Sacrifice (9 page)

“Oh, Delilah. What did you do?”

“I took your pain away. Aren’t you happy now? Don’t you love me?”

“Yes, Delilah. I love you. But - I can’t leave you like this. You have to give it back. I can’t stand to see you hurt like this. It’s not right. It’s not fair for you to suffer for me.”

“It is my purpose, April.” She smiled again. “I am the whipping boy.”

April leaned forward and kissed Delilah, and this seemed to quiet the distress in her face a little. Still, April could not help but feel bad for what she’d done to the beautiful black woman.

I didn’t know it was going to hurt her like this. How can she stand it? If one person’s anger and despair can hurt her so badly, how does she function after absorbing the combined sorrows of her entire congregation? How does she get rid of all that hatred and pain?

April’s worry only increased as Delilah’s eyes rolled up in her head and she began to shake and moan, gritting her teeth against some terrible pain. April knew exactly what the woman was feeling. She’d done the same thing herself on a gymnasium floor long ago.

Chapter 11

Detectives Malloy and Rafik sat with the hysterical children in the school cafeteria as their parents arrived. They interviewed each child one by one before allowing them to leave in their parents’ custody. They were almost hoping the children wouldn’t be able to remember what happened, that they would be spared the gruesome memories, but they remembered it all. They just couldn’t tell him why.

“What was it that made you so angry, Darla?” Malloy asked, looking down at the tiny first grader with her curly red hair in braids. Her huge hazel eyes were red from crying, her dimples still evident even absent the smile. Her knuckles were raw and swollen from punching her teacher, David Orluske, to death. Her fingernails were broken from digging them into the schoolteacher’s face. Her mouth was still smeared pink from where her mother had tried to wipe off the blood with a handkerchief and water from the fountain. Her mouth was a crimson hell from where she’d tried to rip out the teacher’s throat with her teeth.

“I don’t know. I just was. I was so angry I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to kill him.”

“Are you glad he’s dead now?” Detective Rafik asked.

“No.” Her eyes welled with tears. “I loved him!”

“But you hated him today?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know!” she cried out and tears began again.

“That’s it, Detectives. She can’t tell you any more. You’re just scaring her,” her mother said, draping a protective arm around her daughter.

Rafik sighed deeply and stood up; he stepped in front of Darla Watson and her mother, blocking their exit. “Ma’am, with all due respect, your daughter participated in the murder of her teacher. We need to find out why this happened. And while I completely understand your wanting to protect your daughter - we want to protect her and the other children - I can’t let her walk out of here until I know what happened. I don’t want to have to arrest her, because frankly, we don’t have the facilities to house a child that age and I’m not sure she’s entirely responsible for her actions. But I have to be sure, for the safety of both of you.”

“You don’t think she’d hurt me?” her mother asked, turning back toward the detectives and looking from one to the other. That entirely new and foreign possibility apparently crept into her mind, reminding her how she’d found her daughter just moments ago drenched in blood like some cherubic vampire.

“At this point we have to consider it a possibility. I need to know a little bit more about what transpired here before I can be comfortable with letting her go. So far we haven’t detained any of the children. They’ve all been released into their parents’ custody.”

“Just a few more questions, Mrs. Watson,” Malloy said, smiling in that lopsided way women had often told him was both goofy and charming. He knelt down to stare little Darla in her eyes as he spoke, still wearing that goofy self-conscious grin.

“Darla? Did anything unusual happen before you got angry?”

“We were just playing.” Her eyes drifted off as she tried to remember, and then her face suddenly brightened. “Oh, and then we saw Mary!”

“Mary?”

“Yeah, Mary Neilson. She was lost. Her picture was on the news and everything. Then she just came walking across the field. Mr. Orluske saw her too, and he told us all to stay where we were and he ran over to her. We all followed him. He knelt down to talk to her, and she patted him on the forehead and said, ‘Tag. You’re it!’ Then she walked away. Mr. Orluske tried to stop her from leaving. But then we …”

Detective Rafik reached into his pocket for a picture. He unfolded the Missing Person’s flyer that he’d found on his desk that morning. It was a picture of Mary Nielson, a girl who’d been abducted nearly a month before. It just occurred to him that this was the same school she’d attended.

