Desolate Angel

by Chaz McGee

  The other girl nodded. “Practically. Way younger than him. I think maybe twenty-eight or twenty-nine. He thinks it makes him look younger or something but he just looks even older and more pathetic next to her.”

  Ah, men, I thought wryly. How we deluded ourselves. We believed we were in control, when the truth was that any teenage girl could sign, seal, and deliver our egos to us on a platter with a single, truthful insight.

  “What are you going to do?” Sarah asked her friend. A cloud passed over her face when she asked the question. Bad memories.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It sounds like your dad is getting serious with her.”

  The other girl sat quietly. “Nothing,” she finally said.

  “Nothing?” Sarah asked.

  The other girl shrugged. “What can I do? If he wants to marry her, he will. And don’t think she’s not trying to get him to ask. Last week, she didn’t return three of his phone calls, that I know about, and he was going crazy. But there’s not much I can do. I leave for school next year anyway.”

  “But your mother’s only been dead a year,” Sarah said. “How can he?”

  The other girl shrugged again. “He’s not meant to be alone.” She nodded her head wisely. “Not many men are, you know. They get lonelier than we do. She’s not the ideal stepmother, but at least she treats me like a sister and doesn’t try to be my mom. Plus, she’s my size and has some pretty cool clothes and she’s always trying to buy my love.” The girl held out her arm and jangled her bracelet. “Check these out. They’re real.”

  “Really?” Sarah bent over the gemstones. “Those are nice.”

  Her friend nodded. “Nothing but real diamonds and real gold for Taylor.” Her voice sounded too old for someone so young. When had our children stopped being children?

  “At least—” Sarah started to say, then stopped abruptly.

  “A least what?” the other girl asked.

  “At least you have a great dad,” Sarah said quietly. “A really great dad, and cool grandparents, and a thousand cousins and uncles and aunts.”

  Her friend nodded. “And I bet every single one of them is going to hate Taylor.” The girls burst out laughing and every male head on the bus turned to watch. I can’t say I blamed them. It was the sound of sirens luring men to their death on rocky seas.

  “I’ll invite you to the wedding,” the other girl told Sarah. “Want to be a bridesmaid? I could guilt her into it.”

  Sarah shook her head. “No way. I’m opposed to step-mothers on principle.”

  “I bet you are,” the other girl said as she rose from her seat. “It’s us.”

  “Already?” Sarah asked and I understood then that their minutes on the bus together might be all she had when it came to human contact that brought her pleasure without expectations or danger in return.

  “I know. It never takes long when you’re here.” The girl smiled at Sarah as I followed them down the aisle. They ignored the stares of the boys and the sudden quiet that fell upon their classmates as they passed by. There was something about Sarah’s friend that caused their insults and lewd suggestions to die on their tongues. Her dignity made them feel diminished and outclassed from the start. I hoped Sarah would learn from her. She would need it.

  The two girls waved their thanks to the bus driver and stepped out into the sunshine, blinking against the glare. I stepped down after them and there, in the middle of the sidewalk, in a quiet suburban neighborhood, with sunlight spilling around us, I felt a stab of evil so pervasive and powerful that I clutched my hands around my middle as if that might, somehow, protect me from it.

  I looked around, seeing nothing but a deserted block and empty houses, doors locked against the world while their inhabitants were away, extra cars lined neatly at the curb and in driveways. I felt the danger, though, and I felt it in every fiber of my being. I knew it was there. It was the same darkness that had lingered over the body of Vicky Meeks.

  Her killer was near.

  The girls walked down the sidewalk together, chatting about inconsequential matters, oblivious to what I felt. When they reached the corner, Sarah turned right and the other girl turned left. They waved each other a farewell.

  An SUV parked to my right abruptly pulled out from the curb and rolled down the street, the sound of its engine unnoticed by anyone but me. I turned around to get a better look at the driver. I could feel the choking darkness drawing closer. It was shiny black and its windows were tinted as deeply as the law allowed, hiding its driver from view. I’d seen it before—I’d seen it following Maggie.

