Angel Fire (16 page)

These were the rooms of hard-working people of small and honest means. If she had to guess, Lydia would say that Joe Matthews, Greg’s father, was a former military man who conducted his business and his home the way he had been taught in the barracks. Greg’s mother had either left them or died young because there was no feminine warmth in any of the rooms, and Greg seemed fairly self-reliant in the kitchen, not like a mama’s boy used to being coddled.

She tossed it out. “You live here alone, Greg?”

“No, with my dad. My mom passed on when I was ten from cancer.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Me, too. But my dad took real good care of me. A little strict, though,” he chuckled without much mirth. “But what do you expect from a former Marine?”

“Mind if I record our conversation?” Lydia asked, pulling a small tape recorder out of her bag and laying it on the table. She never went anywhere without it but almost always forgot to use it, relying more often on pen and paper.

“No. How do you like your coffee?”

She looked over at him and noticed that he was peering into an empty refrigerator.
So much for light and sweet
.

“Black,” she answered. “ ‘No,’ you don’t want me to record this? Or ‘no,’ you don’t mind?”

“I don’t mind, Ms. Strong. I’ve got nothing to hide.”

He sat down across from her, placing a chipped white cup in front of her, filled with coffee so black it looked like tar. The chair creaked beneath his weight and screeched against the floor as he pulled it toward the table.

“Your name sounds familiar,” said Greg.

“Well, I’m a writer.”

“I’m not much of a reader. Is that why you’re here? You’re going to write about Shawna?”

“Not exactly. I also consult with a private-investigation firm.”

“Did somebody hire you to look for Shawna?”

“Not exactly. Let’s just say I’ve taken a personal interest in this case and I have the time and the resources to see what I can do to further the investigation. Shawna is not the only person missing.”

“You mean that other woman who went missing yesterday?”

“Yes, and others, too.” She didn’t want to be the one to tell him that Maria wasn’t missing anymore. He’d read about it in the papers soon enough.

“Why are you interested?”

She considered her answer before speaking. “I lost someone once, too, Greg. A long time ago. And even though I know what happened to her, I still don’t know why. So I guess I’m always looking for answers, in a way.”

He nodded as if he understood that. Lydia wasn’t even sure why she said it that way, having never vocalized the thought to anyone. She’d never revealed anything about herself to a stranger before, especially someone she was interviewing. But the fact that she’d shared something personal with Greg seemed to have put him at ease and he began to speak.

“Most people just assumed Shawna ran away, Ms. Strong. And while she might have run away from her foster parents, she never would have run away from me. We were just waiting for her to turn eighteen so that we could get married and live here. I was going to keep working for my father and someday we wanted to buy a house.”

Greg’s eyes glistened and Lydia felt him searching her face for faith and compassion. He had paused, waiting for her to question his words, offer judgment, but she nodded her head and remained silent.

When he didn’t continue, she encouraged him. “Tell me about the night she disappeared.”

“She called me on the phone about eight on Sunday, August fourteenth. She was real upset and said she was on her way over. I told her to stay put, that I would come and get her. But she said no, she had to leave the house that second. It was a short walk, about a mile, and she needed the time to cool off. She had had another fight with her foster parents. They are good people but they were strict with Shawna and she was headstrong, so they were always going at it.

“I told her to get moving because it was getting dark. I waited about a half an hour and then I set off to find her down the only road she would take. I went all the way to her house and knocked on the door. Harden, her foster father, told me she had left. I didn’t believe him, so I pushed my way into the house and ran up to her room. She was gone but it didn’t look like she had packed anything.

“I was angry. She had promised me she would try to get along with them because we only had four months to go and I didn’t want her to be sent away. I got back in my truck and drove home fast, hoping I would find her there. But the house was empty. I
swear to God, as soon as I walked into this kitchen and didn’t see her where you are right now, smoking a cigarette, I just had a feeling in my gut that something wasn’t right. I don’t know how many times I drove up and down that road looking for her.

“She’s gone,” he said, voice trembling, betraying a boyishness that his physical bearing did not. “Something terrible happened to her that night. I can just feel it, you know?”

