She settled into one of the chairs in front of the man’s desk. It was immaculate to the point of being anal retentive. More mother issues?
To Mala’s surprise, Richard walked into the office within a minute of Mala’s arrival. That was almost unheard of.
Even more unsettling, he seemed… chipper.
An internal alarm bell sounded in Mala’s head. This was wrong. This was very, very wrong.
“Ms. Charan,” he began, then corrected himself. This was another part of his pattern. “Oh, sorry. Dr. Charan. Good to see you.”
Mala eyed him for a moment before responding. “You too, Mr. Templeton.”
The social worker grimaced for a second before resuming his fox-head grin. Mala suppressed a shudder. There were way too many teeth in that mouth of his.
“So…” Richard drew out the word as he pulled out Janey’s file. “What has our Caitlyn been up to this month?”
Another deliberate emphasis. He had clued in to the fact that Mala’s charge now went by a different name. Her legal name couldn’t be changed until the adoption was finalized, and in order for that to happen, Templeton had to sign off.
The whole adoption process always took time, but this had been dragged out to the point that it was ridiculous. In the name of due diligence, Richard had gone through multiple searches for any remaining relatives that Janey might have, publishing in newspapers around the nation.
The publications hadn’t even been limited to the states where Janey’s family had previously lived. He’d used the justification that her extended family could be almost anywhere.
Mala cleared her throat, pushing down the bile that threatened as she framed her response to his question. It was an easy one to answer, as Janey had been doing quite well this past month. But Mala had learned never to go with the easy answers. Somehow those all seemed to go awry.
“She’s progressed quite a lot,” she finally said.
It was a political answer. Not glowing enough to incite suspicion, but positive enough that he couldn’t fault her.
“Is that so?” Templeton asked, his grin growing wide enough to bare his teeth once more.
Mala felt her heart sink. Something was about to happen. And whatever it was, Richard Templeton was happy about it.
And if he was happy, it was a guarantee that Mala would not be.
“I have reports of some troubling behavior on your part.” Templeton made a show of looking at one of the sheets of paper he pulled out from a file. Mala was confident that he had the thing almost memorized.
“Such as?” she answered, unwilling to give him anything.
“Late night visits from men. Nights where you did not come home until the wee hours of the morning.” He pursed his lips, clucking his tongue in apparent disapproval and disbelief. “Oh, and this last bit… Trips to crime scenes where Caitlyn was exposed to violent images.”
Mala’s heart sank. This was so far beyond bad that she couldn’t fully process the situation at all. These were accusations that could wind up getting Janey removed from Mala’s care completely.
How could he know any of this? The only ones present had been Janey, Trey, Darc and Mala herself. And none of them would have…
And then it dawned on her.
The door behind them opened, and Mala knew who she would see before she turned around. The girl-woman who was supposed to be at the library right now. Janey’s sister. Currently Mala’s worst nightmare.
Carly.
* * *
“No,” Trey said, trying not to retch. “Just… no.”
The crime scene reeked, but that was nothing new. Trey could handle stench. You couldn’t last long in this job if you couldn’t.
But this? This was an assault on the senses of a level that he hoped he’d never have to experience again.
The fact that it was inside a small room intensified the experience. There was nowhere to look, nowhere to even step that wasn’t covered with blood or viscera. Some was clearly human. A lot of it was not.
A woman’s head had been propped up on a stand made of what looked to be bones in the middle of the carnage, clearly the central part of the horror show. She stared back at the detectives, but the eyes were wrong.
Dead wrong.
Where there should have been irises and the whites of her eyes, there was just a solid brown. The killer had removed the woman’s orbs and replaced them with ones from an animal. Judging by the head that was facing the woman on its own stand of bones, staring at her with her own dead eyes, Trey would have to guess that it was a deer.
And scattered about them both were the rest of their bodies, commingled.
This was going to take a long time, and possibly some therapy, for Trey to ever forget. He glanced back at the woman’s solid-brown eyes. Scratch that. This was never coming out, ever.
A doe’s eyes had always seemed so soft to Trey. Warm, welcoming, a bit mysterious. But to see them like this was nothing short of apocalyptic.
Alien looking.
But looking at the carnage here, Trey had to admit that the only ones capable of such an act were already here with him on the planet. There was no foisting this one off on some extra-terrestrial race.
What made this worse? It was in an office building. A busy one. And it was the middle of the morning.
Okay, yes, they were down in the basement, in one of the storage closets that exited onto the furnace room, but still. This was brazen, even for some of the messed up freakazoids Trey and Darc had tracked down in the past.
“This one took some massive cojones,” Trey said, suppressing his gag reflex for the seventh time. “This is an out-of-the-way area, but…”
Darc looked up at the walls. “They are sound-proofed to keep the sounds of the machinery localized.”
That would be true, Trey supposed. “Okay. I get that. But what if someone had come down and caught the guy in the act? I mean, this had to have taken some time, you know? There’s no way to make sure you wouldn’t be interrupted.”
