Desolate Angel

by Chaz McGee

  That, I thought, made her a very dangerous opponent to whoever had taken the lives of Victoria Meeks and Alissa Hayes. Maggie knew her weaknesses and she had learned how to use them. I was filled with an inexplicable pride that she had taken on the task of bringing the dead justice and would not rest until it was done. Maggie would do what I had not done.

  After a while, Maggie murmured her regrets, promised to send a squad car later, and left the mother sitting with Morty, taking comfort in the remembered glory of the mundane milestones humans mark their brief lives with. Birth, baptism, school, confirmation, holidays, graduations, the senior prom. Morty was ready to listen to it all. Morty was ready to bear witness.

  I followed Maggie, knowing that whatever good still lurked within me, it was not in my heart, but in my head. I could help Maggie. Morty, well, he was a master at what he did best. He needed no help from me.

  We left Morty and the mother sitting together on the sofa, yet another photo album spread out across their knees, the mother intent on remembering her daughter while Morty, resplendent in his dress uniform, listened with an unwavering interest, his entire being devoted to the stranger beside him.

  I was alone with Maggie, content to search her face for signs of what her magnificent mind was mulling over. She seemed distracted, upset by something. I could not fathom her thoughts.

  And then I felt it again. Like an icy finger from the grave reaching through the warmth of the car to trace a fingernail down my spine: cold, cultivated, celebrated, coddled evil. And it was near.

  I looked around, searching the curb, the driveways, the houses. I saw no one. No one at all.

  Maggie reached the corner where the subdivision began and turned right toward the station house. As she turned, I looked behind us and saw a gleaming metallic black SUV pull out from the curb to follow us. It was soon lost in the traffic behind us, mired in a sea of trucks and impatient rush-hour motorists who lost their manners and, frustrated, created mayhem in the process. All Maggie had to do was activate the dash lights—which she did not hesitate to do—and, unwittingly, she left the SUV far behind us as the traffic parted to let us pass.

  But I had seen the SUV. And I had felt it. The man from the grove was following Maggie. It would not take him long to find out who she was.

  Chapter 10

  Maggie had left the living for a date with the dead. The body of Vicky Meeks was waiting for her. The medical examiner was already well into the autopsy and Maggie did not interrupt. After a brief nod, she stood out of his way and watched him work. He was a thin, silent man who exuded calmness even when his hands were buried in a body cavity.

  He and I had something in common, I realized. We knew what others did not: that the bag of skin before him, holding a stew of decomposing tissue and percolating chemicals, was no longer Vicky Meeks. She was long gone, and the body left behind was nothing more than a symbol for her mother to mourn over.

  The medical examiner’s detachment intrigued me. I concentrated on him, trying to feel what he was going through as he weighed out parcels of tissue on the scale and reduced Vicky Meeks to a series of precise scientific notations. Up in the forensics lab, three stories above us, Peggy Calhoun had chosen a microscopic world as her battlefield, but the medical examiner had chosen a world within as his. He was its warrior and his concentration absolute. To him, Vicky Meeks was a puzzle in reverse, a conundrum of flesh and bone to be filleted, separated, laid bare, and labeled in his search for the reasons why this body had given up as her vessel.

  It did not take him long to catalog the causes of death. He announced them to Maggie quietly as he worked. Vicky Meeks had been killed slowly, bit by bit. She had been battered, bound, tortured with sanguinary zeal, and finally, strangled when her killer grew disenchanted with the reality of games that could never measure up to his fantasies.

  Washing her body clean of grass and grime had revealed more of the small groupings of parallel slits carved into her legs and torso. Alissa Hayes had borne the same strange cuts, although some of hers had been much older than others and a few people had suggested she’d done it to herself—until they were discovered on the backs of her thighs, where no one could have achieved such symmetry solo. Vicky Meeks had similar cuts in almost the exact same places, although hers looked freshly inflicted, the wounds as red and raw as bite marks.

  With unwavering silence Maggie watched the body reveal its secrets. She was not like the medical examiner, I realized. To her, the flesh and bones before her were still sacred. Yet I could tell she had shelved almost all personal emotions, that she was focusing on what the body could tell her with such intensity that she was close to sharing in the obsession the wounds revealed.

  When the examiner explained that the girl had been held for at least a day, bound by her hands and feet, Maggie touched the rope burns tenderly, her eyes half closed, as if she hoped to divine the source of the torturer’s madness. It was the same thing she had done at the crime scene—held her palms to the earth where the body had lain, as if she could feel knowledge through it.

  The medical examiner was in the middle of cataloging a constellation of shoulder wounds when Danny bumbled in the door, a sterile gown thrown haphazardly over his clothes. He reeked of booze and sweat.

  I was astonished. What had inspired him to attend the autopsy? Was he trying to rise to Maggie’s level of competence? Or did he have a more malignant reason for being there?

  I could not feel much from Danny. A dullness clung to him, as if he were giving up life layer by layer.

  I wondered if Danny was dying.

  “Well, look who the wildcat drug in,” the medical examiner said, his eyebrows rising in surprise.

  I’d never known he had a sense of humor.

  Danny glared at him but said nothing.

