And now we sing, responsively:
(Angels at the altar)
Glory God, Glory God, Glory God
Without you, we do not rise
Without you, we do not fly
(Congregation)
Glory God, Glory God, Glory God
We pray for wings
Your grace, your love, your Supreme knowledge.
We pray to get nearer and nearer to thee, through every realm
For we are your chosen, and we choose thee.
(Angels at the altar)
Cantara, cantra, Velpay,
In the language of Angels
We are with thee, Glory God, Glory God, Glory God
Protecting the floating ship of Taurara.
For we are your angels, and we understand our mission
Page 118
Rules of Angels Rising. Follow or thou shall perish.
That ought to make some light reading for another night. For now, Mills closes the book to an unnerving quiet in the house. It’s stiller than still, as if there’s a prowler padding around the perimeter. Or a death. He immediately thinks of Kelly, and the image of her lifeless body drowned in the tub propels him from the couch. Her face will be purple. Her body will be blue. She will have slipped away. He’s breathing heavy, aiming for the master bath. But before he gets there he finds her in their bed. He feels like a dunce. She’d already crawled into bed and she’s fast asleep. He crawls in beside her and checks her breath anyway.
20
The book is doing somersaults in his head. He can’t get his mind off it. He’s fascinated, but he doesn’t understand a word of it. Maybe that’s why he’s fascinated. Whatever it is, he’s so intrigued he’s brought the book with him to the office. He keeps trying to take a peek at it, but he keeps getting interrupted, like right now by Morton Myers who comes busting in his office.
“Am I disturbing you, Alex?”
“No. I’d ask you to come in, but apparently you’ve read my mind.” “Sorry. Whatcha reading?”
“Scripture from the Church of Angels Rising.”
“Any good?”
Mills laughs. “Oh yeah. It’s a page turner.”
“No, really. Is it, like, a real religion?”
Mills hyperbolizes a shrug. “What’s a real religion?”
“You know, a major one. Like Christianity or Jewishness.”
“I think they call it Judaism.”
Myers sits. “I probably just had too much coffee this morning,” he says. “What I meant was does the scripture sound like a real religion, you know, like something from the Bible?”
Mills shakes his head. “I don’t know, Morty. Who’s to say what a real religion is? If you read parts of the Bible, some of that stuff sounds as far out as the scripture from Norwood’s church, maybe even more so. Maybe religion is just a state of mind.”
“Oh, man. You’re not thinking of signing up?”
“For what?”
“Norwood’s church . . .”
Mills does backflips with his eyes. “Of course not, dumbass,” he says. “Now are you here to discuss theology, or is there another reason for your visit?”
“More breaking news from Viveca Canning’s cyber footprint,” Myers replies. “Listen to this little morsel of information: I discovered a receipt for a one-way ticket for Viveca Canning to fly to P-A-P-E-E-T-E. I don’t know how to say it, but I Googled it, and it’s the airport city in Tahiti and the capital of French Polynesia.”
“I don’t know how to say it either,” Mills tells him. “But that’s good work.”
“She was scheduled to leave in three weeks.”
“Vacation probably.”
“Maybe. But don’t forget the calls from her phone records. She’d been calling a real estate developer in French Polynesia. And maybe you didn’t hear me, but it was a one-way ticket.”
“I heard you. Maybe she was actually moving to P-A-P-E-E-T-E.” “Bingo,” Myers says, like he really means it.
His phone rings. It’s the switchboard. He puts a hand up to Morty and takes the call. “Mills . . .”
“Can you take a call from Scottsdale PD?”
“What’s it about?”
“Something about a break-in . . .”
A break-in? Why the fuck would they be calling homicide? But as a courtesy he says, “Yeah,” and the operator puts the call through. The caller identifies herself as Lieutenant Liv Chang.
“Thought this might interest you, Detective,” she says.
“I’m all ears, ma’am.”
“I was working a break-in last night at a gallery here in town. Carmichael and Finn. The owner says you guys were just out here asking questions about a corpse.”
