Avenging Angel (5 page)

“You’re Detective Sergeant Wager, are you? The one they sent out to clear all this up.” He made it sound more like a statement than a question. In time Wager learned that all of Sheriff Tice’s questions came out that way, and that he expected them to be answered.

And in time the sheriff would learn that Wager didn’t answer the dumb ones. He folded away his badge case. “Can you show me the victim’s file?”

Tice heaved out of the chair, which creaked with relief. Behind him, anchored by a half-shut window and a frame of plywood, an air conditioner fluttered a short strip of cloth from its grill. The sheriffs offices, like almost every other building, were near the edge of the small town. Through the window, Wager saw the long arc of blue-green sagebrush, broken here and there by a mist of irrigation wheels and scattered ranch buildings. Somewhere beyond the etched horizon was the rugged benchland, cut by a small river, then the true desert leading into Utah. Then came a massive upsweep of earth that tilted into those mountain peaks so far away that only their summer snow glimmered low against the sky, like dimly seen clouds.

“You want some coffee first?”

It was part of the ritual between cops, even those whose trust of each other was only official. “Thanks.”

Tice poured a cup from a Silex with glass sides stained brown. “Cream or sugar?”

“Black.”

Black it was. And hot. And bitter. Routines might vary, faces might differ, settings might change, but the coffee in every police unit in the sovereign State of Colorado tasted the same. Wager sipped and waited for the sheriff to pour his own careful cup, the
tink
of his spoon light but sharp over the muffled radio traffic and typewriters in the outer office. Tice would take his time about showing Wager the file; when the sheriff had asked for help from DPD he’d meant information, but instead he was sent an outsider who looked like he wanted to poke his nose into Tice’s business. Well Grant County was his county, and in his county things were done his way. And Wager would be patient; good manners would allow Tice to save some face.

“You have a good drive over?” The back of the sheriff’s head was still toward him.

That wasn’t what occupied Tice’s mind, but Wager said “fine.” Which was true: it had been fine—once out of the brown haze that settled over early-morning Denver and its noisy highways, up into the front range, and finally beyond the clusters of towns that now littered the freeway and threatened to join together into a single hundred-mile-long strip-city of booming alpine suburbia. It had been fine to turn off the broad concrete lanes of carefully engineered curves and get onto the network of secondary roads—the ones that twisted and bumped through narrow canyons or across empty valleys and past mile after mile of vacant grazing land or along shallow, bright streams that on this side of the Divide foamed toward the Colorado River. That had been the best part: to be reminded of the vast spaces that still hung silently between mountain peaks, of the variety of shades of green that covered valleys and slopes up as far as the nude and snow-freckled rock above timberline. To be reminded, too, that not all of Colorado was booming, with a new skyscraper every week, a new subdivision every month, another Fastest-Growing-Little-City-in-the-Country report. “It was a nice drive,” Wager said.

“What was it—five hours? Six? You could’ve flown,” said Tice. “It’s less than an hour to Denver. We got a new county airport put in—all-weather tower, night illumination. Had to have it for the oil shale people.” He finished stirring his coffee with a final
tink
and put the spoon in its own empty cup. “Come on,” he said. “You’ll want a place to look over the file.” He did not ask how long Wager planned to stay, and Wager did not tell him.

Leading back through the outer office, Tice introduced him to the clerks. “This here’s Detective Sergeant Wager from Denver. He’s come to help out with the Mueller case, so I want you people to give him whatever he needs.”

The office staff for the Grant County sheriff’s office: a very nice-looking brunette wearing tight jeans and shuffling through a file drawer, a not-as-nice-looking bleached blond thumping a typewriter, and an older woman in slacks monitoring the radio and telephones while she, too, typed. They smiled collectively at Wager, who nodded back and said hello. He had no doubt that they’d known who he was before he walked through the door. They might or might not have known that it wasn’t Tice’s decision that brought Wager to them.

