“Say your wife’s name,” Razz said.
“Why?”
“Just say it.”
Darryl rarely said her name unless he was half-asleep. “Carmel,” he murmured. It felt strange after so many years.
“That’s a beautiful name. We nearly called our youngest Carmel, only we didn’t think you could handle it.”
Darryl almost choked. His wife would have loved it. If only he had been less selfish. Less stubborn.
“Maisie’s a good woman,” Razz continued. “She’s a marvel. I don’t think she’s missed one practice in twenty-five years. Not one. If it hadn’t been for my beautiful Gloria, I might have married her.”
Darryl tried to swallow that down with a shudder. He couldn’t imagine Razz and Maisie. You know. Under a quilt. It just didn’t seem right to him.
“And I know what you’re thinking,” Razz said, patting his belly. “You’re thinking I’m a good looking guy. That Maisie would have jumped at the chance. Thing is though, she wanted to be a nun in Junior High.”
“A nun?”
“Yeah, a nun. She said she didn’t want to play the game. You know, the one where the woman pretends to be all mysterious and the man can’t help himself because all that secret stuff’s driving him crazy.”
Darryl had no idea what Razz meant. He couldn’t remember a day when his late wife had ever played games, except chess perhaps. She was good at chess.
“You’re lucky to have her, Darryl. It could have been worse.”
What was worse than this? Darryl smothered a yawn and glanced at his watch. “Feel like going for a drive in my Comet next week?” he asked, studying Razz’s wide smiling face. It was the color of well-done steak and there were more jowls on him than a bulldog.
“If they’ll let me out of the booth at Lightwalk. I’m beginning to wonder if anyone ever listens.”
Darryl enjoyed the show, a combination of bible study and light comedy kicking out at the televangelists of the seventies. Razz had excellent delivery, especially in church. “Of course they listen. Got higher ratings than that weather man and his dogs on Channel 4. You could slice a demon in half with your wit.”
They shook hands and Razz made his way to the front of the church to congratulate the music leader on another hour of trilling and jumping about. He felt like he’d spent the greater part of his weekend in church.
As he drove home, he barely listened to the girls in the back seat, voices raised to a joke or two. Maisie was quiet beside him, fingers pinching her nose. The Comet was stinking of oil again, stronger this time than before.
He turned off McMahon and swung into San Timoteo, pulling into the first house after a vacant lot. It was made of brick and stucco, evoking the desert southwest. He had grown to love the arches, the exposed beams and the floodlit courtyards. There were two blood-red ristras under the porch and a twist of Christmas lights around the vigas. Bought with his late wife’s life insurance money so there would always be a part of her there.
Maisie took the girls upstairs and he could hear them thumping along the corridors still singing How Great Thou Art. He poured himself a glass of milk and that’s when the phone gave a shrill ring.
“Darryl, this is Detective Temeke. Sorry to call you so late.”
The milk almost curdled in Darryl’s stomach. What could he possibly want at this time of night?
“I just wanted you to know there might be a newsflash tomorrow morning. We found another victim today. Partial remains.”
Darryl barely stuttered into the phone and he quickly found a chair at the kitchen table. “Where … where did you find her?”
“Over on the south side of town in a private house. The doctor said it was the same cause of death. Only it looks like our man left a bit of himself behind so to speak.”
Darryl had the beginnings of a nasty headache and began to massage one temple. “When you say a bit of himself―”
“A few strands of hair and some blood. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to find a match first. In any case, it was the newsflash I was worried about.” Darryl heard the long drag of a cigarette on the other end of the phone and then, “But we think it’s the same guy.”
“How did she die?”
“Manual strangulation. And then she was decapitated.”
Darryl felt a bubble in his throat like a large bloat of gas and he thought he was going to throw up. “If Morgan Eriksen’s inside, he couldn’t have―”
“The remains could be older.”
“So he could have done it.”
“He could, yes. I’ll be seeing him again tomorrow.”
“I’d like to see him.” The words were out of Darryl’s mouth before he could stop them. “Face to face.”
“You and I both know that wouldn’t be a good idea, sir. You have a good evening now.”
Darryl heard the soft click as the phone went dead and he let out a long sigh. Somebody would be told soon their daughter had been found and that same somebody would be crying bitter tears just like he had. It was probably the same girl that was on the news a month ago, missing, lost.
He walked over to the kitchen window and saw the fir tree covered in a fresh fleece of snow. The lower branches bowed under the weight, some flicking upwards at the sudden release of their burden. The solar lights gleamed across the yard and bounced off a black shape that seemed to glide along the wall. It tumbled over the other side and down the embankment, perhaps to the arroyo.
A coyote? No, it didn’t move like a coyote. It was more rigid, like a man vaulting sideways, legs outstretched. Darryl leaned over the sink almost pressing his nose to the glass. He had to be seeing things again. Although, it wouldn’t hurt to look.
He opened the sliding glass doors on the back porch and in six long strides he was standing by the back wall, peering down into the arroyo. There was a path directly below and beyond that, sand mixed with snow and sagebrush.
