Angel of Death

by J. Robert King

  “Don’t laugh. That is the man’s defense. He wants you to think he is not just crazy, but legally insane. His lawyer has an even more unbelievable lie, that he is a shell-shocked Gulf War hero. He is no hero, folks. He is no angel, but a cold-blooded killer.

  “If Wisconsin had a death penalty, I would plead for it in this case. Because we do not, I hope for back-to-back life sentences for every victim to be served and without the possibility of parole. He’s fooled too many people for too long. Don’t become the next victims of this charismatic sociopath. Thank you.”

  District Attorney Franklin gazed one last level time at the jury and then again at the judge, his eyes keen and honest. He sat, his stainless steel suit silently reshaping around him.

  “A statement from the defense?” prompted Judge Devlin.

  Lynda Barnett rose. After the slick coldness of Franklin’s delivery, the woman in the bright skirt-suit seemed a tribal wise woman, a storyteller. Her flesh was the color of good, rich earth. Honest. Direct. There was no shuffling of papers on the table, no leaning intensity. There was only the calm, quiet sound of soft-soled shoes on the cold marble floor.

  She turned toward the jury. “It would be so easy if what Mr Franklin said were true. But truth isn’t a melodrama. We do not live our lives among heroes and monsters. We live among people. That’s what we are, people.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to meet a very troubled person, Mr William B. Dance,” she gestured to the prisoner. “Mr Franklin would not call him a person. Not even a mentally ill person. He calls him a monster – a hobgoblin, a bogeyman, the creature in the closet.

  “It’s not that Mr Franklin really believes in such things, but he thinks the rest of us do, or at least he thinks he can scare us into believing in them. He offers folk tales. I offer facts. I want a fair trial; he wants a lynch mob.

  “What facts does he ignore? How about Mr Dance’s wallet, with his driver’s license and Social Security card? How about the records of the American Veterans Administration and the Veterans of Foreign Wars POW

  MIA lists? How about the grade school principal from Waukesha who will tell us what he remembers of a shy orphan named Billy Dance? How about the enlistment records of the Marines?

  “The fact is that this man was a ward of the State of Wisconsin in the seventies, that this homeless boy was remanded to juvenile detention centers instead of foster care, that at seventeen he fled the Racine Institute of Corrections, that he walked and hitchhiked from Wisconsin to Washington, DC, thinking he needed to go to the capital to join up for the Gulf War. He was so eager to make something of himself and defend his country that he volunteered for the Marines, that he landed in battle the very next year and was lost during the push to Baghdad.

  “Lost to us, yes, but not to Saddam Hussein. It was 1991, and the nineteen-year-old Dance was interrogated day and night. He was beaten savagely when he gave no information, not even name, rank, and serial number. He so wanted to be true to his country that he purged his mind of everything. He became a shock-induced amnesiac. I, too, have expert witnesses to establish the reality of such conditions. He was beaten near to death many times, and each torment was like the first, because he blocked out the wounds as they happened. Still, the bullet wounds and torture scars on his body remember those days that he cannot.

  “We left Iraq. William stayed. We gave up seeking him. He – though he had wiped his mind clean of all the particulars of his previous life, such as it was – kept alive in his heart some homing reflex. He, who had never had a true home, still yearned to return to his country.

  “Then, twelve years later, we came back to Baghdad and found William Dance, the ‘crazy American pincushion,’ as his captors liked to call him, in one of the rape rooms of Abu Ghraib prison. The American soldiers who rescued him seemed like angels carrying him out of the hands of devils, and Dance was soon slated to appear with President Bush in the Rose Garden.

  “He never did. While in the charge of his rescuers, William witnessed an American atrocity. Before his very eyes, his rescuing angels turned to tormenting devils.

  “Dance could take no more. He spoke out against what we were doing in Baghdad, spoke out against the president whose reign of war was as brutal as Saddam’s reign of terror, spoke out to the first reporter he could find, a man who happened to work for Al Jazeera…”

  As a low groan came from the crowd, Counselor Barnett paced slowly, nodded at the floor. When the courtroom had settled to silence again, she held her hand out toward her client.

