5th Pentagram: The sequel to the #1 Hard Boiled Mystery, 9th Circle (Book 3 of the Darc Murders Trilogy) (Book 3 of the Darc Murder Series) (28 page)

Glancing in the mirror to make certain Janey had her seatbelt on, Mala’s conscience pricked her once more. Taking Janey to a crime scene was bad enough. Taking her there at two o’clock in the morning was another thing entirely.

And yet, there was something there in the back of her mind that told her she needed to be there. Not only that, but she needed to be there
fast
.

Janey certainly seemed to be of that opinion. She alternated between bouncing up and down in her seat, almost as if she could propel the car forward with her movements, and drawing more badges in the moisture on the windows.

There was one point where Janey thrust her ratty old bear over the seat, shaking it in Mala’s face. It was hard to be sure, but Mala had the feeling that she’d just gotten chastised for being slow by a child’s toy.

Regardless of the consequences to her and to Janey, they were headed out to the train yard. Not a place for women and children to hang out at night. Mala reminded herself to ask Captain Merle about getting a gun.

She pulled out her cell phone, ready to call Darc. Janey’s picture had shown her where to go, and it had also stressed her out. There were lots of places in that drawing where things seemed to be going really bad, really fast. Explosions, people weeping, and red. Lots of red.

Seemed like information that Darc would want to have. But as she called, it went right through to voicemail. Darc’s voice, even more inflectionless than normal, flooded her ear.
If you have reached this recording, I am on another call, chasing a suspect, in an area with limited coverage, asleep or otherwise occupied. Or it is possible I have no desire to speak with you. Leave a message.

If it had been anyone else, Mala would have assumed it was an attempt to be humorous. With Darc, he was probably just covering all of his bases.

But it did leave her with the problem of trying to figure out how to get in touch with the tall detective. She had a basic location for where they were, but the stretch of railroad tracks was fairly extensive. Without speaking with Darc, there was very little chance she would be able to find them.

Unless…

Janey seemed to have developed or learned some of Darc’s savant capabilities. Mala had assumed that there would be no way for the little girl to do much beyond drawing a picture, but they hadn’t actually tried anything else.

Mala spoke over her shoulder to Janey. “I can’t get a hold of Darc. Do you think you could point to where we need to go?”

A pensive look came over Janey’s face. It was as if the idea had never occurred to her either. She gave Mala a tentative nod.

Maybe. Maybe this could work.

As they neared an intersection, Mala looked into Janey’s face for an indicator, but she shook her head. No. Not the right street.

There was a slight hesitation at the next. First Janey pointed to the right, but then pointed to the left. The stutter start worried Mala a bit. She had no desire to get lost down in the Industrial District. But hey, that’s what GPS was made for, right?

As she took the left-hand turn, Mala could see within seconds what the confusion had been. The road curved around, taking Mala back in almost the opposite direction. For a little girl who didn’t drive, that kind of complicated directionality would be tricky.

And then, somehow, impossibly, Mala caught sight of Trey’s Land Rover. It was parked in sight of the railroad tracks. Mala stared at Janey through the mirror.

“Did you know they would be parked here?”

Janey just smiled.

* * *

Trey pumped his arms and legs faster, trying to keep up with Darc as he raced through the middle of the huge open area, heading toward the car in the center of the circle. As per usual, there hadn’t been much of a heads up in terms of what they were doing. It was just up to Trey to follow.

Sometimes it felt to Trey that he’d spent his entire time working with Darc running. Just running and running and running.

And not just that, but running
behind
.

There was never a point at which Darc and he were sprinting somewhere and Trey was ahead. That simply never happened.

Come to think of it, that wasn’t just a physical thing. Darc was always ahead of Trey mentally as well. Didn’t seem fair. Shouldn’t the brainiac be the one that was always falling behind? If Trey knew anything from his years of sneaking copies of
Sweet Valley High
in Catholic school, it was that smart people were not supposed to be good at this kind of stuff.

