Kiss of the Bees, page 27
part #2 of Walker Family Series
Taking out a pair of rubber-handled kitchen tongs he had purchased new for that sole purpose, he laid the metal teeth on the burner of the stove, turned on the fire, and set them to heat. He didn’t take them off the flame until the rubber handles were starting to smolder.
When Mitch returned to the bed, he found Lani Walker sleeping peacefully once again. He stood for a moment looking down at her and feeling godlike, observing the smooth skin of her body, flawless still, except for those few white marks. He had the power to leave that body flawless or to mar it forever. There was never any real question of whether or not he would do it. There was only one decision left to make—choosing which one he would take.
“Lani!” he called out sharply. “Lani, wake up.”
The long lashes fluttered open, but the dark eyes that looked questioningly up at him were vague and confused. There was no still comprehension in them, still no fear.
“Watch this,” he said.
For ease of use, Mitch had left the tape recorder sitting on the floor beside the bed with the controls set on pause. With his gloved left hand, he reached down and punched the “record” button, then he slammed his good knee into her abdomen. The force of the blow sent the wind rushing out of her. Holding her pinioned to the bed with the full weight of his body, he clamped the scorching teeth of the tongs into the fullness of her right breast, an inch and a half on either side of the tender brown nipple.
Even tied hand and foot, Lani bucked so hard beneath him that she almost pitched him off her. He had to grab hold of her waist with his free hand to keep from being thrown onto the floor. Even that far away, the fierce heat from the searing tongs warmed the skin of Mitch’s own face. The shockingly sweet smell of singeing flesh filled his nostrils.
It was a magic moment for Mitch. Feeling that naked body writhe in agony beneath his was as good as any sex he ever remembered. But the best part about it was the scream. That was far more than he could have hoped; better than anything he had ever imagined. Hearing Lani Walker’s shriek of torment, it was all Mitch could do to hold back an answering moan of his own, one of exquisite pleasure rather than pain.
At last she lay still beneath him. As soon as she did so, he unclasped the tongs. He had to force the metal free from the charred skin. Around the wounded flesh, a wave of shocked goose bumps slid across her body. Mitch was surprised to see them. Who knows? he thought. Maybe it did as much for her as it did for me.
Reaching down, he quickly switched off the tape before she had a chance to say something that might somehow lessen the impact of that beautifully unearthly scream. Her sudden stillness was so complete that for a moment Mitch was afraid she might have fainted, thus depriving him and putting a temporary end to his fun. But no, when he looked down, her watery, tear-filled eyes were wide open, staring up at him in outraged, accusing silence.
Mitch Johnson wanted her to speak to him then, but she did not. If nothing else, he would have liked her to beg and plead with him not to hurt her again, but she didn’t do that, either. After that one shrill, involuntary cry, no further sound escaped Lani Walker’s lips, not even a whimper.
As the girl studied him, Mitch thought about Eve in the Garden of Eden. Like Eve growing beyond her mindless goodness, Lani had emerged from the cocoon of her drug-induced slumber. Willingly or not, she had now tasted the forbidden fruit. The dark, burning eyes she focused on him had been forever robbed of their trusting innocence.
“Welcome to the real world, babe,” Mitch Johnson said, then he turned and walked away.
He held the tongs under running water from the faucet long enough to cool them down, until the fierce heat sizzled away, first into steam and then into nothing. Once they were cool enough, he put them back in the shopping bag they’d come in originally. Then he rewound the tape to the beginning, returned it to the plastic carrying case, and put that in the bag as well.
This one’s for you, Andy, he thought. It’s a promise I made and one I kept. Somehow I doubt Diana Ladd Walker will like it as much as you would. In fact, she won’t like it at all, but it’s something she and Brandon Walker will never forget, not as long as they live.
The pain was so blindingly intense that for a time Lani wasn’t aware of anything else. The whole universe seemed centered in the seared flesh of her wounded breast. It overwhelmed her whole being. There were no words that encompassed that awful hurt, no thoughts that made such inhuman cruelty understandable.