  Maggie treated Danny with respect, as if his doing his job was no more than what she had expected. She summarized the examiner’s findings in a clear voice, perfect in her recall. As she began explaining the nature of the symmetrical knife cuts, Danny could no longer pretend he did not recognize the pattern. He flushed and I could feel his heart palpitating as if it were my own. His hands began to tremble so violently the medical examiner noticed.

  “You okay?” he asked with concern.

  “Alissa Hayes,” Danny whispered.

  “Who?” Maggie asked, her gaze so intense it broke through Danny’s confusion.

  “Alissa Hayes,” he said. “About four years ago, maybe less. Fahey and I caught the case.”

  “What about the Alissa Hayes case?” Maggie asked slowly.

  “She had these same marks. The parallel cuts that look like gills.”

  “Are we talking about a closed case?” Maggie said. “As in the ones I was going through earlier when you stopped me?”

  Danny was sweating so profusely I almost felt sorry for him. “It was closed,” he mumbled. “We got a guy for it.”

  “Someone is serving time for it?” Maggie asked. I could feel her indignation rising. “Someone got convicted?” She looked straight into Danny’s eyes. “Was it a clean conviction?”

  That was her way of asking Danny if he had tampered with the evidence.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Maggie glanced at the medical examiner, but he just shrugged. “Before my time,” he explained.

  “Let’s take a look at the file,” Maggie suggested. “This could be a copycat.”

  “Maybe so,” Danny said, turning away from the body. “Maybe so.”

  We all knew it wasn’t true. Danny had what was left of his conscience to tell him that he’d been sloppy, that one of his mistakes had come back to him.

  Me? I had Alissa Hayes herself to tell me the exact same thing.

  Chapter 11

  It took Maggie less than fifteen minutes to find what she needed to know from the file on Alissa Hayes: it had been a bad arrest. Not corrupt, no evidence was planted—that I knew of—but sloppy and rushed, which may have been worse
from her standpoint. She was angry at first, and then curious, and then angry again, her eyes narrowing at each step in the tainted trail that took an innocent man from freedom to imprisonment.

  Danny did not wait around for her judgment. He disappeared in search of a bar that would help him forget what was likely to come: headlines, at least locally, and maybe even nationally, all about an innocent man being sent to jail while a murderer roamed free, followed by dissections of the case and where we had gone wrong. Soon after, my photo would be dredged up and my shooting death rehashed yet again. Cop shot dead while his partner stood by, killing the assailant only after it was too late. It would all be replayed endlessly in the press and on television, and soon a defense attorney somewhere would demand to go through our other solved cases, searching for even more mistakes. I’m sure there were plenty to find. And though no one would say it aloud, every person we had ever worked with would share a single thought: our failure to find the right killer had led to another young girl’s death, and who knew how many other undiscovered kills? The blood of Vicky Meeks was on our hands. Danny would become the Lady Macbeth of our world, wandering through the final stages of his career, unable to wash away the stain.

  Yet I thought of it all with complete detachment. What did it matter now? My wife would not be surprised to learn I’d been sloppy. And if she decided to comment, there was nothing, however disparaging to my memory, that she did not have a right to say. I had failed her as miserably as I had failed Alissa Hayes and Vicky Meeks. If it gave her comfort to defend me, so be it. If she needed to condemn me—then so be it, too.

  Judgment belonged to the living. All that mattered to me was making it right. All that mattered was that I stay with Maggie and help her find the real killer. Maggie, my angel. My terrible, beautiful, avenging angel. My Maggie.

  She could have gone a lot of places once she finished reading the file. She could have headed upstairs to see our commander, even the chief of police. She could have stopped by to see the district attorney and set the wheels of a new investigation in motion, requesting the beginnings of the paperwork avalanche that would be required to free Bobby Daniels, the man doing time for the Alissa Hayes murder.

  But what she chose to do astonished me in both its simplicity and in its humanity: she chose to give an innocent man hope.

  I did not know where we were going at first. Nor did I care. It was a joy for me to sit beside her in the passenger seat, breathing in her citrus scent, rejoicing in her closeness as she drove through our town’s streets.

  It was not a physical attraction. I had left such things behind, which was only fitting for a man who had so misunderstood lust when he was alive, never bestowing it on the woman who loved him, wasting it instead on drunken wrestling matches in mildew-scented motel rooms, disjointed trysts that never brought satisfaction and were only attempted as a way to assign purpose to mutual drunkenness. I was beyond such things now, capable at last of a purer love and filled with unshakable devotion to the object of that love.

  Maggie hummed when she was alone. It was the sound of her brain working, I decided, the engine hum of a mind that never stopped seeing, analyzing, concluding, seeking the truth. I listened to the sound, I treasured her nearness, until, within minutes, we had left the last outpost of town, the Double Deuce Bar, behind us and were headed out on a country road toward the county line.

  That was when I knew the magnificence of Maggie’s heart.

  That was when I knew we were going to prison.

