3rd Body: Just try to keep your head (Book 1 in the 2nd Darc Murders Collection)

by Carolyn McCray

  Trey had gone there after checking Maggie into the hotel and procuring food for her. The lines did some further calculations, adjusting Darc’s early conclusion. After checking Maggie into the hotel, finding food for her… and more than likely engaging in brief coitus. Less than seven minutes long, according to one of the strings of color that danced around Darc’s partner. That did not seem lengthy enough to overcome the foreplay threshold required for a female to achieve orgasm. Perhaps Trey should be informed of that fact.

  The thought of Trey and Maggie engaging in coitus should not have stirred up the grey seascape inside of Darc, and yet it did. Massive waves of non-color hit him in rapid succession, pushing out the delicate streams of information processing in the background.

  How much data had just been lost? One push of strong emotion that Darc could not even begin to comprehend had taken away countless calculations that were necessary to accomplish the tasks ahead.

  Two more figures stepping out of Mala’s car drew Darc’s attention. One of the forms was familiar and belonged to Janey. The other was new.

  Streams of blue, green and yellow strands flowed around this new individual, observing and cross checking fragments of data that often were small enough as to be almost irrelevant. But Darc understood that often those tiny slivers of data could add to and adjust some of the farthest reaching theories.

  So it was here. The data was compiled and added to the information already stored in Darc’s mind regarding Janey’s deceased parents. This new young woman was clearly the offspring of Janey’s mother, but not of Janey’s father. Which suggested an early dalliance on the part of Marilyn Parks, who later became Marilyn Walker.

  “Darc, I’ve got some news for ya, big guy,” Trey said as he approached.

  “Janey has an older half-sibling,” Darc replied.

  “How the…? Man, I hate it when you do that.”

  At that point, Mala and the two girls had gotten close enough for Mala to enter the conversation. “Darc, this is Carly. Sounds like you’ve already figured out who she is.”

  There was not a question there, so Darc did not respond. Instead, he looked down at Janey and nodded. He then turned his attention to Carly and observed her at closer range. The details that had been a bit obscured by distance came into even narrower focus now that the girl was here and more illuminated by the streetlamp overhead.

  Her expression seemed to indicate that she smelled something unsavory, but Darc was certain he had worn deodorant this morning. It was on the laminated list of rules Trey had given him. The girl’s arms were also crossed over her chest. Perhaps she was cold, as the night was indeed less than temperate.

  “Who’s the stiff?” the young woman asked, turning to Mala. “He another cop?”

  “He’s a detective, yes,” Mala answered. “He’s also a… friend.” There was a slight hesitation there that the lines of logic picked up. There was no rational explanation for the gap, other than an issue with language that Mala had not demonstrated up to this present date.

  The mass of grey within flowed forward, whispering tales of implausible reasoning for the delay. She was embarrassed about her relationship with Darc.

  That seemed unlikely. Darc was symmetrical enough to be pleasing to the opposite sex. His intelligence and success at his chosen career also made him appealing to those females who sought security in a mate.

  The issues of emotional disconnect were an issue, certainly, but that was more of a concern further into the relationship. And yet the grey whispering continued, blocking out the saner reasoning of the bright stripes of light.

  The caesura in the midst of the conversation stretched out for a long moment. Then Carly broke the silence.

  “Friend,” she said, nodding. “Right.” She sniffed. “He’s kind of a freak.”

  To Carly’s side, Janey had been peering up at her older half-sibling with a look that Darc could not identify. But with Carly’s last statement, Janey’s mouth turned down and she stepped away from the taller girl.

  The reaction was one that Darc could not penetrate with certainty, but the grey wash murmured its pleasure with Janey’s response. Whatever damage Carly hoped to inflict upon Darc, Janey did not want any part in.

  “Hey!” Trey said, his tone sharp. “That’s Sir Freak to you. This guy may be a little strange, but he’s my partner. And he’s a total genius.”

