Blood Angel

by Bernard Schaffer

  She knocked on the trailer’s door before she twisted the knob and opened it. She heard papers scatter and shoes slam down on the floor. Carrie poked her head in and saw Sal Vigoda sitting there, rubbing his eyes, trying to look like he hadn’t been sleeping. His fedora had been draped across his eyes and had left a circular ring around his face.

  “You all right, Sal?” Carrie asked.

  “I’m good,” he said. “You here to check up on me? I wasn’t sleeping. I had a headache, so I just shut my eyes for a second to see if it would go away.”

  “I’m not here to check up on you,” Carrie said. “We’re both assigned to this trailer until they get us back into the office.”

  The trailer had a workstation large enough for one person where Sal was sitting. There was a county laptop and a desk phone. Toward the back of the trailer was a couch, a kitchenette, and a tiny bathroom.

  Sal looked around the trailer. “It’s not really big enough for two people to work in.”

  “Not with just one computer,” she said. “Do you have anything you need to work on right now?”

  “I’m not good with that damn thing anyway. I can barely even turn it on. Back in my day, the dispatcher ran everything. You gave them the tag, they ran it. You gave them the guy’s name and date of birth, they told you everything you needed to know. Now, you gotta do everything yourself. It’s like the automated tellers at the supermarket. A bunch of employees standing around staring into space while I’m there trying to figure out what code to enter for a goddamn tomato.”

  “So, you don’t mind if I use the computer then?”

  “I’ll be better off sitting on the couch anyway,” he said. He got up from the chair and moved. “I’ve got a medical condition I picked up during all those years working midnight shift in a patrol car.”

  Carrie raised the lid on the laptop and turned it on. “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “Whenever I’m seated in an upright seated position, I fall asleep,” he said.

  Carrie laughed as she typed in her password. “Let me ask you something. You did how many years on the street?”

  “Forty-five,” he said. “All in uniform. Never wanted to be a white shirt, never wanted to be a detective, nothing. Just a road dog, the entire time.”

  “Forty-five years,” Carrie whispered. “What the hell made you come to the county detectives?”

  “My brother. At the time, he was real big in politics and thought he was going to be a big-shot county commissioner. He got me the job. Just do five years, Sal, he says. At five years you get a county pension, on top of your township pension. Maybe it makes up for the half you had to split with your ex-wife. You’ll never have to touch a case. You’ll be my driver, that’s all. We’ll go fishing every day. So, I say okay. What’s five years, right?”

  Carrie thought for a moment. “I’ve never heard of your brother, so I’m guessing he didn’t get elected county commissioner?”

  “Nope. He died right before the election of a heart attack. Two weeks after I took this fakakta job.”

  “Shit,” Carrie said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Ah,” Sal said, waving his hand. “He never took care of himself. Always smoking cigars and drinking martinis at these political events. Mr. Big Shot. Meanwhile, I’m stuck here pulling cases just like the rest of you.”

  “You’ve got to be close to the five-year mark now, right?”

  “Six months, two weeks, three days, and four hours to go,” he said. “Not that I’m counting or anything.”

  “If it makes you feel better, I have to do over twenty more years before I reach a full pension. I left my first job way before I vested, and this place won’t count my time from there.”

  “Twenty years is nothing,” Sal said. “It goes by like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.

  “I hope so,” Carrie said. “Somedays it feels like I’m stuck in quicksand.”

  “You got any kids?” Sal asked.

  “No,” Carrie said.

  “That’s why. Kids make it all go by fast. Always needing to go the doctor, or play practice, or football games, or all the other things that go along with it. You spend so much time running around, before you know it, they’re grown up and you’re almost retired. But, there’s nothing better than family. I mean that. Even my ex-wife, as much time as we spent hating each other, she’s still the mother of my children. Last year she got cancer, and I drove her to every single radiation treatment. She beat it, thank God. Never a word of thank you to me, of course, because I’m still the prick who cheated on her with her cousin, but still. You know why I did it?”

