Avenging Angel (19 page)

The woman, thin as a rake handle and with as many curves, held open the screen door and said “Hush” to the still-yapping dogs. “Hush, now! Git!” Then to Tice, her gaze catching the white patch over Wager’s eye, “She’s holding up. I heard you-all coming a half-mile away.”

“Oh, just trying out my equipment,” said Tice. “Nobody’s been around?”

“Around?”

“Reporters. Nosy neighbors. Anybody.”

“No, everybody’s been real thoughtful.” She led the two men into a parlor that centered around a large fieldstone fireplace. On the mantel were family pictures in a row; against one wall, a glass-faced cabinet tilted up some flowered dishes for people to see. Mrs. Winston rose from a wingback chair to say hello. She had a powdery-looking face and her gray hair was braided up over her ears in an old-fashioned way. Her eyes, behind rimless bifocals, were baggy from crying; but now she smiled, and in that smile Wager could see the girl Winston had married.

“Hello, D.L. And this is Detective Wager? I’m pleased to meet you. Orrin had good things to say about you.”

Wager had barely known Orrin and hadn’t spent much time at all thinking about him, until after he was dead. “Thank you, ma’am. I’m sorry about what happened.”

The smile quivered but did not break. “Yes,” she said.

“We won’t stay long, Nelly. You understand. But we’d like to see the notebooks you told us about.”

“They’re at the office.” She went to a small side table and took a ring of keys out of the drawer. Holding them a moment, she fingered the stone that hung like a fob. Wager saw the blue tint of turquoise, matching the slide that Orrin wore on his tie. “This,” she held up a brass key, “is the front door. This one is for his office. This little one’s the cabinet. Orrin kept the notebooks in the cabinet behind his desk.”

“We won’t disturb nothing,” said Tice.

She patted his hand as if it were he who needed sympathy. “Nobody can disturb anything now.”

“Ruth’ll stay with her until the kids get in for the funeral.” Tice steered the Bronco back toward town and the newspaper office. “I don’t think an avenging angel’s going to try something with other people around. And with those dogs. But I’ll have Hodges cruise the area anyway—he can keep an eye on the women without scaring them to death.”

Wager remembered the line of bodies carried out of the Beauchamp house. “I hope that’s so.”

“You don’t think it is?”

“They’ve killed men, women, and children. And they’re not through killing yet if we don’t catch them.”

“Goddamnit, Wager, I’m doing the best I can to catch them!”

“Me, too. And so far that’s not much, is it?”

They drove in silence down the long, rectilinear dirt roads that carved the flat land into large, square lots. Out of the dark on either side came the pale-blue glow of mercury lamps over barns, or the yellow of windows in flat-roofed houses and mobile homes moored like boxcars among the sagebrush. Wager watched the approaching glow of traffic along the highway until they finally turned off Main Street onto Third, stopping in front of a single-story brick building painted white. No light shone through the plate-glass windows but, catching the weak gleam of a street lamp high on a telephone pole, a gilded sign spelled
GRANT COUNTY BEACON—THE COUNTY’S ONLY NEWSPAPER
. A smaller sign taped on the door said
OFFICE CLOSED BECAUSE OF DEATH
. Tice radioed his location and the code that said he would be temporarily out of the net. Then he unlocked the front door.

It swung into a small room cluttered with the paper debris of news work that is forever unfinished and hurried. Even a weekly seemed to have deadline troubles, and, Wager guessed, reporters were alike everywhere in dumping their sheets and galleys on any ledge and for no apparent reason.

Tice fumbled along the inside wall for a light switch, found it, and flooded the room in the antiseptic glare of fluorescent light. “This is Orrin’s office back here.”

He led Wager between the cluttered desks and work tables smelling of rubber cement to a door whose frosted glass panel loomed darkly. When he flipped on the light, the sheriff said “Damn” and Wager, following his gaze, saw it too: the alley window had a pane taped over and smashed out; the sash hung half open. The clutter of this room was not the orderly chaos of the outer office, but a scattering of paper and printed sheets that someone had ripped through in a hurried search.

“How’s the cabinet?”

Tice, wrapping the bandanna around his hand, pressed the very end of the handle. “Still locked.”

