The 9th Hour (The Detective Temeke Crime Series Book 1) (21 page)

He looked out of the window. Trees and streaks of blue sky broke between the branches, and he could see the roofs of other houses. When he thought hard enough a visual came to mind. This was the only view both Patti and Becky had.

The bathroom was devoid of toiletries and the facecloth in the shower was dry. The thermostat had been set at 68 degrees and if Ole showered each day, he had to have been gone more than two days.

Temeke found the rest of the house to be untouched and rushed down the stairs to the front door. He called in the location and told Hackett he was coming back to the station.

It was a lie. He was going north on I-25.
CSP
… the only thing he could think of was Cimarron State Park. It was littered with camping sites and a few dilapidated cabins. He took a deep breath in the driveway, smelling pine needles and fresh exhaust from a passing car.

He called Malin and got her on the first ring. “Where are you?”

“Arroyo Del Oso,” she said.

“You don’t waste any time, do you?”

“No, sir. I figured you’d be at the clubhouse.”

He caught the amusement in her voice and just as he made headway down the street, he saw her car in the parking lot.

“Call Captain Fowler, will you?” he shouted, before snapping his phone shut. “Tell him to pick up my wife’s car.”

“He’s in a meeting with Hackett, sir. So is Jarvis. They’re waiting for you.”

“I’ve got better things to do than drink tea and have small talk with Hackett.”

“Where are we going, sir?”

Temeke didn’t wait to answer. He took off his jacket and harness, replacing both with a bulletproof vest and a duty belt, and he told Malin to do the same. Checking his gun, he sniffed the air.

“We’re going to take a hike, love. And we’re going to see exactly what Captain Fowler missed.”

Ole pulled the knife from a tree. Actually missed. It was a first for him.

He watched her through tired eyes, running with a speed that matched his own. She wasn’t yielding. Not yet. And if she knew he was there, she was doing a grand job of hiding it.

And then, an exotic gem of a moment. She paused and looked around at the drab landscape, lost in her own world. She didn’t understand she was in his territory, that he could so easily kill her just because she was there.

Such curiosity. Such bravery.

He wanted to capture her, own her. He wanted to wreathe her with the final visions of earth and stars. Take his knife and finish it. All that hovered around this girl was the last struggle of life. Then her soul would be just ashes. And he would feel alive.

Even though he no longer heard Odin’s immense voice, he still felt that aching chill reminding him of what he must do.

So why did he hesitate?

Because her body wasn’t limp like the others, wasn’t drugged and lifeless so that he could whisper the Norse songs as she fell asleep. This one was running through a snarl of branches toward the river.

All of a sudden he was Glidehoof, racing in the shimmering snow. Faster now, thundering between the trees, seeing a burst of flesh here and there, dark flesh that would very soon meld with the shadows. If he wasn’t careful, he would lose her in this riparian woodland.

Whatever she saw on her journey, whatever she felt, she had no idea how precious this moment was. How it would never happen in quite the same way.

Almost there, almost smelling the sweat on her dark, wet skin. Only a few more seconds and she would be his.

He lost sight of her again, lost track and scent of her. Odd, he had a trace on her a moment ago, caught a distinct sense she was behind that tree, the one with a cloud colored trunk.

When he reached forward, knife poised at her shoulder, she suddenly darted to one side, pushing through the underbrush like a skittish deer. He teetered on the tips of his feet, hand reaching out for that sycamore. In all his years as a hunter, he had never seen quarry move so fast.

A dark chill ran through him as he stood there panting. She was heading for the river, heading for the ice.

For a while he couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, banishing all thoughts of escape from his mind. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see her out there. What mattered more was that he could sense her, searching, hungry for a way out.

He slipped the knife in his belt and started running again, tearing through a far-reaching expanse of grass to the restless river where winter had locked the banks in ice. The ancient fir trees towered over him, dark and sinister against a bleak sky, and the water glinted like an egret’s wing.

