Angel of Darkness (3 page)

‘Sure,' Connie agreed. ‘How long will it take?'

‘An hour should do it. Then I can give you my recommendation on how long I think Michael needs to stay with us and what it is we're looking at.'

‘Do you think it's drugs?' Connie asked. Fear radiated from her. Addiction. Obliteration. Promises. More addiction. She'd been there before.

Miranda shook her head. ‘There was nothing in his system. This is emotional in nature.'

‘His father—' Connie began.

‘I know,' Miranda interrupted. ‘I have the family history. But let's take it one hour at a time. Michael is his own person and we've come a long way in the treatment of adolescents. Let's see what we're up against first.'

Connie nodded, glad to stave off her worst fears for the next hour, at least. She followed Cal out of the ward while I tagged along behind Miranda, desperate to know if my death was the cause of Michael's grief. As pitiful as it sounds, I needed to know that I had mattered to him. I needed to know he remembered me.

Michael was sprawled across his narrow bed, staring at a book that I was pretty sure he wasn't really reading.

‘I'm Dr Fowler,' Miranda explained, offering her hand as if he were a grown man. Michael held the grip awkwardly before letting go. He inched away from her. She made him nervous. She was too calm, too self-possessed. He was used to fighting Connie's passionate concern with sullen indifference. How do you fight calm?

‘I'm going to be your therapist while you're here,' Miranda explained. ‘I'm not a medical doctor. I have my PhD in clinical psychology, with a specialty in treating early adolescent depression.'

‘I'm not depressed,' Michael insisted stubbornly. ‘I'm just pissed off.'

‘I bet you are.' Miranda dragged a chair closer to Michael. She was not going to ask that he join her in an office. She was willing to join him. ‘It's appropriate for you to be pissed off right now. Your father dies, no one ever talks about it, then your mother replaces him pretty quickly, I'd have to say. On top of all that, I'm willing to bet there's not a person in this world who seems to be paying you a damn bit of attention. Did I leave anything out?'

Michael closed the book on his lap. He may even have been trying to smile. ‘Yes. I'm in love with a girl who barely knows I exist,' he added. ‘Even though I talk to her every day at school.'

‘No!' Miranda seemed genuinely shocked. ‘Now you're depressing
me
.'

Michael smiled in spite of himself. That single spark of humor gave me hope. ‘My mom thinks I'm just like my dad,' he told Miranda. ‘She thinks that I'm going to grow up to drink and mope and screw up all the time, and not care about anyone but myself.'

There it was: the most matter-of-fact indictment of my life I had ever heard.

‘And yet you loved your father,' Miranda said. ‘And I have no doubt that he loved you deeply.'
Thank you, bless you, thank you, Miranda.
‘Now his love is gone. It has to hurt, Michael. To know that his love is gone.'

Just like that, my son was fighting tears. ‘I wasn't trying to kill myself when I crashed my mom's car,' he said through clenched teeth.

‘Maybe not,' Miranda answered gently. ‘But you did steal it. And we need to talk about that. And you could have killed the family in the other car. We need to talk about that, too. And, Michael – I don't think your mother would survive if something happened to you. Nor would your brother's world ever be the same.'

‘I'm only fourteen,' he whispered.

‘I know,' she said. ‘It hardly seems fair, does it? That so much should be on you?'

The tears came.

I left them.

His secrets were not mine to hear.

FOUR

I
wondered if Connie blamed me for what was happening to Michael. Always a glutton for punishment, I went in search of her and found her in the courtyard that marked the center of Holloway's vast grounds, holding Cal's hand as they waited for Michael's therapy session to end. If Cal was impatient to get back to work, he did not show it.

I saw Olivia, the patient I had cast in my imaginary Holloway family, sitting in her customary spot on a bench close to the fountain of marble cherubs. I joined her on the bench, where I had a good view of Connie and her fiancé, though it was hard to look at anyone other than Olivia. The hints of magenta in her hair seemed to dance in the sunlight, mesmerizing me. Her face was so pale and solemn that she looked like a Madonna sitting in repose at the feet of the angels.

