Desolate Angel

by Chaz McGee

  I left my old house with an unexpected feeling of freedom and a certainty that my time there was done. I would return, I knew, to watch my boys grow into men, but I would not and could not be the one responsible for them. I knew now that someone else would. What I had failed to do, this man would do for me, repairing my inattention, showing them love, shepherding them into adulthood. And he would do a better job than I could ever have done.

  I felt nothing but gratitude toward him.

  As I passed the tree where Danny stood brooding under the branches, still staring at my house, I patted my old partner on the back. He jumped, his reaction dulled by alcohol. A goose had walked over his grave.

  I was both bemused and sad for him. Whatever dreams you had about Connie are gone, my friend, I thought. You have my sympathies.

  Danny had finally had enough. He pulled his coat tightly around him and shivered, then stumbled over the tree roots as he fell back into the sunlight. He marched to his car with the exaggerated posture of a drunk, fooling no one who saw him stagger by. I hitched a ride back to the station with him, exuberant with a freedom I had not expected, ready for something new.

  I discovered a childish joy in examining the backseat, a place where I had often shoved perpetrators or relegated bums but never actually sat myself.

  I found wads of gum parked on torn vinyl, scraps of paper bearing phone numbers, crumpled business cards, initials scratched into plastic. People were funny, I thought. They had a need, somehow, to prove that they had been there. They placed such importance on a cumbersome existence that I now knew was merely one form of many.

  For the first time since my passing, I felt a stirring of joy that I was what I was and that I was where I was. And at that moment, a door opened in my mind. It gave off a light. I tried to cling to my epiphany, but it evaporated.

  And yet, it promised me hope.

  Chapter 6

  My newfound sense of freedom opened the door to emotions I had not realized I still had. Though I’d thought I was beyond such things as infatuation, it felt as if my whole world stopped when I followed Danny into the station house and found myself within a few inches of his new partner. Maggie was sitting at my old desk, scrutinizing a case folder opened before her. She had showered and changed clothes. Her hair was wet and pulled back carelessly in a ponytail. She had been in too much of a hurry to get back to work to bother to dry it.

  Something new infiltrated my existence as I stood near her. At first I did not realize what it was. Then I had it: I could smell again. Maggie smelled of citrus.

  I inhaled the air around her deeply, thinking how fitting it was that she smelled of oranges and sunshine. She did not look as if she had stayed up all night processing a crime scene. She was clean and alert, busily cross-checking items, so absorbed she barely glanced up when Danny sat down beside her.

  “Got held up,” he explained and I heard the old familiar slur in his voice. Had I been like that, that clueless about how I appeared to others? Deluded into thinking that no one would notice what a mess I was?

  “I gathered as much,” she answered, without emotion. I winced. Danny was as dead to her as I was. I felt a stab of sympathy for my old partner.

  “Anything I can do to help?” he asked, as if it were perfectly natural for a nineteen-year veteran to be looking to his younger female partner for the lead.

  “Not until we know who she is.” Maggie took in his disheveled appearance. “You want to head down to Missing Persons and light a fire under their tail? Maybe check the college registrar after that to see if a coed’s gone missing?”

  “Will do,” Danny said, shuffling off. I knew he was relieved to be leaving her. Her refusal to judge him was more awful than contempt might have been. It meant he was not even worth her appraisal.

  I sat in Danny’s chair and watched Maggie work. She had astonishing concentration. After a few minutes staring at the list of evidence that had been collected at the crime scene, she picked up the phone. I knew she was calling the lab. I had done it myself many times, usually because of a lack of inspiration on my end.

  “How long?” she asked into the phone. She looked so disappointed at the answer that I could not bear to simply watch.

  I would help her.

  I made my way through the halls of the law enforcement building, my senses hyperalert. I had gained more than my sense of smell back. Everything around me appeared in ultra-relief. I could see the brushstrokes in the green paint slapped haphazardly on the walls. Every piece of grit on the floor twinkled as if it were diamond dust. And every person that passed, from clerk to perpetrator, exuded a distinct smell that triggered a visual composite consisting of random images from their lives. It was fascinating and horrifying at the same time to read each person who passed me by.

