Angel Fire (15 page)

Suddenly she jumped up and ran from the room. In the distance he could hear the phone ringing. He sat and stared at the sunset, the sky painted in brilliant pastels, the sun dipping below
the mountains in the west. He became aware of a powerful, irrational feeling of jealousy that she had gone to the church yesterday and again today.
Why did she go there? To see the blind man? The one she dreamt about?

A moment later she was standing in the door.

“Well, you got your wish,” she said, smug and smiling bitterly. “They found Maria Lopez’s body.”

S
omeone had gutted Maria Lopez like the dog Lucky. It was a disturbing sight for the hunters who found her, in an open body-bag, sloppily half-covered with the dirt and sand from the ground around her, deep in the woods at Cimarron Canyon State Park.
I guess you thought the animals would get to her, you cold bastard
, thought Morrow as he stared down at her decomposing body.

“Cover her up,” he said to the uniformed officer standing beside him. He felt badly for her. No one had come to the station to report her missing, no one could be found to notify about her death. And there was no one to question about her life except her boss at the restaurant and Mike Urquia, who was the last person to see her alive. He was the prime suspect, only because there were no other suspects. But there was no evidence so far to indicate that he had done anything but sleep with her, and looking into his eyes, Morrow knew it wasn’t him. This was something much bigger than a good fuck gone wrong. Something so much uglier.

He took the number Jeffrey Mark had given to him and called from his cell phone. The phone rang a couple of times at Lydia’s before she picked it up.

“You and Jeff might want to meet me at the station. We think we found Maria Lopez’s body.”

“I want to see where he dumped the body. You didn’t move it yet, did you?”

“No, but …” Morrow didn’t really want her at the crime scene. He didn’t want her to have a front-row seat to this investigation, even though he’d agreed to have them on board.

“Good,” she said, like she was talking to a student. “Tell me how to find you.”

He told her to take Highway 64 north for thirty miles and that he would have a squad car waiting for her at the park entrance so she and Jeffrey could find the way to the remote spot in the woods.

“Fine, we’ll be there.” She hung up the phone without another word. A little civility was perhaps too much to ask from someone like Lydia Strong.

A
n hour later the pair arrived at the crime scene. Lydia brushed by Chief Morrow without a word and walked straight to the covered body. She asked the uniformed officer for a pair of surgical gloves, which he handed her, and she removed the light plastic tarp from the victim’s body.

“Was this tarp sterile?” Morrow heard her ask the officer. “Because if it wasn’t, you just contaminated the crime scene.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“ ‘Yes ma’am,’ what?”

“Yes, it was sterile.”

That was exactly why Morrow hadn’t wanted her here, looking over his shoulder, second-guessing every fucking move he made. Waiting for him to screw up again so she could ruin him for good.

“Hey, Chief,” Jeff said as he approached Morrow. “Who found the body?”

“Some hunters from New York were looking for big game and they came across the body instead.” He motioned to a group of men, who for all their weathered toughness, rifles, and orange hunter’s attire, looked pale and shaken.

Lydia regarded the grotesque body of Maria Lopez. Throat slashed, a gaping wound from her sternum to her belly, eyes wide and glassy, skin tinged black-and-blue, the naked body lay discarded by the killer without regard. Lydia could tell instantly by the careless disposal that the killer did not care for Maria, had not known her in life. She was less than trash to the person who had killed her. Lydia wondered if the killer was becoming disorganized, descending into a careless rage to murder Maria so brutally and then dispose of her like a hated piece of furniture. Or maybe he was becoming cocky, having killed, presumably, three times without even raising suspicion.

She did not feel moved by the body. Life had abandoned it. It was nothing more than an object, arousing only wonder in her, as if she had spied a single shoe lying dirty and flattened in the middle of a city sidewalk. She stood up and circled the body. This was a dump site and not a true crime scene. He had not killed her here. There was not enough blood. He had carried her here in the body bag and opened the zipper, hoping, probably, that the scavengers would find her before the park visitors did.