“We cleared a table for you back here, Detective Wager.” The sheriff pointed to a room larger than a bread-box but smaller than a closet. Freshly outlined marks on the floor showed that filing cabinets had been shoved aside to make space for the small table that looked back blankly. “It’s the best we could do. The department needs a whole new building, but we don’t have a hope of one for the next five years. By then,” Tice’s shoulders rose and fell in a heavy sigh of promised contentment, “I’ll be retired, and somebody else can fight with the county commissioners.”

“This is fine,” said Wager.

“Make yourself at home. I’ll get the file.”

It was a manila folder with the familiar red tag for an unsolved case. On the lip, penned carefully with the foreknowledge that this folder would get a lot more traffic than most, was the name “Mueller, Herman F.” The investigating officer’s report was the top sheet; beneath that were depositions, statements, coroner’s report, receipts, correspondence of one type or another, and a smaller envelope of Polaroid photographs. Wager would look more closely at those later. He began with the officer’s report. Herman Frederick Mueller, b. St. Louis, Mo., Mar. 19, … Wager scanned the victim’s history and the crime report for facts that he did not already have from Tice’s earlier letter. When the entries conflicted, he checked his little green notebook and made the corrections. In the section of the report headed “Statement of Circumstances,” he found the item that had led him to Loma Vista: placed between the first and second fingers of the victim’s left hand was a folded slip of paper bearing the sketch of an angel holding a sword.

The paper itself would be in the sheriff’s evidence locker; after he finished studying the file, Wager copied down Mueller’s case number and wandered back into the busy main office, where he stood waiting. The women hesitated before the pretty brunette smiled and said, “Can I get you something?”

Like the others, she wore no name tag. “I need an item from your evidence locker.”

“The what? Oh—the safe! Sure.” She led him to the large Mosler that blocked one corner of the room. The heavy door hung open and, without glancing at the file number Wager held, she rummaged through the middle shelf to pull out a flat brown envelope. “Here you go—the Mueller case, right?”

“Yeah, right. You want me to sign for it?”

She shook her head, brown eyes wide with curiosity. “What for?”

“You don’t require people to sign evidence in and out?”

“No. We’re always here. And when we’re not, the safe’s locked.”

“What’s your name?”

“Cynthia.”

“Thanks, Cynthia.”

“And your name’s Gabriel. Or do you want to be called Officer Wager?”

Her eyes teased and he smiled back. “Gabe. Only angels are called Gabriel.”

“And you’re no angel?”

“I just work for them,” he joked.

The laughter went out of her eyes, blown by a sudden gust of fright that she quickly hid behind a taut smile. “We’re all on the side of the angels,” she said, and turned away with the smile carefully held in place, leaving Wager puzzled. He stared a long moment before he went back to his small table.

There he matched the sheriff’s evidence with his own copy of the sketch. Under the magnifying glass they looked identical, which wasn’t surprising since both were Xerox copies. Turning to the photographs of the victim and the supporting documents of the case, he set aside Cynthia’s unexplained fright and gradually lost himself in the awkwardly precise language of reports. After a while, as he neared the bottom of the stack of papers, the silence behind him became noticeable: the clatter and ding of typing had ceased, the telephone noises quieted, and only the occasional snap and chatter of the radio filled the sheriff’s offices. Wager gave a long sigh, put Tice’s evidence back in its plastic Baggie, and tucked his own copy of the angel away in his small green notebook.

“Is the sheriff in?”

Apparently Communications took her lunch break after the others; the older woman looked up from her log of radio messages and nodded at the sheriff’s door. “Just go right in.”

Tice was poking with a ball-point pen at a small stack of papers. “You got it solved yet?”

If it was a joke, it wasn’t funny; if it was sarcasm, Wager could do without it. He set the plastic Baggie on the sheriff’s desk. “This should go back in your evidence locker.” Pointing to the sketch, Wager asked, “Does the drawing mean anything to you?”

