Angels Burning

by Tawni O'Dell

  Gil was rich, highly visible, from a good family, a pillar of the community. Our mother was a loose woman with three illegitimate children who married him for his money and was murdered by an ex-lover.

  We knew we could never get anyone to believe what Gil had done to Champ. We also didn’t want Champ to have to talk about it. He wasn’t even able to talk to us about it. We naïvely thought he could forget about it and we could, too, if we pretended it never happened.

  None of these suppositions help me to climb out of the guilt swamp I’ve found myself wallowing in this morning.

  I realize I’ve lost a skirt and blouse, a sundress, and a shoe to this investigation, ruined by coal, dirt, blood, and chewing tobacco. All that’s left is for me to get spattered by motor oil or the grease from a serving of hot wings and I’ll really feel like one of the boys.

  I know I’m bucking the odds, but I put on one of my favorite summer ensembles: a fitted robin’s egg blue sleeveless dress, nipped fetchingly at the waist, with a matching jacket, and the taupe pumps I was wearing the day we found Camio.

  Her phone is long gone, scooped up by a state trooper who was in the area almost instantly after I called Nolan last night and told him about my gift from Mason.

  I also told him Jessy no longer has an alibi.

  I’ve been invited to the state police barracks this morning purely as a spectator and once I arrive, I do feel like one. What unfolds before me is even better than attending a sporting event or a Broadway musical. Watching Nolan try to interrogate Derk is an unparalleled form of entertainment all its own, and my mood begins to lighten.

  Shawna sits with me watching the proceedings on a computer screen. She didn’t want to be present in the room while Nolan talked to her son, but she did agree to observe rather than bring in a representative from child services.

  I watch her watching him looking for any signs of distress or anger. She reveals nothing, and I wonder if she’s retreated again into her titanic detachment.

  According to the troopers who escorted them here, Mrs. Truly cooperated fully with them when they showed up at her house, although it did take close to a half hour of her repeatedly going to the back and front porches and shouting for Derk before he finally appeared, but once he did, he surrendered peacefully after informing both officers that cops are a bunch of cocksuckers and showing them how he could throw his pocketknife hard enough to make it stick in a tree trunk. Their suggestion that maybe she wanted to give her son a bath and have him change his clothes was met by expressions of utter disbelief on both their faces.

  “Has he always been this energetic?” I ask Shawna.

  Derk is on top of the table jumping up and down, his fists clenched, his now bare feet hitting the surface in loud slaps, his head tilted back, howling, “Not telling! Not telling! Not telling!” in response to Nolan’s latest attempt to find out where he found the phone.

  “Even as a baby,” Shawna says, her eyes never leaving the screen. “He was hard to control.

  “But he’s a good boy,” she thinks to add.

  “Of course.”

  Derk has been reacting to all of Nolan’s questions in a similar fashion. He’s hidden under the table. He’s done a headstand in the corner. He’s done a cartwheel-type maneuver by grabbing the back of his chair and throwing his legs up and over it. He took his sneakers off and chewed away big chunks of the soles and spit out the pieces at the wall before putting them on his hands and crawling around the room on all fours. He ran in place at an impressive speed while shouting “Dick!” at the top of his lungs.

  There were no usable prints found on the phone. Derk is our only lead.

  Nolan gets up from his chair without bothering to give Derk an explanation and heads for the door. Even after he leaves, the boy continues to jump up and down and yell.

  The door to the small empty office where we sit with nothing but a laptop opens and Nolan steps inside.

  “Mrs. Truly,” he begins, and runs a hand over his crew cut, “is your son retarded?”

  “You’ll have to forgive Corporal Greely’s political incorrectness,” I intervene on his behalf. “What he meant to say is, is he special?”

  Shawna doesn’t respond to either question.

  “He doesn’t like to be confined,” she states. “Makes him antsy.”

  “Maybe I should talk to him on a mountaintop somewhere,” Nolan says gruffly.