It had not rained since Maria was taken from her apartment, but the ground was soft and damp so maybe they would get lucky—footprints, tire tracks. He could have driven only part of the way to the dump site. He would have had to then park the car on the dirt road below and carry her up the incline that Lydia and Jeffrey had just ascended, moving through the trees. Had he
known this area well? Or had he just driven in during regular park hours and dumped her, hoping he wouldn’t be seen? It was very risky behavior, if that’s what he had done. Maybe, more likely, he had come and stayed at one of the campsites and done his deed under the cover of night. She wondered if there was a visitor registry or a list of license-plate numbers of park visitors. “Lydia, check this out,” Jeffrey called.

Lydia walked over to where Jeffrey stood. He pushed aside some weeds, revealing a partial footprint. The rest of the area was more exposed to the wind, but the weeds had preserved the top half of a large boot. Lydia glanced over at the hunters.

“It could belong to one of them, or to another hunter. We should check their boots before they leave.”

“Gentlemen, could you help us out over here?”

One by one, each man removed his right boot and compared the tread to the track in the ground. There were no matches.

The crime-scene photographer came over and took some shots as Jeffrey directed.

“Chief, can you get someone over here to take a mold?” Jeffrey inquired.

“I don’t know how well a mold will take. The ground is pretty soft,” Morrow replied.

“We should at least try,” Lydia snapped, annoyed by what she considered to be his laziness.

“Fine,” Morrow replied curtly, angry at her tone but feeling powerless. He walked off to the squad car to use the radio.

“He’s right, Lydia. There’s no need to be so hard on him.”

“Back off, Jeffrey.” Lydia was still angry from their argument earlier in the afternoon. She always held a grudge for a little while, at least, and didn’t like being criticized at the best of times.

“Fine.” Jeffrey walked off toward the squad car as well.

You’re the most popular girl at the crime scene
, she thought.

Lydia walked back over to the body and scrutinized it for anything she might have missed before. Around Maria’s neck hung a small gold cross. Lydia bent down, covering her mouth and nose against the stench, and leaned in to get a better look at it. It was plain, thin and light, a cheap piece of gold if it was gold at all. Had she seen something like this in the case at the church? She couldn’t remember. She checked Maria’s earlobes. They were pierced but she wasn’t wearing earrings. Lydia was reminded of the earrings Jed McIntyre had stolen from his victims. She noticed that Maria’s right hand had a deep, wide gash, probably a defensive wound, and that she appeared to have blood beneath her fingernails.

Lydia approached Jeffrey and Morrow, who were conversing with the hunters. She eyed the strange men one by one, envisioning each of them as the killer, trying to imagine them stalking and murdering their victims, then removing their organs. But they all seemed too dimwitted, too simple. She was sure they would offer nothing by way of leads or evidence. She waited for a pause in the conversation.

“Morrow,” she interrupted, purposely neglecting to use his title, “will you make sure that you get that gold cross off her neck? And we need to talk to someone who administers the park to find out if there is a camera at the entrance, or a register of vehicles that have entered the park since Maria Lopez went missing.”

“Yeah, no problem,” he answered, silently kicking himself for not thinking of that first.

She turned to Jeffrey. “Unless you think I should stay, I’m going to speak with Greg Matthews and then go to Smokey’s, see if anyone’s talking, maybe run into Mike Urquia.”

“You want me to come with you?”

“No, I think I should go alone. Sometimes people are willing to say more to one person than they are to two.”

“I’ll go with Morrow and follow the body to the Medical Examiner’s office and see what the autopsy turns up. On the way out, we’ll stop at the guard on duty, find out what the procedures are for logging in visitors.”

Lydia looked at Jeffrey, and smiled slightly, lowering her eyes in a silent apology. She raised her hand and quickly smoothed the collar of his leather jacket, a gesture he knew meant peace. “I’m sorry, too,” he said and her smile widened.

“The results from the Maria Lopez apartment could arrive as early as tonight,” Morrow interjected. “I have a contact at the state lab who promised me a rush.”

“Great,” Jeffrey answered Morrow. Turning to Lydia, “Just be careful. I’ll get a ride back to the house from Morrow or someone.”