  “This prisoner of war – missing in action for twelve years – was no longer invited to the Rose Garden. No, sir. William B Dance, POW MIA, was remanded to Guantanamo.”

  This time, the crowd gasped. Counselor Barnett lifted her eyes, and they sparked with fire.

  “You bet. Gitmo. Waterboarding’s just the beginning at Gitmo. When you’re at Gitmo, the interview’s not over till there’s blood. When you’re at Gitmo, the interview is never over. So, the guy was saved from beatings by the Butcher of Baghdad only to get beat by Uncle Sam himself!”

  The hubbub of the crowd caused Judge Devlin to rap her gavel. “Quiet down, all of you. This isn’t story time. This is a trial!”

  Counselor Barnett nodded her thanks to the judge.

  “Well, William escaped Guantanamo the only way you can: by playing dead. Yes, he got out in a body bag and went to an American base in Mexico and then waded the Rio Grande to reach America.

  “Remember, we are talking about a Marine, trained until his survival skills were instinctive. We’re talking about a man who lived through thirteen years of torture. When he returned home to Milwaukee, who was there to deprogram him? Who was there to tell him the war was over, that he wasn’t surrounded by enemies?

  No one. He fought onward, slaying anyone who endangered his mission.

  “What mission, you ask? The same mission of every Marine, to follow orders, to take and hold enemy soil, and to slay any who seek to harm his country. These are powerful directives, especially when indoctrinated into the mind of a twenty year-old, especially when they are deepened and transformed by thirteen years of agony.

  “What happens to good soldiers when their minds are impregnated so young and then abandoned, so that doctrines grow and grow? William Dance came to believe he was the Angel of Death for Milwaukee and Chicago, making certain anyone who died in this area died well.

  “Into this terrifying delusion came a single ray of humanity: Detective Donna Leland of the Burlington Police Department. William fell in love with her. Nearly twenty years of insanity slowly dissolved away. At last, he began to regain his humanity.

  “In the end, Your Honor, people of Wisconsin, what we have here is no demon-possessed man living among the graves. What we have is the lost lamb who, after all the torments he has endured, has gone crazy. Perhaps the prosecution is correct that William knows right from wrong, but William learned right and wrong in Marine boot camp and the sun-baked sands of the Middle East.

  “How could we, who abandoned him, possibly condemn him to a lifetime of punishment for it? Isn’t it time we deprogrammed the creature we programmed in the first place? To paraphrase the prosecution, William has already been abandoned by so many people in his life – parents, the state, the Marines, the country, the world. Do not abandon him again.”

  The body bag was cold. Not as cold as the trash bin had been when it stopped raining, but this was cold. And loud. And dark. There were other bodies all around – real bodies, and they smelled. They shifted with the plane.

  How long do they fly these? Do they fly them forever? Did I fall asleep when they landed and now I’m awake and they’re flying again? They do fly them forever. The cold hurt his ears and his eyes. There wasn’t enough air. He breathed very fast.

  He wished for his scorpion saints.

  SIXTEEN

  Donna stood in her bathroom and stared at herself in the medicine cabinet mirror. The trial had dragged on for three weeks so far.
She had worn every decent outfit in her wardrobe, twice – and that was after a spree at Kohls. The pundits were beginning to name the days after her outfits.

  And her makeup had evolved, too. At first, she had tried to look like the all-American girl, healthy and happy. The press didn’t buy it. About a week ago, she started making herself up as the supportive but wronged wife – less foundation, less blush, less care. The press liked that look. They had even run side-byside shots of her at the beginning of the trial and two weeks in, showing the toll the trial was taking. But what look now? Perhaps she should go without makeup, without attempting to hide who she was.

  “But who am I?” Donna asked herself, the mascara brush hovering beside her cheek. “Who am I, really?”

  Someone who can’t save Azra.

