Angel Fire

by Lisa Unger

“I want you to think carefully, Benny. You are not in any trouble and you haven’t done anything wrong. Has anybody taken you for a ride in a green minivan? Did someone take you to the park the other day?”

  “Benny, what’s wrong?” Greta asked, as she saw his eyes grow red and well up with tears.

  Benny released a low moan and shuddered. Greta pushed Lydia aside to get near her son and put her big arms around him. “It’s all right, honey. Try to relax,” she crooned.

  “Ms. Savroy, where was your son on the night before last?”

  “He was in his bed. Where do you think he was? He’s nothing but a child mentally. He doesn’t go out by himself at night. What is going on?”

  Benny’s moaning grew louder. He rolled his head back and his mother tightened her grip on him.

  “What about yesterday between the hours of six A.M. and eight P.M.?”

  “I don’t know. That’s when I work. I’m an ER nurse at the hospital and I worked a double shift yesterday. Here probably, or at the church. He can’t drive.”

  “Flowers,” Benny said, his breathing becoming shallow, “belong in the ground.”

  In the next moment he fell to the floor, convulsing. And Greta, pulled with him, began screaming, “I told you! I told you not to upset him. This is what happens. Oh, God, Benny! Someone call 911. He’s having a seizure.”

  Lydia ran to the kitchen phone and dialed 911. As she explained the situation and gave the operator their location, she noticed one of Father Luis’s crucifixes hanging on the wall above the phone.

  —

  Lydia watched as the paramedics loaded Benny’s unconscious body into the ambulance and Greta crawled in after him. She had felt guilty and sad as she instructed a police officer to remove Benny’s shoes to compare to the print mold they had taken. She recognized Benny as a pawn in the killer’s game—just like she was. She didn’t know how Benny had been involved, but she knew that he was, and that she had made him remember things he had probably been able to forget, causing him to seize. Through the back window of the ambulance Greta glared at Lydia with unabashed hatred as they pulled away, headed for the hospital. A squad car followed behind.

  “I like flowers. They never do bad things. They’re just quiet.”

  “Well, the shoes are the same size as the print we found at the park and the forensic report stated that the impression was made by someone upwards of two hundred fifty pounds,” Morrow said, startling Lydia as he came up behind her. “It looks like we might have our man.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Lydia.

  “You don’t think so?”

  “No,” she said, incredulous. “He’s fucking retarded.”

  She shook her head and walked away toward Jeffrey. Lydia had been starting to hate Morrow a little less, wondering if she had been too hard on him, even feeling a bit guilty for having held a grudge since St. Louis. Now she remembered why she disliked him so intensely. He hadn’t given a shit about the prostitutes that were killed in St. Louis. He’d just written them off. He’d said, “Johns kill whores every day, Miss Strong.” And he’d ignored her when she’d told him more would die if he didn’t listen to what she had to say. Whether it was because he was lazy or because he didn’t want to admit that something like that was going on under his nose, he’d shut the door on her. Three more women had died before the case was solved by the FBI. Now he was just jumping at the first person that came along as a suspect: someone who obviously couldn’t have committed these crimes, whatever his involvement turned out to be. Someone who would have a hard time defending himself.

  “We are not going to let Benny take the fall for this just because these locals are looking for a victory here. He’s not the one,” she said to Jeffrey, as she passed him and went back into the house. She took the stairs up to Benny’s room.

  Jeffrey watched her storm off and turned to see Morrow, who seemed to have had all the air knocked out of him. Morrow wasn’t aware that Jeffrey was observing him while he followed Lydia with his eyes. There was something in the way Morrow looked at her that made Jeffrey, unconsciously, put his hand on his gun.

  Moving past the police officers who were overturning cushions and looking into drawers, she sat on Benny’s bed made up with Star Wars sheets. It was a child’s bedroom—shelves were filled with toys, posters of Power Rangers hung on the wall, an old computer sat on a blue faux-wood desk. A wastepaper basket was shaped like a football. An oversize polar bear sat on a wicker love-seat by the window. Next to Benny’s bed on the nightstand was a photography book filled with color shots of flowers. She flipped through the pages, wondering how long it would be before Benny was able to speak again.

  “Flowers belong in the ground,” he had said. What did he mean by that? It had raised goose bumps on the back of her neck when he’d said it. “I like flowers. Flowers don’t do bad things. They’re just quiet.”

  “Flowers don’t do bad things. But people do, right, Benny?” she whispered. Then she slapped the book shut, standing up suddenly, and ran down the stairs.

  “Jeffrey,” she said, as she came out the front door … and walked over to Benny’s flower garden. She touched the earth with the toe of her boot and wondered if her thoughts could be right. “Flowers belong in the ground.” But people don’t, right Benny? Jeffrey had come to stand beside her.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I think we need to dig up this flower garden.”

  Lydia wanted to be the one to tell Greg. He needed to hear this news from someone who knew what it was like to lose the only person that mattered. But she didn’t have to take it on alone. When Jeffrey had offered to come with her to Greg’s garage, her first instinct had been to tell him no.

  “I can handle it,” she said.

  “No doubt,” he answered, “but I want us to be a team, Lydia. Let’s deal with the hard stuff together from now on.”