  Chapter 12

  Like all prisons, the structure was immense and forbidding: bricks stretched upward toward an irrelevant sky, the expanse of claustrophobic walls interrupted only by narrow windows that resembled suspicious eyes looking out at an unwelcoming world. Three separate barbed wire-topped metal fences surrounded the prison, creating a barrier no man could hope to penetrate. A worn exercise area near a side door curved in a red quarter moon, hugging the prison walls, its clay surface tramped into barrenness by thousands of feet over thousands of days filled with millions of moments of despair. The courtyard was deserted and even the corner guard towers looked desolate, though I knew steel-eyed men lurked in their shadows, rifles in hand, ready and willing—maybe even eager—to kill. This was a maximum-security facility. It held the worst of the worst. It took hard men to guard them.

  The day had grown cold and the sky had turned gray. It was a fitting mood for the oppressive journey that lay ahead. But Maggie was not one to contemplate the unhappiness of the world within those brick walls. She hopped from the car determined to emerge unscathed from the joyless atmosphere that awaited her. She strode toward the front gate with a brisk competence, leaving little need for the guard to request her badge number, though he did, recording it carefully in a computer before checking it against her physical badge and photo ID. It was not a familiar process for me as I had cared too little about my cases to follow up behind these distasteful walls and, god knows, few district attorneys had wanted anything to do with either me or Danny once one of our cases had passed into their hands.

  I followed on Maggie’s heels, indulging in bursts of nervous immaturity made possible by my invisibility to the living. I made faces at the guards, stuck my hands through bars that had no power over me, walked back and forth through the bulletproof glass barriers, goose-stepping like Charlie Chaplin. I could not help it. This was a place of confinement and yet here I was, enjoying the ultimate of freedoms, freedom from the constraints of the physical world.

  As Maggie progressed through a series of guard points, I grew bolder. I touched the guns of the guards and danced in front of the security cameras. I was a nine-year-old boy in an abandoned candy store, left alone to indulge my desires.

  But every scrap of my enthusiasm evaporated in a single, sobering moment when the last of the metal entry gates clanged shut behind us and we stepped into a world of hopelessness; of brooding, evil influences; of hatred made tangible; of lost souls and despair; of the blackest, most base impulses our species can harbor in the most secret recesses of our hearts and minds. It was all there in a world that was relentlessly lit and yet choking with darkness, a world where the air smelled triumphantly of cruelty overpowering kindness and of the strong cannibalizing the weak.

  There was no Hell, I realized at that moment. Because there was no need for a Hell. We built our own hells, we dotted our world with them, we enclosed them and manned them and fed their residents with hatred and peopled them with bodies as dead to life as those moldering under the ground. We made our own hells and then we forced others to live in them.

  Nothing could be as bad as this, I thought, as I felt all joy hoarded within me shrivel and shrink from the evil surrounding me.

  But I was wrong.

  The prison was noisy with the shoutings and murmur ings of men, yet underneath the cacophony of voices, I could detect an undercurrent of endless agony, the echoes of unut tered screams and the residual taste of eternal hopelessness. Though I could not see them, I knew lost souls lingered here among the living, men whose lives had been claimed within these walls, rendering them into vengeance-filled spirits unable to move on, beings who clung either to their murderers or to their confinements, bound by hate to a world where all goodness had withered, exulting in the only power they now had left—the power to torment the living.

  This was where I had sent an innocent man.

  My hands trembled as I followed Maggie down the tiled floor between rows of cells. The catcalls started at once. Men shouted lewd suggestions, grabbed at their crotches, and pumped their hips, running their tongues over their lips.

  I was ashamed for all men.

  Maggie ignored it all. The light that surrounded her, seen only to me, did not waver. It was as if she was protected by a cocoon of grace that allowed her to move through their dark world unscathed, unaffected by their ugliness.

  I followed in her footsteps, cowed by the forces around me, afraid I might run into evil spirits with the power, somehow,
to harm me. I had not yet felt fear for myself in this existence, yet it now filled me like a poison—until, as I walked down that long corridor, I realized that the noise that greeted Maggie at each cell died as abruptly as it began, the men silenced almost immediately by some unseen force even as the next cell in line began their catcalls. Then I began to notice the faces of some of the men as they rushed to the bars of their cells, staring, mouths open, yet silent, their eyes disbelieving, their bodies exuding the acrid odor of fear.

  They were seeing me. And they knew I was not of their world.

  They could see me.

  Yet not one of them said a word.

  Not every man had this power. But those that could see me were frightened and it was that thought that calmed me. I did not need to be afraid of them. They were afraid of me. I began to move closer to their cells, enjoying the way they would back mutely to the far wall of their enclosures, looking around to see if anyone else had noticed their cowardice, ashamed to say anything aloud.

  Yes, I thought: see me and fear me. For I shall visit the righteous terrors of unspoken worlds upon you if you sully the uncorrupted splendor of the woman who walks before me.

  But why was it that some prisoners could see me and others could not? Did it have to do with their crimes? Did killing open up a terrifying window into the world of the dead—was that the punishment the universe visited upon its murderers? Or was it simply that the profane atmosphere within the prison walls and the lack of distraction had fine-tuned their senses, much like a blind man who develops hearing beyond the acute? Had their solitude caused some of them to see what they might otherwise only have felt in passing?