Sacrifice (8 page)

“What did you do then?”

“I went out to look for her. I went to the pool. I drove around the neighborhood. I even went over to Sunset Park to see if she’d gone there. I was more angry than worried. I didn’t think for a second that something might have happened to her. Just that she’d run off without permission.”

“When did you start to get concerned?”

“When I started checking with the neighbors and the little girls she was playing with, the Jones’s two little girls down the street, Jennifer and Amy. They said they had decided to go to the pool and that Marsha had told them she had to stay on the block and had stayed behind. That’s when I called Frank and he called the police.”

“As you were driving around looking for your daughter, did you see anyone or anything that was out of place or unusual? A strange car parked nearby or cruising the neighborhood, a strange person, anything?”

“No, I wasn’t really paying that much attention to anything. I was just trying to find my daughter.”

“What about the days before the disappearance? Did you notice anyone hanging around that you didn’t recognize? Did you notice any strange vehicles? Did your daughter talk about meeting anyone new?”

“No. She knew not to talk to strangers.”

Detective Rafik continued to look around the room with a curious expression on his face. He looked first at Mr. Wells and then at the bare walls and mantle.

Mr. Wells was grinning at him almost defiantly, as if he had a secret he knew that the detective would never figure out. Finally Detective Rafik spoke up, interrupting Detective Malloy’s cursory interrogation. “Do you have any pictures of your daughter? I notice there are none on the walls or mantle. Can I see a picture?”

“Sure. I’ll get you a picture.” Mr. Wells grinned at him again and then stalked off into the next room.

Malloy looked at Mohammed with a questioning expression on his face. Mo shook his head slightly, meaning that he would explain later.

Mrs. Wells stood between the two men watching the exchange, clearly growing more nervous and agitated by the second.

Mr. Wells returned from the den carrying several pictures. “Here you are, Detective. Take whatever you need.”

The detectives looked at the handful of pictures, all taken at a professional portrait studio, some with the American flag as a backdrop.

“These are her class pictures from school, right? The same ones you gave the detectives over at Missing Persons. We were hoping you would have some more candid photos. Say, of Marsha at home, around the house, playing. You have any photos like that?”

“We aren’t very big on photography. We like to leave that sort of thing to the professionals.”

Detective Rafik took another long look at the bare walls, noticing the stark contrast from the rest of the room, which was cluttered with furniture and knick-knacks and little figurines and trinkets. He nodded, staring Mr. Wells directly in his eyes. The man bared his teeth at the detective in what could pass for a smile but held no pleasantness.

“I see. Well. I think we’ve got all we need for right now.”

They handed the Wellses their business cards.

“Please give us a call if you think of anything else, and we’ll be in touch if we come up with anything on our end.”

The door shut with a loud bang at their backs.

Malloy turned to Mohammed. “So what was all that about the pictures?”

“You didn’t notice how bare the walls were? There were areas on the walls that were almost clean. Areas roughly in the shape of a square. They took down all the pictures before we came. There was something they didn’t want us to see, and it involved their child. Either that or …”

“Or what?”

“Or they took those pictures down even sooner than we think.”

“You mean you think they took the pictures down right after their child went missing?”

“Maybe even before.”

“But why would they do that?”

“Guilt maybe. Closing the door on that chapter of their lives and moving on. Trying to forget.”

“Trying to forget their own daughter? So you think they’re suspects?”

“I know they’re involved. If they took the pictures down before the girl went missing, then they knew it was coming. Did you see the way they looked at us? The father was almost daring me to catch him. We need to talk to the guys from Missing Persons who interviewed them the day their daughter disappeared. I want to know if those pictures were on the walls then.”

They walked to their vehicle, both trying to guess at the secrets hidden within the Wells’s house. Just as they stepped into the car the radio sputtered to life. “Code two! We have reports of a 415 at the Learning Tree Elementary School.”

Then, moments later, another call came out. This one was a little more urgent.