  “Or the surface of the moon?” I suggest.

  He gives me an exhausted, frustrated look I’m not expecting.

  He wasn’t able to break Eddie, and I know this is weighing heavily on him.

  Even though Eddie’s fingerprints were on the steering wheel of Adelaide’s car and on a few surfaces inside her house, and it’s been confirmed that the blood in the trunk of the car, in the kitchen, and on the bottom of the cast-iron skillet belongs to Camio, he claims he visited his aunt recently and that she loaned him his car. Nothing more. He says he doesn’t know anything about Camio’s murder or his aunt’s disappearance. He’s sticking with this story for now.

  “Do you want to try?” he asks me.

  I don’t want to steal Nolan’s thunder, especially here in his own barracks. I also don’t think I’ll have any better luck.

  “I think we should let his mother try,” I reply.

  “He don’t listen to me,” Shawna says automatically before Nolan can comment one way or the other. “I can’t make him tell me anything.”

  “Don’t make him,” I say. “Ask him nicely. Tell him it will help Camio. He thinks she’s an angel now.”

  Nolan and I wait.

  “Just speak from your heart,” I urge her.

  She looks back at the screen where Derk’s antics continue. I wonder how long he could do this.

  A heavy sigh fills the room and she rises, seemingly pulled up by the release of air from her lungs.

  Nolan nods at me. I accompany her, and he stays behind to watch.

  Derk doesn’t even look at us when we enter the room.

  We each take a seat on either side of the table where he hops up and down like a frog still shouting, “Not telling!”

  “Maybe you should tell him to stop,” I say to Shawna.

  “Won’t do no good.”

  I get up and walk to the end of the table, put my shoulder under it, and heave with all my strength. The table tilts and Derk slides off onto the floor. He grabs the chair I was sitting on and swings it around while backing into a corner. Once safely situated, he squats down and sets the chair in front of him like a cell door.

  “Your mother has something to say to you, Derk,” I tell him. “I know you think you’re pretty tough, but even the toughest guys in the world listen to their moms.”

  He puts his hands on the back of the chair and peers through the metal railings at Shawna.

  “Go ahead,” I say gently, hoping she might still feel a little of the empathetic connection we had the last time we spoke and still trust me.

  The three of us sit in silence for what feels like an entire afternoon but is probably only a minute.

  “This ain’t a game,” Shawna finally speaks.

  Her voice is low and quiet, barely audible. She doesn’t look at Derk but stares at her hands clasped between her knees.

  “Your sister’s dead. And she loved you. You know how rare that is? To have someone who really loves you? It don’t happen much. Now she’s gone. Forever.”

  I know she’s talking about Camio being gone forever but I can’t help wondering if she’s also thinking about herself before she met Clark and Miranda Truly and even Sugar, the sacrificial cat.

  Derk watches her, fascinated.

  She raises her head and stares back at him.

  “Derk, I want you to tell us where you found that phone. I’m not going to tell you to do it for Camio. She’s an angel in heaven now, like Grandma told you. She’s happy. I want you to do it for me. Your old mom. Because I’m very, very sad.”

  He shifts around
behind the chair but continues to hold the seat’s back rails like they’re bars he can’t shake loose.

  “I’m going to get in trouble,” he replies. “I’m going to get kilt.”

  “Don’t say stuff like that,” Shawna tells him. “I won’t be mad at you no matter where you were.”

  “You’re not who’s gonna kill me.”

  “I won’t let anyone kill you.”

  His mother’s promise appears to be the key that frees him from his corner. He pushes the chair aside and walks over to her.

  “You will be the mighty good queen?” he asks with extreme gravity.

  He’s a slip of a boy, all wiry muscle and bone hidden beneath his dirty, ill-fitting clothes. He looks like he’d be easy to subdue, but I imagine trying to physically force him to do something he didn’t want to do would be like taking on a rabid weasel.

  “Yes,” his mother answers him.

