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) (26 page)

“But, Darc, didn’t you hear me? They’re
Masons
.” The last sentence was given in a loud stage whisper that would have been comical in some other situation. But right now, this grouping of men seemed like the best bet they had to get the Mayor back alive.

“I understand that,” Darc replied. “But Bradley was here with witnesses the entire evening. And Carson was at the hospital.”

“Yeah!” Yelled Trey. “Killing a witness!” He spun to the remaining member of the trio. “What about Cody? Where was he? Huh?”

Cody lifted up his hands in a defensive gesture. “I was out watching movie with Yana.”

“The Wiccan?” Trey screeched. He spun back to Mala and Darc. “See? It’s all interconnected.”

Mala placed a hand on Trey’s shoulder. “You may be right. But we’re not going to get clear answers out of any of them if you keep trying to put them in cuffs.”

“Look,” Bradley said, stepping forward. “I just joined the lodge three weeks ago. Cody, too.” The CSI intern nodded his head, looking like he’d just been spanked. After the conversation she’d had with him earlier, Mala wouldn’t be surprised to find out that’s exactly how he felt.

“Okay, fine,” Trey spat. “But what about Mr. APA there?”

“Oh, him?” Cody asked. “He’s a Master Mason.” Both Bradley and Carson glared at the young intern. “What?”

“That’s gotta be enough to arrest him, isn’t it?” Trey pled with Darc. “Come on! You know there’s something up with this guy.”

“Detective Darcmel,” Carson addressed the taller detective. “I hope you can understand when I say that this is beginning to feel like harassment.”

“
Beginning to
?” snarled Trey. “Then I haven’t been doing my job.”

“Trey,” soothed Mala. They weren’t going to get anywhere with him popping off like this. “Calm down for a second.”

He started to give what looked like a strongly worded retort, seemed to think better of it, and stalked a few paces away, muttering to himself as he went. Every few seconds, Trey would look back over his shoulder at one of the three men in the trio. What he thought of them was written on his face, plain for anyone to see.

The APA lowered his voice so that Trey couldn’t hear. “I think you can understand why I’d be reluctant to let him take me into custody.”

Mala pitched her voice at a similar volume. “And I think you can understand, Mr. Speer, why he might be suspicious.”

“I did not kill anyone,” the attorney said, his tone aggrieved. “And I certainly didn’t kidnap the Mayor. Come on. I was at the hospital just a few minutes ago.”

A thought crossed Mala’s mind. “How did you know about the Mayor?”

“I got a text from Bradley,” he answered, looking into Mala’s face. What he saw there seemed to spark even more defensiveness. “Okay, look! I can’t help the fact that we’re all Masons. But I had nothing to do with this.”

“There is something you can do,” Darc said, entering into the conversation once more.

“Name it,” the APA replied.

“Give us the names of all the brothers in your lodge.”

“But… I…”

Mala stepped in. “You can see that every symbol in that room has some relation to Freemasonry on some level. We have to track this down. We have no idea how long the killer will wait before he kills the Mayor.”

“He may be dead already,” Trey said, moving in closer. “Sorry about the screaming and stuff,” he said, nodding to Mala and Darc. He then turned his attention to Carson. “I’m not apologizing to you.”

The APA held Trey’s gaze for a long moment. “You know, I have been nothing but helpful this whole time—”

“That’s my problem!” Trey answered. “Since when have you heard of a
friendly
APA?”

He had a point there. Mala turned to the attorney, waiting to see what he would say to that. The lawyer was just about to open up his mouth, when his attention was diverted downward.

There, right on the edge of their circle of people, was Janey, holding her bear.

* * *

The grownups were yelling. A lot.

Janey knew she was supposed to be sleeping, but she wasn’t sure how anyone could think she’d be able to do that while everyone was making such a racket. Mommy used to call Janey a noise monster, and that’s just how they all sounded.

So, she’d gotten up.

