by Hopkin, Ben
Darc seemed to be struggling to express something important. The strain in his jaw and neck were apparent in the muscles standing out in sharp contrast against his taut skin. The more he tried, the more it was clear his body was fighting him. The anguish in him was crystal clear, and Mala’s instinctive response was to soothe and comfort. But that job was being handled by his partner at this moment. Trey massaged the detective’s arm, working to help his muscles relax.
“Don’t force it, Darc.”
What Trey was doing seemed to be working. The tension in Darc’s neck and shoulders slowly began to ease. His breathing slowed itself, and he began to speak.
“The…next crime scene.” The words were halting, unsteady, but they came out. Progress.
But his partner didn’t understand. “I don’t think there’s another one of these indoor skydiving rigs in the—”
Darc shook his head with force, cutting Trey off. Mala could see that he was doing everything he could to communicate with his partner, but it still appeared to be an enormous strain.
“Different,” Darc said, as he rose.
“All right.” Trey soothed him with his tone. “Just give me the address.”
Once more, Darc shook his head. He stopped struggling and took a deep breath. Another. When he lifted his eyes once more, they sought out Mala.
“I need to see the girl first.”
The intensity of his gaze dried her mouth. There was something so incredibly intimate about it. In these moments of intense focus, Darc seemed to leave himself wide open to anything that might be directed at him. His vulnerability was beguiling.
She wanted more.
When Darc turned to leave, his movements direct and abrupt as always, the sudden lapse of his attention caused Mala to stagger emotionally. What was it about this detective?
Trey caught her expression. “Yeah, don’t bother getting that look on your face.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
He sighed. “Respect. Admiration.” He turned to follow his partner, speaking over his shoulder. “Take it from me.” Trey stopped and held her gaze for a long moment.
“He’ll never return it.”
* * *
Another of Henry’s special tasks at the slaughterhouse. The other workers always left the best jobs for him. And tonight’s was extra special. The other slobs hadn’t just left this one for him. He had planned it ahead of time.
When the animals were killed, the blood had to be drained out of them. That blood had to go somewhere. And here was where it came. Buckets and buckets of it.
One of Henry’s favorite games was Guess the Animal. He would try to identify what had come in through the gates outside just by the smell and thickness of the drainage that came down. He almost never got it wrong. He knew his blood.
Henry rolled one of the metal barrels they always used at the slaughterhouse into place beneath the sluice. Blood and little bits of flesh poured down the chute, hitting the bottom of the container with a sickening, rhythmic sloshing.
It started as a metallic sound against the metal bottom, but that soon turned into a wet, splashing sound as blood struck blood and spattered, sometimes against the walls of the barrel, sometimes against the ceiling. Sometimes against Henry as he got close to the container.
Every once in a while, the spatter would land on his face. He didn’t mind too much. It was easy to clean off, and the dried blood on his face looked kind of cool when he caught sight of it in the mirror. Made him look tough. Like an action hero or something.
As the blood continued to drain, Henry was amazed at how much was coming down. Especially considering what it was coming from. The liquid was dark, almost black, but with that touch of red that was unmistakable. The swirling waves and the sloshing in the barrel were hypnotic. Henry felt his head starting to nod, when a particularly loud slapping sound brought him back to full awareness.
A large flap of bloody skin had fallen out of the chute. Henry went to pick it up but misjudged its slickness and ended up stepping on it with his heavy work boots instead. It gave a satisfying squish that made Henry decide to step on it a few more times for good measure.
Seriously, this was the best job ever.
* * *
Darc was moving as fast as he could without impairing his future stamina. The lines thickened and converged here, in the girl’s hospital room. Without her input, there was nowhere he could go. The logic dictated, and there was no arguing with logic. Logic was implacable, insistent, uncaring about the cost to those from whom it demanded its pound of flesh. And Darc was both its master and its disciple, now and always. There really was no choice in the matter.
Bursting into the room, Darc observed that the girl was awake. That was fortuitous. If he had needed to wake her, the girl’s faculties would have been impaired. With her alert, no time need be wasted.
“Where do you live?” he asked without preamble.
The doctor entered into the room just as Darc finished speaking, her breathing labored. Her tone was washed in grey. Dissatisfaction? Judgment? Impossible to determine.
“Do you understand how young she is?”
Darc wasted no time in arguing. Argument was a grey mess. Logic demanded. Logic would be served. That was the way it worked. The fact that this woman of science did not seem to understand this simple fact was baffling to Darc. It did not fit into the way things were supposed to be ordered.
“The address?” He thrust papers into the girl’s hands, but she pushed them away, in essence rejecting their only method of communication. The bands of light inside him tightened, making it difficult to breathe. He needed the address. He needed to know where to go next. She knew.
The doctor’s voice continued its illogical tirade behind him.
“And do you see how traumatized she is? You need to take it slow. Build rapport.”
The girl was resisting. The girl could not resist. Not right now. He picked the papers up from where she had pushed them away and set them back down in front of her. Hard. She had to understand. She must comply. Logic dictated it. The light pulsed, as frustrated as he was.