Wager pointed to a ripple in the lip of the metal door. A glint showed where the paint had freshly chipped. “Someone was trying to pry it open. I think we scared them off.”

Tice wheeled and lumbered toward the front door, the handle of his pistol snagging one of the tables with a scraping thump. Outside, they listened for a moment to the darkness.

“You go that way—take the alley. I’ll meet you around back.”

Wager turned into the narrow lane between the newspaper office and the neighboring building. In the thick darkness, his shoes snagged on grass clumps and kicked against whiskey bottles; ahead, a pale rectangle, the alley ended in a sandy lane empty of everything except windblown trash and clusters of garbage cans that looked like crouching figures. A moment later, Tice’s squat shadow turned the far corner toward Wager.

“Nothing?”

“No,” said Wager. “He must have heard us at the front door.”

“Damn,” said Tice.

Back in Orrin’s rifled office, Wager inspected the windowsill while Tice jiggled the key in the bent locker door. Splintered glass hung at the ends of the masking tape, and a fresh dent showed where a screwdriver had been used to pry open the sash. Whoever broke in apparently did not know exactly what to look for or where, and had spent a lot of time fumbling through desk drawers and piles of paper before turning to the cabinet. But another two or three minutes with that thin metal and the intruder might have found what he was looking for. Wager and Tice could thank the gods of luck for a little help.

“There,” said Tice. The cabinet door snapped open with a twang. He rummaged for a moment and then told a hovering Wager, “They’re still here.” Carefully, he lifted out a handful of cardboard filing boxes and carried them to the littered desk. Then, using the bandanna again, Tice picked up the telephone and dialed his office. “Joanne? D.L. here. See if you can get me that fingerprint kit. Anybody that’s around, have them bring it over to the Beacon’s office. He is? What for? All right, have him bring it over.” As he hung up, he told Wager, “Yates is in town for some paperwork—he’ll bring it over.”

The spiral notebooks had been placed in cardboard file boxes lined in marbled gray and white sides. Dates inked on white paper had been glued to the black spines of the boxes. Wager pulled out the most recent, scanning the pages for any mention of the avenging angels. Tice, after a quick prowl of the room, hung over his shoulder and breathed heavily in the still office.

“Anything?”

“Not yet.” The entries quickly became routine; Orrin began a section with a list of meetings for that week—city council, PTA, county board—and, a few pages later, there were his notes on the meetings. The items between were the usual ones, and they were often in cryptic abbreviations, some of which Wager could decipher. Perhaps Orrin’s wife could do the rest. Or, better, one of the newspaper staff.

“Do you know who ‘C’ is?”

Tice grunted no. “But he wrote down a meeting with ‘C’ in his last notebook, didn’t he?”

That was the point; Wager didn’t bother to answer.

They finished that notebook and were halfway into the next when a knock rattled the front door loudly. Tice went and a moment later came back followed by Deputy Yates, who carried a metal tool kit. On its lid was stenciled
FINGERPRINT KIT COUNTY SHERIFF
. Yates peered at Wager. “What in hell happened to your eye?”

“I got some glass in it.”

The deputy winced. “Man, just the thought of that’s like sand between my teeth!” He shuddered and lugged the kit to the half-open window. “This here’s the spot?”

“Start there,” said Tice. “Then the cabinet and the handles.”

“Right.” He, too, glanced over Wager’s shoulder at the notebooks. “You found them in the cabinet? Anything there?”

Wager shook his head. “Nothing I can find.”

“No avenging angels?”

“No.”

By the time Yates had finished dusting for prints, Wager and Tice had read a year’s collection of notebooks. In the one covering Mueller’s death they found the only mention of avenging angels. The rest held now-familiar phrases and memos, and names that began to echo periodically as Orrin noted his rounds and appointments. Wager’s good eye watered from the strain of doing all the work, and he rubbed at it wearily. “It’s got to be in these last couple notebooks,” he said to himself.

But Tice answered. “If there’s anything there at all. Damned if I think there’s anything there at all. What about you, Roy? You come up with any prints?”

The deputy shook his head. “That sill’s clean of everything. I’d say it was wiped off. Or the guy wore gloves. There’s some prints on that cabinet handle, but they’re pretty dry. That means they’re old,” he added, to impress Wager with his skill.

