Authors: Ben Hopkin
Tags: #General Fiction
Mala wasn’t counting on that lasting all that long.
Once more every fear that had plagued her during the first date surged back. What was she doing here? This was a failed experiment on every level.
Scooping up her glass, Mala took a large swallow, allowing the sour fruit flavor to engulf her tongue with overtones of strawberries, oak and vanilla. At least there was the wine.
She glanced over at Darc, who was gazing at her with an uncharacteristic look on his face. His eyes were softer than she had ever seen them, and it seemed like his hands were shaking.
Darc was nervous.
And just like that, what had seemed to be uncaring and disconnected behavior flipped itself about and turned into something else entirely. Darc was trying so hard to behave in the way that was expected of him, and yet he had no idea of what that even looked like.
He was trying. Darc was
trying
.
And looking at it honestly, she was just as nervous as he. She’d been trying to hide it behind a façade of judgment and critique, but she wanted this date to go well. Yet so far, she’d done nothing to try to make it any easier on Darc.
Who was she to decide that Darc had to prove himself to her? He had done nothing so far that demonstrated anything other than his sincere desire to protect her and make sure her surroundings were controlled. The hand washing statement. The request for ID.
Okay, there was the comment about her breasts.
But even that was an acknowledgement that he found her attractive. Just because it wasn’t phrased precisely according to social etiquette, she’d shut him out.
She was behaving like an ass.
A sound issued forth from her mouth. It started small and began to grow.
Mala was laughing.
At first, Maggie and Trey seemed to be even more concerned with this new development than they had been before. But as Mala’s laughter turned into guffaws, they exchanged relieved looks and began chuckling as well.
“Your breasts do appear firm and proportional,” Trey quipped.
“Watch it, buddy,” Maggie growled. “At least, if you have any interest in seeing mine. Ever again.”
Trey gulped and gave his girlfriend a sheepish grin.
Mala scooted in closer to Darc and slipped her hand through his arm. She could feel his body tense up for a moment, then slowly release.
“Thank you for taking me out on this date, Darc.”
“You are very welcome,” he answered.
It was just a polite response. Nothing huge. Not profound.
And yet Mala knew how difficult that had been for him. It was clear that the man who was sitting next to her would do just about anything for her.
All of a sudden, this had turned into one of the best dates Mala could have imagined.
CHAPTER 10
Monday morning. Darc sat at his desk, the inner workings of his mind brought to an impasse.
The streams of logic had kept Darc awake through most of the weekend. Trey had driven Mala home first so she could spend some time preparing for the coming school week for Janey. Then they’d dropped off Darc.
He had stayed there in his apartment, lying on his mattress on the floor. He had spent the time staring up, watching the patterns of information make light as they shifted and played on the textured surface of the ceiling above him, searching and searching.
Even though the date had been pleasing, in the back of his mind the patterns had continued to swirl about in confusion, disrupting his ability to communicate effectively. He had made significant errors in his interaction with Mala this evening. Even with her apparent forgiveness, that was still a matter of concern.
Another matter of concern was his lack of progress in deciphering the symbols.
He had come away with nothing.
The patterns would not coalesce. They bumped into one another, ramming and shoving and cramming themselves into spaces they did not belong. And Darc watched, helpless, feeling time and the lives of innocents slipping away from him.
That was not completely true. They were not complete innocents.
The body they had found had been identified as Raymond Prosser, another member of the City Council. That made three. Council members that had all been rumored to be corrupt. And then the mob boss who had been the first. There could be a correlation there. Darc would need to look into the business dealings of the mob to see if there might be a causal link.
The pentagrams, each distinct with their own unique symbols, floated in his mind’s eye, rimmed in light. The Satanist angle almost fit, but the threads would not join together. They hissed and spat at one another, fighting the connection. Darc had learned better than to try to force them.
And then the symbols themselves.
1
11
21
And the newest addition.
