by Hopkin, Ben
“You can’t.” Darc spoke, his tone insistent.
“Why the hell not? I really, really, really, really want to kill him.”
“Ah. So eloquent, my poor, misguided little lamb.” The reverend sneered at him.
“Hey. Hey!” Trey pushed the gun a little closer to the fallen holy man. “I want it on the record that I have no problem whatsoever killing a man of the cloth that set rattlers on me!”
“Trey.” The word was quiet. Almost a whisper. But Trey glanced at his partner, who was pointing toward the girl on the altar with the beeping clock behind her. The counter was still speeding down…3:11, 3:10, 3:09.
Father John strode down the staircase that led to the chancel and the altar. His robes whirled about his legs, bleeding into the darkness that surrounded them. His eyes were glued on Darc.
“I knew you were the one. You understand.”
Wait. What? Trey goggled at the pastor. “He does?” He spun around and glared at his partner. “You do?” Man, this was not the time to get left in the dark.
The pastor didn’t even glance at him. It was like Trey didn’t even exist. He was used to Darc’s getting all the attention, but this was ridiculous. He had a gun pointed in the guy’s face, for cryin’ out loud. You’d think that would get him at least a nod. Father John moved toward Darc.
“I looked into your eyes. I saw that you peered beyond this reality. You penetrate into the quantum. To the plane only angels dare to tread.” The priest’s face, which had seemed so gentle before, was twisted beyond all recognition. He leered. “One fallen angel in particular.”
“What the hell is he talking about?” Trey asked his partner.
“Are you through with him yet?” The pastor scowled. “May I dispose of him for you as Zeus might a gnat?”
“Hey!” Trey knew he was a serial killer and all, but that was just harsh.
“He should have died in the ninth circle,” Father John said, not sounding all that fatherly right about now.
“Um. Again. Hey!” Okay, that was even harsher.
Darc lifted a single eyebrow, his tone drier than the Sahara. “I think you have a little liquid nitrogen left over.”
“Hey, not you, too.” Now Trey was getting it from both sides. And Darc had made a joke. Right now, his partner had decided to go for the laugh?
The pastor smiled, showing his even white teeth. “You jest, but he is a betrayer.”
Trey’s heart fell out of him. There was no way the reverend could know about Maggie. No possible way. No one knew. Not even Trey’s mom.
But Darc was unfazed. “He has done me no harm.”
Father John cackled again, his laughter ringing at them from every angle. “No?” The priest pouted and made a tsk-tsk sound with his tongue while shaking his head. “He lays with your wife.”
He couldn’t know, but he did. Somehow, impossibly, the pastor knew. Trey sputtered, trying to voice all of the million things he had wanted to say to his partner from the moment Trey had first looked into Maggie’s eyes and realized that things had changed. But it was too late. Someone else had already told him. Trey couldn’t even bring himself to look over at his partner.
“I know.” Darc’s words were no more than a breath. A stirring of dead leaves in a forest of bare trees.
“What?”
Apparently, he wasn’t the only one. Father John’s face was a mask of surprise. “He shamed your marriage bed.”
“She made her decision.” Darc spoke without inflection, his words falling flat out of his mouth.
“Darc. Man. Please listen.” He had to make Darc understand how sorry he was. “I can explain. I swear it—”
Darc looked straight into Trey’s eyes, the gaze soft, without judgment. “We were walking along the marina. Maggie was holding my hand. You were eating an ice-cream cone. She found a baby bird that fell out of the nest. You helped her put it back while I kept walking.” He looked down for a moment, then back up at Trey. “She didn’t pick my hand back up.”
“He betrayed you!” the priest screamed at Darc.
“Dude,” Trey said. “That was, like, over six months—”
“Seven months, fifteen days, and a handful of hours.”
“He lied! He lied to you!” Father John was practically frothing at the mouth.
That wasn’t right. Maggie and he had only really started dating just a few weeks ago. He still needed to explain things to his partner.
“I swear to you, man, we didn’t—”
But Darc seemed to be several steps in front of him, as always. “She left me that day. She just didn’t have the courage to tell me until last month.”
“Why do you let him live!?” The pastor’s face was as red as the white patch at his neck, his veins bursting out all over his forehead.
“I am so sorry, Darc. I wanted to tell—”
And then Father John pulled something out of his robes. A remote. He pressed a button on its side, and there was a loud rattling sound from above. Trey craned his neck back to see what was going on, when he saw one of the hanging bodies rushing right toward his head.
It was the last thing he remembered seeing.
CHAPTER 18
Darc stared at his fallen partner. The angle of his neck, the location of the bloody cut on Trey’s forehead, and the rate of the rise and fall of his chest all became ciphers that danced into Darc’s awareness, filling in the blank space with an answer. Trey would be all right. As long as Darc managed to take care of the explosives, that was.
Now it was time to deal with the killer.
“He was forgiven,” Darc said. He began circling around the pastor, angling around him, forcing Father John to change his positioning or risk having Darc behind him, where the pastor could not see.
“Not by me.” The priest had recovered from his apoplexy and was mirroring Darc’s movements, but was now biting off his words. A sign of defensiveness…or possible constipation.
