Sacrifice by Wrath James White Page A

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