Angel Interrupted

by Chaz McGee

  I searched the rooms, all the while expecting to hear Calvano and his men entering below. There was no trace of a small boy anywhere, not in any of the two empty bedrooms or the chaotic one Robert Michael Martin clearly occupied and used, it appeared, for sitting in bed and eating pizza while he watched television. I even searched the attic. It was filled with the detritus of his mother’s life. She had apparently saved everything she ever owned, just in case she might need it again. The basement was dark and dirt-floored in that way of old houses that have never been updated. The boy had never been there. No one had ever been there. Martin lived in isolation. The rooms were half dead, as devoid of energy as his life.

  I returned to the first floor just as Calvano arrived. If he was surprised to have Noni Bates answer the door, he did not show it.

  “We’re here to search the house,” Calvano said, and I realized, appalled, that he did not recognize her from earlier. “We would like permission to search, but we can get a warrant, if necessary.”

  “Wait here,” Noni told him, and shut the door firmly in his face, locking the dead bolt. I enjoyed that immensely. She called upstairs to Martin, who promptly appeared, attired in a short-sleeve checked shirt and chinos he had obviously not worn for several years. His belly spilled over the waistband like bread dough, but he did look far more respectable, like an actual taxpaying citizen, for example. For some of the cops waiting to search his house, that might make a difference.

  “The police are here,” she told him with her usual conciseness. “They want permission to search your house.”

  “Let them in,” he said at once. “Of course they can search. I have nothing to hide.”

  Noni visibly relaxed. He had passed the test. She was back to believing him to be the innocent she hoped he was. “You be the one to let them in,” she advised him.

  Martin opened the door. When he saw the rows of officers waiting to invade his life, words failed him. He simply stepped aside and let them enter.

  “This constitutes your official permission to search the house,” Calvano said to him. “Please state so for the record.”

  “It does,” Martin said in a weak voice. I caught a whiff of anxiety rising from him, a distress I could not pinpoint until I realized that this dark cave of a house was where he was safe from a world in which he felt off-kilter and, like all creatures, he did not like his lair disturbed. Noni sensed his anxiety and stood beside him, a hand on his shoulder as six men swept past them, fanning out to their assigned rooms.

  “I expect you to put things back where they were,” Noni called after them, but only her forgiving eyes could have missed the obvious—this particular house could look no worse after a search than it had looked going in. How could anyone tell the difference?

  I had not been able to check out the entire first floor before Calvano arrived, so I was anxious to continue my own brand of searching. Martin and the old lady were still in the front hall, where both seemed unable to decide whether it was okay for them to sit down or if they should remain standing the entire time. Dredging up a flash of gallantry, Martin fetched a kitchen chair for Noni, who sat in it numbly. Some of her courage was a façade. Six cops could be intimidating.

  As they tore Martin’s house apart looking for signs of the missing boy or evidence of nasty habits, I checked out a kitchen that seemed oddly unused for someone who was a chef. The refrigerator held dozens of take-out cartons in varying stages of decay, coffee creamer, and two six-packs of Dr Pepper. Pizza boxes lined the counters, paper plates smeared with tomato and grease filled the sink, and a couple crusty frying pans that smelled of old hamburger sat, unwashed, on the stove.

  The guy definitely needed to get a life, but I found myself thinking that maybe he ought to get himself a maid first.

  There was nothing that stamped the house as his until I discovered an office at the back of the first-floor hallway. A plainclothes officer was methodically flipping through a shelf of videos and books along one wall. He was soon joined by a colleague who had completed the search of his assigned room. He went right to a large-screen computer that dominated the room. A few spiral-bound notebooks and a row of pens were lined up next to its keyboard, but otherwise the counter was uncluttered, which was pretty remarkable given the old soda and fast-food wrappers filling every other surface.

  “This is it,” the first cop predicted. “We’ve got him now.”