  “Because you felt guilty about cheating on her?” Carrie said.

  “No, her cousin was superhot and my wife hadn’t come near me in ten years. I don’t regret it at all. But that’s besides the point.”

  Carrie laughed and said, “Okay, so why’d you take her?”

  “Because we’re family. Nothing can change that. Not even her hating my guts and taking half my pension.” Sal leaned his head back against the couch and dropped his hat over his face. He yawned and smacked his lips together. “Get yourself some kids and start a family, Carrie. Before you get old and it’s too late. It’s the only thing you really have in this world. Trust me.”

  * * *

  The laptop was slow and old. Two of the function keys were missing on the keyboard. After ten minutes of running, Carrie could feel the heat emanating up from beneath the thing. She imagined it bursting into flames as she typed.

  Even the interface was old. Her monitor at work had sleek icons and a crisp, bright display. This one looked like an operating system from the 1990s, with cartoonish graphics and ugly gray boxes every time she opened a new folder.

  Still, it let her into the county database. She typed Brenda Drake into the master list of all names associated with all investigations ever conducted by the county detectives. There were multiple Drakes in the system but none of them were named Brenda.

  There was a database for known aliases, and she opened that and typed the words The Master. No results.

  “The Master,” Carrie whispered. “Hey, Sal, you awake?”

  “No.”

  “Who has a master?”

  “A dog.”

  “No, I mean, what kind of lifestyle is someone involved in if they have a master?”

  “I dunno, a kung-fu person?” Sal asked.

  “I don’t think my girl was into kung-fu,” Carrie said. “Maybe it meant for sex.”

  “Someone can be a sex master?” Sal asked. “Is that something you go to school for, or what?”

  “No, I mean, like, people into whips and chains and stuff. BDSM. I think they have masters.”

  “BDSM. Since when did people need costumes to be intimate?” Sal said. “It’s crazy now. I hear they get dressed up in bunny suits and leather masks and capes. When I was young, you didn’t need accessories for lovemaking.”

  “Well, in all fairness, when you were young, everyone was still getting over the shock of having just invented fire,” Carrie said.

  “Oh, that’s very funny,” Sal muttered from beneath his hat.

  “Go back to sleep, Grandpa,” Carrie said. She kept digging through the database, when it occurred to her that she was only searching adult names. She opened up the juvenile database and searched for contacts with Brenda Drake.

  “Bingo,” Carrie said.

  Brenda’s name popped up associated with a fifteen-year-old abduction case, with her listed as the victim. Carrie clicked the link to open the report, and groaned. There was hardly anything there. Back in those days, everything was still being done on typewriters, and the secretaries would enter only the bare minimum information into the computers. There was the victim’s name, the type of case, and a location.

  Carrie clicked the link to read the list of charges and had to wait for it to load. She tapped her fingernails on the laptop’s edge as she stared at the cursor, waiting for it to unfreeze. The charges appeared, an
d they were no joke. Kidnapping. Aggravated Assault. Aggravated Assault of a Law Enforcement Officer. The last one made Carrie lean closer to the screen. Attempted Homicide. “What the hell, Brenda Drake,” Carrie whispered. “Who’d you piss off?”

  It said there was an arrest made, but when she clicked the suspect box, it was empty. There were no investigative reports and no detectives listed as being assigned to the case. It was a dead end. Her only hope was that the physical case file was still in the archives and hadn’t been lost or destroyed when the suspect turned eighteen.

  She felt her phone vibrate in her pocket and pulled it out. She smiled when she saw the name Bill Waylon on the screen. “Well, hey, stranger. How are you?”

  “I’ve been better, kiddo,” Waylon said.

  She could hear the strain in his voice to speak. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I need to see you. Now.”

  6

  He’d lost a hundred pounds since the accident. No, that wasn’t right, Carrie thought. It wasn’t an accident and it was wrong to call it one. A psychopath had cut his throat from ear to ear because he was trying to save her and Nubs. That’s no accident. But Bill Waylon survived and that was no accident either.