  I learned that Morty, who had walked a beat downtown for twenty-eight years, had discovered loneliness in his advancing years. A crack addict was hauled past by a pair of uniformed officers and I knew at once that he had been scalded with hot water by his mother as a child, the memory now hidden under a callus of near-constant unconsciousness. And my old lieutenant, a man I had thought of as rigid and impenetrable, was in love, but afraid of telling the woman—who worked in the public relations department—for fear of being thought old and foolish. That made me the saddest of all. I wanted to tell him to at least try, before it was too late, but of course he could not see or hear me.

  By the time I reached the laboratory, I felt like an empty vessel that had been filled with the lives of others. I was connected to every person who breathed in that building at that moment, a keeper of their hopes and fears. It left me both stunned and determined.

  I knew I could find a way to get through to Maggie. I knew that she would be the one who could help me set things right.

  I recognized the figure on a stool near the front door of the lab, peering through a microscope. Peggy Calhoun had been perched on that stool for the past twenty-five years. She was many pounds overweight and had long since grown too old for anyone to give her a second glance. Her red hair was obviously dyed, piled high and pinned haphazardly in a bun that listed to one side. Her black glasses had slid down to the tip of her nose and her lipstick was smeared, as always. Danny and I had made fun of Peggy ceaselessly when I was alive, speculating that she lived with a dozen cats and celebrated Christmas alone with a bottle of Ama retto and takeout from Nikko’s. How cruel we were to have rejoiced in someone else’s loneliness when all we had to show for our own sorry lives was an unceasing ability to cause the ones who loved us pain.

  There had been a time, many years ago, when Peggy, in her own clumsy way, had let me know that she had a thing for me and was willing to prove it. But that had been lifetimes ago, for both of us, and I had not considered her offer seriously, knowing even then that she believed me to be far better than I would ever be. I had caused her pain, I could feel it in her still, but I had not caused her that pain out of indifference. Not back then. The truth was I’d been afraid of letting her down by who I really was. Now I realized that her belief in the best of others had been all the reaching out that she could manage in the solitary life she had chosen for herself. And that her belief in the best of me would have been a gift had I been able to accept it. I felt as if I owed her an apology of sorts. But I did not know where to start.

  Instead, I watched her work while a new understanding of her opened before me. Peggy’s real world came alive in her microscope. It was her window to discovering magical landscapes on the most ordinary of surfaces. Peggy not only shunned the wider world, she longed to live among the miniscule wonders of the objects she searched each day. She saw beauty in the rough surfaces she examined for evidence. She saw each grain, each ridge, every imperfection, as evidence of divine creation, proof positive that a greater hand was at work. Perhaps it was this certainty that made it impossible for her to truly be a part of the human race, with all of its folly. And, if so, was it so bad that she had reached out to others only when
the basic needs of her heart made it necessary? She was truer to herself than most. Why had I not seen that before?

  Maybe Peggy could help me.

  After all, she saw beyond the ordinary every day. Maybe she could guide Maggie toward reopening the Alissa Hayes case. I knew all Maggie had to do was glance at the file and she would instantly see the connections between the two murders—though she’d have nothing but contempt for Danny once she realized he had either chosen to stay silent about the connection or, worse, not seen the similarities at all.

  Evidence bags from last night’s crime scene were stored in a cardboard box on the counter by Peggy’s elbow. She was funneling them to the proper specialist for examination. She had placed three small bags to her left, awaiting her own scrutiny, and had processed nearly a dozen more, separating them into piles for further analysis. I stared at the bags, searching my memory, trying to identify something among the evidence that would make it obvious that this latest murder was connected to Alissa Hayes. I remembered so little beyond the initial crime scene.

  Why had I not paid more attention when I was alive?