  He’d looked a little surprised when she agreed. “Can I drive?” he asked, smiling.

  “You’re pushing your luck,” she answered, but walked to the passenger side of the car.

  “Wow, this is just like The Taming of the Shrew.”

  She smacked him hard as they got in the car.

  She had watched them load what was left of Shawna’s body into the ambulance. The killer hadn’t even used a body bag for her, just put her in the ground underneath the red larkspurs in Benny’s beautiful, perfectly tended garden. It made Lydia so angry to think that some people never even had a chance at happiness in this world. All those New Age psychobabblers talking about how you make your own happiness and create positive energy in your life didn’t know shit about Shawna Fox. One of the faceless shrinks Lydia had gone to see had accused her of wallowing in her grief for her mother, had told her she was destroying her life with negative thinking. “Maybe you’re right,” Lydia had answered. “When someone cuts your heart out of your chest and expects you to walk around the rest of your life without it, you let me know how it feels. You tell me when you find a way to stop ‘wallowing.’ ” The irony of that statement was hitting her only now as she and Jeffrey drove to Greg Matthews’s garage, to tell him they’d found Shawna’s body.

  “Oh my god,” Lydia said.

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking, when you lose someone you love, if feels like someone has taken your heart.”

  “Okay …” he answered, not sure where she was going.

  “Remember how we were talking about what that meant? To lose your heart or to have your heart taken?”

  “Yeah. So you’re saying maybe the killer lost someone close to him?”

  “Right. And maybe that’s why he wants vengeance.”

  “Against whom, though?”

  She remembered something Juno had said to her on the first day they spoke. He’d said, “There are many people who believe that I have the power to heal. But there are many that disbelieve it—vehemently. These types of people have perpetrated acts of violence against me and this church in the
past, may God forgive them.”

  “What if Juno tried to heal whoever it was … but couldn’t?”

  When Juno awoke that morning, he knew something was wrong. He lay still in his bed and listened to the air. There was a stillness like the pause before speech, as if the church had taken in a long breath and was holding it. He had been loath to move, feeling that once his feet touched the floor, nothing would ever be the same again.

  As he went about his morning routine, feelings crept up on him, rose within him like a tide. Emotions he had rarely known seared through him—fear, and an unspeakable sadness. He tried to ignore them and go about the business of the morning. The door to his uncle’s room was closed, and Juno almost knocked but he hated to disturb the priest, thinking he might be preparing for mass.

  He could feel as he entered the church that the side door to the garden had been left open. He could feel the outside air inside, and smelled the sweet scent of the flowers from the garden. He walked to the doorway but could not bring himself to step outside, remembering when he had fallen in the blood just weeks before. He pulled the door closed and walked to the altar, sat on the stool there to practice his guitar.

  So soothed and rapt was he by his own playing that he almost didn’t hear the phone ring back in the office. He thought certainly by the time he reached it, the caller would have hung up, but when he answered, Lydia was on the line.

  “Juno?”

  “Yes, Lydia, hello.”

  “Juno, I have a question for you. The boy you last attempted to heal, what was his name?”

  “It seems like a long time ago,” he answered.

  “I saw the name when I was searching the Internet before all this started, but I can’t remember it now. Do you recall it?”

  “Yes, yes, it was … Robbie. Robbie Hugo.”

  “Was he the only person you tried to heal that died?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to his parents?”

  “Well, his mother, Jennifer, was a parishioner here. Her husband was not a religious man. I don’t remember his first name or even ever meeting him. She went to Colorado sometime after the boy died and I assume her husband went, as well.”

  “Do you know anything else about them?”

  “Not really. I’m sorry.”

  “Juno, do you have a volunteer or parishioner at the church named Vince A. Gemiennes, someone who might not have been on the list your uncle gave us?”

  “Well, I’m not sure who’s on that list. The name does sound familiar. You’ll have to ask my uncle, he’ll know better.”

  “Can you get him?”

  “He’s preparing for mass,” Juno answered, an odd reluctance overtaking him.

  “Juno, this is pretty important.”

  He knocked on his uncle’s door and when, after a moment, there was no answer, he pushed it open. “Uncle?” He walked into the room and put his hand on the bed which was made and cold as ice.

  He returned to the phone. “Lydia, he’s not here. It’s very odd.”

  “Okay, Juno, there should be a squad car in front of the church. Go outside and tell them there’s a problem. If there isn’t a car out there, go inside, call 911, lock the doors, and don’t move until the police get there. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes. Lydia, what’s happening?”

  “Sit tight and I’ll be there as fast as I can. I just have one thing I need to do first.”

  Juno ran, as best he could, twice jamming his foot against he didn’t know what. The world so familiar to him seemed suddenly like an obstacle course where malicious, hard objects moved themselves into his path to impede his progress. When he finally reached the door, he called out for the police. But he got no answer.

  Simon Morrow was fuming. After the body found in the Savroy’s garden had been taken to the ME’s office, Morrow had come to the hospital to sit outside Benny’s room and wait for him to wake up. Retarded or not, he was involved. There was a body buried in his garden, for Christ’s sake. And that bitch had made him seem like the biggest idiot in the world for thinking Benny was a suspect. He was a fucking suspect. And Morrow fully intended to be the first person to get the information out of him.

