Angel Fire

by Lisa Unger

  By the time she returned to the long and winding drive that led back up to her house, she felt better. She slowed to a walk and was not afraid as she made her way through the quiet, dark cover of the trees shading the road. In spite of the horrors she had witnessed in her life, Lydia was rarely afraid for her physical safety. It was almost as though, having seen the face of evil in her work as a true-crime writer and sometime consultant for the private investigation firm of Mark, Hanley and Striker, and even in her own childhood, it had lost its power over her. After all, wasn’t that why people feared the dark: because they couldn’t see what lurked there? Lydia knew what the darkness held, knew it well.

  Her approach to the house triggered the motion sensors and the night flooded with amber light. Something scurried into the bushes as Lydia punched the keypad lock and stepped out of her muddied sneakers before stepping onto the bleached wood floor of the back foyer. She punched numbers into another keypad inside the door and reactivated the alarm. The lamp outside went out. She didn’t bother turning on lights as she walked through the dark house; she ascended the spiral staircase to her bedroom, stripped her clothes, damp with sweat from her body, and lay upon her bed. She thought to get into the shower before sleeping but sleep came for her deep and fast.

  Later that night she visited the church garden again, in her dreams. Usually her sleep, when it came, was a dark cocoon, an escape. None of the banalities and few of the horrors of her life had ever followed her there. It was the only place where her mind was ever blank.

  In her dream, past the garden and through the door, she could see the blind man playing his guitar, but she could not hear the music. It was as if a sheet of soundproof glass separated them. She did not run away, as she had earlier, but easily manipulated the latch and pushed the gate open. She walked onto the path—the flowers had changed. There was a darkness, almost a maliciousness to the way they swayed in the light breeze. She knew they were talking about her—saying cruel and unfair things that would only seem more true if she tried to deny them. She let them gibber on about her. Fuck the flowers, she thought angrily.

  She walked through the garden and the open door. The blind man turned his head. He must have heard me, she thought. But his eyes seemed to have lost their blindness—he saw her.

  “She’s here,” he said simply, smiling kindly.

  Lydia smiled back, relieved. “Oh, you can see. I’m so happy for you.”

  “The only important thing,” he said, looking past her, “is what you see.”

  She followed his eyes and saw her mother. Not as Lydia chose to remember her from her childhood, but as Lydia had last seen her.

  Her arms were tied over her head, her wrists bleeding and black and blue from her struggle. Though she smiled beautifully at Lydia in the way she always had, her eyes rolled back into her head and her face was ghastly white. Her throat was slit from ear to ear, and blood bubbled in and out as she breathed. Her ankles were tied in the same manner as her wrists, and her panties, covered in blood, were down, tangled around the ropes. Her white nightgown was ripped and filthy with dirt and blood and semen. She was forty-five years old.

  Lydia tried to speak but was choked by her rage and her horror, just as she had been nearly fifteen years before.

  “Mom,” she managed, “let me help you.”

  “No, dear,” she said, “let me help you.”

  Lydia began to scream as the blind man played his guitar.

  chapter three

  The light had long faded from above the New York City skyline before his thoughts returned to Lydia for the first time that day. Jeffrey Mark closed the file he was looking at, removed his glasses, and rubbed his tired eyes. The offices of Mark, Hanley and Striker were quiet now. He could hear only the hum of a vacuum cleaner down the hall and smell the burnt bottom of a coffeepot someone had forgotten to turn off.

  He spun his chair around to look out at his view of the city. A million squares of light reached into a starless sky. A million lies, a million heartbreaks, a million crimes to match, he thought. He wondered again where in the hell she was and why she hadn’t called. He supposed he should be used to this by now after fifteen years. But instead it seemed to be getting harder. He stared at his dark reflection in the plate-glass window. He looked older and more tired than he liked to imagine himself. He unconsciously rubbed his right shoulder.

  He remembered the first time he saw Lydia Strong, fifteen years ago. He was twenty-five then. The death of her mother had been his first case with the FBI. Marion Strong was one of thirteen women murdered in their homes in the New York area in three years. One of the more memorable details of the serial killer’s MO was that he would make sure to leave his victim where she would be found by her children returning home from school. All of the victims were single, working mothers with at least one teenage child.

  Jeffrey was assigned to the case because no one else wanted to be the junior man under Roger Dooley, a twenty-five-year veteran with a miserable personality and a tendency toward obsession. Unwashed, mostly, and reeking of fast food and failed relationships, Dooley was the most unpleasant, bitter man Jeff had ever known—and that was when he was in a good mood. Every lead in the case had turned cold in Dooley’s hands for three years. This investigation looked to be his last before retirement and he couldn’t stand to end a superstar career on a losing streak. He was a real prick and Jeffrey hated him. But he was a genius investigator, and Jeff would learn everything he knew from the man.

  They may never have found the killer if it hadn’t been for fifteen-year-old Lydia. She had an eye for detail and an active imagination. Some days before her mother’s murder, she had noticed a man in the parking lot of the local supermarket. She had noticed him because of his bright red hair, and the way he had stood staring at her and her mother beside a red-and-white car that reminded her of her favorite TV show, Starsky and Hutch.

