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Malin leaned back in the chair of her second floor office. The sky was black and her eyes were locked in the glare of two area lights in the parking lot. Stars blinked through the skeletal limbs of a sycamore and the moon shone down on a row of black and white units. She was waiting for Maggie Watts to call.
Turning her mind to Paddy Brody, she replayed the mental video recording in her head, brooded over it as if there was something she must have missed. His tone had been impossible to read and that made her tense. When she’d asked him if Lily Delgado was dead he simply replied, she is to me. There had been no edge to his voice, no reason to suspect he knew anything about her disappearance. Just four simple words.
There’s always more to a killer than meets the eye, she thought. Some worked for an employer, some were gang related, most were thugs and only a few were independently contracted. This one targeted young, healthy females between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three, no physical commonalities and each murder more elaborate than a bullet to the head. She wondered if it boiled down to timing since these deaths galloped ahead without restraint, as if there was significant ground the killer had to cover.
There was more than a thin thread that connected them, more than just a high school group of friends. A cult, money, and one shared lover. Comparisons and statistics on a case like this were slim to none and she hadn’t a hope in hell of building an accurate profile if none of these deaths were related.
There was a more frightening category of killer; a loner. They weren’t paid by an employer to kill, weren’t expecting to collect insurance. The act wasn’t spontaneous ‒ an idea dredged out of a confused mind ‒ it just didn’t compute. But each victim had been put in a vulnerable situation, they were alone at the time of death.
This left another possibility. Revenge.
Malin paused to think about that for a moment, jumping to the natural conclusion that it was a love relationship gone bad and as for timing, it might have had something to do with the killer’s cover being compromised.
She rubbed her eyes and peered at the computer screen. Asha Samadi had been reported missing sixteen days ago and according to the amount of blood found on the carpet, was regrettably dead. The papers said Kenzie Voorhees was found without vital signs and pronounced dead at the scene of an hellacious south side gas blast. The house had been leveled and debris scattered over hundreds of yards, some of it hanging on trees and neighboring houses. And then there was Rosa Belmonte, drowned in the Rio Grande river in her car.
Paddy was a solid witness – and let’s face it, intimacy with more than one woman could make a man some interesting enemies. She wondered if Wingman could offer any clues. He was on vacation, so he said, only all sociable souls could text and his had gone eerily quiet.
Sixteen minutes past ten on Saturday night and Malin checked her phone. One private message. One text. She listened to the message first, wondering why she hadn’t heard the phone ring.
It’s Paddy. You asked me to call you if I thought of anything. Gray hoodie. Very transparent. I thought I’d seen him before.
Malin felt a wave of disgust, listened to thin air for a second before calling him back. No answer.
She scanned Maggie’s text. A simple ‘can you bring me some coffee?’ Time to relieve her from a night of surveillance outside Paddy’s house.
Malin switched off the computer, shrugged on her coat and padded downstairs. Sergeant Moran was reading a copy of Time Magazine and sipping a can of Coke. One of the graveyard shift officers was playing a game of solitaire on his computer; the lenses of his glasses recklessly mirroring a deck of cards.
She tried to slip past Sarge without saying hello, but his eyes were quicker than a snake.
“Being cordial is not just for cherries,” he muttered.
“I’m going to meet Maggie, Sarge.”
“She said she’s freezing her butt off out there.”
“She called you?” Malin saw him nod. “Tell her I’m on my way.”
Malin raised one hand, uttered a tired goodbye and fled through the front door. It was Sunday tomorrow and the thought of a peaceful day gave her a little more energy. She headed for the twenty-four hour BadA$$ coffee stop on Fourth and Alameda, bought two cups of dark roast and a couple of blueberry muffins at the drive-thru.
Watercress Drive was a quiet neighborhood off Jefferson, looping around into Goldenthread Drive where four handy exits brought you back to Alameda. She pulled up by the curb about twenty-five yards down from Maggie’s truck, couldn’t see Paddy’s residence since it was too far up the street and partially covered by a box hedge.
