Angel Interrupted (17 page)

When I was alive, I had loved car chases. They were an excuse to unleash my recklessness. My old partner, Danny, would brace himself against the dashboard, whooping in drunken glee as I floored the car, sped through red lights, passed other cars inches before oncoming traffic hit us, rocketed around curves at insane speeds, and transformed my ever-present death wish into a series of terrifying yet exhilarating experiences.

It’s different when you’re on foot.

I reached the front gate of the cemetery just in time to see the blue station wagon pull through it and turn right, driving swiftly down a neighborhood street toward a nearby boulevard. I had a chance of keeping up if he kept to the side streets. He reached the intersection and, mercifully, a red light stalled him while I made up ground. The light changed when I was still a quarter block away, but the man did not turn onto the boulevard. He zoomed across the intersection and entered a neighborhood on the far side of it, one of the ubiquitous newer developments with wide, flat yards that had mushroomed all over town starting a few decades ago. I followed and saw the car turn left down a winding road that led me back deep into streets that all looked alike with names that all sounded alike and with homes that featured identical plans distinguished only by minor façade variations like the front stoop design or window placement. If I’d been human, I’d never have been able to find my way out again. But the driver knew where he was going. He made a quick right onto a paved road that took him nearly to the edge of a central lake. Although once our town’s reservoir, it had been converted into a boating and fishing paradise that doubled the value of the homes surrounding it. The blue Toyota followed the road around the lake’s shoreline for a half mile, then turned left and disappeared. If he’d turned onto a road with a lot of turns leading off it, I was in trouble.

The road had only a few turns. The first right turn was a cul-de-sac with five houses arranged around it in a horseshoe pattern. Each yard was landscaped with such a profusion of bushes, trees, and flowers that you could barely see the houses beyond.

The Toyota was parked in the driveway of a small cedar-shingled house nestled in an explosion of greenery at the top of the cul-de-sac. The curtains were closed, the lights were off, and a rotating security camera scanned the area near the front door in increments. Home-monitoring-service signs dotted the yard, but they meant nothing to me. Death has its perks. Invisibility is one of them.

The man I had seen running from the cemetery, the same one Martin had seen in the park the morning Tyler Matthews was abducted, was standing on the front stoop, unlocking dead bolt after dead bolt, a bulging plastic bag from Wal-Mart looped over one arm. When he stepped inside, I followed.

Little Tyler Matthews was sitting with his back to a large television set, ignoring the cartoons that raced and blasted behind him in favor of a set of plastic barnyard animals that he had carefully arranged in a tidy tableau of barn, fence, cows, pigs, chickens, and ducks. Plastic horses had been lined up on the carpet nearby so that they appeared to be grazing. The boy looked unharmed and, indeed, untouched. He was wearing the same T-shirt and shorts he’d had on when he’d been taken. On the couch, I saw a pillow and rumpled blanket and guessed that he had fallen asleep there the night before.

I felt no one else in the house. The boy seemed unperturbed at having been left alone and greeted the return of the man who had taken him with an innocent, trusting look. He also seemed completely unaware that the living room where he sat was rigged with four different cameras so that his every move was captured in detail. I did not know if the cameras were broadcasting live over the Internet or were in place for a future day. I did not want to think about it either.

“What did you bring me?” the boy asked in a high, piping voice. He was holding a pig in each hand, snout to snout, as if they had been having an imaginary conversation.

The man dropped to one knee, and his voice was friendly. “I brought you some mac and cheese—the kind you said you liked, with the little wagon wheels—and some chocolate milk and a bag of doughnuts as a treat.” He spoke very carefully to the boy, as if he wanted to show his innocence the respect it deserved.

“My mommy doesn’t let me eat doughnuts,” the boy explained matter-of-factly. “They aren’t very good for you.”

“I think one or two would be okay,” the man assured him. “We don’t have to tell your mommy.”

“Is she coming to get me soon?” The boy sounded hopeful.

