Desolate Angel (28 page)

“I don’t have time for being involved,” Maggie said. “You may as well give up that dream of grandchildren.”

“That’s not what Mrs. Millard says,” her father teased her.

“Mrs. Millard?” Maggie stared at her old man. I could feel her hackles rising. “You said you were going to tell her to stop spying on me. I mean, really, Dad—come on. I got enough troubles without that woman watching every move I make. When I’m home, I like my privacy. She needs to mind her own business.”

“Don’t go poppin’ your cork, Maggie May. I just asked her to keep an eye on you. I haven’t trusted that partner of yours in days, since before he showed up at the Double Deuce. I figure he’s going to come after you and make you look bad, maybe plant something in your apartment or locker. I want you to keep your eyes open. You don’t understand how resentful the old-timers can get when a woman comes in and makes them look bad. Even when the woman is you. And Bonaventura is old school.”

“What exactly did Mrs. Millard see?” Maggie asked skeptically.

“She saw your boyfriend leaving your house at a time of night when respectable men do not leave their girlfriends’ houses.”

Maggie stiffened. “Are you sure?”

Her father’s voice faltered. He knew that something was wrong. “Yes, I’m sure. She called me this morning. It was last night about this time. Two A.M.”

“I wasn’t home, Dad. I was working. What exactly did she see?”

“I don’t know. A guy leaving your house. She said he seemed to have a key. He locked the door behind him.”

“Didn’t Mrs. Millard think it was odd my car wasn’t there?”

“I don’t think she looked for it. It’s not like she’s trained in surveillance.” Her father’s voice took on an edge. “What’s going on, Maggie?”

“I have to go,” Maggie said abruptly.

“You’re not going anywhere,” her father answered in a tone of surprising authority. “Sit down.”

Maggie sat. I was astonished.

“This is bad, Dad. It could be him. It could be Alan Hayes. In my home.”

“It could be anyone. It could be Internal Affairs. It could be that scumbag ex of yours. It could be Bonaventura, trying to find out what you have on him or trying to plant something on you. We just need to think it through.”

“What do I do?” Maggie asked, her voice faltering.

“Nothing tonight,” her father said firmly. “You’re staying right where you are and getting some rest. I’ll get the blankets. You look exhausted and you’re not going back to your house alone in the dark. Both of us are smarter than that.”

“I didn’t even notice,” Maggie said, horrified. “I spent a couple hours there this morning and didn’t notice anything different.”

“We’ll talk about it in the daylight,” her father told her.

Maggie lay down on the couch, weariness overtaking her, unable to resist the comfort and safety of her childhood home. I think she was asleep before her father had even wheeled out of the room. He returned in a few minutes with a blanket and placed it lovingly over his daughter, tucking the ends in around her shoulders with the tenderness of a lifetime.

And then he did something extraordinary.

As his daughter slept through the remaining hours of the night, he sat in the front hallway, staring out a side window at the dark streets of his neighborhood, a gun across his lap, his attention never wavering unless it was to look over and check that his daughter was safe.

The night wore on, the hours wore on. And still the old man did not break his vigil. He kept watch while Maggie slept. And I kept watch beside him.

Chapter 27

I needed to know who had been in Maggie’s house. It was all I could do to help the old man keep watch, and if not for my fear that Hayes had followed her to her father’s house, I would have rushed off at once to see what I could find. Instead I waited until dawn. It finally came, bathing the world in a reassuring light, chasing away night fears and lulling Maggie’s father into long-delayed sleep. He was snoring gently, gun still in his lap, when she tiptoed past him and slipped out the front door. I followed, knowing she was headed home. Her determination radiated off her: she would find evidence of whoever had been in her home.

Me? I’d find evidence of a different sort.

She stopped by a local cafe for coffee and I breathed in its aroma as she sipped it in her car. What joy it gave me, that simple pleasure coupled with the remembrance of what she had said the night before: we were connected.