  “Look, Mom, that man is watching us,” she remembered telling her mother.

  “Lydia, don’t stare. Get in the car,” her mother had told her sternly, not in the mood for another of Lydia’s fantasies. But Lydia was already playing a game in her mind, pretending the man was following them. She wrote down his license-plate number in blue eyeliner on the back of a note passed in class from one of her friends. She was pretending, but in the back of her mind, the man looked familiar to her. In fact, he had been watching them for months.

  Going through the house with detectives, she had also noticed one of her mother’s earrings was missing. Not from the pair Marion was wearing when she was murdered, but from a pair of garnet studs Lydia coveted and had borrowed the day before but carefully replaced in her mother’s jewelry box.

  “She’s a natural detective,” Dooley had said, with something like resentment in his voice.

  In a matter of hours they had traced the plate to Jed McIntyre, a freelance engineering consultant living in Nyack, New York. When they raided his home, he was in his underwear, drinking a beer in front of the television. He smiled as he was led away in the cold night.

  “You idiots,” he kept repeating. “You idiots.”

  In the subsequent search of his home for evidence, they found thirteen photo albums filled with pictures of his victims and a large jewelry box with twenty tiny, velvet-lined drawers. Thirteen of them held one earring from each of his victims—minute, glittering trophies of his deeds.

  Lydia coolly identified Jed McIntyre in a lineup a week later with a strange, trancelike composure. She looked dangerously close to floating away into her grief-stricken mind. Jeffrey was afraid for her and took her to his office so she could avoid the hordes of reporters that followed her everywhere.

  “I need to be left alone,” she had said to him, “just for a minute.”

  But as he closed the door and walked down the hallway, he had heard a scream that he carried with him still, that would, to him, forever be the very sound of grief. He ran back to his office to find Lydia sitting on the floor screaming and sobbi
ng. He dropped to his knees and took her in his arms and rocked her until she stopped. She became limp with grief and fear, whimpering for her mother.

  Sometimes he still saw her that way when he looked into her gray eyes over dinner or when they were working. He remembered her small, gaunt features taut with stress and terror on that first day. Her eyes heavy-lidded, blinking slowly—they would seem almost reptilian if they weren’t so warm and intelligent. She’d had an odd strength and maturity for an adolescent. Her voice never quivered when they interviewed her, but she never made eye contact. She sat next to her grandfather, who sat with a protective arm around her as tears fell from his eyes.

  Even now, though at thirty she was an award-winning journalist and an author, an investigative consultant with Jeffrey’s firm, and a strong and accomplished woman, when they were alone he could see the demons in her still. He could see the little girl inside who had never really healed but had been locked away in the attic of her subconscious. He knew one day she would have to be let out. He only hoped he would be there when it happened.

  He had been trying for weeks to reach her at her Upper West Side apartment in New York and on her cell phone. The number to the house just outside Santa Fe had been disconnected. That was not unusual, as she changed her numbers often. He could find her, he knew, if he really tried. But he always let her be, let her come to him.

  Five years ago, he had left the Bureau and started his own private-investigation agency with two other former special agents. The firm Mark, Hanley and Striker Investigations, Inc. had started in a studio apartment in the East Village. With one phone line and one computer, a couple contacts at the Bureau, and a couple of informants on the street, he, Jacob Hanley, and Christian Striker had built the firm to what it was today: a suite of offices on the top floor of a high rise on West Fifty-seventh Street, employing over a hundred top people, grossing more money last year than Jeff would have thought possible. At first they took the cases no one else wanted, cases the police had dropped or deemed unsolvable, like desperate parents with no money looking for lost children, welfare fraud investigations. Hanley had a nose for finding the lost. Striker had a gift for surveillance. And Jeffrey, military and FBI to the core, had a hard-on for the facts, the evidence, the crime-scene details. As far as Jeff was concerned, the facts were the only element of any case that could be totally trusted. People lied, intuition failed, but facts, if followed carefully, would always lead to the truth. Working closely with government agencies they quickly earned an inside reputation as the guys the FBI and the police called when their hands were tied, when their leads had gone cold and they were about to give up.

  But it was Lydia who had put them on the map as the firm that could solve the unsolvable. Her New York Times best-seller about the Cheerleader Murders, a case she had solved while consulting with them, had catapulted Mark, Hanley and Striker into the national spotlight.

  Jeffrey, Jacob, and Christian had flown out to a suburb of New Orleans to investigate the disappearance of four high-school girls. Later dubbed “the Cheerleader Murders” by the local media, these girls, all blond with blue or green eyes, had been on the same pep squad. They were among the prettiest, most popular girls in school, by all accounts bright, with good grades and good manners, from happy homes. Looking at their faces in photos, Jeff could easily see what features were attractive to the killer, or so he thought. They were nearly identical in demeanor, with the same bobbed silky hair, wide smiles, unblemished skin. They could have been sisters.

  After four weeks, the girls were presumed dead. Jeffrey and his partners, called in by the local police, were working under the assumption that whoever was doing the abducting was a man connected with the school: a gym teacher, bus driver, janitor. They had several suspects under surveillance. They were leaning pretty heavily on a mentally retarded janitor who had a history of violent behavior during periods in his life when he neglected to take his medication.

