by Rex Burns
“Uh-oh—there’s that Spanish accent. But don’t forget, Pancho, I’m not Anglo. I’m Italiana.”
The accent always betrayed his anger. And Jo always seemed to defuse it. He slid his hand across the shelf in mute apology and touched her fingertips. “I’ll think about Polly and her damn barbecue. Here, Policeperson Wop, see what you’ve got on this dude.” He showed her the form with Ellison’s name.
She glanced down the report. “Strangulation?”
“Low-budget homicide.”
“Yuk! It’ll take just a minute.”
He watched her lean toward the scanner, the taut blue skirt showing the long curve of leg that his hands knew so well. Her dark hair, regulation length and shorter than he liked it on his women, curled to her shoulders and showed the coppery light that some brunettes had. And despite her slimness and the stiff uniform shirt, her breasts showed fully, too. Wager remembered when he first saw her, the chrome name tag, Fabrizio, J., riding above one of those round breasts while a tall blond cop leaned familiarly against her. That guy was gone now, and she never talked of him. Wager never asked.
He shuffled through the Ellison jacket for a list of known associates and the names of various arresting officers who might remember the youth and the people he hung around with. That was where this kind of case usually found its solution, and the tiny whir of the office’s electric clock over the entry underscored the routine quality of Wager’s work. When the telephone rang he automatically noted the time—twenty to eleven—and pulled a pad of paper to him as he answered. “Homicide, Detective Wager.”
But it wasn’t another death report; it was Doyle’s secretary telling him that the Bulldog wanted to see him as soon as possible. When Wager entered the homicide chief’s office, the man’s lower teeth in the underslung jaw glinted in a polite way.
The Bulldog motioned Wager to one of the black Leatherette chairs with its embossed seal of the Denver Police Department. Visitors to the offices of division chiefs got to sit on those chairs; molded plastic rested the backsides that visited lesser offices.
“You making any progress on that strangulation case?”
Wager eyed the man. The Ellison case promised to be a garden-variety homicide and not worth Doyle’s special notice. “He was a small-time pusher. I’m working on a list of known associates now.”
“Keep it legal.”
That was Doyle’s prejudice against ex-narcs. Wager knew his business. He did not bother to answer.
“What about that John Doe found east of town Monday? Anything?”
He shook his head. “No i.d. yet. Coroner’s report, pathology findings. We’re still waiting on the dental check. With no i.d., we’re not going to get very far.”
“Uh-huh.” Doyle pushed a leaf of paper across the shiny dark wood of his desk. “Does this look familiar?”
It was the sketch of an angel, domed wings spread and sword upright.
“Another one?”
“It came in the mail this morning. It was found on a victim in Pueblo a couple days ago. Give me everything you’ve got so far.”
Wager told Doyle the findings of the coroner: death by gunshot, an exploding bullet of heavy caliber—probably .44 or .45—sometime in the early morning of the day he was found. No FBI record, no military service, no missing-persons report. The Salt Lake City store that sold the victim’s suit did not remember the man’s description. No laundry marks.
“Possible motive robbery? Maybe a dope deal?”
“The pathologist found no traces of dope in his organs. The summary says he was very healthy for a man his age.” Wager shrugged. “He was robbed, yes. But robbers don’t usually leave a note on the victim.”
“So outside of that little drawing, we got a lot of nothing.”
“Yessir.”
Doyle pulled the drawing back across his desk, his square fingers tapping it lightly. “The Pueblo victim is unidentified, too. A white male, mid-to-late thirties, shot once in the heart with a large-caliber handgun. Robbery victim, but this was found stuck in his hand. Pueblo sent copies statewide to all agencies to see if it turned up anywhere else.” The Bulldog’s fingers stopped tapping. “Did we send a circular out?”
“No, sir. I should have.”
Doyle nodded. “That’s right, Wager. You should have. It was sloppy not to. So do it now. Start working from this angle.” He tapped the drawing again. “It’s the same m.o. and looks like the same kind of drawing. See what the lab can come up with on the picture you found. Get in touch with …” he read from a letter “… Detective Orvis down in Pueblo and see if he has any other replies to his circular.”
“Yessir.”
Doyle’s fingers tapped again, holding Wager in the chair a moment longer. “I don’t know how it was in Narcotics, Wager; but in Homicide, routine can be good and it can be bad. It’s good when it makes you work systematically and cover all the bases. It’s bad when it makes you think every murder’s just another day at the office. You understand?”
“Yessir.”
Doyle was right: Wager had screwed up, and the anger he felt was at himself. Back at his own desk he called Baird in the lab. “Have you run any tests on that angel drawing yet?”
“Let’s see. … No, we haven’t got to it. I was hoping we’d get an i.d. to work with before we did any more on that one. We got about eight cases pending with viable suspects.”
“Doyle wants the tests run as soon as you can.”
“Crap. Well, the chief gets what he wants, doesn’t he?” Baird added, “I can tell you one thing about it without any tests, though.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a copy. Xerox, maybe. But a plain-paper copier was used. I took it out of the evidence bag and looked at it in the light. You can see the difference in the embossing.”
“A Xerox? It looked real to me.”