  What had we nailed Alissa’s boyfriend on? It would have been something obvious as Danny and I had been incapable of spotting more. Bobby Daniels had been a student, just like Alissa. He’d also been a real Poindexter, neat and clean in his pressed jeans and starched flannel shirts and shiny work boots. Who the hell starched their flannel shirts? His hair was clipped short and his little glasses had sat on his nose so precisely that I had loathed him on sight. It was as if his very being was there to mock my own sloppiness, to make it more obvious that I clawed through each day barely managing to hold it together.

  I had let my self-loathing and dislike of him interfere with my judgment. That had been the first step I took down the wrong path. Where had it led me?

  I remembered a little more. He had been a geology major and classmate of Alissa’s. That was how they had met. When we first tied the crime to him, it was simply because it was an easy connection. There had been fingerprints on her belongings found at the scene, plus his hair and fibers from his hiking jacket were found on her body—though that could have been explained by their relationship had he bothered to try. His DNA, too, was present, but the boy had not denied that the two of them had slept together the night before Alissa’s death. What other evidence was there? I tried to remember more.

  Maybe a look at the evidence from the new murder would help. I moved closer to the box and Peggy looked up abruptly, as if sensing me there. I froze, but she returned to her microscope. That was when I saw it. A plastic bag of sandy granules collected from underneath the dead girl’s foot, a glittering mixture of fine grains that did not belong at the scene. Maggie had discovered the substance and directed the techs to bring the grains back to the lab.

  Similar granules had been on the few items of clothing found at the Alissa Hayes crime scene. I knew it with certainty. I just needed Peggy to realize it.

  “Detective Gunn,” Peggy said, looking up at the doorway.

  Maggie Gunn? Her name was Maggie Gunn. It was so perfect for her.

  She entered the lab with a smile. “Hey, Peggy. How’s Mr. Whiskers?”

  “Better. Antibiotics helped.”

  “How does one give a mouse antibiotics anyway?”

  “Very, very carefully.”

  As the two women laughed, I joined in their delight. Of course—Peggy raised mice, not cats. Cats would be too big. Mice would be just right for her, with the perfection of their precise whiskers and tiny paws.

  People, too, were fascinating, I realized, so perfect in their own way.

  “How’s your dad doing?” Peggy asked.

  Already they had exchanged more personal information than Peggy and I had exchanged in twenty years of working together.

  “Okay. It’s hard on him,” Maggie said. “They were married a long time.”

  “I know. Did you know I was sitting at a table next to them the night they had their first date?”

  Maggie seemed surprised. “You’re kidding!”

  Peggy’s eye twinkled. “Sal’s. Far right corner. Your mother ordered linguine with clam sauce. Your father had veal chops. Neither one of them saw anyone else in the restaurant but each other. I knew your father from his beat, and I knew your mother from the beauty shop. But most of all—I knew they’d be together from that night on. You could just see it.”

  Maggie pulled up a stool and sat. “You never told me that.”

  “It was one of the most romantic moments of my life,” Peggy admitted, and then, she had the great, good grace to laugh at herself.

  As the women laughed together, I was filled with the knowledge that all people were connected by a great web of comings and goings, moments of passing through each other’s life, moments of touching one person, who then touched another, and on and on through the years, an ongoing, never-ending river. I could have been a part of it, if only I had been able to see beyond my own miserable shell. My ripples could have mattered. I could have been a part.

  “Find anything good?” Maggie asked.

  Peggy shook her head. “Got a name for the victim?”

  “Not yet. Danny’s with Missing Persons. Maybe he’ll get a hit.”

  Peggy glanced at her, not saying anything.

  “He can’t do any harm down there,” Maggie said in his defense. “After that, he’s heading over to the college to see if anyone’s been reported missing.”

  They were silent until Maggie asked, quietly, “Was he always like that? So . . . disheveled and sad?”