  “I go in her house sometimes and take things and put them back later,” he confesses. “I want her to think she’s crazy. She locks her doors, but I know an upstairs window I can get in.”

  Understanding shines briefly in Shawna’s eyes. She knows what he’s talking about.

  “You found Camio’s phone in your grandma’s house?” she asks him.

  “On the table next to her bed with her Bible and her TV Guide,” he confirms.

  He moves closer to her.

  “Now you can make me a knight,” he states.

  From his shorts pocket, he pulls out one of the novelty toothpicks Mason accumulated on his road trip that he traded with him for Camio’s phone and gives it to her. She takes it and holds it delicately between her chubby fingers.

  He kneels down in front of her and bows his head. She gently taps his skinny shoulders and all the burdens he carries there with the tiny plastic sword.

  chapter twenty-five

  NOLAN DOESN’T SAY MUCH to me after questioning Derk other than to ask if I want to hang around for Miranda’s interrogation. I tell him nothing on heaven or earth would keep me from seeing that.

  It makes no sense for me to drive all the way back to Buchanan, then back to the barracks. I find a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts, have a coffee and cruller, and feel like a cliché.

  Upon my return I find Nolan standing statue-still in the parking lot, his hands in his pants pockets, his Ray-Bans affixed firmly to his face, his shoulder holster and gun peeking out from underneath his suit jacket.

  I don’t know what this means at first, then I think I do.

  I want to see Camio’s killer brought to justice as much as anyone—sometimes I think I want it more than her own family—but the official investigation doesn’t belong to me. I’m doing all I can to assist, but aside from listening to future grumblings from residents about the incompetence of the local police department and irate blogging and letters to the editor bemoaning their once idyllic community’s loss of innocence, it’s not going to impact my career.

  Nolan is at the end of his, but this doesn’t make a bit of difference. Every case has always been of equal importance to him. He works as hard now as he did when he first joined the force. In some ways, I think he works harder. He’s no longer performing his duties with an eye toward advancement and glory but out of accountability.

  A teenage girl from a small town brutally bludgeoned to death and lit on fire is a very big deal. He needs to close this case for his own peace of mind as well as for everyone else he has sworn to protect.

  He’s nervous.

  I park, get out of my car, and walk toward him.

  “She’s here,” he says.

  I wait for him to expand on this narrative, or he might say nothing more and I wouldn’t be surprised.

  “I don’t have to tell you how important this interview is,” he finally continues. “Once she talks, Eddie will talk, too. I can’t screw this up.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “I’m not telling you what you want to hear,” I jump to my own defense. “I didn’t say you will get the confession; I said you won’t screw up. There’s a difference.”

  We both fall silent. I know from experience that Nolan can remain this way indefinitely until he decides to depart without any explanation.

  I’m getting ready to say something when he speaks again.

  “We checked Eddie Truly’s phone records and right around Camio’s TOD he received a phone call from his mother on her landline. After what we’ve just learned from the boy, we were able to access her phone records, and before she called Eddie she received a call from Jessyca’s cell. We already have her records, since her line is on a family plan under her father’s name. Originally we didn’t pay much attention to her calls.”

  He pauses. I know he’s upset he let this get by him. He’s feeling regret but not guilt.

  “Why would you?” I reason. “A girl calls her grandmother. So what? Even if it happened around the time her sister was killed, there was no reason to suspect either one of them.”

  “Now we know what we’re looking for,” he goes on. “We checked the origination of the call. It bounced off a tower near Adelaide Bertolino’s home.”

  My heart drops. I didn’t realize until this moment how badly I didn’t want Jessyca to be involved.

  “Jessy was at the crime scene at the time of death,” I state unhappily. “She called her grandma. Her grandma called her uncle.”

  “To help clean up and dispose of the body,” Nolan finishes for me.

  “Or maybe not,” I argue hopefully. “When are you talking to Jessy?”