At last, though, through her unseeing anguish, Lani became aware of the man standing over her, aware of his eyes pressing in on her and of her nakedness under that invasive gaze. She squirmed, as if hoping to escape that look, but the scarves binding her hands and legs held her fast. The only way to combat that look was to stare back at him, holding his gaze with her own.
Studying him, she was suddenly aware that he wanted something more from her, as if what he had already taken wasn’t enough; as if he longed for something else in order to achieve real satisfaction.
Trying to imagine what that could be somehow took her mind away from the searing pain arcing through her body like the burning blue flash of her father’s welding torch. And then, as clearly as if she had read his thoughts, she knew. Standing there, clothed in his presumed superiority, he was waiting for her to speak, to say something. It was almost as though he needed her to acknowledge his brutality and then bow before it.
Her only weapon was to deny him that satisfaction. She kept quiet, biting her lips to hold them together. After a long moment, he melted out of her line of vision, leaving her to ride out the terrible pain alone and in utter silence.
But somehow she wasn’t alone. The vision came surging at her out of the past the moment she closed her eyes.
Lani was five years old again, standing naked in front of the mirror in her parents’ bathroom. She had pawed through her mother’s makeup and found the tube of concealer, the white lipstick-looking stuff Diana sometimes put under her eyes before she applied her other makeup.
Carefully, looking down at her body rather than watching her reflection in the mirror, Lani drew a perfect pair of half-moons on her flat chest, encircling the little brown knob of flesh that would someday grow into a nipple.
Then, pulling on her nightgown, she went racing through the house. She wanted to show someone her handiwork, but her parents were out. Instead, she went searching for Rita Antone. She found Nana Dahd in her room at the back of the house, working on a basket.
“Look,” Lani crowed, pulling up her nightgown. “Look at what I did. Now I can be just like Mommy.”
Rita’s face had gone strangely pale and rigid the moment she saw the circle Lani had drawn on her body.
“Go wash,” she ordered, in a terrible voice Lani Walker had never heard before. “Go wash that off. Do not do it again! Ever!”
“But why can’t I be like Mommy?” she had said later, after she had showered for a second time. Once again dressed for bed, she had come back to Nana Dahd’s room to say good night and hoping to make some sense of what had happened.
“Shhhh,” Nana Dahd had told her. “Your mother looks like that because the evil Ohb did something to her. Because he hurt her. You shouldn’t say such things. Someone might hear you and make it happen.”
Now someone had.
Lani’s eyes came open. The pain wasn’t any less. If anything, it was worse. She looked down at the angry welt of seared flesh. It was red now and blistered, but someday it, too, would be a pale white scar, almost the same as the one that encircled the nipple on her mother’s right breast.
And that was the moment when, without being able to say how, Lani knew this was the same thing. Lani had learned from reading her mother’s book that Andrew Carlisle had been blinded and terribly disfigured by the bacon grease Diana Ladd had thrown at him. And she remembered a few weeks earlier, when her mother had told her father at dinner that it had said in the paper that Andrew Carlisle was dead.
Mr. Vega had worn his hair long and in a ponytail when he had been out on the mountain, painting. This man’s hair was very short. He was neither blind nor disfigured, but he was somehow connected to the evil Ohb.
Knowing that, Lani had a blueprint of what to do.
“I’m going to untie you now.”
Once again the man was standing over her. “Actually, ‘untie’ isn’t the word. Do you see this knife?”
In one hand he held a long narrow knife. The blade was very long and it looked sharp. “I’m going to cut you loose,” he continued. “If you don’t behave, I’ll use it on you. Do you understand?”
Lani nodded again.
“All right then.”
One at a time, he cut through the strands of silk that had held her captive. As soon as he set her limbs free, the pins and needles in her arms and legs—the cramps in her shoulders and hips—were bad enough that the new pain took some of Lani’s attention away from the pulsing throb in her breast.
“Get up now,” he ordered.
