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) (2 page)

Instead of leaving this life with someone holding his penis, as had been his plan since puberty, Ken left wishing he’d been less of one.

CHAPTER 1

Detective Trey Keane ran through the husk of the partially built ship with something growling at his heels. His partner, Detective Robi Darcmel, was in front of him, as usual, and right about now Trey was getting pretty sick and tired of staring at the back of the tall man’s bald head.

“Darc!” he yelled up ahead of him. “I don’t know what the hell this is, but it’s getting closer!”

They sped through what would at some point become a hallway, the growls getting louder and more menacing by the moment. Trey wasn’t sure if it was his imagination or not, but he would’ve sworn on a stack of Bibles that whatever the beast behind him was, it was breathing hot steam down his neck.

Bursting out of the genesis of the ship, Trey sprinted after Darc, trying to make for the next ship being built in the shipyard. Or at least that’s what Trey
thought
they were doing.

Darc wasn’t much of a sharer.

Slamming open a door that then careened off to one side, as it had only been attached on one of its hinges, Darc was swallowed up into the shadows of this new hall of horrors.

Seriously, whose idea was it to chase down bad guys in the middle of the night, out in a shipyard on Harbor Island?

Oh. Right. It had been Darc’s.

The man was a sadist.

“Darc! Dude! I’m telling you… this thing’s about to eat me!”

And then they burst into what looked like the beginnings of a conference room.

Two things stood out to Trey. One was the bloody mess of what once must have been a human being bolted spread eagle on the metal wall in front of them.

The other was the fact that there was no exit.

Shit
.

Trey screeched to a halt, almost running into his partner’s back. Darc, of course, was staring up at the wall in front of them, examining the corpse and the symbols painted there in what looked to be the victim’s blood.

“Hey, no problem, Darc. We just have some ravenous beast on our tails.”

Right at that point, a form flew into the room. Trey’s heart leapt into his mouth as he watched the form… not quite as big as he would have thought, or as snarly… race right past them toward some sheets of metal that were propped up against the wall.

Then, from behind the metal, came a yowl and a hiss, and a grey streak shot out from the shadows and sped out through the open door behind them.

It was a cat.

The form of the ravenous beast turned and gave chase. As it passed by, it got close enough to the beam of Trey’s flashlight that he could see that it was a dog.

A Corgi, to be precise.

Okay, so maybe not the scariest of animals to walk on four feet. Maybe next time Trey would check what was chasing behind them before he started running. But wait just a minute…

He turned to Darc. “Did you know it was just a little dog?”

Darc nodded.

“Then why the hell did you run?”

His partner turned to look at him. “I thought you needed the exercise.”

* * *

Janey was having a problem.

It was a hard one, but it wasn’t something she could talk to Mala about. She loved Mala, so much, but Mala was really worried right now, and Janey didn’t want to make her more worried.

Darc would understand. So would Trey, probably, and even if he didn’t he would smile and joke with her and make her feel better.

But she hadn’t seen them in a while.

Popeye said something rude about how they didn’t
want
to see her, but she just stuck her tongue out at him. What did he know? He was such a naughty bear.

Janey was in school now. She had been really excited to go that first day. The new clothes, the school supplies… she especially loved how her erasers smelled.

But after that first day, things had not been so great.

She was making friends, though. Sort of. Some of the kids had thought she was really weird at first, because she didn’t talk. Some of them still did.

But there were two girls and a boy in her class who had seen her drawing pictures and really liked them. So now they would sit together at lunch and sometimes draw things before they went out to play at recess.

It had also been a little strange because Mala had been arguing with the teachers before school started. Mala wanted her to be in a
may-stream
class, or something silly like that. But the teachers had said that wasn’t a good idea.

Janey had heard them talking about it, even though they stopped every time Janey got close enough for them to notice. So it wasn’t something they wanted her to know about.

Popeye said it was because she smelled funny. Janey didn’t even answer that, since the only one who smelled funny was him and she didn’t think it would be polite to tell him. He could be so sensitive.