He watched her walk back to the car, her hands in her pockets. She paused before she was out of sight and looked back at him, saw he was watching her, and smiled again. She looked at him with equal parts apology, laughter, and wistfulness. He took a breath at the intensity of his feeling for her, at the magical quality of her beauty in the early-evening light.

L
ydia knew about isolation, the lure of it, the seduction of having only yourself to answer to. She knew about the craving for a silencing of all voices but one’s own, about the urge to escape the gaze of others. In fact, she had constructed a life where isolation had become as comfortable as down, solitude as welcome as sleep. She was alone, had taught herself not to need anyone, and somewhere
along the line loneliness just became familiar. And she had grown afraid of everything else. She had started to fear intimacy the way some people fear being alone. She had driven people away all her life with her coldness. She had no friends; her relationship with her grandparents, who still lived in Sleepy Hollow where they had moved from Brooklyn after Marion was killed, was loving but distant. The only significant person in her life was Jeffrey, and she kept him always at arm’s length.

But she also knew that beneath that desire to alienate the world was another, more ardent wish to be understood and recognized, a desire bound and gagged by the hopelessness that such a thing was possible anymore.

That was the look she saw in Shawna’s eyes, and the image she carried in her mind as she drove up the winding road toward the garage where Greg Matthews worked. Lydia pulled up slowly, the gravel and sand on the unpaved road crackling beneath her tires. The garage looked more like a shack than a place of business but the large, painted sign above the roof reading
JOE AND GREG’S AUTO REPAIR
told her she was in the right place. As she got out of the car, a young man emerged from beneath a red pickup. His curly hair stuck out from beneath a plain red baseball cap, its team logo, whatever it had been, long since fallen away. He stood up, wiping his hands on his overalls and squinting into the dusk, then shielding his eyes as he strained to see her.

“Are you Greg?” she called as she walked toward him.

“I sure am,” he said amiably. “What can I do for you?”

“I would like to talk to you about Shawna’s disappearance.”

The friendly smile dropped from his pink lips and his face seemed to age. Big, light-blue eyes swam with emotion in a galaxy of freckles. His hands were square and strong, with black grease wedged beneath his fingernails. He smelled of soap and gasoline,
and beneath his baggy coveralls, he was large and muscular like a bodybuilder.

“I’ve already spoken with the police and nobody has listened to a word I said,” he said quietly. “Short of accusing me of hurting her, they basically have done nothing to try to find out what happened to her. I’ll tell you what I told them, my girl did not run away. Unless you’re going to tell me something I don’t already know or are going to try to do something to find out what happened to her, I have nothing to say to you, ma’am.”

He turned to walk away from her but Lydia gently grabbed his arm.

“Greg, wait. I don’t think Shawna ran away, either. I’m an investigator. My name is Lydia Strong and I do want to find out what happened to her.”

He looked her up and down suspiciously. She was conscious that she didn’t look the least bit official in her faded blue jeans, lizard-skin boots, and cream suede jacket. She began to reach for her ID, but he spoke before she could present it.

“All right, then, come on inside.”

She followed him behind the garage and the adjacent office to a small apartment. Run-down but clean and orderly, it smelled of burnt coffee and cigarettes. Lydia sat down at a faux wood Formica card table on a wobbly, green vinyl-covered chair, while Greg made coffee.

Her eyes scanned the room, soaking up details. The appliances, an olive-green stove and matching refrigerator, were old but seemed to be well maintained. The countertop, made of butcher block, was well scrubbed but riddled with scratches and deep, black burn marks. Some of the Formica tiles on the floor, featuring a gold and brown floral pattern, were buckling. The orange sun coming in from a dirty window over the stainless steel sink lit
the dust particles that fell like snow through the air. The room was overly warm and Greg turned on an air-conditioning unit over the door that protested, then reluctantly groaned to life.

She could see two orderly bedrooms from where she sat at the table. One, presumably Greg’s, had a wall covered with posters of motorcycles and a shelf filled with books about hot rods, mechanics manuals, and luxury car magazines. On the bedside table was the picture of Shawna that she recognized from the copy in her file.