There was no response from Darc for a moment, and from his partner’s focus, Trey could tell that Darc had moved on to another topic.
“Where is the rest of the CSU team?” he asked one of the techs.
“Dunno,” the guy said, shrugging. “There are a few of the team that haven’t shown up yet.”
“Is Jeff Fischer one of them?”
The man lifted his eyebrows, and Trey could see that he was surprised by Darc’s seeming insight. The only reason he was surprised was because he didn’t work with Darc on a regular basis. This kind of deduction was commonplace for the bald detective. He didn’t even work up a mental sweat doing stuff like this.
“Yes, as a matter of fact…” he began.
But Darc had already moved on. Trey’s partner was studying the layout of the heads, the one human, the other not. Well, that wasn’t exactly true, considering the eyes.
Man, this case was weird.
“Could it be something stupid?” Trey asked. “You know, like they’re all pointing at something. Or… I don’t know. Something so simple you’d never think of it?”
Sometimes he got tired of things being so complicated that only a savant could interpret the information. Maybe if the clues were simple, he wouldn’t feel so unneeded most of the time.
But Darc stopped suddenly, his head cocking to the side.
That wasn’t good. But at least…
Darc clenched his fist.
Really not good.
“Get out of the way!” Trey called out to the team.
“Why? What’s up?” One of them asked. It was the one that Darc had questioned just a moment before.
Too late.
Darc bowled the guy over, sending the poor investigator sailing into a pile of what looked like sliced up liver and maybe part of a kidney.
“Sorry, man!” Trey called out as he ran after his partner. “Sometimes he gets like this!”
Trey had no idea what was going on in Darc’s head, b
ut clearly something was. And Trey knew enough to hang on for dear life when his partner started moving this way.
Because it was usually to another crime scene.
* * *
Mala wanted to scream.
But screaming would be seen as evidence of insanity, and based off what was happening right now, she really couldn’t afford one more notch on that particular belt. Even with Mala being the model adoptive parent, things were looking grim.
Carly was off having a conversation with Richard now, but she’d managed to leave a swath of emotional destruction in her wake that rivaled anything Mala had ever seen. And what made it worse was that Mala had seen it coming.
The signs had all been there. In addition to the fact that Carly was clearly troubled, there had been multiple incidents that had gotten swept under the rug. With as much as had been happening over the last week, Mala had kept thinking that they’d work it out when they could. There hadn’t been any rush.
Until things had exploded here in a small office at DSHS.
In the interim, Templeton had taken Mala to his immediate superior, a dour-faced woman in her fifties who wore glasses that made her look like she’d just stepped out of an episode of Mad Men. Ms. Regina Cross. And the woman was doing her best to live up to her name.
“You are telling me that you took a young child… a girl, no less… to a violent crime scene?” It was the third time the question had been asked, and Mala gave the same answer she’d given already twice.
“I had no idea the scene would be violent.” In desperation to better answer the question, Mala continued this time. “Ja… Caitlyn is very close to Detectives Keane and Darcmel--”
“Yes,” the supervisor interrupted. “Detective Darcmel. Who abducted Caitlyn at one point, did he not?”
“No, that’s not what happened at all. Caitlyn escaped from--”
“Yes, yes…” she replied, brushing away the implied criticism. “I have to say, police detectives do not seem suitable companions for a girl of Caitlyn’s age. Your judgment is proving less than adequate, from what I can see.”
“Ms. Cross, I am a licensed and well-respected child psychologist. I am providing Caitlyn with positive male role models. I’m not sure you could find better in Seattle.”
Regina Cross made a wrinkled rosebud of her mouth, as if she’d tasted something sour. “A detective who is on the spectrum? A positive role model?”
Shifting in her seat, the social worker made another note on the sheet of paper she was holding. It was a tactic that Mala knew well, but even with her knowledge, she had to force herself not to crane her neck to try to see what had been written.
Then Ms. Cross said something that felt like it would stop Mala’s heart.
“Do you have a relative that Caitlyn could stay with while we resolve this situation?”
There were no words for a few moments. There was almost no breath for the same amount of time. Mala felt like she had been punched in the solar plexus.
Finally, she regained the power of speech. “No. I have no one close.”
“Then we may need to set Caitlyn up with her sister,” Regina stated, tapping her pen against her mouth.
The ink cartridge in the pen seemed to have exploded, and every time the woman tapped the pen, a small black dot on her upper lip grew a bit. Mala found her attention drawn to the spot, like it was a cancer that was spreading and would eat off the face of her accuser.
“You would place Caitlyn with Carly?” Mala managed. “She’s barely 18, has no place to stay, and--”
“She is family,” the woman interjected. “And we could provide a place for them to stay temporarily while she sorts out her employment situation.”
“Employment…?” Mala was dumbstruck. This could not be happening. “She’s barely out of childhood herself. There is no way--”
“She is an adult in the eyes of the law,” Cross shot back at her. “And in a case like this, I think it may be the better option.”
Mala could feel her temper rising in her, her powerlessness threatening to choke her. If she wasn’t careful, she might go postal on the woman, and then any chance of salvaging this would be done.