  Tinted windows could not stop me. Within seconds, I sat in the front seat next to the driver, surrounded by the smells of new leather seats—and a feeling of danger so pervasive it sucked the very oxygen from the air.

  The driver was Alan Hayes.

  He sat behind the wheel, his back ramrod straight, his tie perfectly knotted, his shoes immaculate and gleaming, his expensive suit custom fit to his frame. He did not look like a man who had been questioned by police the night before. He looked like the leader of a European conglomerate, tall, sophisticated, and utterly successful.

  I clung to how he looked, not wanting to believe that the feeling of danger came from him. I told myself that he was just a nervous father following his daughter home from the bus stop, anxious to see that she was safe. Overprotective, perhaps, and maybe for the wrong reasons, but he had lost one daughter, so the fear of losing another would be very real for him. Surely he was not the source of the darkness surrounding us—would I not have sensed such distilled evil the night before, in his home?

  He turned left, away from Sarah, following the other girl.

  I peered at his profile, trying to read his thoughts. I could penetrate nothing, though I could see tension in the way he held his jaw and sensed an anger in him, perhaps triggered by his encounter with Maggie the night before. I felt a need rising in him and I was afraid to examine it more closely. I did not want to know what that need was. I did not want to know it even existed.

  The girl picked up her gait. Her hair began to swing back and forth with each long stride. I felt the rising need in the car shift, feral and unpredictable, as if an animal had stirred in the shadows of the backseat.

  It was coming from Hayes. Eagerness roiled off him in waves as he crept along, hidden in his car, following the girl. His tension was gone, subsumed by a hunter’s obsession. He focused on the girl with an unwavering, relentless concentration that made his eyes glitter. His breath was coming in shallow gasps and he kept touching his lips with the tip of his tongue, as if he were tasting something delicious. His nostrils flared, though he could not possibly smell her, and a smile crossed over his face. It was not the kind of smile to inspire happiness. It was a smile of self-satisfaction to come.

  I was afraid.

  I knew he could not see me. I knew he could not touch me.

  Still, I was afraid.

  The young girl continued her walk down the block, each stride as regal as the one before. She was unaware that she was being watched, protected by her youth from knowing that evil could strike even when you were close to home, that evil could claim you even in bright sunlight.

  She turned into the driveway of a ranch house that sprawled across a generous lot surrounded by six-foot-high bushes for privacy. Hayes slowed the SUV and drew to a stop along the curb. He shut the engine off and waited, the smile on his face stretching wider. He knew what was about to come.

  The young girl bent over, revealing the backs of her thighs and a flash of pink as her skirt inched up over her legs. Hayes groaned softly, his relentless self-control crumbling. I felt no desire at what I was seeing, only fear for what might happen next. The girl stuck her hand in a small opening at the back base of the steps, where latticework and smaller shrubs nearly concealed a small crawl space. Extracting a small gray rock, she turned it over and slid something toward her: a tab that opened to reveal a tiny compartment. In the compartment,
I knew, was a house key.

  Hayes knew it, too. He laughed quietly—it was a ratch eting sound that had no humor in it—as the girl replaced the fake rock in its now-useless hiding spot, then skipped up the steps and let herself in the front door of the house she thought of as home, the place she considered safer than all other places in the world. She slipped the key into a jacket pocket as she stepped inside.

  Hayes waited a moment, checked the empty street and sidewalks to make sure he was alone, then slipped soundlessly from the front seat of his car. Within seconds, he was gone from sight, having disappeared down the driveway, where towering bushes protected him from any neighbor’s eyes.

  I followed. He did not hurry. His movements were not the slightest bit furtive. He walked as calmly as if he were striding the halls of the college and intent on being in class on time—until he stepped abruptly sideways with practiced ease and disappeared between two tall spruce bushes guarding the back corner of the house. It was the perfect hiding spot. His tall frame was concealed in the shadows between the elongated branches of the spruce pines, yet he stood only inches from the sliding glass doors that formed the back wall of the corner room. He had a perfect view inside.

