“No. I met him somewhere.”
“Corrales Café wasn’t it?”
“How did―”
“It’s law enforcement, love. Got eyes everywhere. Should have told that nice surveillance officer you were going for a drive. He was worried sick. Incidentally, how did you get out without being seen?”
“Over the back wall,” she said, picking at her fingernails. “Albuquerque Yellow Cab met me up the street. You can check.”
“Oh, I intend to. But just to make you feel comfortable, Detective Santiago here will be staying with you from now on. Don’t want any pizza vans turning up at your door. Awful what happened to Zarah Thai. You were saying?”
Adel gave him a frown and lowered her eyes. “I needed a few Smarts. He gave me all he had.”
“Did you give him any money?”
“No, sir.”
Malin pitched in. “You know it’s illegal to give prescription drugs to other people?”
Adel was really crying now. Mumbling something about wishing Paddy hadn’t taken so many because he would still be alive. “He’s addicted... can’t last a day without them.”
“He gave them to all of you, didn’t he?” Malin said, remembering Paddy’s crushed in head and the bag of Smarts they found in his pocket. “Made a killing on the side.”
It was a shot in the dark, nothing to say it was Paddy’s fault the girls all wound up dead, but when the nod came it gave a Malin jolt.
“Paddy never loved me. Not the way I thought he did.”
“Womanizer’s the word that springs to mind,” Malin said. “I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to get even, give him a taste of his own medicine.”
“I hated it... but I couldn’t stop it.”
Temeke was clearly holding out on the details, the real reason Paddy had died. Malin had seen him do it a hundred times, especially with the drug dealers they picked up on the street, the ones who had no idea how the crack got down the pockets of their pants because they claimed the pants weren’t theirs. He would likely hit Adel with that gruesome bit of news. The bit where Paddy hadn’t died from an overdose, rather he had been slit from ear to ear and left in a puddle of blood. It was all in the file.
Temeke did it with every suspect. And Adel was a suspect because out of four dead and two in hospital she was the only one left kicking.
“Got ADHD?” Temeke cocked his head sideways and almost winked.
“No, sir. We just use it to study.”
“Whose prescription?”
Adel shook her head, shrugged and wiped an eye. She wasn’t talking.
Temeke gave Adel a box of tissues. “Miss Baca an old dragon?”
“It's a school for gifted students, what do you think? My dad said if I didn’t get good grades he’d take away my car.”
“I doubt getting good grades is hard for a gifted student.”
Adel’s eyes narrowed. “Do you even know what the pressure’s like?”
“Seems like your day was one round of pleasure judging by the amount of spare time you had. Let’s face it, it takes an hour here and there to have a séance, thirty minutes to enforce the power of levitation, at least ten minutes for a smoke down the nature trail and one for a bit of casual sex. Mustn’t forget the hours you all spent reading that book, mixing herbs and pulling feathers off a sodding roadrunner in the potting shed. When did you have time to study?”
“It was just kid’s stuff.”
“You do realize roadrunners are a protected species? State bird and all that. There’ll be a fine.”
“I don’t know about any birds.”
Malin wriggled in her chair, would have appreciated details on the roadrunner an hour ago. Animal cruelty was a fourth degree felony.
“I thought there was someone following us that night,” Adel said.
“Care to describe that person?”
“Medium height, black coat, dark jeans.”
A black coat? Malin thought. She was wearing a black coat.
“It was the beanie he was wearing that made me wonder... Homeless, all spaced out like he was on something. I couldn’t think where I’d seen him before, but there was someone just like him on campus a few weeks ago, digging around in the trash.”
The question on Malin’s mind came bouncing back hard. What man? And had he seen her? She hadn’t been aware of another soul in the woods that night. Thought she’d been thorough.
Temeke sniffed. “Can’t be homeless if he was digging around in the trash on campus one minute and outside Corrales Café the next. A good few miles between Gibson and the West side. Must have wheels.”
“I never saw another car in the parking lot. Do you think someone’s stalking me?”
Adel’s eyes seem to bore into Temeke’s and never once did they roam over Malin. At a guess, Malin knew Adel hadn’t seen her that night. She would have recognized her if she had.
“I specialize in stalkers, love.” Temeke seemed to be digging a hole in his cheek with a finger. Something was bothering him. “So, Paddy was going to find Lily?”
Malin stifled a chuckle. Adel had not communicated that piece of information and judging by a wrinkled brow, she must have been wondering how he could have known. Temeke was pushing her into a corner and he was taking pleasure in watching her squirm.
“He told me he knew where she was.”
Well, not exactly, thought Malin. It wasn’t quite how she remembered it. Paddy had said, I think I know where she is.
Temeke ran a finger over a pack of cigarettes on the table, probably craving a smoke now the questions were getting close to the mark. “Paddy gave you an overnight bag. Care to tell us what was in it?”
Adel looked down at the table, eyes running over each score and nick as if she was trying to make a shape out of them. “Just clothes.”
“Why would he bring you clothes?”
“I left them when I stayed the night.”
Malin wondered who Adel was covering for, who she was afraid of.
“So you knew he was sleeping with other women?” Temeke said, offering her a cigarette.
