Desolate Angel

by Chaz McGee

  Who were they? What were they? And why did they fear me?

  Did this mean that Peggy would live?

  An angry murmur was starting to run through the crowd like an electrical current: Maggie was shoving her way through the onlookers. There was no way she would be stopped. The patrolmen guarding the perimeter recognized her and let her though. She pushed to the front of the rescue group and I caught a glimpse of her face as she reached out to Peggy, still trapped in the car—and what I saw in her face, oh, what I saw in her face. It could not be good. Whatever Maggie had seen in the car, I knew it could not be good.

  What I saw next made it all worse. I saw Danny. He stood half a block away, staring toward the chaos, staring at Maggie, mouth open. And he was covered with blood. Blood smeared his face and stained his shirt, and his hands were drenched in it as if he wore long red gloves. He stood as if he were in a daze—had he somehow been in the car with Peggy? No, I had seen Peggy drive off alone. That could not be the case. But he had gone to her after the wreck; that was where he’d picked up the blood. Had he been the one to call it in?

  Or had he been the one to cause it?

  Gonzales had arrived. He strode through the crowd like a conquering hero, people parting before his authority and gawking at his uniform. Danny saw Gonzales, too. He turned and walked rapidly away. I followed. His car was parked farther down the block. It had been pulled so hastily to the side of the road that two of its wheels were propped up on the sidewalk and the driver’s door still hung open. Danny hopped inside, anxious to get away before he was spotted. As he pulled from the curb, I saw that his old clunker was just as dented and dirty as ever—but not more so. He had not run Peggy off the road.

  But someone else had. I knew with a certainty that someone had tried to kill Maggie. And Peggy had paid the price.

  And Danny had been nearby. He would know who had done it.

  I walked back toward the wreck, scanning the crowd and the cars crawling down the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of Alan Hayes. But there were too many people, too many lights flashing, too much newly descended dusk, and way too much confusion to separate all the sounds and sights and voices coming at me. Hayes would be long gone by now, anyway. He’d have left, thinking he had succeeded in stopping Maggie.

  I thought about how Hayes had not tried to take her or torture her, as he had the others. He had not had the courage for that. He had simply tried to stop her as expediently as possible.

  He was afraid of her.

  It gave me some satisfaction.

  Rescue workers had extricated Peggy from the car and were securing her to a spinal board. The shards of glass embedded in her cheeks and forehead glittered in the glare of the overhead streetlights.

  Maggie was crying openly and holding her friend’s hand, murmuring to Peggy as the emergency medical technicians transferred her to a waiting stretcher. No one dared tell Maggie to step away. No one stopped Maggie from climbing inside the ambulance with Peggy. No one even stopped her when she drew her gun and took a seat by her unconscious friend, then placed her gun across her lap and scanned the crowd, as I had scanned it, searching for Hayes.

  She, too, had put it all together. She would be on her guard now.

  Hayes had made a mistake in failing when he tried to take Maggie out. With someone like Maggie, that one mistake might be all she needed to survive—and to conquer. She would be looking for him now.

  Gonzales stood near a rear bumper of the wrecked car, staring at it without inspiration. He seemed distracted, irritated at his job being made once more, somehow, harder, just when he thought he had contained the damage.

  An older couple stood behind him on the sidewalk, taking it all in, and a third figure huddled in the shadows behind them, looking like a man trying to disappear from a too-jangled world: Bobby Daniels and his parents.

  The older Daniels was examining the crowd methodically, his eyes alert, an odd look on his face. It was a look I thought a man could easily come to fear.

  He knew, I thought. He knew, somehow, that Alan Hayes had caused all this. He felt it, too. He could feel when Hayes was near.

  With that thought, a wild hope shot through me. I was not alone. I was not the only one who saw Alan Hayes for what he was. I was not the only one who would be trying to help Maggie.

  For once, Alan Hayes would be the hunted.