Nothing moved. And then about a hundred yards to the left of Tuscany Park something did move in the shadows. Something lurching up a gravel incline toward Bandelier Drive.
Darryl saw the car lights red and small, and a steam of exhaust as the car spun into gear and headed south to who knows where. He couldn’t see the model but he heard the low rumble from a loud exhaust.
A performance muffler.
Darryl wondered if it was the same car he’d seen outside work, black, aggressive front-end. Camaro SS Coupe. It wasn’t like he would forget a car like that, the type that was on every teenage bedroom wall. If you made a thumbs up sign at the driver you were already part of an exclusive club and it was mutually understood you’d left yours at home.
Three nights ago the car was in the bank parking lot at closing time, all fired up and glowing. It was the same halo headlamps that followed him all the way to McMahon, the same glass-shattering roar, the same black tinted windows.
He’d never get to bed now, not with that Camaro in his head. Not when he knew someone was out there watching him.
THIRTEEN
Ole drove around for a few hours, enjoying the afterglow of his latest stakeout. He was wearing a horizontal carry over a crisp white shirt and weapon tucked neatly at his side. He must have looked like Special Ops.
What was it that haunted a man’s soul? He didn’t claim to know the answer. He only knew that men like Darryl Williams needed to be haunted in order to be broken.
Broken and haunted. Haunted and broken.
The car window was open to a gush of icy wind. The cold never bothered him, nor did he need a coat in thirty degree weather. He felt like the wolf in the darkness, his Loki. Sometimes he pretended he had thick skin and fur you could sink your hand in, sometimes he was just flesh like a man.
It was dusk when he’d made up his mind. Time for something different, he’d earned it after all. He liked to make sure the subject was in his sights long enough to create an impression and not enough to know he was there.
And this one was worth somet
hing.
The girl had an evening job at the Corrales Café and he waited outside until closing. Twirling a short flouncy skirt, she walked outside, painted nails dancing through black hair. She put her hand up over her eyes to shelter from the headlights of an oncoming car, then looked up at the trees as if searching for something. The moon, a constellation of stars. He had seen it often enough.
This was his fourth time of watching her. Unique, unforgettable. As always the loneliness of his situation pressed in, a strange blackening moment, and then a souring excitement fell deliciously over his soul.
Acting like a shadow was getting boring, especially as he was stoned most of the time. Fun in his mind meant a frenzy of blackouts and the whir of faces, and he never remembered much after the fact. Reliving his cruelties was no longer exciting. He needed so much more.
He knew how to stalk anybody, anything, and he parked deep in the shadows under the trees and watched the girl. She unlocked the chain around the back tire and looked up a couple of times. She was probably uneasy, knew she was being watched. That was the part he liked the most, the part that ratcheted up the pace and made his heart pound.
There were eight other cars in the parking lot, his was the ninth, and she wouldn’t have a clue where that feeling came from. Even as she brushed a hand through those blunt bangs of hers, she had no clue what was nagging at her senses, telling her to hurry up.
She flicked a glance in his direction because the Camaro, a dark stud of a machine, had a place in every girl’s dreams. It had a place in her heart. She could only see her own reflection in the windshield, but she must have recognized it.
Even the cops gave him no mind at this strange hour as he waited outside the café watching the girl and the bright red bike. Part of being Ole was not looking at all like what he did.
By now she was unsettled enough to make a mistake, wobbling slightly as she pedaled away from the curb and out into the parking lot. That’s when she noticed the tire. The one he’d slashed with his knife.
Ole was invisible inside that dark shiny shell, wheels hardly turning as the car coasted after the bike. She would be drawn to it like kids to an ice cream truck, only this one was offering more than a snow cone. Just as he was thinking that, her head snapped around and she came to a grinding halt in the middle of the parking lot.
He wouldn’t jump out though. That was the oldest of all tricks. She might run for the trees if he did.
Forehead a frown and mouth working up a shout or two, her skin seemed whiter than he remembered. She was petite and slender, and that’s what mattered. He powered down the window and stuck his head out.
“Becky. It’s me.”
She pressed one hand flat against her collarbone. The tiny smile, the nervous twitch. It was all fake. She knew his car well enough.
“Looks like the back tire,” he said. “Leave it behind the dumpster.”
She gave a tentative wave and pedaled on ahead, looking back twice to see if he was still there. Then she hesitated at the crossing, even though no cars were coming.
“I’ve got a bicycle pump in the trunk,” he shouted. The slash was too far gone for one of those but she wasn’t to know.
She swung her leg over the saddle and leaned the bike against the dumpster. She fumbled with the chain and crouched down to wrap it around the back wheel.
Ole backed the car into an available space and slipped out of the driver’s door. He leaned against the passenger side fender and watched her in the shadows. She seemed to be taking her time.
Something throbbed inside him, a lingering burn of ancient lust. She turned then, eyes skimming down his body, visualizing things a young girl should never know. After the age of fourteen girls were no longer pure. They knew what they wanted. And this girl wanted him.
“It’s slashed,” she said, tucking her lower lip behind her top teeth. “I can’t believe someone would do that.”
