The Fifth Angel

by Tim Green

  “Like Magnum PI?” she said.

  “No, that’s TV,” he said. “I’m talking like the big screen. I’m talking like Bogey. Eastwood.”

  Back at the inn, Amanda phoned home. There was no answer. She called Parker’s cell phone. He had the kids out for pizza and miniature golf. She started to remind him that it was a school night, but then shut her mouth. The kids got on and said they loved her. She loved them back. This wasn’t so bad. They were happy. She was working. They’d all be together soon.

  She stood by the window for a minute looking down at their pictures on the desk. Outside, the sun was going down. The water on Seventh Lake was still, like a pool of oil. It was growing cold.

  Amanda sighed and changed into her running shorts. She pulled her sweatshirt on and descended the pine staircase into the lobby. It was empty. Outside, she stretched and then began her six miles down Route 28. It was a good workout. The strong fresh scent of mountain pine brought her no pleasure, but she did feel a growing sense of pride as she climbed first up and then down the long hills. She was growing stronger.

  She needed it.

  It was still dark the next morning when the phone rang in her room. It was McGrew.

  “I got a call from Briggs. We have to go,” he said.

  “Go?” she asked. “What?”

  She squinted and fumbled for the clock. It was five A.M.

  “We’ve got a witness,” he said.

  “A witness?”

  “A girl.”

  “A girl? Where?”

  “Not here,” McGrew said. “Pack your things. He killed another one. There’s a girl in Vermont. She saw him.”

  CHAPTER 48

  Jack wound his way up the tree-lined hill to Crestwood. He passed the spot where he’d seen Beth running so many months ago. He looked at the clock on the dashboard and heaved a sigh. He was early.

  It had been almost six months, and finally Janet’s doctor said it was all right to see her again. His hands sweated as he closed the car door. The air was still and heavy, the musty aroma of decaying autumn mixing with the scent of fresh-cut grass. A pair of orderlies in clean white uniforms strolled by, smoking cigarettes and chatting. From somewhere behind the building Jack could hear the excited squeals of a children’s ball game. He stuffed his hands deep into the black leather jacket. The air had turned suddenly cool. A shudder danced up his spine.

  At the steps leading into the institution he hesitated. A huge cheer, muted by the distance it had to travel, went up from someplace in back, drawing an involuntary smile from the corners of his mouth.

  After a deep breath he mounted the front steps and passed through the doors. Inside, the lobby wasn’t empty, as it was most afternoons during the week. A white-haired couple sat in the corner, side by side, reading old magazines and glancing nervously his way with glassy eyes before returning politely to their outdated reading materials. Jack hesitated, then rang the silver bell on the reception desk, feeling foolish at the sound while other people were with him in the room.

  He looked back into the office to find himself the subject of Dr. Steinberg’s powerful stare. After a moment, she blinked behind her glasses and pressed her lips tightly together as if to choke back any emotions. She opened the door with a curt but not unfriendly greeting and led Jack down the familiar back hall. When she finally came to a stop Jack recognized the door. It led into the same room he’d entered six months before. Dr. Steinberg reached out with her diminutive hand and grasped his forearm with surprising strength.

  “Now, I don’t want you to expect anything,” she said. “If she remains calm in your presence—if—then you can talk quietly to her. Quietly.”

  The older woman opened the door and thrust him into the room. Jack couldn’t help looking back at her anxious eyes, magnified by her glasses, peering intently at him. She made a whisking motion at him and he turned toward his daughter. She was sitting much the same as she’d been six months earlier, and Jack couldn’t stop the dread from filling his stomach and weighing him down. Outside the window the colors were dimmer now; even the towering spruce trees seemed a muted green, weak and almost gray like the muted light from the sky.

  Janet’s skin had a bluish cast that was ghoulish. Her once golden hair had faded to a mousy brown. The circles under her young eyes had deepened and she had certainly lost more weight. The joints of her bones protruded grotesquely and still the welted scars burned angrily on her bare arms. Jack felt bile rushing up the back of his throat.

