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Malin watched a cylinder of ash drop from Temeke’s cigarette before he took a drag, smoke exiting through his nose. The office was slowly fogging up to the density of a low hanging rain cloud and it was pointless hanging no smoking signs on the wall. He ignored every one of them.
There were two more in the boardroom, each torn down with an angry snarl. This wasn’t the seventies where crystal ash trays sat on every desk and a decorative pedestal outside the elevator. He’d flipped, that’s all. Willing the axe to drop on his career because he was no longer part of an elite team.
Temeke dropped the cigarette in his coffee cup, gave a disdainful sniff and walked beside her down the corridor with a file under one arm.
“Blimey, this is going to be a downer,” he said. “Why can’t we just send her a letter with the bad news? Duke City Police logo on the letterhead. You could frame something like that.”
“How would you feel? You can be such a jerk sometimes.”
“Of course, I’m sorry for her, Marl. I’m sorry for him too. How he died. She’s going to be in shock for a day or two.”
Malin always preferred the personal touch. You could tell a bunch by a person’s reaction, the way they look up or down, the shock, the tears. And sometimes there weren’t any tears. Like today.
“He can’t be...” Adel looked from Malin to Temeke, shook her head a few times. “He can’t be.”
“It was a terrible thing finding him there. Of course it was quick. That type of thing usually is.” Temeke tapped the file against the edge of the desk a few times before setting it on the surface. “When did you last see Paddy?”
“Last Saturday night.”
“Did he come to your house?” Temeke leaned forward and frowned a little. “Because the surveillance officer never recorded it.”
Malin knew he was trying to listen to the speech inflection, trying to match it to the female voice he’d heard in the cornfield. Bottom line, Paddy’s description did not match the man Temeke had seen that night.
“No. I met him somewhere.”
“Corrales Café wasn’t it?”
“How did―”
“It’s law enforcement, love. Got eyes everywhere. Should have told that nice surveillance officer you were going for a drive. He was worried sick. Incidentally, how did you get out without being seen?”
“Over the back wall,” she said, picking at her fingernails. “Albuquerque Yellow Cab met me up the street. You can check.”
“Oh, I intend to. But just to make you feel comfortable, Detective Santiago here will be staying with you from now on. Don’t want any pizza vans turning up at your door. Awful what happened to Zarah Thai. You were saying?”
Adel gave him a frown and lowered her eyes. “I needed a few Smarts. He gave me all he had.”
“Did you give him any money?”
“No, sir.”
Malin pitched in. “You know it’s illegal to give prescription drugs to other people?”
Adel was really crying now. Mumbling something about wishing Paddy hadn’t taken so many because he would still be alive. “He’s addicted... can’t last a day without them.”
“He gave them to all of you, didn’t he?” Malin said, remembering Paddy’s crushed in head and the bag of Smarts they found in his pocket. “Made a killing on the side.”
It was a shot in the dark, nothing to say it was Paddy’s fault the girls all wound up dead, but when the nod came it gave a Malin jolt.
“Paddy never loved me. Not the way I thought he did.”
“Womanizer’s the word that springs to mind,” Malin said. “I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to get even, give him a taste of his own medicine.”
“I hated it... but I couldn’t stop it.”
Temeke was clearly holding out on the details, the real reason Paddy had died. Malin had seen him do it a hundred times, especially with the drug dealers they picked up on the street, the ones who had no idea how the crack got down the pockets of their pants because they claimed the pants weren’t theirs. He would likely hit Adel with that gruesome bit of news. The bit where Paddy hadn’t died from an overdose, rather he had been slit from ear to ear and left in a puddle of blood. It was all in the file.
Temeke did it with every suspect. And Adel was a suspect because out of four dead and two in hospital she was the only one left kicking.
“Got ADHD?” Temeke cocked his head sideways and almost winked.
“No, sir. We just use it to study.”
“Whose prescription?”
Adel shook her head, shrugged and wiped an eye. She wasn’t talking.
Temeke gave Adel a box of tissues. “Miss Baca an old dragon?”
“It's a school for gifted students, what do you think? My dad said if I didn’t get good grades he’d take away my car.”
“I doubt getting good grades is hard for a gifted student.”
Adel’s eyes narrowed. “Do you even know what the pressure’s like?”
“Seems like your day was one round of pleasure judging by the amount of spare time you had. Let’s face it, it takes an hour here and there to have a séance, thirty minutes to enforce the power of levitation, at least ten minutes for a smoke down the nature trail and one for a bit of casual sex. Mustn’t forget the hours you all spent reading that book, mixing herbs and pulling feathers off a sodding roadrunner in the potting shed. When did you have time to study?”
“It was just kid’s stuff.”
“You do realize roadrunners are a protected species? State bird and all that. There’ll be a fine.”
“I don’t know about any birds.”
Malin wriggled in her chair, would have appreciated details on the roadrunner an hour ago. Animal cruelty was a fourth degree felony.
“I thought there was someone following us that night,” Adel said.
“Care to describe that person?”
“Medium height, black coat, dark jeans.”
A black coat? Malin thought. She was wearing a black coat.
“It was the beanie he was wearing that made me wonder... Homeless, all spaced out like he was on something. I couldn’t think where I’d seen him before, but there was someone just like him on campus a few weeks ago, digging around in the trash.”
The question on Malin’s mind came bouncing back hard. What man? And had he seen her? She hadn’t been aware of another soul in the woods that night. Thought she’d been thorough.
Temeke sniffed. “Can’t be homeless if he was digging around in the trash on campus one minute and outside Corrales Café the next. A good few miles between Gibson and the West side. Must have wheels.”
“I never saw another car in the parking lot. Do you think someone’s stalking me?”
Adel’s eyes seem to bore into Temeke’s and never once did they roam over Malin. At a guess, Malin knew Adel hadn’t seen her that night. She would have recognized her if she had.
“I specialize in stalkers, love.” Temeke seemed to be digging a hole in his cheek with a finger. Something was bothering him. “So, Paddy was going to find Lily?”
Malin stifled a chuckle. Adel had not communicated that piece of information and judging by a wrinkled brow, she must have been wondering how he could have known. Temeke was pushing her into a corner and he was taking pleasure in watching her squirm.
“He told me he knew where she was.”
Well, not exactly, thought Malin. It wasn’t quite how she remembered it. Paddy had said, I think I know where she is.
Temeke ran a finger over a pack of cigarettes on the table, probably craving a smoke now the questions were getting close to the mark. “Paddy gave you an overnight bag. Care to tell us what was in it?”
Adel looked down at the table, eyes running over each score and nick as if she was trying to make a shape out of them. “Just clothes.”
“Why would he bring you clothes?”
“I left them when I stayed the night.”
Malin wondered who Adel was covering for, who she was afraid of.
“So you knew he was sleeping with other women?” Temeke said, offering her a cigarette.
Adel shook her head and blinked at him through the lenses of her glasses. “The signs were all there. I just didn’t want to believe it.”
“You see I’m trying to understand why an intelligent male would see the sense in all of this. Unless he was hurting for his next fix.”
Temeke slipped the photograph of Paddy Brody’s blood-spattered remains from the file and laid it face up on the table.
“And why a perfectly intelligent male would go to a crack house on a whim. Because he died, you see. Got hacked to pieces. You wouldn’t know anyone who would do such a thing?”