“You mean the Viveca Canning case?”
“Right,” the woman replies. “The gallery owner showed me your card. I’m headed back over there now if you want to swing by.”
“Uh, yeah! I absolutely want to swing by,” Mills says. “Thanks, Lieutenant. I appreciate the call.”
“No problem, brother. But just so you know, there’s not much to see. Broken storefront. Nothing was taken.”
Mills tells her he’ll take his chances and hangs up. “Look, Morty, can we pick up on this Tahiti stuff later? Aside from the spelling bee, it sounds romantic, but I gotta go.”
A deflated Morton Myers turns on his heels and leaves. Mills follows immediately, texting Preston to meet him in the parking lot.
“I’m right here,” Preston says, his head rising above his cubicle.
“Great. Let’s go.”
Gus waits inside the air-conditioned vestibule. In the distance he sees the broil of the day, the way the tendrils of heat rise, layer by layer, across the valley. The air wrinkles in the gust, and the billowing heat, clouds of it, builds an invisible prison. He hears someone say the planes are grounded. He hears another person say, “They can’t take off in this heat.” And he remembers hearing something like that on the news. A guy in a mechanic uniform weighs in and says the heat doesn’t affect arriving flights. And the two others are relieved. They say as much. So is Gus. He’s waiting for Billie. He didn’t realize how much he missed her until he stands here waiting. Sure, he missed her. But here, the anticipation of her strips him naked, gets all the other distractions out of the way. It’s a tangible thing, not an ephemeral notion. He feels her, feels the absence of her. He smells her, smells her absence. And the touch.
She chartered a jet out of Burbank and is due here at Sky Harbor in minutes. He watches the sky. He can easily tell the private jets from the big commercial ones. An older woman with a fedora and diamonds galore is waiting in the same vestibule. Is she waiting out the heat to board her Gulfstream for her weekend in Cabo, or is she waiting for her Gulfstream to courier her boytoy from LA for an erotic weekend in Phoenix? She’s seventy-five, if not older. Gus realizes he’s been staring too long when the woman curls her lips into a lascivious smile and winks. She’s 75 Shades of Gray. He turns to the window again and notices a small, private jet taxiing to a space on the tarmac. He just knows it’s Billie. Not a psychic thing. Maybe a psychic thing. It’s bubbling in his blood. The aircraft door opens upward and outward before lowering a set of stairs to the ground. Nobody exits. He can’t take it. It’s his crazy heart, in love, unsure, wild, confused, hopeful, tortured. Finally, the pilot pokes his head out, then makes way for a burst of black lace caught up in the wind. It can be no other than Billie Welch. She hovers at the first step while she lowers her sunglasses against the blazing sky. There she is, curling her pup, Glinda, into her arm as she hoists her enormous shoulder bag into place. Gus watches her approach the ramp to the doorway. He watches her notice him and he sees the feisty grin appear on her face when she does. She quickens her pace. She comes in gushing, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” Half singing, half laughing. She’s entirely crazy. She says she has to pee. “That lavatory on the plane was so small, I could barely fit all my hair in there.”
“You have a
lot of hair.”
“Do you think there’s a restroom in the terminal?”
“Over there,” he says, pointing around a corner.
“Do you mind?”
“Who am I to stand between a woman’s bladder and the ladies room?”
She drops Glinda on the floor and hands Gus the leash. She’s gone in a flourish and returns with a little less drama. “I’m good,” she says. “Shall we?”
It’s only a twenty-minute ride or so to Paradise Valley, but Billie yawns sweetly and nods off on Gus’s arm. He drives her to the Desert Charm, her favorite hideaway while she’s in Phoenix. After they’re checked into the bungalow, she orders lunch for them and asks room service to bring an “abundance of coffee.”
“Why don’t you take a nap?” Gus asks her. “If I know you, you’re going to stay up all night and work anyway . . .”
