by Hopkin, Ben
Shit.
How in the name of all that was holy had he heard that? She had just met with the principal today. There was no way that word had spread that quickly. Unless... Templeton was keeping tabs on Mala above and beyond what was necessary and appropriate.
Her mind raced, thinking through the various scenarios. In the end, she decided that going on the offensive was called for here. She would use every tool in her arsenal. It seemed clear that this man was doing what he could to stand in the way of Mala’s successful adoption of Janey. That made him the enemy. There would be no quarter given here.
“May I ask where you came across that piece of information?” Mala asked, keeping her tone light.
“When we have concerns about a child’s well being, we dig. From the start I’ve had questions as to whether you could keep your professional ego in check and become a true parent to Caitlyn. She needs discipline that you seem unprepared to provide.”
Mala ground her teeth to keep from barking out her question once more. “I will ask you again. How did you know about my conversation with the principal?”
“Did you really think we wouldn’t be checking in with Caitlyn’s school?” he asked. Mala noted that he hadn’t really answered her question at all. “How well would I be doing my job if I didn’t?
From what I hear, this kind of attention to detail is a first for DSHS, Mala thought but didn’t say. She may be at war with Templeton, but allowing it to get out of control would hurt no one but her. And Janey. Keeping her eye on that prize was all-important.
“Ja… Caitlyn is having difficulty adjusting to school life,” Mala replied. “That’s not surprising considering her history. We’re working it out with her teacher and principal.”
“I believe that the issues here are symptomatic of larger problems.” The social worker ordered files on his desk, studiously avoiding Mala’s gaze. “They usually are.” He rapped his finger against his desk for emphasis.
Mala froze.
“That’s an interesting ring you have there,” she commented, pointing at the piece of jewelry.
Templeton snatched his hand below the desk, but then recovered with a silky smile. “It was my grandfather’s,” he said.
“Interesting,” she replied. “It’s a beautiful piece.
“Thank you,” he said with poor grace. “Now, as for this situation with Caitlyn’s school—”
“I said that we are working it out,” Mala shot back. “Now, was that the only reason you called me in?”
“Only reason? I think you are underestimating the seriousness of—”
“And I think your behavior is bordering on harassment,” she retorted. “I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that’s frowned on here.”
The social worker met her gaze and smiled at her, his teeth showing. “You might be surprised. We all take the safety of children very seriously here.”
“As do I, Mr. Templeton.” She stood up. “Was there anything else?”
“Just that I wanted to let you know that I’m escalating your case,” he said, tapping the file in front of him. “All this information will now be in front of my direct supervisor. Thought you should be informed, so that there are no surprises.”
“No. Wouldn’t want surprises, now would we?” Mala stared into the man’s eyes, wanting nothing more than to gouge them out. But she had other plans.
There was a certain someone that she needed to chat with.
* * *
The glowing pathways intersected in new ways, with fewer collisions, more connections. The information they had received today had gone a long way to reconciling the disparate strands and streams that had been pushing back so strongly since the beginning of the case.
There was still interference from the odd groupings of numbers, but that disruption was less now. And it seemed to have to do with letting go of the Satanist angle. Or at least backing away from it for the moment.
Darc sat in the passenger seat of Trey’s Land Rover, the sounds coming from his partner filtering in to Darc’s branched highways of brilliant color, merging with what they found there and coming up with a solution.
Trey had a question. It was a realization that struck Darc, as those types of intuitive leaps were generally beyond the scope of the logical threads. But the combination of Trey’s grunting noises and awkward shifting, added to the glances he continued to send in Darc’s direction, gave shape to what before would have been grey emotional topography.
Darc was learning.
“What is it?” he asked, turning toward his partner.
His messy-haired companion startled at that. “What d’you mean?”
“You have a question for me.”
“How…? You…?” he began. Then he shook his head. “Wow. This is big, Darc. Like, I-gotta-tell-everyone big. You know that, right?”
But Darc just stared at him. Somehow he knew that Trey wasn’t truly looking for an answer to that question.
“Okay,” Trey said after a moment. “How come we’re not racing off to another crime scene right now?”
The pathways tangled again in confusion. Trey must have seen the echo of that chaos in Darc’s face, as he continued.
“I mean, last time, you saw the star-map-whatsit and you were off like a bat out of hell.” Trey thought about that for a minute. “Come to think of it, you almost look like a human bat. The smooth head, the small kinda pointy ears…”
“Trey…” Darc prompted.
“Right. Well, my question is this… Why don’t you know where the next murder’s gonna happen?”
The strands of light buzzed about, seeming almost… offended… somehow. Odd. Logic should not get upset. Things either were or they were not. There should be no personality involved. And yet, the response was definitively there.
Darc sorted through the various colored threads to find the one that would communicate most readily with his partner. He picked the most straightforward of the lot.
“When we saw the first array of points on the pentagram, they included two outer points of adjacent arms of the five-pointed star, and one inner point on the far side of one of those arms. The remaining inner space was still lacking a mark, which indicated the location of the next murder. I have no such point of reference now.”
