Avenging Angel

by Rex Burns

  “Sheriff? You awake?”

  “Hell, yes. How come they let you up and keep me in this damn thing?”

  “They’re afraid your guts will drop out.”

  “Not after that damn doctor sewed them in so tight. Every goddamn stitch is pulling.”

  “What did Hodges say about Zenas and his people? They moving out?”

  “Naw. They say that’s home and that’s where they’ll stay.”

  The cost of Willis’s raid had been two dogs poisoned, three attackers dead, and three more seriously wounded. The deputies had four wounded, including Tice and Wager, and one dead. But nobody said much about Yates. The surviving attackers, Willis among them, had been trucked off to Denver to face the homicide charges waiting there. That was the place to find out which of them had killed Kruse and the Beauchamps. Besides, the Grant County commissioners said they didn’t have funds to feed that many prisoners for the time their trial would take. They were glad to get shut of them.

  “Hodges did say,” the sheriff went on, “that the Kruse family was out there all right. He thinks Zenas married himself to the widows.”

  “Sweet Jesus.”

  “Maybe sweet sixteen by the time he’s through.”

  “Does Zenas think any more of Willis’s followers will come up from Mexico?”

  “Earl says he’s pretty cocky about that. Claims God helped him lead a victory over the Antichrist, and now his Church of God’s Peaceful Blessing is shown to be the only true church. Who knows—maybe Zenas will go on the warpath now. I just hope to hell it’s in somebody else’s county and after I retire.”

  Back in his own bed, Wager let the ever-present hazy feeling well up and send him to the edge of sleep. He was just about to slide over the rim when the telephone beside his bed buzzed sharply.

  “Gabe? How are you?” It was Jo, her voice bright and healthy as usual, and with that special note that seemed to say she was glad to hear him. “Did I wake you?”

  “Fine. And no. In fact, I was thinking what a waste all this time in bed is.”

  “We’ll make up for it—I know just the cure.”

  “That’s a fine cure.” And it was. “Did Doyle have any luck with the prisoners yet?”

  “No. I saw Willis Beauchamp going to the arraignment. He’s scary!”

  “He won’t be scaring anybody for a long time.”

  “I hope so. But not one of them’s admitting anything about the Beauchamp family, not even to their lawyer. The DA indicted them all for the murders and for conspiracy to commit murder. But a lot of them can prove they were in Mexico when the Beauchamp family was killed, and none of the weapons that were found match the ones used in the Beauchamp shootings. It’s going to be circumstantial evidence again. Kolagny thinks it’s going to be hard to prove.”

  “Is that bastard the prosecutor?”

  “No, the DA himself. I hear he was really angry at Kolagny for taking a reduced plea on the Ellison garroting. Besides,” she added, “this case has a lot of publicity—Gargan has a front-page article on it almost every day. And the DA’s up for re-election.”

  Ah, the eccentric wheels of justice. “The ones they don’t get for the Beauchamps will be sent up for attempted murder out here.”

  “They could serve as much time for that as for killing those children. That’s ironic.”

  “Yeah.” It wasn’t his worry now. He’d done what he could to establish order, and if the law was chaotic that was somebody else’s problem. To hell with it.

  “Gargan’s stories make Sheriff Tice look real good. But he hasn’t even mentioned you, Gabe.”

  “From him, that’s a compliment.”

  “Oh, and Max wanted to know how you feel. Since we couldn’t make Polly’s barbecue, he wants to have a little get-together to celebrate your coming back.”

  Polly. And another get-together. If Wager needed one thing to prove that despite what happened to him the rest of the world went about its own business, it was Polly.

  “He really was worried about you, Gabe. He didn’t say anything, but you could see it. Gabe? Are you there?”

  “I’m here.” All he’d have to do was say he didn’t feel like it. You say that enough times and people start to leave you alone. Even Polly.

  “Max really wanted me to ask you.”

  Which, of course, was the real issue. “What’s she have in mind this time, a luau?”