  Chapter 35

  Where would Hayes go? He could not go home—his house was being watched. Nor would he dare return to his office at the college. He had to be wherever he took his victims. His hidden safe house was nearby somewhere.

  I made my way to a pond the town had dug several years before in the center of its downtown park. I was always alone there at night. No one else felt safe there, far from civilization—and far from screaming distance—once the office workers had all packed up and gone home. At this time of year, not even the bums sought a good night’s sleep on the benches that rimmed the pond. But I did not need to fear muggers, or the night. I liked to sit on the bench at the far end of the pond, just beyond a spotlight cast by a street-lamp overhead on a circle of rippling water near the intake pipe. The ripples sparkled in the night, reflecting stars and clouds, creating a patch of endless universe undulating on the water’s surface that fascinated me. This was where I felt connected to all things; that patch of water was a portal into infinity for me. This was where I liked to think. I sat, surrounded by silence, contemplating every move Alan Hayes had ever made, reviewing every word he had ever uttered, cataloging every scrap of information others had offered on him. I was trying to find a clue about where he might have gone.

  I knew it had to be there somewhere. And I knew it was my job to find out where. Maggie would be at the hospital with Peggy, Gonzales was distracted—there was no one left to lead the team. But Hayes would be moving, and he’d be moving swiftly, to complete whatever dark ritual he felt the need to indulge in. I did not want to even think of his possibilities. Where would he go? Where would a man like him feel safe? I had to find out for us all.

  It took me over an hour replaying all I had heard about him, over and over in my head, before it came to me: a comment Bobby Daniels had made a few hours earlier, when speaking to Maggie privately: “He acted like he owned it,” Bobby had said, speaking of how Hayes acted about the hill at the far side of town. He acted like he owned it.

  He’d be hiding near that hill. He thought of it as his.

  His hill. His daughter. Alan Hayes certainly had a sense of entitlement. But in his anger over having either claimed by others, he had a made a mistake. By forbidding Bobby Daniels to even tread on that hill, he had tipped his hand.

  I thought of the grove Maggie had discovered the day after Vicky Meeks had been discovered and of the hidden watcher who had run away when Alissa Hayes appeared to him.

  It had been Alan Hayes. His lair had to be nearby. I would find it.

  There are not many things I can do in my present form, other than to face my human mistakes and wish my life had been different. But I can roam. Oh, how I can roam. I can roam the hills with the best of them, and I need not worry about my safety nor wait for daylight to start my travels.

  Maggie would eventually realize the significance of it being his hill. But she would have to wait until daylight to search it. Me? I’d find his hiding place tonight and then, in the morning, I would find a way to lead Maggie to it.

  I set off for the hill. I moved through the streets and over the sidewalks of my town, watching as twilight gathered in the sky and families gravitated toward home, their steps quickening as they neared their blocks, drawn to the safety and warmth of those who knew them, drawn to the light of home and hearth. And though evolution and extinction had long since erased the dangers of the night for most, I knew that darkness still signified danger for most humans. Not for me. A bright moon above was as welcoming as the sun. And a night sky sprinkled with stars behind it was even better. I would have that hill to myself. Soon I would find out his secr
ets.

  I pondered the nature of Alan Hayes as I moved through the darkness. What would a man devoid of humanity depend on to fill the empty places inside him? Arrogance, I thought. Cunning. Unquenchable rapaciousness. And, no doubt, an immense sense of self-satisfaction.

  I thought about his cunning. If he had a hiding place on the hill, what had driven Alan Hayes to leave Vicky Meeks so close to his secret hiding place? If his daughter Sarah had spoken the truth to Maggie and he had not used the basement for his darkest purposes but had, instead, taken his victims to a place only he knew about, a place where he could take his time, it would likely be on this hill he felt a need to claim. But it had been sloppy of him to leave Vicky Meeks on that same hill. Had arrogance overridden cunning? Maybe he had grown so good at what he did that the thrill of being caught had faded, perhaps he was driven by a need to dance near that line?

