Desolate Angel

by Chaz McGee

  Alissa Hayes.

  An almost electric shock ran through me as a wave of fear pulled me deep into the river of blackness. Alissa Hayes had been one of my rare successes in the last years of my fading career. One of the few cases I had actually solved.

  Why was she here now, with me?

  “Alissa,” I whispered.

  She turned back to me, examining my face with an intensity I could not read. Then she took my hand and I actually felt her touch, the first physical sensation I’d had in months. Her hand wasn’t quite tangible, it was cold and without true substance, but it was undeniably there.

  She pulled me forward and I followed as she led me, her hand in my hand, through yards and woods, parks and thoroughfares, fences and ponds. Barriers that stopped the living were nothing at all to us, for Alissa, too, had moved beyond the physical world. I knew because I had seen her sprawled among the weeds, body broken and drained of blood. I had seen her displayed on the cold steel of the coroner’s table, body reduced to meat. And I had been at her funeral, scanning the rows of the mourners with my partner, halfheartedly hoping that her killer might be discovered among them, thus granting us a rare victory.

  And, indeed, we had solved her murder within a week.

  So why was she here with me, now?

  I had not failed her, not like I had failed the others. What could she want from me?

  I kept following her, unwilling to relinquish the touch of another. Within minutes, without ever seeming to hurry, we were miles away, just beyond the small college whose campus encircled the north end of my town. We passed a pile of boulders and made our way up a hill that crowned the northern half of the county. It overlooked an abandoned canyon gouged into existence a hundred years before by quarrymen seeking granite. She led me still further up the hill, to a deserted field several hundred yards below the crest. A thick tangle of bushes gave way to forest above it. Few people ventured beyond the field.

  I saw why we had come.

  There, discarded among the weeds, a young woman was sprawled faceup, still and naked. Her slender body was as pale as bone in the moonlight; her delicate face bruised by both man and shadow. Her long brown hair had been arranged around her head in thick strands so that it flowed through the grass like seaweed undulating in a current. One of her arms was outstretched, as if in supplication, but her blue eyes were lifeless, reflecting the moon above her with a dull patina. The lower half of her body curved gracefully in a single arc, the feet bound together by a rope of twisted weeds, as if she were a mermaid caught in dry dock, left behind when the seas receded.

  The air about the body was thick with a miasma I had never felt before, not in life and not in death. Whatever beauty had prevailed in this hidden spot was gone—and something ugly lived in its place.

  Alissa and I stood staring down at the body. Welts had been cut into the pale skin of the young woman’s stomach and thighs, as parallel and precise as gills. Alissa did not need to tell me what I now knew: I had been wrong about her death. I had been wrong about her killer. I had failed Alissa Hayes, after all. I had failed the young man in jail for her murder, too. And I had failed the brown-haired girl sprawled in the weeds before me.

  Chapter 3

  I stood by the body as night deepened. Alissa had disappeared, but I was unwilling to leave the dead girl alone. I could feel no sense of her spirit, only the presence of a lingering evil that hovered over the clearing, its power so tangible it was almost as if it murmured to me, daring me to listen more closely. But I was not cowed. An unexpected power had filled me as I stood watch, a certainty that I had not been brought here to regret. I had been brought here to atone. I don’t know what sent me the knowledge, or why it chose that moment to come into being, but a faith flowed through me as I stood watch in the night. I knew that I was supposed to be there. I knew that I had been called upon to bear witness to this cruelty for reasons I did not yet know. And I knew what I had to do next.

  Alissa had led me here for the living, not for the dead girl sprawled before me. She had led me here because the man she had once loved was in prison for her murder while her real killer roamed free, still killing. The body before me was proof. My job was to stop him. I was dead, but I was still a detective. I had found my quest at last.

  I would begin with what had happened to Alissa and the connections between her death and the one before me now. The death scenes were identical. I remembered it all with a vividness that my dispirited vision had missed the first time around: Alissa’s hair displayed in the grass, the broken body presented to the elements as if it were an offering, the curve of the legs, an arm outstretched and beseeching, the rows of precise slits in the flesh, deliberate decorations of torture, like runes designed to bring forth evil spirits.

  Seeing the crime repeated so precisely before me, I finally understood the power of human need. Both bodies had been arranged according to a desperate vision, the dump sites staged so some dark, unimaginable compulsion could play out to its end.

  These were not crimes of passion, I realized. That had been my first mistake. These were crimes of privation, fed over time, triggered by an insatiable need that incubated slowly, nurtured by a conflation of despair and dispossession. Whoever had killed these young women treasured his need to torture as others treasured their gold. He reveled in his need to maim and kill.

  The sudden clarity of my wisdom was breathtaking. I knew it all with a certainty: it would take unspeakable cruelty to create a human being capable of such evil. If I had understood that when I was alive, when Alissa was murdered, I’d have known that the man I put in prison for her death could never have reached such a point, would never have felt such a need.

  I would have known he was the wrong man.

  But what could I do about it now? There was little I could do but wait until the body was discovered.

