Avenging Angel

by Rex Burns

  But this wasn’t an informant. The Play button brought the slightly nasal voice of a policewoman in Missing Persons, responding to the note he had left there before he went home for the day.

  “Detective Wager, we have no report of a missing person matching that John Doe description you gave us. We should have a report from the national listing sometime tomorrow.”

  The tape clicked and then ran long enough to tell him that was the only message. He pressed Rewind and Off and dialed the police laboratory. A recording of Baird’s voice told him what he already knew: the laboratory was closed and would be open tomorrow morning at eight. Please call back. Click.

  Wager hung up and gazed through the glass doors to his balcony at the scarlet feathers of cloud hanging beyond the ragged lines of mountains. At this altitude, the summer light lasted well into evening, and there were times, like now, when the sun touched wisps of cloud lingering a hundred miles away across the Rockies. If he were in those mountains, say camped beside one of those small lakes that looked as if they clung to the earth’s tilted flanks, this would be the time for those last few casts. The mosquitoes and night insects would be out, the still water circled here and there with rising trout and the quick touch of dipping insects. Just the time for half a dozen quiet casts; time to try for that last savage strike and the intense play of taut line against the surge and leap of the fish out of the placid mirror.

  But he was here, ten stories above a downtown Denver street that echoed with the urgent summer noises of automobiles and the shuffle and scrape of feet made restless by the warm night. There was a different kind of fishing down here; perhaps a different kind of savagery. Wager wasn’t so certain about that, though; muggers, rapists, killers—they struck, like any other animal, at the weak, the crippled, the defenseless. They came out of dark crevices between buildings and went after the sure thing as a fish lunged after a wobbling minnow. Except for executioners. Executioners were different.

  An angel holding a sword. Michael, the sword of the Lord, prince of celestial armies. That was the picture Wager remembered from one of the stained-glass windows when he had fidgeted through another of Father Shannon’s droning sermons in old San Cajetano’s. Michael holding his sword before him while below his left foot Adam and Eve slunk away—the top half of Adam, anyway. Eve’s blond head peeked over his shoulder, and the teenage Wager had only been able to imagine faintly what the rest of her looked like. Below Michael’s right foot, a serpentine Satan recoiled in fear, and Father Shannon would point to that glowing scene in every sermon against fleshly lust.

  Father Shannon: a grim man, more like a Lutheran than a Catholic. “He doesn’t have a warm soul,” his mother used to murmur in Spanish. “He doesn’t have the soul of a man who serves God with love.” And his father, whose Spanish, like his adopted faith, often stumbled, would grin. “Maybe he serves God with fear. He sure as hell scares me sometimes!” Michael was gonna get you if you didn’t watch out.

  Wager reported before eight the next morning. Munn, who was getting an ulcer worrying about his ulcer coming back, was glad to check out a half hour early.

  “I’ll be goddamn happy to get off this shift.” The baggy-eyed detective leaned for a moment against the metal door frame of the homicide unit’s suite of partitioned offices and sculpted plastic furniture. The department had finally moved into the new Justice Center, but Wager had not yet gotten used to the expanse of space that surrounded each desk, and his elbows and knees were still cautious. “There’s nobody to talk to,” said Munn. “I got too much time to think.”

  “What do you think about?”

  “My ulcer. I can feel the sonofabitch. I can feel it start to grow.”

  “Take some sick leave, Munn.”

  “I used it all. I just hope I can hang on until retirement.” A sour look crossed his face as his mind turned to something inside. “I got to go. Thanks, Gabe.” He went hurriedly toward the men’s room down the hushed and carpeted hall.

  Wager punched the telephone number for the laboratory. The recording started and then with an abrupt squeak broke into Baird’s real voice. “Lab. Sergeant Baird.”

  “This is Gabe, Fred. What do you have on that victim we found yesterday?”

  “Right now, Wager, I got a cup of coffee sitting on his file. The working day hasn’t started yet.”