Taking several deep breaths, Mala got her anger under control. “What is your plan, then?”
“We will go and collect Caitlyn from her school right now,” the social worker said, reaching out to pick up her the phone handset. “I think any delay at all could be detrimental to the well-being of the child.”
Fear and rage battled inside Mala. They bubbled and boiled so fiercely, it seemed no power in the world could keep them from being vented.
But somehow she managed it. She kept the feelings inside.
It was more bait. Mala could feel it.
This was an extreme line for them to take for a situation that hadn’t put Janey in direct danger. If there were concerns, those concerns could be addressed over a period of time, during which Janey wouldn’t have to be removed from the home.
The removal was more traumatic than anything that had happened up to that point, and Mala knew it. What’s more, she knew that Regina Cross knew it.
And what’s more… Mala knew Janey.
There was no way in hell she would let these people take her from her home. She would escape the first chance she had, and take that ratty bear of hers along for the ride.
And Mala knew just where she would go.
So instead of doing what she wanted, which involved taking Regina Cross’ head and inserting into another, much less comfortable part of her anatomy, Mala forced herself to relax. She sat back in her chair, crossing her arms and legs. She looked the social worker directly in the eye.
“Whatever’s best for Janey,” she said, her voice calm.
And smiled.
* * *
Numbers.
It was not the shapes the bodies had created. Nothing about the symbols that had accompanied them. Nothing about the crime scene itself had meant anything in the end.
Trey had been right. It had been simple. Simple to the point that the correlation had never been noticed. Not by Darc. Not by the strands of light.
It was the numbers of victims.
Three at the first scene. Seven at the next. Five at the following, but from the level of decomp, that had been the first actual killing. And now just the one.
5371.
The moment Darc had realized the link, the information had been crystal clear. It had also been obvious to what the numbers were referring.
It was the address of Darc’s apartment complex.
“Dude,” Trey said as he took the next turn Darc indicated. “Are we going back to your place? I thought we were hot on the trail of another murder.”
Darc didn’t answer, as it was probable that was exactly what they were doing. The new silver ties combined with several colored strands, warning that Trey’s ability to guide the vehicle could be compromised if he understood what could be awaiting them.
When they pulled up to the building, Darc exited the car and sprinted toward his apartment. The one that he and Maggie had shared. The one that the killer had mapped out for them in his choice of victims.
The place where something horrifying was awaiting them.
* * *
At first, Janey hadn’t understood what was going on.
A woman she didn’t know showed up at school, right in the middle of recess, and called her away from the friends she playing with. Strike number one.
Popeye asked her if she was a baseball fan now, but she ignored him. This was more important.
Next, the woman took her to the office, where Richard Templeton was waiting. She knew Richard Templeton. Strike two.
Popeye didn’t say anything to that. Both of them hated her social worker, even though Mala said that hate was a strong word to use, and that there might be a better one.
Of course it was strong. So were Janey’s feelings.
Then they told her that they were taking her away from Mala. St
rike three. They were out.
So now all that was left was figuring out where they were taking her, and how Janey was going to get away. She knew all about grown ups. Except for Darc, and sometimes Mala, grown ups thought they were smarter than all the little kids everywhere.
They were wrong.
They were not smarter than Janey. They weren’t even smarter than Popeye, most of them.
Popeye perked up at that. He wasn’t sure if he was flattered or mad. So he just ended up giving her a sarcastic thanks. He was so silly sometimes.
“So now we’re going to take you to your sister,” the woman in the funny glasses said. “Would you like that?” She smelled like a mix of really strong flower soap and beef vegetable soup.
But Janey just nodded. That’s how you dealt with dumb grown ups. You made them feel like they were right and you were stupid and you would do whatever they said.
Popeye grumbled something about them being at least half right. Guess he’d decided he was mad.
They were taking her to Carly. So Janey would wait a little bit before she escaped. There was a message she needed to get to Carly before she got back together with Mala and Darc and Trey.
While the grown ups were talking to each other, making their plans, Janey grabbed a sheet of paper and a pencil off the counter in the office. She’d need them.
There was some drawing she needed to do before she met back up with Carly.
* * *
Because of the fact that Mala had been kidnapped once before, she’d worked out a system with Janey. Seemed the best thing to do for a family that got into as much trouble as they did.
If ever something happened to either one of them and they were separated, they would meet up at the frozen yogurt place close to Mala’s apartment. But before she did that, she had some research to do. And some errands to run.
It would take the social workers some time to get to Janey’s school. More time for Janey to get away. Additional effort to then get back to the yogurt shop.
She should have enough time for what she needed to do.
It was information she had been quietly working on since she met Carly, but now it had become vital. And Mala kicked herself for not making it more of a priority earlier on. They might have been able to avoid this entire scenario if she had.
The 2nd Cycle of the Darc Murders Omnibus (the acclaimed series from #1 Police Procedural and Hard Boiled authors Carolyn McCray and Ben Hopkin) Page 25