Desolate Angel (21 page)

“I was sorry to hear about your mother. That’s a tough way to go.”

Maggie looked away. “It was kind of you to come to the service.”

“Least I could do.” Gonzales sounded almost human. It was a side of him I had not seen in two decades. “My dress blues ought to be good for something.”

“It helped my father,” she said. “You being there.”

But Gonzales had used up his humanity allotment for the day and, to my relief, there was not even a smile exchanged between the two of them when they were done. He simply signed the request for a warrant, handed the file back to Maggie, and picked up the phone to call the judge.

By five o’clock, Maggie had her search warrant.

Chapter 22

With warrant in hand, Maggie radiated an immense, intractable resolve that transcended consciousness. It was a determination to conquer her prey that extended back thousands of years, connecting her to her primal ancestors hunting for their survival. She no longer needed to kill to eat, but she still had the urge in her. I could feel it throbbing like a piano wire being plucked with a thumb. She had simply turned the compulsion to hunting a new kind of prey. Was this why she was so much better than I had ever been at her job?

She exuded a cold and terrible light about her when she was in this state. Nothing living would want to venture near her, and even I, beyond such things, felt a vague fear as I waited with her in her car, an unseen companion who craved her company as a way to chase all other thoughts from my overactive mind. Where had Danny gone? Had my old partner known more about who killed Alissa Hayes than he’d let on? Why had he disappeared?

Let it go, I told myself. Just let it go. Watch Maggie be Maggie and let it go.

Maggie had parked down a side street with a clear view of the Hayes front door. She was waiting for Alan Hayes to leave his home before she served her warrant. Backup was awaiting her instructions and, occasionally, she would update them via radio, always telling them to keep standing by. She knew his schedule by heart. He would be leaving for a faculty meeting soon. She’d approach once he left. His wife would be easier to deal with alone. Maggie was not as reckless as Danny and I had been. Today, she just wanted information. This was a preliminary search. She’d get Hayes for good later on.

The sun was setting with a spectacular fiery pulsing of reds and oranges in the western sky. Maggie did not give it a glance. Me? I sat in the backseat and stared as fingers of scarlet tinged with purple began to spread across the horizon, marveling at its beauty. I could feel the dying beauty of the earth around me acutely now that I was dead: the choking of the rivers, the poisons in the air. But sunset was one earthly glory that pollution enhanced. And enjoying it would not make anything worse.

It was, I realized, as terrible and as beautiful in its power as Maggie herself.

She waited. Finally, Alan Hayes left his house. She gave him ten minutes to come back for anything he might have forgotten. She then asked her backup for a five-minute head start and walked briskly to the front door, knowing exactly what she was going to say. A single uniformed officer emerged from a car across the street, ready to accompany her inside. Morty, her father’s old friend. Morty, master of the notification and condolence call. Morty, a man I had underestimated.

“Ready?” he asked her in a low voice.

She nodded and rapped sharply on the door, then pounded when no one responded. Finally, the door opened a crack.

“Mrs. Hayes?” Without missing a beat or betraying her intentions, Maggie used her foot to gently but insistently push the door open wider.

“Yes?” Elena Hayes took a step back, confused. She did not seem to recognize Maggie from her prior visit. Her eyes were unfocused and the air about her felt sluggish, almost muddy.

Prescription drugs, I thought, a bad American habit to chase away bad Russian memories.

“I have a warrant to search your premises for items outlined in this document.” Maggie thrust the papers at her. Elena Hayes stared at them dully. “It’s mostly items from your husband’s lab in the basement,” Maggie explained. How had she known it was there? Was she guessing?

Elena Hayes blinked at Maggie. “Lab?” she repeated.

“His hobby room. Where he makes his jewelry.” Maggie nodded toward the brightly colored bracelet encircling Elena’s wrist. She was guessing.

“Oh, yes. His workshop. It’s in the basement.” Her words were slurred. “You know, I really should call Alan and let him know that you’re here to—”

“No problem,” Maggie interrupted. “But we already tried to reach him ourselves. We called his office and cell. He seems to be at a faculty event right now.” Maggie took Elena Hayes by the elbow and guided her inside the house, as if willing the groggy woman to cooperate.

It worked. Elena Hayes led us into the house and to the basement steps. As we descended the stairs, I felt waves of despair rising around me, welcoming me into an embrace of lingering sadness. This, I thought, was like the first faint stirrings of Hell, the level before you descended down into eternal torment. This was where the pain rose, hovered, and spread out in a mushroom cloud of suffering. It was not a place where anyone with a spark of goodness would want to linger. It reminded me of the miasma that had hovered over Vicky Meeks’s body in the clearing a few days before and of the evil within the prison’s walls—but did that prove anything? I could not be sure. I did not understand my new ability to feel fully. I only knew that the vast, sterile basement I followed Maggie into was a receptacle for great sorrow.

It was as spotless as an operating room. Drywall had obviously been installed within the last few years and painted a blinding white. The ceiling was just as relentlessly bright and smooth. Inset fluorescent lights lent the surfaces a faintly greenish glow. Steel counters lined two walls and held a series of meticulously labeled white plastic storage drawers. Each drawer held a different kind of rock. There were hundreds of uncut gemstones and other rock samples, all organized into the appropriate drawers. Between sections of storage drawers stood various tumblers, cutters, and electric saws, with each piece of equipment stored precisely in its spot and protected with a plastic cover.

For a man into rocks, the workshop was strangely texture-free. Even the floor was smooth concrete, marred only by a central drain that gaped open in its center like the terrible dark eye of a Cyclops.