  Someone who couldn’t save Kerry.

  Someone who won’t even save herself.

  It’s a church, Azra thought idly, struggling to banish the boredom of the third week of testimony. They have styled their courtrooms after churches. The long chamber had a high clerestory of doublepaned windows, a chancel raised three steps from the pew-filled nave, a mahogany altar worthy of Elijah, a pulpit where the bailiff lurked, a lectern where the Word of Truth was spoken by its witnesses, an acolyte with a silent, mystic machine that captured all that was said and done for the record, even gun-toting ushers who passed at intervals down the center aisle, as if hoping for an offering. Judge Devlin made an impressive deity, and before her cavorted rival ministers, seeking her approval. There was Lynda Barnett, the Baptist matriarch in neoAfrican garb. There was also Attorney Jim Franklin, the young televangelist – white, tall, male, and cocky in his light suit and white patent leather Pat Boone shoes. How fitting that a fallen angel be tried in a church, Azra thought. Of course, given the church’s record with trying heretics – witches, Moors, scientists, Jews, Sons of God – the prospects aren’t good.

  The media had made him a monster, the incarnation of evil. The deepest fears and dreads of the world were projected onto his empty soul.

  He reached out, taking hold of Donna’s hand. She returned the squeeze, though with stiff fingers – a kind of rictus dread. Her eyes were focused on the current witness. The trial was withering Donna. It was drawing the life out of her. It was as though the seat that held her was an inquisitor’s rack, and with every question, she was being slowly, mercilessly, pulled apart. One such inquisitor was the FBI profiler giving expert testimony even now. His fundamental argument had been and would continue to be thus: I’ve sent plenty of his kind away, so trust me to lock up this one, too.

  “Fully capable, yes… One inmate had told me the key to faking a mental illness was to do it all the time, even when you think nobody is watching… Yes… I’ve known quite a few who knew of it and read it… DSM- IV, now…Yes, that’s right… Edmund Kemper had read the Diagnostic Statistical Manual III cover-to-cover and said they’d have to put in a special entry for him in DSM-IV, since none of it covered him… That would be purely conjecture… It’s easy enough to come by. I’d bet fifty bucks there’s a copy of it in this courthouse…

  Yes… A good library would have it, too.”

  Azra hadn’t been listening closely enough to catch Counselor Franklin’s questions, but then the man turned toward him. “You examined Mr Doe when?”

  “Three days ago, only three hours after I got in from Quantico.”

  “So, after the second week of trial?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he told you he believed he was a fallen angel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was your impression that he was lying?”

  “Objection,” interrupted Counselor Barnett without standing or looking up. “Leading.”

  “I’ll rephrase,” said Franklin, nodding an apology to the judge. “What was your impression of this story?”

  “Objection.”

  “All right, did you think he believed what he was saying?”

  The witness said, “That’s, perhaps, a misleading question.”

  Judge Devlin looked at him through her reading glasses, and her eyes looked like big black crescents on her face. “Answer it.”

  “Yes. He seemed to believe what he was saying.”

  “But, correct me if I’m wrong: psychopaths are expert liars.”

  “Objection, Your Honor,” said Barnett wearily. “The district attorney has just put the word ‘psychopath’ in the mouth of the witness.”

  “Sustained.”

  Mr Franklin gave the defender a smoldering stare.

  “All right, let’s cut to it. From your experience as a profiler with the FBI, do you think Mr Doe is a psychopath?”

  “Absolutely. A classic case.”

  “Do you think he knows right from wrong?”

  “Absolutely. He is well organized and methodical.”

  “Do you think he is a – let me get the wording right from the psychiatrist – ‘paranoid schizophrenic with a narcissistic personality disorder?’”

  “I think he would like to be.”

  The crowd laughed at that.

  “You think he’s lying?”

  “Objection. Leading.”

  “Sustained.”

  “All right, in your own words, what do you think?”

  “I’d sooner believe a story from Berkowitz’s dog than one from him. Yes, I think he’s lying.”

