Desolate Angel (9 page)

Maggie’s smile was sad. “I think she may have been all this lady had. I couldn’t bear to go it alone.”

Morty touched the brim of his hat. “That’s what I’m here for. You break the news; I know you see it as your job, but you can leave the rest to me.”

“I bet you thought this part of your job was over once Dad retired,” Maggie said as she headed out for the bypass that encircled our town.

Morty shook his head. “This is one part of my job I know will never be over. At least not until it’s me they’re notifying someone about.”

“You have a family?” Maggie asked, a little startled, as if it had never occurred to her.

“A brother out in California. He has a family of his own. I haven’t seen him in years. Not quite sure why. Seems like every passing day pulls us further apart.”

“It happens that way sometimes,” Maggie admitted, as if she were thinking of the people in her own life who had drifted away from her for no real reason.

“It does.”

They rode in an easy silence I envied, having never reached that point of comfort with anyone, not even my wife. I was always getting berated for something, or apologizing for a transgression, and there had been no time for this sort of peace. But I had slithered out of facing my failings with the skill of a jackal, so how could I blame those who had disgorged their disappointment on me when they had me pinned down?

The mother of the dead girl lived in a two-story clap-board house that was too large for a person living alone. She had been unable to leave after her daughter left for college, I guessed, perhaps unwilling to abandon the memories that the house held. Oh, but she would likely leave after today. This would not be a memory to cherish.

As I trailed Maggie and Morty up the long walkway, I knew I was about to witness the tipping point in another human being’s life, that very moment at which they gave up on living and decided to wait it out until the end. To lose a child could not be easy; it was not the way of the world. Had I been paying attention in the past, I might have absorbed the magnitude of it before. Certainly I had delivered this kind of news to parents more than once. But all those notifications of next of kin, delivered according to some script Danny and I had been given in the academy a good twenty years before, had blurred into a single uncomfortable sense of aversion and left little impression on my soul.

This one would be different. I would be seeing the destruction of a human heart, the loss of all of its hopes and endearments, from a place close to inside that heart. I resolved to see it, to remember it, to learn from it. I would make up for what I had missed the first time around.

The enormity of the suffering that awaited slowed me down. I hung back, gathering my courage, as Maggie knocked on the door. A trim, middle-aged woman answered. The welcoming look on her face collapsed into disbelief and uncensored anguish as Maggie delivered the news. Morty caught the woman on her way down and led her to a nearby sofa. There, the mother aged before my eyes. I saw the flow of blood leave her complexion, the brightness in her eyes deaden to gray, the lines of her face harden and deepen in permanent sorrow. The air around her solidified, as if the universe itself was trying to embrace her, trying to remind her that she, at least, was still among the living. She sank against the cushions of her couch, speechless, as Maggie filled the room with words, giving the woman time to compose herself and to absorb the enormity of what she had lost.

Morty sat next to the mother, holding her hand, waiting his turn to serve. The woman closed her eyes, unable to face the world that had betrayed her, and Maggie waited until she had opened them again before she offered to answer any questions she might have.

The woman asked how her daughter had died.

The news that her child had been murdered hit the mother with the force of a blow. She jerked back and Morty put his arms around her, holding her tight, as if infusing her with his strength. She began to weep, her tears flowing like liquid silver from her eyes until she buried her face in her hands and sat, face hidden, absorbing the details of her daughter’s demise with a determination that shone through her sorrow as a testament to human endurance. It was the worst possible news a mother could hear and yet she was forcing herself to face the truth. I was awestruck at her courage.

Maggie sat on a footstool at the mother’s feet, speaking slowly and clearly, assuring her in a dozen different ways that whoever had done this to her daughter would be brought to justice. The light I had glimpsed in Maggie the first time I had seen her returned, surrounding her, making me wonder if my Maggie—for I thought of her as mine by now—was more than human, might even be an avenging angel sent down from the heavens to repair the unholy violence humans visited upon one another.

Or did we all have that light within us, that brightness and strength?

No, I told myself. Not everyone. It was Maggie. Maggie was special.

When the mother asked if they were sure it was her Vicky, Maggie was ready. She had known the question was coming, had known that the mother would be unable to risk hoping for a reprieve. She gently showed her the photo Danny had shown around campus. The hopelessness in the mother’s eyes told them all they needed to know: the dead girl was absolutely Victoria Meeks, only child of a loving mother who would now need to face the worst alone.

Then Morty worked his magic. I saw that he was not the passive oaf Danny and I had labeled him. He was, indeed, a gentle man whose heart ached for those who hurt around him. In the kindest of voices, he asked the mother to tell him about her daughter, saying it would help them find her killer if they all knew more about her.

I understood that this was not why he had asked.

He was asking because he knew that the broken woman before him needed to talk about what she had lost, would want to honor her daughter’s brief life—and that talking would help her reconcile the awful truth of the present with the lingering light of her dead girl’s past. Perhaps, in talking, she would realize that though her daughter was gone, the memories of her remained and could never be taken from her—the kindest gift the human mind has to give its host.

At first the mother answered Morty’s questions in a faltering voice. Eventually, her voice grew stronger. She began to tell them about all her remarkable daughter had accomplished, despite having lost her father at an early age.

The mother paused abruptly and I knew she was thinking of her long-dead husband, wondering, with the endless optimism of the human race, whether he might not be waiting somewhere for their daughter, a loving presence that would usher her to a better place than this world.

