Obscure Blood (2 page)

Octa’s father threw the knife at him, and it hit Octa in the stomach. Holding his injury, Octa heard a noise behind him. Something hit him on the head.

When he woke up in the hospital the next day, the last thing Octa remembered was the sound of a gunshot.

Waking up in the hospital is not something everyone does regularly. But for Octa, the only thing unusual was not remembering the last scene at his family’s house the previous day.

He kept on going back to hearing the sound of a handgun’s blast. He reached for the back of his head and discovered it was slightly swollen.
The back of my head hurts,
he thought.
My abdomen hurts too.
The knife was somehow deflected and caused little injury. He had a slicing flesh wound.

Bob walked in and said, “How are you feeling?”

Octa took a breath and replied, “Don’t worry about it. Just tell me what happened.”

“You passed out and the suspect was shot, and managed to get away by…” he said. “Do you remember anything about the suspect?”

“No, all I heard was a gunshot. I was half dead.”

Someone must have hit me in the head,
he thought.
Is
my dad’s working with someone in the department?
Octa got up and pulled the IV out of his arm.

“You need to rest,” Bob said. A nurse walked in and made the same suggestion, only more forcefully. Octa, however, went to the bathroom, changed into his clothes, checked the markets on his phone, and walked out without addressing or responding to anyone.

“Octa, what are you doing?” Chief Detective Albany asked, when she walked into the hospital.

“Please, no more lyrics,” Octa said, “I need my car key.” Whenever Octa got injured while on an investigation, Albany usually confiscated his car key, because when a case was standing wide open like this one, no injury was ever going to stop him. Even his wife knows he cares more about a case than his health.

“You’re not going to drive like that,” she said.

Octa stopped.

“Give me your freaking badge, Detective Octa,” she said. He still proceeded out.

His boss accompanied him out onto the street.

She patted his back and walked away. As he stood on the sidewalk, a taxi stopped in front of him.

He jumped in the car and gave the address of his childhood home. He was heading back to the same house where his mother had been murdered and from which his father had disappeared. His phone rang. Lucinda was calling him.

“Yes, bunny,” he said.

“Are you doing okay, love?” she asked. Bob had already informed her about Octa’s injuries.

“Yes, bunny, I’m doing awesome. It’s just a small thing.”

“Lucinda, I think you should stay a little bit longer in North Carolina until everything is settled down here.”

“I’ll not stay here for another week.”

“We should move to another house, then.”

“Hell no!” she screamed. “This won’t happen. Also, I know your body is injured. You always lie about your health. Let me guess . . . you left the damn hospital, too.”

“Well . . .”

“Well, what?” she said.

“I love you. Let’s talk about it when you come back to Miami.”

“Yeah, bye.”

She hung up. Octa did not have the chance to make a kissing sound into the phone.

Once the taxi dropped him off, he looked around the house. The back door had fresh mud smears on the cement. There was an imprint of a boot. The tip faced away from the door. He took pictures. He stepped in easily, hands in his pocket. He walked toward the kitchen where he had faced his father. He stood by the door to recall the scenes before he went unconscious. He remembered a noise coming up behind him before he got hit in the head. Then he recalled the knife and his father’s heartless attempt to kill him. Octa started blinking. He held his head and kneeled, trying to remember the whole scene.

He walked into the kitchen, looking toward the window. He saw where the bullet had passed through one of the kitchen’s windows and hit his father. There was blood on the floor. Must have been from his father. He was shot. After he put in a call to his office to check on the status of the evidences found at the crime scene, while he was unconscious, Bob informed him that the blood matched his father’s DNA, and no man with such description was reported in any hospital in the past two days.

“If he was shot through the window once he rushed toward me, then someone hit me in the back of the head shortly after to take him somewhere safe. The police officers found me lying on the ground and thought I passed out because of my physical wounds.”

Now, how did they disappear from the scene?
he wondered.
I think I’m over exaggerating,
he thought.
There must be a secret place here. If the neighbors heard a shotgun blast, police officers would probably have been here in less than two seconds, scanning the whole house for any deadly suspects. However, there should have been a path taking my father and his helper down somewhere or out in less than thirty seconds. There’re blood traces, and some have been wiped by someone.

He stood transfixed. It was a childhood memory that stopped him, taking him way back to other scenes. “I told you not to go in this room,” his father had screamed at him.

“The shelf,” Octa mumbled, coming back to the present.
This was the same room from which my father disappeared and where my mother died. There was a chair right in the middle with bloody ropes. The blood did not match my mother’s. The police officers said that he might have been kidnapped; the blood on the chair and on the ropes matched his blood type. If my father was kidnapped, then he was forced to do things against his will. Whoever hits me wants him to do that. Forced to kill your own family might have been to satisfy a grudge that someone had.

Walking toward the shelf, he pushed it away from him on both sides, but it didn’t move. There were a few books on the shelf. It was dusty.
I remembered seeing my father pulling this shelf, but he always stopped whenever I walk in,
he thought.
Is there something behind this shelf?
He then pulled it toward himself from the right side. It moved.

