Blood of Angels

by Marshall, Michael

  'No,' Gayle said. 'He goes for long walks sometimes, in the evening. He has done…he did for the last three or four years. It was his idea of a fitness regime. He didn't like gyms.'

  'Did he used to go any place in particular that you're aware of?'

  'No. Just around the town.'

  'Not Raynor's Wood, for example?'

  The woman looked at her coldly. 'The last time he would have been there at night was over two decades ago. With me.'

  'The local cops seem convinced your husband was murdered by a woman, Mrs Widmar. What's your reaction to that?'

  'The same as yours.'

  'Which is?'

  'It's bullshit.'

  'He never had any affairs that you're aware of? I'm sorry to ask you that, but…'

  'I know. You have to. And my answer—as it has been to everyone who has asked it either directly or indirectly over the last two days—is no.'

  'And you can't think of anyone who might have a desire to harm him?'

  Mrs Widmar shook her head fervently, and briefly looked close to breaking down. She blew her nose aggressively and then blinked at her knees for a moment.

  'I loved my husband,' she said. 'I still do. He was a decent man, and a good father. It sounds trite, but it's true. The kids are going to miss him. A lot. But…he was just a guy. Just a normal guy.' Finally she looked up. 'I just don't understand it. Why would anyone want to kill a man like that?'

  '"Why" isn't always there to be found.'

  'And how come the FBI are involved in this?'

  Monroe stepped in. 'There are aspects of the murder which attracted our attention.'

  Mrs Widmar smiled tightly. 'Well, focus that attention. Find who did this to us.'

  'That's our job,' he said.

  But she hadn't been talking to him.

  •••

  Nina and Monroe walked back down the road. The sun was getting low in the sky and the light was slanted and golden.

  'What do you think?'

  'We know she can't have done it,' Nina said. 'And I don't see her being involved in any other way. There's no incentive for the business partner to have dropped him?'

  Monroe shook his head. 'They were old friends, guy had nothing to gain and a lot to lose. He seems more upset than the wife.'

  'She's plenty upset,' Nina said. 'Trust me.'

  They reached the car. Nina waited for Monroe to unlock it, but he seemed distracted by a house across the street. It was smaller than the Widmars', and in significantly worse repair. It appeared to be for sale, though it didn't look like the vendor was exactly putting his heart into the task. Eventually he turned back.

  'Widmar had a reputation. In a quiet way. One of the girls who worked in his store, plus a waitress in the restaurant. Occasional inappropriateness.'

  'I know. Reidel told me. And evidently at least some of Widmar's walks ended up in bars. But the fact his wife didn't know this does not prove he had some double life or was a total scumbag. Men of a certain age talk to barmaids. Harassment remains harassment, but hands can wander without their owner being one of Hitler's henchmen. Not everyone has your moral fibre, Charles, or your level of self-control.'

  'I'm not saying Widmar was a bad man. And I don't appreciate the sarcasm.'

  'Sarcasm? Your fibre is legendary.'

  'Nina—why are you busting my balls?'

  'Just for recreation, I think.'

  'I don't believe so. You have a reason for everything you do. And now is the time to tell me about it, because I won't ask again.'

  'Okay.' She cocked her head. 'Ward told me that everything we gave you has been pulled from the Jones/Wallace case. That Paul's back to just being a lone psycho again.'

  'Christ, Olbrich. He's a good cop but Jesus does he talk.'

  'Maybe he felt he owed Ward something, what with having mislaid his psychotic brother. Of whom I assume there is still no sign? Despite your confidence yesterday?'

  Monroe shook his head.

  'So—true or false, Charles?'

  'There's no evidence anyone else was involved in the Jones and Wallace murders, which is what the trial pertains to. Hopkins' rants about an alleged conspiracy of serial killers could do nothing but muddy the waters.'

  'You know what they're called, Charles. They're called the Straw Men.'

  'I know what you told me. I don't know it's true. And it's not something I'm ever going to try to prosecute.'

  'And that's nothing to do with the fact that if they were mentioned in court, it might slip that you got a tip-off concerning the location of Jessica Jones' body? Doesn't that somewhat suggest some other person or persons were involved? But we wouldn't want those waters muddied, right?'

  Nina finally noticed a man was standing in the garden of the house opposite, and was watching with interest as he hosed water over his lawn. She realized she had been a bare few decibels short of shouting, and dropped her voice. It shook a little.

  'Let's hit it back to the hotel, Charles. I want to be somewhere generic. I've had enough of this town for one day.'

  Chapter 7

  The car pulled in to the front of the Holiday Inn a little before seven o'clock. I was standing in the parking lot. Partly because I could smoke there without being glared at, also because I had no strong desire to run into Monroe. The two of them got out of the car and were joined by someone who'd been waiting outside.

  I watched the three of them walk to the lobby and disappear inside. That was slightly weird. The third man was not far off my height, with only a slightly heavier build. It was almost like I was outside my body, or my life, and looking in. That's not a good feeling. This sensation intensified during the time I spent waiting, watching the three shapes in room 107 on the ground floor. When I was younger I might have thought that being a man loitering in a parking lot with a gun in his jacket would be cool in some way. In fact it just makes you wonder if you'll ever be let back inside.

