Avenging Angel

by Rex Burns

  Not even Detective Ross had a smartassed comment. No one who entered the small house wanted to open his mouth to breathe, let alone talk. Wager had been able to make only a quick survey of the main floor before rushing for the less-tainted air of the front porch and radioing Homicide for the new duty watch. The only ones who came prepared were Baird and his assistant; they wore industrial masks over nose and mouth. Ross and Devereaux made do with alcohol-soaked handkerchiefs wrapped about their faces like cowboys. Lincoln Jones held up until he reached the four kids and older girl tumbled over each other in the basement bathroom, where it looked as though they tried to hide. There he puked into the sink, trying not to splatter the small arms and legs tangled in the shower stall or the girl pressing a child between her and the toilet bowl gummy with smears of thick blood. Even Doyle came down to see this one.

  “What do you mean they were the man’s wives, Wager? All three of them?”

  Tiredly, he went over it for the chief and wished to God that the Bulldog would throw away the half-smoked cigar he chewed on wetly. But Doyle didn’t. Instead he twisted it half a turn and absently brushed away the cold ash that flecked his jacket. “An execution? You’re calling this an execution?”

  “That’s right.”

  “A religious goddamn sacrifice?”

  “An execution for religious purposes. Like Beauchamp. They even drew an avenging angel on the living-room wall.”

  “God.”

  That he wasn’t too sure of. It took a lot more faith than he had to blame this on a god of any kind. It was simply human, and there the responsibility rested. There, too, the punishment would rest.

  Beyond Doyle’s car a second ambulance waited; the first was being loaded with sheeted figures trundled on gurneys down the short step of the front porch. Many of the lumps were small. The attendants worked quickly, pausing at the doorway for a deep breath before plunging back into the house. At a distance on both sides of the street, housewives and small children stood silent or sat on the curbs and watched; a mail truck puttered without moving as the bearded driver stared, and at the nearest intersection cars were already starting to nose toward the crowd of flashing lights. In her doorway hung Mrs. Johnson’s face, mouth finally stilled in a slack-jawed O.

  Wager fought another yawn and groaned as he rubbed his watering eyes. He thought the groan had been silent, but the Bulldog looked over at him.

  “You were on duty last night?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Ross and Devereaux can handle it here. Can you come in at five this afternoon? I want every man in the division to go over this thing. This is one of the worst … In over thirty years, Wager, I’ve never …” He plugged the words with the soggy cigar butt and made a faint squishing noise.

  “I can be there.”

  “Fine—go get some sleep, if you can. Oh—and let me remind you, you’ve already built up more overtime than you can be compensated for. This will have to go under the ‘service to community’ category.”

  “I’m not worried about comp time.” Or the goddamn activity forms.

  “That’s what I figured.” When Doyle joined over thirty years ago, cops were on call twenty-four hours a day and never asked for compensatory time. That was before the union, the one Wager still hadn’t joined. In some ways he and Doyle understood each other.

  Wager heaved the car door open and was half out when he heard a familiar voice tell someone, “Get the house—wait until they’re bringing out another one, and then get a full face of the house. What’s all this about killer angels, Wager? What’re you trying to hide from the public this time?”

  “Screw you, Gargan.”

  “That’s enough, Gabe,” said Doyle. “You’re off duty. I’ll see you at five.” Then to Gargan, “I’ll be liaison with the press on this one, Mr. Gargan. But let’s wait until the television people get here so I only have to go over it once.”

  Wager slept. It was the total, motionless sleep of exhaustion, the kind you dive into as you drop onto the bed, and when your eyes shut you hear it coming fast, like an approaching train, and it roars over you. The next thing you hear is the alarm. You drag yourself across the bed to grope for the sound, your gummed lids sorely trying to squint open against the splintery feeling in your eyeballs. With one hand wrapped around the still-quivering clock, you take a few deep breaths and open your eyes a blink or two, a little longer each time, until they stay open enough for you to focus on the clock without tears blurring the red glow of numbers: 4:15. A steaming shower, a frozen dinner heated up to perfection, a hot and traffic-snarled scramble across town, and Wager stepped out of the elevator and into the eighth-floor conference room five minutes early. Max was already seated at the lower corner of the long table, where he could have room to sprawl his knees and elbows.