But Maggie could, and with a good pair of binoculars she could probably see as far as the clock on the mantel if he had one.
Malin’s phone vibrated, felt the warning before she heard Maggie’s voice. “Done some checking. He has a roommate, Burmese guy called Maun Tung. Got his phone number if you need it. Paddy was looking out of the window about twenty minutes ago.”
“Any interest in your truck?”
“Nope. There are two others on the other side of the street, same color, same model.”
It wouldn’t have made any difference, Malin thought. If Paddy was alert, knew all the cars in his street, he would sense a variation in traffic. “Bought you some coffee.”
“I’ll be darned...” Maggie said slowly. “Subject’s opening the garage door. Most activity I’ve seen all evening.”
“What’s he wearing?”
“Black jacket, khaki pants. Putting a gym bag in the trunk.”
“How big’s that gym bag?”
“Weekend sized. About twenty-one inches.”
“Bit late to be traveling,” Malin murmured.
“Might be meeting someone.”
“What sort of meeting would make a man leave his house at ten thirty at night?”
“A sick relative... a girlfriend. He’s on his way. Shall I follow him?”
“I’ll go,” Malin said, and ended the call.
The smell of coffee and muffins reminded her Maggie would have to do without. Passing food across to another undercover squad car was as foolish as following a suspected killer.
She rubbed her forehead, felt a sudden ache creeping up the small of her back and settling into the base of her neck. She lowered her jaw to relieve the pain, pulled out into the middle of the street and nodded at Maggie on her way past.
Malin hung back as the white Honda Accord backed down the driveway and out into the street. She wasn’t close enough to blind his vision in the rearview mirror with her headlights and, staring at a mud spattered back window, realized he likely couldn’t see her at all. Her fingers began to tingle against the steering wheel as she kept about a hundred yards behind.
He turned west all the way to Camino Vega Verde and just before the turn off she decided it was time to get closer. He didn’t drive to the Delgado House on Bazan Loop, but turned left at the fork and stopped before a white house with plantation shutters and palm trees which towered above an acre of lush grounds on the west side of the street.
Malin chose the right turn, drove anticlockwise around the loop until she was about thirty feet in front of him, pulled over to the curb and parked under a weeping willow with the headlights off. She slumped down in her seat and studied him, the direction of his eyes, the slant of his body, the general demeanor.
He didn’t look up. Seemed in a hurry to take the gym bag from the trunk and lock the car. Six seconds later, he turned along a narrow path huddled in the shadows of two properties and bordered by a high wall. Wherever he was going, he didn’t want company.
Malin checked her weapon and swung the driver’s door open without taking her eyes off the white car. She stepped out into the darkness, locked the door from the inside, heard a faint click.
She blinked a few times to ward off a bitter breeze that swung from the northwest and sent a skitter of leaves along the same path Paddy had taken. A few stars twinkled overhead and the street lights gave off a pinky-yellow blush.
Narrowing her eyes, she peered around the corner of the block wall, advancing slowly at first before breaking into a jog. She was looking at every shadow, every clump of grass that led toward a faint rumble of traffic, stopping to catch her breath at the edge of a wide dirt track. Beyond it lay an arroyo and an empty parking lot that bordered Corrales Road, and to the right, a sandy track that meandered to the north.
There were no footprints, no sign of movement, and she closed her eyes for a moment to listen to the echo of silence and the emptiness in her head. Then voices drifted from a clump of cottonwoods behind the Café and to the left of where she was standing. Although she couldn’t make out the words, it was a male and female arguing.
She passed silently under overhanging tree limbs, jogging over a wooden bridge that led to the floodlit restaurant patio. As the voices grew louder, she saw a man standing beside a table, head down and face illuminated by the glowing blue rectangle of his cell phone.
Pausing at the foot of a large tree, she held her breath for a few seconds and peered through the branches.
“I don’t see any messages,” he said. “When did you call?”
“This morning.” Her voice was shrill with a whine to it.
A scraping sound as he drew a chair out from under a metal table, set the bag down between them. “Did anyone see you leave?”
