Angel Fire (3 page)

Going through the house with detectives, she had also noticed
one of her mother’s earrings was missing. Not from the pair Marion was wearing when she was murdered, but from a pair of garnet studs Lydia coveted and had borrowed the day before but carefully replaced in her mother’s jewelry box.

“She’s a natural detective,” Dooley had said, with something like resentment in his voice.

In a matter of hours they had traced the plate to Jed McIntyre, a freelance engineering consultant living in Nyack, New York. When they raided his home, he was in his underwear, drinking a beer in front of the television. He smiled as he was led away in the cold night.

“You idiots,” he kept repeating. “You idiots.”

In the subsequent search of his home for evidence, they found thirteen photo albums filled with pictures of his victims and a large jewelry box with twenty tiny, velvet-lined drawers. Thirteen of them held one earring from each of his victims—minute, glittering trophies of his deeds.

Lydia coolly identified Jed McIntyre in a lineup a week later with a strange, trancelike composure. She looked dangerously close to floating away into her grief-stricken mind. Jeffrey was afraid for her and took her to his office so she could avoid the hordes of reporters that followed her everywhere.

“I need to be left alone,” she had said to him, “just for a minute.”

But as he closed the door and walked down the hallway, he had heard a scream that he carried with him still, that would, to him, forever be the very sound of grief. He ran back to his office to find Lydia sitting on the floor screaming and sobbing. He dropped to his knees and took her in his arms and rocked her until she stopped. She became limp with grief and fear, whimpering for her mother.

Sometimes he still saw her that way when he looked into her gray eyes over dinner or when they were working. He remembered her small, gaunt features taut with stress and terror on that first day. Her eyes heavy-lidded, blinking slowly—they would seem almost reptilian if they weren’t so warm and intelligent. She’d had an odd strength and maturity for an adolescent. Her voice never quivered when they interviewed her, but she never made eye contact. She sat next to her grandfather, who sat with a protective arm around her as tears fell from his eyes.

Even now, though at thirty she was an award-winning journalist and an author, an investigative consultant with Jeffrey’s firm, and a strong and accomplished woman, when they were alone he could see the demons in her still. He could see the little girl inside who had never really healed but had been locked away in the attic of her subconscious. He knew one day she would have to be let out. He only hoped he would be there when it happened.

He had been trying for weeks to reach her at her Upper West Side apartment in New York and on her cell phone. The number to the house just outside Santa Fe had been disconnected. That was not unusual, as she changed her numbers often. He could find her, he knew, if he really tried. But he always let her be, let her come to him.

Five years ago, he had left the Bureau and started his own private-investigation agency with two other former special agents. The firm Mark, Hanley and Striker Investigations, Inc. had started in a studio apartment in the East Village. With one phone line and one computer, a couple contacts at the Bureau, and a couple of informants on the street, he, Jacob Hanley, and Christian Striker had built the firm to what it was today: a suite of offices on the top floor of a high rise on West Fifty-seventh Street, employing over a hundred top people, grossing more money last year than Jeff
would have thought possible. At first they took the cases no one else wanted, cases the police had dropped or deemed unsolvable, like desperate parents with no money looking for lost children, welfare fraud investigations. Hanley had a nose for finding the lost. Striker had a gift for surveillance. And Jeffrey, military and FBI to the core, had a hard-on for the facts, the evidence, the crime-scene details. As far as Jeff was concerned, the facts were the only element of any case that could be totally trusted. People lied, intuition failed, but facts, if followed carefully, would always lead to the truth. Working closely with government agencies they quickly earned an inside reputation as the guys the FBI and the police called when their hands were tied, when their leads had gone cold and they were about to give up.

But it was Lydia who had put them on the map as the firm that could solve the unsolvable. Her
New York Times
best-seller about the Cheerleader Murders, a case she had solved while consulting with them, had catapulted Mark, Hanley and Striker into the national spotlight.

