Blood Angel

by Bernard Schaffer

  Carrie looked at the letter from The Master again.

  I so look forward to seeing you at our reunion.

  “Is he being released?” Carrie asked.

  “Could be. I read the government is cutting the budget for all their mental health facilities. People like Pennington are suddenly declared fit to return to society.” Waylon pulled another letter out of a stack on the table and showed it to Carrie. It was a hearing notice. “This came a few weeks ago. I suppose they want me to testify as to why Pennington shouldn’t be set free.”

  “No one’s ever going to let him out. Come on. After what he did? They can’t.”

  “This is the government we’re talking about, kiddo.”

  “Have you heard from Jacob?” Carrie asked.

  Waylon took a long sip of water. He cleared his throat and grimaced in discomfort. “No. We haven’t spoken in some time.”

  “Did something happen between you two?”

  Waylon pointed at the scar on his neck. “Besides this?” He picked up the letter from The Master. “Besides this?” He tossed the letter aside and pounded his fist on the table. “I’ll be paying for being Jacob Rein’s partner for the rest of my life, Carrie. But I won’t let it anywhere near my family. Not ever again. If Pennington so much as dreams about showing up here, I’ll put a bullet in him and everyone who looks just like him.”

  Carrie picked the letter up from the floor. She folded it and put it in her pocket. “Well, Jacob has to know about this. Both of you need to be there to keep this maniac from going free. I’ll find him and make sure he knows to be there.”

  “I’m not going,” Waylon said.

  “What? Of course you’re going.”

  “I’m not.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Exactly what I said.”

  “Chief,” Carrie said.

  “I’m not Chief anymore. They fired me after the long-term disability ran out. Now, you’ll have to excuse me,” Waylon said. He got up from the table. “I need to go lie down. Please see yourself out. And I’d appreciate it if you don’t say anything about this to Jeri or the girls. It would just worry them.”

  She watched him shuffle down the hall, going away from her. The sound of his bathrobe sweeping the floor grew distant, until she heard his steps going up the stairs toward his bed. It wasn’t yet ten in the morning.

  * * *

  The Vieira County Children and Youth Services building was crowded with all the extra staff from the DA’s office. All the intake workers who answered the phones for incoming reports of abuse and neglect were stuck sharing desks with unhappy-looking Child Protective Services personnel. All of the DA’s and county detectives scattered around the office were relegated to the rear and sides of the main floor. The walls were covered with paper signs that told people where to go to find whoever they were looking for.

  The front lobby now had two desks. The Children and Youth Services secretary’s desk and the DA’s office secretary’s desk, which was only a card table and folding chair with a laptop and phone.

  Carrie got off the elevator and walked toward the card table. “Good morning, Miss Mabel.”

  “Can you believe this nonsense?” Mabel asked. “Where’d they put you?”

  “Out in a trailer with Sal Vigoda.”

  “Be glad you aren’t stuck in this mess. We’re all tripping over each other,” Mabel said.

  “I’m guessing we still can’t get back into the old office?”

  “Nope. I asked them to bring my old chair over so I’m not stuck sitting in this uncomfortable thing, but they won’t unlock the doors or nothing. This place is a dump,” she said. She looked at the Children and Youth Services secretary seated across the way and said, “No offense.”

  “Can you look up a case for me? There’s a hearing coming up, and I’m wondering who hearing notices were sent to. The defendant’s name is Tucker Pennington.”

  “Pennington,” Mabel repeated as she typed. “Here we go. Looks like hearing notices went out a little while ago. Brenda Drake. Patricia Martin. Alexis Dole. Dr. Linda Shelley. Here’s your buddies, Bill Waylon and Jacob Rein. Detective Rein’s came back undeliverable, just like everything else we’ve sent him, of course.”

  “Of course,” Carrie said. “Can you print me out that list of names? There’s a few follow-ups I’d like to do.”

  “Who assigned you to do follow-ups on this rusty old case?” Mabel asked, surprised. “This is a civil hearing, it looks like. There won’t even be an ADA there. Is somebody giving you busywork? You’re too good for that, you hear me?”

  “This is just something I’m doing on my own,” Carrie said.

  “Oh, I see. You know this is how people get in trouble, right? Looking into old mess,” Mabel said as she leaned forward to find the print button.

  “I sure do,” Carrie said.

  * * *

  Carrie ran intel on Tricia Martin and Alexis Dole from her phone in the parking lot. Martin’s digital footprint was nothing. She had a driver’s license and work history, but no social media at all. No photographs of her appeared in any search engine when you typed in her name. She wasn’t listed on any school alumni sites or property listings.

  Alexis Dole was a different story. Dole’s scarred face was everywhere. She’d been interviewed on survivor websites and featured as Shooter of the Month at various local firing ranges. There were pictures of her holding guns and trophies. Her, smiling with her deformed half mouth, her one remaining eye gleaming. Carrie watched videos of her teaching kali, a Filipino martial art fought with knives, and she spun people around and slashed the inside of their thighs and necks with a dull-edged training blade with ghoulish precision.