  A cop’s working day never stopped, not unless he got transferred to a desk somewhere away from the street and away from a world that never stopped either. But when that happened, you weren’t a real cop anymore. “I could use an i.d. on him, Baird. There’s not much we can do until we know who he is.”

  “Gabe, I really am working on him. I’m filling out the background forms right now, and I’ll be going to the morgue in about five minutes. You can even come with me and watch if you want.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  He left a note telling Axton where to find him, and after a few twists and turns through the color-coordinated hallways he cleared the security door to the new laboratory. The brochure printed by the department for the taxpayers who toured the recently built Justice Center said it was the most complete and modern forensics laboratory outside the FBI lab back at Washington. What the brochure did not say was that the department budget had not yet authorized any more people; most of the new equipment and space was still unused. Call it planning ahead: in another twenty years, the Denver area was supposed to double in size because of Colorado’s energy boom. Then the lab would be too small.

  Baird was at his desk along one of the walls that caught light from the tinted and sealed windows high above the street. Somewhere behind the tangle of glass piping and chrome stands a Bunsen burner gave its soft hiss and an unseen hand clinked a stirring rod. Baird glanced up when he heard Wager’s shoes on the tile floor. “There’s the report on the clothing—I got that done last night. Working overtime. Your copy’s on top.”

  Wager glanced down the slip. “It doesn’t say much.

  “Don’t blame me.”

  The victim’s pockets had yielded lint and dust of a non-definitive nature. The cuffless trousers had a little bit more: a couple of seeds that had not been identified, and a film of dust trapped in the vacuum bag. Both were on their way by registered mail to the FBI for classification. The shoes, too, had been delicately cleaned and the scrapings of each packaged and forwarded. The label from inside the coat was from a men’s store in Salt Lake City, Utah; no other identifying labels or laundry marks had been found.

  “How long—”

  “Possibly twelve to twenty-four hours.” Baird, thinning hair showing his pink crown, did not look up as he finished the form with signature and date. “The coroner will pin it down better. Let’s go.”

  The basement of Denver General Hospital served as the morgue for DPD. Wager drove, then followed as Baird, lugging his metal case, stenciled DPD LAB—FINGERPRINT, walked through the tiled and echoing halls to the cool room with its bank of drawers like a gigantic filing cabinet. A young orderly who looked slightly hung over rolled out the drawer. A puff of cold, artificially scented air came with it. “Give me a call when you’re finished.”

  “Right.”

  Baird pulled off the coarse sheet. The body, its torn chest black from the blood dried beneath the bruised skin and mottled with lividity marks on buttocks and shoulders, stared with half-open eyes at the fluorescent panels of the ceiling. In the field, Wager seldom looked closely at a victim’s face—a glance, maybe, for identification, then he focused on the wound and the body in general and especially on the site. It made the corpse seem less human, less a perversion of the everyday world. But here in the antiseptic glare of the morgue, the humanness was washed away and he could study the face as if it were an object under glass. Now he saw the victim more clearly than he had when it lay in the field. In this flat light he could see that the gray-streaked hair had receded far up the man’s curving forehead; at the side of his neck, like hashmarks leading up to the hairy earlobes, sharp
wrinkles creased the dry skin. The prominent nose and eyebrows marked a narrow face that was already losing its strong characteristics. The gaping lips, which had never been full, now looked like a razor slash through the gray flesh. Wager made a few notes in his little green book.

  “You find any needle tracks?”

  “No. But the doc’ll have to look at the organs to know for sure if he was a user.”

  “You figure he’s around fifty?”

  Baird looked up from rummaging in the shelves of his open kit and squinted at the face. “Yeah—he looks like it. We’ll try to pin it down a little closer for you.”