But Wager’s attention was elsewhere, and the remark went past him. Orrin had been killed because someone thought he knew something; Wager had been shot at for the same reason; now a burglary had been attempted for those notebooks, which were supposed to tell them something. But no recent mention of avenging angels, no name or place or time linked to that group of murderers who loomed so threateningly over Orrin’s half-brother and ultimately over Orrin himself. It just didn’t make sense. “I’d like to make copies of these last two or three books, Sheriff. Maybe somebody else will see something that I don’t.”

“All right by me,” said Tice. “You through, Roy? Let’s take one more look outside then. Get your flashlight.”

They made a final sweep of the alley, using the headlights of Tice’s Bronco and the sharp gleam of flashlights to pick out any fresh tracks. But the dirt was scuffed only by blurred footprints, new and old, and nowhere did a line of crushed weeds or ridged sand clearly indicate the wheels of a vehicle. Yates, his long-handled flashlight sweeping back and forth, finally spotted some fresh ruts in the sand at the rear of the building. “This must be where he parked. But you’re not going to get any impressions in this loose crap.”

That was true. And in fact the whole damn case seemed like loose sand to Wager. Nothing stuck together; it all slid apart and trickled between his fingers. Into this surrounding darkness the burglar had run; perhaps out of it, as near as a touch, the killer would come again. Yet no matter how hard Wager tried, he could not pull things together into a pattern of cause and effect. It brought the kind of feeling he hated most, a sense that no matter how hard he tried he would not be able to grasp that pattern. But the pattern had to be there. And the fact that he was too blind to spot it made its absence sting all the more.

He was tired. Although he had slept heavily, the night had seemed as brief as a wink, and Wager was still tired when he rolled out of bed in the morning. The day before had been a very long one; it always did things to your sense of time when somebody shot at you. When the last surge of adrenaline finally ebbed, it left a sense of collapse at the center of the brain where effort came from. He had discovered that in Vietnam, and it was true now. But a shower would help; that, a careful unpeeling of the bandage from his gummy eye, and a squirt of the cooling ointment given him by the doctor. The ball was bright red with irritation and flecked with dark blood, and tears washed out of the corner of his eye when the light stabbed at the soreness. Wash carefully, try to keep from scratching the itchy feeling, retape with a fresh pad. Shave, breakfast the specialty of the house—huevos rancheros, but don’t touch those hash browns—and then back to his room to wrestle once more with the heavy sheets of paper onto which they had Xeroxed the pages of Orrin’s notebooks.

Taking each entry and numbering it, Wager gradually worked up a classification system—civic meetings, production memoranda, obvious news items, names of assorted people, and, most important: questionable. As he fit an entry under a heading he penciled a light X on the notebook page beside it. Gradually the sifting left fewer and fewer items without an X, but those that remained gained in importance. At least they would look interesting until somebody could explain them away, because they were the “questionable” items.

That phase of the process would take legwork; but just as he was leaving his telephone rang and Jo’s worried voice was at his ear, asking him how he was, how badly he was hurt.

“I’m all right. It was only some glass in my eye, but the doctor got it out. It feels better already,” he said, lying.

“I was so worried. Max just came by and told me. He said you were okay, but I was so scared. I guess I still am.”

At the time, Wager had been more startled and angry and very, very alert than frightened; now that it was over and death had missed him, there wasn’t much sense in dwelling on it. “I really am all right, Jo. How about you—how’re you doing?”

“Oh, Gabe!” Her voice pulled away with a sigh and a moment later came back half humorously. “You won’t even let me worry about you, will you?”

“Jo, there’s not one damn thing—”

“I know. But I’m still glad you’re all right. I’ve got to get back on duty—will you give me a call as soon as you get home?”

“I’ll do more than that. We’ve still got that dinner date.”

“I’m waiting.” Her voice said that she, too, knew how unsatisfactory telephones were. “Oh … we missed Polly’s barbecue … you were down in Pueblo. I told Max we were sorry. Both of us.”

Wager wasn’t sorry. “That’s nice. I forgot all about the damn thing.”

“I know. Gabe, please be careful!”

“Well, sure!” That was a silly thing to tell him. “And you be good.”

“That’s a silly thing to say. Bye.” The buzz of the telephone line seemed almost mocking.