  She came to the last name on the hearing notice list. Dr. Linda Shelley, address, the Vieira County Juvenile Detention Center. It took her a minute to put Shelley’s face to the name. “Oh right,” Carrie said, remembering the last time they’d met. “This should be fun.”

  * * *

  “Detective Carrie Santero, here for Dr. Shelley, please,” Carrie said at the front window.

  The secretary looked up. “Is she expecting you?”

  “No, but she helped me two years ago and should remember me.”

  “Let me see if she’s in.” The secretary moved away from the window to talk on the phone. She came back and said, “I’ll buzz you through the door. Do you know where you’re going?”

  “Straight down the hall, if I remember,” Carrie said.

  “Stay to the center of the aisle,” the secretary said. “Don’t get too close to any of the doors.”

  Carrie stood at the large metal door and waited to hear it unlock. When it clicked, she pulled it open. Fists pounded against the doors when she entered, like caged animals demanding to be fed. High-pitched voices screeching at her. The first three rooms were crowded with teenagers in jumpsuits. At the second window, a boy pulled down the front of his pants and thrust his penis against the glass at her.

  She could hear guards shouting, “Get the fuck back from the door!” and “Quit that fucking banging!”

  Many of the rooms were dark and unoccupied. The security station at the first intersecting hallway was empty. No orderlies or nurses patrolled the halls. The trash cans were overflowing with coffee cups and wadded-up papers. Bags of trash sat next to the cans in a row that no one had taken out yet.

  Carrie passed the gymnasium and it was filled with children. Children who should have been home getting showered and ready for elementary school the next day were mixed in with older boys who towered over the security guards. Dozens of children stood on the parquet floor and none of them were moving. They swayed like trees, staring in her direction through the window but none of their eyes tracking as she walked by. Against the wall beneath one of the bare basketball hoops, orderlies counted racks of trays filled with paper cups on a large metal cart. The shelves around the bottom of the cart on one side were labeled CLOZAPINE, RISPERIDONE, ARIP
IPRAZOLE, CARIPRAZINE, and TOPIRAMATE.

  A door opened at the far end of the hall and Dr. Linda Shelley emerged. Carrie walked faster, wanting to get out of the hall. She shook Dr. Shelley’s hand at the door. Shelley’s grip was harder than Carrie had anticipated, and Carrie found herself having to squeeze back to keep her finger bones from being ground together.

  “Doctor,” Carrie said.

  “Detective.”

  Shelley led her into the office and told her to have a seat. Shelley’s office was unchanged from two years prior. Ornately framed diplomas and certificates decorated her walls. Papers and binders covered her desk. A coffee cup was balanced on top of a thick report next to her computer keyboard and had left a damp brown ring on the paper beneath it.

  “I’m here about Tucker Pennington,” Carrie said.

  “He has a hearing coming up.”

  “That’s right. I was wondering if I could ask you about him. You were such a big help to us last time.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Of course,” Carrie said, nodding that she understood. “What I meant was, you’re listed as a witness, and I wanted to know if there was anything you could tell me about his victims.”

  “I never met them.”

  “Well, several people connected to the case have received letters from someone calling themselves The Master. Real threatening. Have you gotten one?”

  “No.”

  “It could have been sent here or to your home.”

  “I don’t get mail at my house, Detective Santero. I use a PO Box. After all the years I’ve spent treating prisoners and sex offenders, I prefer not to use my home address very often. I’m sure you can understand. Now is there anything else? I’m extremely busy here.”

  “Smart,” Carrie said. “Before I go, can you tell me anything about Pennington? What was he like when you treated him here?”

  “I didn’t treat him here.”

  “But you’re listed as a witness. What, are they just having you bring his records or something?”

  “If you’d done your homework, you’d know I wasn’t working here back then. If you’d done your homework, you’d know I treated Tucker Pennington after he was committed at Sunshine Estates.”

  Carrie set her pen down. “Hey, did we get off on the wrong foot or something? I apologize for not knowing any of that, but I can’t access the old case file because there’s black mold in the building.”

  “I’m sorry to hear you’re having problems with your building. I’m currently working with half my regular staff, and the county won’t free up any funds to hire more personnel. Over the summer, they only allowed the air conditioner to run in the morning, which meant the temperature inside this facility reached ninety-five degrees each day by three P.M. The budget for recreational activities has all been reallocated into drugs, in hopes that by turning all of the children here into overmedicated zombies, we won’t need to hire any more guards. Shall I go on?”

  “No, I get it,” Carrie said. “You’ve definitely got it rough out here, but Pennington sent one of his victims a letter, calling himself The Master and that he can’t wait to see her again. She killed herself. My old boss, Bill Waylon, the one I was here with last time? He got a letter too. All I’m asking is, what can you tell me about Pennington that might help me understand what I’m dealing with here?”

