Angel's Advocate

by Stanton, Mary

  “We’ll just have to see,” she said, and then walked briskly out of the room.

  “Well, Sasha.” Bree put her cheek briefly against his furry face. He breathed in and out, in and out, with the sound of ocean waves.

  There was a soft stirring of the air behind her.

  “Hey, boss.”

  Bree turned around. Ron shimmered quietly in the corner, encased in a sphere of spinning light.

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Bree said in a fierce undertone. “How could it? How could it?!”

  Lavinia stepped out from the other side of the gurney, her violet aura draped around her like a cocoon. She shook her head sadly. “Poor old boy,” she said. “Poor old Sasha.”

  “I don’t understand,” Bree said. “Is Sasha going to die? He can’t die, can he? He’s one of you. He’s a member of the Company!”

  Lavinia reached across Sasha’s body and brushed the tears from Bree’s face. Her hands smelled of lavender. “It comes to all of us in the end, honey. One way or the other.”

  “There must be something we can do. Something you can do.”

  Sasha sighed, in his drugged sleep.

  “Passing from one room to another,” Ron said. “It’s something like that. We have all the tools the temporal world can give us to save him, Bree. We’ll just hope that it’s enough.”

  Bree looked at them, her teeth clenched. She shook with helpless anger. “No. You didn’t hear me. There has to be something else. Something . . .” She stopped, half afraid to ask—not even knowing the kind of question she could ask. She wasn’t afraid to beg, if begging would save Sasha’s life. “Can you? Can you help me? Can you help him? With . . .”

  “Something extra?” Ron’s voice was gentle. “No. No. I’m so sorry, dear Bree.”

  “I don’t care what it costs,” Bree began, recklessly, but they were gone, the two of them, and Miles and Belli, too, leaving her alone with Sasha’s body, and the breath that barely stirred it. Bree bit back a shout. It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t fair!

  It may have been hours later—it may have been minutes. Bree wasn’t sure. Waiting, Bree had time to think. The motive for Probert’s murder stuck out like a neon sign.

  Suddenly, Sasha’s golden body quivered. He began to pant, heavily, and tiny bubbles of foam appeared at the corners of his mouth. His right foreleg jerked in a spasm, then his left.

  “Help!” Bree shouted. She put both hands on the now warm fur and pressed down, trying to keep his body still. “Hey! I need some help in here!”

  “Help,” said a smooth voice behind her. “We thought you’d never ask.”

  Bree whirled.

  They looked like accountants. Or a Sinclair Lewis version of accountants, anyway. Medium height. Neat. Dressed in sober blue suits, white shirts, and nondescript ties. The taller one had a prim mouth; the shorter one was bald; both wore dark glasses.

  The taller one took his glasses off and his eyes were a dark, dried-blood red with yellow pupils. He extended his hand. His nails were thick and manicured to blunt points. “Henry Beazley, at your service, Counselor. And this is Caldecott.”

  Caldecott smiled. His teeth seemed to be all canines, sharp and not quite clean.

  “We represent the prosecution,” Beazley said cordially.

  Bree’s chest got very tight.

  “In the matter of Chandler v. The Celestial Courts,” Caldecott added. The words “Celestial Courts” had a pronounced hiss—like the sound made by a fire doused with water. Or a large snake.

  Sasha choked, gasped, and quivered. Beazley raised his hand, in a “now, now” kind of gesture, and Sasha’s breathing slowed to a peaceful tempo.

  “T’cha,” Beazley said, with patent insincerity. “Such a shame. Such an”—he paused, thoughtfully—“ardent soul, Sasha. Quite an asset to Beaufort & Company, I believe.”

  Bree bit her lip. She waited for the rise of the wind. She waited for the silvery shadow that was Striker. She felt nothing but fear for her dog and a gagging disgust for the burned-match smell that suffused the little room.

  Beazley sat down in midair and crossed one leg over the other. Bree took a breath and gasped a little. “We thought it was time for a prehearing discussion,” he said. “You’ve got a court date in . . . when is it, Caldecott?” He tipped his head in Caldecott’s direction, but kept his red-yellow gaze on Bree.