1211
There had been a moment, early on, when Darc had thought it was the Fibonacci sequence and that they were missing the first body, which would have used the zero that was the first number in that famous sequence. But that theory had been shattered with the third killing.
The numbers taunted him, skittering about the surface of his consciousness, disrupting every pattern that would begin to form. The lights would come together, start to adhere, and then those digits would intrude.
Maddening.
This must be what it felt like to be without the deductive skills that were a part of his autistic heritage. It felt dark and frightening and excruciatingly lonely.
“Hey, Darc!” It was Trey. Impossible to feel too alone when his partner was about. Trey rolled his chair over to Darc’s desk. “Check out what I found here.”
Darc took a look at Trey’s screen. It was a listing of murders in the Tristate area of New York. That seemed like such a non sequitur, even for Trey, whose thoughts could sometimes appear completely random.
“What do these murders represent?” Darc asked.
“I’ll tell you what they represent. They represent the proof that our new APA is a slimy bastard-face killer. That’s what.”
The threads started down that pathway and became tangled in milliseconds. There was nothing there for them to latch onto.
“In what way does this constitute evidence?”
“Well, Carson Speer is new, right?”
Darc nodded his head. That truth, at least, was almost self-evident.
“And before he was here, he was somewhere else?”
“As he was not moved up from within the Prosecuting Attorney’s office, that would be an accurate statement.”
Trey rubbed his hands together. “And guess where he was before Seattle?”
The threads now had something with which they could work. The answer was clear in the way Trey had been behaving toward the APA and the list that was currently occupying space on his computer desktop.
“Somewhere in the Tristate area.”
“Exactly!” Trey crowed. “Manhattan, to be precise. Upper East side. Snobby prick.”
“This still—”
“Hold on,” he stopped Darc with an upheld finger. “Go with me here for a minute. Bryce dies and we have no serial killer activity for like two whole months.”
“Actually, there was the real estate agent, as well as—”
Trey grunted in what seemed to be irritation. Or constipation. “No, no. Not that kind of serial killer. I mean the freaky symbol-pentagram-trying-to-cleanse-Seattle kind.”
The strands contracted again. “So the killings in the Tristate area also included symbols?”
Trey’s face fell. “No. Not really. I hadn’t thought of that.” That seemed to derail him for a moment, but he rallied quickly enough. “Still, the guy feels
wrong
, you know?”
“No, I do not know,” Darc clarified. “If I had been able to discern this kind of behavior, neither the priest nor the former APA would have escaped my notice.”
“Well, that’s just it. I don’t want that to happen again.”
“Statistically, the likelihood of two APAs in a row being serial killers would be—”
“Okay, okay, okay.” Trey griped. “I get it. Not likely. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen. And I’m telling you, something’s off about this guy.”
At that moment, the phone rang. The number indicated on the display said Bryce Van Owen. It was the new APA calling, and apparently they had not removed the previous one from the system yet. An egregious oversight, all things considered.
“Right there!” Trey yelled, pointing at the screen. “There’s a coincidence that just now happened that you can’t explain away. We were talking about the guy and he calls, almost like he’s got the place bugged.” Darc’s partner stopped and then began rummaging around the desk, picking up lamps, looking under his computer monitor, picking up files and setting them back down.
“What are—?” Darc began.
“Bugs. I think he’s got our desks bugged.”
Darc moved around his partner, who had shoved him aside to look through the potted tree that sat in the corner next to Darc’s desk. Picking up the receiver, Darc answered the call.
“Detective Darcmel.”
“Darc!” Carson’s voice came through the receiver. “Oh, I’m sorry. Is it okay that I call you Darc? It seems like everyone else around here does.”
“That’s fine.”
“I wanted to follow up with what we talked about in our conversation on Saturday. The Satanist you mentioned… ah…” Papers rustled about as Carson evidently went searching for something. “You mentioned a High Priest? Name of Edward?”
“I mentioned that there was a Satanist High Priest that might be a suspect. Mala mentioned his first name,” Darc corrected.