  “It’s Max. He wants us all to go to the Brother’s. Sandwiches and beer and a big welcome back.”

  “Oh.” Then, “You want to go?”

  “Yes!”

  So did Wager. “Tell him we’ll be there.”

  After Jo had hung up, Wager lay in the air-conditioned room and drowsily watched the afternoon thunderstorms form where the desert heat of the benchland met the cooler mountain air. The first sign was a wisp, like fraying steam, that lifted swiftly on the thermal drafts. Then the wisp thickened into a pearl-gray haze, and rising out of that came a more defined, thicker cloud that caught the sun whitely on one side while its eastern half was left dark with shadow. Sometimes, farther away, a larger upsweep of cloud towered even higher through gray, wind-sculpted ledges to fan out into a fluffy mushroom form. Those were the ones that, as they pushed up the mountain flanks, would flatten in the jet stream and shape into anvil heads and sail majestically above the lightning and hail and thundering rains they pounded onto the huddled earth below. Half asleep, he watched one cloud rise and move slowly nearer, towering and twisting silently into a mottled silver-and-black mass, whose center began to look like a standing figure. To each side, billows of inexorably moving cloud fanned and curved and spread like gigantic wings.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Gabe Wager Novels

  CHAPTER 1

  “MR. SHELDON, IF you have need of an attorney, you can call one.”

  Max Axton’s voice rumbled like distant thunder. From down the carpeted hall came the muffled ring of a telephone and the mutter of the duty watch answering. Like Max’s voice, the sound deepened the silence of the almost empty Homicide offices.

  Sheldon, his eyes blurry behind thick lenses, looked from Axton to homicide detective Gabe Wager, then back to the big man who rested his elbows on the desk.

  “You think I did it? You think I killed my own wife?”

  Wager shifted his gaze from Sheldon and the mustache that straggled across his suddenly gray and vulnerable face. In the daylight, the office windows looked out over southwest Denver toward Pikes Peak some sixty miles away. On good days you could see its humped outline, powder-blue snowfields, and rock against the slightly darker horizon. Ten, maybe twenty times a year, you could see it sharply etched with its own glow; most of the time you couldn’t because of the smog. Now, you could only see the freckled lights of office towers thrusting up at the south edge of Denver—the other downtown, local boosters liked to call it. Even this late, there were those columns of glowing dots. Cleaning crews, probably.

  “I didn’t! For God’s sake, I loved her! I been nearly crazy—she didn’t come home from work and I called and then I called you guys, the cops, and for five days. … I didn’t kill her! I loved her!”

  “All right, Mr. Sheldon. All right, now.” Axton’s voice didn’t rise or accuse. It stayed as calm as a stone—like, Wager thought, Axton himself. “All right, we’re not saying you did anything. We’re only saying you can have an attorney if you want one.”

  “But then why—”

  “Because the law says so, Mr. Sheldon. If, while we interview you, something comes up that might possibly incriminate you, then the law entitles you to have a lawyer present.”

  That wasn’t quite accurate, Wager knew. Sheldon wasn’t under arrest, so he didn’t need the Miranda warning. But it sometimes shook information out of people who confused the warning with an accusation, and it covered anything let slip by a witness-turned-suspect. It was a good idea, and he guessed that Axton felt the same way Wager did: this grieving husband wasn’t tellin
g the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but.

  “If you can prove indigence, Mr. Sheldon, then a public defender will be provided for you. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.” The man’s cheeks pulsed with weak anger as he tugged at the few hairs that formed the corner of his mustache. “‘Indigence’? That’s ‘poor’? I ain’t poor! And what I don’t understand is why you guys are laying it on me! Why don’t you look for the son of a bitch that did it!”

  That’s what they were doing. When a husband was killed, you looked at the wife; when the wife was blown away, you looked at the husband. He or she didn’t always turn out to be the murderer, but the odds were in your favor.

