Angel Fire

by Lisa Unger

  “Someone else,” Jeffrey continued, “needs to start going over the crime-scene notes and photographs. Go back to the locations and poke around, get the feel of them, make sure nothing was missed. Then start going to places like the bar, the restaurant where Maria worked, the church. Observe, ask questions, start making people uncomfortable.

  “Does anybody have any questions?”

  When no one spoke, Morrow stood up. “Okay. Let’s get to work,” he said, as he starting handing out assignments to different officers at the table. In pairs the officers filed out, each with their tasks before them, looking a little overwhelmed, Lydia thought.

  “Is there anything else you think I should do, Jeff?” Morrow asked when he was finished.

  “Chief, you are the hub of this whole operation. You probably have a better overall picture of this community and its crime activity than anyone does. Spend time thinking back on anything over the last few months or even as long as a year that has struck a chord with you.”

  “You got it,” Morrow said, with alacrity. He walked away feeling like the clumsy kid finally chosen to play on the softball team.

  Jeffrey looked around the room for Lydia, then caught sight of her through the window, leaning against her car, smoking and staring off into space. She was waiting for him. He walked out of the station house and approached the car. “I’m not letting you out of my sight until this is over. And don’t even think of pulling another stunt like you pulled this afternoon.”

  “Yes sir,” she answered sarcastically.

  “Lydia, I’m serious. There’s no reason for you to be a renegade. What were you hoping to prove by going there alone?”

  “Nothing,” she said, shrugging. “I just didn’t want to wait for you to get back.”

  “But you’re not going to do anything like that again, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I want to drive,” he said, nudging her aside playfully with his shoulder and reaching for the driver’s-side door.

  chapter seventeen

  It was late evening before Jeffrey and Lydia returned to her house. They stopped at the bottom of the drive and picked up the mail, which Lydia sorted through as they pulled into her garage.

  “Any letters from the president?” asked Jeffrey, after noticing a prison seal on one of the envelopes.

  “The president?”

  “The president of your fan club?”

  Most of the letters that arrived from her fan club of the world’s most sick and twisted Lydia threw away unopened, the way they had been forwarded from her publisher’s office, particularly those that came from correctional facilities across the country. Initially she had been interested enough in what these people had to say to her to open them. A lot of them were the incoherent ramblings of damaged minds; some were from families of murder victims. Some were from people who claimed to be serial killers on the loose and she forwarded those to the FBI. But there was a person who had written to her every month since the publication of With a Vengeance.

  When she received the first letter, in a way, she wasn’t even surprised.

  Dear Bitch,

  I fucked your mother and then I killed her. She was very satisfying.

  I liked your book. You really put your finger on it. You really got into my head. But you know that, don’t you.

  You like being inside my head? It makes you feel like you understand? Maybe you do. Maybe you don’t. Maybe I can make you understand a whole lot better one day.

  I take great satisfaction in you, too. I made you what you are today. Don’t forget it.

  Fuck you,

  Jed McIntyre

  After the first letter, Jeffrey called the publisher’s office and insisted that her mail be screened from that point forward. Lydia’s editor, appalled by the incident, agreed. But Lydia called her back and asked that they continue to forward her mail unopened.

  She wanted his letters. She needed them.

  She never opened them. They just sat in a locked drawer in her desk, whispering profanity. But as long as she kept getting those letters with the prison stamp on them, she knew where he was. Locked away, forever. They reminded her that he was a mentally ill man and not a demon. Not a demon with supernatural powers who could reach through the earth from the depths of hell and snatch her away.

  Jeffrey never stopped nagging her about the letters. But, as usual, Lydia could not be swayed. And Jeffrey had long since given up, feeling rage rise in his chest whenever he thought about the first letter.

  But as they walked in the front door and he caught sight of the letter in her hand—indeed a letter from Jed McIntyre—with the rest of the mail she collected from the box, he felt his throat constrict with anger. He slipped it from the pile when she dropped it on the kitchen table.

  “Jesus, Lydia, what the fuck do you do with these?”

  “At least I know where he is.”

  “By not returning these, you’re allowing him to perpetuate whatever fantasies he’s having about you.”

  “Jeffrey, don’t we have enough to deal with right now without rehashing this?”

  He handed the letter back to her without a word and opened the refrigerator, looking for a beer. She stared at his profile cast in the light. She could see the anger in his set jaw. She stood behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist.

  “Don’t be angry. Try to understand.”

  He placed his arms over hers and leaned back into her. “It makes me crazy to think of him even thinking of you.”

  “I know but it’s all right. He can’t hurt me,” she said, turning him around.

  “Okay,” he said, and gave her a sad smile.

  She left him and walked up the stairs to her bedroom. As she flipped on the light, she stopped cold in the door frame. Her lingerie drawer stood open and its contents had been cast to the floor. On the full-length mirror that stood beside the dresser was a message written in red lipstick.

  o righteous god, who searches minds and hearts, bring to an end the violence of the wicked and make the righteous secure.

  Jeffrey came up behind her. “Lydia, did you leave the back door unlocked?” he asked.