It wasn't that I was trying to eavesdrop. I was just trying to find my way. Connie and Cal were waiting in a companionable silence. They fit, and it hurt.

‘I come out here to be alone, you know,' Olivia said to me.

I turned to her, stunned. ‘You can see me?'

‘I'm crazy, not blind. What unit are you in?'

‘Me? I'm . . . I'm a visitor here,' I stammered. How was it that she could see me when she never had before? Only people close to death or spiraling into madness could see me. My heart sank. I knew what it had to be.

‘Don't do it,' I told her.

‘Do what?' She chewed at her lower lip with perfect white teeth as she stared at the cascading waters of the fountain.

‘Don't hurt yourself.'

She looked up at me, startled.

‘Don't ask me how I know,' I said. ‘Just don't hurt yourself. You can't be more than thirty. You have your whole life ahead of you.'

‘My daughter is dead,' she said matter-of-factly. ‘My life died with her.'

What do you say to that?

‘That's my wife,' I offered. Hey, it was the best I could come up with. I nodded at Connie, as if offering up my own sorrow might somehow make Olivia feel better about hers.

‘The woman holding that guy's hand?' Olivia squinted at them. ‘He works here at Holloway, you know.'

‘A doctor?'

‘No. I think he hires the nurses and orderlies. They all know him. Why is he sitting with your wife and holding her hand while you're sitting here with me?'

‘It's a very long story,' I told her.

‘OK. Maybe a better question is this: why are you just sitting there staring at them and not doing anything about it?'

‘That's an even longer story,' I explained.

Olivia's gaze was like warm honey. I felt its heat and tasted its sweetness. To be seen, to be recognized, was . . . divine.

‘What's your name?' she asked, letting curiosity overcome her despair.

‘Kevin. I know yours. It's Olivia.'

‘Well, that's not creepy at all.' She stared back at the fountain. For the first time, I noticed that all of the marble cherubs were boys and that they appeared to be peeing on one another. Good lord. What kind of message did that send to Holloway's already confused patients?

‘Are you sure you're a visitor?' Olivia asked me.

‘I'm sure. I just like it here. It's peaceful.'

‘Like a tomb,' she agreed. ‘A tomb, a tomb, a tomb.'

‘What happened to your daughter?' I asked, needing to know.

‘I killed her.'

I was going to say something, anything, to break the silence that followed, but the air was split with the sudden sounds of sirens approaching from far below, growing in volume as official vehicles raced toward Holloway.

‘This isn't good,' Olivia predicted. ‘Probably one more crazy for the hardcore unit.' She looked up at the brick building where the criminally insane were kept and I realized, with a start, that Otis Parker, the killer I'd failed to put on Death Row, was standing at the fence staring at Olivia as he idly caressed his groin.

But Parker, too, was distracted by the sound of sirens. Oddly, he hurried across the exercise yard to the back of the hospital, where a chain-link fence marked the edge of the cliff that overlooked a valley. It was almost as if he already knew what I soon realized: the approaching police cars were not headed to Holloway at all. They zoomed past the front gates and continued in a loop around the hill, down toward the river that snaked through the valley below.

‘I must be going,' I told Olivia. ‘We shall meet again soon.'

She stared at me, for the first time, I think, wondering if I was real.

‘Don't do it,' I repeated. ‘Promise me. Just wait. We can talk again.'

She looked back at the fountain, unwilling to promise, but I could not stay any longer. I had to know what was going on.

I am not bound by cliffs or walls. It was nothing for me to take the most direct route to the scene. All I had to do was pass through the unit for the criminally insane first. The men inside were pumped up from their game of basketball. The possibility of violence nearby excited them further. I could smell the tang of their sweat and feel their energy buzzing around me like angry bees as I moved through their ranks. I reached the far edge of the exercise yard and joined the inmates gathered at the inner fence overlooking the cliff. They stamped and jostled like beasts in a pen smelling a blood sacrifice.

The inmates had a bird's-eye view of the scene unfolding along the banks of the Delaware tributary below. Official cars were pulling up near a small bridge that spanned the river just before a wooded area. A group of men stood at the top of the embankment, peering down at a dark shape sprawled on the riverbank below. It had to be a body. Nothing else brought out so many badges.