She tried to stand and then fell back on the low bed with a jarring thud. “I can’t,” she said. “My legs are asleep.”
“Well, sit there, then.” He turned away for a moment and came back holding out a cup. “Drink some of this,” he said, sounding almost solicitous. “That must hurt, and maybe this will help deaden the pain.”
Lani had figured out by then that he must have drugged her, that he must have put something in the orange juice she had drunk that morning or whenever it was when she was supposedly posing for him. And if he had drugged her once, no doubt he was going to do it again.
She reached up as if to take the cup. Instead of taking it, though, she slapped it out of his hand, gasping with pain at the shock of the cold water slicing across her burned flesh, searing it anew.
“Why, you goddamned bitch!” he muttered. “There’s still some fight left in you, isn’t there. But believe me, there’s plenty more where that came from.”
He walked as far as the kitchen. She saw him pouring something into a fresh cup of water, then he came back. This time, before he gave her the cup, he knotted his other hand into the hair at the back of her neck, yanking her head backward.
“This time you’ll drink it like a good girl, or I’ll hold you down and pour the stuff down your goddamned throat. Got it?”
She nodded.
He placed the cup in her hand, and this time she drank it down. When she gave it back to him, he checked to make sure it was empty.
“That’s better,” he said. “You swallowed every drop. Here are your clothes now. Get dressed.”
Concerned about fingerprints, he had rinsed out her clothing earlier that morning, but hadn’t bothered to dry them. How could he? He didn’t have a dryer, and if he had hung them on the clothesline, someone might have noticed. They were still a sodden lump when he tossed them into her lap.
“I can’t wear these,” she said. “They’re wet.”
“So? This isn’t a fucking Chinese laundry,” he told her. “Go naked if you want to. It sure as hell doesn’t matter to me.”
After a struggle, she finally managed to pull on the jeans. The shirt hurt desperately whenever it touched the burned spot on her breast, but at least the man couldn’t look at her anymore. Without further protest she pulled on the wet socks and forced on the boots.
“Come on now,” he said impatiently. “Off we go.”
With her legs shaking beneath her, she staggered across the room. A few feet away, she stopped beside the easel. There in front of her was a picture—a picture that was undeniably of her.
Mr. Vega saw her stop beside the picture and look. “Well,” he said. “What do you think? Is this the kind of thing you had in mind for your parents’ anniversary present?”
“Tohntomthadag!” she said.
“You were talking Indian, weren’t you,” he observed. “What do those words mean?”
Lani Walker shook her head. She never had told Danny Jenkins that s-koshwa means “stupid.” Not caring what he might do to her, she didn’t tell Mr. Vega that in Tohono O’othham, the single word she had spoken, tohntomthadag, means “pervert.”
In the forty minutes between the time Brian Fellows called Dispatch for assistance and the arrival of the detective, Brian stayed in the Blazer. Working on a metal clipboard, he started constructing the necessary paper trail of the incident. He began with the call summoning him to assist Kath Kelly and had worked his way up to unearthing the bones when he realized how stupid he was. Rattlesnake Skull, the ancient village that had once been near the charco, had been deserted for a long time, but it had probably been inhabited for hundreds of years before that. It made sense, then, that there would be nothing so very surprising about finding a set of human remains in that general area. In fact, it was possible there were dozens more right around there.
Brian Fellows was still considered a novice as far as the Pima County Sheriff’s Department was concerned. He cringed at how that kind of mistake might be viewed by some of the department’s more hard-boiled homicide dicks, none of whom would be thrilled at the idea of being dragged away from a Saturday-afternoon poolside barbecue to investigate a corpse that turned out to be two or three hundred years old.
Brian was putting together his backpedal routine when a dusty gray departmental Ford Taurus pulled up beside him. When the burly shape of a cigar-chomping detective climbed out of the driver’s seat, Brian breathed a sigh of relief. Dan Leggett. Of all the detectives Brian might have drawn, Dan Leggett would have been his first choice. Dan was one of the old-timers, someone who had been around for a long time. Dan had grown up in law enforcement under Brandon Walker’s leadership. He had a reputation for doing a thorough, professional job.
