Angel Interrupted (24 page)

“You’ve been sloppy. Haven’t you been reading the papers? They’re getting closer. I’m moving the timetable up.”

“I’m not ready,” the first man insisted, panic in his voice.

The second man laughed. It was an ugly sound that filled me with darkness. It was so ripe and evil and filled with certainty that the first man would fall. “You’ll be more than ready when the time comes. Then it will be all I can do to control your appetite.”

“I’m not like you,” the first man insisted.

“Aren’t you?” the second man challenged. “Now get back into camera range and take the boy’s shirt off.”

The first man started to argue, but changed his mind. He hung up his phone and coaxed the boy back into the living room. He did not remove the boy’s shirt. “I’ve got to go out for a moment,” he told Tyler. “I’ll be right back. I’ll bring you a treat.”

“Can you bring me my mommy?” the boy asked hopefully.

“Not yet,” the first man lied. “But soon. When she’s feeling better. How about some French fries. Do you like French fries?”

“I like the toys that come with them.”

“Okay, I’ll bring you some. In the meantime, here are your other toys.” The man arranged the plastic soldiers he had bought earlier in front of the boy and left. His cell phone was ringing again before he was even out the door. “What are you going to do?” he said into the phone. “Come over and make me?” The front door shut behind him and I was alone with the boy.

Or maybe I wasn’t.

Tyler Matthews picked up a toy solider and held it out, like an offering, speaking to someone I could not see.

“I share,” he said proudly. “I learned how in preschool. I will give you a soldier.”

He smiled at whatever answer he alone had heard. He arranged the soldier on the rug and added a few more plastic men. “That’s you, Pawpaw,” he said, pointing to a toy soldier dressed in a paratrooper outfit. “See his gun?”

The boy touched a tiny gun painted on the plastic soldier’s hip. “Let’s play army.” He cocked his head, listening intently. “No,” he told his invisible friend. “I’m not scared. I’m a big boy. But I think Mommy will be mad about the doughnuts. Do you want one? I can get one for you.” Whatever he heard in reply, he settled back into place on the rug, then stretched out on his stomach and, with the deep intensity of small children, became lost in his imaginary world, unaware that the cameras above him were recording his every move and that the man who would soon return was not his friend.

A few minutes later, the man who had abducted Tyler Matthews returned to the apartment, carrying a Happy Meal and a newspaper. He left the food with the boy and took a seat at the far end of the kitchen table, where the cameras could not see him. He lit a cigarette and began to read the newspaper intently. The front page was splashed with the news about Tyler’s abduction. He pulled on a cigarette as he scanned through the articles on the front page. Both excitement and dread danced in him as he read of Tyler’s abduction, the adrenaline overcoming any fear he had at being caught. Then I felt something in him catch, a curiosity and some sort of recognition. He let his cigarette drop and reread the article he’d been scanning, frowning as he did so. Images flickered across his mind as he searched to find meaning in something he remembered. Confusion followed, then a revelation, and, right on its heels, guilt again and a sense of obligation. He stood up abruptly from the table and joined Tyler in the living room, coaxing the boy to eat. I lingered behind, curious to see what he had been reading.

It was not an article about the abduction of Tyler Matthews. The article that had triggered his internal turmoil had been a story about the murder of Fiona Harker, relegated to a spot on the second page, juxtaposed ironically above a story detailing the success of a recent fundraiser for the hospital.

What in the world could Fiona Harker have to do with him?
I wondered.
What was the connection?

The man’s cell phone rang again. This time he sounded angry rather than obedient when he answered it. “What do you want?” he demanded.

“Have you been smoking in the house?” the man on the other end asked.

“No,” the first man said.

“You’re lying. The smoke is spoiling the clarity of the shot. It’s a filthy habit.”

“You should know about filthy habits,” the first man snapped. He was staring at Tyler Matthews, who was trying to feed French fries to his plastic soldiers.

The other man took a long time to think before he spoke again. “I forbid you to smoke,” he said flatly. “It is forbidden.”

“You smoke,” the first man said. “Why is it you want me to pick up some of your filthy habits, but not all of them?”

“You will do as I say,” the second man ordered, his voice growing in volume. It had an instant effect on the first man—I could feel overwhelming fear, shame, and revulsion fill him. It was a conditioned response. “You will do as I say or suffer accordingly. Need I remind you why I am this way? It’s your fault and your fault alone.”

Guilt flared in the first man, a crushing, overwhelming guilt.

“Did you hear me?” the second man barked.

“Yes,” the first man said, his voice reduced to a whisper. “I heard you.”

“Now, take off the boy’s shirt and leave the room. I want to watch him alone for a while. I will call you when I am ready.”

The first man gently removed Tyler’s tiny T-shirt and folded it neatly into a square, as precisely as a soldier might fold his uniform, before leaving the room.

If there had been anything I could have done to protect the boy, I would have stayed. But I thought I knew who the man on the other end of the phone was. I prayed that the core of goodness languishing deep inside the man who was with Tyler would hold, at least for a while, and I left to find out if I was right.

There are luxuries the living alone enjoy that I can no longer take for granted—picking up a phone, tapping at a computer keyboard, turning the pages of a police report. I have but two weapons left open to me when it comes to uncovering information: what I can see and what I can feel. I would need both to learn if what I suspected was true.

Robert Michael Martin was a lonely man sitting in a lonely room. He was perched on the edge of a chair in his newly clean living room, as if he was hoping for more company at any moment. The house seemed bigger than ever, the rooms even more empty. Not even Noni Bates was there to help him pass his suddenly empty hours. He was no longer welcome at KinderWatch, and his time in the sun helping Calvano and Maggie had passed. Now everyone else was frantically pursuing leads or resting at home with their loved ones, while he sat alone in a living room that had been cleaned for people who would no longer be coming. Without work to fill his hours, he had nothing.

