ONE
The man walked to the edge of the trees carrying an ax. Blood dripped from the blade, leaving crimson beads on the forest floor.
He had killed again.
He hardly felt the wind against his naked flesh or the snow between his toes, and he was alone in his moonlit world.
He closed his eyes for a moment, hearing the hollow breeze in the pine trees and a young girl’s whispers, rattling into the night. What luck for him that such a beautiful head had appeared in such a place.
She was young. So young.
He would have searched the universe to snap her up, and tonight the pleasure was all his.
When Odin had nine heads, the dead would walk again. That was the promise.
The man had the seventh head but not the eighth or the ninth. That was the worst of it.
“Odin doesn’t need to know,” he whispered, trying to ground himself.
No, Odin didn’t need to know about the mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. One head’s just as good as another.
The man was dreaming more and more, and that bothered him. Dreams of pine trees and frozen lakes in a far off land; dreams of sleds and laughing children, and dreams of going home. Things he couldn’t have. He replayed childhood memories over and over again in the hope that the ending would somehow change.
He wasn’t sad. Not all the time.
Peering up through the branches, the man likened the moon to his brother’s face. Round and bright.
At first, he thought it was his brother, Morgan, reborn until the memories came flooding back.
Dead. Morgan was dead.
He remembered his brother lying on a bed of leaves with the stench of sweat and blood seeping from an open wound. The man remembered what had butchered Morgan – the thing that had stolen his family. But the man had been too small then, too helpless.
Now he was older. Deadlier. And Morgan would walk again. He would make sure of it.
If he listened hard enough, he could hear his brother’s voice. It reminded him of summer rain and the blur of voices that were once his family. He couldn’t remember their faces. It had been so long ago. But they did have faces once, didn’t they?
Still, the man shouted the same question. “Freedom or life?”
The trees whispered: Freedom is life.
The man ran naked through the trees, feeling the snap of branches against his thighs. He tried to relive the memory of his brother’s voice, singing rune poems and tributes to Odin.
If he closed his eyes, he could see Morgan laughing. He enjoyed the chase. He was only nine.
When the man took life, it was to resurrect the brother they had taken from him. It was a power he secretly loathed as if someone had thrown a switch that could never be turned off.
There were no witnesses, no first-hand accounts. That was the beauty of it.
No one to tell him to take deep breaths as they tied him to the bed. No one to flip the switch that released all the barbiturates and whatever else they pumped into a prisoner’s veins. That was his dream, his longing.
It would stop then.
He would take his last breath and become immortal like his brother. The battle of good against evil was almost finished.
He’d done the right thing.
Only, not in the right way.
TWO
Detective David Temeke parked his Jeep around the back of the Northwest Area Command building, where Unit Commander Hackett wouldn’t see it. The officers had teased him about the rattling exhaust and the squeaky horn, but the thing flew like a phantom.
He tensed as he turned off the ignition. Homicide detective, Jack Reynolds, was found dead in his car two days ago with a decapitated cat on the passenger seat. It was thought to be connected to one of his cases.
Temeke’s jaw tightened. No bastard was going to leave a bloody feline in his car.
There had been other victims of this deranged serial killer. Seven young girls, the most recent of which was Patti Lucero, a seventeen-year-old senior at Cibola High. It was all over the news and highway billboards, and if they didn’t hurry up and find her, there would be candlelight vigils in every town.
Temeke zipped up his jacket and looked up at a gray brick building dedicated to two fallen cops. Light and bright, it held an Impact Team of three detectives, one unit sergeant, and eight additional teams of sworn officers. Lucky boys and girls who were still in their beds snoring like chainsaws. It was five-thirty in the morning.
He shivered as he walked toward the front door, rasping a match on the wall to light a cigarette. Two long hard drags later, and he was surprised to see a prisoner transport vehicle parked nearby. The passenger window was heavily tinted, and the rubber seal in the door was cracked and peeling. No longer the model of security the public was led to believe.
The crime-stopper sticker on the rear window was a picture of Bullet, the friendly coyote. The heading read; Be alert! Crimes hurt.
Temeke ran a hand over his bald head, powdered with a light dusting of snow, the first flakes of December. He had been relegated to Northwest Area Command because he couldn’t get along with the nine detectives and two sergeants assigned to the Homicide Unit. Eight, now Jack was dead.
The Chief of Police wasn’t partial to Temeke’s crude humor or his tendency to cut corners, and Temeke was beginning to feel like he was being put out to grass.
The substation doors swung open, and brother-in-law Lieutenant Luis Alvarez ran down the steps toward him. Temeke wanted to ask him if he had enough gel in his hair but thought better of it.
Nobody was laughing much now, and every night was a sleepless night wondering who was next.
“Morning, Luis. You look like shit.”
Luis rested his hands on his belt, shoulders slumped. “Hackett’s taken Jack’s death badly. Blames himself. Hardly ate the burrito I brought him.”
“I’m sorry. I liked Jack. Everybody did.” It was time to get to the point. “There was something I wanted to ask you. When you found him, you didn’t see anything else unusual?”