His partner joined in on the doctor’s side. Darc had not noticed that Trey was in the room. Up to this point, he had been irrelevant. Actually, from what he was saying, he was still irrelevant.
“Darc. How about we take the doc’s advice?”
The woman of science. His partner. Neither understood what was at stake. Darc looked the girl in the eye and spoke.
“People are dying.”
“Detective!” The outrage in Dr. Charan’s voice was clear, even to Darc. She turned to Trey. “Detective?”
The words, what they were trying to do…all irrelevant. All that existed was the bright line of logic. It must be followed. His eyes had not moved from the girl’s.
“Right now,” Darc demanded, as he pointed to the paper in front of her. She had not moved. Something was there in her face, some sort of murky emotion, but it was not as important as the throbbing of the logical path. The path they must take.
Now.
His partner placed a hand on his shoulder, and Darc pulled from the contact. Nothing could stop him in what he needed to do.
“Hey, buddy, let’s dial back the apocalyptic—”
“Dying just like you were.” Darc’s eyes bored into the girl’s. She had to understand.
The doctor gasped. His partner spoke to her, clearly to forestall a stronger reaction.
“Yeah, yeah. On it.” Trey moved to latch on to Darc’s arm this time, trying to pull him away from the bed. Darc resisted, his eyes still locked with the little girl’s.
“You’re the only one who can stop it.”
Trey’s grip on his arm strengthened, cutting off his circulation. It hurt, but the pain was inconsequential next to the demands of the bright path. His partner spoke with intensity.
“Darc, dude. That’s just not cool.”
But Darc would not be dissuaded. He planted his feet, refusing to m
ove from the girl’s side or to release her gaze.
“Do you understand?” he asked. “Do you?”
Trey was pushing, pulling, doing all that he could to uproot Darc from his spot next to the bed. Darc dug in, unwilling and unable to relinquish what he knew to be the pivotal information here in the convergence of the lines of logic. What he needed could not be found elsewhere.
Why was everyone fighting him?
Pushing back against his partner’s insistence, Darc watched as the doctor moved around to the other side of the bed, her hand out, more than likely to try to comfort or soothe the child. But as she began to stroke the girl’s head, the young one seemed to make a decision.
She picked up the crayons and paper in front of her and began scribbling with intensity. She was drawing a house. Darc pushed her forward into the logic path with his words.
“Yes. Yes. Your house.” As he saw her finishing the picture without the information needed, he prompted her. “What is the street name?”
The girl scrunched up her face and began drawing another picture next to the house. A truck. A moving truck. The information flew from the page and filled in a patch of light that was missing. The doctor, her voice tinged with something grey Darc could not identify, spoke to the girl.
“You are new to town?”
The child nodded, her face still contorted. The twisting of her face meant something, but Darc could not take the time or the effort at this moment to ascertain what. He focused on the paper. His partner pulled out his cell phone and began dialing.
“Oh, crap,” Trey said. “That’s why nobody recognized her.”
“No family in town?” Dr. Charan asked the girl.
The little one looked down, her hands falling limply into her lap. Darc followed the doctor’s question with another of his own.
“The address?”
Again the girl’s face contorted, this time in what looked to be…confusion? Uncertainty? Darc couldn’t tell, but, after a moment of indecision, she began drawing once more, this time with the green crayon. Trees. Pine trees.
“Yeah,” Trey commented. “Not much help there. We’re in the Pacific Northwest…”
Darc looked at the trees, then back up to the girl’s face. The trees leapt off the page, aligning themselves around a space that was, as yet, blank and formless. Darc probed.
“Pine Haven?” A shake of her head. “Evergreen Ridge?” Nothing.
“What’s he talking about?” the doctor asked Trey.
“Housing tracts, I think. He’s trying to nail down which development she moved to.”
“Ponderosa Park?” When Darc mentioned the last, the girl’s head bobbed up and down with vigor.
The lighted path opened up before him, turning from the yellow of indecision to something closer to green. He now knew in what part of Seattle to search.
Now he just needed one more thing. The light pulsed with urgency, and Darc prepared for the grey cloud of confrontation ahead.
* * *
Mala tried to remain clinically objective. That seemed impossible at the moment. Darc was clearly a danger to Janey’s mental health. There wasn’t a child psychiatrist in the world that wouldn’t condemn his methods.
Yet they not only yielded results but calmed the girl. Each time Darc challenged her to face the ordeal, Janey seemed all the stronger for it. Seldom was Mala a “the ends justify the means” kind of therapist. However, she also couldn’t negate the fact that Darc was helping Janey in ways she never could have imagined. And wasn’t her philosophy all about the patient, all the time?
She turned to Trey, who was talking rapidly into his phone.
“Yeah, we need a patrol car to sweep the Ponderosa Park community for moving trucks and—”
Janey shook her head, picked up the red crayon, and drew a large gash across the moving truck in the drawing she had made.
Darc translated. “They already returned it.”
