Angel of Death

by J. Robert King

  She pulled one of the books from the stack, a true crime expose about criminal profiling. Though modern mythology had made FBI profilers into supermen – divining the state of a killer’s underwear and his taste in movies from the position of a shell casing – the science of profiling was still largely unknown in small-town police work. What Donna knew of it was second-hand, pieced together from books by former members of the Quantico Behavioral Science Unit.

  By dismembering victims and burying hands and heads separately, organized offenders can make identification difficult. A victim’s identity is a critical piece of evidence for narrowing the field of suspects, determining motive and opportunity, and rallying community assistance in tracking down the killer. The removal of these parts takes time and effort and produces large quantities of blood. It is a technique used almost exclusively by psychopathic personalities. Donna paused. The dark bay window behind her breathed coldly and she drew up the tattered afghan she kept on the chair arm. Out of old habit, she crossed herself. How could a person think of heads and hands merely as forms of identification? She glanced up at the crucifix hanging above her twenty-four inch TV and reflexively imagined Christ dismembered. She crossed herself again.

  By contrast, psychotic personalities engage in dismemberment not to eliminate clues, but for symbolic reasons and to fulfill personal fantasies. Their mutilations tend to center more on genitalia, viscera, hearts, and eyes.

  Sickened, Donna closed the book. Sociopaths did what they did by design. Psychotics did what they did by instinct. One group were humans who thought they were gods. The other were humans who thought they were animals. Both were monsters.

  Donna stopped that thought. Her hand strayed to a picture on an unvarnished end table. He was a boy. Only a boy. Her twin, Kerry, at fourteen – bright-eyed, hopeful, and human. In her mind, he would never be older than fourteen.

  By their fifteenth birthday, Kerry had lost all his friends, dropped out of school, and never came out of his room in the basement. Father John, principal of St Mary’s, joked about getting an exorcist. By their sixteenth birthday, Kerry was so sedated that he never spoke or even smiled. By their seventeenth birthday, he was institutionalized in Elgin. He didn’t reach his eighteenth, hanged by a noose he had made from his own torn-up shirt.

  Kerry had not been a monster. A bipolar schizophrenic, they said, with homicidal fantasies. A manic-depressive with multiple personality disorder. A cyclops. A Grendel. A steppenwolf…

  No, Kerry was not a monster. He was a sick boy. Sighing sadly, Donna set the picture atop her pile of books and leaned back on the seat. Road to Utopia was on tonight. Kerry had loved the Road pictures. Donna got up, turned on the set, and moved the rabbit ears to pick up WGN. Then she went to the kitchen.

  “I’ve got a bag of popcorn around here somewhere.”

  Assuming after the third ring that the doorbell didn’t work, Investigator Leland knocked. She stood in the lee of a storm door held together by duct tape. The cool gray winds of a December 7th morning breezed past her. It had been standard police work. Lots of dead-end leads. Lots of waiting for someone to file a missing persons report. Lots of phone conversations assuring cottagers and farmers that everything that could be done was being done. After two days of office work, Leland had at last been asked by Detective McHenry to help him knock on doors and canvas the Bohner’s Lake area to find out the identity of the body. She looked down at the crime scene photo in her hand. In it, Sergeant Banks squatted gravely beside a dark pine tree and propped up a stiff collie mutt. At the zenith of a washed-out foreground, the dog looked spectral. Its frozen legs were poised in a flat line on tiptoe. The effect made the collie appear to be dashing pell-mell through the picture, past Banks’s stern, downturned face. The dog’s eye glowed with the flash, as if Banks held a light to the blown-open back of its skull.

  “I feel like a Goddamned trophy hunter,” Leland murmured to herself.

  The door eased back, shuddering a little. Warm wet air came from within, along with the mill-wheel tumble of a stove-sized humidifier. A thin old woman stood there in a faded cotton housedress. A Kleenex jutted out, ready between two buttons. “Yes?”