“So now you are the arbitrator?” Darc challenged the man of the cloth.
That seemed to stop the priest for a moment. His face went blank, before he shook his head and re-adopted his harder expression. Darc felt another cipher fall into place inside his head.
“You did not do this to punish. You took no relish in the killing.”
Once more, Father John’s face changed, this time softening almost imperceptibly. “How far have I fallen?” His tone was plaintive, beseeching. “Fallen to his level?”
More symbols swung into place, the tumblers of glowing light aligning themselves. Darc saw the pattern. Another piece of the puzzle was clear. Darc moved a step closer to the pastor on his next circle, forcing the man to shift his positioning even further.
“All this so that you might climb down Satan? Climb down him into purgatory?”
A flicker of what might have been a smile crossed the priest’s face but did not touch his eyes. His eyes were deep pools of emptiness, as black and void as a moonless, starless night sky. His lips parted, revealing teeth that flashed in the low light. His robes flared around his legs as he turned.
“I have chosen my instrument wisely.”
The tumblers continued to snick into place. Bits and pieces of information as symbols floated around, sucking themselves into the spaces that put them all together and formed another cipher. More information flowed forth.
“Your wife’s suicide. That’s what triggered this.”
The once-holy man stiffened. The stiffening was another glowing shape that added itself to the conglomerate. Glowing letters formed, but they were incomplete.
“You’re trying to save her from hell?” Darc questioned, seeking another set of ciphers.
The insane, cackling laughter was back. There was no warmth or mirth in the laugh, only bitterness and despair. Father John practically spit out his words.
“She took her life against God’s will. She is where she deserves to be. I have no right—no desire—to rescue her from her agony. But my…” The priest ch
oked on his next words, the pain evident in his contorted face, even to Darc. This was clearly not gastro-intestinal.
More gleaming and glistening shapes congealed. The shapes were crystalline in their purity. Darc increased the speed of his circling.
“Your daughter.” The priest made a sharp intake of breath at Darc’s words, confirming what the ciphers had already told him. He continued. “Did she suffer?”
“Hers was a quiet death,” the pastor whispered, his voice barely above the beating of the fans.
“Sudden infant death syndrome,” Darc stated.
Once more, Father John’s face contorted, the features twisting in on themselves. His voice caught as he attempted to force the words out. He cleared his throat once, forcefully.
“On the eve of her christening.”
Every movement the killer made, every statement he uttered, even the facial expressions, were a continual stream of new forms that fell into place. Never before had Darc experienced this immediate a process. Questions asked and answered in milliseconds, changing the psychological landscape, filling in the blank spots of the puzzle, replacing mistaken pieces. Another answer surfaced.
“So your daughter lingers in purgatory. Without a baptism, she is denied entry into heaven and, innocent, she cannot fall to hell.”
“She was always scared of being alone. We kept her in our room for the first little while. But…we…it was the first night we decided to move the crib into the nursery.” A dry sob burst from the reverend, but he controlled himself quickly. He stumbled, missing his footing. “We thought when she stopped crying that we could finally…we could—”
“So this is about your wife’s guilt?”
The pastor shook his head, seemingly not in negation of Darc’s question, but perhaps against the memories that assaulted him. “She fought against it. Months passed, and she seemed to be doing at least a little bit better. But then…then we found out she was pregnant again.”
“You would have another child. That was not a cause for happiness?” This was well into the gray area, misty swaths covering the glimmering ciphers. As Darc sought to piece the veil with his understanding, Trey’s rule seven popped into his mind. When you don’t have any clue what’s up, try listening, dude. Darc fell silent, awaiting Father John’s response. It was long in coming, and halting when it arrived.
“We found out…We had…She conceived that very night that…we were…while our little baby…”
Ah. That was where the extreme guilt welled. The guilt swirled off the pastor and formed itself into another symbol. But the equation was not yet complete.
“But you. You persisted. You did not kill yourself.”
The priest came back from wherever he had been, refocusing on Darc. “I was of the righteous. I could not take that path. And I have no desire to join my wife with the other fallen. But where I was headed, my child…my children…could not follow.” His voice and face hardened. “Where they linger, so shall I.”
Darc stopped circling. The symbols were congealing within, but Darc did not want to let them. There was something coming. Something unacceptable. Something terrible. He asked the question that he knew he did not want the answer to.
“You’ve already spilt the blood of innocent children. Killing one more is not going to bring the devil forth.”
A leer crept across Father John’s face, transforming the soft and gentle features into something malevolent. He leaned in toward Darc, his voice barely above a whisper.
“That’s why you are going to do it.”
Darc backed away from the pastor, away from the girl and the altar, away from every piece of this horrific puzzle. Surprise was a useless sensation, one that detracted from the delicate flow of the lines of logic within. Darc had felt nothing but disdain for those who allowed surprise to incapacitate them.
Darc was not surprised. He was stunned.
He managed to croak out a single word. “Never.”
The pastor ripped away the velvet covering the front of the altar. Across the facing of the lip of the marble slab, symbols had been carved, then filled in with something red.
“Read them, Detective. Read them.” Father John paused, looking into Darc’s face, his gaze searching. “Then tell me.”