  The night passed and a new day dawned, the miracle of it unnoticed by most of the living. Alissa reappeared with the light and waited with me, the dead watching over the dead. She was either unwilling or uninspired to communicate with me and I felt no need to change that. She had played her part. She had brought me here. The rest was up to me.

  Humans came and went in the distance as we stood watch in the clearing, keeping the dead girl company. The morning progressed and students hurried along the brick path far below us, unaware of the struggle between life and death that had been fought—and lost—so close to their own lives. It could have been any of them.

  I wondered where the dead girl’s essence had gone, why she did not join us in keeping watch, whether she was trapped as I was, on some plane that was neither here nor there. Or had she gone beyond me already, leaving me behind, and would I ever know?

  There was little for me to do except to ponder the role I’d had in the young woman’s death. I thought of the unalterable chain that led from my own indifference as a detective to an innocent man sitting in a prison cell, doing time for a murder he had not committed, while the real killer continued to kill.

  If I had known how a single action could trigger a lifetime of consequences, how it could change other lives profoundly and forever, I would have been more careful when I was alive. I would have lived more deliberately. I would have banished my regrets and robbed them of their power. I would have been more of a man.

  I thought of Bobby Daniels, the young man I’d put in prison for Alissa’s murder. What would it be like to be confined to a room barely larger than a coffin, breathing air thick with hatred spewed from others—others who had killed, maimed, and tortured, poisoning their very humanity—when you knew you had done nothing to be among them?

  How could you hold on to your will to live in a world that allowed that to happen? How could you?

  I’d never pondered such things before, never given another human being that much thought. But now I could think of nothing else. What had I done? I had taken away a life as surely as some unknown monster had taken the life of the girl sprawled before me.


  Bobby Daniels had been Alissa’s boyfriend at the time of her death—and easy to convict. He’d done nothing to protect himself against the probing, the theories, the accusations, the patched-together shreds of physical evidence that bound him to Alissa’s death. We had thrown theory after theory at him, imagined scenarios leading to more scenarios—all of them culminating in Alissa’s violent death. And Bobby Daniels had never once fought back. He’d accepted it all with a numb indifference.

  I understood now that, perhaps, he had simply lacked the will to defend himself against the horror that had claimed him without warning. I understood that my self-absorbed heart had blinded me to the pain that other hearts could feel. That Bobby Daniels had been too consumed mourning the loss of Alissa to have noticed what was happening to him.

  And I had set this injustice in motion.

  The day faded. As the sun started its descent, its light thinned to a pale rose streaked with fingers of gold, an old man in a Burberry raincoat approached through this splendor, laboring up the hill with a sandy-colored dog. The dog was the first to find the dead girl. At first, I thought the creature was barking at me. I had learned soon after my death, while passing by my wife’s cat, that some animals could see me, or at least sense me, and that they sometimes reacted to my presence. Kitzy had hissed at me relentlessly for weeks after my death, and at last, I had returned the favor, taunting her until she rose in a fury of arched back and spitting, a display that earned her a pillow thrown across the room by my unknowing wife. Oh, I had enjoyed that battle many times before the cat had learned to accept me with the same disdain she’d bestowed upon me during my life. I rather missed our feuds once they were gone.

  But no, this was not the case now. The little dog ignored me completely. He pulled the leash from the old man’s hands and darted past me to the edge of the clearing. There, he dropped to his belly and crawled to the side of the girl’s body, whimpering for his master to hurry.

  The old man pushed through the bushes and discovered the dead girl just as the last rays of afternoon light bathed the clearing in gold, rendering her an offering to the gods. The old man grew still at the sight before him. I could feel his whole being grow heavy with the knowledge that such evil existed.

  The old man had been a good man during his many years. I could feel that coming from him, too. He was not equipped for what he saw. I knew this because something astonishing was happening to me, perhaps triggered by my newfound feeling of purpose: memories of the old man’s life unfolded in my mind, as if I were him and he were me. I knew in an instant who he had been and what had mattered to him. I saw a brown-haired woman walking along a beach, beckoning toward him to walk by her side. I saw laughing children running into his open arms, gleeful in the knowledge that they were well loved. I felt his sorrow as a loved one slipped away too young, her face pale against a hospital bed. I saw loyal friends, relatives spanning the generations, dinners filled with conversation and laughter, rooms crammed with books, children growing into adults, more nights, more rooms, more children, more laughter, and always, the man’s grateful presence moving among it all, forming the bond that held his life together. He understood that he was the center of his universe, no one else, and he was grateful for what he had.

  But I also knew that it was this life that had led the old man to this moment in it—and that he would never completely shed the sorrow he now felt. The world was not as he had hoped and the evidence was vividly before him.

  Sadness infiltrated his body, filling him with an anguish that only human beings can feel. I was overcome with compassion for the innocence he had lost. Yet I also envied him his grief, for it was proof that he was among the living. And proof that I was not.

  The old man collected himself, then pulled his whining dog away, commanding him to be silent. The little beast complied, lying down with his snoot balanced on obedient front paws, waiting as his master knelt at the edge of the clearing and prayed for the dead girl.