And in this case, he had no idea if they were running toward danger or away from it. He was hoping for toward, since that meant that Darc would get there first.

He continued hoping that until the railroad car behind them exploded, throwing Trey headlong into the side of one of the tracks. He sat up, his ears ringing, and held his hand up to his forehead. It came away red.

Great. He was bleeding.

Glancing up to check on Darc, Trey could see that either his partner had been outside the blast radius, or he had just gotten up a lot faster.

Dammit.

He pulled himself up to standing and started running once more. By this time, Darc had increased his lead to an uncomfortable distance. Bad things happened when you were stuck in a death trap away from Darc. Actually, spending a moment on that thought, bad things happened when you woke up in the morning and Darc was your partner.

“Darc!” he panted. “Wait up!”

“You saw the timer,” was the only reply from his partner.

“Yeah, I saw it,” Trey called out. “Didn’t mean I
understood
it.”

By this point, Darc had passed the next boxcar and was moving past it to the one on the far side. What the hell? Was there something here Trey was missing? More than usual, anyway?

“What about this one?” Trey said, pointing to the boxcar that was up on what looked like hydraulic jacks as he neared it. “I mean, it’s right in the middle.”

“The Fibonacci sequence,” Darc answered. Well, he said it, at least. Didn’t mean it was much of an answer.

“Seriously, Darc! Can you just give me a straight answer for once?” Trey panted, stopping for a moment and leaning his hand against the car.

“Move away!” Darc barked at him.

Oops. Trey felt a click, and then the boxcar shifted out from underneath him. So did the earth underneath Trey’s feet.

Somehow, the entire car was being swallowed up in the ground. And Trey was being taken right along with it. He pushed backward with all his strength, but it was clear he wasn’t going to make it.

Until he felt a fist grip the back of his jacket and pull. Hard.

Falling to the ground, Trey landed in the dirt, kicking up dust and pieces of gravel that lodged themselves in the gash on his forehead. Man, that sucker hurt.

Rolling over, he saw that Darc had fallen alongside him, his partner’s chiseled face streaked with grime. At least Trey wasn’t the only one getting beat up here.

From behind them, there was a
whoosh
and a blast of heat.

Twisting around, Trey saw that the car had been perched precariously on the edge of a huge pit. Inside that pit was some sort of viscous fluid that was now aflame.

“Crude oil,” Darc answered his unspoken question.

“See, Darc. Was that so hard? I needed information, you gave it to me.”

But the tall detective was already back on his feet. “We have less than three minutes left.”

Okay, the ticking clock was more important than Trey’s unanswered questions. Even he got that. He raced off after Darc once more.

They ran for the rail car that was almost directly opposite the first. As they ran, another explosion rocked the open area.

It was the railcar directly next to the first one they had approached.

Trey glanced around, ticking off the cars in his head. Okay. There were three remaining cars. The one they were headed to looked to be the last in the line, if that’s how the explosions were happening.

The second blast had come about thirty seconds after the first.

So, instead of the three minutes they thought they had, it looked like it was closer to a minute and a half. Trey wondered if there would be two explosions, or if the one would be enough for this sicko.

How much more could you be killed once you’d been blown into a million bits?

* * *

Mala held Janey’s hand as they ran out into the middle of some kind of apocalyptic nightmare that felt like it was straight out of one of the end-of-days sections of the Bible. The twisted metal remains of what looked like it was once a railroad car squatted right in front of their path, a grim reminder of what awaited them farther in.

A pit burned with red heat, sending waves of distortion up into the atmosphere, as well as gouts of black roiling smoke. The acrid scent of burning oil assaulted Mala’s nose and burned down her throat as she gulped for breath.

An explosion rocked the ground, causing Mala to stumble. She pulled up on Janey’s arm, trying to keep the little girl safe.

Safe? Who was she kidding? This place was a war zone.

This was a lose-lose scenario she had dragged Janey into. She could leave her out in the car in one of the scariest areas of Seattle. She could ask her to wait here, with no assurances that whatever traps lay ahead weren’t right here as well.