Jeffrey, Jacob, and Christian had flown out to a suburb of New Orleans to investigate the disappearance of four high-school girls. Later dubbed “the Cheerleader Murders” by the local media, these girls, all blond with blue or green eyes, had been on the same pep squad. They were among the prettiest, most popular girls in school, by all accounts bright, with good grades and good manners, from happy homes. Looking at their faces in photos, Jeff could easily see what features were attractive to the killer, or so he thought. They were nearly identical in demeanor, with the same bobbed silky hair, wide smiles, unblemished skin. They could have been sisters.

After four weeks, the girls were presumed dead. Jeffrey and his partners, called in by the local police, were working under the
assumption that whoever was doing the abducting was a man connected with the school: a gym teacher, bus driver, janitor. They had several suspects under surveillance. They were leaning pretty heavily on a mentally retarded janitor who had a history of violent behavior during periods in his life when he neglected to take his medication.

But nothing felt right. The pieces weren’t falling together. So, as was often his move when he hit a dead end, he called Lydia in for a fresh perspective. Her gift for intuiting elements of a case that eluded him had been an aid to him many times before. Jeffrey, a confirmed “just the facts” man, had learned respect for Lydia’s intuitions and their value in an investigation where the facts led nowhere.

Lydia was displeased when she arrived. “Well, ‘You can take the man out of the Bureau …’ right, Jeff? This is a typical FBI witch hunt,” she complained. “I have a feeling you guys couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

She was referring to their treatment of the suspects. During the investigations, long-buried secrets had been surfacing like bodies dredged from a river. The gym teacher’s wife had accused him, during a vicious custody battle, of sexually molesting his daughter. A bus driver had revealed that he was a recovering crack addict. A female gym teacher, who was big and burly like a man, was discovered to have had a sex-change operation. They were shaking up that quiet suburb and actually not getting anywhere.

Lydia began speaking to the girls’ classmates. The picture they painted was not the idyllic one presented by parents and teachers. A tight clique, popular and beautiful enough to be the envy of every other girl in the school, the girls were nonetheless secretly feared and hated by most of their friends and classmates. Viciously mean and brutal, they were predators, choosing the homeliest and most unpopular students to taunt and humiliate.

Their most recent victim was a sixteen-year-old by the name of Wanda Jane Felix. A notably overweight, unusually tall, bespectacled girl with poor personal hygiene and a severe case of acne, Wanda had few friends and was painfully shy. By all accounts, she was a kind and exceptionally smart girl. But having moved to the area only at the beginning of the school year, she must have been lonely. In short, she was an easy mark. The four girls had befriended her for a week, treating her like royalty, giving her a makeover and taking her to the movies. Then on Friday afternoon, they invited her to the exclusive and much-anticipated Saturday night keg party. The unsuspecting Wanda accepted, thrilled with her new friends and social status but unaware that the girls were mocking her.

On Saturday night they proceeded to get her drunk on Orange Blossoms, a sickly-sweet combination of orange soda and cheap vodka. When she passed out, they stripped her of her clothes and left her on the lawn of her parents’ home. Virtually every “popular” kid in school was witness to her humiliation. And for those who weren’t, there were color photographs available. Wanda had not returned to school since the incident, two weeks prior to the disappearance of the first girl.

Lydia’s heart ached for Wanda. “Imagine the rage, the shame,” said Lydia sadly, showing Jeffrey the horrible photographs procured from a cooperative student.

“I don’t know,” Jeffrey had replied. “Sounds like a normal high-school Saturday night to me.”

But all joking aside, he could see where she was going. Lydia felt that Wanda or somebody close to her was behind the disappearance of the girls.

“You really think a teenager could be capable of this?” asked Jeffrey.

“I do.”

The motive was there, certainly. And in view of the total lack of evidence surfacing against the other suspects, Jeffrey and Lydia went to question the girl, accompanied by local police with a warrant to search the premises.

And in fact Lydia’s theory proved to be right.

With the help of her mother, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, Wanda Jane had abducted each of the girls in her mother’s station wagon, tortured and then killed them. The bodies were found in freezers in the basement of the Felix home. The girls had been mutilated, golden hair shaved, pretty eyes gouged out, pearly teeth smashed with a hammer. Apparently, though, Wanda’s mother, Kara, had done all the killing. Wanda, Kara later confessed, would have been satisfied with disfigurement. But Kara could not forgive the ugly deed done to her daughter, and finished each of them off with a .22 caliber bullet to the temple.