  “Sorry to bother you this morning, ma’am. I’m Investigator Leland of the Burlington Police Department–”

  “If you’re here about the cardboard, I didn’t know it could be recycled until just last week, and I’ve got it ready for the bin this time, if you want to come see–”

  Leland laughed in quiet dismissal. “Actually, ma’am, I’m looking for the owner of this dog.” She held up the photo.

  The old woman peered, unblinking, at the picture.

  “You probably think I should have reading glasses or bifocals to see something like this, but I’ve had the new cataract surgery, which lets me read a book and look out at the sunset without any glasses at all, or see this picture of the dog and see Mr Koenig walk that dog just about every evening at eight thirty before the gas station stops selling those little flasks of devil water that I’ve signed petition after petition against, always the first or second name…”

  “Mr Koenig?” asked Leland, writing. “And he lives where?”

  “Three houses down, on the right, toward town, the one that still has the Christmas lights from three years ago up on the eaves even though he hasn’t plugged them in for two Christmases and he’s not turned them on yet this season if they work at all anymore. I haven’t seen him in a while, but he keeps those irregular hours, a newspaper man for the Gazette, and coming and going at all times and working on that old junker of his in the middle of the night sometimes, trying to keep a twenty-year-old car going with these two-day-old computer car parts they have nowadays, and him without the first bit of mechanical skill but too cheap to buy something better…”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Leland said, tucking the photo into her breast pocket. “You’ve been a great help.”

  With no trace of humor on her face – the shape and hue of a garlic clove – she said, “Too bad about that dog of his. Sometimes it would break loose and dig in my petunias. Not that I would have wanted it dead – hit by a car, right? Forty-five’s too fast for a residential block.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Leland said, backing out of the door space and letting the storm door sway inward. The old woman caught it and held it ajar as Leland backed away. “And if you’re going to get so up in arms about cardboard in the garbage, what about these folks that pile it in with their leaves to burn and we have to be breathing that all day long?”

  Leland marched away. Her black boots splashed through the dead oak leaves, brown and gold like muddy water. Behind her, the woman’s voice continued to labor shrilly, a too-small pump struggling in anonymous obsession to empty a too-deep pit. The oaks were tall and stout here, their crags deep with gray shadows. The sky above was an acrylic blue, and a wintry wind tumbled brown leaves over the rim of the Bohner’s Lake bowl and down toward the water. Mr Koenig’s house was on that rim, perched like a ship breaching the head of a standing wave and about to plunge down the trough beyond. The land dropped away behind it, baring a line where clapboards gave way to gray cement block. The white Masonite boards on the main floor were curved with inexpert installation and years of seepage, but they clung to the frame with all the tenacity of a gunwale on a ship. She knocked. In good intention, someone had painted the white door red, and then left it to peel behind a rusting screen. No answer. Again she knocked, and again, nothing.

  It was a Tuesday. He could well be at work, but a rustriddled gray ’89 Olds sat on the cement slab beside the chimney. He couldn’t have walked to the Gazette from here, but could have carpooled. It wasn’t enough to warrant a search.

  Unholstering her walkie-talkie, she switched it on.

  “This is Investigator Leland. I’m in the fourteen-hundred block of County P. I think I might’ve found our victim. Anybody near a phone? Over?”

  The crackle and hiss of static answered at first, and then Banks’s butch
voice: “What do you need, Leland?”

  “I need somebody to call the Gazette, see if a Mr Koenig – a newsman – see if he’s there.”

  “I’ll get back once I know something.”

  “Thanks, Bill. Out.”