  “Jumping Jesus, Gabe, you look awful.”

  “I don’t feel awful. I feel pretty damn good.” Which wasn’t a lie, though it didn’t help to have someone say he shouldn’t.

  Munn put some kind of tablet in his mouth and chewed it slowly. It left a little white scum at the corners of his mouth. “He don’t look so bad.”

  Down the glossy table Ross sat busily jotting things on one of the yellow tablets that Doyle’s secretary had sprinkled around the table. Ross’s partner—the one Wager could stand, Devereaux—gazed out the window toward the distant mountains with sad and unseeing eyes. He was a Catholic, one of the few family men left in the division, and he had four kids about the age of some of the victims.

  “Where’s the coffee?” Wager asked.

  Max shook his head. “Doyle’s secretary hasn’t brought it yet.”

  “She won’t,” said Munn. “Doyle thinks we drink too much coffee. The police doctor said that, collectively, we have higher blood pressure than any other group of public servants.” He belched softly. “Something more to worry about.”

  Golding bustled in, nodding to everyone at the table, even those who didn’t nod back. He was followed by the section’s new man, Ziegler, recently transferred from Burglary and still a little uneasy at division meetings.

  “Max—” Golding whispered loudly down the table. “Max—I got something new you’ve got to try. I don’t know how I ever got along without it. It’s the greatest thing in the world for getting rid of tension: a biofeedback machine.”

  “A what?”

  “Biofeedback. You plug yourself into it, see, and then you concentrate on relaxing different parts of your body. You get a sonic readout on these earphones that tells you how relaxed you really are. Man, I had tensions I didn’t even know I had. But with this machine, you can actually hear your tensions leave. It’s amazing, Max; you really got to get yourself one.”

  “This machine relaxes you?” asked Munn.

  “No. You do that yourself. The readout only tells you when you do it right. It’s amazing how much tension we have and we never even know it. This machine tells you things about your own body that you’d never learn otherwise—it really works!”

  “Well,” said Munn, “with my luck, I’d probably electrocute me.”

  “Naw, there’s not that much juice in it. Look, I’ve tried TM and est and even went to some Personal Relations Seminars, and none of those worked as good as this machine for letting you know just where you’re at. And it’s purely organic.”

  “How can a machine be organic?” Wager asked.

  “Because it projects your inner being. It’s like watching what your soul is doing on television or something. It’s a … a religious experience! You come out of that kind of relaxation, you feel like you’ve been reborn.”

  Wager would have been happy to be reborn with a cup of coffee, but just as he shoved back his chair to get one, Doyle entered.

  “All right, gentlemen. You’ve all seen the afternoon papers; you know the press reaction to this slaughter. It’s the biggest local story since the tornadoes, and the wire services have picked it up nationally.”

  Wager hadn’t seen the papers
, but he didn’t waste time saying so. If anything in them was important Doyle would repeat it sooner or later.

  “I’m trying to keep the lid on this thing until we have some kind of case. So I don’t want any of you people talking to reporters. Be polite”; his blue eyes rested on Wager. “But refer all questions to me. I don’t want anything coming down like all that crap in Atlanta, with newsmen tripping the police and police agencies stumbling over each other’s jurisdiction.”

  “Not to mention each other’s asses,” muttered Ross.

  “Everything you hear in this room,” Doyle continued, “keep it confidential. And send the reporters to me—it’s one of the reasons I get such a munificent salary.”

  Golding chuckled loudly.

  “All right, Phil. Tell us what you’ve come up with so far.”

