Angel Interrupted (25 page)

Martin knew where he was going. He headed down the hallway and passed two bedrooms. One was wheelchair accessible for the colonel; the other was as spotlessly clean and unadorned as a monk’s cell. Toward the end of the hallway, Martin entered another bedroom that had clearly been converted into the headquarters of KinderWatch. My guess was that some of its volunteers worked from their homes, but others worked here, at times, with the colonel watching over them. Counters had been built along two of the walls and were lined with computer monitors at intervals, their dimmed screens illuminating a room darkened by drawn blinds and heavy curtains. The room was cooler than the rest of the house, and the steady hum of electronics filled the air.

Martin knew where to find the main computer and, within seconds, I realized why he was there. I had underestimated Robert Michael Martin. Yes, he had been bullied and disappointed his whole life. But he had yet to embrace this fate as permanent: he was, in no way, a willing victim. Martin wasn’t just angry at the colonel for accusing him of the worst crimes he could imagine, he was determined to get even.

Martin peeked out a window, barely lifting the curtain and blind to do so, verified that he was still alone, and set to work. However awkward he was in the real world, however ill-equipped to deal with women or to live a normal life among others, he was at home on a computer. Rapidly typing in commands, he pulled up lists of files, sorted them by date, culled the ones he apparently thought of little use, and began copying the others onto the miniature hard drives he had brought with him. I didn’t know enough about computers to understand what he was copying, but soon he was working on three computers at once, copying files simultaneously from all three to speed up the time required to capture what seemed to be an endless list of files. As the status bar of each file slowly filled, the minutes ticked past. Martin no longer seemed nervous or angry or awkward or uncertain. He had a plan. When the thumb drives grew full, he took disks from a drawer in a supply closet as casually as if he did it every day and began to copy still more files to those.

It was fascinating to feel the strength growing in Martin as he moved around his electronic world. I knew there had been a time when the imaginary world of his computer had been the only one to welcome him and, somewhere along the way, Martin had become master of that world, and he felt like himself within it.

Almost an hour had passed when we both heard the slam of a car door. Without panic, Martin quickly aborted the copying of the remaining files and tapped out commands on the keyboards to return them to their screensavers. He grabbed his thumb drives, stuffed his pockets with disks, and slipped out the door to the hallway before either one of us heard the click of the colonel’s key in the entrance door lock.

Martin knew his way around the house. As the colonel entered at one end, Martin quietly eased out a back door at the far end of the hall. It was not yet adapted to accommodate the colonel’s wheelchair. It was narrow and opened onto a small back deck that held a grouping of plastic chairs clustered around a large gas grill. This was where the volunteers probably gathered to hang out, talk among themselves, and escape the colonel’s overbearing manner. Cigarette butts littered the deck, and plastic cups half full of rain lined the railings. I don’t know why, but it made me feel better to think that Martin had had some sort of a social life after all, even if it was along the edges of the occasional volunteer get-together.

Martin was fast when he put his mind to it. The backyard was completely encircled by the tall cedar fence, its corners anchored by trees with overhanging branches ripe with the buds of spring. A swimming pool had been carved down the middle of the backyard in a perfect oblong. It gleamed a pristine light blue, as if it had been newly cleaned and was just waiting for the season to cooperate. Tables and chairs had been arranged around the edges of the pool. The KinderWatch volunteers probably kept the pool and backyard clean in return for being allowed to throw parties there.

Great bait for attracting volunteers and building a respectable façade.

Ignoring everything but his need to get away, Martin slipped out a back gate. I watched him gain speed as he drew away from the house. Soon he was practically running, the impact of what he had just done fueling his adrenaline. I was certain he was headed home to review the files in hopes he would find something to incriminate the colonel so that he could return the favor of hurling ugly accusations.

I returned to the colonel’s house, my own goal satisfied. I knew where the colonel lived now. I just needed to figure out what to do with that knowledge.

The colonel had returned home angry. It radiated from him in dark pulses as palpable as sound waves from an explosion. He threw his keys onto the kitchen table and immediately wheeled back to his computer room. Switching on the lights, he took his place at the largest monitor, pushed a few buttons, and adjusted the lens of a web camera. He pressed a few more keys, bringing up an image of the house along the lake where Tyler Matthews was being held. But the monitor displayed nothing but an empty living room, and my heart soared with hope—had the second man left with Tyler?

The colonel leaned forward and spoke distinctly into a microphone attached to his computer’s base. “Come here now,” he ordered in a voice now familiar to me.

He stared at the monitor, waiting. When nothing happened, he pulled out his cell phone and made a call. Soon, the man who had taken Tyler Matthews came into view on the webcam, stumbling sleepily into the living room. “What is it?” he mumbled sullenly into his own cell phone. “I was taking a nap.”

“Alone, I trust?”

“Yes, alone. What do you want?” The first man was angry.

“Put the phone down,” the colonel ordered. “Look into the camera.”

The man instantly complied. I realized he was used to performing for the colonel on cue. “What’s wrong?” the man asked, a note of fear creeping into his voice.

“I have just spent a very unpleasant hour at the police station being interrogated about KinderWatch volunteers.”

The other man flinched.

“You were careless,” the colonel accused him. “Your name is at the top of the list.”

“They won’t be able to find me,” the man said plaintively, and there it was again: he had dropped back into a much younger persona, almost as if he were two different people. He whined in his desperate desire to please the colonel. “This house is rented under a different name. They’ll find no evidence of me.”

