The 9th Hour (The Detective Temeke Crime Series Book 1) (24 page)

She felt no anger. She felt no fear. It was the remote courtesy she couldn’t understand.

“You know who I am, don’t you?” He stared down at her with a fire in his eyes, waiting for some kind of response. When she nodded, he nodded too. “Ole,” he said so softly she almost failed to catch it over the wind. “And you are Malin. Such a beautiful name.”

This was the man they called the 9th Hour Killer and yet here he was walking toward the hearth, giving the wolf a cursory pat. He stoked those flames and set a pot on top of a three-legged stand. She could smell twigs and pine cones and very soon a bubbling chicken broth. The wind whistled in the chimney above the hearth and that’s when she noticed tiny specks of snow whirling down into the flames.

“Where’s Tess?” she asked.

He ladled enough to fill a wooden bowl and pressed it against her lips. He told her to drink and she did, and then he wiped her mouth with his finger.

“She was hiding beside a kill when I found her.”

“A kill?”

“Yes, a kill. A dead elk. Very smart, don’t you think?”

Malin took another sip, smelling man scent. His eyes narrowed and his mouth tilted into a secretive smile.

“Sit still now. Don’t fret.”

She tasted something bitter in the back of her throat and she knew what it was.

“Little Tess was fast,” Ole said, tilting the bowl toward her lips again, “Faster than I thought she’d be. She jumped when she saw me and ran through the trees. I was very impressed. If there was a way out she would have found it by now. But there isn’t. She broke the rules and now she’s paying for it.”

He became blurry and indistinct, and that’s when Malin closed her eyes and felt her head snap forward onto a muscular shoulder.

Temeke crested the hill after about fifteen minutes, already feeling the strain in his thighs. There were trees all over the place, some denser than others and he hoped Tess was sheltered somewhere beneath a canopy of branches.

The acrid smell was stronger and he looked east and west and didn’t see anything moving. He couldn’t feel his feet and if it wasn’t for his scarf he wouldn’t have been able to feel his ears. How could he possibly do any surveillance with Hackett butting in every five minutes. The radio vibrated into life and he fumbled to switch it off.

“Old misery guts,” he mouthed as he paced the edge of the clearing. Hackett was probably sitting at home with his feet up drinking a full-bodied glass of ale.

Where was Malin? She should have seen something by now. Probably tripped over another gnarly root and knocked herself out.

He was about thirty feet from the cabin and all he could hear was the dull rattle of dead leaves in the wind. Before getting to the edge of the deck, he noticed a narrow shaft of light that fell through a crack in the door mullion. In front, a wire stretched about three inches above the deck boards secured around the porch columns.

An alarm.

That’s the trouble, thought Temeke, pinching his eyelids together as he peered into the gloom. There might have been a few in the woods.
I’ll never see the sod. He’ll jump me from behind.

He trained his eye on a shudder of movement to the right of the cabin, slipped the gun out of his holster and crept forward. He learned very quickly in his life that it was one thing to read body language from a distance and another thing to see it close up. He barely recognized the slip of a girl, arms crossed and wrapped around her waist. Out of her mouth came a stammer and a violent shake of the head and she tried to hold up a hand.

He lifted the chain around his neck and pulled out his badge. Slipping the gun back into the holster, she flinched, and then ran into a thicket of spruce. He followed her, followed that strong smell of ammonia that only confirmed she had been tied up for days. Racing under a canopy of fir trees, he lost her for a moment and he waited, listened, measuring the density of his hiding place. He couldn’t see her but he knew she was there.

“Tess,” he said. “It’s Detective Temeke with the DCPD. You’re safe.”

She came out from behind the tree trunk, eyes wide and glistening. The moonlight was enchanting on her oval face and the bones of her cheeks, and he could see she had been crying. How to explain the clear evidence of African and Spanish blood in all of them, the petite frame and the brightness of the eye against a tan colored face. Yet it was there.

“Are you OK?” he said, peeling off his backpack.

It was a stupid question. She couldn’t answer through the sobs, the incoherent stutter. He wanted to keep her warm and the car was at least a twenty minute hike. He’d make it in ten if he ran.

He felt it in his chest and in the pit of his stomach, a terrible gut-wrenching pity that wouldn’t go away. He covered her in his jacket, held her close. He felt that age old stirring in his gut, felt his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. He had to ask. He had to know.

“Are there any others?” Through the chatter of teeth he heard the word
pit
. He asked her where it was.

Her finger pointed at a dark mass about thirty feet from the cabin, much closer than he had expected. Through an overhanging branch he could see an old chimney surrounded by a low brick wall. It was the glowing embers that made his stomach pitch.

