Avenging Angel (2 page)

“The fifteenth? That’s a long way off. What’s the fifteenth?”

“It’s a Saturday.” Axton kept his attention focused on the driving. “Polly’s planning a little get-together. A barbecue.”

Wager glanced at Max. His profile looked as jagged as the mountain range silhouetted behind him: heavy brow jutting over the notch at the bridge of his nose, that nose rippling out across its break and then sharply back to the full mouth, then the long curve of a chin that came out farther than the nose and swung down and back to a size-nineteen neck. Wager enjoyed watching a suspect’s eyes when they first saw Max crowd into an interview cubicle. They always went first to the face, then, as they measured the torso and realized his size, they went guardedly back to that craggy nose. Occasionally, Wager smiled and introduced him to the suspect: “This is Detective Axton. Some people call him Max-the-Ax.”

“I might have a date with Jo,” said Wager. “It depends on the duty roster.”

“She’ll be welcome, too. It’s nothing formal,” Axton added quickly. “Just a cookout for whoever shows up, and you and Jo are welcome.”

A casual barbecue planned that far in advance. That was like Polly: arranging her world and everyone else’s, and using Axton’s easygoing ways as her reason for being so organized. And it was like Axton to pretend that the invitation was nothing special. Wager watched the eastern horizon shade into darker and darker purple, the way night comes across the prairie through dusty summer air. There was nothing to catch the low-lying sun except the wavering ranks of new suburban rooftops, and they, too, rolled steadily under into dusk. “Polly’s not mad at me anymore?”

“Aw, come on, Gabe! As soon as she found out what the problem was, she understood. I get that way, too—we all do; she understands it’s the job. It’s just that she knows my signals and she didn’t know yours.”

“Your ‘signals’? You and Golding been talking body language again?”

“Did I say that?” Axton’s head wagged. “Well, there may be some truth in it.”

No truth that anyone with a pair of eyes and half a brain hadn’t already figured out by the time he was ten years old. But that excluded Golding. “He hasn’t said much about acupuncture lately. He give up on that?”

“I think so. He had a book—
Acupuncture as a Hobby
—but he couldn’t find anybody to practice on. Except himself, and I guess that didn’t work out too well.”

“Maybe we should use him in interrogation.”

Max’s eyes slanted in Wager’s direction as if he wasn’t quite certain whether or not he was joking. “Anyway, the invitation’s there. Polly wanted me to tell you.”

Body language or no body language, it had taken Polly long enough to understand why her carefully planned evening had been spoiled by his fight with Axton about Tony-O. But Wager said nothing about that because they weren’t really talking about Polly or her dinner. This was something more important—it was about Max, his partner. And the reason for that fight and the coolness that resulted. It was the first time since the Tony-O thing that Axton had said a word about getting together outside a patrol car.

But if it took Axton almost a year to get over blaming him for something he knew was damn well right, then maybe Wager wasn’t too eager to kiss and make up.

“That’s a long way off,” he said again.

“I hope you can make it.” Axton’s eyes were back studying the light traffic of the freeway. “I mean that.”

And, just maybe, Wager had his own pride, which Axton had stepped on. “I’ll check with Jo.”

The rest of the ride was in the silence that had become habitual and almost without strain during the past months: two people arbitrarily yoked together to put in their time. Neither one had been willing to go to Chief Doyle to ask for a change of partner because that would have been acting like a prima donna. Golding might have done it, but not Wager or Axton. Homicide was a small division, and there wasn’t room to coddle personalities. Especially if neither man could tell the division chief the real reason for such a request. But if Axton felt guilty because his partner had abetted a homicide, that was his problem. Wager felt no guilt at all. He was, as he’d heard people call him, a tough little spic bastard, and he was proud of it. What the hell, you didn’t have to like your partner; all you had to do was work with him. Wager could tell himself that, and he could almost believe it.

