Desolate Angel (30 page)

I did not know what to do: to go or to stay.

“Can you remember anything about what he was like when he would return from being away at night?” Maggie was asking Sarah.

The young girl thought about it. “He was always sweating,” she offered. “And he seemed tired, as if he had been exercising.”

Maggie’s face did not move. She did not want Sarah to guess at the thoughts that I could quite clearly read: torture was hard work.

As Maggie asked more probing questions, a familiar feeling of impending doom crept over me, an insistent breeze of evil that sprang forth from the tangled copse of bushes next door. I imagined Hayes, hidden in the cool shadows beneath the hanging branches, watching as Maggie took his daughter from him just as Bobby Daniels had dared to take Alissa from him. I imagined the hate he would feel for Maggie, and I needed to know where that hate might lead him. I had to know what he was planning.

And then I did not have to imagine his fury. I was there, along the edges of his hiding place, peering inside—and I could feel it. The hatred that emanated from him had the power of scalding water. I did not want it on me. He sat completely immobile, almost in a parody of his daughter, his legs bent and his knees folded precisely up against his chest, his hands clutching his legs to him as he simmered in his hatred for Maggie and all she represented to him.

I did not want to crawl inside that hiding place with Hayes. I was filled with a mixture of despair and fear. I stayed outside, needing the sanity of the sun, but I could see his vantage point from where I stood: Maggie and Sarah, side by side, heads pressed together, whispering, forming a bond that threatened the hold Hayes had forced on his daughter.

Then, like a ray of the sun, focused by the lens of a magnifying glass until it turned into a laser beam of heat, Hayes turned his full hatred on Maggie. He had eyes only for her. He had room in his mind only for her. I felt blistering fury wash over him as a single thought took hold—
he would destroy her.
His mind flickered through the ways he might humiliate Maggie, the ways he might rip her flesh away and make her scream in agony while he stood, gloating, staring down at her, letting her know that he held the power of her life and her death in his hands. It was as if I were being forced to watch a film despicable to decent people but with a pornographic allure to others. Hayes loved his imaginings, I realized. He enjoyed feeding his wrath because he felt more and more alive the more his hatred swelled within him.

And then an even more terrible thought took hold of him. I could not quite touch it; it was there and it was evil, but all I could tell was that his mind had been distracted from Maggie, that his need for a more immediate release had overcome his obsession with harming her. His mind had wandered to another, I realized, someone who would be far easier than Maggie to take, someone more helpless, more willing to submit to his promised mercy, someone more like the one who had started it all, who had betrayed him to Maggie in the first place: someone more like his daughter.

As Hayes unfolded his long limbs and fastidiously brushed the debris from his pants, I knew where he was going. I felt sick inside as I remembered the words I’d overheard on the school bus: “My dad is taking her to Bermuda for the weekend and he’s letting me stay by myself.”

That beautiful, naïve, trusting, unknowing girl. Alone in her house, surrounded by hedges that hid all that happened inside from the neighbors.

Hayes would take her that day.

I knew it with every fiber of my being.

He would take her, and then he would take out every ounce of his rage toward Maggie on that helpless young girl. She would pay the price for his frenzied hatred.

I had to get there before he did.

Chapter 29

The girl was not alone. I thanked god for teenage girls who disobey their parents and have boyfriends over when they’re not supposed to. And although I knew it was possible Hayes might try to take her anyway, and harm her companion in the process, Hayes was above all else a self-preservationist. I thought there was a good chance the six-foot-tall boy lounging in the television room with the girl might dissuade Hayes from making an attempt, at least for that day. The kid was muscular and his age made him very unpredictable. He was potentially dangerous and in no way the passive victim Hayes desired—and Hayes would know it.

The two teenagers were sitting side by side on the lumpy old couch in the den. Though it was barely afternoon and the room was flooded with sunlight, the boy was a teenager, after all, and taking full advantage of being alone with the girl. She was fending his hands off routinely as she watched television. No sooner had she removed his palm from one of her breasts than he was all over the other breast, or sliding his hand up her thigh, or trying to stroke the smooth expanse of her stomach. At first she was too engrossed in the movie to care much about these familiar territorial encroachments, but when a commercial flashed on, she turned her pent-up irritation on him.

“Will you stop that,” she snapped. “I told you,
no.
It’s broad daylight and a Sunday afternoon and you’re not even supposed to be here and I am not in the mood. Quit pawing me.”

The boy looked as if she had insulted him deeply. I’d have laughed under any other circumstances, since I’d tried that hangdog expression many a time myself as a teenager. But I could not laugh because I was terrified the tiff would escalate into a full-blown fight and he would leave her alone. She must not be left alone.

“Come on, baby. What’s the difference?” He smiled. “Let’s draw the blinds and pretend it’s Friday night.”

Wrong move. Ah, but high school football players should never go out with the smart girls. They’re just too easily outsmarted by them. The girl jumped to her feet, slapped his hand away, and told him to
go now
because she had to wash her hair.