“Was this her? Was this the girl?”

“That’s Mary,” Darla said, nodding.

The detectives let Darla and her mother leave. They spent the rest of the afternoon interviewing the remaining students and teachers. All their stories were the same.

“How much do you want to bet that when we find Marsha Wells it will be somewhere in the proximity of one of these weird-ass murders?”

“What are you thinking, Mo?”

“I don’t know. But I think we need to talk to Mary Nielson’s parents today.”

“Why? Do you think she might head back home?”

“No. I’m pretty sure she’ll turn up in a coma somewhere just like the rest of them. I just want to see if her parents left her pictures on the walls.”

The detectives ended their evening at the coroner’s office staring at the body of the young teacher with questions flying through their heads. The ME was on the other side of the room working on another body, that of a teenage prostitute with bruises and track marks in equal number on her arms and legs. A cynical part of Malloy wondered why he was even bothering. The streets had killed her, pure and simple, and chances are no one would ever claim the body, just as no one had come to rescue her in life.

“Hi, John, Mohammed. I hope you two aren’t expecting this autopsy to happen tonight? I’ve got nearly a dozen others before you.”

“What? Homicides?”

“I won’t know that ‘til I autopsy them.”

“Okay, smartass. Well, can you tell us anything on the teacher?”

“Not much. I only looked at him briefly when he first came in. You said kids did that to him? What was it some kind of gang?” the doctor asked.

“His students. Seven and eight-year-old children. Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

Dr. Medoff’s eyebrows knitted together in concentration, Malloy could see the doctor probing his memory for some frame of reference, for one situation even remotely similar to the tragedy that lay torn apart on his examining table. He told them he’d never seen anything like this. At least not done by children. Attack dogs, even a circus lion once, but never children; never like this.

Malloy was still haunted by the image of those children ripping into their screaming teacher as if they were in some type of feeding frenzy. He shook his head to try and clear the vision from his mind, only succeeding in giving himself a headache. He grabbed Dr. Medoff, squeezing the man’s slender bicep hard enough to leave a bruise as he tried to fight off the wave of revulsion that suddenly came crashing through him. Seeing the man wince, he slackened his grip and took a deep breath to calm himself.

“Doc, you have to have some theory about all this. I mean something had to have made those kids go nuts like that. They looked like they were possessed!”

“There’ve been many cases of mass hysteria, mob mentality, riots, in which relatively normal people suddenly turn into looters and murderers. There’ve even been gang-rape cases where large groups of people have gotten swept up in the moment and committed what to them would ordinarily have been an unthinkable act. It’s some bizarre type of peer-pressure dynamic that seems to override the normal restraints we place on ourselves.”

“But children?”

“Maybe it had something to do with the bees.”

“What?” Detective Rafik asked incredulously.

The doctor walked over to the table where the two detectives stood looking down at the body. He removed the sheet, revealing the tortured remains of David Orluske, the young teacher who’d been beaten to death by his students just hours ago. There were bee stings and insect bites all over him along with a profusion of other bruises, lacerations, and avulsions. The corpse still teemed with maggots, slugs, and earthworms. It was literally vibrating with activity.

“Maybe when the bees attacked the kids panicked, and in some type of mass hysteria mistook David Orluske for their attacker. I mean, there had to have been thousands of bees. The pain and confusion, coupled with a child’s imagination and limited understanding of the world could have made the children believe that they were literally fighting for their lives, that the only way to stop the bees was to kill Mr. Orluske here. They could have thought he was somehow causing the bees to attack them.”

“That’s a pretty good theory. I’d close the case with that. Except none of the kids were stung.”

“What? But how? There had to be a massive swarm to have caused this type of damage. This guy has stings over 70 percent of his body, and not one child was stung?”

“Not one.” The detectives turned to leave.

“Then maybe it was the birds? There were a lot of feathers on the body, and he was covered in talon marks. Maybe the kids were frightened by the birds? Or maybe it was a combination of-”

“The birds and the bees?” Malloy scoffed. “I was there, remember? The kids didn’t even seem to notice the goddamn birds. It was just like the dog guy yesterday. Every fucking thing was attacking him. Like they were all working together. Look, just let us know when you get something solid.”

