“Lily Delgado. Nineteen, five-seven, a hundred and twenty-five pounds. Missing? Maybe not after inheriting a crap load of money.”
“Tell Hackett I’ll be in at eight.”
Temeke hung up and mashed the remains of the cigarette in the cactus pot, pressing it deep into the soil.
It had been a week of reports, car thefts and drunks. Old files, new files, cases-that-got-under-your-skin files. A box of black three-ring binders that had found their way onto Unit Commander Hackett’s desk over two weeks ago had now found their way onto Temeke’s.
He remembered the Delgado case even down the photograph of a young woman on the front page of the newspaper. A redhead, a suicide, an aggressive investigation. The medical report confirmed an overdose of amphetamines and alcohol ‒ if he remembered correctly ‒ but it was possible they had missed something.
He poked another cigarette between his lips and dragged a match along the top of the coffee table, blew a smoke ring and watched it drift toward the cactus, separating between two spiny shoots. The house was spartanly furnished, cold, uninviting, nothing like it was when Serena had been there. Dumbbells on the hearth where a brass coal scuttle once stood and eleven bottles of amber ale piled in a pyramid on the mantelshelf. Letters still lay on the kitchen table, untouched, unopened since the day they arrived from her attorney and that was over a week ago.
He almost laughed, but not as much as he did when she told him she was leaving. A striking woman in a red dress, standing by the front door with a mound of suitcases she expected him to carry. It was lucky he managed to squeeze them all into her car on the first trip, he couldn’t have handled it if she had come back for the rest. He’d lost the love of his life.
Reluctantly, he picked up the phone and called Malin Santiago. She was the only partner he had ever had who could put up with a bawdy, cynical, chain-smoking Brit like him and somehow infuse some hope into his bald skull.
“Marl,” he said, imagining the apologetic smile, her half-hearted condolences. She knew about the divorce papers he refused to sign and the house he refused to sell. “Fowler just called. Looks they’re reopening the Delgado case.”
“He told me this afternoon. Said the girl’s tall, skinny. Nice looking.”
“It takes a horny old sod to notice.” Temeke could hear the sound of dripping water on the other end of the line and the echo in her voice. “So, where would you go, Marl, if you were tall, skinny, nice looking?”
“LA. Where all the models go.”
“Most of them end up bussing tables for a living.”
“Someone with a large handout wouldn’t be working in a restaurant, sir. If this girl’s a looker, she’ll have an agent and might already be the new face of Rogue’s Bazaar. She had an older sister.”
“Alice. Committed suicide at school on her nineteenth birthday.”
“Any family background, sir? Reporting officer?”
“Alan Delgado, Albuquerque’s top racing driver, was killed on NAPA Speedway in 2006. Public refused to believe it was an accident, refused to believe their star was dead. Apparently one teenager, who was sitting in the Turn 1 grandstands claimed he saw the two drivers in an altercation half an hour before the race. The surviving driver denied any such disagreement.”
“So no foul play?”
“None that I can see. It was one of Jack Reynolds’ old cases, only Jack’s dead and there’s no one else to ask.”
Temeke knew the police had monitored every murmur, every move, every breath for months after that terrible day and still couldn’t come up with a reason other than depression. They'd gotten hints over the years, carefully planted lies that made you itch under the skin. But nothing solid you could hang your coat on.
“We’ll go and see Mrs. Delgado tomorrow and it wouldn’t hurt to call a few modeling agencies either. And it wouldn’t hurt to get out of the tub, Marl, before you turn into a bloody raisin.”
Hanging up, he ground the cigarette in the ashtray and stood up to stretch. He noticed the motion sensor lamps flick on and off in the neighbor’s yard and saw Fats Riley sauntering down the driveway toward his mailbox. His dog did a fine impression of an air raid siren as it sprinted after a drift of junk mail. It was the same every night.
Temeke felt an unusual urge to see Alice Delgado’s picture again, to study those eyes, read what was in them. He imagined that lowered chin, faraway gaze, strands of Titian-colored hair playing around her jaw. Not smiling, yet she was strangely haunting, beautiful come to think of it.
She reminded him of someone.
THREE
Late on a full-mooned Sunday night, Gabriel Mann walked along the street in a fierce wind. Dressed in coveralls ‒ a sheath of protection against a biting cold ‒ throwaway clothes that didn’t matter, throwaway clothes that would soon be spattered with blood.
Shadows were playing tricks under a lambent moon and he thought he saw Demon, the grinning gargoyle he had learned to trust. The man with a hundred names, the man with the irresistible charm. Made him feel he was worth something for once.
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