Ole shook his head and shrugged. He was fascinated and thoroughly turned off at the same time. It was incredibly stupid to talk to a complete stranger, especially near a densely wooded path that led down into an arroyo. Only he wasn’t a complete stranger. Not to her.
“Do you live around here?” she asked.
“Corrales,” he lied.
She lowered her head, eyes flicking up to his. “I didn’t know you lived so close.”
“There’s a lot of things about me you don’t know.” He couldn’t keep the laughter from his voice and she half smiled in response. “Suppose I take you home and you tell me more about yourself on the way.”
She didn’t read the insult, the fact that her life would hardly fill the three long minutes to her front door. He wasn’t sure he wanted to kiss those lips or touch any part of her. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to slash her throat from ear to ear.
Not yet.
She eyed the gun in his belt and the car, and then nodded. He opened the passenger door, seeing the curve of her buttocks through that flimsy skirt. He wanted to look away, unable to form the simplest words.
He drove slowly, watching her out of the corner of his eye. She seemed to study the tuxedo shirt he wore, eyes fixed on the flesh at his collarbone. So strangely relaxed for one about to die, unless she was trying not to show any ounce of fear.
“Home,” he murmured, parking in front of her ground floor apartment. He flexed his left hand, the hand that would snake around that tiny little neck in a moment.
She slipped off her seat belt and turned to face him. In utter silence she studied him, lifting her chin to expose her neck. “You remind me of someone. I can’t think who.”
Ole bobbed his head. He could see she was fortified by his smile. It was Morgan’s face on every newspaper, long braid and tattoos etched into his temples. He doubted she would see the similarity. “Perhaps I have an ordinary face.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You look like an actor.”
That made all the difference to him. She would trust him if she thought he looked like someone else. He knuckled his forehead in mock concentration then snapped his fingers, rattling off a famous name. Her red painted lips parted, just wide enough to laugh.
“Trust,” he whispered, “means walking down a dark, empty street without a gun.”
“I’ve never held a gun, never touched one.”
“You can touch mine,” he whispered, knowing she hadn’t missed the innuendo.
She lowered her eyes, shook her head. “They scare me.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he murmured, trying to decide when to do it, when to lean over and kiss her, when to slide his hands around her neck and hear the frantic gurgle. “I won’t tell your dad.”
She looked at him then, eyes moist, like she suddenly knew what he was thinking. Only she was oblivious to what was going on his mind, even his hesitation. “How well do you know him?”
“Let’s just say… better than he knows me.”
He was getting closer to the edge, as if he would tumble into that ravine at any moment. How could it be so hot sitting next to her? Yet his mind was so cold.
Then he heard her say his name as if he’d been thinking for too long, grounding him, bring him back. She even smiled, brightened, like she was enjoying his company. He wasn’t listening to her voice. Not really. It was just a blur of words, the type you hear in a bar, the type that bores the pants off any regular guy.
But he wasn’t any regular guy. He was as welcome as a foreboding dream, as eloquent as grim poetry on a prison wall. Even when he took a single strand of her hair and wound it round his finger, he was still a killer.
She had got him at his name. Ole. It sounded odd and nice at the same time. He didn’t feel vile, not anymore, not by a longshot. “Have you ever kissed a man?” he said.
There was nothing more exciting than a kiss. Doing it well was another matter.
“Yes,” she said, cheeks flushing, hands flat on her thighs.
Ole threw up his head. “Show me.”
He liked it far more than he thought he would, and he stopped for a moment to look at her eyes. It was too dark to see details but there was a light across her face from the apartment office and for the first time in his life, he wasn’t afraid of what he saw.
He’d been expecting the rise of bile in his throat, the screaming ravens in his head, the thick black smoke that threatened to suffocate him; but he felt none of those. It was like a cup of old whiskey in oak, streaming through his veins, fresh and delicate. The opiate of the rich.
He traced the line of her lips with a finger. “Do you know how hard it is for me to look at you?”
“No,” she whispered.
He couldn’t bear to look at those moist lips and not kiss them, and her tender, exquisite features only filled him with an ominous sadness. She wasn’t vulnerable to the same things that he was, the insatiable desires, the raging anger, the repulsive smells each time he killed. It was his secret, a dangerous secret. It would compromise her to share in his world. But then again, she wasn’t exactly Snow White.
Mustn’t forget he was a cop, playing a cleaner role than the monster he was. He held on to that hand for a moment, sensing she wanted things to gallop ahead before he had a chance to show her how it was done.
“I should leave,” he said, watching her face crumple like that of a child about to bawl.
“Don’t,” she murmured.
When he dropped her hand and said nothing she looked puzzled. “Don’t you want my number?”
“I don’t need it,” he murmured in that fluid resonant voice she was clearly falling for. “I already know where you live.” He leaned over and kissed her again. She wasn’t going anywhere.
She had an inkling of what he was, monstrous and magnificent, a chimera. She didn’t care. But it was hardly polite to kill a girl outside her own house.
“Let’s go for a drive,” he said, seeing the inflated cheeks and the smile beneath them.
The 9th Hour (The Detective Temeke Crime Series Book 1) Page 8