  He leaned his head back against the cool plaster and tried to get comfortable in one of the metal-and-vinyl, stiff-cushioned chairs that lined the waiting-room walls. In the background he could hear the quiet rushing back and forth of nurses on soft-soled shoes, the occasional tone that issued from the intercom before a doctor was paged to the ER.

  He was tired. He’d barely slept last night.

  He had been in the office late, sorting through old records, remembering his last few years on the job. He wanted so desperately to be the one to solve this case. He wasn’t a forensic expert or a victimologist or one of those special high-tech detectives that they had on all the TV shows these days. He was just a regular cop who came of age in the department on the street. He walked the grid, assembled the clues, and made the collar. So he’d gone through every arrest that stuck out in his mind since he’d come to New Mexico. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was forgetting something.

  He remembered a time when he had been so sure of himself. No problem he couldn’t fix, no case he couldn’t solve. That was so long ago. A lot had changed.

  Even after he had returned to his home and gone to bed, he had stayed awake, thinking, watching the ceiling fan rotate. He had just been drifting off as the sun started to peek in through the blinds, his wife still sleeping soundly beside him. A loud grinding noise woke him suddenly. His retired next-door neighbor was mowing the lawn at the crack of dawn for the second time in a month. Son of a bitch, he’d thought, knowing that any hope of sleep was gone.

  “Didn’t you talk to him about that?” his wife had murmured sleepily. She had turned over to look at him and he noticed that her pale skin was creased from the way she had slept.

  “Yeah, but he said he had to do it in the morning. He’s too old to mow the lawn in the heat of the day. So I suggested he get someone to do it for him. He misunderstood and thought I meant he couldn’t take care of himself. He got all pissed off.”

  “We should get a caretaker. That lawn is a bear.”

  “How would you know? You’ve never mowed it in all the years we’ve lived here.”

  “Yeah, and you’ve never mopped a floor or cooked a meal.”

  He remembered the conversation with a chuckle, as he shifted in the waiting-room chair. He snorted, “A caretaker …”

  And then Simon Morrow remembered what he had forgotten.

  As Simon Morrow was stepping into his prowler, his cellular phone rang.

  “Morrow,” he answered.

  “Chief, we just got a 911 call from Juno Alonzo. He says his uncle is missing and that the squad car that was supposed to be watching the church isn’t there,” reported the desk sergeant.

  “All right. Get a uniform over there and then call Jeffrey Mark and Lydia Strong and ask them to head over. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Can do, Chief.”

  He hung up with a pang of guilt. No one was going to take this collar from him. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before. But it didn’t matter now, because he was going to end this thing. And it would be just him.

  It was funny how God worked. The ignition in his van had been giving him trouble for weeks. That had been partly why he’d rented the Jeep the night he’d done God’s will for Maria Lopez. Also, he had wanted to see how smart Lydia was. She was smart all right, very smart.

  He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to pull that off. He could have easily been caught that day, but he’d had faith and God had seen him through. He’d used a fake license, not a very good fake, that he’d made on his computer, and then laminated it at a Kinko’s. And the credit card … he’d actually changed his name to Vince A. Gemiennes with the social security office. He got a new credit card with that name but gave a false address, 124 Black Canyon Road. But he’d nev
er stopped using his old name, never got a new driver’s license. He’d remembered how his wife had changed her name when they were first married but how it was ages before she changed things like her driver’s license, how her paychecks still came in her maiden name. There was never any problem.

  But in the end, he’d been scared. He asked the girl if he could see his file, said he wanted to make sure he had given her the right credit card. She just handed the folder to him because she was busy and he slipped the copies out. She hadn’t seemed especially bright, so he wasn’t worried that she would notice later. Then, when he was done with the Jeep, he just dropped it off and left in his minivan that he had parked in the airport long-term parking lot.

  Then, without his even realizing, God had led him to Greg Matthew’s garage. It was the closest to his home, so he’d stopped in there because he couldn’t have the ignition being hateful that way. He had a lot to do and a long way to go and he couldn’t risk another rental. So he’d brought the minivan to be fixed. It wasn’t until Greg had come out and seen him that he realized who Greg was, the boyfriend of Shawna Fox. He didn’t know what to do; he had been very scared. He was sure that God had led him there for a purpose, but he couldn’t see why. Then God showed him the way again. When he saw Greg writing down his license-plate number, he reached for an old piece of pipe he saw leaning against the garage and neutralized the threat to his plan.

  The time was almost here. He fairly quivered with the rapture of doing God’s work. Though everything had been taken from him, in the place of all that was lost he had become God’s avenger, His warrior, His angel of death.

  Standing in his son’s room, he said his farewell to the place where his son had dwelled in life. A feeling of power coursed through him. He remembered the feeling from his surgery rotation as a second-year intern. The ability to save a life, the knowledge that one mistake could end a life. To have a human body sliced open, vulnerable before him, was a thrill that heightened all his senses, made him feel infallible, omnipotent. All that had been taken away from him was being returned to him now.