“I’m not sure,” the man said. He folded his gangly arms and legs in on himself and sat in front of the boy, then pulled some new toys from his shopping bag. “In the meantime, I thought you might like some soldiers. I liked soldiers when I was your age.” He freed a set of a dozen plastic toy soldiers from their see-through prison and arranged them on the carpet for the boy. Unlike the crudely molded army men of my own childhood, these were carefully designed fighting men of the modern era, immaculately painted with bright daubs of yellow and red and blue for accents. Many of them carried the weapons of their specialty: bazookas, missiles, rifles, radios. They were irresistible to any young boy.

The boy smiled at the soldiers and that smile took my breath away. He was exquisitely beautiful, with large, dark eyes rimmed with thick, black eyelashes. His curly brown hair fell into his face in cherubic loops. His skin was a perfect, creamy pink and his tiny mouth pursed in concentration as he examined his new army. “My daddy was a solider,” he said, excited, as he gazed up at the man.

“You mean he is a soldier?” the man asked.

“No,” the little boy said, again matter-of-factly. “A bad man killed him and now he got dead.” He knocked over one of the plastic soldiers with another one and then dragged the toy to a place by the barn. “Me and Mommy buried him and some real soldiers shot off their guns. It was very loud. Mommy said not to cry, so I didn’t. She said I was very brave afterward and gave me an extrabig piece of cake.”

The man was startled at this information. I felt a flicker of shame in him, which told me that he had not known the boy personally and that he’d had no idea the boy’s father had been killed in Iraq last year.

“Are you hungry?” he asked the boy, who nodded solemnly. “Would you like some mac and cheese now?” Tyler nodded again.

As the man rose from the carpet, a voice came out of nowhere, echoing through the room, deep and disembodied. “Do not feed the boy too much. I prefer them thin.” It was an order, uttered by a man who expected to be obeyed. Short and to the point, leaving no room for argument.

The boy looked up, unconcerned at this intrusion, and returned to his toys. The man who had taken him did not react so casually. I felt the agitation in him rise and give way to a tumble of emotions triggered by the voice. Where first I had felt nothing in him but sympathy toward the little boy, I now felt anger in the man, accompanied by a desire to hurt, a need to exert power, and something much darker, something very much like lust. Whoever the disembodied voice belonged to, he had complete power over the man who had taken Tyler Matthews.

The man walked toward the kitchen and spoke into a camera affixed to the edge of the door, speaking low so the boy would not notice. “He has to eat.”

“I do not want you to spoil him.” The deep voice had a dark quality hidden beneath it, as if the real danger lay in all the things he was not saying out loud.

“How can I possibly spoil him in a few days?” the man who had taken Tyler argued. The fear in him rose, though, as if he knew he was daring to push his boundaries.

“You misunderstand me,” the voice said, then repeated more precisely: “I do not want you to
spoil
him.”

The man in the house froze. “I would never do that,” he said in a flat voice.

The laughter that answered him was so rife with evil it turned my heart to ice. It started out low, then grew in volume, as if it were alive and had fattened itself on cynicism and carnal desire and was now filled with a satisfied certainty that no man could resist taking the fruit from the tree. “We shall see,” the voice said as the laughter tapered off. “We shall see.”

There was a moment of silence as the man in the apartment looked at the floor, stifling the hatred and fear and, yes, desire that flickered in him. He looked up, startled, as the voice boomed suddenly from the webcam’s speakers: “Turn him!”

“What?” The man still held the groceries in his hands.

“Turn the boy around so I can see him better.”

The man in the house put the chocolate milk and frozen dinners down on the counter without a word and returned to the living room. “Hey, little buddy,” he said in his most soothing voice. “Why don’t we rearrange the farm and soldiers so you can watch TV at the same time?”

Before the boy could react, the man moved the toys and then gently turned the boy so his face was visible to a camera mounted on the far wall. The man gauged the distance between the boy and the camera, then carefully inched him back a bit. Satisfied, he stepped out of camera range and returned to the kitchen.

