Desolate Angel (31 page)

He slid from the car as lightly as a shadow, glanced around to satisfy himself that he was alone, then stepped quickly down the alleyway to where the girl’s back fence began. He found a slender opening where the neighbor’s fence ended and a perpendicular hedge that demarcated the side boundaries between the two backyards began. He groped his way through a few bushes, then pushed past them into a shaded corner of the girl’s yard, where the landscaping was thick enough to conceal him from the girl’s view should she happen to look up from her writing. From there, he slipped from tree to tree, making his way closer to the house, his grace marred by the terrible certainty of what he hoped to do.

He reached the base of the deck, stooped, and crept below its perimeter until he was once again in his favorite hiding place at the corner of the house near the side driveway. There, he could wait in the shadows between the evergreen cedar bushes and see into the back room through its sliding glass doors.

The young girl had let her journal and pen slip onto the floor and was leaning back against the cushions of the couch, her eyes drooping drowsily. She yawned and lay down, her head on a pillow, her face relaxing into sleep.

To wake up to someone like Hayes standing over her was an unimaginable horror. I did not let myself think of it.

Hayes was thinking the same thing. He began to breathe more heavily but forced his mind inward until he was once more under control. I followed him around the corner of the house to a side door that led into the kitchen. He tried the door. It was locked. He crept toward the corner that led to the front of the house, but the traffic on the street out front had started to pick up. Families were returning from church. He would not risk being seen entering that way.

He returned to the kitchen door. He gripped the handle and turned it one way and then the other, putting his whole weight on it as he pushed inward. The door gave lightly everywhere but near the doorknob itself: the young girl had locked it, but failed to turn the deadbolt as well.

Hayes smiled to himself and went to work. He knew where she kept her spare key, but a lock this flimsy did not require one. He put on a pair of thin latex gloves and pulled a strip of gray metal from his back pocket, gently easing it into the opening between the door and its frame. He jiggled the doorknob as he felt his way along the edge of the pressure lock. His tongue slipped out in concentration and gently stroked his lips, and his hips thrust unconsciously to the right and then upward as he felt his way around the lock. There was something sexual in his movements, as if, in penetrating her house, he was penetrating her.

The door slid open with a click. Hayes had to lean backward to keep from falling into the kitchen. He slipped inside, then carefully pushed the door shut behind him, barely letting it touch the frame—he wanted it to open with little more than a push of his foot when he left the same way.

He inched across the tiled floor and peered into the hallway. He had only a few more feet to go before he would be at the entrance to the back room where the young girl slept. But as he stepped out onto the thick carpet of the hallway, the phone rang.

He stepped back into the kitchen calmly.

The phone rang again as the girl padded across the den’s carpet. Her voice was sleepy as she answered.

It was the boy, calling to apologize. It was the boy wanting to be invited back over.

The girl would not let him come. “Drop dead, Craig,” she said firmly and the sound of the receiver being slammed back in place was unmistakable.

The girl did not return to the couch. Stretching, she walked into the hallway, yawning, then ran her hand through her long hair, flipping it back over her shoulder. Hayes tensed. She walked toward the kitchen and I could feel his heart start to beat with a rapid, determined staccato.

The girl stopped and turned to go the other way.

Hayes sank back against the kitchen wall.

She made her way down the hall, passed several doors, then entered a bathroom at the far end.

Hayes followed. He stepped out into the hallway soundlessly, the carpet muffling his footsteps. The girl had pulled the bathroom door shut out of habit, even though she was alone.

I wondered if she had locked it out of habit, too.

Hayes walked silently down the hall, closer and closer to the bathroom door. The sounds of water running came from the other side, accompanied by a sweet, high voice—the girl was singing to herself. I could hear drawers opening and shutting as she rummaged through them. She was automatically searching, as I had often watched my wife search, for a lipstick or something else to dab on her face so she could feel as if she had made an effort to look her best before she stepped back into the world.

Hayes was directly on the other side of the bathroom door now, his right ear and his palms flat against the wood surface as if he were divining what she was doing inside. The girl coughed and he flinched. She slammed a drawer shut.

He stepped back, stared at the doors lining the hall, then opened the nearest one, stuck his head in the room to check it out first, and stepped inside to wait.

I followed and knew why he had chosen this room: it was her room. And he did not want to take her until he had violated this safe place, until he had left his mark on what had once been her haven.

He walked across the pink carpet to her chest of drawers. He opened the top one and lifted some of her lingerie out, holding it up to his critical eye, frowning as if he were her father and did not approve of the maturity of her taste. He touched a photo on the top of her dresser: an older woman and a girl no more than ten or eleven years old. Her mother, I knew, probably with the young girl during a happier time. Hayes drummed his fingers impatiently against the top of the dresser, as if he were not quite satisfied.

The door to the bedroom began to open.

Hayes stepped inside the closet.

And that was what he had been waiting for. It wasn’t enough to watch her from the outside as she moved inside her house. No, he needed his violation to be nearer. He needed the terror she felt when she first glimpsed him bursting out of nowhere to be a horror that was immediate, all consuming, and above all, paralyzing. I knew that to his broken mind the rush of power he would feel at seeing her panic would be far more satisfying than an orgasm.

