Angel Fire (29 page)

It seemed as if time slowed as the police officers moved out of the way and Wizner knelt by the garden, opening his black bag. He removed surgical gloves, a small paintbrush, and a spade. With
the brush he carefully whisked away the dirt to reveal a small glass circle, around which he carefully dug with the spade. Lydia moved over closer to him as he reached with his gloved hand and pulled a glass mason jar from the earth. Inside, floating in a clear liquid Lydia could only assume was formaldehyde, was a human heart.

“I
t’s time to go, Juno,” Lydia said, approaching Juno from behind. He sat where she had left him an hour earlier, barely having moved.

“What did you find?”

“Maybe we should talk about this another day.”

“My uncle?”

“No.”

Juno just nodded.

“Why don’t you come back to my house?” she offered. “You can stay there as long as you need to.”

“I need time alone. I need to be somewhere familiar.” He answered slowly, his voice as slight and far away as he seemed to be. “I need to try to understand everything that has happened here.”

“I can’t let you stay here, Juno. You are part of his plan and he’ll be coming for you.”

“And for you.”

“Yes, I think so. But don’t worry about me. Where do you want to go?”

O
n the way back to the Hugo house, she brought him to the home of Mrs. Turvey, the woman who had tutored him as a child. She was old but hearty; she took him in her arms and he seemed to find comfort there.

“Lydia,” he called to her as she walked away from him, “take care. Don’t do anything foolish.”

His voice had an odd strength to it and she turned to face him.

“Don’t worry about me, Juno. Just take care of yourself.”

Now Lydia walked around Bernard Hugo’s home and tried to get a sense of him. It was difficult. A few tattered items of clothing hung in the master-bedroom closet; the bed had just one dirty, rumpled top sheet; no photographs sat on the bedside table or hung on the wall. Downstairs there was only a worn recliner and a card table. There was nothing in the refrigerator, except a carry-out bag from the Blue Moon Café and a few cans of Budweiser.

The bag was evidence and she called it to the attention of one of the officers scanning the small, nearly empty house. Lydia wondered if Maria Lopez had handed him that bag, and how many times he’d gone to the café before he’d killed her. He was as alone and disconnected as his victims.

She walked back upstairs to look at the “operating room.” It was so eerie to see her image, her articles, her book covers on the wall of a maniac’s death chamber.

Chief Morrow was on his cellular phone giving a description of Bernard Hugo to the state police, who would then distribute it to neighboring states. “You guys are going to make sure the area airports, and train and bus stations are covered?” she heard him ask. “Right … right.… Well, the only place I can think of might be Colorado. His wife is there. No, I don’t recall her maiden name but I can get it. I’ll get back to you.”

Lydia walked over to the table. It looked so cold, so cruel. The table, the implements, as well as the rest of the room, were immaculately clean now. But she imagined the table covered with blood, imagined Shawna lying on it, her chest sliced opened, and she shivered. Lydia wondered if the killer wanted to see her there, too.

Jeffrey walked up behind her and she jumped a little.

“I’m sure he’s on the run,” he said to her, with too much conviction, as though he were trying to reassure himself as much as her. “He’s not going to get far.”

“He’s not done yet.”

“There’s no way he can get to you or to Juno. I’m not letting you out of my sight. And there are two detectives parked in front of the Turvey house to protect Juno. It’s over, he must see that.”

Lydia just nodded. She knew with a cool certainty that Bernard Hugo was somewhere close by, waiting, that he wasn’t done with whatever he had set out to do. Jeffrey placed an intimate hand on her hip and she leaned into him. She felt her face flush as the warmth of his presence washed over her. It was such a new feeling, to feel personally happy, even though the sight that faced her was grim.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Horrible and wonderful,” she answered. “Horrible about this, wonderful about … everything else.”

“I know,” he said, grabbing her hand and squeezing.

It had been a long day and the sun was going down as Lydia sat on the stoop outside the Hugo home, writing longhand in her notebook the events of the day, narrating them already. In the house behind her, she could still hear the activity of the crime scene. Jeffrey’s voice was clear and strong, full of authority. The sound of it comforted her as she wrote. A parade of people rushed back and forth, carrying evidence away, delivering coffee and files.