“Seriously?” the guy asked. He was incredulous. “That is the oldest excuse in the book.”

“Really?” she asked, her eye blazing. “How’s this one? Get the hell out.”

“Oh, come on, baby,” he complained as he started to rise from the couch.

No, I rooted silently. How can you give up so easily? Stay put, man. Show some backbone. Don’t leave this girl alone. Please, dear god, do not walk out that door. Do not leave this girl alone.

“You don’t really mean it,” he told her when she refused to dignify his comment with anything but silence. “You’re just going to call me in twenty minutes and tell me to come back.”

It was so the wrong thing to say. Teenage boys and their egos. This one might cost the girl her life.

“I don’t think so,” she told him, then turned her back on him and pretended to be interested in the TV. My hopes sank. She was giving him the silent treatment. There was no way to fight it. He’d have no choice but to leave.

The boy shrugged and rolled his eyes, for my benefit only since the girl refused to even look at him. And then, to my dismay, he slouched out the front door. It slammed shut, bounced, and settled into the jamb.

The girl did not lock it behind him. She had refused to give him the satisfaction of even acknowledging that he was leaving.

I rushed to the front door and peered out through a window inset in it, hoping the boy would come back. I willed him to put his pride aside. I cursed the virtue that had caused the girl to want him to leave. And I cursed a world that would let a young girl die because she’d tried to live up to being the kind of young lady her father wanted her to be.

The boy reached the end of the front walkway, then turned around and stared at the door for a moment. I peered back at him through the glass, willing him to return. And as I stood there, praying for him to come back inside, I saw it: a black SUV passed behind the boy. It was gliding slowly down the street, its engine silent and efficient, the tinted windows hiding the occupant from view. It hesitated, nearly imperceptibly, before sliding out of view. But not to go away, I knew that with a certainty. His need was too great. Hayes would park down the block, or circle it and return. He would keep watch, he’d see the boy was leaving, and then he would return. All I could do was wait.

Chapter 30

The girl was relieved to be alone again. She locked the front door, let out a deep breath, retrieved a journal from a hiding place under a cushion, and sat, cross-legged on the couch, writing out her frustrations. Her face was so beautiful in repose, so perfect caught in mid-concentration. Her mind was absorbed with her desire to try to parse the all-too-human riddle of being both attracted to and repelled by another human being at the same time.

How I hoped that her teenage tiff would be the only crisis this day would bring her.

I set out in search of Hayes.

He was parked in the alley behind the girl’s house, his SUV concealed by the hedges and fences that a too-crowded neighborhood had put up for privacy. The alleyway was obviously used by sanitation crews to pick up garbage each week: most of the homes had backyards accessible to the narrow path by back gates flanked by neatly boxed-in garbage can areas.

The young girl’s house was no exception. Hayes had parked his vehicle just a few yards down from the double doors of the gate that opened into her backyard. I checked the lock. It was still securely fastened, but it would not take him long to unlock it from the yard. If he brought her out the back way, she would be inside his SUV and gone before anyone could see what was happening.

As I approached his car, the terrifying hum of his malevolent brooding washed over me like a stench. Hayes was sitting in the front seat, calming his nerves, savoring the moments before his hunt. I could feel his blood moving through his veins. It was thick with the need to kill, as deadly as a poison.

He had stopped to make preparations on the way over from the safe house where his daughter was being kept. The backseats of the SUV had been folded forward. The floor of the back compartment and center section were now neatly covered with a plastic drop cloth, held in place at the far end by a lightweight dolly tilted on its side. Two-inch nylon straps lay neatly coiled at intervals along the perimeter of the vehicle, placed close by metal eyes that had been affixed to the SUV’s interior walls.

My stomach lurched: I didn’t know where he took them, but I now knew how he got them there. And I knew by looking at his backseat that he could not wait to have them completely under his power. He had to be able to look in his rearview mirror and see them bound and spread out in the back, helpless and under his control. He was willing to take that chance, indeed he wanted to take that chance, to drive through the streets like a normal person, to idle at stop signs next to minivans filled with squalling children and harried mothers, to pass police cruisers and businessmen along the way, to offer his toll money to oblivious state workers—all with his victims bound and displayed a few feet behind him. He wanted his victims to know that he was so very much in control that he was willing to flaunt his act before others.

It was an evil so finely honed that I knew a girl as young as the one who sat writing in her journal would never have a chance. Not for a moment, not for a second. She was ripe fruit for his picking and would fall, sweet and heavy, into his palm if he so much as brushed the branch.

I was overcome with a panic so intense I was paralyzed. What could I do? How could I stop him? I had nothing to fight him with.

His breathing had slowed and his body seemed little more than a statue as he sat, posture perfect, behind the wheel of his car, waiting for the right moment to begin. He was dressed, as earlier, in impeccable charcoal gray trousers, a black golf shirt, and shiny black loafers on his feet. His face, almost dreamy as he savored his anticipation, was utterly benign. And yet, beneath all that seeming respectability, a lust to annihilate innocence simmered.

He was ready.