But now she had this problem and no one to talk to about it.

There had been something good, though. The lines of color in her mind that sometimes told her stuff about people were helping. They would twist and turn and make shapes that meant things. And they were helping her come up with a plan.

It was a plan that was going to get her in trouble, but it would be worth it.

She hoped.

* * *

It was many hours later and the sun had just made an appearance through the clouds. Trey looked down at the body in front of him in disgust and a certain amount of pity. It was arrayed just as that first victim had been, spread eagled inside a pentagram painted with the victim’s own blood. The Vitruvian Man, but as what’s-his-bucket had never intended. Da Vinci. The
Mona Lisa
guy.

And, of course, the symbols. Couldn’t forget the effing symbols.

“Are they all going to like, the same serial killer night school or something?” Trey asked his partner, Detective Robi Darcmel, rotating his shoulder as he spoke. He’d broken his collarbone during a case involving the last Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, of all people.

Darc hadn’t escaped without injury either. He was hunched down close to the circle that contained the corpse, doing his savant-thingy with the symbols that were painted around the curve of the pentagram. The part of his arm that had been in a cast until two days ago was still the sickly white of flesh that hadn’t seen the sun in a while.

Darc’s bald head glistened in the light set up by the CSI unit. They were out in the middle of Harbor Island, where this grisly discovery had been an inadvertent part of a young couple’s nighttime almost-tryst. The guy worked out here in the shipyard, and Trey was guessing that an official reprimand was in the works for the horny teenager.

Trey would feel bad for the two of them, except for the fact that their gruesome surprise had ruined his nighttime shenanigans with his own lady, Maggie. Well, his own lady
now
. Darc’s ex-lady. Ex-wife. Whatever.

That was old news. Water under the bridge. Darc and he had worked all of that stuff out. Twice. In front of serial killers, no less.

Anyhoo…

Darc had ignored his partner’s comment, which Trey viewed as progress, actually. There had been a time when the brilliant detective had attempted to answer every one of Trey’s rhetorical questions. They’d gotten past that. Mostly.

The Asperger’s sometimes got in the way on that account. When it came to anything deductive, Darc was the man. No, scratch that. Darc was the
Super
man. His IQ was off the charts. But when the topic was emotional quotient, the number dropped down to Trey’s shoe size. Darc had the emotional development of some rhesus monkeys Trey had met.

That was an exaggeration. Trey should know better than that. Some rhesus monkeys were pretty empathetic, once you got to know them.

And yet, for all that, Trey couldn’t imagine a better partner. Unless it was someone that brought him breakfast meats to work every morning. But let’s face it, that was never going to happen, so…

“There seems to be a clear line to the other two cases.” Darc spoke with little inflection, and often with no clear sense of the thread of the conversation. The fact that his statement had something to do with what Trey had said a minute or so ago was somewhat shocking, to be honest.

“Yeah, but we knew that, right?” This was the second body that had been found matching the same MO. The first been the head of the Colacurcios, a family with known mafia ties that operated out of Seattle.

This one? This appeared to be the body of the missing Councilman Kenneth Hughes. His wife had called 911 in hysterics two days ago, and when the unis had gone out to the office to check it out, they’d found lots of blood but no body.

And here, as far as Trey could see, was that missing body. As well as most of what he guessed was the remaining blood.

Trey’d seen pictures of the man gracing lawn placards and billboards during the last election. An older man in his mid-fifties, with perfect greying hair and a chin that was starting to double up on itself. Standard Central Casting version of an aging politician. Although from what Trey could discern, the picture had been taken about five years and fifteen pounds ago.

The man’s chest had a gaping, bloody hole where his heart had once been.

Darc seemed to finish analyzing whatever the hell he was analyzing, stood up and almost ran into one of the CSI guys.

“Move,” he said, his tone flat.

The poor young investigator, who seemed to be an intern, blanched white and scurried out of the way without a word. Trey sighed. He’d have to find out who that had been and go apologize to him. And then maybe have a little heart-to-heart with Darc.