There she was, thirty feet away, foot tapping away at a thin layer of ice.

“Don’t do it,” Ole shouted, holding up both hands.

The water was shallow there, only a trickle and he saw her lift her head, eyeing him with those same mystical eyes.

He threw off the mood, becoming the dispassionate killer once more, edging toward her with a measured step. “Where is your God now, Tessie? Where is he?”

“Right here,” she said, finger pointing toward her foot as if someone actually stood there.

Ole narrowed his eyes to the meandering streams, cutting around sandbanks and surging onwards with the current. He couldn’t see anyone.

“Come on, Tessie. You can’t love a phantom. And I know you’re scared. He can’t help you with that.”

There was a tremor in her lips if he wasn’t mistaken, a spasm in her arms. She backed up a few steps, wincing at the icy water around her ankles.

Her head turned toward the river, thinking perhaps how long she had, how she could rush to the other side and be buffeted to death by the cliffs. But the mud would suck her down and those heavy shoes she wore wouldn’t help her one bit.

Only ten feet from her now, he reached out, fingers stretched. “Give me your hand,” he whispered, tilting his head to one side.

That was the look women couldn’t resist. Before they were gouged, broken and shattered, that is.

“You must be a lonely man,” she said, panting slightly. “Are you lonely?”

Ole felt a shrinking in his breast, reminding him of the grotesque thing he was, a fading fragment of a man. “Lonely?” he said, feeling a tightening at his temples.

“Afraid then.”

Now that was downright stupid. How could he be afraid? He was the one that chased after frightened and hunted things because he had been frightened and hunted himself. It didn’t mean he was afraid. Not until she mentioned it.

“I won’t be afraid,” she said, teeth chattering. “Perfect love drives out fear.”

He paused for a moment, wondering how she managed to dredge up these powerful words. Was she in love with him? Was that what she said?

His legs felt suddenly crippled and bent, so cold they would snap if he tried to move them. What was wrong with him? He had once been adept at netting girls to add to Odin’s collection. He had once been impervious to the cold. This one was number nine.

The very last one. The one he should have snatched in the first place if it hadn’t been for her little sister swapping places in the tent. Morgan hadn’t seen that coming.

His knife could slice a grapefruit in half, or a bed sheet blowing on a clothesline. It was sharp enough to slice a branch off a sapling because he polished that blade now and then. He wanted to slide it out of his waistband, but his fingers were so cold they were powerless.

“Who is your god?” she asked.

Death
, he wanted to say but his lips were trembling now. The more he thought about it, the more he realized what the change was. Odin wasn’t there anymore. Like a migrating bird he had answered the call of the north, returning only with the march of the seasons.

Ole began to feel the gut-aching loneliness the girl talked about. Abandonment.

Hadn’t his father abandoned him to a foster home? Hadn’t Morgan abandoned him. Even his mother. He wasn’t going to be at the mercy of others, wasn’t going to be at the mercy of this skinny dark girl in a tartan skirt.

Even though his shirt was soaked in sweat he was cold. He couldn’t remember the last time he was cold and he wondered why his bodiless spirit had slumbered all these years. Like it was dead.

He was afraid now, just as he had been after Morgan died, that poor fragile soul who floated around in the darkness because he never knew God.

Don’t children go to heaven? He thought they did and suddenly he felt shunned, a thing of ridicule – not infamous, newsworthy. An evil thing that hunkered in an alley wearing a beggar’s coat. He weighed it all calmly, never quite sure how his black heart ticked. His father was clothed in a mahogany casket. That’s how black Ole’s heart must have been.

He gripped that knife and swung in from the right, blade slicing through air and water. He was suddenly head down in the river as if embracing an icy lover. He had miscalculated, heard the tinkle of childish laughter, couldn’t believe his ears. There she was edging toward the trees, boots crunching in the snow.