“It is real. But it’s not an original. It just looks like an original. Hell, some of these new copiers can photograph a dollar bill close enough to fool a change machine. My son told me some of the kids in his junior high are working that little scam.”
A copy. There could be tens of copies. Hundreds.
“I don’t think the paper’s going to tell us much,” said Baird. “We already dusted it for prints, of course, but there weren’t any. I’d have let you know if there were.”
“Do what you can.”
“I always do.”
His next call was through the WATS line to Pueblo, one of the string of growing cities that ran down the east face of the Rockies from Wyoming to New Mexico. All Wager could remember of the town was the wall of towering steel blast furnaces and the mountains of coal piles that lined I-25 as it arced past the small and usually hot and dusty city. After two or three voices he finally reached Detective Orvis.
“This is Detective Wager, Denver Police, Homicide. I’m calling about that inquiry you sent out—the angel with the sword.”
“Right! Do you have anything for us?”
“A similar killing. And a similar drawing.”
The line clicked somewhere in the muffled distance. “A white male? One shot in the heart? Possible robbery motive?”
“And no identification yet. Has anyone else called you?”
“No, no … You’re the first.”
Wager understood why Orvis said “first”; the idea of multiple murders had crossed his mind, too, when he talked to Baird. “Is your drawing a Xerox copy?”
“Yeah. That’s why I sent out an inquiry. How about yours?”
“It’s a copy, too.” He gave Orvis the date and circumstances of his John Doe killing. “Let me know if you get an i.d. on yours—or anything else. I’ll give you my office and home number.”
“Fine. You’re the case officer up there?”
Wager noted the stress on “up there”; Orvis was telling him that it was his case, too; that the Denver PD might be the state’s biggest department, but it had no jurisdiction in Pueblo. “Right. Me and Detective Axton
.” He spelled Max’s name. “We’ll keep you informed of what we come up with.”
After he hung up, Wager finished the list of Ellison’s known associates and phoned them to Records and the Crime Information Center for any addresses they might have. Then he and Axton would start down the list and shake trees until some clue fell out. But the real thing on his mind was that angel and sword. One here; one in Pueblo. Maybe one or more in other states, too.
He stared across the empty desks at the cream-colored wall of the pleasantly quiet office. Controlled acoustics. Controlled temperature and humidity. Carefully neutral in color scheme. Space for each desk measured by some engineer and the square footage written into the building design. But as much as the old headquarters building had depressed him with its indelible dirt, its confusion of noises and crowded bustle, it had seemed closer to the street than this shadowless and efficient box. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before this newness wore off—before the snarled clutter of the street gradually worked its way up the muted elevators, up the wide and carpeted stairwells, to glide like gritty fog into this room with its hermetically sealed windows. A little of it had to come in each time a detective strode through that door; a pinch, a wisp, a slight odor hanging in the creases of a jacket, trailing from the worn rubber heel of a shoe. It was a matter of degree, a matter of balance between order and confusion. But as yet too much order dominated this new office and made him uneasy. One could stay up here and forget the disorder that swirled through the streets outside the building.
Restless, he stood and looked past the tinted glass down at the rectangles of streets and alleys. To the south of the new police building the roofs were kept low by city ordinance so that people strolling in the parks on the east side could have an unobstructed view of the mountains. Elsewhere thirty-and forty-story towers thrust up to glint in the sun. And everywhere the fragile web of cranes swung gently over new excavations. More office buildings, more commuter space, fewer homes to fill the evening streets with the glow of living-room lights. The city was becoming as functional as a draftsman’s sketch. The starkly efficient plans of engineers, backed by the irresistible pressure of oil money, were creating a new city of smooth plastic façades.
From up here even the older section, the less-developed swatch of stubby apartment buildings and small houses, seemed as clean and regular as the face of a waffle iron. What would be left to erupt in a city as orderly and functional as a dynamo? What cries or songs would fill the vacant night streets between the empty skyscrapers of the future? Wager, his vision of the future blurred with doubt, did not believe that all happened for the best. It just happened. And if he often hated the things that belched rage and pain into the streets, he also loved the excitement and heat of it. It was a paradox he occasionally wondered about in the silent times in his apartment—how one could love the thing he hated and hate the thing he loved. He was drawn to the street and its hungers up to a point—the point when those hungers became chaos.
Denver did have its share of truly weird ones, those who moved far beyond excitement in order to open doors to subterranean terrors. Some drifted in from Texas or New Jersey on their way to LA, where they settled in like ticks to start a religion or a revolution. Some were homegrown—native talent to be proud of, like the kid who thumped his roommate to death with a ball peen hammer and then carved him up and wrapped the bits and pieces in neat packages, which he distributed around the neighborhood. Or the woman who went just a tad too far into chemically induced ecstasy and burned her mother to death so the smoke could carry her prayers to heaven. And there was the series of half a dozen killings of young women—rape, strangle, and dump—that was still on the open file, without even a suspect to watch. Those were the ones that made killings like that of the garroted Ellison seem as routine and familiar as tying a shoe.