Tossing his clipboard to one side, Brian clambered out of the Blazer and hurried forward to meet the man.
“So what have you got here, Deputy Fellows?” Leggett asked. He handed Brian a plastic water jug and then paused to light a half-smoked cigar while Brian gulped a long drink. “Dispatch tells me they sent you out here to investigate a dead steer,” he continued once the cigar was lit. “They claim you turned that steer into first a beating and now a homicide.”
“I never said it was a homicide,” Brian corrected, hoping to salvage a smidgeon of pride. “And it isn’t even a whole body. I dug up some human bones is all. If it turns out to be some Indian who’s been dead a few hundred years, you’ll probably think I’m a complete idiot.”
“Suppose you show me where these bones are and let me take a look for myself. Afterward, depending on the results, we can take a vote on Deputy Brian Fellows’s powers of observation and general reliability.”
“This way,” Brian said. He led Detective Leggett over to his small collection of previously unearthed skeletal remains. “There’s a skull down there too,” the young deputy said. “Down there, toward the far end of the hole. As soon as I realized what it was, I left it there for fear of destroying evidence.”
Leggett blew out a cloud of smoke, held the cigar so he was upwind of both the cigar and the smoke and downwind of the bones. He stood there for a moment, sniffing the air. Finally, he stuffed the cigar back in his mouth.
“Thank God whoever it is has been dead long enough that he or she doesn’t stink,” he said. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a second cigar and offered it to Brian. “Care for a smoke?” he asked.
Brian shook his head. “No, thanks,” he said.
Leggett shrugged and stuffed the cigar back in his pocket. “Just wait,” he said. “If you’re in the dead-body business long enough, you’ll figure out that there are times when nothing beats a good cigar. At least, that’s what I keep telling my wife.”
Clearly amused by his own joke, Leggett was still chuckling as he pulled on a pair of disposable latex gloves and then dropped to his hands and knees in the dirt. Chomping down on the lit cigar, he held it firmly in place while he used both hands to paw away loose sand. Brian kept his mouth shut and watched from the sidelines.
It wasn’t long before Dan Leggett picked up a small piece of bone and tossed it casually onto the pile with the others. “Looks like a finger to me,” he mumbled.
Still saying nothing, Brian waited anxiously for Leggett to locate the skull. Eventually he did, pulling it out of the dirt and then holding it upside down while sand and pebbles drained out through the gaping holes that had once been eyes and nose. When the skull was finally empty, Dan Leggett examined it for some time without saying a word. Finally, with surprising delicacy, he set it down on the ground beside the hole, then he stood for another long moment, staring at it thoughtfully while he took several leisurely puffs on his cigar.
Brian Fellows found the long silence difficult to bear, but he didn’t say a word. Lowly deputies—especially ones who intend to survive in the law enforcement game—learn early on the importance of keeping their mouths shut in the presence of tough-guy homicide detectives. Finally, Leggett looked up at Brian and gave him a yellow-toothed grin.
“Well, Deputy Fellows,” Leggett said, “it looks to me like you’re in the clear on this one.” He knocked a chunk of ash off the end of the cigar, but Brian noticed he was careful none of it landed in the hole or on any of the recently disturbed dirt around it.
Brian had been holding his breath. Slowly he let it out. “Why do you say that?” he asked.
“Because, if this guy had been dead for a couple hundred years, I doubt his head would have five or six silver fillings. I doubt the Indians who lived around here back then were much into modern dentistry.”
“No,” Brian agreed. “I suppose not. Can you tell what killed him?”
Leggett shook his head. “Much too soon to tell,” he said. “Looks like there was quite a blow to his head, but it doesn’t mean that’s what killed him.”
Stuffing the cigar back in his mouth, the detective climbed out of the hole. Brian was surprised to think the detective would give up the search so soon.