  “Fourteen hours,” Caldecott said primly. “Two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Petru filed the appeal yesterday!” Bree said indignantly. “I haven’t had time to prepare my case!”

  “Time,” Caldecott mused, “is a mutable thing.”

  Beazley nodded. “Yesssss.” The sibilance died away. He looked smug. “Our case looks good.”

  “Very strong,” Caldecott said.

  “But anytime prehearing negotiations can keep costs down . . .”

  “The whole system benefits . . .”

  “And we like to avoid cost overruns wherever possible . . .”

  Bree folded her arms. “You’re willing to withdraw your objections to a retrial for my client?”

  “Not exactly, but we are willing to make some small concessions,” Beazley said.

  “Small,” Caldecott echoed.

  “We could reduce the eternal sentence to three or four millennia?” Beazley said.

  “And perhaps move from the ninth circle—so cold, that lake! And Probert hates the cold—to perhaps the eighth?”

  “Windy,” Beazley said. “And quite warm, on occasion, but on the whole, much less discomfort.”

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” Bree said. “But I’m becoming quite convinced there’s been a true miscarriage of justice here. I’d like the evidence to be weighed again.”

  “We would be quite disappointed if you insisted on that.” Caldecott held both his hands in the air in apparent dismay. Sasha stiffened, as if seized by the throat. Bree blinked back tears and held him. Caldecott dropped his hands, and the dog dropped back into his drugged sleep.

  “Tricky thing, blood transfusions,” Beazley observed coldly.

  “It’ll work,” Bree said frantically. “It has to.”

  “Trusting in man, like your mother?” Caldecott sneered. “She trusted in the temporal, and look what happened to her.”

  Bree stopped herself from leaping forward and grabbing the opposing counsel by the neck. “Just what did . . .”

  They were gone. Just like that.

  Bree bit her lip hard, to keep the tears away, and forced herself to trust in God and man. And while she waited, she thought. About the paperweight she found that day by the scene of the crash. About the murder weapon. About the tracking system at Marlowe’s, where every piece of merchandise sold in the store could be located at the press of a button.

  And very soon after, when Sasha woke and yawned widely at her, her trust in man, at least, proved to be enough.

  Twenty

  One more devils’-triumph and sorrow for angels,

  One wrong more to man.

  —The Lost Leader, Robert Browning

  Bree was arrested the minute she stepped out of the clinic doors. It was two o’clock in the morning. She didn’t know if Hunter had waited outside for her all that time—it seemed unlikely—or if the vet assistant had called the police station the moment Sasha woke. Whatever. But she had had a lot of time to think. And she knew now who had killed Probert Chandler on that lonely bend of Skidaway Road. The syringe. The blood test. The keys. The Marlowe’s paperweight. And the photograph from years ago.

  Hunter was there, grim-faced and grouchy. Sergeant Markham read Bree her rights, handcuffed her, and pushed her into the backseat of the police car with a certain amount of purposeful glee. They drove off to the Chatham County Courthouse. Bree argued with Hunter all the way. Hunter grunted. She hoped he was listening. Markham set her jaw and muttered, “Bullshit bullshit bullshit” all nineteen miles back to town.

  Bree spent five hours in the holding pen, dying for a toothb
rush. She made one phone call, to Antonia, and made three requests. Her sister had no problem with the food and coffee—and too many questions about the second and third. “But where,” she said, “am I supposed to find something like that?”

  Bree told her.

  “And you want it for what?”

  “I’ve got a murderer to catch—and I’ve got to do it before two P.M. today.”

  When she was released on her own recognizance at nine thirty, Antonia waited outside the courthouse with hot coffee and a lox-and-cream-cheese-stuffed bagel.

  “The other thing’s all set up,” she said. “Jeez. The guys at the garage think I’m nuts, by the way. But I gave them a hundred bucks each and a deposit on the thingummy . . .”

  “Jackhammer,” Bree said.