A gray northeast wind blew over the land, sighing over the rushing river. He turned his eyes upward just in time to see three geese dropping from the sky, a curious natural rhythm in their pulsing wings. It seemed to mimic the beat of his heart as they raced south, disappearing as mysteriously as they had arrived.

He heard the rustling of the grass as he lifted himself from the icy water, like a cripple rising from the Jordan River. Only he wasn’t changed. Not like that.

He was still Ole, misshapen, grotesque Ole. That’s why the girl had taken flight from something she wasn’t yet able to understand.

He found the knife, felt the cold blade between his fingers, saw the sigh of warm air from his mouth. He staggered through a squelch of mud, heart pounding almost as loud as a base drum. He was excited by what he was about to do, knowing he could never undo it.

Malin gripped that steering wheel, sighed and stepped on the gas. She had two choices. Either tell Temeke the car was fitted with a taping device or get her badge taken away. If she didn’t bring it up, he’d know. Bound to suspect the procedure, bound to appreciate her loyalty.

They’d been talking about him again – Sarge, Fowler, Hackett, Jarvis. Saying he was a womanizer, a drug dealer. Saying he was having sex with underage girls. Saying he was probably the 9th Hour Killer all along.

Malin began to snigger. She couldn’t help it. Temeke wasn’t the type to go looking for sex on the Internet. He had a sensual well-bred look about him, somehow wild as if he had come straight off the African plains. Black sweatshirt imprinted with the words
If I don’t like you, I’ll write about you
, and a black baseball hat that seemed to give him an air of authority. They felt threatened. That’s what it was.

His eyes briefly caught hers, eyebrow raised as a slow smile crept across his face. She raised her forefinger and made a wide circle. He would know what it meant.

“Thank you,” he mouthed, gazing with focus.

He was probably looking around for anything new in the car, an extra telephone jack, another dial on the dashboard. It had been well over two hours since they left the hospital in Rio Rancho and he’d hardly spoken at all. Seeing Luis wrapped in tubes was bad enough. Seeing Becky and that little bruised body was somehow worse.

He was animated at a large sign to Taos, shifted around in his seat and then checked his phone. He was a shrewd man, been close to death so many times, almost expecting it, and nothing made him nervous. He was used to the dirty tricks and sleaze of law enforcement, and he operated by his own rules.

The GPS told her to bear right on NM68 at Riverside Drive and there were signs to US64 and Eagle Nest. She had no idea where the Shelby Campground Park Office was, only Temeke had called ahead before they left and asked for a ranger to wait at the gate. She reckoned on forty more minutes. Better step on it the rest of the way.

And what was that sign back there?

“Watch your speed, Marl,” Temeke muttered, lifting his head up from his phone. “This isn’t the Circuit of the Americas.”

She eased her foot off the gas and sighed. Sometimes he made her feel inadequate and yet here she was, a raven-haired beauty. Didn’t he find her just a teeny bit exquisite?

There was nothing in those black eyes to suggest she was anything at all. That’s what bugged her the most. She almost gasped, panicking under her breath. If she wasn’t anything to him, she had never really been anything to Hollister except a schoolboy’s dare. Maybe she needed to change something. Her hair, clothes, character.

“Did we pass Paseo Del Canon?” he said.

“I think we did, sir.”

“Then hang a right on Kit Carson. We’ll join 64 in a few.”

Malin was nervous, and sitting next to Temeke didn’t help. He hardly looked at her, hardly spoke. Just gave orders like he was a commander in the marines or something. She needed to think, only she’d done a lot of thinking in the past few days. No more men.
No more
.

Instead, she watched the palisade cliffs and the occasional waterfall that trickled down between the crags. Fir trees stood tall on their silvery verges and a full moon shed an eerie light between the branches.

“We’re at eight thousand feet,” Temeke said. “Want a boiled sweet?”

“Candy,” Malin corrected, feeling heat in the back of her neck. She was just plain tired. “No thanks.”

It had to have been the bug under the dashboard that made him quiet. He must have known it was there. Hackett could trace them through the GPS, watch their speed, listen to the conversation. Temeke couldn’t exactly talk to her about anything if they were listening.