Adel shook her head and blinked at him through the lenses of her glasses. “The signs were all there. I just didn’t want to believe it.”
“You see I’m trying to understand why an intelligent male would see the sense in all of this. Unless he was hurting for his next fix.”
Temeke slipped the photograph of Paddy Brody’s blood-spattered remains from the file and laid it face up on the table.
“And why a perfectly intelligent male would go to a crack house on a whim. Because he died, you see. Got hacked to pieces. You wouldn’t know anyone who would do such a thing?”
THIRTY-FIVE
I saw you set the candle in water, watched it burn until it went out. Were you thinking of me?
Gabriel saw the eyes he longed for, bursts of memory seen through a gauzy curtain where gray silhouettes moved at random and the room was alive with whispers.
Sometimes he heard the sounds of crying, sometimes screams. Then silence as the night began to talk to him, all within a tangle of nightmares. He remembered the friends who shared this hell, friends marked with the same broken presence he knew so well. Friends who had passed on and left him abandoned and alone. Why did they have to do that?
He saw it in detail now, the chairs, the tables, the hierarchy of the place. Her hierarchy. He didn’t belong, she’d made that clear enough.
He couldn’t decide what was worse. Girls being teased and humiliated in the locker rooms with cruel words that made no sense, or boys doing the macho thing, trying to get noticed, trying to keep their egos intact. Boys who hid behind a blank, indifferent mask, saying few words but just enough to get them by. And they say a man is only as good as his word.
He wondered how he could do better, make better, see better. It wasn’t like he didn’t know. There were classmates, teachers, friends who could attest to a strong religious stance at school. Not like he hadn’t heard it all before an
d wondered.
He just didn’t want it rammed down his throat, that was all.
There was a pastor on 19th Street who came to the school to counsel and read scripture. What was his name? A man you warmed to because he had a sense of understanding hopelessness. He’d told Gabriel once that if a man claims to be in the light and hates someone, he is still in the dark.
The dark was a cold, lonely place where people go to die. Trouble was, Gabriel was very much alive and it all seemed wrong somehow. He was done kidding himself. Whenever he heard the distant sound of an airplane in the sky he thought of home. Bright sunny days as a child with a swollen diaper between his knees, looking up into the clouds to see where that sound was coming from.
His gut turned with the thought and his nostrils filled with the smells of childhood. Freshly mown grass, a girl’s laughter, his mother’s voice. What had gone wrong?
Then a new thought. If he turned himself in to the police, the screeching, the needling and the pain would stop. The shakes would stop. The vomiting, the sweats... Anything was better than this.
There was another way, and that was take his own life. The longer he waited, the more he wondered.
Demon never once portrayed himself as anything other than powerful and killing Paddy Brody had been a Herculean job. It didn’t seem possible for one man. Quick as a flash Gabriel’s whole world went muddy, with slashes of red and gray, and the scent of rust. The hatred seemed to accelerate one minute and dissipate the next, and he was never sure how to draw back the curtain to let in the light. He’d tried often enough and kept seeing things, orange eyes and dark shapes. It was starting to get to him.
Only a man knows how another man feels, the despair, the degradation, the panic. And the punch, when it came, hurt Gabriel right down to his secret place.
Change is good, so they say.
Shards of memories meant only one thing. His past was broken, swept up and thrown away. Today was new. It felt different, as if something vital was missing, and it wasn’t until he talked himself into drawing back the curtains of the room, squinting through a shaft of sunlight that he realized what it was.
He wasn’t sad any more.
THIRTY-SIX
Malin rolled her shoulders and stared out of the window of the house on Columbia Drive. How Temeke had managed to pull this off she would never know. But that winning British tongue had a way with words and Detective Suzi Cornwell couldn’t resist him.
The road was frosted in the moonlight and she tried to shake off the feeling of sadness and duty. A day of checking the university campus for witnesses of the homeless man Adel had described turned up no leads. No one seemed to remember much about him because no one ever looks the homeless in the eye.
Paddy Brody’s house had been cleared of all his personal effects and his roommate was a nervous wreck. She’d tried to calm the poor man down, tried to make him understand it was unlikely he was on the killer’s hit list. But what right had she to say that?
A kettle rumbled in the kitchen, made her tense sitting there with a small overnight bag listening to the infernal clink of cups and saucers.
“Here,” Adel said, placing two mugs of tea on the coffee table next to a cell phone.
A small crop top revealed the glimmer of a belly piercing, thighs sticklike and encased in a pair of yoga pants. She sat on the couch, pale eyes jittering behind stylish glasses. Exhaustion or a nervous tic? Malin couldn’t decide which.
“Sugar?”
Malin shook her head and took the tea black. She sat on a chair decorated with hunchback flute players so typical of the southwest. It was a darn sight more comfortable than perching on bar stools in front of the kitchen counter with your back to the action.
“You took my iPad,” Adel said. “I only use it to study.”
“If you’ve deleted anything, we’ll find it,” Malin said. “Not worth the trouble really.”
“Only pictures of Paddy and me.” Adel ran a finger under one eye, caught a tear before it slipped away.