  But nothing felt right. The pieces weren’t falling together. So, as was often his move when he hit a dead end, he called Lydia in for a fresh perspective. Her gift for intuiting elements of a case that eluded him had been an aid to him many times before. Jeffrey, a confirmed “just the facts” man, had learned respect for Lydia’s intuitions and their value in an investigation where the facts led nowhere.

  Lydia was displeased when she arrived. “Well, ‘You can take the man out of the Bureau …’ right, Jeff? This is a typical FBI witch hunt,” she complained. “I have a feeling you guys couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

  She was referring to their treatment of the suspects. During the investigations, long-buried secrets had been surfacing like bodies dredged from a river. The gym teacher’s wife had accused him, during a vicious custody battle, of sexually molesting his daughter. A bus driver had revealed that he was a recovering crack addict. A female gym teacher, who was big and burly like a man, was discovered to have had a sex-change operation. They were shaking up that quiet suburb and actually not getting anywhere.

  Lydia began speaking to the girls’ classmates. The picture they painted was not the idyllic one presented by parents and teachers. A tight clique, popular and beautiful enough to be the envy of every other girl in the school, the girls were nonetheless secretly feared and hated by most of their friends and classmates. Viciously mean and brutal, they were predators, choosing the homeliest and most unpopular students to taunt and humiliate.

  Their most recent victim was a sixteen-year-old by the name of Wanda Jane Felix. A notably overweight, unusually tall, bespectacled girl with poor personal hygiene and a severe case of acne, Wanda had few friends and was painfully shy. By all accounts, she was a kind and exceptionally smart girl. But having moved to the area only at the beginning of the school year, she must have been lonely. In short, she was an easy mark. The four girls had befriended her for a week, treating her like royalty, giving her a makeover and taking her to the movies. Then on Friday afternoon, they invited her to the exclusive and much-anticipated Saturday night keg party. The unsuspecting Wanda accepted, thrilled with her new friends and social status but unaware that the girls were mocking her.

  On Saturday night they proceeded to get her drunk on Orange Blossoms, a sickly-sweet combination of orange soda and cheap vodka. When she passed out, they stripped her of her clothes and left her on the lawn of her parents’ home. Virtually every “popular” kid in school was witness to her humiliation. And for those who weren’t, there were color photographs available. Wanda had not returned to school since the incident, two weeks prior to the disappearance of the first girl.

  Lydia’s heart ached for Wanda. “Imagine the rage, the shame,” said Lydia sadly, showing Jeffrey the horrible photographs procured from a cooperative student.

  “I don’t know,” Jeffrey had replied. “Sounds like a normal high-school Saturday night to me.”

  But all joking aside, he could see where she was going. Lydia felt that Wanda or somebody close to her was behind the disappearance of the girls.

  “You really think a teenager could be capable of this?” asked Jeffrey.

  “I do.”

  The motive was there, certainly. And in view of the total lack of evidence surfacing against the other suspects, Jeffrey and Lydia went to question the girl, accompanied by local police with a warrant to search the premises.

  And in fact Lydia’s theory proved to be right.

  With the help of her mother, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, Wanda Jane had abducted each of the girls in her mother’s station wagon, tortured and then killed them. The bodies were found in freezers in the basement of the Felix home. The girls had been mutilated, golden hair shaved, pretty eyes gouged out, pearly teeth smashed with a hammer. Apparently, though, Wanda’s mother, Kara, had done all the killing. Wanda, Kara later confessed, would have been satisfied with disfigurement. But Kara could not forgive the ugly deed done to her daughter, and finished each of them off with a .22 caliber bullet to the temple.

 
It was their first formal case together, though Jeffrey had consulted Lydia many times in the past, often breaching ethics to share facts with her and gain her opinion, her insight. She had taught him respect for things unseen, for intuition, for “the buzz,” as they called it. It was a good match. He kept her grounded; she took him places he might never have gone without her.

  The Cheerleader Murders was a typical Lydia Strong story, one she would have wanted to investigate and write about had she come across it in her endless scanning of the nation’s newspapers. Lydia chose local cases with a peculiar twist, something that called to her, like a child abduction that wound up leading to a child-slavery ring or the unsolved murder of a local Florida woman that was shown to be tied to Santeria. She seemed always to be searching local papers and the Internet, looking for something that gave her “the buzz.” Her only criterion was that the case be as dark and twisted as possible. The focus of her books was never the victims, though she believed they were often the key to the solving of crimes. In fact, critics had accused her of treating the victims as incidentals in her work, of treating them as evidence rather than as people. But what drove her was the mind of the killer, the details of the crime, and the process by which it was solved.

  Jeff knew it was a search for answers, that she was trying always to understand why some people did the evil they do and what turned them into demons. As if by understanding them and exposing them to the light, she could make the monsters smaller and less frightening.

  He looked at the phone a final time before rising, grabbing his black cashmere coat from the hook by the door, and leaving the office. He braced himself against the unseasonably cold fall air as he pushed through the glass doors and walked up West Fifty-seventh Street toward the subway.