by Chaz McGee
Table of Contents
Cover
A Selection of Titles by Katy Munger
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Epilogue
A Selection of Titles by Katy Munger
The Dead Detective Mysteries
(formerly under the pseudonym Chaz McGee)
DESOLATE ANGEL
ANGEL INTERRUPTED
The Casey Jones Series
LEGWORK
OUT OF TIME
MONEY TO BURN
BAD TO THE BONE
BETTER OFF DEAD
BAD MOON ON THE RISE
ANGEL OF DARKNESS
Katy Munger
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published 2012
in Great Britain and in the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.
Copyright © 2012 by Katy Munger.
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Munger, Katy.
Angel of darkness. – (Dead detective)
1. Fahey, Kevin (Fictitious character) – Fiction.
2. Delaware – Fiction. 3. Detective and mystery stories.
I. Title II. Series
813.6-dc23
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-213-9 (ePub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8131-1 (cased)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
PROLOGUE
A young girl looks out the window at a world ruled by monsters. They swoop at her, whisper to her late at night and tell her secrets she must not reveal. She has come to know these dark creatures well. But the monster she sees creeping along the edge of the lawn this night is different. She has seen him before, in the daylight, pretending to be one of them.
Without warning, the earth swallows him.
She blinks and peers out into the darkness. Where has the monster gone?
She looks around to see if anyone else has noticed. The others stare at the television, minds dulled to the world. Only she has seen the monster.
‘Here,’ a voice says. A paper cup is thrust at her. The girl knows better than to protest. She spills the pills on to her tongue and washes them down with the grainy juice that has been proffered.
‘I saw a monster,’ she tells the nurse.
‘You’re safe in here,’ the nurse assures the girl – not understanding that, this time, the monster was real.
ONE
If there is one thing I have learned from my death, it is this: secrets can destroy you. The words you cannot say, the lies you keep, the actions you pray will go undetected? They isolate you from the people who love you. They drive you into the shadows. They can divide you from yourself.
I kept many secrets during my life. Sometimes, I take them out and count them: the dreams I coveted, yet never tried to attain; the women I hid from my wife; the many times I gave up on a case, tossing the file into a drawer. But my indifference to the people I had sworn to serve was my biggest secret. Those who knew me when I was alive thought that I had stopped trying. The truth was that I had stopped caring.
These secrets shame me now as I wander through this world of mine, caught between the living and the dead, feeding on the secrets of others, like a vampire seeking life in its victim’s blood. I walk the streets of my small Delaware town, unseen, peering in windows, following the furtive, savoring the mortality revealed by the secrets of others. I have seen a priest whip himself with razor-tipped wire until his back ran with blood. I have witnessed a woman following her lost love for days at a time, weeping all the while. I once glimpsed a bride tearfully bidding her young lover goodbye at the back door of a church even as a far older man waited for her at the altar. These months of watching have confirmed what I already knew: secrets can destroy you.
As proof, I point to the Holloway Institute for Mental Health, a house of secrets built high on a hill overlooking my town. At its heart, Holloway is an imposing granite mansion that towers over its lesser, more modern neighbors. Long-term patients reside in this majestic central building. If the hospital’s administrators thought that living in the original wing might somehow heal the fissures in these poor souls, they were very much mistaken. The people who live in prison are lost. Their minds are alive with private worlds infinitely more compelling than the real world that awaits them. They will never return to living among others because they do not want to.
To the right of this majestic edifice, a newer three-story stone structure stands as a testament to the optimism of Holloway’s founders. This is the short-term unit where the drug-addicted and depressed dwell. The people of my town send loved ones here whose lives have careened off track, spilling them in embarrassing terrain where their behavior frightens those whose more reliable lives chug onward as usual. Yet I know that little separates the despairing residents of this unit from those who live in the suburbs below and cling to the illusion that such a thing as ‘normal’ is even possible. It is entirely debatable as to which side suffers from the biggest delusions.
Of all the dark secrets at Holloway, none are darker than those savored by the residents who live in Holloway’s third building, a stark brick box surrounded by a double chain-link fence and built on the lip of a cliff that falls abruptly to a valley below. I have sent two people to live behind the bolted doors of this unit. Both men deserved a darker fate. Both deserved to be locked up in dark barred cages far from the people whose lives they fed upon. But both men convinced a jury that their enthusiastic violence was caused by a broken mind rather than their insatiable need to inflict pain on others. I was not fooled by their a
cts. And I know now, that each man was a fraud, for I have visited the darkest corners of their minds, where the screams and pleas of others are stored like treasures in a museum. I have tasted their satisfaction at these memories and felt their abiding hunger for more. These men did not kill out of madness, they killed because they chose to.
