Angel Interrupted (6 page)

Gonzales tried not to smile. “Take a team and talk to him. Do you have his address?”

“Right here, Commander.” Calvano held up his notebook.

“If he gave you the right address,” Maggie pointed out.

Calvano looked momentarily alarmed, but recovered. “I know what he looks like,” he said confidently. “We can smoke him out.”

“Fine,” Gonzales said. “Pull six men from across town to visit your suspect. No lights, keep it low-key. They should be out of uniform. Ask for a voluntary search of the house. Get back to me if the owner refuses, and I’ll arrange for a warrant.”

Calvano left the car as supremely confident of his abilities as when he had first entered it. Nothing, not reality or the scorn of others, could put a dent in his ego. The sad thing was that it had carried him this far.

With Calvano gone, there was plenty of room for me. I made myself comfortable in the driver’s seat and pretended to steer as I eavesdropped on Maggie and Gonzales. There were times when I badly missed my old life or, rather, badly missed the life I wish I had lived. This was one of them. I wanted to be one of the good guys. The best I could do was to eavesdrop while they talked.

Gonzales had relaxed the moment Calvano left the car and became as close to human as he can manage. “Don’t say it,” he said to Maggie.

“Don’t say what?” she asked innocently, though she was trying not to smile. Maggie’s plain face is transformed when she smiles, but she doesn’t smile very often. She feels the world’s pain a little too much than might be healthy for a woman her age, but it’s the price she pays for being a better detective than I ever was.

“You’re angry I put Calvano with you,” Gonzales said.

“You couldn’t have put him with one of the other mouth-breathers?”

Gonzales looked apologetic. “I can’t afford another nonfunctioning team,” he explained. “I’m still paying the price for Fahey and Bonaventura.”

Ouch.
That hurt. The reference to my old partner and me stung. Were we never to be posthumously rehabilitated? They did it for politicians all the time.

Maggie started to say something—I let myself imagine she had been about to spring to my defense—but Gonzales stopped her with an upturned palm. “For another reason, too,” he said. “I can’t take another lawsuit in the department. You don’t put up with his crap. If I let him partner with any other woman, it would be a disaster. If I let him interact with witnesses or victims without someone like you to keep him in line, it would be a disaster. That’s why he’s in your lap. I promise it won’t be forever.”

“Sir, why have him at all?” she suggested. “I’m just asking.”

“Being a pigheaded bully is not incompatible with law enforcement,” Gonzales said. “You just have to know how to use his special talents.”

“And the fact that his uncle is a councilman has nothing to do with it?”

“Of course not,” Gonzales assured her with his politician’s grin, but at least he had the decency to know he was full of it. His smile faded. “Maggie, I need you to take the lead on Fiona Harker’s murder. It means a lot to me.”

“I heard about her treating your son.”

“She didn’t just treat him, she saved his life,” Gonzales said, his voice taking on an edge of genuine emotion I had never heard in him before. “I owe her. The emergency room was crashing in around us. It was a Saturday night and the ER was crowded with drunks bellowing and people brawling and all the doctors were just pushing the cases through and that—” His voice broke and he stopped to regain control. “That woman cared enough about my son to take a second look at his scan when the doctors had dismissed it and, because of her, they had him in surgery within half an hour. It saved his life. She deserves some justice. It’s all I can give her, but I owe it to her.”

“I understand, sir,” Maggie said. “I won’t let it go.”

“I know you won’t. That’s why I put you on it.”

“Unfortunately, that means Calvano needs to be lead on the missing kid case,” she said for him. “They might be related.”

“Do you think they are?”

“Only in the sense that whoever took the boy used the first crime as a distraction and was able to get away unnoticed.”

“You’re sure?’ Gonzales asked.

“The time frames are different. MO is different. No connection between victims.”

“What about the mother?” he asked. “Could she have harmed her boy?”

Maggie looked so sad at the mention of the missing boy’s mother. She wasn’t just empathetic to people, she assumed their sorrow and carried it inside her for the duration of a case. “It’s not her, sir. I talked to her briefly, but I had to have her taken to emergency psych. She’s broken. Lost her husband a year ago. Her kid is all she has. She thinks it’s her fault. It’s not her.”

“You’re sure about that?” Gonzales was being very careful; he’d had enough public relations disasters thanks, in part, to me.

Maggie nodded. “She didn’t have the time, she doesn’t have the motive, and she didn’t have the means. Witnesses saw her with her kid seconds before the crime scene distracted everyone, and there’s no way she could have killed him and hidden the body far enough away to avoid detection. We’d have found something. He was taken, sir. I put three offices on a closer search of the park, though it’s been trampled by volunteers. I doubt they’ll find anything.”

“We can’t stop people from wanting to help.”

“Not when there are six of us and sixty of them.”

“We’re going to have a lot more than six people on our side, and you don’t have to worry about Calvano screwing it up. I made a decision, and then I made a call. The feds are coming in on the missing child case.” Gonzales noticed Maggie’s smile. “Yes, Gunn, Calvano will have to deal with them instead of you.”

“When will they be here?”

“They’re in Baltimore wrapping up another case, but they’ll be here tonight.”

“You know that Calvano’s going to roust that poor neighbor before they get here,” she predicted. “He’ll want to get his licks in while he can.”

“The guy might be involved,” Gonzales warned her. “Calvano’s been right before.”

“From what I hear, Robert Michael Martin is just some poor guy who wants to be a hero,” Maggie said. “He’s not organized enough or motivated enough to have done what this abductor did. I think we’re looking for a pro.”