  He found his spot and waited, growing completely still, content to bide his time. He had done this before.

  What would he say if someone discovered him, standing among the bushes, impeccably clad? What possible excuse could he give for being there?

  But he was not concerned with being caught. He knew he would not be caught. I could feel his certainty that he was in control. That nothing would interfere with what he wanted to take from the girl.

  The girl.

  I stood as close I could bear to Hayes, wary of his spiritual poison, still trying to probe his thoughts. Emotions slipped out of his unnatural control every now and then, occasionally shifting like the currents of a spring-fed lake, colliding, adjusting, running hot and then cold. I felt triumph flare prematurely for an instant, a steadier flickering of desire, a vein of fury that threaded through them all, and beneath that, an utterly self-congratulatory assurance that he had dominion over his quarry.

  The girl entered the back room of the house, holding a bowl of popcorn and a can of diet soda. She was wearing a pale blue tank top that revealed the thin straps of her pink bra beneath. The gym shorts she had changed into were barely larger than a bikini bottom and of a material so worn they were nearly translucent.

  She placed her snack on the floor by a rumpled old couch, arranged the pillows just so, then flopped down and flicked on the TV. As a soap opera emerged from the static, she draped one of her impossibly long legs over the back of the sofa, freed her hair so it spread out behind her in a fan and settled down into the cushions as if she did not have a bone in her body. Sprawled on the old couch, watched, she thought, by no one, she was completely without guile—making her seem even younger than her years. The girl in the woman emerged from beneath the stern eyes and scathing wisdom about men. She was an ever-changing chimera, moving from one form to the other in seconds, depending on your desire, from girl to woman, from woman to girl and back again. The effect was, I admit, charming.

  For Hayes, it was something else. He was dancing with a desire that raged inside him, warring with his self-control. So far, as he gazed through the glass at the girl, his self-control was winning. I could feel his heart beating steadily in his chest, skipping only when she shifted and rearranged her long limbs across the couch. His breathing, shallow and excited at first, had grown steadier with each passing moment. He drew inside himself, his strength turning inward, thoughts lost in some unfathomable fantasy.

  His pulse did not hasten. His pulse did not waver.

  He was where he wanted to be. This was what he had craved: the watching, the waiting, the wanting but not having, the exquisite torture of desire.

  He was deeply excited, and I could feel the lust moving through his blood but I could not tell what it was he lusted for. I only knew it was not love or even sexual in a sense I could understand. It was far more primal than that.

  The young girl, bored with her show, grew restless. She began to eat her popcorn with disinterested motions, then glanced at a computer in one corner of the room and back to the television set. She spilled some soda on her tank top and made a face before pulling its hem up to her mouth to suck at the stain. Her torso was long and muscled and the color of honey, remnants of a summer tan.

  Hayes groaned again. It was little more than a sigh, but I heard it and it frightened me. It was a whisper of warning: he was not always in control.

  And this was a girl barely older than his daughter, a girl remarkably like his daughter, in fact, in so many ways.

  I could not leave her to him.

  I stood beside him, the ugliness of his need washing over me, the dark urgency of his excitement infiltrating my being, and the power of his predatory stasis filling me with despair.

  This was a man to be feared. This was a man in waiting. This was a man who knew exactly how it would all end.

  The girl was gazing out the sliding doors now, distracted by something she saw. She rose, walked barefoot across the thick carpet, and unlocked one set of doors. Hayes began to breathe more quickly. Had she looked to her left, she would have easily seen him, but she did not look and he was as still as the spruce shrubs that flanked him. Even the air around him did not move. It seemed to collapse inward, as if he were a dead spot in a sea of wind. Hopelessness. No escape. Death.

  The girl pulled one of the glass doors open and stepped out onto the back deck, where she stood on tiptoe to check the contents of a bird feeder hanging from the branches of a tree planted close by. Her thigh muscles stretched and Hayes flinched, his right hand trembling, before he regained control.

