The 9th Hour (The Detective Temeke Crime Series Book 1) (4 page)

Darryl Williams slipped the gun from his waistband and checked the ambidextrous safety. It felt good in his hand. Too good. Sometimes he would do this two or three times a day, pointing it at the tree in his backyard, pretending it was
him
.

He had only just cleaned it, always marveling at the small springs for such a big gun although it was a bear to put back together. When he finally fired a round at the tree yesterday, he could almost see those gases porting through a small hole in the barrel.

He stared at the picture on the wall, a patchwork of blues and greens so intense, it made his eyes water. Bluebells in a wood, a painting Kizzy had done at school. It still hung in her bedroom, proof that she had once been there.

He had accepted many things in his life but never forgiveness and he had hated a whole life-time’s worth in those first few months until he was completely burnt out.

The phone call came thirty-four days ago. He remembered it vividly. It was the same day he was promoted to a loan officer at Wellington Capital Bank on Southern.

Detective Temeke called to confirm they had a body, if you could call it a body. Darryl couldn’t feel his legs after he’d seen it and he couldn’t feel them now.

He sat on the bed and stared at the gun in his lap. He could either top himself, or someone else, and the someone else option seemed to be the most practical. He had two surviving daughters to take care of. It wouldn’t do to abandon them.

He felt soft cotton beneath one hand, fingers caressing the quilt his late wife had made. There were little hexagonal boxes and perfect stitching, and then the colors all melded into a teary haze, worse than when he was drunk.

He had tried to stop drinking, tried to stop buying the stuff when his kids were around. He brewed dandelions with ginger, cloves and orange peel. It went much further when you mixed it with wine and you got a whole lot drunker too.

He wiped his eyes and looked outside the window at the back yard and the arroyo beyond. On the horizon he could see the west mesa and the remnants of five cinder cone volcanoes. They had erupted long ago, leaving behind a lava flow of fine black dust.

All dead and forgotten, he thought. Like the dad he once had. He missed the tall lean figure that towered over him as a child, missed his soothing voice. He knew that voice more than anyone else. That was the pain for him.

He gazed at the fir tree in the corner of the yard covered in snow, a reminder that Christmas was near. He began to wonder how many times Kizzy had seen the same view, what thoughts had gone through her head. This was her bedroom, after all.

The detective had called again this morning about a journal they had only just found. A journal they should have found thirty-four days ago when the scene was first combed by a pack of field investigators. Now Darryl would relive Kizzy’s nightmare through her own words.

There can’t be any more hate in me
,
he thought, until a new day came bringing a fresh portion of it.

Kizzy was good at writing diaries. She was good at writing stories. He remembered her doing cartwheels in the sun and he could still smell the scent of her hair. Only he couldn’t quite see her face. It was a shadow now, unless he found a recent picture of her, and he was tired of slipping the small photo from his wallet and crying over it if he was honest.

There was a knot of pressure in his chest when he recalled a recurring dream, a face with milky eyes like the one on the autopsy table. It was always without a body and he would wake suddenly and be cruelly reminded he was the one that had survived. There wasn’t even the barest threshold of life in that face and thinking of it made him dizzy, disjointed. He tried to tell himself it was just a painted doll’s head, something a child would make in sixth grade. But it wasn’t. The nightmares were always the same and a scream would catch in the back of his throat choking him awake.

Pastor Razz said
hate
makes a man sick. Forgiveness means letting go, lessening the grip of bitterness and pain.

I won’t forget. I’ll never forget
,
Darryl thought, brushing one hand over his close-cut hair and squeezing the gun with the other.

There had been no funeral because forensics still had her head. Who in their right mind buries a head without a body?

Carmel had died nine years ago from an asthma attack and he could never bring himself to spend her life insurance. It stayed in his bank for seven long years until he bought the new house. So she could share it with him.

As for the murdered, there were men out there preying on the innocent, men still at large and men so evil their very faces were enough to keep a child indoors. One murder every month. Someone had to find him.

Kizzy was baptized in September, a month before she was taken. Darryl wondered if that was a fluke or if it was a God thing.

“Up is better than down,” Kizzy used to say. “That’s where the bluebells are.”

“
Heaven
, Kizzy,” Darryl corrected. “Where there’s no more crying or pain.”

“But Dad, there are bluebells there. I’ve seen them.”

Kizzy was determined there were carpets of them in the mountains spreading beneath the giant pines. Only bluebells thrived in English woodlands, not the sandy loam of New Mexico. Still, they went camping to look for them, the summer she died.

Kizzy was like him, big eyes and a big nose. Darryl began to laugh at that for the first time in thirty-four torturous days. Deep in his throat the sound came like rain beating on the roof tiles and he almost lurched forward in his chair.

His mind was suddenly a blur of memories, fishing, hiking, horse-riding as he looked out of that window at the old wooden swing set he had bought for Kizzy’s birthday. The seat was powdered with snow now and there were large flakes in the air like the molt of a cottonwood tree.

Best not think about what that man did to her. Best not think of her last moments.

A small part of him always did – especially the last moments. He wished he could have been there if not to save her then to hold her while she died. During his darkest times, he would hesitate in his thoughts, pausing to wonder. Why her?

Did that man have a swing when he was a child?

The thought took him by surprise. What did he care? The man was a monster. He was never a little boy with rosy cheeks and a swing to sit on. Was he?

He’s someone’s son. He’s someone’s brother. He’s. Some. One.