Gonzales sighed. “What kind of world has professional child abductors?”

“Our world?” Maggie suggested.

Gonzales regained his professional detachment. “I want you to ignore the media, ride herd on Calvano, and find out who did this to Fiona.”

“What about the boy?” She sounded wistful. Like everyone, she wanted to help.

“You’re going to work on that, too.”

“How?”

“Use the Harker case as a cover but, when you can, I want you to pursue any local angles on the kid, all right? You and I know the feds are going to come in with a profile and they’re going to broaden the search—but this is a small enough town that someone, somewhere, knows who it was. Or at least suspects who it was. He was taken from the heart of town. There’s got to be a local connection. I want us to be the ones who find it.”

“So you want me to solve the Harker case, and find out who took the boy, and keep Calvano in line all at the same time?”

“That’s about it,” Gonzales agreed.

“Do I at least get overtime?” Maggie asked, joking.

“I know you can do this,” Gonzales told her solemnly. “You can do it and more, if you need to.” For once, I agreed with Gonzales.

If ever I am sent back to the world of the living, I want a friend like Noni Bates to be with me. She beat the cops to Robert Michael Martin’s house, having correctly surmised that Calvano would set his sights on him. But it was more than that, I realized, when I found her on his front porch. A vein of anxiety ran through her, a fear he might turn out to be the most evil of beings her schoolteacher’s heart could imagine. I realized it took courage for her to be there at his house in pursuit of the truth. She was sturdy, but she was small, and she was no match for a man Martin’s size.

I wanted to search his house before anyone else arrived and polluted it with their own agendas. I didn’t think Martin was connected to the boy’s disappearance, not after feeling the residual emotions the kidnapper had left behind. But I’d racked up a lifetime of being wrong. So I felt it was prudent to check, just in case.

I lingered in the front hallway, soaking in the loneliness of the dusty old house, while Noni rang the bell outside. Martin appeared promptly, shambling along like a bear awoken from hibernation. I get to see the things people do when they think no one is looking, and sometimes it’s not pretty. Martin was sleepily scratching his belly and blinking as if surprised to find it was still daylight outside.

“Mrs. Bates?” he said when he opened the door—without checking to see who it was first, I might add. He was lucky he’d not been swept off his feet by a sea of cops and flattened against the hallway walls. “What are you doing here?”

“Get dressed,” she said firmly. “And call a lawyer now. I am certain that detective is on his way to arrest you.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong.” He sounded so dumbfounded, I almost felt sorry for the poor slob. He actually thought being innocent might protect him. That only told me he’d never run into cops like Calvano before.

“May I come in?” Noni asked. He stepped aside and she entered his front hall as if it were Buckingham Palace. If she noticed the musty air, the dust on the furniture, or the lingering smell of fried meat, she gave no sign that she found it in the least important.

But she did eye his attire. He’d ditched the flour-dusted jeans and was wearing a dingy T-shirt and boxer shorts. “Really, dear. I taught men like that detective when they were still boys and pushing other children around on the playground. He will be here soon. You get dressed and call a lawyer.”

“I don’t need a lawyer,” Martin said again, affronted at the implication that he might.

“Then at least get dressed.” The steel was back in her voice, and he blinked once, then obeyed, climbing the stairs to the upper chaos of his second floor. I followed.

It was as uncared for as the rest of the house. I moved from room to room, picking up on the vague fear that had driven his mother’s existence. It permeated every room, including the one where she had died: a hospital bed still dominated the interior and pill bottles still littered the bureau surface. Only the bed, stripped clean of its linens, had been touched since the body had been removed—what had he said? A year ago? The dude seriously needed to move on.

I felt sorry for the guy. He was just some schlep who’d never been loved enough as a kid because his mother had been too overwhelmed and afraid of sliding into poverty to spare the time. He didn’t have friends because he didn’t know how to make them.

I searched the rooms, all the while expecting to hear Calvano and his men entering below. There was no trace of a small boy anywhere, not in any of the two empty bedrooms or the chaotic one Robert Michael Martin clearly occupied and used, it appeared, for sitting in bed and eating pizza while he watched television. I even searched the attic. It was filled with the detritus of his mother’s life. She had apparently saved everything she ever owned, just in case she might need it again. The basement was dark and dirt-floored in that way of old houses that have never been updated. The boy had never been there. No one had ever been there. Martin lived in isolation. The rooms were half dead, as devoid of energy as his life.

I returned to the first floor just as Calvano arrived. If he was surprised to have Noni Bates answer the door, he did not show it.

“We’re here to search the house,” Calvano said, and I realized, appalled, that he did not recognize her from earlier. “We would like permission to search, but we can get a warrant, if necessary.”

“Wait here,” Noni told him, and shut the door firmly in his face, locking the dead bolt. I enjoyed that immensely. She called upstairs to Martin, who promptly appeared, attired in a short-sleeve checked shirt and chinos he had obviously not worn for several years. His belly spilled over the waistband like bread dough, but he did look far more respectable, like an actual taxpaying citizen, for example. For some of the cops waiting to search his house, that might make a difference.

“The police are here,” she told him with her usual conciseness. “They want permission to search your house.”

“Let them in,” he said at once. “Of course they can search. I have nothing to hide.”

Noni visibly relaxed. He had passed the test. She was back to believing him to be the innocent she hoped he was. “You be the one to let them in,” she advised him.

Martin opened the door. When he saw the rows of officers waiting to invade his life, words failed him. He simply stepped aside and let them enter.