Or she could make use of Janey’s obvious gifts and hope that everyone would make it out okay. It wasn’t a perfect solution, by any means, but maybe it would be okay. They’d stick to the perimeter as much as possible.

Mala’s self-justifications were making her sick to her stomach. She never should have come. This was one of the worst mistakes she had ever made.

And she knew if anything happened to Janey, she would never forgive herself.

Almost as if the little girl understood what was going on in Mala’s head, Janey squeezed her hand, hard, and tugged at her to stop moving. Mala needed no extra encouragement. She looked down at the girl in front of her, clutching her ragged toy.

Janey tugged again, indicating that Mala should come down to her level. Mala crouched down until she was eye to eye with her beloved charge, looking straight into those bright blue eyes.

Moving forward, Janey gave her a kiss on the cheek, then pulled back for a moment. She squeezed Mala’s hand once more and gave one of the most radiant smiles Mala had ever seen.

Janey was happy.

No, it was more than that. It wasn’t the excitement of a child at Disneyland or the thrill of having a friend come for a sleepover. It was deeper than that. Filled with an inner peace that made the smile that much more precious.

There was destruction all around, they could die at any moment from some horrific trap laid by a madman, but Janey was…

Joyful.

And in that moment, something happened deep inside of Mala’s soul. Whatever happened here tonight, no matter the outcome, Mala would no longer stand in the way of Janey’s involvement. She would stand between her and danger when she could, she would protect her with life and limb. But she would not keep her from her joy.

Janey must have seen the change in Mala’s face, as her smile widened. She pulled on Mala’s hand once more, this time leading her out.

Out into the fray.

CHAPTER 20

Zero was the first number in the sequence.

The first car had been empty.

The lines traced diminishing patterns of blue, green, gold, orange, violet. Everywhere Darc turned, another piece of information flew out from the surroundings, supplying him with additional knowledge.

Whether or not that knowledge would lead to the Mayor was undetermined at this point. The Fibonacci sequence continued. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3… From the narrowing of the bands of color around the number three, that was the car that would house the Mayor.

Three. Prime number. Triangle for the all-seeing eye. The Trinity.

All the other cars would house corpses; they would find no one still alive. Burned out husks, small pieces of meat that was once a human form, all that was left from the violent explosions that were occurring around them.

One of the threads, tasked with timing, alerted him to the next scheduled blast. Darc grabbed Trey by the collar and thrust him to the ground.

“Hey!” his partner squawked as he landed. “What was that—?”

The earth shaking below them both from the timed explosion seemed to be enough to answer his unfinished question. He stood up, brushing off his clothes.

“Okay, fine,” he huffed. “But don’t expect a
thank you
anytime soon.”

Darc turned back and sprinted the last few yards to their destination. They had 24 seconds left before the boxcar next to them would blow. The one in front of them would follow 30 seconds after.

Not enough time to decipher the clues left by the killer.

It had all been designed this way. From the beginning, they were destined to fail, perhaps to die. Darc calculated it at a 83.2 percent possibility that the 30-second blasts had been triggered manually by the killer, who was almost certainly somewhere in the nearby vicinity. But all the clues were directed inward, curving back toward the trap in a Golden ratio spiral.

Working off of the information he had in front of him, Darc searched under and around the boxcar. There were chalk marks at what appeared to be irregular intervals around the bottom perimeter of the container.

They were not irregular.

The glowing fragments of light swarmed about, collecting data points, correlating them, sending back their conclusions. The chalk marks were based off the Fibonacci sequence. This was the correct car.

It had to be.

Examining the underside of the large metal box, Darc could see no wires or explosives. Nothing obvious to indicate that there was anything there that would be a threat. If this car were to be examined on its own, without the context of the trap, there would be no reason to suspect that there were anything at all unusual about it, barring the chalk marking around the bottom lip.

The colors and lights cavorted about in Darc’s mind, trickling a stream of possibilities into his consciousness. There were three options. The threat could be buried. It could be above, on top of the car. It could be inside.