  No, Alan Hayes would not make a mistake like that. He’d only have dumped the body close to his hiding place if he’d absolutely had to.

  I had been a detective once. And I had been a good one once, though that had been much longer ago than my death. I had, in fact, been considered the best prospect in all the academy, outclassed only by Lazaro Gonzales and his dazzling skills at ingratiating himself with instructors. Now Gonzales was commander and I was dead. But I still had the knowledge in me that I’d had back then—I had that knowledge and so much more.

  I reached the hill just as the moon had climbed to its peak in the sky. I sat on a rock, watching, as the sky turned a deep, rich, almost luminescent blue that seemed to draw the stars to it. It felt good to be alone at times like this, and my solitude settled easily on me.

  Then I saw a tiny figure far up the hill with a black spot dancing around it.

  Of course. The old man and his dog. The man who had discovered Vicky Meeks in the weeds. This was his hill, too. For as long as Alan Hayes had been using it for his own darker purposes, this man had been using it as a farewell to each day and a place to greet the dawn. This was his place of solitude before he returned to a house full of other people, other voices, and all the responsibilities of his responsible life. The old man would not give up his walks on the hill just because he’d found a body. No, he, too, needed his rituals and his hill.

  I saw the connection. Perhaps the old man had spooked Alan Hayes the day before Vicky Meeks was discovered. Maybe that was why Hayes had left her body in a place so close to his hiding place. He had probably been moving the body when he heard the old man drawing close on an early morning walk. He’d had no choice but to dump it where he was and to run.

  As I imagined the scene, a habit I had used long ago when I still cared about my job, it was as if my thoughts now had the power to inspire a rewind of reality. I saw it all with clarity in my mind: a night like this, hours later, hovering on the edge of dawn, stalled by approaching daylight, still lit by the moon, the air crisp and clean, stars winking out above, the end of a perfect autumn night—and the perfect time to dispose of the girl who had so inconveniently died on him at last, taking away his pleasures. He’d leave his hiding place with her body somehow, a plan in mind to take the body to his car below and dispose of her elsewhere, far from his hiding place. He’d not have gotten far when he heard the old man approaching, or perhaps the little dog barking nearby, smelling him, smelling the body, alerting his owner that all was not well.

  He’d have to move quickly. He’d have to move off the path to a place as close by as possible. He’d have to dump the body and run. And he’d be angry that his own routine had been interrupted by something so inconsequential and unworthy as an old man and his yappy little dog.

  He’d be hoarding that anger still.

  I stood up abruptly, ready to search the hill. The rock quarry on the other side of the hill offered a hundred hiding places. There were caverns and cul-de-sacs among the mountains of rocks, abandoned clearings, the desolate bottoms of dried-out reservoirs. But he would not be in the quarry. If he’d been surprised by the old man and his dog, and if he’d been using the clearing in the woods for some of his more public fantasies, he’d have to have a hiding place somewhere closer to where the body of Vicky Meeks was found. He would not run back uphill to dump her, away from the old man, not with a body in tow. He’d run downhill instead. Which meant his hiding place was above both the clearing and the crime scene.

  I could see it as clearly as life and I knew that I was right. I, Kevin Fahey, had blown it utterly and thoroughly when alive. But in death? In death, I was a detective again. A good detective. I knew I was right.

  I headed for the spot where Vicky Meeks had been discarded among the weeds like the unwanted remains of a meal. I found nothing and headed uphill toward the clearing where Maggie and I had seen a figure running through the woods. But again, there was nothing malignant lingering there. It felt like nothing more than an altar to the night, awaiting the scratchings and scurryings of night creatures—and so I moved on.

  I continued upward, alert for signs that the old man and his dog were on the same path. I did not want to risk exposure and dogs were tricky. The little terrier had not bothered me before, but perhaps he’d only been distracted by the scent of a decomposing body nearby.

  I was close to the crime scene when I heard whistling: a classic swing song popular during World War II. The old man was near.