One of these men died shortly after I first visited Holloway, his last thoughts dark recollections of those moments when he had taken the lives of others and gloried in his power to do so. This man died in a comfortable hospital bed, fussed over by a nurse who would have driven her syringe straight into his heart had she known the evil he savored in his final hours. I sometimes wonder where he went after his death. I did not see him go and I have not seen him since. And though I tempt my own fate by saying so, given the punishment he deserved, I can only hope there is a Hell.
The other man still lives in the brick building on the edge of the cliff, sharing his ward with men whose madness makes them a danger to others. The inmates in this wing for the criminally insane – all men – often stand at the inner fence of the maximum security unit, fingers curled over the heavy steel strands, licking their lips and making smacking sounds at the ready-made victims cowering on the other side. They delight in the way that the patients outside their unit shrink from their shouts. They exult in their power to inspire fear.
The man I put there among them, Otis Redman Parker, spends his days blatantly bullying other inmates while bullying the orderlies in far more subtle ways. He is the worst of the worst. His most fundamental need is to have power over others. He has trained his mind to remember every detail of the pain that he caused when he was free and he spends his nights reliving his crimes, ever excited by his memories.
I can see the darkness that surrounds him like a sick, bleak fog. At rest, his mind is a terrifying landscape of gleaming skulls, scattered bones, deep pits and a perpetual night filled with terrible cries. To loose him upon the lambs of the world would lead to terrible slaughter.
Which brings me back to the most shameful secret I carry with me in death. I keep watch over this monster known by the world as Otis Redman Parker because, had I done my job better when I was alive, he would be caged deep in an impenetrable prison instead of ruling a hospital wing so quaintly labeled as for the criminally insane. These men are not insane. Indeed, they see life with more clarity than most. They see that laws are nothing more than words on a page and that there is no force in the universe that can stop them from inviting in the chaos.
Had I done my job better, Otis Parker would have died with a needle in his arm. But, like so many others before him, my incompetence proved to be his blessing. All I did was teach him to hide his hunger behind a mask of madness.
I fear what will happen the day he convinces others that he has been cured and is a man who should be set free.
TWO
I do not return to Holloway day after day to remind myself of my mistakes. The truth is that I have felt at home at Hollo-way since I visited it after my death.
Some patients I recognized from my prior life, but others I did not know at all. They had been at Holloway for decades, I realized, and their very existence was a profound surprise. How could they have orbited my world since I was a child, without me ever even knowing they existed?
One of these patients was a woman of faded beauty whose once-blonde hair was nearly gray and flew about her face, wild and untamed. She spent most of her days in a chair by a window where the sunshine spilled through obscenely, highlighting her indifference to its splendor. One day, soon after my first visit to Holloway, a man I had known forever came striding down the hall toward her, a bouquet of yellow roses cradled in his hands. The sight of him paralysed me with surprise.
It was Morty, a beat cop I had known when I was alive – a man we’d all ridiculed for leading a solitary life; a man we’d labeled as a eunuch.
He knelt at the woman’s feet and placed the roses in her lap. Her eyes focused on his and he smiled. She did not return his smile, but she did not look away, either. She searched his face, trying to remember a life she had left long ago. Morty waited patiently, willing to give her the time she needed to place him in her world. After a moment, she reached up and caressed his jaw with her palm, her face unreadable.
They made an oddly ancient tableau: a knight kneeling before his lady.
I saw Morty often at Holloway after that day. He visited the woman several times a week, always with yellow roses, always content to say not a word. I tried to search out the cause of this devotion, but I could learn nothing from his memories. He kept his mind blank, having decided it was too painful to look back, or maybe believing that he owed his lady the honor of being in the moment with her, no matter how bleak that moment might be.
Secrets. We all have them. Even an aging beat cop who has remained unmarried for his sixty-some years, his heart imprisoned behind the walls of Holloway.