  He laid out his equipment on a wheeled table and began to fold a pair of disposable rubber gloves over his fingers. “I’m not sure how long this is going to take, Wager. There’s bound to be some decay already set in. A whole day lying in that sun…”

  The statement called for no reply. Wager watched as Baird cupped a crooked forefinger in his hand and pressed with his thumb on the victim’s knuckle; the flesh under Baird’s thumbnail whitened and after a moment he grunted with pent breath. “Have to use the knife.”

  “Does the rigidity give you a better idea what time he was killed?”

  “A little. But lividity, digestion, ocular fluid—all those things have to be figured in, and the pathologist will get to them. One thing at a time, okay? You were crapping your pants to get fingerprints; fingerprints you’re gonna get.”

  Baird always got prissy when he defended the technicalities of his work. Wager shut up and watched. The lab man’s scalpel sliced deeply under the second joint of the fingers and between thumb and forefinger. “Might as well do both hands while the knife’s dirty, right?” A paper towel soaked up the seepage. Baird levered each finger straight with a quick motion, as if punching open a can. Then he began gently washing the fingers with soap and water. He used a small toothbrush to lightly work any foreign matter out of the ridges of the fingers and then dribbled a solution on a cotton swab and dabbed at the fingertips. The wet cotton tip followed the swirls and ridges of gray flesh. “Xylene,” he said. “Cleans away any oils or grease that soap and water miss.” Bending over the awkwardly stiff arms, he rinsed and dried each finger. “All right, now we can go to work.”

  He picked up a tool like a long, shallow spoon and threaded a strip of fingerprint paper through the notched end. “We’ll try the easy way first.” He rolled ink on a spatula and pressed that around the bulb of the forefinger; then he slipped the spoon beneath the carefully lifted digit and pressed it firmly down. Raising it carefully again, he drew out the fingerprint and bent over the flattened paper with a magnifying glass.

  “Well?”

  “Take a look.”

  Wager did. In the lens, the print of black swirls and ridges had numerous gaps and empty patches, as though someone had half erased the man’s fingertips. “Will this be good enough?”

  Baird was already filling a syringe from one of the kit’s bottles. “No. The fingers have dried out too much—dry climate, hot sun. We’ll do a little tissue builder.” He jabbed the needle into the underside of the first joint and down beneath the ball of the fingertip. “This is good stuff. Glycerin and water’s okay, but they leak out after a while. This stuff sets up. Undertakers use it to fill out sunken tissue.” His hands busy, he nodded toward the victim’s face. “Like around his eyes. You see where it’s already sunk in?”

  “I see.”

  “Expensive, though.” He finished and tied a wide thread around each finger below the needle hole. “So the tissue builder won’t leak out. It’ll be a few minutes.” He began rinsing the syringe. “You want some coffee?”

  “No.” Wager checked the time; he and Axton were supposed to be on the street by now, making rounds. “How long’s this going to take?”

  “Christ, Wager, it could take all day! If this doesn’t work, I try something else. A sodium hydroxide bath, maybe. Sometimes I’ve had to peel off the fingertips and wrap them around my own. If it’s real bad—worse than this one—I have to send both hands to the FBI and they do the work. That may take a week or two before they come back with a good impression. Check with me this afternoon, okay?”

  “I’ll check at lunch time.”

  CHAPTER 2

  BAIRD FINISHED HIS work by noon, but that didn’t do Wager much good—the prints cleared both the state and FBI files with no identification; and despite Wager’s daily calls, Missing Persons listed no one closely matching the victim’s description. After one day, the small article—”Unidentified Man Found Slain”—dropped out of the local news section; after two days, radio and television stopped mentioning the case. By the end of the week, it rested in the “active” drawer, one more thin manila folder with no new information, deserving little attention compared with the steady demands of current stabbings, shootings, bludgeonings. And one garroting, which was sure to make the front page because it broke the routine mayhem.

  “Wager, I hate to ask you this—in fact, I hate to ask you anything—but can you give me some reason why a guy would be strangled like that?” Gargan held his reporter’s notebook ready. As always, he wore a black turtleneck pullover, a color Wager swore he chose to hide the dirt.