  Leland stowed the walkie-talkie and knocked again. Still, no response. She stepped from the front stoop and strolled slowly around the cottage. It had the decent dirtiness of most middle-class bachelor places, eaves stubbled with dirt, shingles beginning to curl, storms and screens in random assortment, flower beds gone to volunteers and weeds, grass left overlong after the mowing season, sticks lying on the walk. Ah, a dog tether, and no dog on it – and no dog barking inside. Perhaps he and his dog were at the vet, or on vacation. She glanced back at the old woman’s house. The storm door was closed, though the woman still haunted its frame. This man was the same as she. Perhaps this whole block was the same, shipwrecked souls clinging to whatever sargasso they could gain and hold. Leland descended a set of concrete steps beside the house. She came to a wide window of the walkout basement, a sixties design in aluminum and single pane glass, actually releasing more heat than it held in. In fact, the window where she stood poured dry furnace air out through its open side casement –

  He had worn no jacket the night he was killed. On the desk within was a framed photo of a shaggy collie mutt and a similarly hairy man embracing her. His bearded face smiled, and the dog, too, smiled. Leland blinked, and the photo changed – half the dog’s head was gone and its remaining eye was gray with death, the man’s neck was vacant and his embracing arms ended in a pair of stubs.

  “Leland, come in, over,” crackled the walkie-talkie. She lifted it. “He’s not been in since the 29th, has he?”

  “They’ve already given his job away.”

  THREE

  Death comes in threes; everything comes in threes. It is the mathematics of God’s universe.

  When Keith McFarland killed the editor in Burlington, I knew two more would die there, two people somehow connected to the rum man. This occurs naturally enough – a heart attack, a suicide, or some other resonation of an individual death. I typically do not have to do any of the arranging but merely approve the results.

  I wasn’t surprised, then, when some days later I needed to oversee the death of Detective McHenry of the Burlington Police Department.

  The man was a stereotypical career policeman: heavyset with a steely bristle of gray hair, blue eyes with yellow edges, a piercing stare that was half command and half reproach, a neck permanently scarred by worn razors and tight collars, a barrel body that could wrestle a mule to the ground, and narrow legs better suited for driving than running. If he were older – say, sixty-three – he would die when the last bit of grease that he had poured down his throat solidified across the web of his coronary arteries and made his heart explode.

  But he was fifty-five, and it wasn’t to be a heart attack today. Only an accident. The detective deserved an elaborate death, with its measure of ceremony and civic pride.

  Detective John McHenry had been a cop in Racine County for forty-five years and in Burlington for the last twelve. He’d been known as Officer Friendly by two generations of kids before landing the detective job in Burlington; had pushed for D.A.R.E. programs and started anti-graffiti campaigns; had rescued one adult, seven children, four dogs, a cat, and a hamster from various house and apartment fires; had organized the Tornado Task Force for the Union Grove Fire Department after the twister of ’83; and done countless other works for good.

  He’d paid for it all with a bullet still in his left lung, a pack-a-day habit for his right lung, a hardened liver from nightly drinking, a few bar-fight scars on knuckles and face, two back-to-back failed marriages, and an addiction to twelve-hour days. He was a stereotypical cop and deserved a death better than what would be scripted for the average cop show.

  Here’s what I came up with.

  You still look like a cop, John. The faded blue Dockers don’t change what you are or who you are. You tug at your belt as you walk across the hardware store parking lot. You hold the plastic ball cock as if it were a blackjack, and the hardware receipt crouches in your shirt pocket. Nobody uses shirt pockets anymore, John. Smile and nod, yes, greet your townsfolk, but what about the bright belligerence in your eyes? Always scoping. Level and unapologetic suspicion. Only sunglasses could mask that, but those are still in your squad.

  In moments, it won’t matter.

  Then you see her. After all these years, she still has her hooks in you. “Ah, Susan – how are you and Edward?” you ask the once-lithe creature on the sidewalk in front of the store. Her pageboy hair shifts as she turns toward you. A distant train bellows mournfully.

  “Ed, please,” she says. “Can’t you call him Ed, after twenty-five years? And he’s fine.”

  Even you notice the twitch in the corner of your eye, and you wish for those sunglasses. The windshield of a nearby car glares mirror-like, showing fragments of tattered sky. “Good to hear.”

  The train’s marching feet clang on the track. You stare at each other, nodding. A rebel thought reminds you that you were once inside her. You blush and look away.

  Something’s going on in the elementary school parking lot across the street. The child’s fingers still show above the hard gray line of the Chevy’s roof when the rumple-faced man slams the door. Her scream is loud even through the glass. He tries the latch. It is locked. He drags keys from his pants and shouts angrily at her,

  “Shut up! Shut up!”