  I melted back into the shadows just as he rounded a curve in the path, anxious to get home now that he had lingered too long into the night, perhaps more anxious than usual because he was remembering the dead girl he’d discovered a week before.

  But I, too, had lingered too long. The little dog sensed my presence and pulled away from his master, growling more like a Rottweiler than a terrier. He darted toward me, yapping furiously, pursuing me into the bushes. I got a glimpse of the old man’s face, pale and worried in the moonlight, and I feared he might have a heart attack, so sudden and overwhelming was his terror. I could hear his thoughts as they rushed through his mind: Why had I taken a walk so late at night? Why had I tempted fate? What will my family say if I don’t return home? How could I have been so careless?

  I fled, not wanting to frighten the old man further, hoping to leave the little dog behind. But the damnable beast kept pace, and there was no question now that he could see me. I moved quickly through the underbrush, relentlessly pursued by the dog. His determination would have been comical had I not been thoroughly annoyed. The damn thing wiggled beneath the brambles that did not bother me, leapt over rocks with a joyous abandon, darted around trees, and sent leaves flying as his paws scuttled over the forest floor. So far as he was concerned, he was doing his job, and what a grand game it was indeed.

  I could not shake him. He pursued me endlessly, rattling me so much I became unsure of where I had been and where I had yet to go. I needed to find the path. I took off to my left, through a heavy tangle of dormant bushes that would surely at least slow the beast down, then I moved through a patch of pines that had established a small colony deep in the hardwood hills. I smelled asphalt ahead and reached the path again, moving quickly uphill where I knew the old man would be reluctant to follow his dog. Perhaps he’d command the dog to heel and I’d be left alone.

  But that damn little beast was too quick for me, and he was a far better pursuer than I had ever been. He was with me on the path in an instant, his barks and growls triumphant. What could I do now? I couldn’t swat him and I couldn’t shake him. I had to keep moving until his master called him off.

  I reached the crest of a ridge, the little dog still on my heels. I had nowhere to go. I followed the path around a bend and it continued to wind slowly upward, the steepness of its slope softened by its circular route. The boulders grew larger, the rock interface taller as I neared the top of the hill. Behind me, the dog had settled into a series of annoying yips. It sounded like I had an incredibly loud, nasal beeper affixed to my rear end. There was a reason I’d never let my boys have a dog, I thought grimly as I searched for some w
ay to shake it.

  The asphalt path stopped in a clearing surrounded on three sides by massive rocks that had tumbled from the pinnacle of the hill to a depression in the ground, forming a natural barrier. The paved walkway ended abruptly against one of the granite boulders. End of the line.

  I went right, through a tumbled pile of rocks, and into the underbrush surrounding the crest of the hill. A hundred feet into the overgrown area, I knew I was lost, but I kept moving. If I found a space small enough to hide in, the little dog would not be able to follow. Then I saw it: a tangle of dried brush and brambles at the base of another outcropping of conjoined boulders. What the hell, I’d head right into the rocks and see what happened.

  I moved through the brambles and discovered an unexpected clearing no more than four feet wide. The forest floor had been stamped down and smoothed; dark earth showed through the coating of fallen leaves. I examined the brush surrounding the clearing more closely and discovered a makeshift blind made of dried branches woven together and propped up against the rocks. Behind it, where the rocks came together, I saw the opening to what looked like a cave.

  I knew at once I had found the hiding place where Alan Hayes took his victims. Death lingered outside the entrance, drawing me to it with the power of an inescapable but self-destructive impulse. I could not turn back.

  The entry hole was no larger than a linebacker, but it was big enough for a normal person to slip through, and certainly big enough to drag a body in and out of. I stepped through the opening, into a narrow pathway formed by rock walls, seeking the cavern that must be inside.

  Behind me, the little dog was barking and clawing his way through the bushes, relentless in its pursuit.

  What if someone waited inside? I would be putting the dog and the old man in danger.