“Because,” she says, curling an arm around his, “I want to be awake now. For you. Come on.”
She escorts him out to the private courtyard. “I took the day off,” he tells her.
“I know. But I hope you don’t mind if Miranda stops by later just to say hello.”
Miranda is Billie’s younger sister who lives in Scottsdale.
“No problem,” Gus tells her. They sit side-by-side holding hands.
“I’m going back out on the road,” she says.
He doesn’t respond right away. There’s something about her that feels autonomous. And sometimes all it takes is seven words. It’s nothing new. She’s not aware. She’s means no harm. She lives in a different world. “Wow,” he says finally. “What prompted that?”
“I got a great offer to do a bunch of concerts in Australia and New Zealand,” she says. “I didn’t go there on my last tour, which was a miss because I have a really big fan base in both countries. And I absolutely love it there.”
“I know you do.”
“Wanna come?” she asks, squeezing his hand.
“For how long?”
“Three weeks.”
He turns to her. “I just can’t up and leave for three weeks.”
“So just come for the first week.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Not for another month,” she says. “They’re still working on the contracts.”
There’s a knock on the door. It’s room service. She has ordered a spread of fruit and a massive chef’s salad for the two of them. The waiter reveals the last plate under the silver cover; it’s some kind of torte in three shades of chocolate. Billie looks at Gus mischievously. He gives the waiter a healthy tip and sends him on the way. They’re about five minutes into chowing down without coming up for air or words when Gus thinks, what the hell, and says, “You came in the terminal this afternoon singing, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’”
“So?”
“So, where’s the ‘I love you’ in ‘I’m going back on the road’?” “Oh.”
“Oh?”
“Well, come on. You know me better by now. I don’t mean anything by it.”
“By ‘I love you’?”
She kicks him under the table. “No. Not by that,” she says with a growl. “You know I don’t mean anything by making the leap from one thing to the next. You know how my brain works.”
“Right.”
“Meanwhile, did you say you love me too?” she asks him.
“Oh.”
“Oh?”
“Touché, Ms. Welch,” he says impishly. “But you said it with such gusto. You said it three times. I guess my brain must have perceived that you said it enough for both of us.”
“Lame,” she says with a throaty laugh. “That is so fucking lame.” Maybe it is. They eye each other with a knowing smile. But there seems to be an unknowing smile just below the surface. They continue to graze the salad tentatively. And as they do, Gus tries to shoo away the doubts grazing at the edges of his intuition.
Scottsdale police have blocked off the area around the Carmichael and Finn Gallery, almost two blocks in each direction. Mills thinks that’s excessive until he sees the bomb squad truck wedged into the alley beside the building. He and Preston flash their badges when they reach the yellow tape. Mills asks a Scottsdale cop for Lieutenant Liv Chang. The cop relays the information into his radio. In less than a minute Lieutenant Chang appears. What she lacks in height (she barely comes up to Mills’s shoulder), she makes up for in intensity.
“Call me Liv,” she says, shaking their hands with the clamping force of a vise. “I’ll take you inside.”
They follow her aggressive footsteps into the gallery. Mills recognizes the place, of course; nothing has changed since his first visit except for a smashed window out front, and half the door is missing.
“Brazen,” Preston says.
Liv chuckles, her spastic body still in motion. They follow her back into the gallery’s restricted area, into the maze of hallways that lead to Viveca Canning’s vault. “We think your victim’s vault was the target.”
“Nothing was taken from the gallery itself?” Mills asks.
“Nothing. According to the owners,” Liv says.
Mills is almost sure he spotted Jacqueline Carmichael out of the corner of his eye. She’s hard to miss with that fortress of hair on her head. “All this expensive art and nothing taken,” he muses.
“Which is why we believe that the perp or perps were after the Canning vault alone,” Liv says.
Mills stares at the vault with his arms folded. Preston is noting the injuries to the door. “This place is obviously alarmed,” Mills says.
