Angel Fire

by Lisa Unger

  At school, the regimen, the high academic standards, and the constant physical exertion relaxed and exhausted him. He excelled there and went on to West Point. But he knew before he graduated that the military life was not for him. He liked the order and the discipline, but he craved risk, danger. He wanted a steady diet of adrenaline.

  But lately thrills like those he sought when he was younger were becoming less appealing, especially since he had been shot. The pain in his shoulder as Lydia worked the muscle, her closeness, reminded him of the way he ached for her when they were apart. He was forty, with nothing in his personal life to show for it. He realized that Lydia was the only woman he had ever loved. There had been other women, but his job, his schedule, made relationships hard to maintain. And he had never felt so kindred with anyone. He was alone, except for Lydia. And even with her, the way they were now, he felt alone.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked, sensing that he was far away.

  “Just about how I’ve missed you the last few weeks.”

  “I’ve missed you, too. But you’re here now.”

  But for how long? And then how long until I see you again? I don’t want to hold you down. I want to be your home. I want to be the place where you come to hide. “I’m glad,” he said.

  “Does your shoulder feel better now?” she asked, changing the subject.

  “Much. Thanks.”

  She moved away from him, afraid to have her hands on him any longer. She sat in the overstuffed chair by the hearth, folding her legs beneath her. There she was cast in darkness. He couldn’t see her face anymore.

  Silence was usually a comfortable place for Lydia and Jeffrey. They meshed, wrapped around each other like wicker. But tonight the air between them was charged, electric with desire and fear.

  She reached for a cigarette in the small drawer in the table by the chair. She lit it and took a deep drag.

  “I thought you quit,” Jeffrey said, disapproval in his voice.

  “I can’t quit.”

  “Please. You have a stronger will than anyone I know.”

  “Fine, then, I don’t want to,” she said stubbornly.

  “I fail to see how you can run as much and as far as you do and still suck that poison into your lungs. It’s physically impossible.”

  “For me, it’s the same drug.”

  “Are you going to explain that?”

  “No.”

  She wasn’t oblivious to what was between them. She knew what he wanted. She wanted the same thing, more than she admitted to herself. But something powerful held her back—a dark fear dwelled in the pit of her stomach that somehow for her, love and death would be inextricably linked.

  “So maybe we should pay a visit to Chief Morrow tomorrow, Lyd. What do you think?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. You know he’ll be glad to see me.”

  “Because you’re so charming.”

  “Right.”

  She rose from the chair. He was always surprised by her beauty, amazed by the power of his desire for her. Bathed in the orange light from the fire, she was radiant as she raised her arms above her head and stretched, exposing flat, supple abs as her shirt lifted a bit.

  “I’m going to go to bed,” she announced.

  He nodded toward the pile of clippings and the information Lydia had printed out from the Internet. “I think I’ll sit up for a while, look over those articles.”

  “Good night, Jeffrey.”

  “Good night, Lyd.”

  chapter eleven

  “You can make a murder into art,” Sting and the Police sang from the car radio. The irony was not lost on him but the heat was cranking and his legs were getting cramped. He rubbed his eyes and put the copy of With a Vengeance by Lydia Strong in his lap. The cover was bent and cracked and the pages coming loose from the binding, he’d read it so many times. But he had been looking at the same page for the last hour.

  He knew that for many killers, Jed McIntyre included, stalking was half the game. But he hadn’t been enjoying it. He found it boring. He’d been waiting in front of Maria Lopez’s small dilapidated apartment building in the barrio for almost three hours and he was starting to lose his patience. He stared at the plastic Madonna and Child his wife had stuck to his dashboard years ago.

  “ ‘Please God,’ ” he said, “ ‘how long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart. How long will my enemy triumph over me?’ ”

  He turned off the ignition and was glad for the silence. A moment later, like an answer to his prayer, he saw the man that the whore Maria had taken home leave through the front door, get into his black pickup truck, and speed off. He waited a few minutes, let the adrenaline stream through his veins. Then he donned a pair of surgical gloves and a black ski mask. From a plastic bag on the passenger-side seat he took a terry washcloth that had been soaking in chloroform. He patted his pocket, checking for the scalpel and the picklock he would use to get in the building door.

  But when he got to the building, the door had been left ajar so there was no need to pick the lock at all. He walked up the one flight to her apartment, and then knocked lightly on the door, knowing she would assume it was the man who had just left.

  He stood to the side.

  “Forget something?” she called, and flung the door open carelessly. He grabbed her by the throat, almost lifting her small body off the ground with one arm and shoved the washcloth covered in chloroform over her nose and mouth with the other, before she even had a chance to scream. When he felt her body grow limp, he uncovered her face. But it must not have been for long enough because her eyes fluttered, she saw him, and she started screaming and thrashing. He threw her hard through the imitation Oriental screen that separated her bed from the rest of the small studio apartment. But she got up and scurried away from him as quickly as a mouse, her face a blank mask of terror.

  chapter twelve

  Maria Lopez had fought for her life. With every inch of muscle, every ounce of strength she possessed she went down fighting. And it showed. But her body was nowhere to be found.