  Ross cleared his throat and leafed back through the folded sheets of the tablet until he came to item one. “We have eleven victims, three adult women, the rest apparently juveniles ranging in age from maybe a year to approximately fifteen—five girls and three boys. The oldest was a girl, the youngest a boy. All were shot at close range by a large-caliber handgun, apparently a single weapon. I suspect the killers used a silencer since none of the neighbors remembered hearing shots, and that was a lot of shooting. Since silencers are hard to get, that supports the single-gun theory. Baird guesses they were killed maybe ten days ago, but the coroner hasn’t had a chance to analyze the stomach contents, so we don’t yet know what time of day. We figure there was more than one killer, since the shootings took place all at approximately the same time, and apparently nobody tried to escape. To judge by the location of the bodies, they were divided up into two groups. Let me draw this floor plan for you.”

  He went to the portable blackboard and, referring to his notes, sketched the rooms of the small house and its basement, placing X’s for each of the bodies. “Now this isn’t exact, but it’s close enough, okay?”

  “Can you give us your reconstruction?” Doyle asked.

  “Yessir. We figure it’s likely one killer was at the back door when the other or others knocked at the front. There was no sign of forced entry, except for Wager’s little lock-picking trick. If the killer effected entry that way, any evidence of it has been violated.”

  “You think I should have kicked down the door, Ross?”

  “We’ll get to Gabe’s part later. Go on, Phil.”

  “Yessir. Anyway, it looks like the victims let the killer or killers in through the front door. Whereupon the best guess is the killer pulled a gun and let in his accomplice or accomplices. No one made a run for it,” he explained again to the men, who sat silently at the table looking at the chalk sketch. “If they hadn’t had the exits covered somebody out of all those people would have made a run for the back door or a window.”

  “I agree. Go on.”

  “We think they then took the three adult women and sat them in the living room under guard, while an accomplice took the older children to the downstairs bathroom, which has no windows or other exit. Who got shot first, I don’t know. But after the women were killed, and maybe the ones in the bathroom, the killers went through the bedrooms shooting the three littlest kids, who were sleeping there.” He turned from pointing at those X’s. “That place was like a dormitory—double, triple bunks everywhere. I don’t know how in hell that many people lived in a house that size without going nuts. Anyway, we spent the whole goddamn day in that place marking and measuring, and we still don’t have too much. Baird and his people are doing what they can with ballistics and fingerprints; the first coroner’s reports should be coming in sometime tonight.” Ross lifted the lapel of his coat and sniffed, making a sick face. “The goddamn smell—”

  “Did you find any notes?” Wager asked. “A drawing of an angel with a sword?”

  Ross looked down the table. “Your killer angel? Only the one you saw, Wager. Here, we took a picture of it.” He passed along a Polaroid color photograph of the living-room wall. Daubed in brown streaks of dried blood and taller than a standing man, the familiar spread-winged angel towered over the flung body of a woman. Gazing at the picture, Wager saw what he hadn’t had time to notice in his hasty tour through the room before calling in the homicides: this angel had a face. It was dominated by two round circles for eyes, and in the center of each startled ring was a single dot of blood—the pupils of an enraged, maddened stare.

  “As you know from the papers, they’re calling it the ‘angel of death’ murders, and they’re doing their best to scare people shitless about it.”

  Munn crunched another tablet. “It scares hell out of me, Chief. Anybody killing women and children and decorating the walls with their blood, they got to be maniacs.”

  “I won’t argue that. But Wager has some information that’ll tell us what kind of maniacs. It’s what sent him to that address in the first place, and it was a good piece of detective work. But next time, call Technical Assistance; don’t use a lock pick. Go ahead—fill them in.”

  Wager was tired of telling the same story over and over and getting the same startled exclamations, “polygamy?” and “avenging angels?” But it was necessary and he did his best to hold his temper even when Golding went off on some half-assed dissertation about religious mania and a modern search for values. It didn’t have one damn thing to do with finding out who butchered eleven women and children.