“There’s a cop car outside every night and one assigned to me during the day.” She shrugged, lips widening a little. “They won’t know I’m gone.”
Malin could see the girl now. Long hair, black sweats, about a hundred and thirty pounds at a guess. She might have been tall judging by the length of one coltish thigh crossed neatly over the other and a foot that kept bouncing in the air as if she was nervous. Malin recognized her from the photographs as Adel Martinez, recognized her voice too.
He reached over and dropped a small zippy into the palm of her hand. “It’s all I have.”
Adel’s head fell back for a few seconds and she gave a tentative sigh. “That’s it?”
“I’m not a freaking pill mill. It’ll keep you going for a while.” He leaned forward and brushed a drift of hair from Adel’s heart-shaped face, finger tracing her cheekbones and lingering on the pouty curve of her upper lip. “I want to tell you something.”
Adel’s face was stony. It gave Malin a jolt, made her feel nauseous standing under the cover of the trees, waiting for the inevitable.
“I did some bad things. Things I regret. You remember the time when you found me with Kenzie... in the Lion’s Mouth? Well, I did sleep with her.”
Adel hugged her stomach, chin quivering under the weight of that blow and there was something dark and mysterious swimming about her eyes. “You two-timing low-life―”
“I made one mistake. I know it was wrong. But after Alice died... it changed me. I tried to fight it. But it got worse.”
Adel seemed to fill her lungs greedily, chin raised. There was nothing flexible or negotiable about her; she was simply looking for a way to snare him. “This isn’t you, Paddy.”
“OK, so maybe I deluded myself into thinking I was something special. Maybe I took things too far. I’m sorry.”
There was several seconds of silence and Malin felt an inexplicable chill running down her spine, a dizzy sense of certainty. Paddy was milking the moment for all it was worth.
“You did something terrible, Paddy.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“You cheated. You stole, lied, hated. All because of these.” She slipped the pills into her jacket pocket. “All because you never had the guts to stand up to her. Does that make you happy?”
Paddy’s face was impassive, but there was an underlying tension Malin sensed, a suspended moment when his mood could have shifted either way.
“We all got what we wanted. What’s wrong with that?”
“You got what you wanted. All I see is black now. And I can’t sleep.”
“It’ll all be over soon. Asha will come home.”
“She’s not coming home. She said there was this guy following her weeks before she disappeared. Some guy dressed in black. Had eyes like―”
“She was hallucinating. It happens to me all the time.”
“What about Rosa and Kenzie? Don’t you think it’s because of what we did? And now there’s only two of us. There’s nothing you can do.”
“There is something.” Using his foot, he pushed the bag on the ground toward her.
“You think a few wigs and a girl playing dress-up is going to fool anyone?”
“You’ve done it before.”
“You want me to disappear, is that it? Surely you’re going to come with me?”
“I’m not going anywhere. Except to the police.”
“Go ahead. Because you know what? You don’t have one ounce of credibility. You’re finished. I might go down with you, Paddy, but you’re going to fall a hell of a lot harder.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“You’re facing twenty years.” Her voice drifted now and then, and when she spoke, her words seemed distant, as if she was going back to her past if only to torture herself. “You want to make it all better, don’t you? But it’s too late.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
Thoughts swirled in Malin’s head, spinning and dancing. What was too late? The silence grew thick and heavy and she gulped audibly.
Adel stared into Paddy’s eyes as if she was trying to find an explanation. “You’re not talking to anyone about this, OK?”
“That’s not my problem.”
“No, it’s not your problem, Paddy. It was never your problem. Even when it destroyed her.” A tear ran down the side of Adel’s nose, chin bouncing with every sob. “Don’t you care?”
Malin noticed a twitch at the corner of Paddy’s eye, as if he had received some invisible communication right on cue. He leapt to his feet, kicked back the chair and started walking toward the tree Malin was standing under.
“Where are you going?” Adel said.
Paddy turned, long enough for Malin to creep back into the shadows behind the east wall of the restaurant.
“I’m going to find Lily. I think I know where she is.”