Otis Parker had claimed his spot at the front of the pack and stood at the fence, inches from me. He wore a huge smile as he watched the scene unfolding below. His attention was absolute. It was as if he were watching a play that had been staged just for him. He groaned, unaware he had made the sound, and pressed his body against the fence, unconsciously grinding his hips against the metal.

That's when it hit me with an absolute certainty: Otis Parker had known this was going to happen.
He had been waiting for it.

FIVE

E
very crime scene I have ever visited is different, yet somehow the same. Invariably, the body seems smaller than you ever expect. Death itself seems smaller, almost like a let-down. Is the absence of life really this quiet, this ordinary? How is it that the world can go on around it, as if nothing has happened at all? Would death even matter if the living were not there to mark it – and fear its cold finger one day?

It was no different with the scene by the river. The area had been quickly taped off from onlookers. State troopers and county deputies were holding back the curious that had started to gather. The body had once been a young girl. Her denim miniskirt and gauzy white peasant blouse were bunched up, as if she had been dragged back toward the river by her ankles, exposing long arms and legs. Her skin seemed impossibly pale in the afternoon light. She lay face down on the grassy bank, her head and hands extending upward as if she were trying to crawl away from the river. The undisturbed grass around her made it clear that she had been killed elsewhere and left by the river to be found.

Usually when a body has been moved, I feel nothing at the dump site. The essence of the person whose life has been taken has long since wandered beyond to the place I cannot find. But that was not the case with this girl. I could feel a trace of her essence lingering nearby. I wondered if she, like me, was looking on from a twilight world, unable to move beyond, and if she, like me, wondered why she had been given so little time to live, so very little time to become who she had wanted to be. Yes, there was regret surrounding her body, a sadness and recognition of loss, but there was something else there, too: relief, perhaps, or maybe resignation. A sense of weariness and a burden put down. It seemed a heavy load for one so young. Whoever she was, she had not had an easy life.

I moved closer. Her body sprawled half in mud and half in tall grass that ruffled in the breeze. Butterflies flittered from wild flower to wild flower, only inches from her body. Her death had not disturbed the spring.

Her hair had been bleached weeks ago and her dark roots were obvious. That and her clothing told me she was probably from the neighborhood in our town that was, quite literally, ‘on the other side of the tracks.' A hundred years ago, train-loads of coal from Pennsylvania had sped through that side of town, dusting the area with a black rain so sooty and persistent that the residents had named the neighborhood Helltown. These days, trains still roared through a half-dozen times a week at most, ferrying manufacturing supplies from Wilmington to New Jersey and back, still splitting the town into two sides: one for those who had everything and one for those who had almost nothing. Only people without the money to live elsewhere called Helltown home. It was filled with young girls like the one lying before me, girls whose only tickets out were their youth. This one had not even had a chance to trade hers for a better life. And now her life was over.

I heard the slam of a car door on the roadway above, followed by the sounds of someone moving fast through the bushes. I knew it must be Maggie, my replacement on the squad. Maggie always arrived at a crime scene moving as fast as she had driven there, exceeding the speed limit in both cases. She would leap from her car and be halfway across the crime scene before her car door even shut behind her. Her natural speed was surprising, given her stocky build. She was muscled with plain features and ordinary brown hair that looked as if it had been cut by someone more used to trimming men's hair. But the way she moved, parting the world around her as she claimed her way in life, made her beautiful to me. She was emphatically alive and always absolutely focused. I think she loved being alive; I think she loved being here. And I loved her for it.

Sure enough, Maggie arrived on the scene full speed ahead, taking in the girl's body and its arranged posture immediately. She wasted little time talking to the uniformed cops who had arrived at the scene before her. She liked to pick up her own first impressions. She vetted a small grassy area for evidence and then knelt by the body, running her hands over the girl meticulously, as if she were blind, consulting with the forensic technician about body and air temperature, humidity and the effect of the sun on the girl's exposed skin. From what they could tell, the body had been dumped there the night before, and discovered when a pair of retired postmen broke through the brush in search of a good fishing spot.