She looked up from her notebook when she heard a vehicle approach, and saw Wizner emerge with three police officers and walk toward the house. “I think you’ll be interested in this, Ms. Strong,” Wizner said without stopping or looking at her as he passed. She got up to follow them.

Jeffrey looked up from the conversation he was having with one of the forensics officers when Wizner walked in.

“Well, Mr. Mark, it looks like those organs weren’t put to such good use after all.”

“That’s what I hear, Wizner,” said Jeffrey, not in the mood for a flashy presentation.

“They were buried in the church garden … four human hearts preserved in jars of formaldehyde.”

“How long will it be before you are able to determine whether the hearts belong to the victims?”

“I’m on my way to the office right now. I just thought you’d like to know first what we found.”

“No sign of Father Luis?” asked Chief Morrow.

“No bodies in the garden, only the hearts,” Wizner answered with a ghoulish smile, as if he’d just said something witty.

After another hour, the room and the house started to clear out as Forensics completed the gathering of evidence. All Hugo’s equipment had been removed, and only a few technicians remained, combing for hair and fibers, searching for minuscule blood samples in the carefully scrubbed and sanitized room.

Jeffrey and Lydia stood alone in the room and stared at the walls.

“You certainly figure rather prominently in his imagination,” said Jeffrey.

“It must run in the family,” she answered, trying to sound light but failing.

She got up and walked over to him, and without hesitation wrapped her arms around his waist, pressing herself against him. She felt his body relax and he folded her in his arms. She didn’t care who saw them or what anyone thought. She was just glad she didn’t have to face her demons alone anymore.

The chief approached them. “Jeff, can I have a word with you?”

Lydia bristled at her exclusion, but she tried not to eavesdrop as the two walked out into the hallway, and pretended instead to be looking closely at the collages on the walls. At first the chief looked contrite and almost ashamed. Jeffrey’s jaw was set the way it generally was when he would reprimand Lydia. And then she saw the chief’s face flush in anger as he raised his voice a bit.

“Don’t forget who runs the show here, Mr. Mark,” he said, and stormed from the house, climbed into his car, and pulled quickly down the drive, his tires spitting up gravel.

“What was that all about?” she asked as Jeffrey returned to her, shaking his head.

“Let’s get out of here. This place is starting to give me the creeps.”

They walked out the front door of the house and got into Lydia’s Kompressor, and started for home.

On the way back, Lydia shared with Jeffrey her conversation with Juno.

“It doesn’t seem possible that someone could believe a story like that,” Jeffrey said skeptically.

“I agree that it’s hard to believe, but trust me when I tell you it’s true. He had no idea what actually happened to his parents until I told him.”

“How did he take it?”

“Badly. It was sad. He was such an innocent and that’s lost now. Bernard Hugo murdered his innocence.”

They were both silent for a moment as Lydia drove fast on the dark, winding road toward home, the Mercedes hugging curves, graceful and silent.

“So, if you were Bernard Hugo, what would be your next move?” Lydia asked Jeffrey.

“Well, it depends. If I came back this way and saw my house swarming with cops and I was sane, I’d probably dump the minivan, steal another vehicle, or hop a bus and get out of Dodge.”

“But if you weren’t sane, if you needed to stick around for some reason, where would you hide?”

“In all those miles of desert and mountains … all I need is a tent and some supplies. But why would I want to stick around?”

“Because the man who killed your son, the man whose heart is the most false of all, is still alive. His heart is still beating and every day it does, it’s a greater insult to God.”

S
imon Morrow hadn’t said a word since he returned home. He’d just sat in the old lawn chair that had been in all the backyards of their marriage. His wife knew well enough to leave him be; so she’d left a plate of food on the table for him and gone out with her friends. It was moments like these when he remembered he was an alcoholic. He felt a hurtful need for a beer as the light dimmed around him and evening fell.