  “Janet,” he whispered involuntarily.

  She turned her head his way and her big brown eyes widened with recognition while at the same time welling up with an immense sadness. Jack took a step closer.

  CHAPTER 49

  Twice during the trip Amanda advised McGrew to slow down on hairpin turns. Otherwise she was all for the breakneck speed as they raced through the twisting mountain roads, then down Route 87 to Troy and finally into Vermont. The cell phone reception was lousy, but Amanda was finally able to get through to have the agents from the Albany field office turn around and meet them in Bennington.

  When they arrived, the nurse from the medical center was set up and ready to go. After a few courteous formalities with the chief of police, Amanda walked into the interview room with McGrew by her side. The nurse sat by herself, still in her blue scrubs, her long blond hair spilling free from its bun. She looked up and rubbed the weariness from her eyes. Amanda introduced herself as well as McGrew and then asked what happened.

  “We were just talking,” the nurse said, “when this crazy guy comes in yelling about his daughter not breathing. Well, we didn’t know. We get some real nutty stuff late at night like that, it’s not a big town or anything, but we do. So we jump up—”

  “Did you see the man?” Amanda asked.

  “I guess I did,” she said. “They asked me to describe him. I don’t know if I really can. I mean, it happened fast.”

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him?” McGrew asked.

  The nurse said, “I think so.”

  “Go on,” Amanda said.

  “So, Doug, Dr. Case, he catches the girl that this guy kind of just throws at him and he sees the tape on her mouth and he yells at me to go follow the guy and I did.”

  “And?”

  “Well, all I saw was this black Town Car, shiny, racing around the corner. That’s all I saw.”

  “It looked new?” McGrew asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Many people have a car like that around here?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you don’t see a lot of black Town Cars,” McGrew said. “People around here drive mostly Jeeps and trucks and Volvos and outdoor woodsy things, right?”

  “Kind of.”

  “I’m going to get on that,” McGrew said. Amanda nodded and he left the room.

  The nurse didn’t know much more than that, but Amanda went through it a couple more times before she asked, “Would you be willing to try to identify this man in a lineup if we can find him?”

  “A lineup?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “No,” Amanda said. “I can’t make you. But this man committed a very serious crime.”

  “He killed a guy,” the nurse said.

  “Yes.”

  “I heard the guy he killed was the one who kidnapped that girl,” she said.

  “We don’t know exactly what happened,” Amanda said. “But we think the man you saw killed Dante Pollard and others.”

  “Well,” she said. “I guess I could try.”

  “It’s very important,” Amanda said, but she could see that the nurse doubted her. In the back of her mind she knew the most important witness would be the girl.

  Amanda interviewed the doctor as well. He was against trying to pinpoint the man in a lineup. He didn’t say so, but Amanda had the distinct impression that the doctor felt that their blond killer was justified.

  Ne
xt, she went to the hospital. The teenage girl was with her parents and apparently doing well. The father was a Lutheran minister and very much in favor of having the girl do a lineup to help identify the blond-haired man despite the circumstances. The mother was less pleased with the prospect, but Amanda watched her wringing her hands and she knew who made the decisions.

  If they could get a positive ID on the guy from a lineup, Amanda felt their chances were good for a conviction. When she got back to the police station, McGrew bolted out of an office down the hall and came her way. He was slapping a piece of paper with the backs of his fingers.

  “Wait until you see this,” he said. “I got on the computer and found all the rental car companies within a hundred miles that rent Town Cars. Then I got into their databases and started going through, searching for black Town Cars rented in the last week.”

  “And?”

  “I cross-checked their driver’s licenses for a male, blond hair, five eight to six feet,” McGrew said. His crooked smile was blazing. “I got him. Guy’s name is Jack Ruskin.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Daddy?” Janet said. Her voice was quiet and raspy.