I hated what I was about to do.

I sat across from Martin and concentrated on following the thread of loneliness that emanated from him. I followed it into his memories, memories that felt as lonely as his present. I caught glimpses of a solitary little boy, terrified of others, hiding behind his mother, peering out at the world, certain it would hurt him. I saw a pudgy boy sitting at a desk in a corner of a classroom, unnoticed by either teacher or classmates. I saw a grown man climbing the steps to a second-floor bedroom again and again, bearing food, offering flowers, administering medications, patiently adjusting pillows, doing what little he could to ease the suffering of the dying woman who lay there. I felt his certainty that, when she died, the only person in the world who loved him would be gone. Then I saw a grieving man at a graveside service, attended by few others, and then again, walking alone along the sidewalks of our town, nearly as unseen by others as I was, seeking out the noisy life of a playground to fill the empty hours of his days.

I hated the cruelty of what I was about to do even more.

Gently, I probed Martin’s mind and found the fresh wound that was born of his memories of Calvano’s treatment of him and Colonel Vitek’s accusations. They had merged into a single, painful reminder that he was a man born to lose, a man who had stepped forward to help, only to be accused of the worst crimes imaginable. I concentrated hard on the feelings of betrayal their accusations had triggered and how they had torn at Martin’s fragile ego. I felt his shock that this had happened to him give way to a sense of deep injustice, followed by outrage, recurring sadness, anger, and—finally—there it was: resentment. I fanned that resentment. I made him think of all the hours he had put into protecting children, of how he had trusted the colonel for guidance and how very hard he had worked for the colonel’s approval. I made him remember all the times the colonel had asked favors of him, the hours he had given without pay to the cause, the children he had no doubt saved with his selfless vigilance. Like a singer with only one note to offer, I planted a thought in his mind over and over:
I trusted him, I trusted him, I trusted him. And he betrayed me.

Then, like a man starting a fire with a tiny mound of tinder, I fanned his outrage ever so carefully by triggering the memories of Maggie and Calvano in his living room earlier that day. “We are looking for a man who would insinuate himself into the investigation,” Calvano had said. “He would want to be of help, so he could keep an eye on what the police have found.” Once Martin had that thought firmly in his head, I brought him back to his resentment toward the colonel and, finally, I intertwined those thoughts in his mind.

He got it.

Martin sat straight up and gasped. His face grew red with fury. His heart burned with outrage that he had been accused by a man he was now certain was guilty.
How dare the colonel have said such things about him? How dare the colonel have tried to ruin his reputation when his own hands were surely dirty?
But then Martin’s conviction faltered. . . .
The colonel was in a wheelchair. How could he have managed to . . . ?
I felt Martin’s resolve wobble and stepped up the cruelty of the thoughts I was planting in his mind.
He accused me of hurting children. . . . He accused me of unspeakable acts. He as much as said that he was certain I had taken the boy. . . . The things he implied I wanted to do with a child . . .

That did the trick. Martin rose abruptly and raced to his computer room, where he stuffed his pockets with those tiny computer thumb drives I had never bothered to master when I was alive. I wondered why he needed them and, for one brief moment of fear, grew afraid he would only lead me back to the station house. But no, he turned away from the direction of headquarters as he left home and strode angrily along the sidewalks of his neighborhood, leading me in the opposite direction.

I knew he was taking me to the colonel.

But then another thought rose in my own mind, one I should have considered from the start. What would happen when Martin tried to confront a man who was clearly more experienced than he was at harming others, a man who might even have a gun? What if I could not stop Martin from forcing a confrontation? The desire to hurt is easy to bring forth in the human mind; there are so many things human beings feel angry about it. But restraint? Impossible once you have set the wheels of fury in motion.

Martin stopped in front of a small ranch house isolated from its neighbors by a large, flat lawn designed to discourage company. The front of the home was nearly obscured by an unbroken line of shrubs. The entrance door was on the left side of the house and it opened onto a low, wooden platform connected to a wide, concrete driveway by a ramp built to accommodate the colonel’s wheelchair. The driveway ended at the rear of the house, where a garage and adjoining cedar fence blocked the backyard from view.

The driveway was empty. The colonel was not home. My relief was profound. I would remember this lesson and be more careful in the future. I had no business using people that way.

Martin had been there many times before as a volunteer, and he knew the house’s weaknesses. He looked around to see if he was being watched, then quickly walked around to the far side of the house. He was completely concealed from the eyes of neighbors by the fence and shrubbery. A window had been left cracked open toward the middle of the house. Martin braced himself against the trunk of a tree, pried the window open farther, and wriggled through it with difficulty, finally dropping down into a bathroom. He waited until he was sure he was alone, lowered the window to its original position, and stepped out into the hallway of the colonel’s house.

There was no evidence of a woman’s touch anywhere, nor was there any attempt at decoration beyond the utilitarian. The floors were linoleum and the furniture crafted in a blocky, crate design. A large-screen TV and new couch dominated the living room. The dining alcove was barely big enough to hold a plain pine table. Chairs lined the table along three sides, while the fourth was kept clear for the colonel’s wheelchair. The kitchen was big but outdated, with appliances and fixtures that were decades old. Cereal bowls and coffee cups had been washed and left to dry in the drainer next to the sink—did KinderWatch volunteers gather here for breaks, or did the colonel live with someone?