  “So other than this drawing, you found nothing to link the Mueller killing to the others?” Doyle asked to get the talk back to the subject.

  “No, sir. I also called Orvis down in Pueblo and brought him up to date, but he still doesn’t have an address for his victim. I’d like to look through any letters or documents that Ross and Devereaux find—these people kept in touch with each other, and I suspect the killers knew that, too.”

  “Good God,” muttered Axton. “Not another houseful.”

  Doyle made a note on a yellow pad.

  Devereaux, who had been murmuring with Ross, caught Wager’s eye. “We didn’t have time to go through everything in the house, Gabe—we went after the more fragile evidence first. But the drawers we did look in were messed up. I think you’re right—I think the killers were looking for some kind of lead to the Pueblo victim, and they obviously found it.”

  Ross added, “Baird’s fingerprinting the whole house; with that many people, there’s prints everywhere. He told me it’ll take him all day tomorrow just to get prints from the victims. The kids’, especially, had decayed pretty bad, and he says it’ll take time to build them up. Anyway, he’s still out there dusting the drawers and contents. Probably be half the night before he’ll let us go through them.”

  Wager thought a moment. “What about telephone records? With a deuces tecum, we can subpoena a list of long-distance numbers billed to that phone.”

  “We could,” said Ross. “And in fact I already thought of that. But one problem, Wager: no phone.”

  “All right,” said Doyle. “This is obviously—”

  The pop of every transmitter in the room interrupted him as the dispatcher called for the homicide officer on duty. “X-86, you have a 10-32 and a possible victim at Colfax and Emerson. Officers at the scene.”

  Munn groaned and answered that he was on his way.

  Golding, on the same shift, quickly gathered his notes. “They’re singing my song—sorry, Chief.” And he was out the door behind Munn.

  “Obviously,” the Bulldog continued, “this is a case whose brutality makes it especially important. The mayor’s asked for and received the governor’s approval for a statewide task force to pursue the perpetrators. I will head that task force, DPD Homicide will provide the manpower. The attorney general’s office will effect liaison with any and all local agencies we may be led into contact with. We have been assured that every district attorney will cooperate fully in this investigation. The governor has also asked the FBI to provide assistance in case interstate flight is involved, and he has been assured by neighbor
ing states of the fullest cooperation of their agencies if we need it. We will go after these people as priority one. However, we will not let up on our other duties. It means extra work; it means more overtime if you’re willing to give it. With the—ah—union rules, of course, I can’t demand that. But I will find ways of—ah—compensating those who donate. Those who do not will not in any way be penalized, of course.”

  That was for Ross, the union rep for this division. Doyle went on to detail the assignments for the remaining detectives, most of which they had thought of anyway. Except maybe for Ziegler, whose Bic pen scratched busily: question every household along both sides of the street; nontechnical assistance for Baird’s understaffed lab people; a central desk for information gathering and communications; visits to every grocery store or clothing store or medical center or pharmacy where the victims might have traded. Anything else that might fill in the routines of the victims’ last day—and with it, anybody who might have seemed interested in them.

  CHAPTER 7

  IT WASN’T UNTIL the next morning, during one of those long, desultory stretches that usually come between two and four, that Wager had a chance to pay attention to the itch that had pestered him even while he sat in the car with Chief Doyle. The two of them had watched the sheeted figures carried out past the crowd of neighbors, the cars slowing to a halt at the distant intersection, the faces mute with shock … something about those faces … That crowded scene had been unlike the vacant streets Wager and Axton were cruising now, where the patrol car’s headlights moved through the dark like prodding fingers touching nothing … Silent and preoccupied, Wager drove, the unmarked car creaking loudly as it bounced across the dips of intersections; Axton, equally silent, gazed at the lights sliding past. Finally he proved to Wager that, as so often in the past, they had been mulling over the same thing: “I still can’t believe it—women, children, slaughtered like that. And for what reason?”