  Emotion filled Jack’s throat. Tears blurred his vision, but still he saw that she was holding out her arms, opening them for him to come near. In a panic he looked back at Dr. Steinberg, who was still watching from the door. He sensed the doctor’s amazement, and was relieved when she nodded and motioned for him to go ahead. Jack crossed the room and sat down next to Janet on the nondescript couch. Slowly he reached for her and held her to him. A stifled sob escaped him. Beneath the cotton hospital dress, her emaciated form was a frail jumble of angles.

  He had to restrain himself from holding her too tightly. His fingers trembled as he stroked the hair on the back of her head. Tears spilled freely down his cheeks. The feeble hug she gave him sent an electric charge through his frame. And then, just as abruptly as she had emerged from her catatonic state, she was gone. Her arms dropped lifelessly to her sides and her eyes grew vacant. Jack struggled with the urge to squeeze her to him, to rip her from this place and run off with her, to reclaim her for his own. Instead he kissed her cool forehead and let her gently slump back into the couch.

  He kissed her gently on the forehead again, then looked apprehensively toward the door for what he expected to be Dr. Steinberg’s glare. But her expression was plainly mystified, and that might have explained the uncharacteristically gentle signal for him to come away. Jack rose, looking long and hard at his daughter before quietly leaving the room.

  In the hallway she grasped both Jack’s arms in her diminutive grip.

  “That was marvelous,” she whispered, as if not to disturb the inert girl on the other side of the door.

  “Is she better?” Jack asked, realizing that his mind had jumped many months into the future. He was using the word in the sense of a total cure.

  Dr. Steinberg looked up at him through her thick round glasses and blinked in surprise.

  “I’m . . . I am surprised,” she said. “She’s made some progress, especially over the last two weeks. I thought there might be some indication of recognition, something in her eyes. But to have her say your name . . . to have her open her arms to you? That was . . .” The older woman shook her head.

  “When can I see her again?” Jack asked anxiously.

  “Come on,” she said, “let’s talk. We can sit in my office. I want you to understand how we got to this point. I want you to know what it’s going to take to keep things going this way.”

  Jack followed her through a maze of hallways to a corner office that looked out over the fading remnants of the rose garden. He sat listening attentively as Dr. Steinberg recited for him the litany of treatments Janet had undergone and would continue to undergo. The drugs and the different psychotherapeutic methods meant little to him, but he knew they were essential to the healing process.

  “I have to tell you that after your last visit, I thought we’d lost her.”

  Jack drove to the beach.

  The sky, which had been bland and bleak only an hour before, was now darkening and seemed to reflect Jack’s mood of boiling uncertainty and hope. A front was moving in quickly and the ocean, too, was roiling and capped with frothy white spray. The beach was abandoned and that was just what Jack wanted. He pulled his jacket close and hunched down over his shoes as he walked along on the edge of the wet sand. A seagull, its feathers ruffled by the wind, refused to fly but made way for Jack with a grating screech that barely registered in his brain.

  Jack turned and headed back down the beach toward his car. Before he got there, a rent in the clouds opened the sky and a thick beam of sun lit the drab beach all around him. Jack looked up, pushed a tangle of hair from his face, and blinked.

  On the way home he called Beth from his car. From the sound of her voice, he knew something bad had happened.

  “Jack,” she said. She was frantic. She was whispering. She was nearly hysterical. “Jack, the police are here, the FBI. I told them you weren’t here, but they’re waiting. They’re in the driveway.”

  CHAPTER 51

  Amanda and McGrew sat together in his car outside Ruskin’s house.

  McGrew looked at his watch and grinned. He was certain from the way the girlfriend acted that Jack Ruskin would be back soon. She was pretty, and it gave McGrew a newfound respect for his quarry Ruskin. He didn’t mind waiting. He didn’t have anything else to do but check an empty answering machine or eat Chinese by himself on the billionaire’s deck. The crime scene tech never did call. Maybe she mixed up his number.