  After forty minutes the second man came back out of the hotel and drove away. Eventually it seemed like there was only one shape in Nina's room. It stood motionless behind the curtain for a while.

  I went into the hotel, swung around the far side of reception and walked along the corridor. I knocked on her door and it was a full minute before it was opened.

  Nina had taken her shoes off, and thus looked about two feet shorter than usual while being about the same size. She looked tired, and wary.

  'How did you know what hotel I was in?'

  'Called the cops, said I was a Fed underling and had an important package for you.'

  'Christ. And the room?'

  'I asked at reception,' I said. 'Security in this town is not iron-clad. I should warn you that if al-Qaeda decide to take out the Thornton Savings and Loan, they may well pull it off.'

  She didn't smile. 'Did I make a mistake coming here?' I asked. 'It's just, I thought someone left me a note.'

  'Sorry,' she said, and stood aside.

  I walked past her into the room. Other people's hotel rooms are strange. Unless you've entered it with them, been present at the initial dispersal of case, jacket and small change, peered hopefully in the bathroom together and pulled the curtain aside to establish the view isn't all that great, they always feel like someone else's nest. The dampness of another person's towel is private. Maybe that's all I was feeling.

  'Nina, are you okay?'

  'I'm fine,' she said, in an un-fine way. 'This is the first day I've been out in the world for a long time. I hadn't realized how used I'd got to being the way we were.'

  There was a pot of coffee sitting on the desk. I helped myself to a cup and sat in an object which some designer, somewhere, had evidently believed would function as a chair.

  'Is that all it is?'

  She sat cross-legged on the end of the bed. 'Maybe.'

  The coffee wasn't great, but I soldiered on with it. Nina stared at the mirror above the desk.

  'Tell me,' I said. 'Tell me why you're here.'

  'It's
my job.'

  'No,' I said. 'It is, but that's not why. Monroe knew you'd come out for this one. Why?'

  She smiled at her hands. 'I keep forgetting you're not stupid.'

  'Me too. It's an easy mistake to make.'

  She looked at me, rolled her eyes, and seemed okay for a moment. Then her face clouded again. She slowly let herself fall back until she was lying rigidly on the bed, eyes on the ceiling.

  I sipped quietly for a few minutes longer, until she finally started talking.

  'When I was young,' she said, 'there was this woman.'

  •••

  Nina grew up in Janesville, Wisconsin. She was an only child. Her parents got on well with each other, and with her. She was smart and good at sport. For some reason this had not translated into having large numbers of friends. She did not take the bus home from school with the other kids, but walked to where her father worked and waited on a bench outside. He drove them home, talking about his day, or, on infrequent but memorable occasions, sitting in churning silence. When she turned thirteen she got with a crowd at last, and became a little more sociable, but for a number of years that was how each afternoon ended. The walk from school, and then a sit, getting an early start on her homework or just watching the world go by. She liked to do that, and only accepted the offer of a seat in reception when the weather really was too cold or wet (and Janesville got plenty wet, and plenty cold). It was not a great part of town but her father could see the bench from his office window, and the security guy on the door kept an eye out for her too. Perhaps things would be different now, but back then, the arrangement was fine.

  Opposite the office was a bar, on the ground floor of the only Victorian building left in a street of concrete oblongs. One of the things Nina watched was the people who came and went from the bar in the late afternoon. She was always intrigued. You saw all types. Businessmen in suits who walked in as if they had a meeting there, but who sat in the window alone, and not for long. There were the old guys, too. You only ever saw them go in, or come out. The length of time between the two was too long to wait. It might be years. They wore thick coats and moved with slow deliberation and had grey stubble on their chins. There were also guys who were not so old but not businessmen either, who came and went from the bar like busy birds. It was hard to imagine what they did when they were not inside. Slept, maybe, or did whatever it was that meant they had just enough money for another beer.

  And there were the women. Not too many, but some. After a while Nina came to recognize one of these.

  She first saw her when she was about eleven, and then on and off for the next two years. Nina first noticed her because she looked a little younger and prettier than the other women who went to the bar, the majority of whom were, frankly, dogs. She had a lot of brown hair and wore tight jeans and a sweater without any sleeves. The second or third time Nina saw her, the woman noticed her back—and winked from across the road. Occasionally men spied the young girl sitting on the bench opposite, and looked at her, and when they did it made Nina flush. She didn't like it. But when this woman winked, it was okay. It made her feel a little grown up.

  They never spoke. The woman never crossed the road, or waved. But maybe twenty or thirty times over the next few years, her and Nina's gazes interlocked. Over that period Nina watched the woman change. Nina never saw her too close up, so perhaps she had never been as young as her clothing suggested. But she got a lot older, and fast. It was like each time you saw her something irrevocable had happened in between. She put on thirty pounds. Her hair went blonde and then red and then blonder and then back to something like brown, but not in a good way. Parts of her face went rosy, the others pale. The only thing that stayed the same was her walk, the way she approached the bar as if this was the first time she'd been there but she'd heard good things about it and was confident of a fine time within. She looked that way even when it became so that she was generally staggering a little even when she arrived. By this point Nina didn't really like to see her any more. It was like watching someone whose life was running on faster film, as if every step this woman took counted for a thousand of ours. But still now and then the woman would notice her, and wink. A slow wink, that just said, 'Hi, I see you, and you see me, and that's okay.' On the last few occasions Nina actually wondered whether the woman could still see her at all, or was just doing it out of habit. Still, it happened.