  “In case it gets wrecked or whatever. And the one guy, Manny, wants to be sure you’ve got a court order to do this. Do you have an actual real court order, Bree? Or is that official piece of paper Ron dropped off for me a crock? I think it’s a crock. I don’t see how you could have gotten a judge to sign the thing at three o’clock in the morning, or whenever it was that you asked Ron to do this. I think,” she said dramatically, “I just pulled a fast one on the guys who do our lube jobs. And I don’t feel good about it.”

  “You’ll get over it,” Bree said unsympathetically. The hot coffee tasted wonderful. The bagel tasted even better. “How’d you get the car back from the clinic?”

  “I took it back to the theater when I left the clinic. Hunter said you weren’t going to need it for a long, long time. As I make it, it was only a couple of hours.”

  “He’s mad at me,” Bree said. “Or was. I think he’s on his way to a little forgiveness, if things turn out all right this afternoon.”

  “You’ve got hope. I’m telling you, sister, you start messing around with the guy’s job, he’s not going to feel real good about it or you.” Antonia pulled the car away from the curb with a cheerful lack of interest in what the rest of the traffic on Montgomery was doing. Since this was Savannah, and not Manhattan, nobody honked or swore or even made rude gestures out the driver-side windows. “I’m taking you back to the town house.”

  “I really need to go to the office,” Bree said. “I’ll drop you off.”

  “No, you really need to go to the town house.” She sniffed the air in a pointed way. Bree looked down at her wrinkled suit and her filthy shoes. Her shirt felt like it was glued to her shoulders. “Shower,” she said wisely. “I guess I need to clean up.”

  “I guess you do.” The drive to Factor’s Walk was short. Antonia pulled up to the town house. “So how was it? Jail, I mean. This is the first time any Beaufort’s been in the slam since the pirate Beaufort in 1763.”

  “The holding pen,” Bree corrected her. “Not jail. And it wasn’t too bad, considering. Smelly, due to the unsettled stomachs of the lady drunks. Rowdy, due to the irritable tempers of those same lady drunks, who’d been deprived of their gin. But not too bad.” She heaved herself out of the car, wanting to sleep for a week. “To be honest, I’d rather not do it again.”

  Antonia followed her into the house. In her room, Bree stripped off her clothes and headed for the bathroom. She turned the shower water on, as hot as she could stand it, and stepped in. She let the water run over her for a long moment, without moving.

  “. . . back here!” Antonia called from the other side of the door.

  Bree dumped shampoo on her head. “What?!”

  Antonia cracked the door. “I said I talked to Ron, and he’ll pick Sasha up as soon as the clinic’s ready to let him go. And he’s really glad we seem to have solved the case.”

  Ron’s picking up Sasha on his bicycle? Bree decided not to worry about how the carless Ron was going to retrieve the dog. Or why sometimes people could see him, and sometimes they couldn’t. It appeared to be up to Ron.

  “Those two monster dogs showed up at the Angelus office, he said.”

  “Ron said Miles and Belli are there?”

  “Yes. And they’ve got to stay there, he said. Since the law wants to lock them up the way they just locked you up.”

  Bree scowled to herself. “They didn’t bite anybody.”

  “They menaced, Ron said, which is enough to get them quarantined, these days, I guess. They scare me to bits, Bree, but I’d hate to see them end up in custody and then get put down, the way they do with those poor pit bulls.”

  “Fat chance.” Bree would like to see those county officials brave enough to attempt to euthanize either one of the pair.

  “Don’t be too sure. And Ron said George Chandler has apparently called you about forty-two times.”

  Bree scrubbed herself down with the loofah, twisted the faucet handle from hot to cold, endured the spray of icy water for all of thirty seconds, and jumped out of the shower. She wrapped the first towel Antonia handed her around herself, and the second around her hair. “I’ll have to get back to George later. One way or the other, he’s not going to be happy with what I’ve found out. So I’d just as soon it was later.”

  “So now what?” Antonia said brightly. “You want some more breakfast? I think you should go to bed and sleep for the next twenty-four hours.”