I wondered, too. There had been no one there for me. And no one able to give testimony to my memory, not the way this loving mother had. No one had grieved for me like this, in fact, yet I had no one to blame but myself.

Morty seemed to know that the mother was thinking of her dead husband, was envisioning a reunion between her loved ones. He patted her hand as if to reassure her that this was almost certainly true. The mother wiped her eyes and asked if Morty would like to see photos of her daughter’s life.

“Oh, yes,” he agreed at once. “I would. Let me get them for you.”

Soon the mother had stacks of albums piled before her on the coffee table and was poring over them with a rapt Morty beside her. He listened quietly as she sketched a portrait of her daughter. Unnoticed, Maggie found the kitchen and made them all tea while the woman led Morty through page after page of her daughter’s life.

Maggie listened intently as the mother talked, sorting out all that the woman said in some part of her amazing mind, searching for a clue to the girl’s killer. That was what made her different from Morty, I realized, and more dangerous to the killer. Morty was listening with his heart, Maggie with the total sensory acuteness of a hunter seeking prey. Yet, she had known this about herself—had known her sympathy would quickly give way to the desire for vengeance—and so she’d had the good sense to bring Morty with her to provide the gentleness she lacked.

That, I thought, made her a very dangerous opponent to whoever had taken the lives of Victoria Meeks and Alissa Hayes. Maggie knew her weaknesses and she had learned how to use them. I was filled with an inexplicable pride that she had taken on the task of bringing the dead justice and would not rest until it was done. Maggie would do what I had not done.

After a while, Maggie murmured her regrets, promised to send a squad car later, and left the mother sitting with Morty, taking comfort in the remembered glory of the mundane milestones humans mark their brief lives with. Birth, baptism, school, confirmation, holidays, graduations, the senior prom. Morty was ready to listen to it all. Morty was ready to bear witness.

I followed Maggie, knowing that whatever good still lurked within me, it was not in my heart, but in my head. I could help Maggie. Morty, well, he was a master at what he did best. He needed no help from me.

We left Morty and the mother sitting together on the sofa, yet another photo album spread out across their knees, the mother intent on remembering her daughter while Morty, resplendent in his dress uniform, listened with an unwavering interest, his entire being devoted to the stranger beside him.

I was alone with Maggie, content to search her face for signs of what her magnificent mind was mulling over. She seemed distracted, upset by something. I could not fathom her thoughts.

And then I felt it again. Like an icy finger from the grave reaching through the warmth of the car to trace a fingernail down my spine: cold, cultivated, celebrated, coddled evil. And it was near.

I looked around, searching the curb, the driveways, the houses. I saw no one. No one at all.

Maggie reached the corner where the subdivision began and turned right toward the station house. As she turned, I looked behind us and saw a gleaming metallic black SUV pull out from the curb to follow us. It was soon lost in the traffic behind us, mired in a sea of trucks and impatient rush-hour motorists who lost their manners and, frustrated, created mayhem in the process. All Maggie had to do was activate the dash lights—which she did not hesitate to do—and, unwittingly, she left the SUV far behind us as the traffic parted to let us pass.

But I had seen the SUV. And I had felt it. The man from the grove was following Maggie. It would not take him long to find out who she was.

Chapter 10

Maggie had left the living for a date with the dead. The body of Vicky Meeks was waiting for her. The medical examiner was already well into the autopsy and Maggie did not interrupt. After a brief nod, she stood out of his way and watched him work. He was a thin, silent man who exuded calmness even when his hands were buried in a body cavity.

He and I had something in common, I realized. We knew what others did not: that the bag of skin before him, holding a stew of decomposing tissue and percolating chemicals, was no longer Vicky Meeks. She was long gone, and the body left behind was nothing more than a symbol for her mother to mourn over.

The medical examiner’s detachment intrigued me. I concentrated on him, trying to feel what he was going through as he weighed out parcels of tissue on the scale and reduced Vicky Meeks to a series of precise scientific notations. Up in the forensics lab, three stories above us, Peggy Calhoun had chosen a microscopic world as her battlefield, but the medical examiner had chosen a world within as his. He was its warrior and his concentration absolute. To him, Vicky Meeks was a puzzle in reverse, a conundrum of flesh and bone to be filleted, separated, laid bare, and labeled in his search for the reasons why this body had given up as her vessel.

It did not take him long to catalog the causes of death. He announced them to Maggie quietly as he worked. Vicky Meeks had been killed slowly, bit by bit. She had been battered, bound, tortured with sanguinary zeal, and finally, strangled when her killer grew disenchanted with the reality of games that could never measure up to his fantasies.

Washing her body clean of grass and grime had revealed more of the small groupings of parallel slits carved into her legs and torso. Alissa Hayes had borne the same strange cuts, although some of hers had been much older than others and a few people had suggested she’d done it to herself—until they were discovered on the backs of her thighs, where no one could have achieved such symmetry solo. Vicky Meeks had similar cuts in almost the exact same places, although hers looked freshly inflicted, the wounds as red and raw as bite marks.

With unwavering silence Maggie watched the body reveal its secrets. She was not like the medical examiner, I realized. To her, the flesh and bones before her were still sacred. Yet I could tell she had shelved almost all personal emotions, that she was focusing on what the body could tell her with such intensity that she was close to sharing in the obsession the wounds revealed.