He was met with soft laughter from the unseen man on the way, laughter that told me the man was utterly confident in his ability to control what happened to Tyler Matthews next.

I knew it was only a matter of time. I had to find a way to get help.

My town was in turmoil. That much was evident everywhere I went. It had been invaded by the media and infused with a hysteria you could feel on the streets. Not even the missing boy’s mother, Callie Matthews—already a widow and now facing every parent’s worst nightmare—was spared the ugliness of speculation. And this from people who knew her, not strangers.

I knew all this because I searched for Maggie at the dead nurse’s cottage first, then stopped by the park looking for my little otherworldly friend in hopes he was up for another playground session. I needed some respite from the evil I’d sensed in the cedar-shingled house near the lake. Instead, I found a group of mothers, heads bent together as their children played nearby for television crews with nothing better to film than cheesy re-creations of Tyler’s last moments before he was taken.

“She’s unstable, is my point,” one of the mothers was whispering to the others. “She’s taking a lot of pills. Who knows what that can do to a person?”

“Tyler is her life,” another disagreed. “She’s not going to hurt him.”

“She couldn’t fake what she’s going through,” another agreed. “She’s devastated.”

“They’re all devastated when people are watching,” yet another mother insisted. “She could easily have lost it if he disobeyed her. You’ve seen how she gets. Was Tyler even here yesterday? I don’t remember seeing him. Neither does Chelsea, and she is a very observant child.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, he was here,” a stocky woman said with disgust. She walked away from the other mothers, ignoring the cameras, called her child to her, and left the park, probably wondering, as I did, what it was about tragedy that made people salivate and become so anxious to believe that even the best among us were capable of evil. I sympathized with her frustration, but I watched her go with sadness—her obvious rebuff of the group could cause a permanent rift. Crimes like this had a way of sending out fractures like earthquakes lead to fissures, carving divides that separate people and spread out in unpredictable directions, driving a wedge of destruction between friends and loved ones.

I left the park behind and went in search of Maggie. She was not at the station house, which was besieged by media vans. My guess was that Callie Matthews was inside being interviewed by the feds and that Gonzales would emerge as soon as the cameras were set up and the frenzy of reporters had reached the size of a large wolf pack. He’d appear, get his next five minutes of fame, then disappear back inside to cover the department’s ass and plot his next move toward fame and fortune.

I kept going.

Maggie is a predictable creature, and she leads a solitary life. I know her routine like my own, in part because the patterns of her life fascinate me. She lives alone in a condo and is friendly to her neighbors, but never stops to chat with any of them; she works out at a gym four times a week whenever she can, depending on her caseload; she shops at a small market owned by a Korean couple who save the best fruit and produce for her behind the counter; she seldom buys anything that comes in a package, as she is careful about what she eats, and her body shows it: she is not a thin woman, but she is in superb condition and the epitome of health and strength. It is one of the reasons I remain so enamored of her after other infatuations have come and gone. Everything about her celebrates life. She is impossible for someone like me to resist. I am a moth to her flame.

I checked her condo, then the market, the gym, and a coffee shop she sometimes frequents for skinny lattes sweetened with a shot of sugar-free vanilla syrup. When none of those spots panned out, I knew she had to be at her father’s. She always ended up there at one time or another during a difficult case, as well she should. Her father, Colin, had spent ten years on the streets as a beat cop and thirty more as a detective, rejecting all promotions and attempts to pull him onto the department ladder in favor of working the front line. He’d been allowed to stay on well past standard retirement age and had only left when, eventually, the ill health of his wife forced him to. Maggie’s mother had died a few years ago and, though I had been too drunk and self-centered to notice it then, I felt the sting of her loss in both daughter and husband. Maggie and her father carried their sorrow around like internal wounds that time did not seem to heal. Perhaps she had been the glue that bound them.