Without any conscious effort on Darc’s part, the ciphers flowed from the marble and into his mind, sorting themselves into their proper places with no resistance. The resistance this time came from Darc. He pushed against the symbols, not accepting where they were headed, refusing to acknowledge their patterns. His breathing escalated, his heart pounding in his chest. The priest gave a sad half-smile.
“I didn’t make the code complex. For a mind like yours, they should fall together like children’s blocks.”
The letters fought Darc, seeking their proper places. Darc forced them out, the lines and curves sparking and spitting at him in frustration. They wept drops of light as they fluttered about in dismay.
The priest moved around behind the girl, placing his hands on her slight shoulders. “She knows. She is prepared.” The girl’s heart rate lifted for a moment, then settled back to her normal speed, her eyes squeezed shut.
The symbols slipped out of Darc’s grasp, slotting themselves neatly into a nice little row. The glowing cipher that formed itself pointed Darc back to the device at the girl’s head, tracing down the wires that led to the C-4. The symbols also pointed to the wires leading away from the explosives.
Dozens and dozens of lines snaked from the cluster of plastic explosives and across the floor of the church. In his mind, Darc traced the glowing lines of logic that superimposed themselves on a map of Seattle. The lines ended in points of light that glowed an ominous red.
Each of the points sparked in an area of specific vulnerability. A structural stress point in the foundations of Seattle. Larger tunnels in the Underground. Water mains. Gas lines.
The pastor must have seen the dawning awareness in Darc’s countenance. He smiled, this one stretching across his entire face but still somehow not reaching his eyes. Stretching his arms wide, he indicated around himself, his attention seeming to reach beyond the walls and ceiling of the cathedral.
“Yes, my dark angel. My error was not in the process, but in the scope.”
“No.” The word was a rejection. A rejection of what the priest was saying. A rejection of the glowing ciphers. A rejection of the impending disaster.
“But to destroy an entire city?” John queried.
“No,” Darc argued. “Even you would not—”
“A half a million people.” The priest’s face took on an almost beatific glow. “If Satan doesn’t take notice of that…”
“You’ve rigged the entire Underground.” It was a statement of fact, not a question, but the act of putting it into words was staggering.
“Yes. And it will detonate, destroying the underpinnings of Seattle, bringing the metropolis crashing down.” The pastor paused, gesturing to the child. “But only if you choose for this little one to live.”
While the girl’s eyes were closed, almost as if she were asleep, it was clear she was listening. The beeping of the monitor sped up, the rhythmic sound matching itself to the throb in Darc’s temple. The symbols all lined up. The meaning of the pastor’s words was clear. But Darc could not accept them.
“Choose?” Darc asked.
“Or you can sacrifice her.”
The electronic ticking raced ahead of even Darc’s elevated heart rate. The timer was down below a minute and a half and speeding ever faster toward zero. The priest’s voice drilled into Darc’s head.
“Five hundred thousand souls gone, with no time to repent. Or one of God’s chosen strangling a single little girl.” Father John’s lips tugged up. “Either way, I shall have my chance.”
Darc sent his mind scanning across the schematics over and over again, looking for a weakness, a way out. The glowing lines were smooth, flawless. No entry point. No chink in their icy, glowing armor.
; This could not be. As his mind raced, whirling and spinning in place, getting nowhere, the monitor behind the girl slowed, coming back to a normal rate. She sat up, opening her eyes and looking directly at Darc. Darc backed up another step.
“No.”
But she slowly stood up, placing herself directly in front of Darc, the wires stretched taut. Her eyes never left his. Her intent seemed clear. Darc felt himself rooted in place. There was no place for him to go. He shut his eyes against the calm demand in the little girl’s eyes.
“No.”
She reached down and grabbed one of Darc’s hands and placed it on her neck. Darc opened his eyes and peered into the girl’s eyes. He spoke directly to her, trying to make her understand. She had to understand.
“He could still detonate.”
The pastor chuckled. “She dies no matter, Detective.”
Grabbing his other hand, the girl placed it on the other side of her neck. Darc pled with her.
“I can’t…”
But symbols swarmed before his eyes, telling another story. The girl forced his unwilling hands more tightly around her neck. The countdown was under a minute. The numbers flowed into the stream of ciphers in Darc’s mind, forming a string of data that he was obliged to follow. He tried one more time.
“Please. Don’t make me.”
The girl gave Darc one more searching look, squeezed his hands, then closed her eyes, tilting her head slightly back.
Darc gave a near sob, slowly lowering the girl’s slight form down to the marble slab. His hands slowly closed over the tiny figure’s throat. In spite of what must have been her best efforts, her heart monitor soared, the counter dipping down below thirty seconds. The girl’s face turned red, then purple.
The priest, on the other side of the altar, placed both hands on the marble, the detonator clicking against the hard stone. His face was alight with a dark ecstasy.
“Yes,” he breathed.
Seeing the ever-changing colors on the girl’s delicate face, Darc almost let go, but the numbers on the monitor fell to fifteen, then to ten. The rate slowed as Darc pressed even harder and the girl’s form went limp underneath his hands.