When he reached his shadowy apartment, the little light on Wager’s telephone-answering machine glowed red for Message Received. Reading the instruction booklet once more, he carefully pressed the Rewind button and waited as the tape whirred dryly. The machine was new, a toy really, and though he wouldn’t be shy about admitting he owned one, neither did Wager tell the world about it. For one thing, he was still suspicious of the home-gadget industry and the fact that Golding had bought one and praised it for three weeks straight. For another, it was nobody’s business what Wager did with his money. And he’d bought the machine for good reason: there were occasions when people wanted to talk to him without having to go through a police switchboard. Usually those voices came on the tape with a hurried “Wager, it’s me. I got something for you. Get in touch with me quick, will you?”

But this wasn’t an informant. The Play button brought the slightly nasal voice of a policewoman in Missing Persons, responding to the note he had left there before he went home for the day.

“Detective Wager, we have no report of a missing person matching that John Doe description you gave us. We should have a report from the national listing sometime tomorrow.”

The tape clicked and then ran long enough to tell him that was the only message. He pressed Rewind and Off and dialed the police laboratory. A recording of Baird’s voice told him what he already knew: the laboratory was closed and would be open tomorrow morning at eight. Please call back. Click.

Wager hung up and gazed through the glass doors to his balcony at the scarlet feathers of cloud hanging beyond the ragged lines of mountains. At this altitude, the summer light lasted well into evening, and there were times, like now, when the sun touched wisps of cloud lingering a hundred miles away across the Rockies. If he were in those mountains, say camped beside one of those small lakes that looked as if they clung to the earth’s tilted flanks, this would be the time for those last few casts. The mosquitoes and night insects would be out, the still water circled here and there with rising trout and the quick touch of dipping insects. Just the time for half a dozen quiet casts; time to try for that last savage strike and the intense play of taut line against the surge and leap of the fish out of the placid mirror.

But he was here, ten stories above a downtown Denver street that echoed with the urgent summer noises of automobiles and the shuffle and scrape of feet made restless by the warm night. There was a different kind of fishing down here; perhaps a different kind of savagery. Wager wasn’t so certain about that, though; muggers, rapists, killers—they struck, like any other animal, at the weak, the crippled, the defenseless. They came out of dark crevices between buildings and went after the sure thing as a fish lunged after a wobbling minnow. Except for executioners. Executioners were different.

An angel holding a sword. Michael, the sword of the Lord, prince of celestial armies. That was the picture Wager remembered from one of the stained-glass windows when he had fidgeted through another of Father Shannon’s droning sermons in old San Cajetano’s. Michael holding his sword before him while below his left foot Adam and Eve slunk away—the top half of Adam, anyway. Eve’s blond head peeked over his shoulder, and the teenage Wager had only been able to imagine faintly what the rest of her looked like. Below Michael’s right foot, a serpentine Satan recoiled in fear, and Father Shannon would point to that glowing scene in every sermon against fleshly lust.

Father Shannon: a grim man, more like a Lutheran than a Catholic. “He doesn’t have a warm soul,” his mother used to murmur in Spanish. “He doesn’t have the soul of a man who serves God with love.” And his father, whose Spanish, like his adopted faith, often stumbled, would grin. “Maybe he serves God with fear. He sure as hell scares me sometimes!” Michael was gonna get you if you didn’t watch out.

Wager reported before eight the next morning. Munn, who was getting an ulcer worrying about his ulcer coming back, was glad to check out a half hour early.

“I’ll be goddamn happy to get off this shift.” The baggy-eyed detective leaned for a moment against the metal door frame of the homicide unit’s suite of partitioned offices and sculpted plastic furniture. The department had finally moved into the new Justice Center, but Wager had not yet gotten used to the expanse of space that surrounded each desk, and his elbows and knees were still cautious. “There’s nobody to talk to,” said Munn. “I got too much time to think.”

“What do you think about?”

“My ulcer. I can feel the sonofabitch. I can feel it start to grow.”

“Take some sick leave, Munn.”

“I used it all. I just hope I can hang on until retirement.” A sour look crossed his face as his mind turned to something inside. “I got to go. Thanks, Gabe.” He went hurriedly toward the men’s room down the hushed and carpeted hall.

Wager punched the telephone number for the laboratory. The recording started and then with an abrupt squeak broke into Baird’s real voice. “Lab. Sergeant Baird.”

