Angels Burning

by Tawni O'Dell

  I look away from happy-go-lucky Zane to Lonnie Harris’s glaring mug shot taken the night he put his wife in the hospital. His face is pale and soft but his eyes are hard and flat.

  Singer and Blonski called me on the way over here. During their search for a connection between Harris and Camio, they showed his photo to her coworkers at Dairy Queen and one of the boys who worked there recognized him. The kid couldn’t remember if Camio had ever had contact with him, but the coincidence combined with his history of violence against women and his pornography preferences was enough to get Nolan interested.

  Next to Harris is a photo of a skinny, skittish-looking guy with a lot of messy hair: the brother of the man Shane knifed. He vowed revenge at the time, verbally harassed Shane at his hearings, and threatened his family, but his brother recovered, Shane went to jail, and nothing had been heard from him for the past two years. For him to suddenly decide to seek vengeance now in such a horrible way against Shane’s sister seems unlikely but has to be checked out.

  Finally I come to Uncle Eddie. Nolan doesn’t have anything written next to his photo yet except a big question mark.

  He’s invited me to go with him to talk to Eddie after this meeting. Now that we know Camio spent time alone at his house, not only does it raise questions about him but it also opens up endless possibilities for her running into sketchy characters Eddie knew, including drug-dealing bikers.

  I haven’t told Nolan my source for this lead was a cupcake-stuffed eight-year-old. He trusts me enough to know I wouldn’t give him a lead without good cause, but he’s not happy about the mystery surrounding my information. Eventually I’ll have to come clean.

  I put my glasses back on and skim through the autopsy report again.

  She was a seventeen-year-old girl of average weight and height in good health. No drugs or alcohol in her system. No signs of sexual assault. No signs of recent sexual activity at all, wanted or unwanted.

  Cause of death was a blow to the head with a heavy, flat object that left rusted iron particulates in the wound, or the miniscule flakes could have been picked up from the floor or ground where she was killed.

  I reluctantly glance at the close-up photo of the wide, jagged laceration at the back of her skull with splinters of bone poking out among flyaway strands of singed hair.

  The coroner determined the first blow would’ve immediately knocked her unconscious and been sufficient to cause her death, and considering the placement of it, she probably didn’t know it was coming. These two bits of information are the only remotely tiny bright spots in this tragedy. Camio was alive one minute, dead the next. Hopefully she didn’t know she was about to die. She didn’t experience any physical pain or terror.

  “We’ve talked to her teachers,” Nolan interrupts my thoughts. “They all say she was an excellent student. Straight A’s. Advanced-placement classes. Her relationship with Zane was common knowledge. They were thought of as a cute couple.”

  The same sour look comes over his face when he says “cute couple” as when he heard the word “shams.”

  “I told you that I talked to her three best friends, but I thought you might want to do it, too.”

  I don’t look up at him. I pretend to be immersed in the report. I want him to beg.

  “Teenage girls are not my thing,” he adds.

  “I’m relieved to hear that.”

  The accelerant was gasoline. It was haphazardly thrown over her body but her hands were saturated with it.

  “What about the burning of the hands?” I ask him. “Any thoughts on what that’s about? Do you think it was done to conceal her identity? No fingerprints?”

  “Doesn’t make much sense. There are still dental records. DNA.”

  “Something symbolic, then?”

  “Possibly. Will you talk to the girls, too?”

  That’s the closest to begging he’ll ever come.

  “Yes.”

  “I also wouldn’t mind you taking a shot at Shawna in an official capacity. Bring her into the station for questioning. I’ve already talked to her. I don’t think she did it, but I think she knows something.”

  “Wow. Okay. I’m looking forward to that.”

  I toss the autopsy report back on the table and pick up the transcript of Camio’s text messages. Her phone still hasn’t been recovered. It’s either been switched off or destroyed.

  For a seventeen-year-old, she didn’t text that much. The majority of her messages during the week preceding her death were between her and Zane. There were some to her sister and friends but none to unidentified contacts. From what I can see, the conversations were banal.

  I focus on the final exchange between her and Zane the night she was killed. The texts were sent during the thirty-minute window surrounding her time of death. It’s possible she was killed right afterward.

  Camio: I need to see you.

  Zane: ??

  Camio: Please meet me at laurel dam.

  Zane: U ok?

  Camio: Yes. It’s important.

  Zane: More UAW shit?

  Camio: Please.

  A half hour later Zane texts: Where r u?

  Camio texts back: I’m sorry. I got in trouble.

  I look through their earlier conversations and I get a prickly feeling at the back of my neck. I’m not sure if it’s from the excitement of making an important discovery or the creepiness over what I think I’ve discovered.

  “Something’s wrong with these texts,” I tell Nolan. “Did you look at these yet?”

  He comes up beside me.

  “Not yet. One of my guys is supposed to be on it.”

  I point at a flurry of texts between Camio and Zane the day before and then at the final ones.

  “Camio’s texting style has changed,” I exclaim. “She’s suddenly writing in complete sentences. She sounds almost formal: ‘Please meet me.’ And look. They always refer to Laurel Dam as ‘the dam.’ Here she writes out ‘Laurel.’ And she always uses the letter ‘u’ for ‘you.’ Look. Here she writes out ‘you.’ ”

  “You’re right,” he says. “And what’s this? UAW? United Auto Workers?”