“We’re moving the schedule up,” the colonel told him. “It’s only a matter of time before they subpoena my records and files. I will not lose this opportunity. I have over a hundred customers willing to pay three thousand dollars each to watch.”

“The boy is asleep right now,” the other man protested.

“Then wake him.” The colonel laughed. “It goes down tonight,” he said firmly. “It’s just a matter of time before they find you. Wake the boy, bathe him, and prepare yourself. I will notify the clients.” The colonel laughed again. It was ugly. “When this night is over, you will be on your knees, only this time you will be thanking me.”

The man on the other side of the camera looked stricken, but he seemed helpless to argue. “Tonight?” he asked weakly.

“Yes. Your whole life changes tonight.” The colonel paused. I could feel the evil in the room grow thick, fed by a lust that had reared its head deep in the colonel’s soul. His corruption of the man who was completely under his control excited him to a depth he had once thought lost to him.

This was what the colonel had been seeking.

He laughed again, more softly, then said, almost as an afterthought: “Tonight, I will make you into a man—and when it is all over, you will dispose of the boy.”

I could think of only one hope for Tyler Matthews: that the man who had taken him might somehow find the strength to go against the colonel’s orders. I had sensed a fragment of goodness deep inside him, buried by years of abuse and pain and hatred. But some good was still there, and it had led him to care for the boy, if not tenderly, at least adequately, over the past few days. That same spark might lead to his, and the boy’s, salvation.

How do you save a soul?
I did not even know how to save my own.

I headed to the house where the boy was being held, moving through a town that was going about its usual business without any inkling that a young boy’s fate hung in balance. People hurried, cars honked, drivers shouted, buses whooshed, trucks rumbled and roared—all the noisiness of a Saturday night suddenly seemed infinitely dear. I wished so badly that this cacophony of ordinary life was the soundtrack to my own existence, but I had moved well beyond that now. I was treading murky waters with no shoreline in sight.

Tyler Matthews was playing listlessly in a back bedroom, once again offering his soldiers to an unseen play-mate, oblivious to the horrors that awaited him. The man who had taken him stood shirtless in the living room, dressed only in jeans that sagged beneath his boney hips. He was weeping from the sting of the words being uttered over the camera system’s speakers.

“I took you in. No one else would have you,” the colonel was telling him, not in a thunderous, commanding voice, but in a quiet voice ripe with malignant confidence—and, oh, it was so much worse, that sibilant whispering that gnawed away at the edges of the young man’s soul with a power as corrosive and relentless as acid. The colonel knew he would win in the end; he was simply playing with his prey. “I took you in when no one, not even your own parents, would have you.”

“What do you want me to do?” the man in the house whispered, his cheeks wet with tears. He had twisted his arms around his torso, as if he might explode if he let go.

“You know what to do,” the colonel said scathingly. “It’s been done to you often enough.” The colonel’s malevolent laughter filled the silence that followed. “Trust me, my friend, once you begin, you will not need to ask me what to do.”

“Why?” the man pleaded. “Why are you making me do this?”

“Why?” The colonel sounded matter-of-fact. “Because I cannot do it myself.”

He was lying. He wasn’t doing it because he was confined to a wheelchair. Like all evil men, he was harming others because it fed a rapacious hole that burned within him, a nucleus of malice that fed on hatred of all that was good in the world, and a companion need to destroy anyone and anything that was happy. He did it because he could. Because he was strong and he had found someone weak. He did it for the power, and it was this power that fanned his lust.

“It wasn’t my fault,” the first man whispered.

“You were the one driving.” I knew it had been years since the accident that had left the colonel in a wheelchair, yet his tone was confident he would prevail in this most familiar of arguments between them. “Do you want people to know what you are?” the colonel continued. “Do you really want people to know who you are, what I’ve done with you all these years?”

The man did not answer. He did not need to. His lowered head, the way his body shrank inward on itself, the twisting of his torso were all proof to the colonel that his words had found their mark. The man would do his bidding.

“Do not fight me anymore,” the colonel advised in a deceptively kind voice. “You are about to discover your destiny. How many men can say they have achieved that?”

The first man could not bring himself to reply. His shame was palpable in the silence.

A child’s voice cut through the silence with the purity of a handbell resonating in the hush of a church.

There it was again—Tyler Matthews calling out from the back bedroom, whether to the man twisted in agony a few feet away or to his own imagination, I could not say.

But the man in the house heard him through his pain. I could feel the good in him flicker as his heart responded to the artlessness of that single word.

“Where did you go?” the little boy’s voice called out.

“I’m right here.” The man turned his back on the camera and walked slowly toward the hall.

“Don’t you dare move until I say you can,” the colonel thundered after him, but the man did not turn around.

Tyler was lying on his stomach, holding a tiny plastic chicken and pretending it was pecking at grain on the floor. He looked up, his brown eyes wide. “I want my daddy,” he said.

The man sat slowly beside Tyler and patted his back ever so gently. Once, I knew, someone had done that for him. But how long ago? Would the memory be enough to save them both?

“Your daddy isn’t here,” the man said. “Remember? He was in the war.”

“He says you can be my new daddy,” the little boy said confidently. “That you’ll look after me.” Tyler touched the man’s cheeks with a chubby hand. “My other daddy had rough skin. He let me hold his razor once.”