“Code three! Code three! We have a report of a 187 in progress. A possible 10-54 at the Learning Tree Elementary School!”

A dead body at an elementary school.

“Shit!” Rafik exclaimed as he put the lights and siren on and took off in the direction of the school. He and Malloy looked at each other with horrified expressions, imagining the mutilated remains of some pedophile’s deviant passions crumpled up beneath a playground swing set or dangling like a ghastly ornament from the jungle gym.

When they pulled into the school parking lot, they paused, mouths agape, staring at the commotion taking place in the schoolyard. Expecting to find a child victim, they were not at all prepared for what they were seeing. Nothing could have possibly prepared them for this. There was no dead body lying in the schoolyard - not yet anyway - but if they didn’t get out there quickly there would be.

A cloud of birds circled the schoolyard - crows and pigeons, scavengers, carrion eaters, and below them a bizarre melee was going on, some type of riot. Occasionally some of the birds would dive down and attack the victim struggling on the ground before returning to rejoin the flock. Malloy and Rafik stared aghast as they tried to absorb exactly what they were seeing. Malloy felt shivers race the length of his spine as a feeling of de‚ja vu overwhelmed him. He knew he was witnessing exactly what had happened to the victim who’d been killed by his dog the previous day.

Yards from where the sandbox, swing sets, and jungle gym sat neglected, an angry mob of seven and eight-year-old children attacked a man as he scrambled on all fours, running for his life and calling out for help. It almost looked like a game - except for the blood running down his face and the shrill and desperate sound of his voice. The children were killing him.

They rained blows down on him, swarming all over the screaming and bloodied man in a flurry of savage violence. It looked like a riot at a hospital for the criminally insane. Teachers were running out of the building, trying to rescue the victim from the biting, kicking, punching frenzy of pre-adolescent fury engulfing him. It was almost comical if it wasn’t for the fact that the man was clearly being murdered. A cloud of birds surrounded the assault, attacking as relentlessly as the children.

“What the fuck!” Malloy exclaimed. The detectives left their vehicle and began jogging across the field toward the horde of angry, murderous children.

Malloy and Rafik looked at each other while they ran. The detectives stared out across the field as more than two dozen children seethed over the helpless man, attacking him with fearsome savagery. They clawed and bit and dug their fingers into his eyes, nose, and ears, ripping off whatever appendages they could manage to tear free. He was bleeding profusely as he went down, succumbing to the weight of their numbers. The teachers were striking the children, trying to get them to release the man, but the children barely seemed to notice.

The man’s screams were horrible as he tried to battle his way through a storm of raging children.

“What should we do? We can’t shoot them. They’re kids! And what do we do about these fuckin’ birds?” Rafik asked, looking both frightened and confused as he swatted away a dive-bombing pigeon.

“There’s nothing we can do about the birds right now, and the kids are the more immediate threat.”

“They’re just kids,” Rafik repeated in an awed whisper.

When they reached the children they began yanking them off the man and tossing them back into the grass, only to have them come rushing back to dive onto him again with renewed savagery. The birds were now attacking more persistently as well, pecking at his face and eyes and clawing through his tattered clothing. The detectives swatted them away as they struggled to control the children. They were making no progress at all and the man was dying.

Breathing heavily, Detective Rafik stood up and turned to one of the teachers who had come out to help. She had welts and bite marks all over her arms and was batting at herself and shrieking. There were bees and ants all over her. Rafik stared at her and the rest of the teachers, who also seemed to be battling with insects, and pointed back down at the children. Their faces were awash with the man’s blood, and some seemed to be chewing on pieces of his flesh. Many had suffered torn knuckles from the punches they had landed on him, and those who were not biting and kicking were stomping his head into the dirt. There were bees and ants and worms all over him.

“What the hell is wrong with them? They look like they’ve gone mad!”

“What do we do?”