It was their first formal case together, though Jeffrey had consulted Lydia many times in the past, often breaching ethics to share facts with her and gain her opinion, her insight. She had taught him respect for things unseen, for intuition, for “the buzz,” as they called it. It was a good match. He kept her grounded; she took him places he might never have gone without her.

The Cheerleader Murders was a typical Lydia Strong story, one she would have wanted to investigate and write about had she come across it in her endless scanning of the nation’s newspapers. Lydia chose local cases with a peculiar twist, something that called to her, like a child abduction that wound up leading to a child-slavery ring or the unsolved murder of a local Florida woman that was shown to be tied to Santeria. She seemed always to be searching local papers and the Internet, looking for something that gave her “the buzz.” Her only criterion was that the
case be as dark and twisted as possible. The focus of her books was never the victims, though she believed they were often the key to the solving of crimes. In fact, critics had accused her of treating the victims as incidentals in her work, of treating them as evidence rather than as people. But what drove her was the mind of the killer, the details of the crime, and the process by which it was solved.

Jeff knew it was a search for answers, that she was trying always to understand why some people did the evil they do and what turned them into demons. As if by understanding them and exposing them to the light, she could make the monsters smaller and less frightening.

He looked at the phone a final time before rising, grabbing his black cashmere coat from the hook by the door, and leaving the office. He braced himself against the unseasonably cold fall air as he pushed through the glass doors and walked up West Fifty-seventh Street toward the subway.

G
roggy from a fitful night’s sleep, Lydia walked unsteadily to her kitchen and brewed a pot of Hawaiian Kona coffee. Wrapped in a white terry-cloth cotton robe, she sat down in the window seat and stared out at the Technicolor Santa Fe morning sky, trying not to think about her nightmare and what it meant. When the rich scent of the coffee reached her, she turned her head and surveyed the kitchen. It was a large white room, immaculately clean. The appliances were brand-new, state-of-the-art machines that had barely been used. She was satisfied with how the room looked, everything in order, nothing out of place except for the unruly stack of papers on the kitchen table.

The creative mind by its nature, Lydia had long ago concluded, is restless and cluttered—constantly shifting in thought and action until it settles on something that can engage it for more than a few moments. She read newspapers that way, skipping from article to article, looking for something interesting, something different. She clipped items if she felt there might be something to look at more closely. They collected in piles around her house that she would sort through later to pick out things that struck a chord with her and then read more thoroughly.

She had done little but read since she arrived in Santa Fe over four weeks earlier. Mostly local papers, though. Her subscriptions
to national newspapers piled up in her office, her e-mail went unchecked. She didn’t feel ready for another story yet. Not yet. Her last article, for
New York
magazine, had been about a socialite with Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy who was on trial for poisoning three of her four children. It was a long time before anyone suspected her because she had killed one child in Paris, one in Switzerland, and one in New York City. Esmerelda von Buren, known to her friends as “Esmy,” was a most narcissistic and terrifying sociopath. And after dealing with her, her heinous crimes, and the shallow, snobbish world in which she lived, Lydia figured she needed a good two months of doing nothing in Santa Fe before she even thought about writing something new. But some subconscious memory of the articles she had clipped was giving her the buzz, that little edge of excitement she got when she knew something wasn’t quite right, that there was a puzzle in need of solving. And ready or not, she couldn’t resist.

Gathering the articles in her arms, she carried them into her living room. The room, filled with plants and small, potted trees, was flooded with sunlight. The southern wall was completely glass, below which was a precipitous drop into the valley of the mountains. She had an unobstructed view of the landscape, a sight she considered one of the most beautiful in all the world. She had told Jeffrey once that to wake up and see it in the morning gave her faith in the nature of the universe. No matter how wrong so many things were, no matter what tragedy, what chaos existed, this landscape still remained. He had laughed a little, telling her to stick to journalism and leave the poetry to someone else. But he knew what she meant. There was something peaceful about incorruptible beauty. But right now she barely noticed it. She was inside her head.