  There wasn’t desert here. It was hot but not dry. It was sultry.

  He had been out of the body bag before the plane landed. He had put an empty boot in the bag so it would seem there was someone in it – not much of someone, but enough to keep people from looking inside. Then he put on a flight suit and waited until landing and hid behind a crate until the breach ramp of the Hercules cargo plane was open and then stepped onto the ramp like he was ground crew coming to help unload. He helped unload. There were some of those bags that had less than a boot in them. He could see where he was – a military base. Planes all around and tarmac and fences with rolls of barbed wire on top. The bags were going into a truck. After that, they’d be going into the ground or up into the air. The men that had loaded the bodies climbed into the truck. He climbed up into the back. When somebody shouted at him, he just said, “They told me I had to dig.” They let him ride in the back with the bags. It was dark soon, and when the truck slowed down to straddle a dead coyote in the road, he slid from the bumper and was standing there as the brake lights went off and the tail lights dragged away, red, behind the truck and left him in the dark.

  After being dead for three days, he ate his first meal. Raw coyote tastes like life.

  The trial was an endless torment. Questions coursed through Azra like X-rays. At first, his flesh was insensible to the onslaught, but now every tissue was red and swollen, every sinew stood out clear against bone. The jury, the judge, the public had probed and mapped each neuron of his mind. Their eyes, their ears, their opinions blazed over him all day every day. And when the day was done, it was back into darkness. A thin sliver of light coming around a stale crust of bread. Miserable. Hopeless, except for that vision of Donna, the ticklish delight of his own body, the hot ecstasy, the moment of ignominious discovery. “Put your pecker away…” It was the type and substance of human experience.

  For these creatures – that man in the preacher’s suit and this woman dressed like some voodoo mambo, and this friend wasting away beside him, with him – for all of them, existence was like this: beginning and ending and forever mired in desire and despair. It was like this for Azra, now, too. He was human. He couldn’t escape it. He was human and had to live. It was not a choice between divinity or mortality. It was a choice between living or dying. And he chose to live. There would be lies and trickery, of course – compromise and madness, cheating and stealing – but he would do whatever it would take to live. To live, and to cling to humanity, to this one woman. I spent so long arranging the deaths of mortals, but I didn’t understand them in the slightest. Not until I loved one. Not unti
l I became one.

  I stutter-step through the dimly lit hallway that leads from the trial room to the holding cells. One officer walks ahead of me. He is thin and old and long of face. He looks constantly disappointed. The one behind me is muscular and silent. He steps on the heel of my wing-tip shoe and flattens it behind my foot. He hadn’t meant to, and I will be back to my cell soon enough. I can fix it there. We turn a corner. There is a bright flash. Everything is spots for a moment. Then I am pushed to the floor and someone kneels on my back. It’s the thin man. My hands are crunched beneath my chest.

  The other cop has leaped past me to tackle someone in a side passage. There are the dull thuds of elbows and heads against cinder block. I look sideways but can’t see much because of the corner.

  “Hey! Hey, easy! This is an expensive camera.”

  “It’ll be an expensive piece of junk if you don’t lie still. How the hell’d you get in here?”

  “I dropped a couple fifties back here, and they let me come look for them. Ah, here they are. You’d better take them as evidence.”

  “Get up,” growled the cop. “Get up and get the hell out. Fucking reporters.”

  “Give me a fifty, and I’ll give you a quote,” I say to the reporter.

  The cop on my back leans his knee into me, but even so, a crumpled bill rolls around the corner to me. The cop snatches it up.

  “Well,” says the reporter, “give.”

  “He took my money.”

  “Henry, for God sakes, give it,” hisses the other guard.

  “We could all be put up for this.”

  Henry brusquely rolls me over and rams the money into my crushed fingers. “There, you murdering fuck, you happy?”

  “Give!”

  “I’m human today, for the first time,” I say, feeling the warm, dirty wrinkle of the bill in my hands.