Her arms wrapped tightly around her body, Sabrina glanced at the sandwich in his hand. “Oh, wow, you haven’t gotten a chance to eat dinner yet? We’re sorry to bother you so late, Alex.”
He stepped back, inviting them in with a casual motion of his head. “You’re not bothering me.” He gestured to Sabrina to take the recliner and swung a chair from his dining-room set over for Aaron. Although he could have sat in one of the chairs, as well, Alex decided to choose between the worn bean bag squatting in front of the TV or one of the handy, all-purpose plastic milk crates that dotted the floor plan of his house—he opted for the latter, kicking it over a few inches into optimal conversational position. “Beer?” he asked them both, seeing as that was about all he had to offer them at the moment.
“Sure.” Aaron shed his coat and draped it over the back of the chair before sitting down.
“None for me, thanks,” Sabrina added.
Once Alex had returned with two cold Thomas Kempers from the fridge, he handed one to Aaron and sat down. “So, what’s up? Not that I don’t appreciate the visit, but you both look like this is more than a friendly house call.”
Sabrina glanced at Aaron, who leaned forward, resting his elbows on his parted knees. “You’re right, Al. I wanted to talk to you about the murder victim you found today.”
Suddenly, Alex wished he’d chosen the bean bag—the mere mention of the day’s events caused what had remained of his energy level to plummet, and he just wanted to sink into the bag’s nubby softness and forget everything that had happened today. Including and especially the people in his living room, friends though they were. He reached up and rubbed one of his eyebrows. “My talking to your colleagues for more than my entire work shift didn’t give you the information you needed?”
“Alex—” Sabrina began.
“Sorry.” Just because he’d had a crappy day didn’t mean he had to take it out on them. “I’m just tired. Hungry. And freaked out.”
She moved up to the edge of the recliner, so she, too, was leaning toward him. The two of them looked like a pair of shrinks waiting for him to tell them about his childhood. “No, Alex. It’s just…” She flung her hands in the air and turned to Aaron, clearly growing exasperated. “Tell him.”
Aaron took his cue. “The county medical examiner hasn’t had a chance to look at the body yet, but from the look I got, it seems like our guy was killed with a garrote. No blows to the head, gunshots or anything that would handicap him—someone strong and stealthy came up behind him and slipped a cord around his neck.”
Like he needed to hear that before he’d had a chance to finish his sandwich. Damn cops. “You think he might have been immobilized somehow? It did look like some sort of cult got a hold of him.” Alex looked down at the floor, tracing the grooves between the wood planks with his gaze. Anything to avoid picturing what he’d seen that morning.
“Maybe. But we didn’t see any ligature marks on his body. M.E. can tell us for sure.” Aaron took a swig of his beer, then leaned back in his chair, resting one ankle on the opposite knee. “But as for it being a ritual murder, I don’t think so.”
“Pretty much all reports of satanic-cult murders in the U.S. have turned out to be something completely different,” Sabrina chimed in. “There are no documented cases of a satanic cult murdering anyone, ever. Just lots of mass hysteria. There’s a report that came out of SUNY–Buffalo awhile back that investigated nearly 12,500 instances of so-called satanic activity and concluded there was no evidence such cults even existed.”
Alex narrowed his eyes at her.
She shrugged, a sheepish smile spreading across her face. “You learn some interesting things when you’re married to a police detective.”
“Ah.” He took a drink of his beer. “But what about the stab wounds?”
“The cross and circle?” Aaron asked. “Inflicted postmortem, judging from the amount of blood. And they mimic a murder that took place in Ohio a couple of years ago—a priest was convicted of killing a nun, and he tried to make the murder look like a satanic killing. In this case, someone wasn’t being that creative.”
“But why?”
Sabrina started moving around in her seat, first tucking her legs under her, then shifting around until she was in a lotus position. She drummed the back of her right hand against her leg for a few seconds, and then her feet went back on the floor. And since he’d known the woman since they’d gone to high school together, he knew that her fight-or-flight mechanism was kicking in big-time. Whenever the going got tough, tough Sabrina got moving. And if she couldn’t move, she’d dance around in place until she could move.
And from where he sat, she was moving like crazy right now.
He set his beer on the floor with a thud. “What?”
She examined her thumbnail, picking occasionally at the cuticle. “There’s more about what the police found on the body. Besides the manner of death, the garrote, there was other thing that didn’t match the Ohio murder.”
He was really growing tired of this. “Garrote, sheet, stone altar, stab wounds. What else do I need to know?” He turned to Aaron, appealing to the man’s sense of decency to put him out of his misery and just spit it out already. “You’re my best friends, but I’m about to shake you both until one of you starts talking. What didn’t match?”
“Something was placed in the victim’s hand, probably by the killer,” Aaron said quietly. “A crow feather.”
Everything stopped. Time, his breathing, his heart. From far, far away, he could hear Sabrina talking to him but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Blindly, he reached for his beer bottle, and when his fingers touched the cool, slick surface, he closed his hand around it and brought it up, taking a long, long swig out of it. But even alcohol didn’t dull the pain blooming in slow motion inside his chest.
He inhaled sharply, glad to find that his lungs were still working, and forced the world back into focus. “A crow feather?” He knew that the redundant question wasn’t going to magically make them give him a different answer, the answer he was hoping for.
Something in his reaction had Sabrina on her feet. She crouched down beside him and put her hand on his arm. Then she nodded. “Just like when Wilma Red Cloud was killed.”
Another time, another place. Another murder that had happened years ago, on a reservation in South Dakota. A murder that had changed his life and had nearly wrecked his mother.
He’d forgotten. He’d made himself forget. He and his mother never talked about that time—even when he was a kid and had tried to get her to talk about it, she’d refused. And she’d been right; some things were best left in the dark.
Until, that is, they forced themselves out into the open again.
Crow carrier.
Clutching the bottle, so slick with condensation it nearly slipped out of his fingers, Alex shook his head sharply. Focus, don’t think. Just focus. Don’t feel. “So you think this might be tied to…” Say it.
But he couldn’t say it, so he just looked up at his friends, hoping they couldn’t see that he was drowning.
Sabrina rubbed his arm, her eyes wide with something he didn’t want to name. “Your father? Al, I’m so sorry, but that’s exactly what we think.”
“EXCUSE ME, CAN I HELP YOU?”
Alex clenched his teeth and stifled a groan as yet another elderly resident of the Sunnyside View Apartments tapped on his truck window. With the pad of her index finger still pressed against the glass, the woman peered inside, actually moving her head around in circles as she scanned the cab’s interior.
According to Aaron, Sophie had been released hours