  “I want to hear what Miranda has to say first.”

  “Can I bring Jessy in?”

  “I guess you’ve earned that right if you want it.”

  Silence descends once again. I don’t notice it this time because I’m busy coming up with alternative theories of the crime. Nolan is the first to talk.

  “Last time you saw Miranda, you got under her skin. She got personal with you. Was inappropriate?” he asks.

  I nod.

  “Why do you think she did that?”

  “There’s the obvious answer: that she wanted to upset me and throw me off my game,” I reply. “Or she might have done it to impress her family. Show them she wasn’t afraid of the police. But the more I’ve thought about it, I think she was testing me. She wanted to see if I’d make a worthy adversary.”

  “When I talked to her she was polite as can be,” he tells me, “the epitome of a little old lady who was dealing with a horrible tragedy in her family and using it as an excuse to tell me nothing.”

  He pauses.

  “I want to go at her together.”

  An adolescent thrill rushes through me in spite of myself. He’s impressed with me. He trusts me.

  “Good cop, bad cop?” I joke with him, trying to sound nonchalant. “Or good cop, glorified babysitter cop?”

  “From everything we know about her, she likes to control other people’s relationships. If we need to, we can distract her with ours.”

  “Our real relationship?”

  “Hell no.”

  He turns and walks into the station. I follow, knowing full well we won’t end up putting on any kind of act when we confront our suspect. We will be ourselves, only Nolan won’t realize it. He’s an expert at reading others but knows nothing about himself.

  “I’VE ASKED CHIEF CARNAHAN to sit in on this interview,” Nolan tells Miranda.

  She maintains her composure and gives me a nod, not showing the slightest bit of surprise or discomfort.

  Now that I’ve seen a few pictures of her from her youth, I know she’s a woman who has aged from the inside out. Joy, pleasure, optimism left her long ago. Not all at once; like air from a punctured bicycle tire with the nail still embedded in the tread, her compassion atrophy was probably a slow leak.

  Aside from the inevitable wrinkles and gray hair, she looks remarkably like the young mother I saw posing with her sister and their babies
in the photo on Adelaide’s wall, but the stony condemnation in her stare and condescension in her carriage is that of ancient gall.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” he asks while pulling out a chair for me on the opposite side of the table from Miranda.

  I smile at him, not her, and take a seat, crossing my legs, and being sure to flaunt my girlishness.

  I have a stack of folders with me that have nothing to do with this case and a legal pad with a bunch of nonsense I jotted down on it before we came in. I’m wearing my plainest reading glasses and carrying a cup of coffee I hand to Nolan like a doting secretary.

  “Not at all,” she says.

  Despite the heat, she’s costumed in a long-sleeved black sack of a dress that falls below her knees. If it weren’t for the presence of her head and a pair of withered, blue-veined hands, I’d think the garment was still on its hanger.

  She wears no jewelry of any kind, not even a wedding ring or a cross on a chain around her neck. Her hair has been cut since I saw her a few days ago. The style is almost mannish now, shaved on the sides but feathered on top like a grate full of white ashy embers has been dumped on her head.

  The severity of her mourning is excessive.

  “We appreciate you coming in to talk to us,” Nolan says.

  “I didn’t have much of a choice,” Miranda counters.

  He takes off his glasses and levels a concerned gaze at her with his baby blues.

  “How’s that? The troopers didn’t explain? I told them to answer any questions you might have.”

  “They don’t always listen to you,” I say snidely.

  He makes a point of ignoring me.

  Miranda is already watching us closely.

  “They said it had something to do with my granddaughter’s murder. That’s all,” she provides.

  She doesn’t know we’ve found the crime scene. She doesn’t know Eddie has been detained and is in a holding cell in the basement of this very building. His phone was taken from him the moment he was picked up and since then, he hasn’t asked to call anyone, including a lawyer.

  “Is it true things have been disappearing from your home?” Nolan asks her, going completely off topic.