  “Bingo,” the other said. He’d pulled up Martin’s browser history on the computer. “I’m no expert, but name a kiddie porn site or chat room and I’m betting it’s here. It’s all the guy ever went to.”

  “Of course I went to those sites,” a voice said from the doorway. Martin had followed the extra man to his office. It was the only room in the house he really cared about. “I volunteer for an organization that tracks child abusers and sex offenders. I go online and pretend to be a kid. That’s how we know who to track online.”

  The men stared at him blankly.

  “It’s called KinderWatch,” Martin said proudly. “We have members up and down the East Coast, even a few in the Midwest. The founder lives right here, about a mile away. Ask him. He’ll tell you. I’m one of his best volunteers.”

  Had he been better able to read the mood in the room, Martin’s sense of pride would have deflated in favor of fear. They’d seen the sites he had visited. Their judgment was swift and it was final.

  “What’s going on?” Calvano asked from the doorway. Noni stood behind him, craning her neck, trying to see into the room.

  “Kiddie porn sites,” one of the men said loudly. “I’m checking his hard drive next.”

  “Looks like I need you to come to the station,” Calvano told Martin, a petty note of triumph in his voice.

  “But I’m not one of them, I watch them. For you guys,” Martin protested.

  “You need to come with me,” Calvano answered, pushing him toward the hall. That was Calvano for you. Why use persuasion when a little bullying would do?

  “He’s not answering any questions without a lawyer present,” Noni announced, inserting her small frame between Martin and Calvano.

  “Who are you?” Calvano asked rudely and, focusing on her for the first time, realized he had seen her earlier, but was unable to make the leap from the sweet, little old lady before him to any connection to a kidnapped boy. “What’s it to you?”

  “I was a friend of his mother’s. I promised to look after him,” she said firmly. Martin gave her a look of gratitude so raw I felt as if I had invaded his privacy just seeing it.

  “I will not permit you to ask him questions without a lawyer present,” Noni said. She turned to Robert Michael Martin. “You go with the detective but you sit there and you do not say a word until I bring a lawyer to you. Do you understand?”

  Martin nodded mutely. Calvano still had a hand clamped on his shoulder, and the poor bastard was starting to get seriously scared.

  “Furthermore,” Noni added. “He withdraws permission for you to search his house. You’ll have to get a warrant.”

  “It’s way too late for that, lady,” the man at the computer said. “Way too late.”

  Calvano pushed Martin forward and he began to shuffle toward the front door as awkwardly as if he were wearing leg irons. “Don’t handcuff me,” he said. “I don’t want the neighbors to see.”

  Calvano was mean enough to laugh. “You need to lay off watching so much television. You’re doing this voluntarily. No one’s arresting you. Yet.” He pushed him out the front door. A handful of neighbors had already gathered, drawn by the cars parked outside. Regardless of what happened to Martin now, neighbors were drawing their own conclusions. His name would be repeated all up and down the blocks of his neighborhood. God knows what people would say. By sundown, he’d have murdered the nurse and taken the boy and eaten him alive.

  Noni lingered behind. As soon as Calvano’s car drove away, she walked through the house, evaluating the men searching through Martin’s belongings, tr
ying to decide which one she wanted. She finally selected a young officer who’d been pulled from his beat because of the manpower shortage—Denny, the young cop who had disturbed the nurse’s crime scene earlier in the day.

  “You,” Noni said, pointing at him. He was peering under Martin’s bed and he froze, startled.

  “Ma’am?” he asked weakly.

  “Come here, young man. I want to have a word with you.”

  Chapter 8

  Calvano was doing what he did best: rousting a suspect. I had been a bully, too, because bullying was a lazy man’s best option. Slowed down by hangovers and a perpetual depression caused by constant drinking, I had barely been able to rise and shower each morning, and sometimes had not even managed that. I’d soon discovered that browbeating required no advance work, no investigating, no remembering what you’d done the day before. You just jumped in and started harassing a suspect and hoped it might take you somewhere. Sometimes you got lucky, maybe even enough times to convince them to let you keep your badge.