“Apart from the cat and the note, no.”
Temeke had read the file. A tag had been attached to the animal's leg, which simply read: until the ninth hour. There were no traces of DNA on the note, and there was nothing unusual about the handwriting.
“I keep going over it,” Luis said. “All I saw was Jack’s car under the bridge on exit 230 to San Mateo. The driver’s window was open, and he was hunched over the steering wheel with a gunshot wound to his head.”
“Why was he there?” Temeke asked. “I mean, why was he parked under a bridge in the first place. Was it a traffic stop?”
“That’s what we thought. But Jack hadn’t called it in on his radio, so we reckon it was a drive-by.” Luis rubbed the back of his neck. “After the Williams kid disappeared, I took two anonymous phone calls. One from a man telling me to get my cops away from his shit – or else, and the other from a young woman who claimed to have been shot. We traced both calls to the Shelby Ranch at Cimarron Canyon State Park. We never found the girl, but we found Morgan Eriksen. He was disoriented and drugged like he didn’t know what had happened.”
“Stroke of luck, he was sitting there waiting for you.”
“He denied making the call to me, and to be honest, it wasn’t the same voice.”
“Which we understand to be some Scandinavian accent.”
“Correct.” Luis huffed out a loud sigh. “Another thing. The Williams kid was a lot younger than the other victims. All child and no makeup. Unless our killer was a pedophile, I think he took the wrong one. She wasn’t tagged like the others.”
“We don’t know he wasn’t a pedophile. We only have their heads.” Temeke knew Luis’ mind had that uncanny way of unraveling faster than a wind-up toy. “Any commonality in the victims?”
Luis looked up for a moment as if assembling his thoughts. The skin was all bunched around his eyes, and it looked as if he hadn’t slept in days.
“They ranged from fourteen to eighteen, and all of them were tagged with earrings engraved with a number. Dark hair, dark eyes. All around five feet four inches tall. The Williams girl was only nine.”
“I understand she was camping with her older sister?”
“Her fourteen-year-old sister,” Luis said, opening his car and slumping into the driver’s seat. “My guess is Hackett wants you to lead the case, especially after talking to Eriksen’s girlfriend. We can go over it if you like. Feel like grabbing lunch at the Fat Squirrel?”
Temeke shrugged. “Depends what Hackett’s got up his sleeve. I’ll text you.”
Temeke waved goodbye and stomped into the lobby. The door slammed behind him, and he stood there for a moment, agonizing on how they were going to keep the wrong victim from leaking to the press.
He stiffened and lifted his chin to the scent of perfume before a draft snatched away the faintest whisper of it. He visualized one hundred and twenty-five pounds of muscle, namely Malin Santiago, the unit’s newest recruit.
He craned his neck towards the stairs and decided too many cigarettes had put a stop to leaping up two flights of them. He used the elevator instead.
Temeke punched the button and heard a familiar grinding sound from high up in the dusty shaft. He was met with the smell of burning rubber as the elevator clawed up one floor at a time. One of these days, he would see a blur of faces in the tiny window as the thing zipped downward before crashing to the ground floor. Life was always a gamble.
The walls had a new line of graffiti he hadn’t seen before. The first line read, Jesus Saves, and underneath someone had written Pink Car Edition Hot Wheels. It reminded him of his childhood. Life in Brixton, London, had never been easy.
He’d been beaten up twice for having immigrant parents and a school uniform. There was gang graffiti under bridges and the constant reek of death in the public toilets. That’s where the gangs beat you up. That’s where they left you to die, and that’s where bodies frequently turned up – where gangs had been peeing all over the evidence since eight o’clock the night before.
No one could pronounce his last name. It was Ethiopian, so his dad told him. They called him Temakay, Temarky or Temeak. If it hadn’t been for his geography teacher, who compared the short e to the place Entebbe, he might have been one of those kids with a screwed-up nickname for the rest of his sodding life.
He was jolted back to the present as the elevator door opened. Unit Commander Hackett stood in the corridor, tapping his wrist and hugging a buff file under one arm.
“Anything wrong with the stairs?” he asked.
“Stairs, sir?” Temeke saw the roll of Hackett’s eyes. “Am I late?”
“You’re always late. Twenty-two minutes late if you must know. You know why you’re here?”
“No one told me. No one ever does.”
It was Temeke’s day off, and he was already working a double shift. He’d had no sleep last night. If it hadn’t been for those pesky teenagers bumping and grinding in his driveway, he might have got a lot more.
Worse than Hackett’s wittering was the frightening fact that Temeke hadn’t been able to meet Luis Alvarez for lunch in nearly two weeks. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen much of his wife either.
“I expect you saw the prisoner transport vehicle outside.” Hackett combed a thatch of gray hair through his fingers. “They brought Eriksen here this morning. He’d like to talk to you.”
“Me?”
“He knows you’re the last person to have spoken to his delectable girlfriend. I think he’d like to know where she is.”