He waited, just inside her closet door. He’d left it open a few inches so he could peer out at her as she walked restlessly around her room, trying to decide whether to lie down on the bed and nap away her last few hours of freedom or whether to use the time more productively. Her eyes lingered on a pair of running shoes tossed carelessly in a corner. She walked over to them. When she bent down to pick them up, she exposed several more inches of well-muscled leg. She was wearing a pair of shorts and they would not be enough protection if she was going for a run in the October air. She stepped out of her shorts, revealing a pair of panties so innocent they took my breath away: cotton, printed with little blue flowers, a tiny blue bow affixed neatly to the waistband.

Hayes was reveling in his secret power. His breaths were deep and his whole body vibrated with a dark joy at the proximity he had to his prey. His excitement had grown to nearly unbearable proportions. I could feel the bloodlust rising in him overtake a more ordinary sexual excitement—every cell in his body hungered for that girl; every cell in his body wanted to overtake her.

She pulled a pair of running pants from a drawer and bent over to put them on. Her long, smooth hair fell forward in a silky curtain as she did so.

Hayes touched himself when he saw her hair swing forward, but he touched himself furtively, as if such an act were beneath a man of his caliber. And in a moment of terrible insight, I realized that it would not be long before he took her captive—because the act of overpowering her, then binding and torturing her, was designed not only to satisfy a deep need inside him but also to overpower a more base desire, one he would not allow to control him.

He put his shoulder to the closet door and leaned forward, preparing for the right moment to push through and overtake her.

She stood up and was tugging her T-shirt off when the doorbell rang.

Exultation flooded through me: the boy had returned.

The girl pulled her shirt back in place and flounced angrily from the room, ready to give him a piece of her mind.

I followed, determined to get her out of the house some way, even if it cost me another episode of wrenching, diminishing pain.

But it was Maggie who stood on the doorstep, badge in hand.

Maggie, my angel. The girl’s angel, too. Maggie in all of her glory.

The girl started at her, puzzled, as Maggie introduced herself and explained that she was there on an errand, sent by Sarah Hayes to let the girl know what had happened to her.

The girl invited Maggie inside, eager to hear more about Sarah, wanting to know why she was switching schools.

Maggie asked if her parents were home and frowned when she heard the father had gone off for the weekend and left his daughter alone. Maggie knew what happened when daughters were left alone. Not only because she’d been one, but because she’d picked up the pieces often enough for others in a similar situation when things had gone terribly wrong.

“It’s a complicated story,” she told the young girl. “But Sarah wants you to know what’s going on.”

The girl looked alarmed. “I knew something was wrong,” she said. “I just didn’t know what. And I didn’t want to push her.”

Maggie looked as if she did not know where to begin.

“Do you want a Coke or something?” the girl asked.

Maggie nodded, relieved to be putting the explanation off for a little while longer. She followed the girl into the kitchen and immediately noticed the side door. “Did you leave that door open?” she asked the girl, closing it and bolting both locks firmly. “You ought to know better.”

“I do,” said the girl. “I always keep it locked.”

She sounded puzzled. Maggie believed her.

She pulled her gun out and began checking the corners of the kitchen and behind the pantry door.

“What is it?” the girl asked, frightened.

“Just me,” Maggie said. “Being paranoid.”

But not paranoid enough.

I headed back toward the bedroom to find Hayes.

He was gone. A back sliding door left open in the den showed how he had escaped.

I caught up with him in the backyard. He was moving quickly toward the back fence, darting from bush to bush with an urgent haste, as he were fleeing not just Maggie, but the nakedness of his own need and what he had felt growing inside him in the girl’s bedroom. He pushed through the last pair of bushes and into the alleyway, leapt into his SUV, and roared away. I barely had time to join him before he had turned onto the main road and was barreling through the streets, driving too fast, frustration making him incautious. He ignored a stop sign, blew through it, then turned into a main thoroughfare and joined the busy flow of traffic. He seethed with a hatred unmatched until then.

Maggie had ruined his plans. Maggie had destroyed the balance of his world. Maggie had taken away his escape from his one mistake—killing his own daughter—and turned that triumph into disaster. No matter where his mind went, no matter who he tried to blame, no matter which way he turned the power of his memory, it always came back to one person: Maggie. She was to blame.

I knew then that—so long as Alan Hayes lived—Maggie was doomed.

Chapter 31

Maggie took no chances. When I returned to the girl’s house, she was in the process of calling in a crime scene crew to check it, though she had no way of knowing that anyone, much less Hayes, had been there. And she was seeing that the girl stayed with friends until her father returned. But I knew where Maggie would end up eventually. I got there first and waited for her to arrive.

Even though it was a Sunday, the crime lab was crammed with technicians assembled to process the evidence found in the Hayes basement the day before. Peggy Calhoun presided over everyone with a calm confidence. No one would make the mistake of rushing a procedure under her watch. No one would make a mistake at all. The air in the room pulsated with curiosity as man and science came together in a delicate choreography of molecular exploration.

But I was more interested in phantasm than protoplasm. I wondered if the victims might appear again, as they had in the basement of the Hayes house. But the crime lab was not a place for ghosts. This was a place for man and man’s machines, contraptions that hummed and crackled and analyzed and deconstructed matter down to single molecules. No, this was a place for the living, for thoughts that sparked from synapses to synapses, forming theories, verifying ideas, gathering facts, chasing down conclusions. This was home to science. The unexplainable would not be welcome here.