Maggie began to open drawers with a methodical efficiency. Gallon jugs of bleach were stored inside almost every cabinet door and the room reeked of chlorine and lemon-scented disinfectant. There would be no DNA here. Maggie would be lucky to find a fingerprint that belonged to the family, much less anything to tie Alan Hayes to Vicky Meeks.

But she tried. Two forensics specialists arrived, as did three plainclothes officers skilled at searching for evidence. They opened drawers, checked cabinets, ran their fingers across the smooth drywall, but found nothing to interest them. After a few minutes, Elena Hayes drifted upstairs, leaving a whiff of alcohol behind as she stumbled past me on the stairs where I was sitting, watching the show. She was too wasted to care that her home had been invaded. When she did not return, I knew she’d lain down somewhere for a few hours of oblivion, watched over by Morty, who had been murmuring soothing words to her in Russian while the basement was searched. That Morty. He was far more useful than I’d ever been.

But what was Elena Hayes trying to escape with her pills and booze? Was it the past, or was it the sterile coldness of her house and her husband? Were there darker, more recent memories she hoped to evade? I did not know what it all might mean.

Maggie’s energy did not flag, despite the lack of results. She had the team examine every groove in every piece of equipment they found, swabbing, scraping, and bagging diligently. There was little to find. Like the rest of the house, the basement was barren. Even the trap in the floor drain gleamed in the glare of Maggie’s flashlight. She had the crew scrape samples from the sides anyway. All it would take was a few tiny bits of genetic material to link Alan Hayes to the death of Vicky Meeks.

Still, the entire, vast room looked as if it were freshly scoured every hour on the hour. I did not give it much hope.

I would have given up long ago, but Maggie did not seem discouraged. She was hunting evidence on a much smaller scale than I’d ever been able to see. She seemed elated at the minute traces of dust extracted from a polishing wheel tumbler. And a thin drawer set into the counter itself yielded a few more crumbs of unidentified rock residue, which Maggie triumphantly noted. When every counter and storage drawer had been harvested, she turned her attention to a white metal cabinet nestled in one corner. She had just opened one of its glass doors when a young voice said softly from a spot behind me on the basement steps: “You won’t find anything in there. He’s too careful for that.”

I whirled around, astonished that any human being had been able to get so close without my noticing their presence.

Sarah Hayes sat a few steps above me, taking it all in. Her long coltish legs were folded up against her chest and she had wrapped her arms tightly around her knees. She was as protected as a butterfly yet to emerge from its cocoon.

Maggie did not reply. She simply stepped to the foot of the stairs, looked right past me, and stared at the young girl on the steps above me, a questioning look on her face. I felt the wave of Maggie’s empathy wash over me as surely as I had once felt the cooling power of the ocean douse the heat from my body as a child. The girl felt Maggie’s understanding, too, and she pulled her legs in even more tightly against her body.

“Look behind it,” Sarah Hayes said softly. I could barely catch the words.

“Behind the cabinet?” Maggie asked.

Sarah Hayes nodded and unfolded her limbs. She melted upstairs before Maggie could thank her.

My heart ached for them both.

Maggie did not waste time on sympathy. She was vibrating with an urgency that could not be derailed. “Help me,” she ordered two of her men. Together, they inched the cabinet away from the wall, swinging it out on one leg in an arc that revealed a small door cut neatly into the drywall behind it. Its handle was inset and as white as the wall around it, making it nearly invisible even when in plain view.

I had a sudden flash of Sarah Hayes—who had learned to move silently through her life in order to survive—creeping down the basement steps, peering through the dark at her father, determined to know where the enemy was every moment of the day and night, watching while he accessed his secret cache, not knowing what was inside but knowing that, whatever it was, it was worth hiding and might, perhaps, one day save her from him.

Maggie examined the hiding place with her flashlight, pulled on a pair of fresh evidence gloves, and eased a plastic shoebox from the hiding place. She was careful to hold it by the lip as she gingerly carried it to a countertop and set it down for closer scrutiny.

“Let me do that,” one of the men said as she started to pry it open.

“No, it’s okay,” Maggie assured him. “The sides are translucent. You can see inside, at least a little.” They peered through the milky plastic sides of the box. “It looks like scarves, maybe? Socks. It’s just . . . things.”

The men stepped back anyway as Maggie pried the lid from the box and began to lift the stored items out, displaying them on the stainless-steel counter one by one: a purple bandanna, an ankle bracelet made of tiny seashells, a lacy pink bra, a gold necklace with a heart-shaped locket dangling from it, a white cotton jogging bra, four pairs of panties, a diaphanous floral-print top, and an assortment of earrings.

“Could they belong to Alissa Hayes?” one of the men asked. “Maybe they’re mementos of his daughter?”

Maggie was frowning as she handled the garments, comparing the sizes and placing the earrings in one long row as she examined them carefully. She appeared not to have heard the question, but after a moment she looked up at the man who had asked it.

“They’re mementos all right.” She held up the panties. “But they’re not from his daughter. There are three different sizes here, from three different manufacturers.” She held up several of the earrings. “And these are not only completely different styles, two pair are for pierced ears, but these two aren’t.” She touched the two bras. “These are different sizes as well.”

The men stared at her, not understanding.

“They belonged to different girls,” Maggie explained.

No one said a word. They all understood. Alan Hayes was guilty. And Alissa Hayes and Vicky Meeks had not been the only girls to die at his hands.

Me? I already knew this to be true because they were all there, staring at me.

They’d appeared, one by one, as Maggie lifted the objects from the box, their figures arrayed against one of the bare walls as neatly as if they were in a police lineup: a row of battered, once-beautiful, young girls—now gone to the world, mourned by parents, by sisters, by brothers and friends.