Desolate Angel

by Chaz McGee

A cadaverously thin man named Robertson sat off to one side, evading everyone’s eyes. I knew him well. He was the department’s in-house counsel. He did not look hopeful. He was no doubt silently cursing my memory for having bungled the Daniels case and working out a million-dollar settlement in his head. The thought cheered me. I’d never liked the shifty little bastard.

  I entered the room just as they approached the real point of their meeting, arriving in time to witness the commander’s profound surprise when the older Mr. Daniels said, “We have come to thank you.”

  “Thank me?” the commander asked too loudly, betraying his astonishment.

  Mrs. Daniels explained for her husband. “We want to thank Detective Gunn for what she did for our son.”

  “What did she do?” the commander asked, perplexed. I knew then that Maggie had never told him of her earlier visit to the prison, the trip she had taken out of mercy for another man’s suffering, just as she had not told him about the Double Deuce. It appeared that my Maggie was a bit of a maverick.

  Was it wrong that this behavior made me love her even more?

  Bobby’s father grasped the situation in an instant. He was used to the intricacies that a chain of command created, I realized, as I noted his ramrod posture and neatly trimmed hair. Retired military, I guessed, and his precise, clipped way of speaking confirmed my impression.

  “Detective Gunn visited Bobby in prison the second she realized he was innocent,” the old man explained. “We’d like to thank her for letting decency and compassion override standard protocol.” His implications were not lost on Gonzales. “We’d also like to thank her for speaking to the warden about having Bobby put in protective custody until he was released. His injuries could have been so much worse.” Neither Bobby nor Maggie could look at him. “She put my son’s safety first, instead of covering the department’s ass. For that, we are profoundly grateful.”

  He had neutered the commander’s thoughts of retribution against Maggie with the skill of a master. I pegged him for at least a colonel.

  Oh, how the afterlife has its delights.

  The commander glanced over at Maggie and their eyes held, but he quickly regained his composure. “Of course,” Gonzales said smoothly. “We felt it was the least we could do, under the regrettable circumstances.”

  Robertson coughed in a discreet lawyerly fashion, nervous at the reference to culpability. He was thoroughly ignored by all.

  “I just wanted to let your son know that we were doing all we could to get him out,” Maggie said. “I wanted to let him know that he only had to hold on a little bit longer.”

  The parents turned their heads and looked at Maggie with synchronized gentility, a sign of how long they had been wed to one another. They seemed genuinely grateful to her for her kindness. They were good people, I realized, anchored by the moral certainty of a simple life. I felt their purity wash over me, a balm to my soul. Direct. Uncluttered. They were the kind of people I could have helped, but failed to, while I was alive—the kind of people I should have served far better. The kind of people I wish I’d been.

  “The day you came to see me,” Bobby Daniels told Maggie hesitantly. “It was a bad day for me, not that any of the days in there were good.” He hesitated before he spoke again. “It was the day I’d woken up thinking I could not be in that place any longer. Not one more day. That was the day you came to me.”

  “Don’t you see?” his mother interrupted. “You were sent to him.” She started to cry and her husband patted her knee gently.

  The commander looked away and studied the view out of his window before he glanced back at Daniels. “We are profoundly grateful ourselves that justice has been done,” he finally said, and I think that everyone in the room—except for me, who knew better—believed that Gonzales was sincere. “Detective Gunn has conducted herself with the utmost integrity and displayed great ingenuity with the new investigation. She’s heading it up, you know, and I intend to see that she is commended for her outstanding efforts.”

  That’s right, Lazaro Gonzales, I thought: find their soft spot and start kissing it. Give them what you think they want to hear.

  But he was wrong about what they wanted to hear.

  “We’re not planning to sue,” Bobby Daniels said abruptly, speaking directly to Robertson.

  Robertson could not hide his surprise. No wonder he was a lousy lawyer.

  “You’re just here to thank me?” Maggie asked. She paused. “I get . . . thanked so seldom.” God bless her, she did not know what else to say. I was charmed.