  Carly just lifted an eyebrow and snorted, turning away from the group. She muttered under her breath.

  “Like the geniuses that brought a little girl out to crime scene? Fantastic.”

  Mala and Trey seemed to react to this statement. Trey looked like he might say something else to the girl, but then turned to Darc instead.

  “Okay, what’d we find?” He looked up at Darc. “And by that I mean, what did you find?”

  “In addition to the metal plate that appeared to have been inside the Molotov cocktail used to start the fire, very little.” Darc gestured toward the building, where there were two figures on the ground with EMTs surrounding them. “Two individuals appear to have been trapped inside the building after the fire began.”

  Mala stepped in, speaking to Darc. The grey whipped into a frenzy inside of Darc as she approached.

  “Trey caught me up on the basics of the case. Same symbology as the others?”

  Darc nodded. Mala looked more closely at him, seeming to have some sort of reaction that Darc could not track.

  “You seem troubled by this one,” she stated.

  “I do not understand what you mean by that,” he answered.

  “Trey is being targeted?”

  “Yes.”

  Mala nodded. Backing away for a moment, she seemed to be done with the conversation. Then she came back, and her tone had changed.

  “And now they have no place in which to stay.”

  “That is not an accurate statement. They are staying in a hotel.”

  “That isn’t a long-term solution, Darc, and you know it.”

  The logic bands reeled from the accusation. To tell them that they knew something when in fact they did not was highly disturbing to the order in the system.

  But the grey mass settled at the same time, a response issuing out from the center of where that emotional energy was centered. A tacit confirmation that, yes, he did know that Trey and Maggie staying in the hotel was not a good idea.

  Mala stared at him, seeming to look for some sort of response. The streams of logic fluttered, frustrated at and flustered by her actions. A question had not been asked. No response should be necessary.

  But the question was implied, the grey within murmured, its now-placid surface area stirring just enough to communicate its message. And when the jangled threads of color responded in confusion, more explanation was forthcoming. Trey and Maggie should be staying with you.

  That was unexpected.

  The idea was logical enough. In fact, the solution was elegant and straightforward, as the end results of Darc’s inner processing typically were.

  Then why had they not put forth this plan when the opportunity arose?

  The glistening spider web of colors trembled in response. There was no answer forthcoming. It was almost as if the query had not been put forward at all.

  There was some sort of a blind spot here that suggested that Darc’s mental network was not as all encompassing or as thorough as Darc had previously thought. Something this blatant had slipped through with no alarm bells sounded.

  Another thought surfaced from the grey. This had occurred before. This whole conflict between emotion and logic had taken place in the past, and Darc had somehow reset the entire process to zero.

  “Darc?” Mala prompted, bringing him back to an awareness of the outside world. His mental processing, which took place almost instantaneously, had been bogged down by the emotional interference caused by… caused by…

  The thread of logic unraveled even as he was in the process of following it. Something was wrong here. Very wrong. />
  He felt a hand on his arm. It was a touch he knew well. Mala was leading him away from the others.

  “This is about Maggie’s pregnancy, isn’t it?” she asked.

  The strings of logic, normally adjusted to harmony with one another, sounded a cacophony in Darc’s mind. This was not about Maggie. It could not be. That was illogical. Meaningless.

  And yet the grey was placid, confirming Mala’s assessment.

  “I do not know,” he responded, and even to his own ears, his tone sounded strained.

  Mala stroked his arm. “Darc… Robi,” she said, using his given name. “It’s okay for you to have feelings about this. That’s understandable.” The movement of her hand against his bicep stopped. “But it can’t overtake your ability to help your friends in their moment of need.”

  “I do not understand.” It was true. He did not.

  It was an unusual situation in which Darc found himself. The emotional side of things had always remained a puzzle without a solution. But now, when logic clearly dictated a course of action, his emotions had surfaced and supplanted logic with something else much more chaotic.

  Mala sighed. “Tell them they can come and stay at your place.”