  “Oh, no,” Peggy said. “Not always. He and Kevin were a real pair when they came out of the academy. Full of themselves. Cocky like every single other person who came through there back then. And they were something else to look at. Good-looking. Smart. Both of them. They were quite the pair. The women clerks would fight to be the one to help them.” She looked around for a moment, then focused her attention on a small shelf tucked in the darkness underneath her computer keyboard. “Let me show you something.” She rummaged behind some stacks of phone books and technical manuals, then produced an old framed photograph of Danny and me, before the bottle got us both. Dust covered its surface. She used a chamois cloth to wipe the photo clean. “Take a look. You’ll see what I mean.”

  Maggie took the photo from her and brought it into the light. It was like being scalded, knowing that her incredible scrutiny was now focused on me. “God, Danny is like, what, half his size? And he has all of his hair.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “What’s with the rifles and hunting vests?”

  “They helped track down a triple-homicide suspect who got loose in Ronkonkoma State Park and was terrifying the local campers.”

  “That’s not what I think it is, is it?”

  “It is.” Peggy laughed, but Maggie looked horrified and I knew then what photograph Peggy had given her. Five years into the job, Danny and I had helped bring down a true psychopath. Well, we had helped flush him out of the woods and then hung out along the edges while the real snipers brought him down with a shot to his left calf. After he had been handcuffed and bound by the ankles, Danny and I had had the bad taste to pose above him, guns held aloft, my booted foot hovering an inch above his torso, as if he was a deer we had just brought down. It had become a famous photo in the department, or an infamous one, depending on your reaction to it. I’d stopped looking at it a good ten years ago, unable to decide what made me more ashamed: that I had ever been so cocky or that I had long since stopped having any reason to be cocky at all.

  “You had to know the two of them to understand that photo,” Peggy said. “Things were different back then.”

  “I guess so.” Maggie sounded distracted. She was staring intently at my image and my body felt as if it were filling with embers. I glowed with the knowledge that she was thinking of me.

  “Not bad, eh?”

  Maggie smiled. “Not bad at all. Just my type.”
She looked up at Peggy. “Tall, dark, and handsome. And full of himself.”

  Peggy’s face turned suddenly sad. “He could have been a legend,” she said more softly.

  “What happened?” Maggie asked, still staring at my photo.

  “Life.” Peggy started to return the photo to its hiding place at the back of the shelf, but stopped. “Life happened. Here—you take the photo.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes,” Peggy decided. “I think he would have wanted you to have it.”

  Maggie looked puzzled, but took the photograph anyway. “Thanks. I find it, well, I guess strangely compelling.”

  “He had that effect on people. For a while. But I think the job got to him. That happens to some people. They just aren’t equipped. You see so many terrible things. The things people do to one another.”

  Maggie thought about that without comment and I felt her attention slipping away from me. I wanted to jump in her face, to scream that I was there, to prove that I was still worthy of her notice, if only as a fleeting thought.

  I didn’t matter to her. “Nothing unusual?” she asked Peggy, who had turned back to the comfort of her microscope. Their minds were back on the case.

  Peggy shook her head. The rhinestone chain that clipped her glasses to her collar danced in the light, reminding me of the tiny crystals that linked the two murder cases.

  I had to move now. The box sat between them on the counter. It didn’t weigh more than a couple of pounds, but I had never moved a physical object in my present state before. I didn’t even know if I could.

  I stationed myself on the far side of the counter, reached over, and pushed. The box did not move. I could feel it, the cardboard walls had substance, but my pushing produced no resistance. I closed my eyes and concentrated, begging anyone and anything that might be there to help me, to give me the power to make the box move.

  Nothing.

  I thought of all I had failed to do in my life, all I had not even tried to do. I thought of Alissa Hayes, wandering the earth, appearing to me, asking me for my help, and of her boyfriend, who sat alone in a prison cell somewhere, having lost the woman he loved and then his life as he knew it. I thought of the young girl whose body had been dumped in the weeds and the old man who had knelt next to her, praying while his little dog waited obediently.