Perhaps Denver was no longer to be spared the kind of mass murderer who surfaced in other corners of the country—the Zebra killers of California, some of whom were still at large and still preaching revenge against whites; the Texas murders of forty girls and women—still no suspect a decade later; Gacy in Chicago; the Atlanta ghoul who fed on black children; the Zodiac killer of San Francisco, never caught even with a description of the suspect and the notes left behind for the police—a cross in a circle. The Zodiac notes had not been Xeroxed, and the victims had been chosen at random—which added an even scarier note, as if the black edge of the careless universe had been touched.
One of the things Wager liked about his job was that while doing it he sought—and often found—reasons behind an act of insane savagery. Sometimes it was only insanity—temporary or otherwise—a term that comfortably covered a lot of explanations in the eyes of the law. But it was an explanation, though a weak one; it re-established the line between confusion and coherence. The law—people like Wager who served the law—traced that line, and maybe it was part of the burden of his occupation that he could see both sides of that line. But he always felt a personal victory when he could explain the motive of an act, even if in terms of insanity. His job was to claim some territory for coherence, even if that effort had once led him to claim more than the law allowed. And in claiming, to lose a partner’s trust. But of late the territory of chaos seemed to grow larger, while Wager’s victories were smaller and smaller in the face of a threat that loomed like the coming night sky. An angel holding a sword. Somehow that message towered over the usual chaos of the street: manslaughter, family slayings, garrotings—even these were dwarfed by that little drawing. Because whoever committed that murder acted from reason, but a reason founded on, and growing out of, the same vast insanity that brought wars—a superstructure of coherence that gathered more and more followers, those who never looked to see that their belief was founded on insanity.
Cross-in-circle, angel-and-sword. Wager caught himself assuming that there would be more angel killings. He could feel the promise of some kind of pattern in these killings, which was why he was certain there would be more: someone was following a path that led to specific victims. Those notes—symbols of the killer’s triumph—were meant to be seen by future victims.
CHAPTER 3
THE THIRD ANGEL came almost a week later as Wager, elbow-deep in a new set of time-study forms, tried to classify his activities for the previous six months into little boxes that the computer could scan. The little boxes indicated the number of cases handled, the types, the number of hours each demanded, the range of support areas utilized, and something called “other” which the computer couldn’t break down into component parts. Then a highly paid consultant would come in and read the form that he had designed, point to the quantified evidence, and tell Doyle where his people were screwing up. Pretty soon they would be solving forms and not solving cases, because there was nothing to mark on the form that quantified the way victims looked and smelled or the wide-eyed numbness of relatives or the tight-lipped worry of arrested suspects. Those kinds of data couldn’t be put into little boxes with a number two pencil, and to Wager’s way of thinking there wasn’t much of real importance that could be, except the number of cases pending and the number of cases cleared. You didn’t need a consultant or a computer to figure that. But along with the department’s brand-new building had come new ways of administration, and instead of being out on the pavement with Axton where he should be, he was here scratching paper. Wager sighed and filled in another little square and moved to the next query. This afternoon Max was to fill in his form and Wager would make the rounds.
His telephone rang: the Bulldog. “Wager, another one of those angel drawings came in the mail this morning. Can you come up?”
“My time-study’s due at noon, Chief,” said Wager sweetly. “You sent out a memo on it.”
There was a slight pause. “That can wait.”
“I’ll be right there.”
This time Chief Doyle’s fingers tapped on his intercom box while Wager read the letter that had come with the copy of the sketch. The letterhea
d said “Grant County Sheriff’s Office, Loma Vista, Colo., 81321.” It was a small town on the Western Slope; Wager had driven through it on a fishing trip years ago. The letter described the homicide and asked for any help DPD could give. It was signed Daryl Tice, Sheriff.
“This is a little different from the other two,” said Wager.
“How’s that?”
“They know who the victim is, for one thing.”
Doyle nodded and gazed out the window. His view looked across the shallow bowl of the South Platte toward the front range of mountains with their newly cut construction scars orange in the morning sun. “There’s probably no more than fifteen thousand people scattered around that whole county. In a population that small, it would be surprising if they didn’t know everybody.”
That made some sense, and besides, Wager had been a cop long enough to know that any pattern he imagined might not be the one a criminal had in mind. True, this victim had been shot in the back of the head rather than in the heart, but the type of weapon was the same—a large-caliber handgun. “Was the angel Tice found a Xerox or an original?”
“You know as much as I do, Wager.”
The letter didn’t say. “I’ll give him a call.”
“Do that.” Doyle didn’t lean back as he usually did when a conference was over. Instead, his gaze stayed aimed at the window, holding Wager by its stillness. Finally he said what Wager had already thought. “That’s number three. God knows how many more there might be.” Then, “I take it you’ve got nothing more on our angel killing?”
“No, sir. Neither has Pueblo on theirs. I called Orvis to check just before coming up.”
The Bulldog nodded and said, more to himself than to Wager, “Three in a month. All over the state.” His eyes turned to Wager and he asked mildly, “What’s this I read in the paper a few days ago—that article by Gargan on the barbed-wire strangling. Are you the homicide detective he meant when he called one of our people ‘nasty, brutish, and short’?”