  The ball cock trembles as you run across the parking lot and into traffic.

  He has the passenger door open and the screaming girl tries to fight out past him but he throws her back into the front seat. The man’s plaid flannel shirt sticks to him, sweaty, and flaps a warning from his belt line. He rounds the hood and half-runs to the driver’s side door.

  At best an abusive dad. At worst, a kidnapper.

  “Hold it!” you shout. The cars around seem to hear, bunching back like wildebeests before a predator. The man, too, hears, swinging wide his door and lurching in beside the girl.

  “Hold it! Police! What’s going on here?”

  You catch the door he’s trying to slam and almost get your own fingers caught. You yank it open and grab thread-worn plaid that tears beneath your grip. He tips half out of his seat.

  “Get up!”

  The engine roars. As you reach to snatch the keys, you see something. Had you lived longer, you would have sworn it was a knife under her throat, but how can a man start a car and hold a knife under his own daughter’s throat? A reflection in the glass, your friends would have said. A hallucination, a prejudice of a white cop against a Latino father, the prosecution would have said. You’ll be dead before you even recognize his race or his daughter’s.

  It is I who hold that phantom knife. I sit in the back seat of the car and hold the blade to her throat so that you will see it – so that what happens happens. The car lurches. You grab the man’s shirt. Your own weight pinches your arm in the door, but you won’t let go. Tires squeal. Lights flash red. A claxon sounds. You fight to keep your feet, but the blacktop potholes steal your toes. The ball cock only now clatters to the ground. You cling to the man.

  The car drags you fifty-eight feet before, at fortyfive miles an hour, the undercarriage strikes the tracks and jolts you loose. You tumble, arms flapping like rubber from a stripped tire. You come to rest on the southbound line that hooks up with the Illinois Central.

  Susan screams. The horn is louder and nearer, and the brakes, too. You hear nothing, though, and see only sky before your body is struck by the cattle catcher, rolled over twice, and then cleaved by the wheel. It rolls through you like a pizza cutter.

  Cops die well. Cops and gang members. Soldiers, doctors, mobsters. They understand death. They face it at least minimally every day, and some are neck-deep in it. They have given death a lot of thought, and know it for what it is, a ubiquitous necessity. It is no less
mysterious to these folks than it is to everyone else, but it is more a reality to them. They dwell at the edge of a black and endless ocean that others have only heard about.

  Michael, row the boat ashore, alleluia…

  Slaves face death, too. They know that the river of death is black and chilly and endlessly wide, and that the ferryman must row them safely across. And what of the Jews at Buchenwald and Dachau? Did they not pray to the angel of death for release? Mobsters know their saints and go to their confessions. Midwives go softly. Hookers, addicts, fugitives, and freaks – all those marginalized by the world and therefore pushed to the ragged edge of death, they know.

  Only the soft white belly of America dies badly. They know more about Canada than they do about death, and that’s not saying much. They thrash and scream or go dumb in amazement. Most do not even realize they are dying until it is all done. In the face of all religion and science, they believe that if they want to live they will not die. They go about life in ruby slippers that will always fetch them home, wishing upon stars and cars and pensions to keep them alive.

  But they will die. Every last one of them. That black sea is insatiable, and it rises. One day, it will lap at the doorstep of anyone, will fill the basement and rise until it swallows the man crouched in the attic and the woman waving from the rooftop.

  Everyone dies. Pray to me, and die well. It’s interesting how one glimpse can change a town. The white majority had called for and gotten the arrest of Manuel DeGarcia on charges of reckless homicide and child abuse.

  He, in fact, could not have been telling his daughter to “Shut up!” since he neither spoke nor understood English. Nor could he have known McHenry was a policeman. Rattled from having accidentally slammed his daughter’s fingers in the door, he panicked when a fat man ran up, shouting, tore his shirt off, and tried to take his car keys. Manuel drove off, trying to escape, but the assailant wouldn’t let go.