Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

  He’s a medium-sized blond, about five feet ten and maybe 165 pounds. Hazel- colored eyes that seem to sport a flash of green. He’s a very handsome man, the young ladies might say. But his bedside manner sucks. He won’t look any of the four of us, including Lt. Mark of the St. Louis PD, in the eyes.

  “We were in Kuwait together, several years back,” I tell him.

  “So I hear,” he whispers, almost inaudibly.

  “Speak up so the recorder can get all this,” Mark instructs him.

  He smiles, but his eyes are on the table top, here in the interrogation room. The same room we questioned Johnny and his SLU brother in.

  “You remember Kuwait?” Pete asks him.

  “Yes.”

  His eyes stay on the table top.

  “You have a whereabouts for any of these three dates?” Jack asks him as he slips him a sheet of paper.

  “Got no clue. It was a long time ago.”

  “You would’ve remembered these three days,” Pete answers. “You were a busy boy on them all.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Who said you did?” Pete smiles.

  Philip has his eyes trained downward.

  “You wouldn’t lie to us, would you, Lieutenant?” Pete asks.

  “I’m not in the Corps any longer. Haven’t been since I returned to the world.”

  And now he looks up at all four of us. He smiles again.

  “Two families,” I tell him. “And at least one, here in the World. You know anything about it?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “You ever read The Scarlet Letter ?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I thought everybody read it in high school. But I went to Catholic schools and we figured we were better-read than the other public school kids.… Anyway, a preacher named Dimmesdale knocks up Hester Prynne, a married babe, and then she takes the weight—no one knows he’s your daddy, get it? And seven years goes by and Dimmesdale’s sprung for the crime of adultery, which in old Boston is a hanging offense, and you can’t cop a plea, they string you from the gallows tree.

  “After seven years and after skinnying out considerably, Dimmesdale pukes it up on Election Day in front of the whole town. But by then it’s too late. He strokes out right there. However, he gets all that shit off his soul.

  “Isn’t there some shit you’d like to live without, Philip?”

  He lowers his eyes from mine. He smiles at the table. I think I see him rolling his eyes upward. He’s trying to freak the four of us out.

  “Boo!” Pete yells at him. He doesn’t flinch.

  He keeps staring at the table, smiling, only the whites of his eyes visible.

  *

  There will be no confession. We have no evidence. The only time Philip Brandon is facing will be for the child pornography, if he does any time at all.

  We get in the blue Ford and we hightail it back to our home base, north on I-55.

  *

  Thomas and Brandon are drifting away from my grasp. And Mary is no help. I try to get her to throw some scraps my way from the FBI, but nothing is forthcoming.

  We go to movies. We go to dinner. We make very passionate sex together, and then I leave well before dawn.

  “Maybe we should stop doing this,” I proffer.

  “Why? I think we get along.”

  “I can’t believe I’m the one talking about a relationship,” I tell Mary.

  She sits up in bed and displays her small but well-shaped breasts.

  She knows it works.

  “We have a relationship. We go out and we sleep together and that’s all there is.”

  “You’re the perfect woman. Ask Oprah. So why am I bitching?”

  “Exactly. We’re not going here anymore, Will. It’s too exhausting. You know I have my job. I know you have yours. We both know that cops get divorced at a record percentage, and you further know I’m not going to set me and you up for failure.”

  “You’re so sure we’d be a washout.”

  “Yes,” she declares. “It’s the nature of the beast, and the beast is law enforcement.… Look, don’t we get along?”

  “We get along, yes.”

  “Don’t we have something special when we’re together?”

  “I want to go to sleep and wake up next to you. Is that so unthinkable?”

  “How long would the good times roll, Will?”

  I don’t have an answer.

  “You looking for guarantees? Because if you are, they don’t run them off the presses,” I say.

  “How very glib, how droll.”

  I give it up for the moment.

  “We had to let Brandon loose.”

  “Inevitable,” she replies. “No evidence, no bust.”

  “How very glib, how very droll,” I throw back at her.

  “We don’t have anything on Thomas or Brandon. There. Are you happy?”

  “No. I’m not,” I tell her.

  Then I put my hands behind my head and she gets up and gets dressed and gets ready for work at the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the Loop where I met her almost six months ago.

  *

  “When are you going to move out, Will? You don’t need to babysit me anymore, you know.”

  “I know, Dad. I like it here. I don’t like living alone.”

  I’m loading the dishwasher from dinner. There are only two plates, not enough for a load. I’ll turn the thing on at breakfast.

  “You need to be on your own.”

  “You kicking me out?” I smile.

  He laughs.

  “Never happen. You stay as long as you like. I just don’t want you to think…”

  “I know, Dad. You’re fully recovered. I know.”

  “This case still bothering you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thought so.… I know you don’t like to bring work home. I didn’t like to do it to your mother, either.”

  “I can talk. But there’s nothing new. The two guys I like for the killings are home free. We had nothing on them—or anyone else—back in Kuwait, and we’ve got even less on them here in Chicago. Whoever’s doing these kids is smarter than I am, it looks like.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You really think so?”