“This is Gabe, Fred. What do you have on that victim we found yesterday?”

“Right now, Wager, I got a cup of coffee sitting on his file. The working day hasn’t started yet.”

A cop’s working day never stopped, not unless he got transferred to a desk somewhere away from the street and away from a world that never stopped either. But when that happened, you weren’t a real cop anymore. “I could use an i.d. on him, Baird. There’s not much we can do until we know who he is.”

“Gabe, I really am working on him. I’m filling out the background forms right now, and I’ll be going to the morgue in about five minutes. You can even come with me and watch if you want.”

“I’ll be right there.”

He left a note telling Axton where to find him, and after a few twists and turns through the color-coordinated hallways he cleared the security door to the new laboratory. The brochure printed by the department for the taxpayers who toured the recently built Justice Center said it was the most complete and modern forensics laboratory outside the FBI lab back at Washington. What the brochure did not say was that the department budget had not yet authorized any more people; most of the new equipment and space was still unused. Call it planning ahead: in another twenty years, the Denver area was supposed to double in size because of Colorado’s energy boom. Then the lab would be too small.

Baird was at his desk along one of the walls that caught light from the tinted and sealed windows high above the street. Somewhere behind the tangle of glass piping and chrome stands a Bunsen burner gave its soft hiss and an unseen hand clinked a stirring rod. Baird glanced up when he heard Wager’s shoes on the tile floor. “There’s the report on the clothing—I got that done last night. Working overtime. Your copy’s on top.”

Wager glanced down the slip. “It doesn’t say much.

“Don’t blame me.”

The victim’s pockets had yielded lint and dust of a non-definitive nature. The cuffless trousers had a little bit more: a couple of seeds that had not been identified, and a film of dust trapped in the vacuum bag. Both were on their way by registered mail to the FBI for classification. The shoes, too, had been delicately cleaned and the scrapings of each packaged and forwarded. The label from inside the coat was from a men’s store in Salt Lake City, Utah; no other identifying labels or laundry marks had been found.

“How long—”

“Possibly twelve to twenty-four hours.” Baird, thinning hair showing his pink crown, did not look up as he finished the form with signature and date. “The coroner will pin it down better. Let’s go.”

The basement of Denver General Hospital served as the morgue for DPD. Wager drove, then followed as Baird, lugging his metal case, stenciled
DPD LAB—FINGERPRINT
, walked through the tiled and echoing halls to the cool room with its bank of drawers like a gigantic filing cabinet. A young orderly who looked slightly hung over rolled out the drawer. A puff of cold, artificially scented air came with it. “Give me a call when you’re finished.”

“Right.”

Baird pulled off the coarse sheet. The body, its torn chest black from the blood dried beneath the bruised skin and mottled with lividity marks on buttocks and shoulders, stared with half-open eyes at the fluorescent panels of the ceiling. In the field, Wager seldom looked closely at a victim’s face—a glance, maybe, for identification, then he focused on the wound and the body in general and especially on the site. It made the corpse seem less human, less a perversion of the everyday world. But here in the antiseptic glare of the morgue, the humanness was washed away and he could study the face as if it were an object under glass. Now he saw the victim more clearly than he had when it lay in the field. In this flat light he could see that the gray-streaked hair had receded far up the man’s curving forehead; at the side of his neck, like hashmarks leading up to the hairy earlobes, sharp wrinkles creased the dry skin. The prominent nose and eyebrows marked a narrow face that was already losing its strong characteristics. The gaping lips, which had never been full, now looked like a razor slash through the gray flesh. Wager made a few notes in his little green book.

“You find any needle tracks?”

“No. But the doc’ll have to look at the organs to know for sure if he was a user.”

“You figure he’s around fifty?”

Baird looked up from rummaging in the shelves of his open kit and squinted at the face. “Yeah—he looks like it. We’ll try to pin it down a little closer for you.”

He laid out his equipment on a wheeled table and began to fold a pair of disposable rubber gloves over his fingers. “I’m not sure how long this is going to take, Wager. There’s bound to be some decay already set in. A whole day lying in that sun…”