  I burst into laughter. I can’t help it.

  He gives me a profoundly dirty look.

  “UAW,” I explain between giggles. “Us Against the World.

  “And here’s another thing. Look at the amount of time between texts. Once a conversation was initiated, their responses to each other were instantaneous. But with this final conversation, Zane replies instantly to her but look at Camio’s responses.”

  We both stare at the numbers.

  “It takes her several minutes. That’s an eternity by teen texting standards,” I say.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying Camio didn’t send those texts.”

  I reach into the Zuchelli’s box for the lone surviving doughnut, take a bite, and smile at him with powdered-sugar lips. I deserve it.

  chapter eleven

  NOT LONG AFTER Neely rescued Maybe and gave Tug a job, I swung by Edward Truly’s house to get a feel for the guy. I didn’t anticipate any trouble from him. He’d have no way of finding out who took his dog. The trip was motivated purely by my notorious nosiness.

  Then, as now, I was struck by a sense of isolation that made me think of a lone homesteader’s cabin on a windswept prairie with nothing to see in any direction except the sway of tall grass.

  I don’t know where this feeling came from. His house is small and sits alone on the side of the road with no visible neighbors, but a mile over the hill in one direction is a trio of slapdash-constructed yet much-loved houses with frilly curtains in the windows and well-tended flowerbeds lining the front walks; in the other direction is Sawyer’s dairy farm and a few miles beyond that is Buchanan. He doesn’t live in the middle of nowhere, yet the starkness of his property gives off an air of forlorn separateness that makes it seem banished. His sheared yard is devoid of any vegetation: not a tree, not a bush, not a singl
e burst of dandelion yellow or a sprinkle of violets. The house itself is a study in the absence of imagination: an old, aluminum-sided ranch painted entirely white, even the trim, with an attached one-car garage; except for its lack of potential mobility, it could easily be confused with a double-wide trailer.

  Nolan and I stand on the concrete front stoop. Eddie’s house address numbers are missing. I notice the reverse shadows of a six, two, and seven dangling beneath three rusted nails; clean white symbols against the weathered, grayish white. Somehow I know he removed them on purpose.

  The man who opens the door bears only a passing resemblance to the man in the photo on Nolan’s murder board who was scruffy and unwashed with belligerent eyes and long, lank, greasy hair. The hair is still long, but it’s been recently washed and with the filth removed, it’s turned out to be the bright silky white of a mall Santa’s beard. He’s freshly shaven and wearing a clean blue T-shirt. The only signs of his biker past are the tattoos on his arms and a skull earring.

  “Mr. Truly, I’m Corporal Greely with the state police. We spoke on the phone,” Nolan introduces himself and nods at me. “This is Chief Carnahan, Buchanan police.”

  “I know,” he says, and levels a searching gaze on me I find a little unnerving. “I was there when Miranda gave you your dressing-down. You held your own,” he adds with a tinge of amusement in his voice that sounds almost like admiration.

  “Come on in,” he urges.

  The room he leads us into isn’t particularly clean or picked-up, but the dusty furniture and muddy footprints, the dirty socks and an empty pizza box on the floor don’t seem to be so much signs of poor housekeeping as they do evidence of someone once living here who abandoned the house suddenly and completely.

  I look around for any signs of personal expression. Photos. Books. Some kind of hobby or just something he likes: a sports team, motorcycles, hunting, fishing, jigsaw puzzles, carpentry, naked women, his country.

  Nothing. It has even less warmth and individuality than a doctor’s waiting room, and I realize that’s the vibe this house and this man give off. Eddie Truly is waiting. But waiting for what? True love? The grass to grow? His big break?

  “You said you wanted to talk to me about Camio.”

  He takes a seat in a recliner, the only other furniture in the room besides the couch, coffee table, and an old-fashioned entertainment center with a TV, DVD player, and shoebox-size speakers he probably bought in the nineties housed inside it.

  Nolan and I are forced to sit side by side on the sofa. He’s more than a little peeved at me right now. As we were pulling into Eddie’s driveway I finally revealed the identity of my witness against him. Nolan almost turned the car around and left. For some reason, he seems to feel the combative, potty-mouthed, half-feral eight-year-old youngest brother of the victim who hates everyone as far as I can tell isn’t a reliable font of information. I think those same qualities make him an incorruptible source.

  “Don’t know what I can tell you,” Eddie claims.

  “How well did you know her?” Nolan asks, prescription Ray-Bans firmly in place across the bridge of his nose.

  The sun is streaming through the front window, keeping him from looking completely ridiculous. We’re talking to Eddie Truly after all, not guarding the president.

  “That’s a funny question,” Eddie replies. “She was my niece. I knew her as well as men know their nieces.”

  “That’s a funny answer,” Nolan says.

  Eddie looks at him, trying to get any sense of the deeper meaning behind those words, but all he sees is a blank set of features and two black holes where the windows to Nolan’s soul should be.