  “It would be illegal for me to disclose anything related to any of my patients, Detective. I will be at the hearing as required, and give any answers while under oath, but that’s it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot to do.”

  “I’m just looking to talk,” Carrie said. “To stop what might be coming this way, before anyone else gets hurt.”

  “And you think what? I’m supposed to break the law to help you?”

  “You did it before. And I’m grateful every day you did.”

  “Well, the only reason I did it before isn’t here right now, is he?”

  Carrie leaned back in her chair. “Oh. I knew there was something between you two. I could see the way you were looking at him back then. Is that what your problem is?”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I know petty jealousy when I see it.”

  Shelley slammed her hand on her desk. “Jacob was out! Maybe he was lost, okay, but at least he was free, until you came along with your little, I don’t know, white girl lost in the woods routine. I hold you responsible for every single thing that’s happened to him since then. And if anything is, as you say, coming this way, I suggest you stop it long before it gets to him, because if not, your newest problem will be me.”

  Carrie got up and left. She shut the office door behind her and stayed to the middle of the hall past the gymnasium and empty rooms and other rooms where people were shrieking. She came to the metal door at the end of the hall and banged on it with her fist, over and over until someone heard her and let her out.

  II

  LINDA

  7

  Linda grew up in Norristown. That’s the bottom of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, just outside of Philly. Her mother had six children and Linda was the youngest. Her four sisters had ten children combined and all of them were older than Linda. The house had three bedrooms. Linda’s bedroom had two sets of bunk beds with two children in each bed who slept inverted from one another.

  By the time she was twelve years old, she’d been molested six times. Four times by one of her mother’s boyfriends. Once by her fourth grade teacher. Once by her older cousin Antoine when he ordered the sister Linda normally slept with to move and he crawled into the bed instead.

  When she was seventeen she took a bus to the nearest army recruitment center. There was a desk in the center of the office and three flags. One for the United States, one for Pennsylvania, and one for the army. The soldier said, “Can I help you?”

  Linda had a folded-up pamphlet in her back pocket that she’d taken from her school’s library. “Is it true you give people a place to stay in the army?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Is it true they go all over the world and don’t stay here?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you have to fight and kill people?”

  “No, ma’am. Our soldiers do a lot of different jobs.”

  “Is it true they experiment on black people in the army?”

  “Say what now?”

  “I heard that’s what they do.”

  “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “Just around.”

  “Well, back in World War II, some doctor did an experiment on black soldiers in a place called Tuskegee. Is that what you heard about?”

  She shrugged.

  “Well, nobody does those kinds of things anymore, I promise you.”

  “How you can promise that?”

  “I’m black and nobody ever did any experiments on me,” he said. “It’s not allowed.”

  She looked around the recruitment center and put her right hand against her mouth and bit her nails. “Do you have to wear your uniform the whole time you’re in the army or do you still get to wear regular clothes?”

  “You only have to be in uniform when you’re on duty.”

  “How come I see people wearing they uniform to dinner and on the bus?”

  “I guess they’re getting some kind of discount.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Sometimes people do nice things for you when they know you’re serving your country. Out of respect.”

  Linda bit her nails. “How you get in?”

  “You take the ASVAB, that’s the written test, then a physical, and then if you pass all that, you’re in.”

  “How much do that cost?”

  “What, the test and physical?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “It’s free.” He watched her, and she just stood there, biting. “You have any more questions you want to ask?”

  She wiped her fingers on h
er shirt. “Can I take the test now?”

  * * *

  Five years later Linda was asleep in bed and woke up to find the side next to her empty. She lay there a minute, listening. Trying to figure out what had woken her up. There wasn’t any light on in the hallway bathroom. “Jerry?” she called out.

  She rolled out of bed and walked across the bedroom floor. She stopped at the door and leaned her head out. “Honey? You okay?”

  The tall, narrow, window on the staircase landing was black. No lights on downstairs, either. She went down the steps, holding the handrail. She stopped at the landing and said, “Jerry? Are you down here?”

  A car drove past the house, its lights coming through the staircase window first, moving across the wall and Linda, then glanced off the large windows of their living room. Even after three months, the house was bigger than she was used to. They’d bought it with Linda’s salary and housing allowance combined with Jerry’s salary and housing allowance, plus all the money Jerry had banked each time he’d been deployed to fight. Linda had been deployed twice. Once to Japan and once to Germany. Her Food Services job never took her close enough to the fighting to get her the combat deployment bonus.

  The car was up the road and gone by the time she stepped onto the living room’s wooden floor. Her weight made the slightest creak, but it was the only sound in the room. She stood there, listening to herself breathe, then held her breath and tried to listen even closer. Nothing.

  She felt the pressure of his hand around her face long before she heard him coming. His palm tasted like sweat against her open mouth as it muffled her cry. He dragged her backward from the living room, into the darkness of the kitchen and onto the floor. His left hand covered her mouth and nose, not letting her take a full breath or speak. His right arm was wrapped around her torso, pinning her arms to her sides and keeping her tight against him.