But they wanted her to talk to him, wanted as much information about that weed, or any dirt for that matter.

“You weren’t always a detective, were you?” she said.

“I used to be a bell boy at the Sheraton. Multi-tasking, multi-snooping. It got me where I am today.”

“So when did you start smoking weed?” she said, staring at a blank face that suddenly lit up.

“I don’t smoke weed.”

“C’mon, sir, everyone smokes weed.”

“Ever rolled a few in your time?”

She grinned at that. “I had a friend once. Never had any money, but she always had a dime bag to sell in the toilets at school. She used to call it her
valuables
.”

“As I’m sure they were,” Temeke said, “especially valuable to the people she stole it from.”

“She used to keep it in her compact and sell it by the lid. It was from Mexico. Burnt your throat, made you wheeze. But she’d sell it to the hard-ups for seventy bucks and pretend it was Thai.”

“Sounds like she had a roaring business. Which brings me to the subject of college loans. I read somewhere you paid yours off in six months. Mexican or Thai?”

She ignored the question and changed the subject. “Do you like younger women, sir?”

She saw his body perk up, saw his eyebrows furrow. “You what?”

“Younger women,” she repeated for the mic. “Do you like them?”

He stroked his throat and grimaced. “How young?”

“Well you know, sixteen, seventeen.”

“Not like that.”

“How young would you go?”

Temeke shrugged. “Thirty-nine.”

Malin grinned. She knew he was forty-three. “Only a few years, sir?”

“For me, yeah. For Eriksen, anything goes.”

Either he was trying to change the subject or he thought she wanted a man’s opinion on the case. She watched the landscape changing from arid prairie to chaparral, and then to forest as the elevation increased. And then she thought of Becky. She often stood too close to Temeke in the lobby, sometimes taking him to the water fountain to whisper. Surely someone had seen?

“What about Becky Moran? She’s a tight little chick in tight little clothes. Doesn’t it make your blood boil?”

Temeke pressed a fist against his mouth and puffed out his cheeks. “You gotta be kidding, right?”

“No,” she said, feeling a burning in her throat. “She likes you, I can tell. Wants you even.”

“She’s just a kid. Probably too scared to look at a man now.”

“She’s into older men. That’s why all this happened. She wanted you, not him.”

“I’m married, Marl.”

“Even married men, sir. They all look. They all wonder how much they can get away with.”

“Not this one. Besides, I won’t be kicked out of the department for interfering with a minor. How awful would that be? I’d be homeless, hungry and sleeping down by the lavatories.”

Malin felt a bubble of laughter in her belly and saw the friendly grin on his face. He was steaming now, especially for that mic.

“You know, I’ve always admired Hackett,” Temeke said, fingers feeling beneath the dash. “I know he thinks I hate him, that I think he’s an impudent swine. But it’s not the case. About ten years ago, and I say it was ten years ago because you’d never forget a thing like that, there was a photograph going around the department. A girl in thigh length boots, face covered in makeup, breasts covered by nothing at all. It was an old set of buttocks between that young pair of knees. And there was a mole on the left side of those buttocks.”

Malin could only giggle at the bug in Temeke’s hand, held close to his lips. He was going to lose his badge. There was no other answer.

“Just a little mole, about this big – just about here,” Temeke said, leaning to one side and jabbing his rear with the bug. “It was Hackett alright. Dirty old git got a teenager pregnant ten years ago.”

He opened the window and flicked it through the gap. That done, he pulled a packet of cigarettes from the glove compartment and placed one in his mouth.

“No one knows how he got off, Marl. I can only suspect he gave up a few pay checks. At his own request.”

Malin sniggered, heard the scratch of a match before she could tell him not to light up. “Tell me what you found in that house, sir.”

“I found an anchor chain and shackles in the back yard, footprints, broken glass from an upper window. Lucky she escaped. He kept her tied up like a dog. You really can’t beat a white Christmas.”