  Wager flipped open the new manila folder labeled SHELDON, ANNETTE E., and glanced at the crime report sheet. The victim had been found at twilight by one Marie Voiatsi, who had returned home from a week-long business trip to Omaha, Topeka, and Kansas City. She decided to look around her backyard before dark—check on the irises and tomatoes and hollyhocks that grew tall along the waist-high fence lining the back alley. But she found more than aphids. She found a hole mashed in the hollyhocks, and, filling that hole, the sprawled, half-nude body of a female: Caucasian, twenty to twenty-five years old, long bleached-blond hair, eyes of unknown color because the magpies had eaten them. By late evening, Ross and Devereaux—the two detectives on the four-to-midnight shift—had surveyed the crime scene, interviewed the neighbors, and finally got a lead on the victim from the Missing Persons file. Official identification came just before midnight when Kenneth Sheldon was taken to the morgue, where he named the victim as his wife, Annette. When Wager and Axton reported in for the midnight tour, they found Mr. Sheldon sitting alone, bent under the weight of the cold fluorescent lights.

  “That’s the victim’s husband,” muttered Devereaux. “We just brought him from the morgue and haven’t asked him a thing yet. He needed some time to settle down.”

  “Thanks.” Under the new team concept in the Homicide Division, cases were no longer assigned exclusively to individual detectives, but were worked by each shift in the division. It was supposed to provide more continuous coverage of the cases. Maybe it did. But to Wager’s mind, something was lost: the tenacity that a detective brought to “his” case. Some detectives, anyway. A lot of people liked the new system because it helped ensure a forty-hour week. When quitting time rolled around, you just turned to the oncoming shift and said, “It’s all yours.”

  Wager studied the slumped figure sitting beside one of the half-dozen metal desks that the homicide detectives shared. The man was just out of earshot, but judging from the unblinking way he stared at the floor, he wouldn’t have heard them anyway. “How’d she get it?”

  “Back of the head. Small caliber; .22’s my guess.” Wager nodded once at the seated man. “Suspect?” Devereaux half-shrugged. “Looks like a rape-and-dump. But he is the husband. And he’s all yours. Ciao.”

  “When was the last time you saw your wife, Mr. Sheldon?”

  He looked at Axton, and his watery blue eyes blinked back the feeble anger that had stirred him a moment before; then they shifted to the flat white of the wall. It was as if Sheldon preferred to talk to that blank surface than to the man who loomed patient and massive across the desk. “Saturday night. Last Saturday. She went to work like always.” His gaze dropped to the carpet—the gray color and pattern were designed to hide dirt but couldn’t quite manage it. “I told her I’d see her after work. She never came back.”

  “She worked nights? Where’d she work?”

  “The Cinnamon Club.” Wager caught a faint lift of pride in his voice. “She was a dancer there.”

  The Cinnamon Club was the latest name of a topless-bottomless joint on the East Colfax strip. Wager knew it under three or four earlier names from as long as ten years ago when he worked Assault. That was before exotic nude dancing was legal, but the owners had provided equally suitable entertainment in the back rooms. Now it was done up front.

  “How long had she worked there, Mr. Sheldon?” Max asked.

  “A year and a half. She was good. She was real popular. One of the stars in the revue.”

  “Do you know of anyone who ever threatened her?”

  He quickly shook his head and Wager saw Max’s eyelids drop just a shade. “No. She was popular,” he said again. “She made more money than any of the other girls. The owner, he was always saying what a good dancer she was.”

  Axton’s voice softened. “Did she have any male friends that you know of, Mr. Sheldon?”

  “Male friends? You mean was she”—he groped for the polite term—“seeing other men?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hell no! She was my wife! What kind of question is that? What are you trying to say, man!”

  “All exotic dancers get asked, Mr. Sheldon. You know that.”

  “Not Annette! I mean, she got asked, sure. Like you say, they all do. But she didn’t go down for nobody. She was clean. She did her sets and came straight home after the last one. She was a dancer—legitimate—you can ask anybody!”