Trey sat for a while, from all appearances chewing on the inner part of his right cheek. That was an odd habit that Darc had observed in his companion from time to time. The end result of the self-mastication was usually another statement that demonstrated Trey’s lack of understanding of whatever it was Darc had just said.
That was the case this time as well. “Your explanation was… well… not very explanatory.”
And that had been the simplest of the threads Darc could find. He found himself in a very uncomfortable position, one that was normally reserved for only social interactions. He was going to have to communicate without help from the logic strands.
His entire system jangled. This was never a pleasing process for him, and up until recently, he had not really engaged in doing so often. It made him feel strangely vulnerable, as if he were entering a crime scene without his gun.
“I am missing a vital… very important… piece of information. Without it I cannot ascertain… discover… where to find the next murder scene.”
“Oh. Gotcha.” Trey sat back further in his seat, then sat upright once more. His attention apparently compromised, he had to swerve to get back into the proper lane before striking a blue Honda to their side. “Whoa.”
“What?”
“That was the first time I think you’ve ever dumbed it down for me.”
Darc swiveled his head to look at his partner. “I do not understand.”
“You… you…” Trey seemed to be groping for words, his free hand waving in the air in front of him. “You were speaking my language. Well, sorta. I mean, I understood everything you said, but then you even translated some of the words I knew but never would’ve used myself. Good job, dude!”
Good jo
b? There was a gap between Darc’s experience and Trey’s. For Darc, speaking that way had been an almost physical pain. And yet Trey had complimented him for it. And Darc found that the compliment caused a reaction in that shadowy gray topography of emotional context that was… pleasant somehow.
Troubling.
Even more disorienting was the fact that Darc had no comprehension of what to do next. This seemed to fall under the umbrella of social niceties, so he scanned through Trey’s rules and found one that appeared to fit. If someone compliments you, don’t just sit there like a rock. Thank them.
“Thank you, Trey.”
“You’re welcome,” his partner responded, then did a double take. “You did it again! Man, you are on a roll.” Trey grinned at him, turned and honked his horn at a yellow Volkswagen Bug that was getting too close and then returned his focus to Darc. “Okay, so what’s the information you’re missing that’s holding us up?”
“That is the issue. I do not know. There is a blank space of non-information that I cannot penetrate.”
“Ooo. Ouch. Brain fart,” Trey said, wrinkling his brow. “Okay, that was a slight step backwards on the communication front.” He waved the comment away. “Don’t worry about it. Baby steps.” Darc’s partner seemed to refocus his attention. “What about those numbers?”
The gray landscape heaved in a violent response that was not nearly as pleasant as the one earlier. The words left Darc’s mouth as if they were leaden balloons.
“They are impenetrable to me.”
Trey gave Darc a sharp look. “Wow. I knew it was bad, but I had no idea it was that bad. Numbers never get away from you. Hell, neither do letters or lines or little squiggly marks or random scratches in the dirt or…” He appeared to stop himself. “Okay. Whatever. Do you have them written down somewhere?”
Darc opened up the glove compartment in front of him and pulled out a scrap of paper and a pencil. After drawing the sequence of the number down, he handed the paper to Trey.
“Hey. Steer for me a minute, okay? Tell me if I have to brake or something.” Trey handed over the guidance of the vehicle to Darc as he sat and pondered the numbers. “There was something about this that was bugging me before…”
Turning the wheel to avoid clipping an SUV that was encroaching in their lane, Darc observed his partner out of the corner of his eye. Trey appeared to be counting the numbers out to himself.
“One. Eleven. Twenty-one… No. Hold on…” He stopped, and Darc glanced away from the road for a moment to determine what was happening. A honk from a nearby truck yanked his attention back. “One. One one. Two one… Oh!”
Trey straightened up and took control of the wheel back from Darc. He started laughing, and soon the laughter had turned to what Darc could only describe as hysterics. It was possible that his partner would need medical attention.
“Are you experiencing a psychotic break?”
“No, no,” Trey answered, wiping tears away with one hand while navigating around a semi with the other. “That was just funny.”
“What is amusing?”
“The sequence. It’s set up so that each line describes the one before it. Look…” He pointed at the first line, which bore the numeral one. “That’s one one. Get it? And then when you look at the ones, they’re two ones. Then one two and one one. The next one will be one one, one two, two ones. See?”
The pattern became clear to Darc the moment it was pointed out to him. But that did not explain Trey’s reaction.
“What about this sequence is humorous?”
“Well, it’s the kind of thing that only a mouth-breather like me would figure out. You see numbers like objects, right?”
That was an accurate, although incomplete, description of the process Darc went through. The numbers were perceived and assigned a shape or color stream that became its own entity. But the subtleties of this internal process would be lost on Trey, so Darc just nodded.
“Well, the only way I figured it out was because I was mouthing the numbers out loud,” Trey explained. “Making sounds. There was no way you were ever going to make sense out of this. Not in a million years.”