Bloaters, he thought, the familiar stench of decomposition. He pulled a bottle of water from the backpack and held it against her lips. She struggled to swallow.

A scraping sound and the squeal of neglected hinges brought his attention back to the cabin. The front door was open now like it held some kind of supernatural power. There was no sign of Ole Eriksen, at least not that he could see.

Tess looked up at him again with those large searching eyes. She must have heard it, too. “Don’t go in there,” she said.

Going in there was the last thing he intended to do, not with a flickering light in the background. He’d appear larger than an elk within twelve yards of a rifle bore. It was exactly what Ole wanted.

There was the possibility – the extremely remote possibility – that it was Malin. But he didn’t believe it for a moment.

He took out his phone and partially covered it with his scarf. Dialing Hackett’s number, he pressed the phone face-down in Tess’s hand. “No need to talk,” he whispered, curling her fingers around it. “The police are on their way.”

She began to shake her head, looking up into the thick limbs of the tree above them. “He’s coming. I can hear him.”

“Easy, love, easy…” Temeke pressed a hand on her shoulder. He wasn’t giving up, even as he shivered and rubbed his arms. “It’s warm in the car. Safe, too. You’ve been so brave. Just a little longer.”

He took the sweater from the backpack and pulled it over his head. He heard the sound of boots against bark and turned to see Tess was already half-way up the tree and nestled in the fulcrum of two branches.

It was the gunshot that made him hit the ground, made him shudder. Tess was hidden in a thick spiny canopy without a bullet-proof vest.

To the right, he could see a downhill slope leading to an icy stream at the foot of the palisades. To the left was the old chimney looming like an ancient monolith against the night sky. He could smell that stench again.

He pulled out his gun and aimed beneath the low hanging branches, watching every shadow. The chimney was old, glowing embers streaking through the cracks and he could see a trail of pale roots amongst the soot.

Not roots. Human limbs, naked and white like wax dolls. Bones were stacked against a low wall, arranged in size and displayed like a row of trophies.

His stomach began to heave and his eyes snapped back and forth in the darkness. Panting, lungs searing from lack of water, he wanted to call out to Tess, wanted to reassure her. But the snap of a loading port warned him that Ole was out there, rifle pointing right at him.

Something moved from behind the chimney, a head, an arm perhaps. It seemed to slink forward, not like a relieved hostage running into the arms of a savior, but like a hunter dropping to the ground to take aim.

Temeke lay there under the trees, both hands gripping his weapon.

Malin took a deep breath as cold air rushed at her cheeks through the open door. She could see the trees and smell the snow, but she couldn’t see Eriksen. She couldn’t see the wolf.

She had no coat and no scarf. When had he taken them off? She couldn’t remember.

It was too quiet in the cabin, just the crackling of the fire in the hearth, a wooden bowl on the floor and two large jerry cans under the window. The cabin was a large open room and to her left was a mantelshelf thick with years of dust. There were a few thin lines drawn in that dust, angled forward like cursive script. She squinted and held her breath.
TW
.

Tess Williams.

Malin wondered if Ole had written the name immortalizing the girl in some sick way, or if it had been written by Tess. Perhaps Tess wanted someone to know she was there, to know she was still alive.

Malin curled her toes and flexed the muscles in her arms. She hadn’t swallowed much of that soup, letting three small sips settle behind her bottom teeth. It had all spilled out of her mouth when she fell forward on his shoulder, a trick she had learned as a child.

There was another stench, a familiar one that made her study the hearth and the rising flames in the grate. Gasoline. Glossy puddles of it everywhere.

Malin began to rock frantically in the chair without taking her eyes from the front door. Straining against the ropes again and again, she heard one of the chair rails squeal. The structure was rotten just like the rest of the house and if she didn’t get out soon, she wouldn’t get out at all.

Leaning forward and taking the weight of the chair on her back, she made for the door in six lumbering steps. That’s when she heard the gunshot ricocheting against the cliffs. That’s when she heard a man’s laugh and the whoosh of flames behind her.

Get out
! her mind screamed.

Flexing her arm muscles one last time, the chair back split away from the seat. The heat was terrible, flames licking the chimney and the walls. In a matter of seconds, her throat was burning and her lungs were filling with smoke. Holding her breath, she struggled for the deck just as the floorboards disintegrated under her feet, forcing her down into the darkness. She groaned as she lay beneath the house, wrists no longer bound to the chair.

The pain in her right thigh was so intense she squealed in horror. A large splinter of wood poked out a few inches below her right hip, blood glistening from the open wound. Sobbing, she turned on her left side, one hand clawing through clods of earth, the other hand covering her nose. Heat seared through her back and all she could think about was staying low as black smoke began to settle on the ground.