  The white-and-blue checkered curtains and their fixtures lay in a heap on the floor. A white ceramic lamp shattered next to the toppled table on which it had sat. The imitation Oriental screen that separated her bed from the rest of her small studio apartment looked as if someone had been thrown through it, a large hole pouting in the center panel. The checkered sheets of her bed, which matched the curtains, were drenched in blood, soaked through to the mattress.

  This is where he got her, thought Chief Simon Morrow, as he touched a gloved finger to the blood. A sharp instrument to a major artery—the throat, the leg … he couldn’t be sure. He could imagine the faceless killer on top of her, his knee on her chest. He winced at the image in his mind, in spite of having seen worse. Her fear echoed in the tossed-up room.

  He got down on his knees, tucked the bedskirt up between the mattress and the box spring and shone his flashlight under the bed for anything that may have fallen under there in the struggle. He reached for a small wooden crucifix he saw there. He could see where it had fallen from, by the bare nail and the cross-shaped clean space on the dirty white wall above her bed.

  “Jesus Christ. Shit.”

  He wondered how long the neighbors had heard the screams and the banging before they called the police. How he had got her out of the apartment after that. There was no way she walked out, not with all that blood on the bed.

  One of the uniformed officers walked in the front door.

  “Anybody see anything?” the chief asked, knowing the answer already.

  “No. No one I spoke to saw or heard anything, Chief. But some people didn’t open their doors.”

  “Figures. I’ll send a detective out in the morning. In fact, page Keane right now, tell him to get over here.”

  Morrow knocked on the wall with a pudgy callused hand.

  “These apartments might as well be separated by cardboard. Jesus Christ,”
he muttered.

  If there had been any doubt in his mind that the two prior missing-persons cases on his desk were somehow connected, and connected somehow to the dog and the surgical-supply warehouse, he was sure now. The other cases on his desk were cold. No leads. No witnesses. No family or even friends to interview. Those people had dropped from the face of the earth, leaving no trail behind them to follow. But Maria Lopez had made sure her departure was not silent like the rest. There had to be something in this mess. Hair, fibers, prints, something—anything. She had to have been cut very deeply with something razor-sharp for that much blood to be spilled, possibly with a surgical implement. Maybe the same type of instrument used to slice up the German shepherd and remove its organs, an act that had been completed with precision. Lopez was the fourth person missing in two months in a sleepy town that saw little violence. Something was definitely going on.

  Morrow still had the crucifix in his hand, was clenching it so hard the edges were hurting him through his latex gloves. He’d found one of these in the home of each of the missing persons—a detailed Christ figure, highly varnished wood. Did it connect them? He couldn’t be sure. People were very religious here—especially those who had little else to live for.

  “Call in Homicide and Forensics from State,” he said to the uniformed officer standing closest to him. “We need to treat this like a murder, with or without a body.” If these cases were connected, he was going to have to call in the FBI. If he did it too soon, he’d look like a yokel who couldn’t handle a few missing persons. If he did it too late, if someone else disappeared …

  He’d had to make this call before and things had turned out badly. When he was the St. Louis police chief, three prostitutes had turned up dead in a five-month period. He had been reluctant to call it a serial murder case, because johns killed whores all the time in big cities. So when Lydia Strong had paid him a visit to inform him of the striking similarities to unsolved cases in Chicago, he’d disregarded her as a flake. She had told him about an alleged white-slavery ring that an escaped prostitute had reported to her and which she was investigating for an article for Vanity Fair. But he basically shut the door in her face.

  He had been unaware of her reputation and her connections at the FBI. By the time the Bureau finally got involved, two more women had turned up dead. The early St. Louis cases provided key evidence in solving the crime. It turned out that the Russian mob was bringing girls into the U.S. illegally, promising them careers as models. When the girls arrived, they were held prisoner in whorehouses and forced into prostitution. Morrow’s failure to report the murders to the FBI was a blunder that took on national significance due to the article subsequently published. He resigned from the St. Louis police force.

  He’d been drinking then. Heavily. Maybe that’s why he didn’t pay much attention to the prostitute murders. Maybe that’s why he ignored Lydia’s warnings until it was too late. Maybe. Six months in rehab and some therapy had helped him deal with his mistakes. He’d been the police chief in Santa Fe for over five years now and done a competent job. Of course, nothing ever happened here. Until now.

  Lydia’s presence in town gave him an ugly déjà vu. He hated that she was here now, of all times. It was like some kind of fucked-up karma. He knew once this hit the papers, she’d be all over him.

  He left two uniformed police officers to guard the scene until the detectives arrived. “Nobody touch anything until they get here. Don’t make a sandwich, don’t make a phone call, just stand at the door,” he barked as he put the cross in a plastic bag, careful to note in his log where he found it. “Tell Keane to look for an address book. I didn’t find one.”

  He looked around the tiny apartment again, noting there were no photographs. He was fairly sure that when the detectives started looking through drawers and in closets, they would find no address book, no letters, no photo albums. This was the apartment of someone utterly alone. Someone unconnected. The furniture was cheap and temporary, looked like the kind you would assemble yourself.