“I’d like to know where she is. She told me some guy had chained her to a bed. Then she hung up. Now, why would a nice young girl be chained to a bed?”
“If I were you, I’d call the psychic. He’s bound to know something.”
“How much are we paying this psychic, sir? Because according to him, the Duke City Police Department is full of murderers, and us lucky detectives are too dumb to see it.”
Hackett pursed his lips and sniffed. “We pinged the location of the number she used. Came up stolen.”
“Of course, it came up stolen. What perp ever bought a bona fide phone? So, tell me, if Morgan Eriksen’s inside, who’s holding his girlfriend?”
Hackett walked down the corridor alongside Temeke, one hand in his pocket. “Whoever this man is, he calls himself the 9th Hour Killer.”
“And the public thinks it’s Morgan Eriksen.”
“I won’t let PD go down for this one, Temeke. We’ve got to find the killer before the police look like a bunch of idiots. It won’t be the first time.” Hackett patted a large belly. “On a different note, this might come as a complete surprise, but you’re not exactly the flavor of the month. That’s why they sent you here. The Chief’s not ready to get rid of you yet. I’m embarrassed to tell Judge Matthews you’ve been picked for the case. But the fact is, no one else wants it. Not when there’s a cop killer out there.”
“Very commendable, sir.”
Hackett sneezed and wiped his nose on a square of toilet paper. “You’ve got a new partner. Malin Santiago. Speaks Norwegian like a native. I want you both out in the field.”
“Norwegian, sir?”
“To make things easier, Sergeant Moran will locate the witnesses, download any surveillance footage, and manage the database.”
Hackett walked a few paces along the corridor and stopped in front of a poster of a young woman, seventeen years old, with pale blue eyes.
“Patti Lucero. Missing for over a week,” Hackett said, sucking in air and shaking his head. “Listen, I know you’re pushing forty and fed up, but this could be our lucky break. Eriksen won’t speak to me. He won’t speak to Homicide. See if he knows who did it.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know,” Temeke said.
“Of course, he knows.”
“I hope you’re right. I wouldn’t want you making an ass of yourself in front of the judge, sir.”
Hacket shot Temeke and inquiring look and shook his head. “You’ll have a few good men. You and your partner are the few good men. No need to meet with the usual squad members and you needn’t worry about their investigative plans. I’ve got it covered. This case is a top priority. Why? Because it’s getting out of hand. Every month a girl goes missing, gets a nice silver earring, and the public is starting to panic.”
“What about witness interviews, search warrants, reports?”
“As I said, I want you both out in the field. But if you don’t mind keeping me updated, I’d be grateful.” Hackett lowered his voice. “There’s been a few complaints about Darryl Williams, you know, the father of the nine-year-old. Neighbors heard some gunshots last night. I hope nobody told him the killer made a mistake. A father could go over the top if he found out his youngest daughter was taken instead of the eldest. And I don’t want him using that gun on the killer.”
“Noted, sir.”
Hackett handed Temeke a small red notebook. “Take this. Let him know she would have wanted him to have it.”
Temeke clenched the book in his hand. Silently he counted to five and told himself not to react to the wretchedness of a little girl’s last writing.
“And he’s going to be OK with the fact that the field investigators didn’t find it when they were clearing for evidence. He’s going to be OK with the fact that a dog found it instead.”
“Dogs are just as intelligent as man,” Hacket said. “Only a little more thorough, I should say. Eriksen leaves for the Pen this morning. If you guys hit it off, better pin Highway 14 in your GPS. You’ve got three hours before he leaves.” Hackett handed over the file and jerked a thumb towards the end of the corridor. “Interview room 3.”
“Is Eriksen’s face in the papers yet?” Temeke asked. “Because if not, I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Your case. Your choice.”
Temeke had hoped he’d seen the last of dead bodies for a while. It was the faces he couldn’t stand; all pale and staring. Drunks and the elderly who had seen something of life were terrible enough, but it was the kids that tore him apart.
He nodded at an FBI agent and stared through the security glass at the man sitting at the table. Blond hair braided in a rope from the forehead to the nape of the neck. There was the hint of a tattoo above one ear, visible behind the stubble.
Two officers moved in beside Temeke.
Captain Fowler, straight-faced and coldly efficient, whose humor never rose higher than sarcasm, and officer Jarvis, fleshy and overweight, jaw working over a wad of gum.
“Morgan Eriksen,” Fowler said, folding arms corded with muscle. “Says he’s from Norway. Can’t see why he’d want to talk to you.”
“Has he been read his rights?” Temeke asked.
“Yeah, only he’s too frozen to speak.”
“Frozen with fear, amusement? What?”
Fowler shrugged and shook his head. “I guess you’re about to find out.”
“Lucky he’s hobbled at the ankle and wrists, sir.” Jarvis chimed in, jabbing a pudgy finger at the window and winking a pale blue eye. “There’s no way he can escape. But he could spit.”
Temeke felt the nudge at his elbow, saw Fowler’s thin lips making a beeline for his ear. “Really gets under your skin, doesn’t he?”