One last breath. That was all she had.

Splintering wood indicated she was directly below the front deck, only it was on fire above her. Kicking and dragging a leg she could no longer feel, she punched through a clump of grass and out into the clearing.

Move!

She couldn’t determine where that last shot came from, couldn’t measure how close it was. She crawled faster now toward the trees.

Trembling, she lay in a small hollow, taking shallow breaths and wincing at the pain. The sliver of wood was no small splinter. It was about two feet long and sewn into the flesh at her hip. Gripping one end of it, she counted to three. The pain was too intense and she knew she couldn’t shift it without passing out. Coughing made her retch, burning her nose and throat, and she was too thirsty to go on.

It was fear that brought her to a stand, made her limp for high ground. There was no water now, no backpack, no gun. Ole had seen to that. But there was the river behind the burning cabin and she suddenly longed for it, no matter how cold, how contaminated.

Working her way back along the trail where she found the ranger, she saw embers swirling in the sky. It would only take a few of them to light up the rest of the forest and it would become a burning grave. She would have to swim out as far as the ledge below the cliffs if she wanted to survive. It was the safest place to be.

Energized by the knowledge that someone had fired that shot, Malin knew she had to run. Her thigh burned at every step and she panted through gritted teeth.

If he’s a good hunter, he already knows we’re here.

The snag around her ankle when she first arrived at the cabin was no rabbit trap. It was an alarm to alert Ole at any sign of movement. She prayed his mind wasn’t smart enough to build bigger traps.

The fire made the woods hotter than the summer months, searing heat that made you sweat behind the knees. She began to wonder if the wound was charred and bruised, toxins already eating their way into her veins. She needed ice. She needed water.

Sometimes she dragged that leg and sometimes she just reached out to the nearest tree to catch her breath. Then she heard it – a low rumbling sound. A growl. It was coming from the foliage behind her.

Glancing back and listening to the sound, she saw a shadow loping between the grasses toward a boulder. Long tail, sloping shoulders, snout as long as her hand. It was the wolf, although what breed or size it was, she didn’t know.

It doesn’t matter what it is, she thought irritably. A wolf’s better than Ole, isn’t it?

She wasn’t sure. Either way, the animal could smell blood and that’s what it was tracking. She went rigid, tried to hold her breath, tried to force her knees to stop trembling. The occasional snap of a twig from all sides confirmed her worst fear. The animal was circling her.

Five minutes, ten minutes. She had no idea how long it was. Silence one minute, chuffing the next. She saw a shaggy coat and head rising above the boulder, settling on the summit. Bathed in a soft reddish glow from the flames around the cabin, it gave a long snuffling breath as if weighing the threat.

Something deep inside told her to keep perfectly still. She saw the eyes, the tilt of the head, the oddly smiling face. There was the faint sound of the wind rustling through the long grass and the fur at the wolf’s flank rippled in response. It was the most frightening thing she had ever seen.

It was also the most beautiful.

The mournful howl took her by surprise as did the razor-sharp jaws. The wolf looked up and down, nostrils working in the breeze. Two shiny eyes stared over her left shoulder at some distant object and she heard claws clacking against rock as the animal launched into the air and streaked like a cheetah into the wilderness.

Sucking in breath, she gave a long sigh of relief. What it had seen or heard she had no idea. Stretching her leg made her gasp, took her breath away. The pain was followed by a dull throbbing and she knew she had to keep walking.

Taking off down the slope, the trail curved back and forth through deep canopied trees and a musty smell took away the stench of burning timbers. She saw the Charger then, tucked behind a screen of broken branches. It wasn’t easy to crouch, to break off a stout twig and press it against the top of the metal pin. A loud hissing of air escaped from each valve and twice she stopped and listened, hearing the sound of water lapping against wood. The river was ahead of her now and if she was lucky, she would reach the bank just as a low hanging cloud covered the moon.

Flames flickered from the river bank and she could almost see the veins in the nearest leaves. About fifteen feet downriver, she saw a pitched roof through a break in the trees, a simple wooden structure astride a pier. She couldn’t get to it without walking down an open path and the thought of meeting Ole half-way was unthinkable.

She was wading almost knee deep in water before she realized it, flinching at the bite of icy water against her skin. A boat bobbed in a mild current, mooring line tied to a wooden stake.

An escape. It was all she needed.

Taking the rope, she looped it around one shoulder and waded out into the river. Her legs were almost numb with cold and she knew what she had to do. Gripping her pants leg, she tore a hole big enough to see flesh covered in blisters and half blackened with soot. The point of the splinter ran through the top of her buttock, tip visible at the curve of her thigh.

She took a deep breath, gripped the blunt end with both hands, and pulled.