His partner moved away from the body and came in close. Too close. Trey tried not to crane his neck up too far. Dude was tall. There had been too many nights that Trey had gone home with a crick in his neck because Darc didn’t understand the proper spacing for social interactions.

“We understand that this case appears to be linked to the two others,” the tall detective specified. “I am referring to something else.”

“Wait. Isn’t that what you just said?”

“Not precisely. I said that there was a line, meaning a line of authority. The symbols here indicate superiority or dominance.”

“Soooo…” Trey stretched out the word, hoping inspiration or at least comprehension would strike somewhere in the middle. No such luck. “I got nothing. Oh, wait! The guy has a big ego?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Well, suck. Trey felt that most of his time was spent catching up to Darc, both physically and mentally. If it weren’t for the fact that Darc sometimes forgot to tie his shoes, Trey wouldn’t have anything to do.

Okay, sometimes he managed to smooth things over when Darc did stuff that ruffled feathers. Like the time the bald savant had punched a hole in the wall of a business to make sure there wasn’t a body dry-walled in there. Turned out there had been, but Darc hadn’t deigned to get a search warrant first. The paperwork on that case had been brutal. Good times.

Darc stalked around the pentagram, pointing out several of the symbols around the circle. “There—Father John’s symbols. Here—Bryce’s. Both in subservient positioning to the new ones.”

“New symbols?” Trey asked. “What are they?”

“I do not know.”

Wow. Symbols that Darc couldn’t identify? That didn’t even seem possible.

“You don’t know?”

Darc raised his eyes to meet Trey’s. If Trey didn’t know better, he’d say Darc was irritated.

“There is not enough information for a positive conclusion.”

“So, you don’t know.” Trey looked closer. There appeared to be two vertical lines next to one another. “Looks like an eleven. Or maybe a two. Hey! This is the second murder. Maybe--”

“I have already thought of that possibility. The corresponding mark in the first pentagram was a single line.”

The deflated feeling of Darc having beaten him to the punch
again
was mitigated by the fact that Trey seemed to be on the right track. For once.

“It could just be a counter. Like a one, two, three kind of deal.”

Darc said nothing, but glanced from the body spread within the pentagram and then back up to Trey. In effect saying that something as simple as a count didn’t jibe with something as precise and sinister as what was laid out in front of them.

“Hey, guys! I found something!” It was the CSI intern that Darc had scared off a moment before. He was about twenty yards off from where the body had been found. He seemed anxious and kept twisting what looked like a ring that was on under his gloves. If he wasn’t careful he would end up ripping the latex.

Darc and Trey moved over to the intern’s side to see what he was looking at. It was the missing heart, and it looked like it had seen better times.

“Occult,” Darc spoke after a long moment. Trey hated it when his partner did that. Just dropped a word and expected Trey to know what the hell he was talking about.

But it turned out that this time, he totally did. “You’re talking about Satanism and stuff like that, right?”

“Not exclusively,” Darc responded. “Occult means hidden. It includes many disciplines.”

“Oh, well…” Trey began, then realized he knew nothing more than he had a moment ago. “Sometimes you’re not all that helpful, you know that?”

Darc turned back toward the body, but not before Trey saw what he swore was an almost-smile twitching his partner’s lips up on either corner. That bastard was doing it on purpose. Trey was almost proud. But not so proud that he wouldn’t play back.

“So, Darc, tomorrow’s the big night, huh?”

The tall detective spun around on his heel. Trey must have touched a nerve, because Darc never moved that fast unless he was following the crazy voices in his head, or whatever savant-like thingy-bob he did in that super-smart noggin of his.

“I do not understand,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation.

Hesitation? Score! Trey had found a rich vein and he was going to mine that sucker for all it was worth.

“Come on. You know what I’m talking about,” Trey purred. “Your first date with Mala.” Darc and Dr. Mala Charan had been dancing around the mating ritual like two skittish hyenas surrounding a side of beef.