The 9th Hour (The Detective Temeke Crime Series Book 1)

by Claire Stibbe

  That was over seventeen hours ago. She was sleeping now. And he was hungry.

  “Becky,” he murmured, sitting on the bed. He touched her arm, felt no response. “Looks like your Temeke wants to wait. He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t even care.”

  He leaned down to kiss her cheek, flicked a wisp of hair from her mouth. She was chained to the bedhead, wrists clamped tightly together and resting on the pillow. He couldn’t remember the dosage this time, probably no more than two hundred milligrams.

  He looked about for a needle, something to poke that skinny arm with just to see if she was faking. He picked up the flat-blade screwdriver and he let it hover over her skin. She’d feel the change in air current just like a common house fly if she knew how close he was. He pressed it against her shoulder, saw the flesh crater under the pressure. Not a shiver. Not a sound.

  She was out cold.

  “I’m not your enemy,” he whispered. “Never was. I would have loved you if you had loved me. But you didn’t. I am good, you know. Much better than you think. I was perfect once. When my mother loved me. I don’t know why she left my dad, my kind, smart, goodhearted, dad. I don’t know why things have to change. But they do. When did you change, Becky? When did you really know?”

  He liked the feel of her skin, the smell of it. And he liked those dark eyelashes that would have been stained with five-day old make-up if he hadn’t taken a glob of Vaseline and wiped the residue away.

  “You will be going home, babe. I’ll make sure of that.” He lowered his lips to her ear and whispered, “In tiny little pieces.”

  Two minutes later he was driving north on Osuna to the Gridiron Café. He parked in his usual spot, almost directly across from the front door. There were cops sipping shots of dark espresso in one corner and a group of businessmen in the other. If he was lucky, he might see Alvarez and follow him home.

  He liked being out in the open where everyone could see him. Only no one even gave him the time of day. That was the best part. He was anonymous in a town where all the worst nightmares were all his fault.

  By ten o’clock he was having a light breakfast and scanning the crime pages of the Journal. He couldn’t help feeling the flutter in his belly as he read the headlines, a warning sign. It wasn’t a feeling he could interpret right away and he put it down to the dark clouds and the sweep of rain against the window he sat next to.

  Albuquerque’s Murder Count Reaches Eight. Morgan Eriksen, charged with seven counts of murder and kidnapping, and two counts of first-degree assault against a law enforcement officer, has pleaded guilty to kidnapping, but not to murder. Are Police hiding the identity of a second killer?

  Ole pulled the phone out of his pocket and tried Jennifer Danes at the Journal. Her line was busy. He left her a message, only this time in his best British accent.

  Jen, it’s me. And don’t go telling anyone I called. But we’ve been looking in all the wrong places.

  Sounded likely enough.

  Looks like Morgan Eriksen had nothing to do with it.

  Well, that wasn’t quite true. Morgan stalked the girls, quite enjoyed the money until he found out Ole wasn’t about date rape.

  Just doesn’t fit the profile.

  Too damned stupid to fit the profile.

  Off the record, Jen, we’re looking at one of the victims’ fathers, Darryl Williams. Seems he may have had something to do with his wife’s death.

  There. Seed sown. Ole didn’t leave a name. Didn’t have to. He’d be visiting the Williams man as soon as he’d had his breakfast.

  He hung up and sipped a frothy cup of coffee, eyeing a couple of girls behind the counter. One was fat and blond, thighs begging to be set free from a pair of tight black pants. The other was a redhead with a face full of freckles. She reminded him of someone. He stared at her a little too long, caught her attention, made her smile.

  It didn’t come as a surprise.

  He cut the burger in half and took a bite, savoring the sharp taste of cheese, paying no attention to the waitress at his elbow offering him a refill.

  A refill?

  They don’t do refills on cappuccinos. It was the redhead beaming down at him, bill in one hand and pot poised over his cup. “I thought you’d like it. On the house.”

