The 9th Hour (The Detective Temeke Crime Series Book 1) (16 page)

“
Rise and shine,” Temeke said, ambling toward the duty desk and slapping it with his hand. Sarge lifted his chin, suddenly jolted awake by the noise. “I don’t know how you can sleep with Hackett going up and down in the lift.”

“Elevator, sir.
Elevator
.”

“How’s Becky?”

“Taking visitors tomorrow. You can go and see her if you like. Go lightly though. I don’t want her to relive the ordeal.” Sarge cleared his throat and looked away. “Oh, and Hackett’s looking for you. Looks mad if you ask me.”

“He was cussing like a detective,” Jarvis chimed in from his tiny little cubicle. “Had a pink slip in his hand.”

“That’s a layoff notice to you foreigners,” Captain Fowler chimed in to a burst of raucous laughter. He was standing at the door of his plush, white office. “What’s this I hear about Malin calling you
sir
?”

Temeke lifted his chin and grinned. He’d seen the way Fowler looked at Malin, seen the way a lumbering walk quickly turned into a swagger. “I prefer a little distance myself. Pretty, isn’t she?”

“Is she? I hadn’t noticed.”

“She gets five hundred dollars extra for being my partner. That’s a lot more than your bonus once a year, isn’t it?”

Temeke was the only one who laughed as he sauntered up the stairs and he swore long and feebly into the empty corridor. Creeping past Hackett’s closed door, he found Malin poking through the filing cabinet in his office. She turned when she saw him, hand cupping her mouth.

“Something’s happened, sir. You better sit down.”

“I’ve been sitting down all weekend.”

“Mr. Williams called. Tess didn’t come home from school this afternoon.”

“Not another one.” Temeke unzipped his coat and flung it over the back of his chair. His eye was drawn to the window where the trees shuddered in the wind. At night the temperatures plummeted to below ten degrees. “What was she wearing?”

“A black sweater, black jacket, yellow and red plaid skirt and hiking boots. Mr. Williams said there was an intruder in his house yesterday. He said he didn’t see anyone. But there were muddy footprints leading as far as the back yard. Someone’s been tampering with his phone, sending him weird text messages. Should be able to get a trace on it.” Malin turned and pushed the drawer closed with her back. “Why didn’t you tell him about Maisie’s phone?”

“Didn’t want to spook him any more than he already is. There should have been a unit outside his house.”

“There was. Lt. Alvarez. He’s back from vacation. He saw Darryl arrive home in a hurry. Saw his car idling in the driveway. Then he found him on the floor in the hallway. He was OK but he was terrified.”

“Luis is on this afternoon’s shift at Clemency Christian. He hasn’t called, has he?”

Malin shook her head. “I tried calling him an hour ago. Wanted to ask him to get a photograph of Tess from the house when he dropped her off.”

Temeke could hear Hackett honking into a handkerchief next door and dabbing what must have been a bright red nose. “Hackett seem OK to you?” he said, feeling a little sick himself.

She gave him a hostile glare and brushed a wisp of dark hair from her eyes. “Been like a bear with a bee up his nose. Heard him shouting at Jennifer Danes on the phone. She accused him of keeping valuable information about the 9th Hour Killer from the public. Says she’s writing an article for tomorrow’s Journal.”

Temeke unwound his scarf and left it hanging around his neck. He had a strange feeling he’d be going out again. “And what bit of news were we keeping?”

“The bit where there’s two of them. Not just the one.”

“Oh, that bit. Anything else?”

Malin lowered her voice. “The bit where the police are now interested in Darryl Williams. Apparently, you called the Journal and told them.”

“Why would I do a thing like that? It’s Eriksen. Obviously he’s got a way with words and an armory of accents.”

“Andrew Knife Wing called a few times. Something about a dream. He shouldn’t be messing around with strange spirits, sir.”

“Any spirits in his house are the liquid kind.”

Temeke called Luis and listened to the dialing tone. Probably got his sirens on full blast and couldn’t hear the phone. He listened to the message from Knife Wing instead. A vision. A dead body wrapped in a pink quilt lying behind a boulder, which basically narrowed it down to the whole of bleeding New Mexico.