  Of course that was the answer. All that was left was for him to speak to Trey. And yet when he thought of doing so, a wall of resistance came up. A haze rose in front of his eyes, and a searing pain blossomed behind his forehead.

  Darc’s knees buckled out from under him and he toppled to the pavement.

  * * *

  “Um, Trey?” Mala called out to Darc’s partner as the tall man collapsed in front of her. “What’s going on?”

  Trey trotted over to Darc and peered down at him, shrugging. “It’s nothing. Just a sugar crash.”

  “You gave him sugar?” That did not seem like a good idea.

  “Hey,” he responded with some heat. “I didn’t have much of a choice. It was that, or leave Maggie out here shivering in the cold.”

  That put things even more in perspective. Darc was struggling with Trey and Maggie’s pregnancy quite a bit more than he was acknowledging, even to himself.

  Not reacting to emotional cues was par for the course for someone with Asperger’s. But Darc was high functioning, and when it came to observational skills, there was no one better.

  Darc was really having a rough go of it.

  One of the crime scene techs walked past and saw Darc prostrate on the sidewalk. “He finally crash? You should’ve seen him twenty minutes ago. Guy was insane. Running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” He paused. “Well, a robot chicken with its head cut off, anyway.”

  “Can you get one of the EMTs over here?” Mala asked.

  “No, it’s fine,” Trey interjected, waving the tech away. He reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out a package of something Mala couldn’t quite identify. “Seriously. I’ve seen this before. I just need to give him some jerky. I got some at the corner mart before I came back.”

  At least Trey had prepared for this. Mala watched as he knelt down next to Darc and held out some of the dried meat. Darc took the food and began chewing, propping himself up on one elbow.

  “Sorry, dude,” Trey murmured to his partner. “Just wasn’t sure what else to do.”

  Darc shook his head, then made eye contact with Trey. Mala perked up at that. Eye contact was not easy for Darc, and it indicated that he was working hard to make a conscious connection.

  “I would like to invite you and Maggie to stay with me.”

  Trey sat back on his haunches. “What?”

  “You and Maggie can live in my apartment until you are able to repair your own.” Darc tone was soft, but growing in strength. The jerky seemed to be working.

  Trey rubbed his hand through his hair, making it stand up on end. Mala could almost see the gears turning in his head, and could only imagine the conversation that was taking place in there. Which was worse? Spending enormous amounts of money on an extended hotel stay, or moving in with his partner?

  Mala had never been over to Darc’s place. On their previous dates, they had either ended up at a crime scene or back at Mala’s when it was time for Darc to take her home. Or to get Janey back into bed after she’d stowed away in the backseat of the car.

  As Mala imagined it now, the place was more than likely as stark as Darc himself was. Empty other than the essentials, clean only where cleanliness was a logical extension of effort. It couldn’t be too welcoming.

  And Trey had to know that.

  “Listen, buddy… Thank you,” Trey said with what seemed like some amount of caution. “And that sounds like it might be a good idea. I’ll talk to Mags about it.”

  “It is the only logical choice,” Darc insisted.

  “Yeah, I know, and I get that this is a big deal for you to even ask. But I gotta talk it through with Maggie.” He stood up and walked away from his partner, motioning for Mala to join him.

  “It’s the only way to get out of that loop once it’s started. Just step off.” Trey chewed at his lip for a second. “That was your influence back there.”

  Mala started to protest, but Trey held up a hand. “Hey. I don’t know or care if you pushed him into this. No one else… and I do mean no one else… could get him to even listen when he doesn’t want to.” He gave her a smile. “You’re good for him.”

  Her cheeks warming, Mala gave Trey a quick nod, not trusting herself to do anything more than that. Trey seemed to sense her discomfort and changed the topic.

  “Okay. Time to search through the rubble, yeah?”

  He turned and was walking back toward the blackened but no longer burning apartment complex, when a detonation burst into Mala’s awareness. It struck her in the chest and the eardrums simultaneously, rocking her senses. Milliseconds later she felt the ground beneath her tremble.