  He wondered what else was on the house and spread the newspaper out on the table as if both pages were a pair of white thighs.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Fawn,” she said, screwing up her nose as if she hated the name.

  “Bringing a bill this early makes a guest feel unwelcome. Like you want me to leave.”

  “Oh no, sir. I’m sorry. I can bring it back later if you want.”

  “Olafr,” he said, tapping his chest. “It means ancestor’s descendent.”

  “Are you German?”

  “Norwegian.”

  “I love your accent.”

  Of course she did. They all did. He stared her down, flicking a hand in front of his nose as if to get rid of a bad smell. Her eyes widened, hip no longer hiking up and down as she backed away.

  There was no sign of the cop and that bothered him. The music bothered him too. A Germanic hum that reminded him of the secret tongue he once shared with his mother.

  A hymn.

  Something about taking the veil from our faces, the vile from our heart.

  His heart wasn’t vile, was it?

  He mouthed the words as he remembered them, words that ran too fast for others to understand. They were kind words, special words. But sometimes they were words that hurt papa and made the whole world tremble, words that drove poor little Morgan to the pantry cupboard because they were quarrelling again.

  It was an hour later when Fawn left the bill on the table. He saw her phone number written on the corner and he wrote no thanks underneath. He paid in cash and studied the pen. At least it wasn’t one of those pink furry things or worse – a huge sunflower with a smiley face. This one had a silver shaft with a blunt end as if it would fit into a countersunk hole. A screwdriver.

  Becky…

  He couldn’t remember leaving the restaurant. All he did remember was the sound of tires screeching through a red light on Wyoming and speeding down Osuna to the house.

  He went in through the kitchen, saw the sliding doors to the patio smeared with blood and rain.

  On the outside.

  He opened the door and stepped down onto the flagstones, shoes crunching on broken glass. Craning his neck up to the shattered bedroom window, he saw shards trickling down from the angled roof and trapped in a clump of cattails below. A six foot chain and shackles lay abandoned by the pool where lights once shimmered blue beneath the surface of the water. He followed the footprints through the back gate toward the road and there, by a storm drain was the screwdriver.

  That’s when he howled.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Darryl pulled the blanket up over his youngest daughter, Sharek. Youngest now that Kizzy was gone. Another bad dream, another bad night. Beads of sweat had collected on her forehead and he touched her with the back of his hand.

  Flu. He’d keep her home tomorrow.

  He listened to every breath, wondering how often she woke in the night and used her inhaler. Asthma wasn’t the only thing she had inherited from her mother. Looks, temperament and the kindest heart. How he loved that heart.

  There was a small nightlight beside her bed in the shape of a hollowed-out tree. Inside it were three brown bears sitting at a table drinking tea. The glow from a single watt bulb was no brighter than a candle, shedding a rosy glow across the room.

  Outside the window was a young pine tree, spiky leaves hanging limp and drizzled with snow. Thousands upon thousands of flakes were illuminated by the headlights of a passing car, incrusted like jewels on a wedding veil.

  He recalled a fragment of their conversation earlier at dinner.

  If you think someone’s watching, daddy, they usually are. Like ghosts in the shadows. Like a reall
y bad dream.

  When he asked her what she meant she merely shrugged and stared at her elder sister, Tess. Sharek talked about a man outside the school, a man who had called her by name. And when he asked her what the man looked like she just turned her face toward her older sister, eyes vacant as if she saw right through her. Tess just looked like she’d swallowed a piece of meat without chewing, forehead creased with a line or two.

  Darryl knew there was an elusive truth to that look. It was all there if only he cared to notice. He wondered how he managed to keep living day after day, feeling the way he did.

  Sharek’s grades were dropping at school and her teachers put it all down to emotional stress. It had been nearly two months since Kizzy disappeared, two nightmarish months. No closure, no funeral. It was hard for an eleven year old.

  Her conversation was often peppered with cryptic nonsense and he wondered if she would ever be the same. He sensed that not every strange statement she made was half as eerie as it seemed. Morbid visions of a man behind a tree, a man sitting on Kizzy’s swing, a man with a crooked smile. He wondered if the child needed a dog, something to take her mind off it all. She had been closest to Kizzy after all.