Lydia was thinking of Maria Lopez’s gutted body rotting in the woods.

He paused and looked away from Lydia. His voice was softer, almost a whisper when he began speaking again, and she noticed his hands were shaking slightly.

“I would have made her stay put if I could have. But no one could tell Shawna what to do, not even me. She had a real problem with authority. I wish she had listened to me only this once.”

She didn’t have to be a mind reader to see how much Greg had loved Shawna, and that he would rather be dead than ever hurt her. There was no way to fake grief like that. Lydia hated to probe further, knowing that the more he had to recount for her, the more painful this conversation would get, but she needed to know who Shawna was, where she had spent time, what her routines were.

“Greg, tell me what you can about Shawna, what she was like. I need to get a sense of who she was.”

“Other people only saw the worst of her, her bad temper, her lack of interest in school, her rebelliousness. But to me, she was an angel. God, she was sweet. Loving, thoughtful.”

The earnestness in his voice moved Lydia more than she liked. She steeled herself against the wave of sadness and sympathy that welled within her.

“No one I know had a harder life than Shawna. Her parents
both died in a plane crash when she was five and she was turned over to the state because she had no living relatives. A lot of people who take in foster kids do it for the money. They don’t really care about the children; some even resent them. Shawna had a real run of bad luck when it came to that. Most of the time she wouldn’t even talk about it. But she had scars all over her body—cigarette burns, a long gash on her back. If you raised your hand too fast, too close to her, she’d flinch. If I held her too tightly, too close to me, she’d panic, fight to get away like a coyote in a trap.

“Meg and Harden Reilley, her foster parents up the road, never hurt her, she said. But she was more than they could handle, stubborn and wild. They tried to love her, I think. But she wouldn’t let anyone close to her but me. She distrusted everyone—for the most part.”

“ ‘For the most part’?”

“She loved to go to church. She said it was the only place that gave her peace, the only place where she didn’t feel like a black sheep. She was close to Father Luis and his nephew Juno at the Church of the Holy Name. She helped out with things like the bake sale, bingo night, the Christmas party. She said they accepted her without judgment, like I did. Trusted her with responsibilities that no one else would dream of. They made her feel special, trustworthy. It was very important to her—the church. But she kept it a secret. She would sneak off there, like she was going to do something wrong. I asked her why she didn’t want anyone to know. She said she was afraid someone would take it away from her. She wanted to guard with her life the things she loved, always afraid of losing them. It broke my heart.”

“So she spent most of her time at the church, at school, or with you. Was there any other place she hung out regularly?”

He shook his head. “She didn’t really have any friends. She
wasn’t one to go to the mall. She didn’t care much for movies. We stayed around here mostly.”

A silent tear traveled down the landscape of his face. He put his head down in his hands and sat, his breathing shallow and quick. She wanted to reach out and touch his hair, or take this boy in her arms and tell him that the pain goes away—that it fades like the memory of Shawna’s face will fade. But she was locked up tight inside, unable to give him what she was still unable to give herself. And besides, maybe it wasn’t even true. Maybe his pain would never go away; maybe every woman’s voice would echo Shawna’s for him for the rest of his life; maybe he would keep thinking he saw her in crowds; maybe the color green would forever remind him of Shawna’s eyes.

Lydia sat across the table from him, watching his big shoulders tremble. She was not at all surprised to learn of Shawna’s connection to the church. Since a few hours ago, when they’d put everything together, she expected each of them to have left a silken, spider’s-web thread leading her back to Juno. She just needed to find the point at which it all converged and the killer would be there, waiting for her.

“I’m sorry,” Greg said finally, raising his head and wiping the tears from his eyes.

“Please don’t be. I understand.”

“You’re the first person to hear me out that hasn’t treated me like a criminal or a fool whose girl ran away from him.”

“In the days preceding Shawna’s disappearance, did you notice anyone strange hanging around or did she tell you of anyone bothering her?”

“No, not that I remember. And I think I would remember. I was pretty protective of her.”