Darryl batted the air with his hand. He felt no pity. Not an ounce of it. Not when a homicide detective showed him Kizzy’s little green blazer all covered in blood. She was proud of that blazer and the gold embroidered bird on the pocket. It had the words
Clemency Christian School, Home of the Doves
written beneath it.

The doorbell sputtered and then gave a peevish ring, breaking the longest silence he had ever heard. He left his gun on the bed and staggered toward the front of the house, dreading what he might find. Through the spyhole he could just make out a man darker than tar. Temeke, he thought. With the notebook.

He had an Hispanic woman with him this time, petite, pretty, probably in her early thirties. Why did warning buzzers whisper in his ear each time he saw an attractive woman?

“How have you been?” Temeke said, eyes shining like two wet pebbles.

“So, so, Detective,” Darryl whispered as he sat down on a wooden chair. He waved them over to the couch and noticed a whiff of cigarette smoke.

“Temeke. Call me
Temeke
.” He introduced his partner as Malin.

“That’s a type of fish isn’t it?” Darryl said, noting the slight shake of the head, the tiny smile.

“It’s not spelled the same,” she said.

Her face was freckled, unusual for an Hispanic woman, and she looked just as uncomfortable as he was.

The detective stared long and hard. “Had a few phone calls from concerned neighbors. Haven’t been using that tree for target practice, have you?”

“A few times,” Darryl said, nodding.

“How many times?”

“There’s four slugs in the bark.”

“This is a caution. Next time you use that gun in this neighborhood, it’s mine. Understand?”

The detective’s words hung in the air and Darryl merely nodded again. He could have confiscated the weapon there and then. But he didn’t.

“I’m right in thinking you’re a widower?”

“Yes,” Darryl said, watching the detective’s eyes as they wandered around the room, pausing at a ball of knitting in a wicker basket. “My sister lives here. She looks after the girls.”

Temeke nodded and placed a scuffed red notebook on the coffee table. “We thought you might want to look at this. I’m sure she would have wanted you to have it.”

They all looked at it like it was a strange archaeological relic until Darryl broke the silence with a choked
thank you
. He opened it and saw a dried flower pressed to one page, a desert primrose if he could give it a name.

“She liked flowers,” he murmured, knuckling away a tear and wondering how many more would streak down his cheeks like an open tap. “How did you find it?”

“One of the field investigators found it in the barn last Friday,” Temeke said, biting his lip, “behind a brick in the wall.”

Darryl felt a slight chill and wondered if he had left a window open in the kitchen. There was a time last week when he thought he saw something through the lashing rain standing beside the fir tree. He was overreacting of course, always thinking he was being watched.

Was it the wind shaking Kizzy’s little swing or did he see someone moving about? He’d been more sensitive to sights and smells since the
thing
happened. He could never call it a murder. It just didn’t seem right. “I wonder why they didn’t find it sooner.”

Temeke cleared his throat. He seemed to be watching him intently. “It can take hours, days to photograph and collect evidence. In this instance, months because of the monsoons. The most we’ve had in one hundred years, so they say.”

Darryl drew his mouth into a straight line and pondered that for a moment. “Even with cadaver dogs?”

“Well it’s funny now you mention it. A dog did find it. But not in the nick of time, sadly. Maybe it was all that rain. Maybe his sniffer was on the blink.”

Darryl felt a surge of laughter in his chest, bubbling out into the open. It was louder than he expected. Genuine. It felt good to laugh again. “I appreciate you coming over,” he said. And he meant it. “Do you have any suspects?”

“We’ve got one inside at the moment. Can’t tell you his name. I don’t think he did it. But I think he knows who did.”

“I hear the police use psychics. Are they any good?”

“Well that’s the thing,” Temeke began in his usual scathing voice. “We know a psychic, well he’s a nut-case really. Said he saw it in a dream. Most of the time he claims the president’s been shot and by the time you turn on the TV there he is in the White House, sipping a cup of Darjeeling. On this occasion the lying sod hit the jackpot.”

“What did he see?”

“Trees with faces. They were carved on the trunks. He was very accurate.”

“Do you use psychics for every case?”

“I won’t use them in any case, stanky-ass waste of time.”

Darryl saw Malin give the detective a wide-eyed look.

“What I meant was,” Temeke said, lowering his voice, “they’re usually after a fast buck. But I had a hunch this time. He took us right there, to the farm and all.”

“Where are you from?” Darryl asked, hearing an accent. It was Australian or something similar.

“Albuquerque.”

“No, that’s Australian.”

“England actually.”

“Do you miss it?”

“I don’t miss the rain and it’s bloody freezing even in the summer.”

Darryl felt himself brighten. “Kizzy always wanted to go to England. She wanted to see the bluebells.”

“My brother and I used to take the bus to St. Matthew’s Church in the spring. We’d find a few under the trees and pick them for my mum. They had a scent you’d never forget. That and furniture polish in the living room.”

Darryl liked Temeke. He was somehow misplaced between one world and the next.

“Talking of churches,” Temeke said, “have you seen your pastor recently?”

“Last week as a matter of fact,” Darryl muttered. “He keeps talking about forgiveness. I can just about forgive the man that flipped me off in Smith’s last Saturday night but not a killer. Not the man that took my little girl and locked her in his house. There was no reason – no reason at all.”

“It was her stories that kept her alive,” Temeke reminded, eyes floating to the floor. “And her optimism. You know that.”

Darryl watched an army of dust motes drifting lazily in a beam of sunlight. He could hear the creak of his chair and the chimes from the clock in the hall. He wondered what Kizzy heard during those last hours. Rain possibly, pattering against the windows and the bark of a dog somewhere in the distance. Had she thought of him? Had she cried out for him?