The 9th Hour (The Detective Temeke Crime Series Book 1) by Claire Stibbe Page A

eyes. It was too dark to see details but there was a light across her face from the apartment office and for the first time in his life, he wasn’t afraid of what he saw.
    He’d been expecting the rise of bile in his throat, the screaming ravens in his head, the thick black smoke that threatened to suffocate him; but he felt none of those. It was like a cup of old whiskey in oak, streaming through his veins, fresh and delicate. The opiate of the rich.
    He traced the line of her lips with a finger. “Do you know how hard it is for me to look at you?”
    “No,” she whispered.
    He couldn’t bear to look at those moist lips and not kiss them, and her tender, exquisite features only filled him with an ominous sadness. She wasn’t vulnerable to the same things that he was, the insatiable desires, the raging anger, the repulsive smells each time he killed. It was his secret, a dangerous secret. It would compromise her to share in his world. But then again, she wasn’t exactly Snow White.
    Mustn’t forget he was a cop, playing a cleaner role than the monster he was. He held on to that hand for a moment, sensing she wanted things to gallop ahead before he had a chance to show her how it was done.
    “I should leave,” he said, watching her face crumple like that of a child about to bawl.
    “Don’t,” she murmured.
    When he dropped her hand and said nothing she looked puzzled. “Don’t you want my number?”
    “I don’t need it,” he murmured in that fluid resonant voice she was clearly falling for. “I already know where you live.” He leaned over and kissed her again. She wasn’t going anywhere.
    She had an inkling of what he was, monstrous and magnificent, a chimera. She didn’t care. But it was hardly polite to kill a girl outside her own house.
    “Let’s go for a drive,” he said, seeing the inflated cheeks and the smile beneath them.
    He threw the car into reverse, felt the shudder of the powerful engine. He also felt an eagerness to get on the road, invigorated by the sudden change as if an invisible wall of darkness had somehow been breached. Instinctively, he tapped the stereo to life, listening for the pounding of the base.
    Instead, a preacher’s voice blared out over the sound of the engine.
    … And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.   It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve.
    Ole balled his right hand into a fist and mashed the button.

FOURTEEN
     
     
    Malin rubbed her eyes and yawned. It was nine o’clock in the evening now and Corrales Café had been closed for nearly an hour. No good wanting a decent meal at this time of night when all the best places were closed.
    She glanced at the buff file on the coffee table. Morgan Eriksen. She had read it from cover to cover and she needed fresh air to clear her head.
    Heads. Eriksen wanted heads. To tell the future, so he said. She remembered the Norse legend of Mimir, a wise man decapitated in a war between two groups of gods. Odin was said to have found the head and kept it so he could listen to its prophecy.
    But the ninth hour? None of the girls had been killed within nine hours. According to the pathology report, time of death ranged between twenty-four and seventy-eight hours, all in the early part of the afternoon.
    She cracked the sliding doors to her second floor apartment. It was too cold to sit on the balcony but she liked to listen to the water tumbling over a palisade of rocks at the front entrance. From her bedroom the soft susurration was a comfort at night, far better than one of those sound machines that mimicked waves on a sea shore.
    Only tonight there was nothing but silence. The fountain was likely turned off due to the freezing temperatures and there was a fresh coating of snow on the floodlit monument sign which read Puerta de Corrales. Wind sighed through the branches of a cottonwood tree and there was