  But I didn’t want to watch Calvano work on Martin. I’d had enough of Calvano for one day. When a man is dying of thirst, he doesn’t dream of muddy waters, he dreams of a pure mountain stream. I needed Maggie.

  I knew I’d find her at the hospital, working on Fiona Harker’s murder. Once Maggie started an investigation, she didn’t stop until she had solved the case or someone like Gonzales pulled her from it and pointed her in another direction. That had rarely happened to her—Maggie almost always solved her cases, something my old partner and I had never been able to do.

  The dead nurse had no personal life to speak of, so Maggie, I reasoned, would go to the place where she had spent most of her life: the hospital. There was only one in our small town, but it was large, well funded, and served the surrounding county. It was a sprawling, four-story building constructed five decades ago, when architects had designed one public building after another as huge, utilitarian boxes. It had kept up with the times, though. Inside its walls, county residents could be treated for everything from a splinter in a toe to terminal cancer.

  I had not visited the hospital much since my death. For every three people surrounded by loved ones celebrating a successful procedure, there was someone in a bed nearby, alone in the dark, facing their own mortality. The trouble was that I could tell the difference. The dying had a glow about them that grew stronger as their bodies grew weaker, as if their life force was being leeched from their physical bodies and gathered for the transition. Many of them sensed this and met their deaths with so much courage and strength it made me ashamed I had squandered my life when I’d once had it. Others lay fearfully in bed, awaiting the worst. And a lucky few slept, blissfully unaware that they were never to wake.

  They all died in the end.

  It wasn’t the death that bothered me, though. It was my knowing in advance. It was the fact that each of them so far, at least the ones I had witnessed, had moved on to someplace unknown, leaving me behind. That alone made the hospital an infinitely painful place for me.

  But Maggie would be there, at least. I could endure anything for Maggie.

  I found her in a staff lounge on the first floor near the emergency room, talking to a tall man with brown hair. He was unremarkable looking except, perhaps, for his eyes, which were copper. He was thin in that way of doctors who, annoyingly enough, look like they run sixteen miles a day and perform in triathlons every weekend. He was at least ten years older than Maggie, though his voice sounded older than that. I could feel his fatigue as surely as if it were mine. He had been working for many hours in the emergency room, I suspected. Wisps of other people’s misfortune clung to him like cotton candy.

  I didn’t like the way he was looking at Maggie. He looked like a man who’d watched his ship go down, only to spot a dinghy filled with enough food and water to last him until help arrived.

  “Did you know her?” Maggie was asking him.

  I sat down behind the doctor and made faces at him. It was childish, and no one could see me, but it made me feel better. That was good enough for me.

  “Of course,” he told Maggie. “Fiona was, hands down, the best nurse we had. She never lost her cool, ever. I once saw her walk in behind a stretcher, cradling the bottom half of a leg like it was a baby, the whole time telling the guy on the stretcher that he was going to be okay. She didn’t blink an eye. Nothing fazed her. She did what had to be done and she wanted to save lives. No matter how tired the rest of us got, we knew Fiona would have our backs. Everyone is devastated about her death and I am, frankly, concerned about our quality of care without her.”

  Well, that was quite the eulogy—I wondered just how well the good doctor had known Fiona Harker.

  “You sound as if you two were close,” Maggie said. Personally, I’d have gone for a bigger bite—but Maggie had her ways. Though I didn’t like the way she was staring into his copper eyes. At all.

  “I only knew her professionally. I’ve been going through some difficult personal times,” he explained. “I haven’t had time for anything but work and straightening out my personal life. I haven’t had time for friends for years, in fact.”

  You hear that, Maggie? The man is a mess.

  “That seems a bit sad,” Maggie said quietly.

  What kind of line of questioning was that?