  Women weren’t on the top of his list anyway. His last real woman was a waitress from Denny’s. They went home in the early-morning hours to be together. Afterward they shared a Marlboro Light. It was good. The next day he brought her a dozen roses wrapped in green tissue paper, brought them right to the restaurant. For some bizarre reason she didn’t like that.

  Women, he knew, had a hard time understanding his intensity. One day he’d find one who did understand, a woman who’d lay down and die for him. Until that time he’d have to wade through the chaff.

  McGrew was feeling pretty good. No question, this was like a major Hollywood production. He was dogging the bad guy with a pretty damn good-looking redhead, racing through the mountains. Working through the night. Screeching his tires. Flying down here in a helicopter.

  And behind the whole thing were his cunning and his connections. He was a fucking star. Amanda was practically blown away by what he did with tracking down the Town Car. She was still talking to the doctor when he was hot on the trail. It was like a scene you’d see Al Pacino playing, him battering the keyboard, bullying the rental car people, and cross-referencing things like a fucking computer genius.

  After that was when he hit her with his really big idea.

  “A helicopter,” she said dully. “Right.”

  “I mean it,” McGrew had said.

  “Where in hell do you expect me to get a helicopter from?”

  “I expect the Bureau has one around here somewhere. If not,” he said, “I know a few people in the New York State police . . . If they got a call from a federal agent in a big interstate case . . .

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll make you a deal. You use your contacts to get us a federal subpoena for Ruskin so we can pop him into a lineup, and I’ll get the copter.”

  They had been airborne, with the subpoena, by two o’clock.

  McGrew was thinking about getting out to take a stroll and having himself a cigarette when a green Saab convertible rolled into the driveway. Without a word between them, McGrew and Amanda got out.

  Ruskin—it was him—turned off the engine and got out. The girlfriend burst from the front door of the house and yelled his name.

  “Mr. Ruskin,” Amanda said, “I’m Special Agent Lee from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You need to come with us.”

  “I’m Detective McGrew,” McGrew said, leveling his gun at Jack, “Suffol
k County homicide.”

  “Jack,” the girlfriend said. She was eyeing McGrew’s gun. “What’s happening?”

  “Everything’s fine,” Ruskin said, “just like I said. It’s a misunderstanding. Everything’s fine.”

  The girlfriend ran to him and Ruskin hugged her and kissed her forehead. He turned to Amanda and said, “My attorney will be here in a few minutes and we can go wherever you want. You’re on notice, and she’s a witness that I want my attorney present before you ask me anything.”

  McGrew pursed his lips. After an arrest in New York State, if the suspect asked for an attorney, anything he said to the police from that point on would be inadmissible as evidence in court.

  “Please get in the car, Mr. Ruskin,” Amanda said.

  “You have to read me my rights first,” Jack said. “If you’re arresting me, you have to give me a Miranda warning.”

  “You’re not under arrest, hotshot,” McGrew said. He didn’t bother to fight back a grin.

  From her jacket, Amanda removed their federal subpoena and handed it to Jack.

  “What’s this?” he asked, peering at the document in the fading afternoon light.

  “We’re taking you to Vermont,” Amanda said, “for a lineup. This subpoena gives us the power to transport you across state lines.”

  “By force if necessary,” McGrew said.

  Jack looked up from the paper to Amanda, to McGrew’s gun, and back to Amanda.

  “My attorney,” he said.

  Amanda shook her head and said, “You don’t need an attorney, Mr. Ruskin. You’re not under arrest. You don’t have the right to an attorney. This is a federal subpoena.”

  “Not yet,” McGrew said. “Now get in.”

  Jack looked at his girlfriend. Her face was tight with anxiety, her mouth a perfect circle of disbelief.

  “Everything’s fine,” he said. “Just wait for me. I’ll be back and everything will be fine. It will all work out. Trust me.”