  “What the…?” Trey exclaimed, darting his gaze up toward the complex, where screams were echoing from the 2nd floor. A blossom of orange swirled out into the sky from out of the already-broken windows, and debris rained down on them from above.

  Then Darc was beside Mala. How he had gotten to her side so quickly, she had no idea, but he spoke as if he had never collapsed. As if explosions in apartment buildings were no huge issue.

  “A bomb,” he said, his inflection flat. “From the blast pattern it had to come from Trey and Maggie’s apartment.”

  “But… how…?”

  “There are only two options.”

  Mala held her breath as Darc studied the face of the building, where new activity had sprung up in the wake of the bombing. The CSU team scurried about, interspersed with firefighters and EMTs. An older man was dragging a figure out of the rubble. Mala was surprised to see that the man doing the dragging was Dr. Hutchinson. He didn’t appear to be either that strong, or someone who would step up in a crisis like this.

  Darc continued, his tone as implacable and uncompromising as the pavement underneath their feet. “Either the bomb was set ahead of time and was scheduled to detonate once help arrived…”

  Mala tensed, somehow knowing the second option had to be even bleaker.

  “Or the bomb was planted by someone here at the crime scene.”

  Someone who had access to the building. A firefighter, someone on the CSU, an EMT. Or even worse. A cop.

  A colleague. Possibly a friend.

  One of their own.

  CHAPTER 6

  Janey was almost asleep when Carly came into her room. Her sister was being very quiet, turning the door handle without making much noise at all. Her bare feet trod on the carpet, the pad, pad, pad of the soles of her feet making little more than the normal sounds the apartment complex made in the night.

  Popeye whispered that this was super creepy and belonged in some horror movie. But Janey didn’t think so. She’d stayed up once and snuck out to watch one of those scary movies that sometimes came on at night.

  It had been called The Shining, and even though it was supposed
to be way frightening, it wasn’t any worse than things Janey had actually seen in real life. There was one part where the boy was making his finger talk and say redrum, redrum. The lines in Janey’s head had told her right away what that was supposed to mean, but instead of making it scary, it made her want to laugh a little bit.

  She liked scary movies.

  But what about her older sister could be scary? Carly was just not used to Mala yet. She didn’t understand that Mala wanted to help her, wanted things to be okay. How would Carly know that? No one had ever told her.

  So Janey opened her eyes and smiled at Carly. Her sister stopped and looked at her, then smiled back.

  “Hey, Cait… Janey. Sorry.” She whispered, her voice making no more noise than her footsteps had. “Do you like Janey better?”

  Janey nodded. Caitlyn was her old self. Her scared self. Janey was strong. Janey knew how to beat bullies, and how to catch bad guys who killed people, and how to protect people who weren’t as strong as she was. People like Caitlyn had used to be.

  Sometimes she wished she were still Caitlyn. Things had been easier then. No bad dreams, lots of hugs and snuggles from Mommy and Daddy. Tons of friends her same age.

  But now she had Mala and Trey and Darc and Maggie. They loved her, and they showed her that all the time in lots of little ways.

  Also, Popeye had just been a stuffed bear back then. He’d never talked to her. Not like now.

  Popeye snorted and said that it was just that Caitlyn had been too stupid to listen. Maybe that was true.

  Carly sighed and sat down next to Janey’s bed. “That was crazy tonight. Does stuff like that happen all the time?”

  Janey shrugged. It didn’t happen all the time, so it wasn’t like she was lying.

  Popeye said that she needed to be careful or her pants would catch on fire like Maggie and Trey’s apartment.

  “It doesn’t seem like it’s safe. For you, I mean,” she clarified, reaching out a hand to stroke Janey’s hair while she whispered to her. It almost felt for a second like it was Mommy doing it. Janey remembered that Mommy would stroke her hair all the time. Daddy would read her a story and snuggle with her for a minute, then Mommy would come in and stroke her hair.