  The doctor shrugged. “I’m good at what I do. Sometimes, that has to be enough.”

  Maggie blinked. He had struck a chord.

  I did not trust the good doctor.

  “Did she have a boyfriend, someone she was involved with?” Maggie asked.

  The doctor shrugged again. “She might have. She was a lovely woman, not just on the outside, but inside as well. Kind. Caring. Infinitely patient, and when you’re talking about the emergency room and people anxious about their loved ones, well, her patience kept things from getting ugly on a weekly basis. But I never heard any talk about her personal life. You’d have to ask the other nurses that.”

  “Was anyone here at the hospital particularly close to her?” Maggie persisted.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to ask the other nurses that as well.” The doctor rose to his feet. “I would like to answer any other questions you have, but we’ve got a head trauma on the way in. Perhaps you would like to get a cup of coffee later?”

  What the hell? He was hitting on her. What had happened to being “good at what you do” and that being enough?

  Maggie’s smile was professional. “I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “Right,” he said, ducking his head and looking defeated just long enough for her to feel sorry for him. “I should have known better than to ask.”

  “Maybe if circumstances were different,” Maggie offered, which was going a little too far, in my opinion. He was a grown man. He could take rejection.

  The doctor smiled at that and, this time, Maggie’s answering smile was way too close to her prime smile for my comfort. What the hell is it about doctors anyway?

  “Well, time to go save lives,” he said reluctantly, still holding her gaze.

  Oh, yeah, well, there is that. The whole saving lives thing and all.

  “It was nice to meet you, Dr. Fletcher,” Maggie answered, holding out her hand.

  “Call me Christian.” He held on to her hand just a beat too long. She didn’t seem to mind. “You can find most of the staff in the nurses’ lounge sooner or later,” he offered, stalling. “It’s at the end of the hall.”

  “Thank you.”

  Maggie’s thank you was enough to cause the doctor to bump into the door frame on the way out, but it was scant punishment for his audacity in daring to take my Maggie from me.

  Dr. Christian Fletcher? What a jerk. Fletcher the Lecher, more likely.

  I took a good look at what I was feeling, and I had to admit it: jealousy was alive and well in the dead.

  Chapter 9

  You’d think nurses would like cops. But not this one. She looked like Nikita Khrushchev weari
ng a black wig—and she was not letting Maggie talk to any of “her nurses.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am sure the staff would like to talk to you and we are certainly all devastated about Fiona. But we are understaffed tonight and it’s simply not possible until the shift is over and a new shift arrives.”

  “How long?” Maggie finally muttered after the third time she was told this. She was not used to having to give up. It unleashed something unpredictable in her that fascinated me.

  “Three hours. But you might be able to catch some of the new shift if you get here a little before that. Some of them knew Fiona.”

  “What about you?” Maggie asked, peering at the woman. Her forearms were as big as hams and she was guarding the nurse’s station like a mother bear protects her cubs.

  “What about me?” the woman shot back. She had mean eyes, like she was looking for a puppy to kick. I’d hate to see those eyes coming at me if I was dying. Or being born, for that matter.

  “Did you know Fiona Harker?”

  “No,” she said abruptly. “Not at all.” She turned her back on Maggie and began stacking patient files. Maggie knew it was a waste of time to argue with her and left.

  I followed her out of the hospital and amused myself playing hopscotch on the colored lines that had been painted on the floor to help people find their way through the maze of white hallways. I don’t know if anyone actually thought the twisting lines of green, red, blue, and yellow were helpful—they confused the hell out of me—but it sure was fun to jump from one color to the other, chanting old childhood songs.

  “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” a high voice said.

  Where did that come from?

  I stopped abruptly and noticed a little girl of around nine wearing a hospital gown. She was standing in the doorway of a vending machine nook, a pack of potato chips in one hand. Her feet were bare and she had no hair. Not a strand. Her head was shaped like a giant Brussels sprout.