  Tess was asleep in the next room, probably in those hiking boots if she had her way. Clemency Christian School’s best sprinter, 400 meters in fifty seconds. He peered into her room, eyes glancing from her bed to the window and the courtyard beyond. The fountain was still floodlit and the pavers glimmered like diamond chips under a full moon.

  It was the sound of a car reversing from the west side of the house that got his attention. The tail lights cast a rosy blush along the street and Darryl walked around the bed to take a closer look.

  It was a black Camaro, lazing under a street lamp. It was either dark gray or black, he couldn’t work it out and the windows were gloomier than his cellphone screen. No one had called him in days.

  He thought of calling the police. At least it would be someone to talk to. But you didn’t just call 911 for a chat and besides, what if the guy was looking at the empty lot next door.

  At eleven forty-five at night?

  It was parked on the wrong side of the street in front of the vacant lot and about thirty feet from the courtyard wall. It seemed to shimmer like a black beetle in the sand, brake lights casting a blood-red beam along the ground.

  Darryl sensed the driver was watching, sensed he was enjoying the moment as if he hoped Darryl was just a mouthful of jittering teeth.

  “I won’t be the rabbit to your hungry fox,” he murmured, padding barefoot to his bedroom at the back of the house.

  There was a short-barreled .44 magnum pistol in his bedside drawer, Israeli-made and fed with a detachable magazine. If two rounds could take down an elk, they would certainly poke a few holes in a gas tank.

  “That’ll frighten him off,” said Darryl, seeing the sense in it. He’d also put a few holes in those wide tires while he was at it.

  Creeping out of the front door into the courtyard, he was careful to dodge the floodlights, bare feet crunching through snow. He felt a spasm of cold shooting up through his calves and he berated himself for not wearing shoes. He could see the back of the car clearly now through a wooden grill in the adobe wall and he could see the Chevy emblem above the rear bumper.

  The engine purred to life and the car slowly moved forward, turning sideways onto the dirt lot as if attempting a three point turn. Although Darryl didn’t see anything threatening or out of the ordinary, the car stopped and sat there for a time, headlights shining over the arroyo. He couldn’t make out a driver until he heard the humming of the window motor, revealing a single pale face that seemed to be staring right at him.

  Darryl ducked instinctively, wincing from the sting of ice beneath his feet. The saliva seemed to evaporate from his mouth and he wondered what the man was doing beneath the amber lightfall of the street lamp.

  The only other sound he could hear was the drift of falling leaves and the hammering of his heart. At least the driver couldn’t see him behind the five foot wall.

  Something sped through the riven sky, a zip of light that illuminated the courtyard and filtered through the grill. It was a powerful flashlight, big and fat, and the silvery beam scurried along the top of the wall before going out altogether.

  Darryl crouched in the darkness, listening for the car door to open, and when it didn’t he inched back toward the wooden grill in the wall, chin resting on the ledge.

  It was then he heard the voice, low and rasping. At first he thought it was the neighbor across the street until he heard the sound of his name.

  “I can see you, Darryl Williams. I know you’re there.”

  Darryl wanted to run. He didn’t care about the madman with the whispering voice, the shallow puddles of melting snow or the pine needles underfoot. He just wanted to get back into the warmth and safety of his house, until he remembered the gun he was squeezing in his right hand.

  “What are you afraid of, Darryl Williams? Are you afraid I’ll cut off your head?”

  Darryl knew the man out there wasn’t a man any more. He had been taken over, slaughtered, conquered, devoured. By a demon.

  “I take heads, Darryl Williams, because I need the wisdom. Young. Teenage. Girls. So you have nothing to fear.”

  God help me! Darryl’s mind screamed. This man had all the supernatural power he needed to scale the wall and no locked door would keep him out.

  “I need more heads, Darryl Williams. More, do you understand? You can spare me another of your little dark-eyed girls, surely.”