“Oh, right. They said that you were literal,” he muttered. “Would his last name be Hoffman by any chance?”
“Yes. That is the man.”
“Well, I was looking through some records, and it looks like he was bringing lawsuits against the individuals who have shown up dead, among others. Just thought you ought to know.”
The strands of light still refused to align, but this information was too compelling to ignore. Plus, the bizarre sequence of numbers he could not decode could still be interfering with his ability to process other information properly.
It appeared it was time to have another conversation with Edward Hoffman.
* * *
Janey was in the principal’s office this time.
It was hard, because she knew that the principal was going to call Mala. He said he had to, but Janey wasn’t sure about that. Popeye said he was full of fluff, which sounded naughty to Janey, even though she wasn’t sure why.
She had scared one of the boys in her class. He wasn’t a nice boy, but Janey felt bad anyway. Sort of. Popeye didn’t feel bad at all, but he almost never did. At least not about things that were going to get Janey in trouble.
Now, things like not getting enough ice cream or being shoved in the washing machine, those made him plenty upset. But stuff like this just made him laugh.
Well, to be honest, he wasn’t laughing right now. He was mostly saying that he had told her so. Which was true.
It hadn’t been that bad. It’s not like the picture she had drawn was even all that scary. She hadn’t even used the red crayon. But the boy had cried when he’d seen it. And then the other thing with the hair was just dumb. But still…
Janey felt a little bad for that one. But she felt worse that Mala was going to get blamed for it. She’d fought so hard to make sure that Janey was in the class with the kids who didn’t bite or take their clothes off or scream weird things at strange times. And now it was going to look like Mala had been wrong.
She hadn’t been wrong, but Janey couldn’t tell her that. Not yet. It would ruin everything.
Popeye said that everything was ruined already, but what did he know? He was just a dumb old bear.
The one part of this that was going to be the hardest was going to be when Mala gave her that look. It was a look that Mommy and Daddy had used sometimes. Not when they were mad. When they were sad.
Disappointed
.
That’s the word they all used. And it was so much worse than mad.
Janey’s teacher was using that word a lot, too. Maybe Mala and Ms. Kingsley should get together and just be disappointed in her all the time.
That wasn’t a good thought, and Janey tried to make it go away, but Popeye just laughed and laughed and laughed. He kept right on laughing until Mala came in the room.
If Janey had been laughing right then, she would have stopped too. This was the worst look Janey had ever seen Mala have. She looked not just sad, but tired and like someone had taken away her favorite toy.
Janey had been so sure she was supposed to do what she did.
But now all of the sudden she wasn’t so sure.
* * *
Bullying
.
That’s the word the principal had used when he’d called Mala. The call that every parent dreaded receiving. The one that told you your child was in trouble. That they had done something bad. And that the something bad had involved other children.
Granted, Janey hadn’t struck anyone. There had been no hitting, no kicking, no biting. Mala almost wished there had been. That was understandable from kindergartners.
The not knowing made it worse.
She looked over at Janey, who had her bear in a stranglehold and was looking down at the floor. Not a great sign, that. Mala reached over and rubbed her knee, and Janey glanced up at her and smiled. The smile threw Mala for a loop. It was not at all what she’d been expecting to see. It was not guilty, not defensive, but sad and somehow very knowing. Hardly the kind of expression you’d expect to see on the face of a kindergarten student.
“Ms. Charan,” the principal intoned. What was his name? Howard Killarney. Big guy, receding red hair and an expanding gut that looked less like heavy eating and more like heavy drinking after school hours. The blue of burst capillaries in his nose seemed to bear that impression out.
“Actually, it’s Dr. Charan,” she corrected. Mala wasn’t one to stand on ceremony, but when it came to interactions with authority figures, it never hurt to make sure the playing field was leveled out a bit. Especially ones who had power over her child’s academic life.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a tone that suggested that not only was he not sorry, he may very well have known about Mala’s title before she said something. “I brought you in to discuss the behavior of your foster child, and what kind of plans we can make for the future.”