  Meanwhile, bodies were being found.

  Three in two years. Then a fourth, and a fifth. Men's bodies found in parked cars, dead of gunshot wounds. Men who started the night looking for something cheap and easy, and who saw in the next day minus their wallets and their lives.

  Three weeks before Nina's thirteenth birthday, a woman was arrested. When Nina saw the news report, sitting with her parents on a Thursday night, her mouth dropped open.

  It was the woman.

  The woman who winked.

  It was a big story, Wisconsin's prequel to Aileen Wuornos, Florida's more notorious man-slayer of a few years later. They called Janesville's killer the Black Widow, though she was neither black, a widow nor a spider. They found out how she had been abused as a child, by at least two family members. They heard how in recent years she had been passed around by men at parties until she lost consciousness, and then passed around some more. They hinted at what she would do for little more than a drink, or even just the promise of one. None of this was presented in mitigation, but as titillating proof of her guilt.

  The woman claimed she was innocent, and Nina believed her. Nina had watched her walking down the street on summer afternoons, had seen the spring in her step. No one who walked like that could do these things. Someone, somewhere, was lying.

  Then it seemed like she might be guilty after all—at least, that's what her attorney was willing to plead. Yes, his client had wielded the gun. But in self defence, always. She had wound up in bad situations with men, and it had been her only escape.

  Nina didn't believe that either. By now she was following the case avidly. She scoured the papers and magazines for more information, kept her eyes peeled for reports on the television. Whenever she heard someone talking about it, at school or on the street, she slowed, tried to hear what they were saying. She became a sponge, absorbing everything, until it became a part of her.

  A month later came the next episode in what was rapidly becoming a soap opera. The woman had reversed her claim. She was completely innocent again, and had never been anywhere near any of these men. Her attorney had also tried to rape her, she said. And the judge. Everybody was trying to fuck her over both figuratively and literally. Every man, and every woman too.

  Not me, Nina thought, as she watched. Not me.

  'But then…' Nina tailed off, and said nothing for a moment.

  I kept silent, as I had done throughout. When Nina spoke again her voice was thick. 'Then there was this five-second piece of film, showing her coming out of court and being helped into a car. It was raining, and her hair was plastered down all over her head. She'd lost pounds again, but from the wrong places. It was like she'd lost weight from her mind. She looked across the top of the patrol car before she ducked her head, glared straight across into the television camera. And you could see it in her eyes.'

  'See what?'

  'She did it. I knew right then that she had killed them after all. You looked in her eyes and knew she was guilty, that she had been there and fired the gun. But I knew she was not guilty, too. I knew she had done these things, but also not done them. And I wondered how that could be. And how there could come a time when there was no winking left in her head.'

  I thought about that for a moment. 'What happened to her?'

  'She went down for all five. Killed herself eight months later. Got hold of a spoon, broke off the end, and pushed the shaft into her throat after lights out. They said it probably took about three hours for her to die.'

  Nina was quiet for a full five minutes. Then I realized the rhythm of her breathing had
changed, and that she was asleep.

  •••

  I watched her a while, then opened up my laptop and plugged it into the phone. I hadn't had a chance to check email during the day, to see if my mystery correspondent still had something to say.

  The hotel's connection was slow. While I waited, I found myself thinking about my own father. These messages from the ether reminded me of the last communication I had from him, a single-sentence note left inside a chair in their house in Montana. When you die, the loose ends are what prove you have been alive. The cans of food no one else likes. The greetings card not sent, its Cellophane now dusty and yellowed, the price sticker faded and historically cheap. My parents had left plenty such loose ends. Through them I had discovered my brother Paul and I had been unofficially adopted as babies after a confrontation with my natural father, a man who had harmed my mother. My parents abandoned Paul on the streets of San Francisco a couple of years later, believing the two of us were better kept apart, and not knowing how else to achieve it. The organization my natural father had belonged to was still in operation thirty years later, and my dad—and bear in mind Don Hopkins was just a realtor—tracked them down to a luxury development in the mountains above Yellowstone. They killed him and my mother. The group was small and very well hidden, but it had money and it had power. I knew this group now as the Straw Men. The detective called John Zandt had told me he believed the Straw Men had been in America for three thousand years or more, growing rich on the profits of prehistoric copper mining in the Great Lakes area. He claimed that a loose confederation of men and women had settled there, arriving from different parts of the globe and many different eras, united in a hatred of the world's increasing civilization: and further claimed they had subsequently been responsible for everything from the disappearance of early settlers at Roanoke to old Indian legends of violent tribes of bearded men, as they tried to resist later settlement of a land they believed to be theirs. I wasn't sure how sane Zandt still was, however. He had doubts about my character too. I had failed to take two opportunities to kill the man who had murdered his daughter. My brother, Paul.