  “Maybe somebody didn’t like him.”

  “I knew you were going to say that. I just knew you were going to say something as corny and predictable as that.”

  “Then don’t ask me anything, Gargan, and we’ll both be happier.”

  The reporter shook his head in disgust. “It’s my job to ask, Wager. My goddamn job. And, whether you like it or not, my right, too. The public pays your salary and they’ve got a right to know just how good, or in your case how lousy, you do your job!” He wandered out of the homicide office in search of anyone else.

  A satisfied smile tilted the corners of Wager’s mouth as he dialed the number for Vice and Narcotics. The garroting had all the signs of a drug killing, and Politzki over in Johns and Junkies was a good place to start. But Gargan didn’t have to find that out from Wager. If the reporter had a right to know, he also had a duty to work for his stories, and over the past years each man had done what he could to make the other’s work a little harder.

  “Vice and Narcotics, Sergeant Politzki.”

  “This is Wager in Homicide. I think we’ve got a victim you might know: Ellison, Michael David.”

  “Ellison…? Black kid? Around twenty-five?”

  “That’s him.”

  “Where’d you dig him up? Ha.”

  Politzki enjoyed making the kind of jokes he heard on television. And like his favorite television shows, he provided his own laugh track. “Over near the Zuni power plant. What can you tell me about him?”

  “Not much, Wager. He’s not heavy—a chipper and a mule, mostly. What’d he do, get ambitious?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Happens all the time.” And if he was dead, he was no longer Vice and Narcotics’ worry. He was Wager’s. “He’s got a jacket. That’ll tell you more than I can.”

  “Thanks, Ski.”

  “My pleasure, Gabe. I mean that, ha!”

  Wager, like Gargan, would have to get his own story. Sighing, he stood and gathered up the homicide report in its secondhand manila folder and went down to Records.

  Where Policewoman Josephine Fabrizio smiled as she caught sight of Wager leaning over the wide shelf looking for her.

  “Hi.” That’s all she said, but the smile and the way she sounded told Wager a lot more, and he felt again that surprised sense of warmth and completeness he rediscovered every time they saw each other.

  “You are one very sexy cop, Policeperson Fabrizio.”

  “That sounds more like monkey business than police business, Detective Sergeant Wager.”

  “Right—we don’t want to waste the taxpayers’ money. But when you get out of that uniform …”

  Jo glanced at the clerks busy in front of computer terminals and telephones. “I know what’s on your mind—and I love i
t.”

  That was the use they gave to the word “love.” They loved things about each other, but neither ever said “I love you.” They had worn those words thin before they met each other, and, Wager knew, the words still opened doors that neither wanted to explore yet.

  “Has the weekend roster been posted?”

  She nodded. “I get off at five, Saturday.”

  “I’ll see you at five-oh-one.” He told her about the Axtons’ invitation. “We don’t have to go,” he said. “I don’t even think I want to.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Polly worries so damn much about people having a good time that I’ve never had one there yet.”

  “Polly invited you? Or Max?”

  “Max.”

  “I thought so. He’s trying to patch things up.” She added, “He knows you’re too stubborn to make the first move.”

  Wager stifled the angry impulse to say that his partner was his business and his business only. But Jo meant well, and, after all, Wager had let her in on it. During one of those rainy dawns when they lay half asleep and still sweaty and clinging to each other, Wager had described how he had ruined Polly’s dinner that time by fighting with his partner. But that was all he told her. If a cop as good as Max could feel guilty about sharing the knowledge of Tony-O’s execution, Wager wasn’t going to burden Policewoman Fabrizio with it.

  “Or didn’t you want me to tell you that?” She smiled.

  “You don’t have to tell me, Querida. All us Hispanos are stubborn. That’s how we preserve our colorful heritage against you Anglos.”