  “Yes,” Bobby Daniels said, his hands rubbing his new slacks nervously. “But we’re also here to help you. I can help you.”

  Maggie and the commander stared at him, puzzled.

  “What my son is trying to say,” Mr. Daniels said firmly, “is that, back when you first looked into things, he was, perhaps, not in a condition to remember things clearly, or to answer your questions as well as he could. Nor could he be of much help when you visited him in . . . that place.”

  “No, of course not,” Gonzales murmured. “Perfectly understandable.”

  “My son has been thinking about many of the things Detective Gunn asked him during her visit,” the father said. “He believes he has additional information that might help Detective Gunn.”

  “Of course.” Gonzales rose to his feet. His forced goodwill swelled to fill the room, squeezing the genuine emotion right out of it. “Why don’t we let your son and Detective Gunn chat in my office while I show you around the station house? Wait until you see how many people we have working on this case.” He nodded at Bobby. “We intend to see that justice is done for your son’s fiancée.”

  No one corrected his mistake. Alissa and Bobby had never even been given the chance to get as far as an engagement—and Bobby would live a lifetime wondering if she had been his one.

  “That’s very kind of you,” Mr. Daniels told him, helping his wife to her feet. “Let’s just leave them alone for a while, Camilla.”

  As the couple followed Gonzales and Robertson out the door, I saw the old man cast his son a look that I could not quite read. It was, perhaps, a fatherly warning. No, that was too strong. More like a father lending his son strength. I saw love in his look—love and sternness.

  “Thank you for not saying anything about last night,” Bobby whispered once he was alone with Maggie. He barely breathed the words, as if he were afraid to say them out loud, perhaps fearing Gonzales was taping their conversation.

  Maggie nodded her acknowledgment.

  “My father served in the Vietnam War,” Bobby explained in a more normal voice. “He was career military. They had me late in life.”

  Maggie looked unsure about where the conversation was headed.

  “He’s seen things so very terrible that he says he believes that anything is possible when it comes to human behavior,” Bobby said. “No matter how awful it may be.”

  “He’s right,” Maggie said quietly.

  “I know that now.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You’ve lived among them. You know that now.”

  “He thinks I need to tell you about Alissa’s father, even though it’s only a feeling. My father never liked him. They met twice. Both times my father insisted afterward that there was something wrong with her father.”

  “Like what?”

  “He wouldn’t say,” Bobby explained. “He just said that Mr. Hayes had something missing in him that decent people had, no matter how good he might look on the outside. My mother hushed him up and said it was losing his wife that had made him that way. But my father disagreed.” He paused. “My father once told me that if I really cared about Alissa, I would take her away from her father as fast as I could.”

  Maggie stared at him more intently. “What did you think he meant when he said that to you? Tell me what came into your mind.”

  “I thought of all the times her father had waited up for us until I brought Alissa home, how angry he was, even
though we never broke her curfew and she was twenty years old by then. I thought of the way he would look at me—he really hated me, you know. Truly hated me. He felt I had taken Alissa from him. I always blamed him for . . . for what happened to me in the end. I didn’t blame the detectives. I didn’t help myself much at the time, you know. They only did what anyone would have done.”

  “That’s kind of you to say,” Maggie said grimly. “Though you may not quote me on it.”

  “I thought, at the time, that Mr. Hayes was just being protective, like any father might be. I don’t really know how fathers are toward their daughters. I don’t have any sisters. And Alissa was my first real girlfriend.”

  Maggie nodded, willing him to go on.

  “But his protectiveness went beyond that, I think, and . . .” He paused.

  “And what?” Maggie prompted.

  “He lied about me at the trial and during the investigation. Again and again. He said things about me that just weren’t true.”

  “Did you tell Detectives Bonaventura and Fahey that?” Maggie asked, though she knew the answer.