  Darryl was sickened by talk of death and dark-eyed girls, and here he was hunkered beneath a drain spout where the snow had melted to water, splattering against the pavers and down the small of his back.

  He had to move.

  He squeezed the rubberized grip of his gun, eyes scanning the ambidextrous safety. He’d stripped and cleaned it last week because a clean gun was a functioning gun. The magazine was nearly the size of an AR magazine, a beast of a gun with a little recoil.

  “You have girls, Darryl Williams. Young, dark-eyed girls. Just like Kizzy.”

  That was enough for Darryl to remove the safety. He twisted around, wrists resting on the wall. Pulling the trigger was the most satisfying thing he’d done all week, squeezing off three rounds in frantic haste. He heard the thunderous boom and saw the car almost list to one side.

  The driver merely turned to look at Darryl as if frozen in anger, eyes wide and luminous, eyes that wouldn’t stop staring.

  Was he dead? Surely not. Not one of those slugs was aimed at the driver’s door.

  No he wasn’t dead, thought Darryl, not with all that laughing. It was a deep guttural laugh that made him madder by the second.

  He squeezed off shot after shot, explosions cracking along the rear fender and the rear door panel until he had emptied the magazine. The car shot backwards then, tires spinning against sand, loose rock ricocheting off the sidewalk.

  His stomach twisted with nausea and the muscles in his forearms began to ache as he lowered the gun. What was he doing on this cold December night, standing barefoot in the snow and shooting at strangers? It was then he heard the rain, felt it against his cheeks, pinging and snapping off the roof in a tuneless anthem.

  Somehow he was pumped with his own bravado, smelling gasoline and grinning through gritted teeth. He wanted to shout. He wanted to cheer, only he’d wake half the neighborhood. As it was a few lights blinked on and off from nearby houses and that was the time he streaked across the courtyard and out into the street.

  He headed west after the car, leaping over a low stone wall and a box hedge that delineated the subdivision from the main road. It wasn’t until he stubbed his foot against a rock that he came to stop, realizing his bare feet were likely torn to shreds. He was in agony and freezing, and he couldn’t help seeing fingers, pale and cold, reaching out of the darkness. They were dead fingers only inches from the nape of his neck.

  H
e turned suddenly. There was no one there.

  Why should there be? The man was going ten times his speed in a car that clocked zero to sixty in just over five seconds. He was probably half way to Gallup by now.

  Gasping for breath and nearly doubled-over in agony, Darryl hobbled back along the sidewalk toward his house, wincing from needle-sharp shards of rock. House after house, floodlights speared out of the darkness triggered by motion detectors and the deep throated growl of a German Shepherd almost made him jump.

  “Quiet boy,” he whispered.

  The growl soon turned into a whimper and two ears pricked, snout reaching between the bars of a restraining gate. Darryl brushed his hand against a wet nose, letting the dog remap his scent. He was surprised at how dogs warmed to him, surprised he never had one of his own.

  He heard no one, saw no one, and he realized a shot fired in the night might sound like a car backfiring heightened by the squeal of tires. This was several shots from a .44 magnum and he doubted any residents would be eager to scout the streets. The dog was frightened enough.

  He still felt a rush of exhilaration as he pushed open the weathered gate and the hinges groaned as he latched it. There were no little faces pressed against the living room window, none peering around the frame of the open door.

  His girls were sound sleepers. Even Maisie. But he checked their rooms all the same, pulled back each quilt to study the rise and fall of their precious chests, checked the closets and behind every door.

  Then he set his gun on the hall table before squatting and collapsing on the floor. Lying on his back and staring up at the skylight, he could just make out a cluster of stars that seemed to rain down from the night sky. He wasn’t shivering anymore and his fingers began to tingle from the radiant heat beneath the travertine floor.

  As he listened to the lulling tick of the hall clock and police sirens in the distance, an idea hatched in his mind. The driver would be back to get revenge.

  Only this time, Darryl would be waiting for him.