  The girl scolded a squirrel that was sitting triumphantly on the branch behind the bird feeder and munching on tiny fistfuls of grain. He chewed, unconcerned, as she reached down beside a set of back deck stairs, where a row of plastic trash cans were lined up. She opened the first one and bent over to retrieve a bag stored inside it, her back turned to the house.

  Hayes stiffened, his entire body poised as if for flight. He was gauging the distance between the corner of the house and the open back door. He took a single step forward, arms tensed at his side.

  A phone rang inside the house.

  The girl popped her head up from the trash can, listening for the sound, then hurried back inside to a cordless phone by the computer. She knew who it was before she even picked up the receiver and launched into a soliloquy that was half exasperated and half loving.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said as she returned to the deck. She cradled the receiver between her shoulder and ear and attempted to refill the bird feeder while she talked. “I’m fine. Yes, I got home safely. No, I didn’t flunk the test. Yes, I’ll water the flowers. No, your package didn’t come. Yes, I know I have piano at six. No, I don’t want to eat Indian food tonight.” She paused and then laughed. “Okay, so I can’t read your mind completely. I’ll have a chicken burrito. But stop worrying. I’m home and I’m fine.”

  A frown crossed over her face. “Okay,” she conceded. “I think you left it by the front door. Give me a minute and I’ll call you back.”

  She placed the phone on the railing of the deck, finished filling the bird feeder, then good-naturedly left a pile of seeds and nuts for the squirrel along a far railing. “Stop being a pig,” she admonished it. “There’s plenty for everyone.”

  The squirrel ignored her. His body had grown still. He’d spotted Hayes in the bushes and his black eyes glittered like tiny black beads as he stared at us.

  The young girl did not notice. She put the bag of grain back in place, retrieved the phone, and headed inside, pulling the door shut behind her.

  She did not lock it.

  Hayes saw it all. His breath, which had been as controlled as a yogi’s, became a series of rapid gusts. He leaned forward, risking detection, as he tracked her movements th
rough the room. She replaced the phone in its cradle, headed for the door to the hallway, then stopped and turned toward the sliding doors again, looking uncertain.

  Hayes stepped back into his hiding spot and held his breath. She hesitated, still staring at the sliding glass door. My mind raced through every horror movie I had ever seen, willing her to remember what happened to foolish young girls who failed to lock their back doors. Come on, I willed her across the divide of space and glass, give me a thought I can hang on to.

  I was too agitated, too frightened to make contact with her. That infinitesimal interval of two seconds seemed an eternity before she finally walked across the room, checked the door, and finding it unlocked, locked it with a nervous smile, as if thinking herself foolish for worrying.

  I was filled with an overwhelming relief. Not today, at least. Not today.

  But he knew where she kept her key and I knew the day would come when he would no longer be able to wait.

  The fury in Hayes flared with frustration, but he shut it down at once. He was too much in control to let a small setback stop him. And, I suspected, this watching was as exquisite to him as foreplay. He did not want to hurry this stage, even though part of him did, and so he accepted his loss of opportunity without rancor. He glanced at his watch, then stepped calmly from his hiding place, checking the driveway and sidewalks for privacy first. He made it back to his car unseen by anyone but me.

  I realized then that he had never once hurried, had never once displayed hesitation or confusion. His timing was perfect, his movements precise, his presence undetected by anyone.

  Hayes had done this many times before.

  Chapter 18

  I left Alan Hayes, my mind troubled by what I had learned about him. Following a young girl didn’t prove he’d killed Alissa, but I had felt what he was capable of and it scared me. How could I let Maggie know that there was something off-kilter about Hayes, regardless of what Danny thought of him? He was no grieving father. He was a predator who needed to be stopped. Not rehabilitated. Just stopped. I had met his kind before, though rarely. Men like him were dispassionate enough about their crimes to evade capture for decades. But they always went back to the well. They had to. They could not survive without tasting the humiliation of others.