  Shame washed over me as Bobby Daniels answered. “I kept telling them he was lying. But they didn’t really hear me. Or they didn’t believe me. I don’t know which.” He hesitated. “There must be a record of what I said in the files.”

  Maggie raised her eyebrows but said nothing. I knew what she was thinking and was humiliated by her thoughts: not only would his protests not be in the file, Danny and I had kept them out on purpose to bolster our case.

  But Bobby Daniels wasn’t really concerned about how he had been treated. What he wanted, and what he needed, was justice for Alissa. He stared at Maggie as he spoke, needing her agreement. “Why would he lie if he wasn’t trying to hide something?”

  “Are you coming to me out of vengeance?” Maggie asked gently. “Because putting the wrong man in jail again won’t take away what happened to you.”

  “No,” he said. “I understand that he saw me differently from the way Alissa saw me, but it went beyond that. The change was so sudden. One moment he tolerated me, and the next, when I started going out with Alissa? I became his enemy. Instantly. He was my graduate advisor, you know?”

  Maggie nodded.

  “He was fine toward me before I started seeing Alissa. Maybe a little aloof. Certainly unpredictable. Interested in my progress one day and distracted the next.” He shrugged. “I guess a lot of advisors are like that. But after I started seeing Alissa, the way he acted toward me changed so much. He was no longer distracted or uninterested. It was worse.”

  “How?” Maggie asked.

  “He never took his eyes off me. I couldn’t walk across the room without him following my every move. I couldn’t leave a room without him, literally, following me. It was like he was . . .”

  “Hunting you?” Maggie suggested.

  Bobby considered it. “Yes, I’ve seen that look since. Many times in prison.” He closed his eyes against the memories. “It was like he was hunting me.”

  “Because you were going to take Alissa from him?”

  Bobby Daniels nodded. “Yes. And I think that’s why he killed her. To keep that from happening. He killed her because of me.” With that, he broke down, unable to continue. His sobs filled the room, as did his shame. Maggie did not judge or pity or comfort him. She waited him out.

  “You must think I’m insane,” he mumbled as he struggled to regain his composure. “I do nothing but cry in front of you.”

  Maggie took both of his hands in hers. “Bobby, most people would not have survived what you went through. Most people would have come out of that prison with a heart so black and so shrunken with hate that there would be no room in it for anything but revenge. But you survived intact. And it’s over. You survived. If you want to break down and cry in relief for a solid year at that miracle, believe me, I understand. It’s something to cry about. No one would think otherwise.”

  Daniels looked away, his eyes seeking the sunshine that waited outside the window. When he spoke, his voice was flat. “He thought of her as nothing more than one of his possessions. She was his territory, like his hill.”

  “His hill?” Maggie asked. “What do you mean, ‘his hill’?”

  “She was like the hill he used to walk up and down each night for exercise. He acted like he owned it. No one else was allowed to walk with him. Or behind him. Or near him. And he hated it when strangers intruded. It wasn’t just that he wanted to be alone. He acted like he owned that stupid path. He forbid Alissa and me to walk along it, even when he wasn’t there. As if that could . . . stop us from being alone.” He became lost in a memory that I could feel was a good one, time spent with Alissa, and I willed other good memories to follow this one, so that they might obliterate the bad memories he held inside.

  “Where was this hill?” Maggie asked him carefully.

  Bobby Daniels described it—a hill near the old rock quarry, along the far side of the college.

  It was the same hill where Vicky Meeks had been found.

  “Bobby,” Maggie told him in an urgent voice. “I want you to leave here as soon as you can. Go back to Kansas City with your parents, see your relatives, and celebrate your freedom—then take some time off and go away with your parents somewhere. Don’t tell anyone but me where you’re going.”

  Bobby looked at her, puzzled. “Why?”

  Maggie’s fear filled the room. She knew what she was up against—and I knew she was right to fear it, because I had felt it, and I knew it had the power to snatch your soul right out of your body and smite it into cinders.