“Maybe something will turn up in the tox-screen. The kids bit him, you know? I mean they didn’t just break the skin; they tore out chunks of his flesh with their teeth. I must have found more than fifty different human bite marks on him. And you say this was done by kids?”

“Seven and eight-year-olds.”

“My God. Okay, I’ll move this one up ahead of the rest. I’m sure this is going to get a lot of press. I’ll make sure you have something to tell the reporters in the morning. Maybe I’ll have something more to tell you tonight.”

“Yeah, I hope so. ‘Cause this whole thing is really starting to freak me out.”

Dr. Medoff stared at the vermin-ridden corpse.

He shoved the body into the freezer to slow the activity of the vermin until he could get around to autopsying it.

Chapter 12

April was hooked. She could not stay away from Delilah. Every second away from her threatened April’s newfound tranquility. She became hostile and disagreeable. Delilah’s love was like a powerful narcotic. Now that she didn’t have the weight of her past haunting her it was every new frustration, every petty vexation of her will that she ran to Delilah for release from: the guy who cut her off in traffic; the teacher who gave her a lower grade than she thought she deserved on her term paper; homeless people begging for beer and drug money; soldiers dying in the Middle East; shoes that didn’t fit right; the busted zipper on her new jacket; anything at all that angered her in the least required immediate relief in the arms of Delilah. She knew she was using Delilah as a crutch and that it wasn’t healthy for her - couldn’t be healthy for any of them. But April couldn’t stop herself and Delilah never refused. It was her purpose, and somehow she was able to deal with it all.

She knew she wasn’t the only one doing it. No matter what time of day or night she arrived at Delilah’s mansion there was always someone else there before her or waiting to enter after she left. She’d seen her “heal” a dozen people during orgiastic masses that left Delilah doubled over and screaming from the pain, yet somehow she always recovered. April found it hard to watch sometimes and often resented the others for the toll their pain was taking on Delilah, but she was just as guilty. Delilah had become the lifeline to happiness for all of them.

Chapter 13

“That teacher’s body - the way it was all covered in insects and stuff and all those damn birds - was that the way you found your dog victim yesterday?”

“Exactly the same, only the guy yesterday was much worse.”

“Worse than that? I can see why you were so freaked out then.”

“We need to talk to the guys from Missing Persons about the pictures on the Wells’s walls, and then we need to go back and talk to them again. We’ve got to figure this shit out quick. Nothing is right about this case. Nothing at all.”

They drove along in silence. They sat contemplating the rest of their day, the witness interviews and interrogations, the leads, the clues, trying to anticipate what truth each clue would lead them to. It was all impossible to predict. Neither could guess at what they were dealing with. Some kind of disease? Hypnosis? A new drug? None of it made sense. How were the murders tied to the missing children, and how were the parents involved? The questions continued to spin in a maddening blur through their heads like some indecipherable puzzle that had to be solved without even knowing what the end product was supposed to look like.

Long moments passed before Detective Rafik finally broke the silence. “You think maybe there was something about this guy that made everybody want to kill him? Like maybe something chemical? A pheromone that triggers some kind of violent response in animals?”

“Animals? Maybe. But kids?”

“Their brains aren’t fully developed yet. Maybe it affects them too. Whatever it is. I don’t know. Maybe he was on some new kind of street drug that has the unpleasant side effect of making everyone around you want to kick your ass.”

Malloy laughed. “Yeah, okay, Mo. Or maybe it was his cologne or aftershave?”

“Could be.”

“Are you fucking serious?”

“I’m dead serious, bro. You saw what happened. There has to be some explanation for why what looked like every bird in the sky for blocks suddenly decided to come to that schoolyard and attack a teacher, and why the kids, bees, ants, even fucking earthworms all decided they should get a piece of him too. Fuck, John, there was a moment there when I wanted to kill him too. It didn’t last long, but for a second it was so powerful I almost drew my weapon. There’s something truly fucked up going on here.”