  “Not yet.” Bree looked at herself in the steamy mirror. She didn’t look too bad, considering. Chandler’s hearing was today, which was totally outrageous. Petru had filed the appeal the day before yesterday. She’d have to speak to someone about the timing thing. It gave Beazley and Caldecott a grossly unfair advantage. She couldn’t remember much about Einstein’s theory of time as the fourth dimension, but the Celestial Courts were on the seventh floor of the six-floor Chatham County Courthouse—not far enough away to make a significant difference in the passage of time for Them, as opposed to the temporal. She’d have to ask Goldstein about filing a petition of some sort if days were going to be months long instead of twenty-four hours.

  “You’re dead on your feet. Whatever you’re planning to do, you’ll do better if you get some sleep.”

  “No time,” Bree said, “no time.” She looked at her watch. Ten o’clock. She had less than four hours to get enough evidence to reverse the judgment against Probert Chandler.

  She had one last chance.

  She called Chad Martinelli at Marlowe’s. And when he found what she needed, she picked it up from the store. Then she called Hunter.

  The concrete mixer in front of Marlowe’s research center was gone and the base was smooth and dry. The day was hot and sunny, unseasonably warm for November. Manny and Gustavo stood at the base of the Marlowe’s sculpture, just as they’d promised. Manny leaned on the jackhammer, his forearms draped over the handle.

  “Hey,” Bree said, as she walked up to them.

  “You got that warrant?” Manny said instantly. “You don’t know these guys, Miz Beaufort.” He waved one hand in the general direction of the Marlowe’s building. “I been checking around. They don’t make a lot of noise about it, but they carry some big weight around town. I don’t want no trouble.”

  Bree set her briefcase down on the concrete and pulled out the document. It looked official. The signature looked valid. It’d been notarized; there was Ron’s signature next to his notary seal. She didn’t look too closely at the judge’s signature—it might have read Alvarez, who was a circuit court judge for the surrounding area—and it might have read Azreal. She wasn’t sure. And she didn’t want to know. “Here it is, Manny. I thank you. And the citizens of Chatham County will thank you.”

  Manny looked pleased. “So,” he said expansively, “where do you want us to dig?”

  Bree walked around the base of the sculpture. The diameter of the circle was perhaps twenty feet. The circumference, of course, over three times that. The concrete was smooth and unmarked. She walked around it again. Manny and Gustavo waited patiently in the sunshine. Above them, faces appeared at the office windows on the second and third floors. Bree walked around the circle one more time, then stopped and sank her chin in one
hand, considering. The other held the warrant.

  The glass doors at the front of the building burst open. First out of the door was a harried security guard. John Allen Lindquist was right on his heels. Lindquist was white with anger. He grabbed Bree by the upper arm and shook it. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Bree watched his eyes. They darted to the left, then back again. She followed his gaze. She looked at Manny and pointed. “Right there,” she said. Then, as the noise of the jackhammer cut through the air, she leaned close and said into Lindquist’s ear: “You, Chandler, and Hansen were chemists at the University of Oregon together. Probert went on to found Marlowe’s and took you with him. Hansen was ruined and went on to seduce your sister. You’ve been protecting her—and your own job—for years by paying Hansen off with money and drugs from the warehouse, so he wouldn’t tell Probert that Lindsey wasn’t his own child. Probert found out about it. You killed him. To protect yourself. To protect your sister. I don’t think you gave a damn about Lindsey.”

  She pulled the sales receipt out of her briefcase. It was in an evidence bag.

  “Your inventory system’s just about perfect. You can track anything—anything—in those stores. Including the purchase of a two-hundred-watt searchlight. By you. And the dents in the metal, Mr. Lindquist, are going to match the dents in poor Probert Chandler’s head.”

  Manny gave a shout of triumph. The concrete was only three inches thick. The flashlight was buried in a shallow pit. Manny reached into the dirt and held it up in one gloved hand.

  Hunter, who’d just shown up with Markham, had told her once there were only three things a criminal could do when confronted with the evidence. Run. Lie. Or lawyer up. Lindquist ran. Hunter and Markham tackled him a hundred feet from his Lexus.