“Strike that,” Trey said into the phone. “We need multiple units out doing a house-by-house search…”
“We don’t have time.” Darc’s tone was almost without inflection. There was no discovery in his tone. Mala had an inkling that he had figured this out even before they identified the community Janey lived in. The intensity was back in his gaze.
Mala was cluing in to the fact that this was not a good sign, no matter how compelling it might seem. Trey’s comments about his partner were making more sense by the moment.
Darc spoke to her, his tone as invasive as his eyes. “We’re taking her with us.”
“No,” Mala blurted on instinct, then backed it up with her intellect. “No. This has been bad enough.”
She stood firm. She was Janey’s doctor, not one of the detective’s flunkies. To her surprise, Darc actually engaged in an argument. This must be important to him.
“She can recognize visual clues,” he stated bluntly, as he stepped forward.
Even with his Asperger’s, Darc must have known on some level that his physical presence was intimidating. He was actually trying to leverage that right now. Mala, however, was not leveragable. Not when there was a simple, twenty-first-century solution to their conflict.
“Stream some video, then.”
Darc shook his head. “The hookup will take too long.” He then stepped so close that their breath mingled. How could he stand the proximity with his condition, when she was shaking from the intensity? “We are only five minutes away from the development.”
How many people bent to his will? Darc had clearly learned to used his “disability” to his advantage. He could get away with sheer, straight-up intimidation. Perhaps with his colleagues, but not with her. She understood him…and his limitations. His vision was tunneled. Straight ahead. He could not see the collateral damage he was inflicting. And even if he could, he simply would not care.
It was her job to care. Janey’s parents were gone. Mala had to be their proxy. Even if it meant solving their murder, Mala doubted Janey’s mother and father would want their baby girl damaged for life.
“And I feel for you, Detective,” Mala said, even though she was pretty sure Darc didn’t even register the words. “But I’m responsible for her mental well-being, and I’m not going to let you—”
“Are you the one that found her in that barrel?” Darc demanded.
“I’m sorry?” Mala asked, shocked by the harshness of the question.
“You seem to feel qualified to hold people’s lives in your hand,” Darc said, glaring at her. “So I’m asking you, when did you pull a child from a vat of their own parents’ blood?”
Horrified that Darc would distill her objections down to such a base level, Mala felt anger rise in her chest. “You can’t berate me into—”
“If this time I’m just not fast enough?”
Oh, so the man who couldn’t feel emotions appeared to be pretty damned good and cast guilt and shame around. Fortunately, this line of attack was familiar ground for Mala. No one—no one—could throw guilt around like an East Indian mother. Darc was less than a rank amateur when it came to this territory.
“You are not very adept at using guilt, Detective.”
“Hey, guys?” Trey interjected.
“And if another child dies?” Darc demanded.
Mala stood toe to toe with him. “That doesn’t negate the risk to Janey’s—”
“Guys!” Trey barked.
Mala turned to look where Trey was pointing. There, in the doorway, crayons and paper in hand, stood Janey. She wore a look of determination that Mala had seen before. And seeing it broke her heart. Those eyes could have been her older brother’s. Back when they still had fire and life in them. Before the adults convinced him to stay quiet with his pain.
The looks that dissolved every shred of resistance left inside her.
The patient knew best. Always. If the patient wished to keep things private, they stayed private. If the patient wanted to scream out to the world what happened to them, they scream
ed. And even though Janey was mute, there was no doubting her message.
“The girl appears to think the risk is worth taking,” Darc said. She supposed he hoped to win the argument with it. Obviously, he didn’t realize the match was already over.
“All right,” Mala sighed, as she reached out for Janey’s hand. “But I am going with—”
Mala stopped when Janey declined her hand and walked toward the two detectives.
“Trey, I think she wants you.”
“Yeah,” the detective said, offering his hand. “Of course.”
But Janey’s lips clenched together and she shook her head. She pointed again, this time clearly indicating her preference. Her finger was aimed right at Darc’s forehead.
“Hey, Darc. I think you’re her man.” Keane pulled his companion forward, placing him before the little girl. But Darc stood there, his stance awkward, his arms crossed over his chest.
He frowned at Janey, then spoke haltingly. “We will keep you safe.”
Janey’s lips set even further, if possible, and she extended her hand to reach for his. Darc backed away in apparent confusion. Confusion…or fear.
Like Mala said. The patient always knew what they needed. But would Darc comply?
“You are asking her to risk something,” Mala reminded Darc. “How about you dig deep and do the same?”
Off to the side, Trey looked stunned. Apparently, no one ever had the balls to call Darc on his crap. Well, that was about to change. The tall detective was still looking at Janey, unmoved and unmoving. Mala decided to put another log on the fire.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you say something about lives being at stake?”
Detective Darcmel glared at her. Fine. It was time for Darc to put his money where his mouth was. He had to have as much emotional skin in the game as Janey. Mala had an idea of how utterly excruciating physical, intimate contact might be for him, but that really didn’t matter much when it came to her patient. Mala held her ground until Darc shifted his gaze back to Janey. He took a deep breath and help out his hand to the little girl. She grasped it firmly and tucked herself into Darc’s side.