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Temeke had fifteen minutes until he met with Adel Martinez and he wasn’t looking forward to listening to her account of slashed throats and unusual accidents with gas.
Suspect? Unlikely. Working with an accomplice... possibly. If he deprived her of sleep or bathroom facilities, he might get a name for composite-man. Besides, there was nothing like returning home with the pride of capture on his face.
A buzzing down his trouser leg. He wriggled the phone out of his pocket and swiveled in his chair. “Yes, love?”
“I’m at the hospital,” Malin said in a voice charged with significance. “Zarah Thai’s nurse said she’ll be available this afternoon at two. Want to meet me here?”
“Sounds like a date.”
“And Lily Delgado was discharged this morning. So you’re on tonight. Might want to take her for a walk out back. In the trees.”
“It’s bloody freezing out back, Marl.”
“Sometimes taking a victim back to where it all happened might help her remember.”
Temeke could tell by the tremor in her voice and the eerie silences she used after each sentence she was trying to tell him to be careful. “A jug of whisky would be quicker. Might loosen her tongue a little.”
“Oh, and Hackett wants to call a press conference to take the heat off the situation. About two o’clock.”
Temeke couldn’t resist a smile. Malin was getting too sharp-witted for her own good and talking to a key witness was the best out they could possibly have for not attending another press dominated fiasco.
“I was following the penalty trail in that creepy book,” she said, reciting a few lines from memory. The first woman to disobey shall be buried alive, the second shall have her limbs severed, the third shall be cast into a fire, the fourth shall be drowned, the fifth shall be poisoned and the sixth shall be suffocated. We know Alice was the first in that group to die, even though hers was an apparent suicide. But what if her Lilin name was Arezo, meaning longed for. Then there’s a long gap between her death and Asha’s disappearance, but it doesn’t necessarily separate the two incidents. This would make Asha the second in these recent spree killings.”
Temeke felt a flush of hot and cold tingling behind his ears and something shuddered deep inside. It was too critical a link to ignore.
“If she is the second then the name carved on the door frame confirms it. M-A-H-T-A-B.” Malin reworked the spelling out loud. “Light of the moon. Since there was nothing left of the Voorhees house, we can assume Kohinoor was scratched on a doorframe somewhere. Mountain of light?”
“Yeah, a big-ass mountain of light,” Temeke agreed. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it, but there was a sense of urgency that raced through his veins.
“Gulshan was written on the flood gauge, sir. Garden of Roses. Rosa? As for the last two, we can ask Adel Martinez and Zarah Thai what their Lilin names were. It’s clear the meanings defined each woman while they lived. What if the killer’s trying to connect those names to their deaths?”
Temeke couldn’t see the connection of light or moon to Asha Samadi, but it was the notion she fell into the category of being buried alive that made him itch under the skin. Wherever she was, they had to find her soon. “Or he’s trying to mislead us with amateurish post-mortem scribblings to disguise what a raving bloody nutcase he is.”
He ended the call, rushed down the stairs to Sandra’s office and hammered a fist on the closed door. Creaking and pattering came from within and the door was opened a chink. Two angry eyes surveyed him and a claw pulled the door open further.
“Come on in,” Fowler said as he walked over to Sandra’s desk and pressed his big fat ass on the corner.
There was a half-eaten box of chocolate cream puffs beside the monitor and judging by the trajectory of crumbs, Fowler had wolfed down most of them.
“Could I have a word, Sandra?” Temeke saw the exchange of looks. “In private.”
“By the way,” Fowler said, giving in to an eye-roll on the way out. “Hackett wants to see you. He was in earlier, screaming blue murder because someone left a cigarette butt in the elevator.”
Temeke had to raise his voice over a slamming door and the loud hammering of keys. “One cream puff and you’ve bought my soul. Do me a favor, love. Call all the mortuaries in Albuquerque and ask them for a list of burials from say February 3rd to the 8th.”
“Righto. There’s well over twenty mortuaries in Albuquerque and, while I’m at it, at least fourteen cemeteries. It might take a while, sir. Which victim?”
“Asha Samadi,” he said between chews and keeping his tone as drab as he was feeling.
“She could have been buried in the woods.”
Temeke didn’t want to consider that option, but Sandra was right. There were other places besides cemeteries to bury the dead. Walls, dumpsters, barrels...
“What exactly am I looking for, sir?” she asked.
“I’m hoping for a name that might point to where Asha is. I’m sick of speculating, sick of not having any facts to report and sick of making a complete balls-up of everything I do.”
The phone on Sandra’s desk gave a long drawn-out wail and she pressed the intercom. “Go ahead, Sarge.”
“Can you tell Temeke his nooner’s just cancelled.”