“The land of enchantment they call it,” he said out loud. “More like the land of bloody
entrapment
.”

That’s how he felt after living in New Mexico for so many years. Trapped. Like he’d blown in from Europe on holiday and never quite made it back. Something about the scent of cedar and sage everywhere. And the skies… those big blue skies that stretched as far as the eye could see, a vivid vault over a thirsty land.

“Get me a coffee, will you?” Temeke sensed Malin’s narrowed eyes, the shake of her head. He pretended to pat a few papers into a neat pile.

What was the password to his computer this week?
H8st8P0lice
or
Hackettsux.
Typing the latter sent him quickly to an email from Hackett demanding an update on the investigation and driveling on about how Temeke’s phone was permanently on voicemail and how many times Captain Fowler had tried to get hold of him in the last twenty-four hours.

There was another email from the local TV station hankering to do an interview and one from Jennifer at the Journal threatening to write her own opinion if he didn’t return her calls.

Temeke deleted them all and opened the database for homicides and kidnap. He found eighteen Eriksens listed, none with the initial
O
. There was a listing in the NPIS, the immigration service in Norway. An Ole Eriksen born October 3rd, 1977 in Tromsø.

Blond, blue eyed, square jaw, but that’s where the similarity ended. Darryl could easily be forgiven for thinking Morgan Eriksen’s picture belonged to the man he saw. Put them together in a line up and he wouldn’t be so sure.

According to the file, Ole had a twin brother, Morgan. He had died at the age of nine in a hunting accident. A newspaper article showed pictures of a boy lying under a tree as if he was sleeping. There was nothing remarkable about it until closer examination revealed a hole in his head resulting from an old battle rifle. Temeke had seen something similar, an
AG-3
fitted with a railed forend and an Aimpoint red dot sight.

“No BB gun,” he muttered. Not even then.

The hunter, a Johannes Elgar, who lived three miles from the Eriksen house, claimed he mistook one of the boys for small game. He was given a life sentence due to a weapon that hardly fell into the collector category according to the Norwegian Firearm Weapons Act.

The Eriksen family owned the Bergenposten, a well-known newspaper on the west coast of Norway and, by all accounts, Eriksen’s father had at one time written an article citing Elgar for buying and selling illegal weapons.

“Revenge,” Temeke said, suddenly sensing Malin in the doorway with two cups of coffee.

“Revenge?” she echoed.

“Little Morgan Eriksen.” Temeke grabbed the cup and read out the article. “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there’s more. There’s always more.”

“More, sir?”

“It’s lonely out in those woods, lonely for a beautiful woman. Ole’s mother was only seventeen. Marja her name was.” He took a deep breath and blew over the rim of his cup. “Looks like he moved to California in 2001. Followed her here. Tried to find her, only she’d committed suicide a few years earlier. He has an aunt in San Francisco. Might want to talk to that aunt.”

“Already tried that, sir. She passed away. Last June.”

Temeke looked up at Malin and gave a curt nod. He didn’t want her to think he was too grateful. Didn’t want her to think he was disappointed either. “And Johannes Elgar had a heart attack in jail.”

Malin sucked on the lip of her coffee cup. “Died with a photograph of Marja in his hand and the very first letter she ever wrote him.”

Temeke had already read the transcript. It was the last sentence that seemed to spin, slowing down as he remembered it.
Hans, you are the burning, glowing flame in my heart, Marja.
The very same words Patti had written to Ole in a card. Words he had wanted her to write.

“His father’s dead. Parkinson’s,” Temeke said, looking at the picture of a well-dressed man in his sixties. “Ole was put up for adoption.”

“He went from foster home to foster home, sir.”

Temeke sensed his vision blurring as he read that screen, but he wasn’t going to let it overwhelm him. “Talking of hunting rifles, did you see the Bonner Levinson file, the caretaker at the Shelby ranch?”