  I do not think he knew the young woman. I felt no connection between them, and yet, as he prayed, I was overcome with gratitude that this good man had been the one to find her. For I felt the evil that lingered around her body dissipate as his love for a stranger filled the air around us. I trembled at its power, humbled by my loss of that power, longing to feel it within me even as I understood that I had long ago surrendered my right to it.

  Slowly, as the evil about the girl lifted, twilight descended over her with the gentleness of falling snow.

  Done, the old man struggled to his feet and pulled a cell phone from his pocket. His voice was sad as he explained what he had found to the emergency operator, but his resolve was strong. No, he said firmly, he understood completely. Of course he would not leave until the police arrived.

  He would not leave the poor girl alone.

  Chapter 4

  Emergency vehicles gathered in the street below as paramedics and officers hurried up the hill. I moved into the shadows, though I knew they could not see me. I watched as my old partner, Danny, came huffing up the final stretch, his face red from exertion.

  Danny Bonaventura. He had been the last person to see me alive, but I did not remember anything about my death except his face looming over mine. Unlike earlier memories, the final moments of that night remained a mystery. I remembered only that Danny and I had gone to the row house to interrupt a drug buy involving a murder suspect. I remembered that Danny had been tipped at the last minute and we had rushed there without backup, against regulations, hoping to nail a man we knew was responsible for seven deaths. My desire to apprehend him had been real. I was never callous, even in my last, most shameful days. I still clung to the thought that I was one of the good guys. That night, I’d figured I might get lucky and do some good, without a whole lot of effort, maybe even in time to stop off for a drink afterward.

  Instead, I had died. My life had simply—and suddenly—ended. I still did not understand how.

  I’d been drunk, of course, deep in the alcoholic fog of my life, my judgment perpetually impaired and my desire to stay in that fog overwhelming all other priorities. But I was not convinced my drunkenness had been a factor in my death. Why could I not remember?

  I remembered a chilly darkness in the room. I remembered the scuttling of rats across the linoleum floor as they made their way through the garbage that drug users leave behind: stained mattresses scavenged from the streets, old needles, cheap wine bottles, used condoms, candy wrappers. I remembered the smell of the alcove where I waited. It reeked of urine and mold and the whiskey sweat that rose from my skin. I also remembered the whisper of Danny’s voice next to me and his familiar, bourbon-soaked breath. But then I remembered nothing, except for Danny bending over me, his nose swollen from years of drinking, his sparse ginger-colored hair gleaming with sweat and grease. After that, my old life had faded, pulling in like the aperture of a camera closing on a brightly lit scene, leaving no room for details.

  To have lived my life as a drunk was bad enough, but to have died as a drunk as well? What a waste. I had missed even that most pathetic of endings.

  I could remember nothing more until I’d found myself standing, unseen, at the back of a room, observing my own funeral, knowing, somehow, that I was dead. It was a real Tom Sawyer moment, if Tom Sawyer had lived in Hell.

  There was Connie, sitting rigid, her face reflecting her inability to understand what she was truly feeling. Relief, I suspected, just as I suspected that the only real sorrow she might feel was for my sons, who sat on either side of her, solemn and confused.

  As each person who had been tapped for the job of eulogizing my sorry ass rose to remember me, the blatant untruth of their words hit me with a cruel clarity. These were the people I was supposed to have loved, but I had not loved them enough. And, yet, they could not face up to my failure to do so. They chose to remember a different reality. It was a bitter pill to be redeemed by their generosity. A state beyond sobriety had come to me in death and I no longer possessed
the comfort of illusions. I saw them not as my loved ones, but as a parade of the betrayed. And I heard every word they spoke not as a tribute, but as a rebuke for what I had failed to do. I wanted to die as I listened. But that comfort, too, had been taken from me. I was already dead.

  I had blown it all, even my own death. And my partner Danny had been a partner in that final failure. That the last thing I’d seen in life was his face seemed a travesty to me. He had appreciated life far less than I had—why should he now get to symbolize it for me?

  But as I watched him struggle up the hill, I was beginning to understand that we neither choose nor deserve our path in life. That the best we can do is to keep going through the days that open up before us. My path had led me to my death, a death forever tied to Danny, and now Danny’s path was leading him here, to this clearing filled with yet more death.

  I wondered if Danny was losing it completely. He wore no tie and his badge dangled carelessly from the stained lapel of a too-tight navy jacket. His breath was little more than ragged gusts as he rested after laboring up the hill. The paramedics passed him easily, though he’d had a head start: they were not necessarily younger, not all of them, but they were clearly far more fit.

  Not that haste yielded them any benefit. The paramedics saw at once that their presence at the scene was useless. They turned back and acquiesced to those whose job it was to help the dead.

  Helping the dead. That had been my job once and I had failed at it. To now be an observer, to have the luxury of sobriety and an undefined understanding of the people who moved before me made this death scene seem completely new, though I had been at dozens such scenes while alive. I sat on a log and balanced my chin on my hands, like a spectator in the front row of a theater, watching my old coworkers move about.