How I longed to be sitting beside her as her real partner, sipping my own cup of coffee, getting ready for the morning with her. If only Danny had died instead of me, what a partner I could have made for Maggie. Oh, how she would have redeemed me and given me the strength to turn my life around before it was too late. And wasn’t that what love was all about? The belief that another person could fix you, make you whole, fill in the missing pieces of your life? An illusion, perhaps, but one impossible to resist.

In return, I would have kept her safe. I wanted to do that now, even though the futility of my vigilance was obvious. I scrutinized every car we passed on the road—there were few this early—keeping an eye out for a black SUV or Danny’s clunker. I saw nothing but ordinary people leading ordinary lives on an ordinary morning in an ordinary town.

And yet, a killer thrived among them.

We reached her house. It was a nondescript condo, chosen, I was sure, because it freed her from responsibility for yard work or maintenance. She shared the building with another unit, but its occupants were still asleep. And no wonder. The sun had barely started its climb into the sky. The newness of the day was filled with such promise.

Maggie’s thoughts were darker. She examined the brass around the locks on her front door and ran her fingers over tiny chips in the doorjamb’s paint. Unlocking the door slowly, with barely a sound, she drew her gun and held it out in the defensive position, then slowly eased the front door open with her foot. She entered, gun drawn, moving quickly from room to room, ready to fire. I don’t think she took a breath for two minutes. After checking each of the six rooms and all of her closets, she double-checked that the front door had been bolted behind her and, finally, relaxed. Stripping down to her jeans and a pale blue bra, she began a more thorough search of her house, checking drawers, running her hands over bookcases, hoping to find a clue that might tell her who had broken in or what was missing. A spot on the top shelf of a cabinet in the dining area interested her. There, a small dust-free rectangle of oak gleamed where something had once stood. She ran her fingers over it, looked perplexed, then continued her search.

Me? I did not need to search to know who had been there. It was Danny. His odors lingered, no more real than memories to the living, but discernible by me: stale sweat, stale alcohol, and a dark emotion that snaked through the air in pencil-thin currents. It wasn’t evil, like the essence poisoning the Hayes house, but something sadder, something that weighed even more heavily on my soul.

I crossed a patch of it and it came to me: fear so persistent it had taken on a life of its own. Danny had come here out of an overwhelming, desperate fear.

As Maggie scrutinized every surface in her house—it was as Spartan as a hotel room, devoid of distractions and excess possessions—I followed close behind her, running my hands over pillows, touching chairs, the couch, tables, doorknobs, anything I could reach as I tried to decipher Danny’s intentions.

Why was he so frightened of Maggie? What could she do to him? What did he fear she might find out? I focused my memory on the original investigation into the murder of Alissa Hayes, searching for some action by Danny that had been out of character. I could remember nothing out of the ordinary, just that he had been deep in the throes of an alcoholic haze by then and growing angrier at the world by the moment.

In the end, neither Maggie nor I had any luck with our search. All I knew was that Danny had been there. All Maggie knew was that her home was not safe.

As she showered, bathroom door wide open and her gun within reach on a counter nearby, I waited in her living room, trying to figure out a way to let her know that it was Danny who had been in her house. Not Hayes, but Danny.

The only thing I could think of was to activate thoughts of Danny in her mind. I concentrated on recent memories: Danny at dinner with her, Danny standing too close to her desk, Danny looking over her shoulder to see what she was reading. I was trying to inspire some spark of intuition on her part.

It worked. She was barely dry from her shower and still wrapped in a towel—her amazing biceps on magnificent display—when she abruptly stopped brushing her hair to call a colleague in records and ask for Danny’s current home address. She jotted it down on a pad by the telephone and I scrutinized it while I waited for her to dress.

My god, Danny really was going down in the world. If that really was his latest address, he’d moved into the warehouse district where the local whores openly plied their trade. That was not a good sign at all. You only lived in that neighborhood if you had to—or if you were trying to prove to yourself that you didn’t deserve anything better.