Malin nodded and walked around to his side of the desk, eyes following the cursor on the computer as it flew across the screen. “His body was found at the bottom of a seventy foot ravine. He must have seen something.”

“That’s the trouble with our witnesses,” Temeke muttered, leaning back in his chair. “They’re all dead.”

“Yet here’s an elderly man shot four times at close range. There might be some muzzle staining on that gun if only we can find it, and as for the killer’s clothes, a nice blood spatter to go with it.”

“According to this,” Temeke said, finger stabbing the screen, “the caretaker had other injuries consistent with a body being pulled down the ravine post mortem. Time of death, around midnight on the evening of Wednesday October 29th. Looks like they found a .22 caliber shell case at the top of the ravine and a walking stick. Levinson’s prints were on the stick but look at this. There’s part of a shoe imprint in the lining of the coat he wore. Forensics say it’s a gripper outsole with the Sebago logo. A leather moccasin.”

“Those are going to be hard to find,” Malin muttered. “The print on the lining isn’t enough to tell us the shoe size.”

Temeke cast a glance at the ballistic evidence. The bullet was said to be grooved, found to have come from a Sears or a Revelation. So far the gun had never been found.

His raw instinct told him the ranch area wasn’t saturated with offenders. It wasn’t exactly saturated with neighbors. “Any guns in the house on Walter?”

Malin shook her head. “Podge said this man had a thing for teenage girls. School girls.”

“Podge was a sucker for booze and the old green dragon. Probably too high to know anything about the girls. He was scared when I found him.”

Malin crossed one arm over her stomach and drained her cup. “I took a look at the yearbooks at Cibola High. Jaelyn Gains, Lavonne Jackson, Mikaela May, Lyana Durgins, Elizabeth Moya and Mandy Guzman. 6 victims from the same school, all taken within a month of each other. The only difference was Kizzy Williams. She was at Clemency Christian School.”

“Where were they taken?”

“From parks, malls, parking lots. Lyana was taken only five hundred yards from her home. She was walking the dog.”

“And Becky?”

“Last seen at Corrales Café after she finished work. I remember her mother saying Becky’s boss had called to say she would be late. Had an accent. When I spoke to him he had no recollection of such a phone call. Nor did he have an accent.”

Temeke studied Malin’s face. Her eyes for all their listless stare were moist. “Anything wrong?”

“I wanted to ask you something. I wanted to ask if you said anything to Hollister?”

Temeke felt the beginnings of a belly ache. The coffee wasn’t going down well either. “What makes you say that?”

“Because he left me an email. Wanted to know where I was.”

Temeke pursed his lips, gave her a sheepish smile. “I gave him a tinkle, man to man. And he knows if he sets one foot in my nice shiny police station and gives so much as a wink to my partner, he’s toast.” That made her smile. It even made her snigger. “So who does the house on Smith belong to?”

“Kelly Coldwell, realtor with Desert Sun Properties. They said she’s on a cruise in the Caribbean. Left ten days ago.”

Temeke sucked in a long breath. He was hoping for a concrete lead, not more checking up to do. “If the driver of that Camaro is Ole Eriksen, he ought to be in hospital.”

“Dr. Vasillion called half an hour ago, sir. He said the blood in the street belonged to Patti Lucero.”

Temeke thought he hadn’t heard her correctly and shut his mouth before a string of cuss words crossed the gap between them. If it had any significance he couldn’t see it.

“The bone was analyzed on Friday, sir. Funny the one thing he tried to hide about the victim ended up on your doorstep.”

“He wants us to find him, that’s why. Wants the publicity.”

Malin swallowed like she had a sore throat. “They found traces of polyethylene in the sample. He was carrying Patti’s blood around in a milk carton.”

Temeke made a face, although he was forced to admit it was the only thing that made sense. “If we don’t find him soon, I’ll have to buy a wig and send myself in as decoy.”

Malin grinned and then seemed to pause to consider her next words. “Dr. Vasillion said when he examined the girl’s head it had no brain. Like it had been completely sucked out. I think he wants to see us down at the lab.”