  He pressed the redial button on the telephone. “You have reached Psychic Helpers. Welcome to your future!”

  He hung up. Then he pressed *69, the sequence which would tell what the last incoming call was. He dialed the number and got a recording from the electric company telling him to call back during business hours. He placed the receiver down gently, though he wanted to slam it.

  He thought about the others. It was the same with them. Christine and Harold Wallace didn’t even have a phone. Sad people. Lonely lives. If a life is lost and no one mourns it, is that death still a tragedy? Regardless, this death was still a crime.

  He stripped off the rubber gloves and shoved them in his pocket.

  “Tell whoever comes from State to be in my office by noon with whatever information they are able to gather by that time.”

  He walked to his son’s room and pulled on a pair of scrubs over his bloodied clothes, then he removed a clean scalpel from the tray. He regarded Maria’s lifeless body, her open mouth, her glassy eyes. He wiped the hair away from her face.

  “ ‘An oracle is within my heart concerning the sinfulness of the wicked. There is no fear of God before his eyes.’ ”

  “ ‘The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the treachery of evil,’ ” he said, cutting away Maria’s bloodied nightgown. His voice was thick with passion, growing louder as he spoke.

  “ ‘Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and goodwill, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is the finder of lost children.’ ”

  He cut into Maria’s chest with the scalpel, pushing through the intercostal muscle, and made an incision down to her navel. Then he picked up the small saw and turned it on. Its frenetic whir and the high-pitched scream of metal against bone as he cut away her rib cage was virtually orgasmic. Sweat beaded on his brow and his hands quivered with excitement.

  “ ‘I will carry out great vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. Then they will know that I am the Lord when I take vengeance upon them.’ ” He was nearly yelling as he made the final cut.

  Lydia sat on the plush couch in her living room and watched as the sun rose over the mountains. When she had opened her eyes in bed earlier, she felt warm and safe, remembering that Jeffrey was in the guest bedroom down the hall. His presence had eased the restless, wandering feeling that had plagued her in the days before his arrival. The next thought in her head was about Shawna Fox, wondering if she had ever risen feeling safe and warm. Or had she always felt alone in her foster homes, never fitting in, forever missing her mother? The grainy photo of Shawna in the paper, a school portrait, had made Lydia sad. She wondered who would want that photo, if it would go in someone’s photo album; if anyone would remember Shawna five years from now, ten years from now. What about Christine and Harold? Was anyone lying awake at night worrying for their safety? Is it possible to live a life that touches no one, that no one remembers? Lydia needed to know the answer to that question.

  Usually when she was working a case with Jeffrey or writing something, she wanted only the details of a victim’s life: what he did for a living, who he knew, what his habits were. But she wanted as little personal information as possible. She didn’t want to get to know them, feel their personal essence. Like turning off a television screen to escape a violent image or suppressing a traumatic memory, she shut them out. She didn’t want to feel even the slightest twinge of pity or sorrow. She didn’t want even the smallest part of their tragedy to become her own.

  She knew that the people she interviewed, families, loved ones, were often shocked by her lack of concern for the victims of the people and crimes she wrote about, insulted by her refusal to even pretend to want to know about them. Her manner was always clipped and professional. People couldn’t believe how little she cared. But in fact she cared too much. The sight of grief, the thought of people being violated, dying in terror and unspeakable pain, was more than she could bear. It cast a light
on her soul that crept into dark crevasses where even she was afraid to peer.

  But she felt differently about Christine and Harold, and especially Shawna. It was as if their memories were orphans that no one would take in. As if the worried question “Where are they?” had not been asked by anyone who cared about the answer. She felt a fierce need to shelter and feed these lost souls, to know who they had been. It was a sensitive business, sorting through the debris of an abandoned life. The layers needed to be peeled back with gentle fingers one after another, like the skin on an onion, to reveal the essence of a person true and ripe. She certainly didn’t trust a hack like Morrow to do it properly.

  She wondered if the police had connected the disappearances to one another, if she was the only one who could see the shadow of something sinister behind the collection of strange events. Jeffrey certainly wasn’t convinced by what she’d told him. But this did not deter her; she trusted herself. She just needed more information on the victims, to find out what they had in common, where their paths had crossed, what experiences they might have shared. At the intersections of their lives, she suspected, she would find a madman.

  She began plotting in her mind the various ways she could gain access to the information she wanted—some more legal than others—if Morrow wouldn’t cooperate. She believed her best bet was to see if Shawna’s boyfriend was willing to talk.

  Jeffrey was watching her from the second-floor balcony that looked down onto the living room, smiling to himself. He could almost see the wheels turning in her mind. She sat on the living room sofa, her back against the armrest, legs tucked up beneath her. She stared absently out the window, biting on her thumbnail. Dressed in black leggings and a pink T-shirt, with her hair wet and no makeup, she looked like a teenager.

  “What are you scheming, Lydia?” he asked.

  She was too cool to be startled; turned her eyes up to him slyly, catlike. “I’m thinking about what you are going to make me for breakfast.”