  He laughs again. That’s two more laughs than I heard out of him since before my mother succumbed to Alzheimer’s, a few years ago. He used to laugh all the time, back in the day.

  “I know how smart you are. I raised you and Sammy. Your mother didn’t birth any stupid sons.”

  “I’m glad you think so, anyway.”

  “Stop whining. It isn’t like you.”

  Now I have to laugh.

  “That’s better,” he says.

  *

  “We need to look at Thomas again to show him we haven’t forgotten him. I think I’m about to get transferred back to a ship,” Pete tells me.

  “They giving up?”

  “They never give up and you know it. But they’ll have me doing other cases. You know how it goes at NCIS.”

  We’re sitting in my cubicle in homicide. I’m looking at my favorite sight, the buildings and the panorama outside our building here in the Loop.

  “Let’s take a drive to Wisconsin again.”

  I agree. We go find Jack in fingerprints, and then we head toward the blue LTD and the north country.

  Seven hours later, it’s 1:00 P.M. and we’ve arrived outside Thomas’s cabin, the one he’s borrowing from his late grandfather. His Yamaha is parked outside.

  After a half hour, he comes loping out the front door and waves at us. So we follow him out to the highway. He rides the bike into Walworth, a small town five miles up the road.

  He gets off the motorcycle and he goes into a small convenience store. Five minutes later, he comes out with a plastic sack of what appears to be groceries.

  This time he doesn’t wave to us. He just mouths one word:

  “Harassment.”

  *

 
We stay the day and return to Chicago seven hours later, at 4:00 A.M. the next morning. Pete and Jack both hang it up and head home. I head for Mary’s.

  “Where’ve you been? It’s six…”

  “Wisconsin.”

  “What were you.… You were shadowing Thomas?”

  “Yes.”

  “To what end, Will? Jesus.”

  “I guess I’ll go home.”

  “Grow up.”

  “Am I behaving badly?”

  “You’re beginning to obsess on a perpetrator.”

  “That’s a bad thing to do.”

  “It is. Stop being a wiseass.… I have to be at work at 11:00 a.m. We’ve got some time to spend, but I’m not going to hear you bitch about how impossible these murders are. All murders are impossible, until you solve them.”

  She smiles. I can’t help but kiss her. I can’t help but love her, even if she has no such feeling for me.

  *

  “You’ll catch him,” she says after I roll off to her left. The sheets are almost as sweaty as we are. It’s late August, and she does have air conditioning in her apartment. The problem is that she sets the thermostat at 78 degrees. I’m far too hot-blooded for the setting.

  “You’ll catch him,” she repeats.

  “You really think so?”

  “If you don’t, we will,” she grins.

  *

  “So,” Captain Pearce begins. “It’s dead end again.”

  “At the moment,” I tell him. Jack sits quietly. Pete has his orders to return to North Carolina where he’ll board a ship for parts unknown.

  “We don’t call it a cold case, even though it’s been more than three years, back to the Middle East. If they really are connected to our newest murders, here in the city. I want you to go at it like it’s isolated, like it isn’t connected to your other two homicides in Kuwait. Try a different angle, even if it isn’t true. Maybe it’ll give you a different perspective on the case. Critters that don’t adapt die.”

  “He did the two over there and the one here, Captain.”

  “Could very well be,” he tells me. “Just give it a shot, okay?”

  “It doesn’t appear we have anything to lose,” I reply.

  *

  We canvass the Milan neighborhood once again. We come on a little stronger at the neighbors this time. Florence Jankowski, two doors down from the Milans, now remembers she saw a motorcycle come down the street about 12:30 a.m., the morning the crime was committed.

  Mrs. Jankowski is about eighty, but her wits seem sharp.

  “I remember it because my cat Lilly was in heat and I went out to the living room to shut her up.… I looked out the blinds and I saw a motorcycle pulling up to the curb down by those poor people’s house. The Milans.”

  “Right,” I tell her.

  “I noticed the motorcycle because it came up so quietly. Usually they make all kind of noise, but it was like he was being quiet on purpose. Like he didn’t want to disturb anybody.”

  “Did you see a license number?” Jack asks.

  “With these eighty-year-old eyes? You’re joking,” the old girl grins.

  “Any idea of the make, the brand of bike?”

  “Do I look like a biker chick to you, son?”

  7

  Carl Thomas goes off the screen. The cops in Walworth County in Wisconsin have been shadowing him in cooperation with the FBI and us in Homicide, but they lost sight of him eighteen hours ago, and there’s no one occupying his grandfather’s cabin at present.

  Mary tells me about the disappearance without my asking.

  “I can’t believe you’re offering intelligence to a lowly Chicago cop.”

  “Don’t grovel. This is just cooperation, the way my boss told us it was.”

  “You can’t be softening to me, can you?”

  “I’ve already compromised myself by sleeping with you. I shouldn’t be involved with any law enforcement people.”

  “But you’re involved?”

  “In a manner of speaking, Will. Don’t make more of it than it is.”

  “Oh, you can count on that, Special Agent Janecko. I won’t make anything of it at all.”