“They disabled the first layer of protection,” the lieutenant says. “That is, the local alarm here in the gallery that would have set bells and sirens off at the time of entry. Most of these galleries have secondary, silent alarms that go right to the police station.”
“And these idiots thought they got in here without tripping any alarms at all,” Preston says. He’s kneeling on the ground examining the sliver of space under the door.
“Our sirens scared them off though,” Liv tells them. “They obviously heard the sirens in the distance and snuck out the back door before we got on scene.”
Mills shakes his head. “But one thing doesn’t make sense. How’d they think they’d get into the vault so quickly? Did they think there’d just be a key hanging in the office? I mean, there are two locked doors, password protected, that they’d have to get through. There isn’t even a lock to pick.”
“It’s pretty clear they had explosives,” Liv says. “Not powerful ones. But the bomb squad has disarmed everything.”
She leads them both to the end of the hallway. They stop just short of the back foyer, where bomb squad technicians are meticulously examining two brown paper bags and the tangled metal coils sprouting from their tops. On the floor lay a few long, thin cylinders, apparently detached from the coils. “Pipe bombs,” Mills says. “This looks like someone had a serious mission.”
Liv Chang laughs. “This shit couldn’t blow up a cereal box.”
“What do you mean?” Mills asks her.
“From what these guys are telling me, only one of the tubes shows signs of an explosive,” she explains. “The perps were either in a hurry, underestimated what it would take to do the job, didn’t understand the strength of the vaults, or were just plain stupid.”
“I think we’ve already established they were idiots,” Mills reminds her.
“I have a few other things to check on,” she says. “Feel free to hang out.”
“But how did the explosives get back here? These hallways are all locked. You can’t access them from the gallery without a key, without codes.”
She offers a wince. “Seems like they pistol-whipped the security guard on duty,” she says. “Made him open the doors. We got a statement from him. I’ll get it to you.”
“What about prints? Any other forensics? Can you share when you’re done?”
She smiles at him. But even the smile is quick, compact, intens
e, and gone in a split second. “Of course. Anything you need. Happy to help.”
She’s already halfway down the hallway. Mills and Preston drift back toward Viveca Canning’s vault. “I guess they planned to wire up the door or something . . .”
“Or just set the explosive by the door,” Preston says. “Obviously not sophisticated.”
“No. In fact, the lack of sophistication stuns me,” Mills says. “A real art thief is not going to break a storefront window. A real art thief doesn’t plan to fail because a real art thief doesn’t get a second chance. You know?”
Preston nods. “Yeah. Something ain’t right here.”
“You mind if I go find the braided bun who goes by the name Jacqueline Carmichael?”
“Not at all. I’ll go review a few things with Scottsdale,” Preston tells him. “And if you want, I can follow up with Chang. Not just here, but until her investigation’s over.”
Mills tilts his head, takes in his colleague from an angle. “I think she’s half your age, Ken.”
The guy scoffs. “Please, Mills. What do you know? She couldn’t be much younger than thirty-five . . .”
“My math was in the ballpark. Have fun,” Mills says as he backs away.
Jacqueline Carmichael is not in the exhibit rooms as Mills had hoped. He checks her office but finds it empty. His next stop is the reception desk, where he’s met by Carmichael’s assistant. Her face a bloom of hope, she says, “Jacqueline’s stepped outside. Come with me. I’ll take you to her.”
The oven heat nearly knocks him over when he walks out the front door. The assistant points. Jacqueline is at the far corner of the building, clutching something in her hand. “Hi,” Mills says when he reaches the corner. She turns. Her immediate reaction is fear in one eye, dread in the other, WTF all over the rest of her face. Not a receptive expression, but who gives a fuck anyway. It’s hot. Crazy hot. Sweat-down-your-crack hot.
She’s jabbering on the phone. She holds up her “one-minute” finger which, Mills notes, is happily not her middle one. He waits for the minute to pass, and then for another, and a couple more after that until she finally hangs up and says, “I’m sorry, Detective.”
Valley of Shadows Page 18