  “Alan Hayes is missing,” she explained. “He hasn’t come home since we searched his house. No one knows where he’s gone. And I think your life is in danger because of him. I think he was at the Double Deuce last night.”

  Bobby stared at her. “What if I remember something else that might help?”

  “Then you call me,” Maggie said, handing him her card. “But don’t tell anyone else but me where you are. Do you understand?”

  He nodded solemnly.

  “You must protect your parents,” she explained. “They’re in danger, too. He knows your father can see through him. He’d have picked up on that. And if he hears you’re part of my investigation in any way, all of you are in danger.”

  “So you do think it’s him?” Bobby said. “My father was right?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said. “Your father was right. The world is full of more terrible things than anyone of us will ever know. There are people that walk this earth, who walk among us, who feed on pain and who exist solely to destroy the happiness of others.”

  “I knew men like that in prison,” Bobby said softly.

  But Maggie shook her head. “Not exactly. Those men are in prison because some part of them, somewhere, wanted to be caught. So they made a mistake. But Alissa’s father? He won’t make a mistake. Because your father’s right: there is something missing in him. And you don’t want to know what it is.”

  “I do want to know,” Bobby said. “I need to know. I need to know what happened to Alissa.”

  Maggie looked sadder than I had ever seen her look. I thought my heart might break for what she was feeling. She didn’t just empathize with people, she fed on their pain before they could, offering herself as a receptacle for the terrible unknowns of what their loved ones had gone through so that they would never have to imagine the unimaginable themselves.

  “Bobby,” she said firmly. “You don’t want to know what happened to Alissa. Go on with your life, remember all the beautiful things about her, and don’t ever look back.”

  He stared at her.

  “Not ever, Bobby,” she whispered. “Not ever.”

  He wanted to ask more, he would have asked more. But the room exploded with noise as two uniformed cops burst through the door, a harried administrative assistant close behind them.

  “He’d want to know,” one of them was saying, but he stopped short and s
tared when he saw Maggie.

  “What?” Maggie asked sharply.

  “We heard you were in a wreck,” the patrolman explained, sounding confused. “At an intersection a couple blocks up Independence. It just came over the radio—”

  “Peggy,” Maggie cried as she jumped to her feet. She was out the door before anyone else could react. I was right behind her.

  Chapter 34

  The intersection was in chaos. Maggie’s car had rolled over several times and come to rest smashed against a telephone pole. The roof and driver’s side door were crumpled in and the hood was jackknifed against the front windshield. A fire hydrant nearby had been sheared off and water sprayed out in a wide arc over the scene. Oil swirled over the surface of growing puddles nearby, creating miniature rainbows of incongruent beauty.

  Two fire trucks and four patrol cars had responded to the scene, with more arriving every minute. All were being frantically cleared away to make way for the Jaws of Life rescue team with their portable engine and strangely oversized hydraulic tools that looked like weapons out of a science fiction movie. They worked with choreographed determination, positioning the spreader, attaching the piston rod, and readying the cutter nearby. They used the spreader to pry the front door open and a rescue worker placed a ram against the driver’s side floor. He began extending the piston rod, working frantically to push the dashboard up to create enough space to free Peggy from the car.

  A growing crowd formed a shield around the wrecked car. Policemen were starting to direct cars around the scene and were pushing back the curious that stood in a ring around the wreck. I scanned the crowd eagerly wit nessing the disaster, trying to find Maggie, and recognized several faces: the two men and the woman who had been at the Double Deuce the night before, staring at the bloodied victims of the fight, as if waiting for death to arrive.

  Unless that’s exactly what they were.

  The watchers felt my presence and looked up at me, furtive at being caught. No, it was more than that. They seemed almost frightened that I had spotted them. Just then, a car drove by the scene too fast and had to swerve to avoid by- standers. People screamed and I looked away at the sound. The car recovered and sped on, the crowd unharmed, but when I looked back at the wreck, the watchers were gone.