  “No,” she answered, turning to him, her face flushed. A moment passed as she heard him inhale sharply and felt him stiffen as he registered the message on the mirror.

  Instinctively, he reached for the .38 he’d been carrying. “Stay right where you are. Don’t touch anything,” he called as he left the room and began searching the house.

  But she knew even as she heard Jeffrey slamming open doors, that the killer was gone. Somehow, somewhere, he had seen her, been close enough to her to want her. He knew enough to know when she would not be here. And he wanted her to know that he had been here. She smiled, in spite of the fear twisting in her belly. The desire to find him, to finish him, was more powerful than her desire to breathe. She leaned against the doorjamb, shaking with an adrenaline rush. I am not a victim, and I’ll be fucked if I’m going to let some backwater psycho turn me into one.

  “He broke into the breaker box behind the house and turned the system off. That’s how he got in. But he’s gone now.”

  “I know,” she said, pulling her cell phone from her pocket and dialing Morrow from her speed dial. “It’s Lydia Strong. We’ve had another intruder at my home … Okay … we’ll be here.”

  Jeffrey walked past her and stood staring at Lydia’s lingerie. The rage, the fear that churned inside him, blurred his vision. It was clear to him that if he lost her now, all his patience, all his resolve would have been for nothing. His love for her would be a stone swallowed whole, unexpressed, unrequited, sitting in his heart for the rest of his life. If anything ever happened to her, he might as well be dead, too. “Never love anything so much that if it goes away your whole world turns black.” Too late. Too fucking late.

  She could see his face in the mirror that hung on the wall over the dresser. The pain etched there frightened her. “Jeffrey?” Her voice was a plea, sof
t but urgent.

  He turned and walked over to her, grabbed her hard into him, burying his face in her hair. “I want you to leave here until this is over,” he said urgently. “Please, Lydia.”

  “I can’t, Jeffrey, you know that.”

  “Lydia …”

  She reached up and touched his face, smoothing the anger from his brow, ran her fingers through his hair. And then he was covering her face in kisses.

  “I can’t do this anymore, Lydia. I can’t pretend that I’m going to leave you when this is over and everything is going to be as it has always been. I can’t pretend that I don’t think about you every day and wish you were beside me every night. I can’t hold you like I’m your friend when I’ve wanted so much more for years. I can’t pretend that I’m not in love with you. I’m sorry, Lydia. I love you. I’ve always loved you.”

  A thousand thoughts swirled in her head: her mother, her father, Jed McIntyre, the killer they hunted now. All this death and tragedy in her life and in the lives of others. Love had never brought her mother anything but pain. Lydia had lost or been disappointed by so many people, except for Jeffrey. She thought of Maria Lopez, how no one had claimed her body, how she had been disconnected from the world. How much more connected am I? If you don’t love anyone, then you don’t lose anyone … but nobody loves you, either. Do I keep him at bay because it keeps him loving me and I don’t have to love him back? So I don’t have to give him my heart?

  She closed her eyes against tears, against the fears. And when she opened them he was watching her, so intently, with so much love. In his face, so beautiful to her, so familiar, she saw home.

  “I love you, too,” she whispered. “You know I always have. You must know.”

  His mouth on hers tasted like the ocean, salty, warm. She felt his urgency, his desire on her tongue. “I’m not going to let you move in close and then back a mile away from me again.”

  “I know. I don’t want that anymore either. I’m tired. Tired of fighting everything. Tired of pretending I don’t need you. I do. I have, probably, since the first day I met you.”

  They were startled by a pounding on the front door.

  She didn’t want to let go of him, didn’t want to move from his arms and face the nightmare they found themselves in now. She’d chased this monster and now the monster was chasing her. She hated herself suddenly for inviting this horror into their lives. But there was no choice now but to face it down.

  “That must be the police,” she said.

  “I know. I don’t want to let this moment pass.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, and smiled. “We have all the time in the world.”

  Lydia sat on the couch in the living room as Jeffrey let the police in. Chief Morrow was the first person through the door.

  “How did he get through the alarm system?” he asked Jeffrey.

  “The breaker box is outside the house. He forced the lock and turned off the alarm. These things are supposed to default to sounding an alarm in that case, but this one didn’t,” answered Jeffrey. “Basically it looks like when the power went out, the house opened wide.”

  “Shit,” said Morrow. “The stakeout starts tonight on the twelve-to-eight shift. I couldn’t start it sooner than that. We’re short-staffed.”

  “A day late and a dollar short,” said Lydia from her place on the couch. “As usual.”

  “It’s no one’s fault, Chief,” Jeffrey said quickly. “Let’s just make sure we’ve got someone on this house day and night from this point forward. On foot, on the property, not sitting in a car down at the bottom of the drive.”

  The chief nodded his head, his face flushed with embarrassment and anger. He followed Jeffrey up the stairs and into the bedroom to inspect the scene.