  She rolls over and shows me her tits. The blinds are closed, and the sunlight is blunted from making an appearance in her small studio on the near North Side, here near Clark Street. She lives among the whacked out and the spaced out and the very far-out denizens of Chicago.

  “You want to ruin all this by giving me a ring and proposing?”

  “Some women might think it was an honor for the asking.”

  “You really want to blow this right out of the lake water.”

  “I love you, but I know you don’t love me back. It’s called…”

  “Unrequited love. Jesus, Will, you’ll move me to tears.”

  “I love it when you’re sincere.”

  She kisses me and smiles.

  “Give me time. Maybe I’ll soften. No promises.… But you’d better not.”

  “Better not what?”

  “Soften, dummy. What do you suppose?”

  *

  We take another excursion north, Jack and I. Pete is headed back to North Carolina and parts unknown.

  We search Thomas’s cabin illegally. We didn’t check in with the local constabulary. They could arrest us for breaking and entering, but, sometimes, extreme circumstances… And so on.

  “I’m stealing his laptop,” Jack tells me.

  “For what?”

  “I know a private hacker.”

  “He’s probably got everything encoded. He’s not stupid.”

  “He left the laptop, Will. That was stupid.”

  “It means he’s probably coming back. We could get in some serious shit over that laptop.”

  I’m smiling at him as he unplugs it from the wall.

  *

  Jack’s hacker friend is Cyril Finnegan. He’s a North Side booster and a computer geek and hacker deluxe. He remains at large because he helps us all the time, but he knows he’s in the shit if he gets caught. He knows we won’t help him if he gets caught in the commission of a heist or a hack. Other than that, our burglary people have been turning the blind eye when they can.

  Cyril is a short, heavy, mid-forties man. He has wispy gray hair that barely covers his pate in what was used to be called a hyacinth bang.

  “This shit is a challenge. He isn’t using common passwords, like birth dates. This prick must have something to hide, boys,” Cyril tells us.

  He lives alone in the top apartment of a three-flat with his empty aquarium. He told Jack he always kills his fishes. He’s divorced, with two small children and a large dose of child support which he rarely pays.

  “You have nothing for us, in other words,” I tell him.

  “Sorry, Will. Sorry, Jack. This one’ll take a while, I’m thinking.”

  “This miserable son of a bitch might be slaughtering little girls and their families, Cyril,” I explain.

  “I’ll go as fast as I can. But you know I can’t make any guarantees, anyway.… Why can’t you take this laptop to your FBI buddies?”

  He knows we’re not friendly with the Feds, but it’s a fair question.

  “Because the fucker is as hot as your Aunt Fanny’s pussy,” Jack tells him.

  “I don’t have an Aunt Fanny, but I get it,” Cyril smiles.

  *

  The calls come in to Captain Pearce the day after we deliver the laptop to Cyril. There have been murders similar to ours in California, in a place called Auburn in northern California, and in Wilmington, Vermont. A thirteen-year-old female was killed with a brother, seven, and their mother and father. The female was shot in the eye, but the other orb remained intact. The parents and brother were shot and then strangled with barbed wire. No prints. No fibres. No semen in the sexually-assaulted girl. The above happened in Auburn, California.

  The other girl, fourteen, was shot in the eye also, but this time the other eye was scooped out and stuck in her m
outh. Someone snapped the mother’s and father’s necks after shooting them both. There were no siblings involved in Vermont. The FBI has sent us this information because of the similarities in MO, of course.

  Now we know the new cases were not Thomas and Brandon. We have confirmed sightings of both men in Wisconsin and St. Louis on the dates of the recent homicides on either coast, which occurred two weeks ago. They couldn’t have been that far away that fast, not even via jet. The timelines just don’t work for either of the two.

  “Maybe it’s just coincidence,” Jack points out as we sit in my cubicle in Homicide.

  “You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

  “Then how did they fly around and do all that damage—either one of them?”

  “Maybe they had help,” I say.

  “You think it’s a gang?” Jack smiles.

  I’m not smiling.

  “That’s rather out there, isn’t it, partner?” Clemons tells me.

  “Yes, it is. You have a better idea?”

  “Dumb coincidence.”

  I’m still spinning my wheels on the shots to the eyes, to the blinding of the vics.

  “You ever seen the play or the movie, Equus?” I ask Jack.

  “No.”

  “It’s about a kid who blinds horses. It’s fairly kinky.”

  “I don’t think I want to see it, either.”

  “It’s not one of those flicks you go back twice. It ain’t Casablanca,” I smile.

  *

  “Why’d he blind the horses?”

  “I don’t exactly remember, Jack. But I know a guy at Northwestern who might understand it.”

  “These aren’t horses he’s blinding, Will.”

  “Maybe it’s about the blinding, though.”

  “You said you pursued that with a Navy shrink,” he says.

  “I don’t think he liked me. I don’t think the doc was all that cooperative, especially to an NCIS investigator. He got thrown out of the Navy for incompetence, which leads me to believe his assessment might be somewhat faulty.”

  “Why didn’t you try another shrink?” Jack asks me.

  “I was on my way out of the Corps and the job when it went down. Never had the chance.”

  “Why didn’t you try a local headshrinker?”