Behind the shelf was a room about the size of a walk-in closet. He put on his gloves. He entered in, flicked on a switch light and pulled the shelf partway closed behind him. On the back side of the shelf, a small piece of cardboard had been stapled to the wood. Carefully, he pulled the cardboard back and discovered a peephole that gave a surprisingly good view of the outer room. He looked down. There was blood on the floor. He assumed it was that of his father. He had had to pull really hard on the shelf. “My father was not that big when I saw him,” he said. If he was injured, he would not have been capable of pulling the shelf toward him so easily and closing it back.
Maybe
whoever was there with him, was about my size
. He walked toward the end of the closet room. He stood motionless with his right index finger on his lips.

“This room seems familiar,” he said. “I still can remember that cinnamon smell.”

My dad once blindfolded me and threw me in when I touched his handgun,
he thought.
I was five years old.

His father never took him into the room without first blindfolding him. He did not let him know what room it was. Octa never knew the direction that his father took him to the room. Now, he knelt on the floor and started looking for any unusual patterns on the carpet. The room had a first aid kit and canned foods that dated back to his youth. The carpet was sealed to the floor too. Rising to his feet, he sighed.

So the room was a secret room that his father had probably used to store groceries and medical tools. But, he must have used it to hide himself when Octa was attacked by him. He was still in the house after the police officers came in. This was the reason he was nowhere to be found in the neighborhood. There were some visible blood trails leading to that place.

Octa then stepped out from the room, leaving the light on. He pushed the shelf back and closed the room’s blinds. He looked straight ahead, focusing on the shelf.
No light,
he thought.
Smart man.
He opened the blinds, walked back to the closet, and turned the light off.

He tried to copy the prints on the switch and handle and bagged them. He went back outside, and beginning with the house to the right, interviewed people in the neighborhood. He inquired about any unusual characters or activities they may have noticed in the past few days, weeks or months. He found nothing.

As he was walking away from a porch, an old lady in her late 70s stopped him and spoke her name, “Hi, my name is Hawoman Parish.”

She had suddenly appeared from the sidewalk. Octa was about half a mile away from his childhood house.

“I just want to know more personal information about my father.”

“You look like your mother,” she said, when he turned his face toward her.

“Do I know you?”

“No, likely you don’t remember, but I know you,” she said.

“What can you tell about my family?”

The old lady invited him in. There were two brown couches and a TV. The couches were torn. The walls were cracked. The wooden floor creaked under every footstep as he followed her further inside and saw pictures of her and his mother. Though her hair was gray and her hands wrinkled, she walked slowly but without trembling.

“I know you, you’re my mother’s friend.”

“Yes,” she said, leading him into the kitchen.

She poured some coffee in a cup, handed it to him and motioned for him to take a seat in the living room. For a minute, he walked around the room looking at the pictures. They both took a seat. They were sitting down on different set of couches facing each other.

Her face could have been taken for that of a 50-year-old’s. She looked him straight in the eyes and said, “Your dad changed ten years after marrying your mother.” Octa recalled the history of his father’s service as a police officer. After his first partner had died in the line of duty, his father had developed PTSD. It was about ten years into the marriage that all this happened.

“Do you remember the names of his partners?” he asked. “No, I don’t,” she said.

“Should I call you Ms–?”

“Ms. Parish, please.”

The look on her face was depressing. She took a long pause before speaking again.

“Did my mother ever tell you anything about fights?” he asked.

“No, your mother portrayed the marriage as heaven,” she said. “They were a lovely couple. I’m not sure what could have happened to your father’s mind if he really did kill her. I have seen you at your family home. What are you looking for?”

“I just want to know more personal information about my father.”

“You should contact your mother’s sister if she’s still alive.”

“My mother had a sister?” he responded, his eyes opening as wide as those of a wolf. “What’s her name?” he asked, suddenly curious.

Ms. Parish rose to her feet, finished her cup of coffee, looked straight at Octa, and said, “You need to leave now.”

Octa’s eyes quickly scanned the room, and looked outside for any unusual things.

Without interruption, he found his way out as he thanked the lady for the information she had provided to him. He walked back to his old home.

He reentered his parents’ house and went into their master bedroom. He was looking for any leftover things from the day his mother was murdered. He pulled open drawer after drawer, went from door to door, and threw books and other objects on the floor. Nothing was of great value. He sighed. He was tired, and stretched and yawned.

Looking down desperately, his eyes stopped moving and stared down at half of a picture sticking out of a book. He bent down and removed the photograph. It was of his mother, clearly showing her blue eyes, darkish hair, and white skin, his father, with brownish yellow eyes, dark hair, and light brown skin, and another lady, who had the same traits as his mother, except that this woman’s eyes were green. There was a note on the back:
From Chelsea Cracker to Molly Cracker. Love. Your sister.

Chelsea Cracker must be the sister,
he thought.
How can I never have heard about you or even met you in my childhood?
Having a picture made things easier for him. Regaining his senses, he called a friend from human resources and asked for any addresses that matched her name or any recent information on her. Then, just as he was putting the picture in his pocket and leaving the bedroom, he stopped. A noise inside the house had grabbed his attention. It sounded like someone had stumbled. Maybe it was in the living room.

He slowly made his way to the living room, though he could not walk that fast. From around the edge of the doorway, he saw someone take something from the bookshelf in the living room and put it in their back pocket. He couldn’t see what it was. The person’s face was masked, his hands were covered with gloves and he wore long, gray sweatpants and long sleeves, Octa thought it was a man. The person’s biceps and triceps were bulging whenever there was a movement.