And then it struck Darc, as the filaments of color assailed him internally, just what that meant. These numbers had been a distraction from the beginning. A nonsensical puzzle designed solely to keep Darc’s full facilities from being engaged. A red herring.
The illusion had been penetrated. The ruse was no longer effective. But Darc had a much more serious concern.
Whatever he had missed, due to his preoccupation with the numbers, was going to catch up to them rapidly. And while he now felt himself to be free of encumbrances, he was no closer to information that would lead them to the killer.
The lines of light dripped color, weeping acknowledgement of their failure.
* * *
Trey leaned back in his chair. Most of the time he was careful about how he did this. Didn’t want to end up sprawled on the ground with everyone laughing at you, trying to explain how a chair got the better of you.
But not today. Not today.
Today he was the guy who had figured out a series of symbols etched around creepy pentagrams. Today he was the hero who had taken his team one step closer to victory. Today was the day…
That he did something that no one would ever hear about, because it hadn’t led to any kind of significant break in the case. Damn that honest voice in his head. It was always harshing his vibe.
But you know what? Trey decided he didn’t care about that part. Darc was always figuring stuff out, and this time it’d been Trey that had done it. No matter what everyone else heard about or didn’t hear about, no one could take that moment away from him.
Yeah, Darc would end up being the guy to figure it all out. Again. But for now, for this one moment, it was all Trey, baby.
The phone rang, startling him. His body twitched in response, and Trey almost went over backwards in his chair. Okay. Maybe there was a reason he didn’t lean back on a regular basis.
He straightened up, grabbing the receiver and holding it to his ear with his shoulder while he pulled out his cell phone. Being on the phone was always a good excuse to play Candy Crush. Not like he could do much else while he was talking to someone, right? That would just be rude. Besides, he was stuck on level 65, and it was making him a little nuts. That stupid multiplying chocolate was kicking his ass.
“Detective Keane speaking.”
“Yes, Detective Keane, this is Bradley Moore over at the Mayor’s office.”
Crap. It was the protective detail thingy. And the chocolate was spreading in his game, and there were no matching candies anywhere close. This was not going well.
“Oh yeah. Bradley. You’re the Mayor’s personal assistant.”
“Ah, that’s executive administrator,” the man responded, his tone sharp.
Like there’s a difference. “Right. My bad.”
The executive administrator let out a breath. It seemed that Trey was getting on his nerves. Weird. That never happened with uptight governmental officials. They usually loved him.
“We need you to come down to the office to discuss the Mayor’s schedule.”
We? You got a frog in your pocket, Mr. Executive Administrator Personal Assistant? Trey made a move in his game and five different sets of candies fell into place, giving him a huge multiplier and finishing out the level.
“Awesome!” Trey yelled, holding up his phone to show the office. No one seemed nearly as impressed as he was.
“Well,” said Bradley. “It’s good to know that you’re enthusiastic about the assignment. We worried that there might be an issue there. See you in a few minutes.”
“No, wait. That’s not…” He trailed off as he heard the dial tone begin. That was unfortunate. Although, with no pressing leads, now was probably as good a time as any.
“Darc,” he called out to his partner. “Saddle up. We’ve got to get over to the Mayor’s office.”
Tr
ey held his phone back up. Maybe he could get through level 66 while Darc was getting his jacket on. He leaned back in his chair once more.
Just in time for Darc to brush past him, bumping the back of his seat. Trey waved his arms wildly, trying to stay upright, but his chair went past the tipping point and he landed squarely on his back.
The office burst into applause.
“Where was that when I made it past level 65, jerk-faces?” Trey said, standing up and brushing himself off.
Time to get out of this unsupportive workspace.
Too bad it felt like they were headed straight for another one.
CHAPTER 13
“Ah, Dr. Charan,” breathed the ME as Mala made her way back into the morgue. “To what do I owe the privilege of your visit?”
Mala smiled at Dr. Hutchinson and looked beyond the doctor to see the intern working at one of the tables. This would need to be handled with some delicacy if she wanted the medical examiner’s good opinion of her to continue.
For a brief moment, she contemplated abandoning any attempt at doing so. The man was a pompous ass, after all. But that was something that could adversely affect her team’s future dealings with this office. And considering the number of dead bodies they worked with, that wasn’t a great idea.
“Dr. Hutchinson. I was wondering…” she began, thinking furiously. Inspiration struck. “If I could get the paperwork on these pentagram killings. Just so I can have something concrete to work with.”
“Ah,” he said with a wink. “It’s about time someone on this team did some proper detective work. According to Detective Darcmel, he doesn’t need anything to refer to.” The tone of this statement revealed the doctor’s low opinion of Darc’s savant abilities. “And his partner wouldn’t understand what he was seeing if he had them. Now you, on the other hand…”
“Would be eternally grateful if you would be so kind as to get them for me.” Mala finished for him.
“No need,” he replied with a smug wave of his hand. “I thought you might want them, so kept them right here.” He reached behind himself and pulled forward several folders full of paperwork and pictures.