Popeye had grumbled a lot, saying that they were going to get in trouble and then they’d never be able to ask for ice cream on the way back to Mala’s apartment. But Janey knew better than that. There was no chance Mala was going to get them ice cream this late at night. Trey might, but Mala would never send them back with Trey.

Once Janey had explained this to her bear, he settled down. At least a little bit. Sometimes it seemed like Popeye thought that it was his job to complain about stuff.

She slipped around the side of the big group of grownups. The one yelling the most was Trey. That was funny. Trey usually didn’t yell much. But right now his face was all red and there was this vein that was sticking out on his forehead. It seemed like he was really mad at one of the older guys there that Janey didn’t know.

She was glad she wasn’t that guy. She’d never thought that Trey was all that scary. He was usually just funny and got her snacks that she wasn’t supposed to eat. He was definitely Popeye’s favorite. Popeye liked Mala okay, and Darc he put up with, but he really liked Trey. Mostly because of the cheesy puffs.

But right now, even Popeye seemed a little scared of Trey. At least he didn’t say much as they passed by.

Janey walked into the office where Mala and Darc had come out just a second or so ago. They had all been in there before the yelling started. Janey had gotten up a few times to look, so maybe it wasn’t just the yelling that had kept her awake.

But now she was glad she had come in here. There were messages all around the room, making colored lines in her mind, pointing out things that she wouldn’t have noticed by herself.

There were the symbols, but she knew that Darc understood all of them. They were easy for Darc. But there was something else. Something that was more like how Darc and Mala and Trey were all different.

The person who drew these things was different, too. Not in a way that Janey liked, but she could see it, like a glowing orange light that pointed to certain things on the desk. It meant something. Janey was sure of it.

Now she just had to explain it to the grownups before they told her to go back to bed.

* * *

Darc observed Janey as she trundled back into the office, dragging her bear along behind her. He also noticed that she gripped a sheet of paper in her other hand.

The informational pathways coalesced around that paper, zeroing in on whatever it was that Janey had discovered. It was clear that she was communicating with him.

She knew something that he did not.

As Darc entered the room, Janey turned and handed him a picture. It was a drawing of Seattle, but overlaid with lines and patterns that made little sense to him. The lines snagged and fought with his internal threads. There were similarities, but the differences were enough to cause chaos.

There was information there, certainly. But there was a warning as well. There was more to the messages in this office than met the eye. Even Janey’s eye.

And then, Janey walked around the room, pointing to objects within the space without actually touching any of them. She was refraining from physical contact to keep the crime scene pristine. Darc found that this realization churned an internal response within him, in that grayed-out topography of emotion.

He felt pride in her.

It made no sense. He was neither her parent nor guardian. But he did think about her more than any other person, with the possible exception of Mala. And there was a feeling of responsibility when it came to Janey and her wellbeing. It was the only reason that Mala had ever been able to convince him to exclude the little girl from his investigations, particularly when she could have been of help.

Like right at this moment.

She was tracking out a pattern in the room. A track that he never would have seen, because it related to how an individual personality would view the space. Objects that appeared to be randomly placed had been moved with deliberation, creating…

Creating the perfect pentagram. The rough sketch on the desk was intended to be misleading. Attempting any sort of triangulation from such a primitive approximation would have put their search off by at least five miles in any given direction.

This arrangement of objects… the stapler on the desk, the lamp in the corner, the potted plant by the side of the filing cabinets, a picture of the Mayor’s family on the wall… when viewed through the eyes of the child, Darc could see that each had been moved. Not dramatically in most cases. A matter of inches, perhaps as much as a foot. But moved. Positioned.

Purposefully.

It was another map, with each of the objects representing one of the crime scenes. The pattern crystallized in Darc’s mind, taking the information from Janey’s drawing, sublimating the positioning of the items in the office, reducing all of the available information to objects.

Regurgitating the answer.

Every instinct in Darc’s body screamed for him to move. Now. But as he looked down at Janey, she peered up at him with her bright blue eyes and Darc could see… sadness. Janey was sad. How had he seen that? It was part of the emotional landscape that Darc could only with great difficulty penetrate, and never with precision. And yet he saw.