“Just think for a minute. Anything she said, even in passing,
someone she found creepy or didn’t like?” She saw something flicker in Greg’s eyes.

“Well, it’s pretty stupid. I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything.”

“What is it?”

“The day before she disappeared we had a good laugh because Shawna made me promise never to buy a minivan, no matter how many kids we had. She said the past couple of days, she’d seen a green minivan a couple of times. She said, ‘Once you buy a minivan, you can kiss your youth and any hope you ever had of being cool again good-bye.’ But she never said where she’d seen it, or that she felt she was being followed.”

“Did you see any other cars on the road that night when you went looking for her?”

“Not one. Do you think someone was following her, Ms. Strong?”

“It’s possible.”

“Either I or her parents drove her almost everywhere.”

“But she walked here often? From her house?”

“Often enough.”

Lydia pulled a card from her pocket and handed it to Greg. “If you think of anything else that might help, call me day or night.”

She stopped the tape machine and put it in her bag, rose, and took his outstretched hand. There was a warmth and gentleness to his grip. It was easy to see why Shawna loved him. He was a protector.

“Do you think she’s dead, Ms. Strong?”

“I don’t know, Greg. I wish I did.”

He nodded, closing his eyes. “Thank you, Ms. Strong.”

He walked her to her car and opened the driver’s seat door for her. “You’ll keep me posted?” he asked.

“Of course.”

—

A
s she did a U-turn and drove up the road away from him, she saw him in the rearview mirror, just standing and watching her drive away. He looked so sad and alone, so powerless, like a child who had lost his grip on a helium balloon and was watching it float into the sky.

She gripped the wheel so hard her knuckles turned white. She was angry, so fucking angry. She’d never admitted to anyone, not even Jeffrey, how furious she felt after interviewing the grief-stricken loved ones, the other victims of murderers. They had to live with what had been done to the person gone, they had to try to keep from imagining what that kind of pain and fear must be like, to keep from wondering what the last moments were like. When someone you love dies in a car wreck or a plane crash, there is always the possibility they died instantly, that they never knew death had come for them, that one minute they were on their way for milk at the store and the next … nothing. The families of murder victims didn’t have that luxury, that chance for peace. They were haunted always, forever altered.

Who are you? And what do you want?
she thought as she turned onto the main road and gunned the engine.

They always wanted something; these kinds of killers always had an agenda. The pedophile, the rapist, he was driven by an urge he couldn’t control. Nature or nurture, biochemistry or psychosis, whatever compelled him was as much a part of him as the blood running through his veins. But a serial killer like this always had a reason—vengeance, fame, punishment.

Jed McIntyre had wanted to destroy lives. The killing of his victims, though he enjoyed it very much, was only a means to achieving an end goal, which was to destroy the life of the child
left behind. Just as Jed’s life was destroyed when his father had killed his mother in front of him and was sent to the electric chair.

Jed was alone with his rage for so many years, so isolated by his circumstances, by the horror he witnessed, by the impenetrable loneliness that surrounded him. He watched people go about their lives, fellow students, then co-workers, knowing that their perception of the world was so vastly different from his, knowing always that his life was forever cast in the shadow of his past. And as he grew older, his fury and his misery grew, too, and twisted like a vine of thorns, choking him and carrying him over the edge of sanity.

In a way, Lydia had grown to see him as someone fighting isolation, someone trying to create a community for himself, a brethren of misery. He had come to symbolize pure human evil to her. Not Evil in some cosmic sense, not the embodiment of Satan, but evil born of unspeakable psychic pain and cruel injustice, the victim become the victimizer with a vengeance.

But this killer … what was his agenda? What did these people mean to him?
She was driving fast, taking the winding roads too hard as the faces of Shawna, Christine and Harold, and Maria swam in her mind. Usually it was so easy for her to see, like in the case of the Cheerleader Murders. All the girls were similar physically and, they later found out, just wicked, nasty young people. Once she knew what they shared in common, it was easy to deduce what type of person would want them, or want to be rid of them. But with these victims, even though she was sure that the church would be the point at which their lives intersected, she just couldn’t see what characteristic they shared, what attracted the killer to them.