  On the night they found the Omnikiller, they’d all nearly died horrific deaths, completely at his mercy. Carrie and Nubs were locked upstairs in a torture room with no way of escape. Waylon and Jacob Rein were knocked unconscious in the basement. The Omnikiller chained Rein’s left hand to the basement wall and made Rein watch as he slit Waylon’s throat.

  By rights, that should have been it. The Omnikiller should have been able to take his time carrying out his sick fantasies for as long as he liked. But Waylon, through an incredible act of determination, survived. He dragged himself across the basement floor close enough to give Rein a weapon. As for Rein, well, he’d taken it from there with an act of determination as well.

  Carrie had been in the waiting room that night when Jeri Waylon and the girls arrived at the hospital. The girls were distraught as they embraced one another and pleaded to God for their father to be okay. It wasn’t possible, Carrie remembered thinking. He’d had his throat cut. The odds of surviving that are next to impossible.

  Jeri Waylon didn’t cry. She didn’t plead. She didn’t move. She did nothing except stare at the operating room door and wait. “He won’t die,” she said. “My husband will not allow that son of a bitch to kill him. He just won’t.”

  Hours later, the doors opened and an exhausted doctor emerged to tell them she was right. Bill Waylon had survived. He’d live. The girls screamed with joy and Carrie wept into her hands with relief and then the doctor said, “He’ll live, but things won’t be the same for him, not for a long time.”

  Two years had passed and they still weren’t.

  In the years Carrie had worked for Waylon when he was chief of the Coyote Police Department, he’d always been a large man with a robust stomach, but he’d always been a stickler for uniforms. He was one of the few chiefs in the county that bought all his officers new uniforms and paid to have them tailored. He believed a police officer’s appearance went a long way. Even as chief, when he could have worn anything he wanted, he still showed up to work every day in a uniform, wearing a clean and crisply starched white shirt with creases down the arms so sharp, you could almost slice bread with them.

  When they went to training and he dressed down, he wore polo shirts and always buttoned all the buttons up to his chin. On the rare occasions when she’d seen him in a T-shirt and shorts, he’d worn the T-shirt tucked into the waistband of the shorts, no matter how much she made fun of him. She’d never seen him unshaven, except for his carefully manicured mustache that was long out of style, but he thought it made him look like some kind of Old West sheriff.

  The man sitting at the kitchen table in front of her was gaunt and dressed in pajamas in the afternoon. He was wearing a bathrobe that hung loose off of his withered frame. The scar along his neck was thick and purple, a jagged length of gnarled flesh, hidden only by the strands of his long gray beard. The beard itself was an ugly thing. It grew high up on Waylon’s bony cheeks, just an inch or so below his eyes. Hairs grew out of his nose down into his mustache and blended in with them. She could no longer see his mouth.

  “Is Jeri around?” Carrie asked.

  “No,” Waylon said. He touched his neck and forced himself to swallow. “She finally went back to work. It was either that or we had to—” He winced and stopped speaking to massage his throat again.

  Carrie got up and filled a glass of cold water for him from the refrigerator and handed it to him and sat back down. He took a long sip. “Or we had to sell the house.”

  “I know the girls are doing okay,” Carrie said. “Abby texts me from school sometimes. Seems like she’s enjoying college, but not too much, so don’t worry. Kate, I don’t hear from as often, but that’s normal. You know how high school kids are. She’s afraid I’ll rat her out to her dad.”

  “She’s a good girl,” Waylon whispered. He took her hand in his. His fingers were bony and thin compared to hers. “All my girls turned out great. I’m very proud of all of you.”

  Carrie smiled and covered his hand with hers. “What’s wrong, Chief? Did something happen?”

  His hand started to shake inside of hers. He reached into the pocket of his robe and pulled out a folded letter. He set the letter on the table and slid it toward Carrie. “This came in the mail three days ago. I had to wait until no one was around to call you.”

  My Dearest Detective,

  I so look forward to seeing you at our reunion.