  “I’d see her at Clark’s house now and then,” he further explains, “but I don’t hang out with my family much.”

  “Those were the only times you saw her?”

  He runs his hands through his hair, falls back against the recliner, and let’s out a defeated sigh. For a moment I think we’re going to skip nervousness, denial, defensiveness, and anger and get right to the confession, but he gives Nolan a smirk of disappointment.

  “Okay. I get what this is about. I wondered how long it would take till the cops started coming down on me considering my past. I don’t hang out with any of those people anymore. Haven’t for a long time. I’m clean, sober. I got a job.”

  “And you’re a liar,” Nolan comes back at him. “We’ve already caught you in your first one. We know Camio came to visit you here at your house.”

  This is the moment of truth. Even I don’t know if Derk made up everything he told me.

  A brief spark of defiance runs through Eddie. He clamps his hands on the armrests and rises up in his chair but quickly changes his mind and crumples back against the cracked faux leather upholstery.

  “I didn’t have nothing to do with her dying,” he says quietly. “She was a sweet girl.”

  His word choice is interesting: not I didn’t kill her, or I didn’t have anything to do with her “murder”; he said he didn’t have anything to do with her “dying.” With these words, all the violence, shock, and outrage had been removed. Her death was no longer an act of aggression but something visited upon her; not something someone did to her but something that happened to her. Something expected. Maybe even something inevitable.

  “Why did she come to see you?” Nolan persists.

  “Hell,” he says, shifting uncomfortably in his chair.

  He gets to his feet and starts rubbing his hand over his mouth and chin while his eyes dart around the room searching for the bottle of booze he would have run for in the past.

  “She liked to talk to me. Wanted to know about some stuff in my past.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans and shakes his head.

  “You know.”

  “Know what?” Nolan prods him.

  “Know all about me. I’m sure you’ve checked me out. You know my criminal record and my service record.”

  I came here fully expecting to dislike this man because he mistreated an animal and because he’s a Truly, but I’m beginning to wonder if the first could have been a regrettable mistake he made in his past like many others and the second might be a reason to feel sympathy for him instead of contempt.

  He’s the oldest of Miranda’s children. What was that like? He survived a war only to return and watch two younger brothers cut down in their prime by their own recklessness mere miles from their home. What did that do to his head? His own little patch of the American dream turned out to be more dangerous than the killing fields of Vietnam.

  “I’m sure Corporal Greely knows everything about you from your favorite song down to the last time you had a prescription filled,” I say to him.

  Both men turn and look at me like they’re surprised I have a voice.

  “All I know is your niece used to walk all the way over here from her house in order to talk to you. That’s a couple of miles isn’t it? And sometimes when she left she was very upset, even crying.”

  “What?” Eddie says, concerned.

  “Corporal Greely, being male and being highly suspicious, jumps to the obvious conclusion that you must’ve hurt her in some way,” I go on. “But as a female who wants to think the best of everyone, I’m wondering if she was upset for you and not by you. I think she cared about you very much.”

  He walks back to his chair and falls into it like he’s just arrived home after a hundred-mile march.

  “I spent some time in and out of VA hospitals. If you asked anyone in my family, they’d tell you I had ongoing complications from a couple of bullets I took in ’Nam. But that would be a lie. They were through and throughs. Healed just fine. I was in the psych ward.”

  He pulls up his shirt and shows us his scars, two tiny, pink, puckered mouths on his lower left side.

  Nolan was shot in the line of duty twelve years ago. It happened right after I’d started looking for the church windows stolen fro
m Campbell’s Run. I think this is one of the reasons I threw myself into that case. It provided a distraction, first from wondering if Nolan was going to die, then from wondering if he was going to walk again, and then from wondering if he was going to be able to be a cop again. To this day every time I see a stained glass window, a spasm of fear clutches at my heart.

  Nolan came here wanting to dislike Eddie Truly as much as I did and wondering if he might be our killer; now he has to give him begrudging respect and accept that on one level, he has more in common with this man than he does with anyone else he knows.

  “It started out with her wanting to talk to me about Vietnam. She was always trying to find out what makes people tick. She wanted to be a psychologist when she grew up. She didn’t know I’d been in a loony bin when we started talking, but eventually I told her and that’s what we ended up talking about most of the time.”

  We all fall silent.

  “So there’s your big mystery solved. She felt sorry for me, I guess. There was a time in my life where that would’ve offended the hell out of me and I would’ve kicked her out the first time I got an inkling of it, but now”—he pauses, leans forward in his chair with his forearms on his knees, and stares hard at the floor—“I gotta tell you it felt good to have someone finally care. I talked her ear off. Told her things I’ve never told anyone, and while I was doing it I realized no one ever asked. Not a single goddamned person my entire life. No one wanted to know about ’Nam, and no one sure as hell wanted to know about the hospital.”

  “Can you think of anyone who would want to harm her? Anyone she had a problem with?”

  “Like I said, she was a sweet girl,” Eddie replies. “Far as I know, everyone loved her.”

  “What about the boyfriend?”

  “I know the family’s all up in arms saying he did it. There’s no way. Cami was crazy about him and vice versa. She was so excited over that sparkly anklet thing he gave her.”