He’d left the scene in disgust. After the hopes he’d had this morning, he’d felt crushed by the events of the afternoon.
Is this what it means to be a broken man?
he wondered. That’s how he felt. He knew his wife felt differently. She had told him once that he was her hero. It was after the whole incident in St. Louis. She’d said it was because he recognized his faults and worked to make them better. She’d cried a little when she told him how much she admired him. The fact he knew she was sincere made him feel like that much more of a heel. But he’d always hoped one day to feel worthy of her pride, of her love. Tonight he believed that day might never come, and it hurt—almost as much as his need for a double scotch neat.

He wondered if Bernard Hugo was long gone or if he was hovering someplace nearby, unsure of where to go and what to do. Simon Morrow wondered if maybe he understood a little of the
desperation Hugo must feel right now. They had both lost something that had caused them to lose themselves a little. Different, certainly. But wasn’t there always something recognizable in the most insane human reaction to pain?

How often had Simon Morrow wished he could return to the St. Louis station house? Not to go back there for a visit as the man he was today, but to go back to the man he had been in the days he ran the place, pretty damn well, he thought. How highly he’d thought of himself then. Never a moment of self-doubt, self-recrimination. What he wouldn’t give to walk those halls again as a young man. He wondered if Bernard Hugo felt the same way.

Morrow rose and entered his house through the sliding glass doors that led to his comfortable living room. He grabbed his car keys off the countertop in the kitchen, and pulled a light jacket off the back of a table chair. He walked out the front door and went to the police cruiser parked in his driveway. He felt a twinge of self-loathing as he crawled behind the wheel, as if he didn’t deserve to be operating department equipment. He thought he’d just take a little ride over to the hospital where Bernard Hugo used to work.

E
ach of Juno’s other senses told him he was in the wrong place. The air smelled of roses and peppermint. The bed was too soft, the sheets too fragrant. He could hear Mrs. Turvey puttering downstairs, cleaning dinner dishes and humming softly. He must have dozed after dinner. He had eaten a great deal in spite of his grief and everything he had learned today. But now he was awake. And he knew with certainty that he was in the wrong place. He must return to the church immediately. It wasn’t his mind that
told him this. It was not a desire to be surrounded with the things that were familiar to him. And it was not a desire to be alone. It was something larger, something outside himself that told Juno he was in the wrong place.

It wasn’t far and he could certainly walk. He had done so a million times as a child. He was sure he remembered the way. He had his cane with him. Mrs. Turvey had told him when she’d leaned it against the doorjamb. He would need to wait until she went to bed. Otherwise he would only worry her, or she would try to stop him somehow. So he would lie and wait until the house was silent. And then he would go home.

A
s they pulled up to the house, two uniformed police officers greeted their car.

“The repairman for the alarm system was here today, Ms. Strong,” said one of the baby-faced officers. “He put a new breaker box inside the garage and says it should be fine now.”

“Perfect,” said Jeffrey, “but a little late.”

“Yes sir,” answered the officer.

“Come up for coffee if you get cold, guys,” said Lydia, pulling her cream suede jacket around her against the chill.

“Thank you, Ms. Strong.”

It felt strange to her, as she turned the brushed-chrome knob and entered through the front door, that Bernard Hugo had been in her house. The hand that had murdered and removed the hearts of innocent people had been on the same doorknob that hers rested on now. She had felt invaded last night but now that she knew who he was and what he had done, it bothered her even more.

“I wonder why he didn’t wait for us to come home last night.”

“Who?”

“Bernard Hugo.”

“Well, we’re armed, for one.”

“How would he know that we’re armed?”

“It’s a reasonable assumption.”

“Still, if he was really motivated to kill me …”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to kill you.”

“What else could he want?”

“I don’t know, Lyd,” he said, moving close to her and leaning in to kiss her.

In the melee, Lydia had barely had a chance to acknowledge the way their relationship had changed, what had happened between them last night. But it felt so natural, far more natural than pushing him away for years had felt. It was as if they had slipped into the relationship they were meant to have all along and the only difference was an overwhelming sense of release.