  You are a lucky man to have such a beautiful family. A wife and two lovely daughters. Perhaps I will get to meet them someday.

  Until Then, I Remain,

  The Master

  Carrie read the letter again, trying to control her anger. Now her hands were shaking. “Who is this prick, Bill? He sent the same letter to a suicide victim I just handled.”

  “Which one?” Waylon asked.

  “Brenda Drake.”

  Waylon nodded, and then his eyes went to a faraway place. “That poor girl. We saved her except I guess maybe we didn’t.”

  Carrie had to lean forward to get Waylon to focus on her. “Bill, who is The Master?”

  “Some maniac teenager from back in the day,” Waylon said. “Christ, he’s got to be over thirty now. Tucker Pennington. Had all these crazy religious ideas. Made up his own Bible, but it was full of spells and incantations that he created. Or read about somewhere. Hell, I don’t know. He wanted to set this girl Brenda Drake on fire to purify her, from what I remember. Had her all tied up in the woods after he snatched her off the street right in front of her mother.”

  “And you caught him?”

  “Right after he poured gasoline all over her,” Waylon said. “Me and Jacob. Christ, Pennington was just a kid. Where’s that evil come from? How’s that kind of thing get into someone so young?”

  It was as if she could see through his eyes into his mind, at all the swirling ghosts there.

  “Can you tell me anything about the other victims?”

  Waylon took another sip of water and touched his throat and closed his eyes. It hurt him to speak, but he forced the words out anyway. “Pennington had a cousin. I can’t recall her name. Real shy and emotional. Hard to talk to. He’d been sexually abusing her ever since they were little. We never got the full extent of what he did to her, because she couldn’t hardly speak about it without shutting down. Her parents weren’t any help. They hired their own lawyer and I couldn’t talk to the girl without them or the attorney present.”

  Carrie grabbed a pen off the table and asked Waylon for something to write on. He handed her a junk mail envelope. “Their daughter was a victim, and her family wouldn’t let you or Rein talk to her without an attorney?”

  “Just me,” Waylon said. “Jacob was too busy with more important things, I suppose. We ended up not letting her testify becau
se the DA thought she was going to have a nervous breakdown on the stand.”

  “Do you remember that victim’s name?” Carrie asked.

  “No, I do not.”

  Carrie drew a line under those notes and said, “Was there anyone else?”

  “Alexis Dole,” Waylon said.

  “You remember her name.”

  “I’ll never forget it, either,” he said. “Alexis was a cheerleader. Class president. Beauty queen. Everything. Back then, the high schools had this dance called the Winter Ball, and they’d build these big bonfires outside. Been doing them since I went to school, and probably longer than that. A group of kids were standing around the bonfire, and Alexis Dole was standing with them. Tucker Pennington crept up on the group and hurled a bottle of sulfuric acid at the group. It hit Alexis right in the face. He’d stolen the acid a year before and had it waiting, all that time. This kid wasn’t just sick. He was a mean little bastard too.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Scarred her bad, for life. Took one of her eyes. She went through skin grafts, hair transplants, everything. The skin was too ruined. She wore this big wig and sunglasses to the hearing, trying to hide her face, but by the end, she got so angry she ripped them off and threw them at Pennington.”

  Waylon took a break to massage his throat. Carrie offered him more water, but he waved it away.

  “She pulled off her eye patch and made everyone look at the hole in her eye and see what he’d done to her. She stood up in the witness box and forced the judge to look right into it. I’ll never forget that. It was her testimony that sent him away for the rest of his life, or so we thought at the time.”

  “Did you try him as an adult?” Carrie asked.

  “Nope. Pennington was such a maniac, they committed him to a mental facility for sadists and sexual offenders after he turned eighteen. People sent there aren’t ever supposed to be released until they’re medically cleared, which doesn’t happen. How can you cure that kind of crazy? The state was supposed to keep people like Pennington confined for the rest of their lives. I guess that’s all changed now.”