Other patients, unfamiliar to me at first, came to be a part of an imaginary family I created in my mind. Their lonely wanderings across the sculpted lawns of Holloway reminded me of my own peripatetic afterlife. Like a child with a fairy-tale family patched together in his head, I had chosen a mother, a father and a daughter for my pretend family – though in life they were not related at all and, indeed, rarely noticed one another.
A funny little man named Harold Babbitt was my patriarch. He had peaked eyebrows that matched his owl-like physique, sharp eyes that glittered and a shiny point of bald head peeping above sparse hair. Harold spent his days murmuring a strange word salad, his brain exploding with electric impulses that churned out verbal waterfalls. He spoke of himself in the third person, his mind leaping from topic to topic like quicksilver: ‘Harold Babbitt is a prince among men and a man among dogs. He is a dog named Prince who knows when doves cry. He is here to fight the people who live as lions in the caves of your heart because they want to eat your soul. He is the man. He is the Harold. He is the Godfather of Soul.’
Harold was like that: ninety-nine percent nonsense, one percent brilliance. And me, with nothing better to do but follow him around each day, fell on that one percent like a bird might fall upon a breadcrumb tumbling to barren ground.
Being Harold had its dangers. At times, his benign chattering gave way to a terrifying self-violence, as if his words were lava building toward an eruption. When the explosion came, he would slam the shiny point of his head into walls, claw at the seeping blood with his hands, and then wipe it along his body as he howled for demons to take the Sun God away. The staff was ready when this happened. They would wrestle Harold to the ground and bind him in a jacket that pinned his arms to his sides. He would whimper apologies from his cocoon as they bundled him on to a stretcher and wheeled him into a room as hushed as a tomb in a lost pyramid. Its walls were padded to protect him from his madness. There, they would unstrap him from the stretcher and lead him to a corner. He’d sit, as docile as a lamb, his mutterings stuttering to a halt in the calm that settled on him in the aftermath.
I came to crave those quiet sessions with Harold in our special room. It seemed the one place in the world where my mind and my soul were still. Harold and I would take our seats, him in one corner and me in another. We would lay our heads back against the canvassed walls, listening to nothing, feeling nothing, our minds calmed by the room’s artificial twilight and gently cooled air. Harold would find peace and I would find peace, too. But the respite never lasted more than a day. Soon enough, Harold was let out to roam, a soft leather helmet affixed to his head until he found a way to take it off and hide it again. After a while, the staff usually gave up trying to find it and surrendered Harold to his walking commentary. For Holloway, Harold passed as normal.
In the fairy-tale family I had constructed in my mind, Harold’s wife was a patient named Olivia, whose face was wet with tears that never quite seemed to dry. I couldn’t tell what the source of her sorrow was, for she would not raise the curtain on that memory in her mind. She clung
resolutely to her pain, refused to acknowledge the future and did not look at the past. Whatever that memory is, she remained its prisoner, her life stalled until she can find the strength to confront it.
Sorrow had made her incandescent. She was tall and slender, with translucent skin and pale-blue eyes shaped like almonds. Her long red hair was the color of blood; it was impossible to take your eyes off it. She moved like an angel, with a slow grace made almost ritualistic by the medications she was on.
I was not the only one who noticed Olivia’s beauty. Otis Redman Parker had noticed her, too. Sometimes, when I was sitting with her in Holloway’s central courtyard, pretending we were friends and enjoying the fountain that she seemed to love so much, I would look up and see Parker staring at her through the fences that enclose his unit, his eyes bright and his mouth wet with desire. I hated him in those moments. He had no right to look upon her.
The final person in my imagined family was a little girl named Lily, who could not have been more than ten or eleven years old, though she, too, had been at Holloway for as long as I had visited. She was kept there by a horrifying world that cavorted in her head, a living landscape created by an unfortunate stew of chemicals and genetics at her birth. I had visited that world, seeking a way out for Lily, but she remained captive to its power. Creatures with fangs and claws and glowing eyes lurked in its darkness. Shadow figures leapt out from behind forests of twisting trees whose branches grabbed at you like hands. Strange hybrid animals with distorted limbs wandered through a post-apocalyptic countryside, sometimes stopping to turn their cartoonish faces to Lily. It was one of those creatures, a winged cat with saucer eyes and a toothy smile, who had ordered her to light a cigarette and burn her little brother up and down his arms, an act that landed her in Holloway. I know this because the cat repeated this command to her so often that the memory haunted her daily.