Malin could almost hear the clunk of chains and a dog collar around her neck. “I’d hate to be tied up, sir.”

“Not into bondage then? No, can’t say I would be. Especially if there weren’t any slop buckets handy.” Temeke tapped a photograph on the steering wheel, cigarette bouncing between his lips. “Do you know where this is?”

Malin stared briefly at the picture of an old cabin surrounded by trees. She shook her head. She hadn’t a clue.

“I’m betting it’s one of the hunters’ cabins near the Shelby Ranch,” Temeke said. “Got names like
Lucky
and
Hope
. Let’s hope it’s the first. Let’s hope it’s soon.”

His last words repeated in Malin’s head and she looked at Temeke with a keenness she’d never known before. He was a hunter, skilled at catching the worst of them, unraveling the complexity of an insane mind as easily as a ball of string. But now there was a desperate look on his face, like he was searching for a dark speck against a black sky. She was actually afraid.

The radio suddenly sparked into life. It was Hackett. “I want to see you both in my office tomorrow morning. Seven o’clock sharp!”

“Sorry, can’t hear you,” Temeke said, blowing out a salvo of smoke rings. “Bad line.”

“You’re as clear as a bell,” Hackett contradicted. “Where are you?”

“Sounds like a crossed line,” Temeke shouted. “I can hear a woman laughing in the background.”

“I’d appreciate it if you could observe the correct protocols,” Hackett shouted back. “You weren’t at the briefing meeting this afternoon and I’ve been hearing complaints. Quite frankly, I’m ashamed.”

“Complaints, sir? What complaints?”

“Bawdy comments in front of the female officers, sexual harassment, that kind of thing. I would ask for your resignation if it wasn’t for―”

“Did you say sexual harassment, sir?”

“I have witnesses, Temeke. You should have been here, should have had the balls to face the music.”

“You forget, sir. You didn’t want me in a meeting room. You wanted me out in the field. Those were your orders. I’ve already gathered you don’t want me around and that’s because you got passed over by the promotional board last year. Wouldn’t want a black foreigner taking over your job now, would you?”

“That’s racism!”

“Your words not mine, sir. Bitterness leads to resentment. I’ve seen it so many times. What’s your birth sign?”

“What’s my birth sign got to do with anything?”

“December 20th. Sagittarius. Overly expressive, frequent burnouts. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re coming up for retirement.”

“That’s none of your business, Temeke. Now, where are you? You can’t be riding out on your own like John Wayne!”

“Did you say hunting game, sir?” Temeke switched off the radio and pinched out his cigarette. He cracked open the car window and flicked it out as far as he could.

Malin heard the loud sigh, and then a small chuckle. “How cold is it outside?” she said, not daring to look up at the temperature sensor.

“Eighteen degrees. I don’t want to tell another father that his daughter was found headless in a garbage bag. There’s no way you can tart up stuff like that. Tess won’t survive the snow. She won’t survive wild animals if they’re out there nosing around in the brush.”

“What about the hunter’s cabins?”

Temeke fumbled in the compartment under the armrest for a flashlight. He unfolded the map and spread it out on his knee. “They’re west of here and within a few hundred yards of each other, spread out like an isosceles triangle. The first one borders the river, the second and third form the base. My wife used to camp in the woods when she was a child. Said they were mostly ruins, except for the boathouse. They used to swim from the pier.”

“There must be a track somewhere,” Malin said, eyelids fluttering in the beam of a passing car.

“Turn off here and douse the lights, Marl,” Temeke said, turning off the flashlight and pointing at a pay lodge. “And before you get out of the car make sure you mute your phone. Don’t want a stampede of elk now, do we?”

They approached the turn, tires crunching on gravel, a dirt road that went onward and upward. She turned off the headlights seeing the pallid bark of aspens and the reflecting eyes of elk as they passed between the trees.

There was no sign of the ranger.