They continued pulling off the raging children, and this time the kids stayed off, though it was apparently not due to any effort on the part of the detectives. They just suddenly broke off their attack. Malloy and Rafik looked up as the dense flock of birds dissipated.

Rafik stopped and looked at the children who had finally ceased their assault on the man and were now standing around his corpse, staring at him with eyes filled with sorrow and confusion. One by one they began to cry and turn away. Some ran back into the building. Others ran to the teachers, hugging them and sobbing.

“Call an ambulance,” Malloy said as he knelt beside the body. A cloud of bees and flies rose from the corpse and flew over their heads. Rafik knelt beside his partner, and they watched the earthworms and ants crawl out of the man’s hollowed eye-sockets, mouth, nose, and from the holes on the side of his head where his ears had been.

Rafik knelt closer to inspect the avulsions in the victim’s throat and was nearly stung by still more bees, which were now evacuating the ghastly wounds around his throat. Just as before, maggots were already writhing on the victim’s body.

“Is this like what happened with the dog guy?”

“Exactly what happened.”

“Fuck.”

Chapter 10

April ran her fingernails over Delilah’s thick thighs, tracing the striations in her quadriceps and marveling at the smoothness of her skin. She still could not believe she’d slept with her. Delilah was the only woman she’d ever slept with, and she’d only known the woman for a few minutes when she’d allowed herself to be seduced by her.

No. That’s not how it happened,
April corrected herself. Delilah hadn’t seduced her. She had only touched her and April had gone wild, consumed with desire so sudden and powerful that it had overwhelmed her. When she’d first walked into the voodoo priestess’s bedroom she’d been petrified of her and sickened by the knowledge that her best friend and her best friend’s boyfriend had both slept with the woman. Then Delilah touched her. One touch and an inferno of lust ignited inside her stronger than anything she’d ever felt before. April had practically attacked the woman.

Delilah’s lovemaking had been every bit as gentle and tender as her voice. She seemed to read April’s every desire, playing her body like a musical instrument until it responded in a crescendo that shook her to her soul. It was the first orgasm April ever had and others followed behind it in rapid succession until she’d almost lost consciousness, collapsing on the bed in exhaustion.

April was still trying to catch her breath as she looked into Delilah’s eyes. The sorrow that had been there before they made love was now infinitely deeper, a mortal wound raw and bleeding out like a severed artery. Her own anger and misery, however, was gone. Delilah had done exactly as she had promised. She had absorbed all her pain. April could feel it. All her fear, her rage, her sadness had left her.

And gone into Delilah.

What she felt now was simply a profound love. Love for the woman who had freed her from her pain. But this love was so different from anything she’d ever felt before. It was wild and savagely passionate, a type of passion she’d never imagined herself capable of. It almost seemed foreign, as if she were feeling Delilah’s emotions instead of her own. Whatever it was and wherever its origin, she liked it. She never wanted to stop feeling this way.

She ran her palms along Delilah’s jaw line and then traced her full lips with her fingertips.

Delilah gently kissed the pad of April’s index finger. Even this small gesture sent shivers through April’s body. Delilah smiled at her and the expression was so pained that April’s heart skipped a beat. Her dark eyes looked even stormier and more turbulent than before, like the sky before a hurricane. The woman was so beautiful it was dizzying.

“You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

Delilah’s body was tense and trembling. April wondered how hard it must be, fighting to control that maelstrom of emotions thundering inside her. Whatever Delilah had taken out of her was now added to the infinite miseries the voodoo priestess already had accumulated within her. It seemed to be tearing her apart. April now understood that whatever magic Delilah performed on her went far beyond empathy. It was some form of telepathy. Delilah had drained away April’s negative emotions and replaced them with her own emotions, with her love.

How could anyone live with so much pain?
April wondered. She stared at the woman in awe, watching as Delilah’s face ticked and twitched, watching her wince and moan. It was then that April realized what was happening to the woman. She was reliving April’s rape. She was experiencing it all.

Delilah tried to smile again, but now it was even more pained than before.