  Lydia stayed on the couch downstairs, her legs pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped tightly around them. She did not want to be in the room while the police dusted for fingerprints. She did not want to see that message again, which she was sure was from Psalms. “O Righteous God, who searches minds and hearts …”

  She heard Jeffrey’s voice but couldn’t make out what he was saying. He had his professional voice on—the one that made everyone jump, the one that accepted no excuses and no hesitation. She always envied him that. It seemed to come so naturally to him, as if he were born with an authority that no one questioned.

  She was not afraid. It was more like every atom in her body was buzzing with electricity. She scanned her memory for strange faces, things that had caught her attention fleetingly but were dismissed, a car she’d seen more than once. Anything that could have been a warning. But there was nothing. She would not have missed something like that. She knew it. He was watching her from the periphery of her life, just out of sight but close enough to touch. And she hadn’t even known it.

  She thought about the name again. It had been bothering her—there was something about it. She grabbed a pen and paper from the drawer in the coffee table beside her and wrote the name again; she started rearranging the letters. When she realized, it was so simple, she almost laughed. “Vince A. Gemiennes” was an anagram for “Vengeance is mine.”

  “Unbelievable,” she muttered.

  What were the odds? Her mother had died at the hands of a serial killer and now she was being stalked by one. Maybe there was some genetic coding that marked her as a victim. The thought made her shudder. Jed McIntyre had chosen his victims because they were so valuable to the people who loved them—their children, specifically. This bastard chooses them … why?

  Shawna, Maria, Christine, and Harold were strangers, ghosts in this world. Unconnected. Disposable. But there was some reason the killer had wanted vengeance on them. They were religious people, though. They went to church. But there was something she was missing. Something so obvious. “O Righteous God, who searches minds and hearts …”

  The fact that he had taken such a risk in coming to her house was an indicator that he was losing control of his desires. He would start making mistakes now. And she was there—waiting for him, like he’d waited for his victims. And he’d pay, the way she’d always wanted to make Jed McIntyre pay. I am nobody’s fucking victim.

  But she was so tired. It was too much … the anniversary of her mother’s death, a second house call from a serial killer, and now Jeffrey. She felt as if her head and her heart were going to explode.

  One by one they left, the cops, the technicians, the photographer. Everyone had hoped that the killer had jacked off in the bedroom, leaving behind some good DNA, but no such luck. Lydia remained on the couch in the dark, staring out the window into the black night sky. Finally, when they were alone, Jeffrey joined her. He sat down beside her and opened his arms to her and she slid into their protective fold. She told him about the name.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

  “About …”

  “What they have in common.”

  “And …?”

  “Well, they were religious to a degree, right? But they all committed actions that could be considered sins. All of them could have been considered sinful people.”

  “O Righteous God, who searches minds and hearts, bring to an end the violence of the wicked and make the righteous secure …” Jeffrey recited the message on her mirror.

  “Yes.”

  “God forgives sins.”

  “But maybe our killer doesn’t.”

  “And he takes their hearts because …”

  “Because their hearts are false, because they are untrue to God.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Does he think I am untrue to God? Has he seen me at the church but thinks I write of godless things? That I’ve done sinful things?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I have, you know.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. As long as I’m alive no one will ever hurt you. I promise you that. I swear to God.”

  She didn’t want to tell him about the
things she’d done, the faceless men she’d sought to bring some ridiculous semblance of love into her life. She didn’t want to tell him how alone she’d finally realized she was and how much she needed him. And how she still missed her mother every day. How broken inside she felt, and that all these broken people, with their lonely, empty lives, all these people who no one mourned, were like mirrors for her. And how she couldn’t bear it anymore, the horrible aloneness of her life. So instead she reached for his face and kissed him gently on the mouth.

  With deft fingers he unbuttoned her blouse, his mouth never leaving hers until he slid the garment off her shoulders, let it fall to the floor. He drew in a sharp breath at her beauty and kissed the delicate slope of her shoulder, the soft nape of her neck. He let her pull his T-shirt off, and groaned as her lips glanced his chest and alighted on the scar on his shoulder. He felt her fingers unbutton his jeans and he grew hard for her.

  She stood and offered him her hand and led him up the stairs to his bed, not wanting to face the mess in her bedroom. She stripped off the rest of her clothes and stood before him. He traced the lines of her body with reverent hands, kissing her breasts, then running his lips down to her tight belly, then to the sacred place below. Her moans, her hands in his hair, brought him to his knees. Then he rose and lifted her onto the bed. She pulled off his jeans, and touched him with a tenderness he had never known, stroking him, caressing him. His pleasure was so intense, he could make no sound as he entered her.

  She could feel the power of his desire as he thrust himself deeply inside her. Slowly, gently at first, then harder, more urgent. His arms held her as close to him as she could be and his lips were on hers with an insatiable hunger. She had dreamed of this but never had she imagined it so beautifully, never had she realized how much she loved him, how strong was her desire—or his. And as he repeated her name over and over like a prayer, she gave in to the building crescendo of her pleasure as they came together.

  They lay wrapped around each other beneath the moonlight that slipped into the room between passing clouds, not speaking, not sleeping, but savoring each other.