  They would. Axton shifted the topic. “What time did she usually get home?”

  “Two-thirty or so. I always waited up for her and we’d have some tea and she’d unwind.” His gaze moved away again. “When she wasn’t home by three, I knew something was wrong.” After a short silence, he said, “Do you know that the people in Missing Persons don’t even take messages until eight in the morning?”

  “Did she have a car? How did she get to work?”

  “She drove. She had her own car.” Again that little swelled note. “We got two cars. Both paid for.”

  “The car disappeared, too?”

  He nodded.

  “Can you describe it?”

  “A Ford Mustang. Black with red stripes. A year old.” He added, “It had a stereo, too. A good one.”

  “License?”

  He pulled it out of his memory. “CB 4827. I told the Missing Persons lady all this.”

  With one ear Wager listened to Axton go through the series of questions that would fill in as much as possible about the victim’s life, her routines and acquaintances, her actions on that last day. And, through constant oblique probing, her husband’s attitude toward his wife and especially her job, toward the people she worked for and those she danced in front of, trying to find out what was behind that little odor of mendacity that had come again when Axton asked if she had been threatened by anyone.

  The reports and photographs in the folder told Wager what the actual scene had told Devereaux: the woman had probably been killed elsewhere and dumped over the fence into the yard. The autopsy wouldn’t be held until tomorrow morning, but from the corpse’s lividity, from the absence of a footpath leading to the body among the blossoming stalks, from the nearby residents who, in that quiet neighborhood, told Devereaux they’d heard nothing, Wager was pretty sure what had happened: she had been raped, shot, and driven down an alley to be tossed. As Devereaux said, it wasn’t the kind of murder a husband would do—not the rape, anyway. Maybe one of her admirers got a little too heated up and just had to have the girl of his dreams—and then was afraid of being recognized by his victim or her husband.

  He studied one of the large black-and-white glossies. There was also a small plastic case holding a videotape of the location in sound and more-or-less living color. It was a new technique the department was trying out, along with the team approach—one that gave a better overall depiction of the site. It was good, but it was expensive, and storage was a problem. Wager didn’t know how long the department could afford it. He and Axton would wait until Sheldon was gone to view the film. When the hand-held television camera played over what was left of a loved one while the flat voice of a narrator described the scene and the corpse, relatives tended to get hysterical.

  From the contorted sprawl in the still photo, Wager could not tell if she had been attractive. She was female and did not seem overweight. The half-unbut
toned blouse showed one breast that had deflated like the rest of her body into that vagueness of detail that death brought. Her long hair was snarled among the broken stalks and half-tangled under one shoulder. Her face, with its ragged, empty sockets, had begun to decay, and even the harsh glare of the camera’s flashbulb could not bring sharpness to those surrendering features.

  In the background he heard Axton’s gently persistent questions and Sheldon’s mumbling, groping replies. Once, the man’s voice was squeezed thin and nasal as an answer carried a pang of memory, and he half-choked into a wet sob. Axton held out a box of tissues and Sheldon, blowing his nose, took half-a-dozen deep breaths before going on in his soft monotone.

  Wager closed the file and telephoned the Traffic Division. If the car had not been found since the Missing Persons report was filed, then it was probably gone, cut up by a chop shop into parts and pieces that would be resold for three times its whole value. And absolutely untraceable.

  A woman answered with one of those defensive voices that civil servants on the night shift seemed to share.

  “This is Detective Wager in Homicide. Can you tell me if you have an abandoned vehicle report on a Ford Mustang, red on black, Colorado CB 4827?”

  “Just a minute, sir.” The line went blank for a short while, then the voice came back. “Nothing on the city-county list. I can’t check the metro list until morning, sir. You want me to have the day watch do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was CB 4827?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. I’ll tell them.”

  Wager hung up and, catching Axton’s glance, shook his head.

  “Do you have a recent photograph of your wife, Mr. Sheldon?” Max asked. “It will help our investigation. We’ll return it to you.”