Malin half expected her to launch into how she met this cool-ass guy she was crying over now, how he was the year’s best catch. And how the heck did he die in that rat infested ruin?
Get a grip, Malin told herself, feeling the sweat break out between her shoulders. Adel wouldn’t ask how Paddy died because she hadn’t asked how Zarah Thai was either.
“I want to know why he was there,” Adel said. “I want to understand.”
Malin studied the bleak gaze, the half open mouth and tried to place the accent she was hearing. Wondered if she could mimic it if she had to. “We think he took a phone call from someone. A drug dealer, perhaps. Did he ever snort or inject anything other than amphetamines?”
“No.”
“Ever complain of stomach cramps? Get aggressive?”
“I don’t think so.”
Malin tried to imagine the flotsam of users who came and went from the crack house on Guadalupe Trail, twitching and staggering with their dark rimmed eyes. “There’s a range of symptoms. You’d recognize them if you saw them. Fever, nausea, hallucinations‒”
“Alice had hallucinations.” Adel stared at the window, glasses reflecting the setting sun, a spotlight in a dark sky. Little by little, she was remembering.
“What’s the thing you most remember about Alice?” Malin asked.
“Always laughing and cracking jokes.” Adel blew into her mug and placed it back on the coffee table. “Every embarrassment became a funny story at dinnertime and with her, it didn’t matter if you failed a test or your grades plummeted. She said everything would turn out fine. You felt happy when you were with her, like you could forget everything bad that had happened. After class, we’d go upstairs and sit on Asha’s Persian rug and drink wine, tell stories... act them out sometimes. You know what I liked best about her? She wasn’t beautiful in the obvious sense. It kind of crept up on you. None of it went to her head.”
Malin remembered the picture. Long hair with traces of red... “Perfect, then.”
“All the guys thought so.”
“How tall?” Malin knew, she just wondered if Adel knew.
“Five foot five, six, maybe.”
“Fat? Thin?”
“Stocky. She worked out a lot. Liked to keep in shape.”
“Did she play sports?”
“Tennis mostly.”
“What about you?”
“Modeling, swimming. I wasn’t good at tennis.”
“But Alice was.”
Adel nodded and wiped her hands on her thighs. “She was always beating Zarah.”
“Something to be proud of. Did you like Zarah?”
“I liked everyone. But I liked Alice best. Thought she was brave. She never cried after her dad died.”
“Holding it in isn’t good.”
“She did it for us.”
Malin felt a familiar stirring in her gut, giddy, as in stepping off a carousel that had spun too fast. Her mother’s voice seemed to creep into the back of her mind. The oldest child is always the most sensitive. They’re the protectors.
“She found this book,” Adel murmured. “It was full of symbolism and rituals. And demons. It changed us. There was no way to undo it.”
“Why?”
“Because someone took the book.”
“Who?”
“Baca. She took everything. Nosing around in our private things.”
“She was protecting you.” Malin took a sip of tea. “Remember what Alice did? She spread ashes around her bed so she could find footprints in the morning. She found some, didn’t she?”
Adel shrugged. “Alice said if you believed, things happened. Good things. Like getting A’s and the boy you liked. Of course, everyone liked Paddy. Flirted with him whenever they could.”
“Did you start dating Paddy after Alice died?”
“Yes.
Malin suspected it was before, but she wasn’t going to push it.
“Do you believe your actions can be co
ntrolled by supernatural forces?” Adel clasped her hands together and pushed them down between her knees. “That they can be influenced mysteriously?”
“By magic, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Well, they can. I’m not talking about a magician who carries a crystal ball for scrying. I’m talking about a questing demon who carries everything he needs in here.” Adel tapped the side of her head. “The type that moves from place to place, occupies the space between mortals and angels. Something that can change a man from the inside out.”
Malin tried to stop the frown and the upturned mouth, but Adel had already sensed it.
“I know you don’t believe me,” Adel said. “But it’s true. He lives in the desert, in ruins, in outhouses, and on roofs. Alice once said he takes up three quarters of the human mind. Did you know the angel of death keeps his tools in a synagogue?”
“No... I didn’t.”
“He can’t procreate. He has to use the semen of Adam to make his own kind and then he uses a woman to birth it. Makes you think, doesn’t it?”
Malin was thinking. The front door was only a few feet away and the thought of staying the night with a quirky girl and a bad spirit seemed like a bad idea.
Adel turned her head slightly, eyes following a faint shadow of light that arced around the room. The headlights of a passing car. “He’s frightening to look at during the day. But at night he looks like a man.”
A man? The cogs in Malin’s mind began to turn. “Then Alice should have found human feet around her bed that night. Not bird’s feet. Someone was having her on.”
Adel leaned forward a little. Her hands were now tucked under her thighs and Malin was sure she saw her shiver.
“Awful what happened to Zarah,” Malin said, trying to keep her mind on the matter. Trying to understand why Adel hadn’t mentioned it. “Awful to think she could have died.”
Adel nodded, gazed out of the window toward the road and the police unit that had pulled out to make way for another on the next shift. “Do you know what drives a demon away? Spitting... bribery... the bells on a priest’s skirt―”
Past Rites Page 19