She missed him.

Kneeling down on one knee, Darc stretched out his arms toward this tiny human, beckoning for her to approach. She needed no encouragement. Almost before he had completed the gesture, she had her arms around his neck and was gripping him with a force that was almost painful.

“You are… like me,” he murmured in her ear. “Like me, only better.”

Janey pulled back for a moment, apparently so that she could look at him. She peered intently into Darc’s eyes, holding onto the sides of his face with her small hands. A smile began in her eyes, radiating out to her mouth and cheeks. She nodded and stood up, pointing out the door.

Darc understood. It was time for him to go now.

Without Janey. Without Mala.

But it was all right. Because the lines that Janey had shown him would travel with him, and it would be as if Janey were right there at his side.

It made no logical sense, but it somehow made Darc feel better.

Much better.

* * *

“So, we’re not going to arrest
any
of them?” Trey whined.

They were back in the Land Rover, headed who knew where, and Trey was… well, he was confused, for one. He was pissed, for another.

“They were all Masons,” he continued. “Did you get that part? All of them. Three. All.” He kept hoping that if he reiterated the facts enough times, the information would actually sink in or something. Maybe they’d turn around and start questioning the people that really needed to be questioned.

Instead, they were off on another wild Darc chase.

Okay, that wasn’t fair. Anytime Darc led them off like this, they ended up finding something. It’s just that the something usually ended up being really, really bad.

And after what had happened last time, Trey was pretty sure they weren’t going to be waiting for any kind of backup. Unknown situation. Serial killer. Kidnapped Mayor. Didn’t exactly sound like a recipe for a nice night of board games and cocktails.

Bollocks.

Mala had taken Janey home, as surprised as Trey had been when Darc had told them to go. That never happened. It was especially shocking when Trey considered that Janey had been the one to help Darc figure the whole thing out. At least that’s what he thought had been happening there in the office.

“So, can you at least tell me where we’re going?” Trey finally asked. Some information was better than the next to nothing he currently had, he supposed.

“Railroads.”

Oh, great. It was back to cryptic Darc. Trey understood that it usually meant that Darc was in the middle of tracking whatever it was that he had to track in that machine of a brain of his. Didn’t mean it wasn’t as annoying as all get out.

“Railroads? Could you be a bit more specific? There are a lot of those around Seattle.”

“Industrial District East.”

Oh. That made more sense. Down south and east of Harbor Island was a huge stretch that was nothing but railroad tracks. Trey had been down there a few times, and it always left him feeling a little desolate. There were sections of trains scattered about, some being repaired, some decrepit, some ready to be joined back up.

It felt like a huge train set for a demented giant.

It also felt like one of the worst places to go in the middle of the night when you were chasing down a serial killer without backup. But hey, what did Trey know about it?

Traveling south on 4
th
Avenue, they crossed over the top of the railroad tracks, ending up on the far side of the area. Trey took a right down Dawson Street, peering off to the left, watching as they passed an area where the train cars were positioned next to one another, almost like cars in a parking lot.

“Okay, we’re here,” Trey muttered, pulling to a stop. “What now?”

Without answering, Darc stepped out of the car and began walking directly down the middle of the parked train cars. Trey followed at his heels, trying not to cry out at every change in the shadows around them.

And then he almost jumped out of his skin as a train passed by, horn blaring out into the night. From a distance, that sound might be mournful and haunting. Up close, it was enough to give him a freaking heart attack.

“Mary Mother and Joseph,” Trey squeaked. He cleared his throat and tried unsuccessfully to slow down his racing heartbeat. Walking a little bit faster, he pulled up close behind Darc. It would have been better if he were walking beside his partner, at least for communication purposes, but that was never really an option when it came to Darc and his walking pace. How he managed to walk that fast without swinging his arms and hips like one of those freakazoids out in the parks, Trey would never know.