I could have been there in minutes, but I waited to ride along with Maggie. I wanted to pretend to be her partner for a little while longer. I had such few indulgences left. I could feel her resolve wavering as she drove down the wide, deserted block of Danny’s neighborhood, gray and grimy in the bright morning light. Her detective’s eyes missed nothing. The sidewalk was littered with used condoms, cigarette butts, and blobs of spit hocked up the night before. Oddly enough, they quivered and glittered in the new sunlight like beautiful jewels scattered across the bleak concrete.

It was a Sunday morning, so the block was empty and businesses shut down. There was no sign of Danny’s old Bel Air parked anywhere, but I knew his habits. He could easily have been dumped out on the sidewalk in the wee hours of the night by a Good Samaritan fellow alcoholic who’d held it together enough to give him a lift home. He could be here somewhere.

Danny’s address matched a ratty first-floor apartment crammed in between a warehouse and discount tire store. I don’t think Maggie believed he lived there. She figured it must be a fake address. She sat in her car, frowning at the front door, unwilling to believe that even Danny might settle for such a place.

Me? I knew Danny wallowed in seediness and embraced his misery, that he had long felt it was his due. And I also knew Danny had been there recently. A familiar strand of fear hovered around the apartment’s front door. I followed it inside like a dog on a scent trail, leaving Maggie behind in her car, waiting for a sign that he was home.

My heart sank at what I saw. It was a hovel, even for Danny. What little furniture there was had long since been buried beneath old newspapers, fast-food wrappers, and dirty clothing. Unwashed dishes were scattered over every surface of the kitchen, the bits of food unrecognizable as anything more than dark clumps clinging to plastic. The refrigerator held nothing but an outdated carton of milk, now soured, and an open can of beans encrusted with a moldy surface as deeply grooved as a brain. Unwashed dishes filled a sink half filled with gray water and the air reeked of rotting food, filth, sweat, and a rubbery odor from the tire store next door.

If ever there was a place where a man who had given up on life could crawl inside and die—this was it. How had Danny ever let it get this bad? Why had he let it get this bad? No wonder he’d been ripe for the picking by Alan Hayes.

I found a copy of our old case file on the Alissa Hayes murder scattered haphazardly over the living floor, as if he had swept it off the cluttered coffee table in frustration. An upended cardboard box next to his bed yielded copies of more case files, mostly drug murders we had failed to solve and some drug cases I remembered solely because they had started out as big busts and ended up as black marks on our records, thrown out or lost in court because Danny had failed to follow some procedure or I’d been trapped by a defense attorney unable to recall something in our notes. It had happened more than once. I could have done without the reminder.

The bed was stripped of all linen, exposing the stained mattress beneath, and the sheets lay tumbled in a wad on the floor. The smell in the bedroom was even worse than the rest of the apartment: the bathroom that adjoined it had not been cleaned in months. Did he crawl drunkenly into bed like a dog each night, pull a sheet over him, and sleep drenched in sweat, breathing in the odors of urine and vomit? Why bother to get up in the morning if things were this bad?

And then I saw a framed photograph on a cheap table by his bed that almost broke my heart. At first I thought it was a photograph of his son. It showed a young man dressed in too-big swim trunks caught in mid-leap as he hurled himself off the cliff of an abandoned rock quarry toward the teal blue water below. It had been taken with a telephoto lens by a doting parent and the young boy’s face was caught perfectly in an expression halfway between ecstasy and terror—a combination, I thought, that perfectly captured what courage was all about. And that’s when I realized it was Danny in the photograph. He had told me about that moment many times, about the first time he’d been able to take his older brother up on his frequent dare to make the leap off the quarry’s highest cliff. How proud he had been to take that jump at last, and in front of his parents and sisters, too. It was the best moment of his entire life, I realized, as I stared at the expression on a face I had never truly known, because that face had already grown weary with disappointment and self-sabotage by the time we met in the academy.