“First, we don’t have an evidence locker, Detective Wager. All’s we got is a safe. And second, no, that angel don’t mean a thing to me. But it does to some damn fools. Or so they claim.”

Such as his own clerk, Cynthia. “What do they claim?”

“There’s some around the county that believe in the avenging angels. I don’t happen to.”

“What’s the avenging angels?”

The man heaved back in his protesting chair and eyed Wager. “You’re not Mormon I guess. I thought DPD sent you over because you were supposed to know all about this shooting.”

“They sent me over to learn about it, Tice. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“I see—learn.” He grunted. “You a Catholic? You raised a Catholic?”

Wager nodded shortly; he preferred to ask the questions.

“Got any Mormons over on the Eastern Slope?” Tice asked.

“Latter-Day Saints? Sure.”

Tice grunted again. “LDS—some of them don’t like to be called Mormons, and some Mormons don’t like to be called LDS.”

When Wager was a kid, all non-Catholics were lumped under the heading “black Prods,” and either were pitied or laughed at because they had traded religion for superstition. There were even a few fights over who was the most Christian. But for a long time now all the sects and their jealousies had made no difference to him, and it was hard to imagine people getting upset over rituals. “What’s this got to do with the picture?”

“You were sent here to learn you say? You want to learn or not?”

Wager picked at an imaginary piece of lint on his trousers and managed to hold his temper. “Go on.”

“I aim to.” Tice waited for Wager to say something more, but he didn’t. “Now out here we got people scattered over the benchland that don’t like either bunch because they think they’re the only real Mormons left. They’re the ones that still believe in the avenging angels or destroying angels or sons of Dan or whatever you want to call them.”

“Why?”

“Because the Mormon church used to have avenging angels, and these people stay with the old ways. They’re the ones that think Negroes are Satan’s children—that’s why their skin’s black; and that Indians are red because they broke God’s commandments. And that polygamy’s still one of God’s laws. They’re what you might call your basic, hard-shelled, unreformed Mormons.”

“Polygamy?”

“You going to tell me that’s against the law?” The sheriff had that look of a man who’d argued the question before and was damned if he wanted to go over the same ground again.

“I don’t have to tell you that.”

“No. You don’t. But around here we got people living together without marriage, we got people living together that are still married to somebody else, and we got people living together that are married to each other—except there’s more than one woman that’s married to the same man. As far as I know, we don’t yet have two men married to each other, not like they do over in Boulder. But we got a few of that kind living together that ain’t married. We got a whole variety of connubial bliss in these mountains, Detective Wager. Maybe it’s something in the water. But as long as those people don’t endanger life or property, I don’t bother them.”

“You have any men and women that are just married to each other?”

Tice coughed something like a laugh. “A few. They seem to be the unhappiest of the lot.”

“What’s the avenging angels have to do with it?”

“Nothing—it has to do with Mormons. The avenging angels were Mormon vigilantes. When Brigham Young started to settle groups of Mormons in the corridor down from Salt Lake City to San Diego, California, they ran into people who didn’t like Mormons. Some were on the land first, like around here; some tried to move in after the Mormons did the improving. Brigham Young sent out a chosen few to convert or kill off anybody they couldn’t buy out. And to go after any Mormons who wanted to stray from Brigham’s path. Since Brigham spoke for God, these vigilantes were just doing what God told them to, so they were called avenging angels or Danites or what-all.”

“And …?”

Tice shrugged. “There were some killings by Mormons around here. Massacres just west of here. But that was a long time ago—a hundred years. And it was kept pretty secret even then. I doubt you find many Mormons today that know much about them. Sure as hell few that believe in them.”

Wager looked at the drawing spread in its plastic wrapper. “Mueller was one of these unreformed Mormons then?”

“No, he wasn’t. I can’t find any link between him and any kind of Mormon or any other religion. As far as I can learn, he spent his Sundays—Saturdays, too—getting drunk by himself up in his cabin. Your Mormons of all kinds aren’t supposed to drink coffee even, let alone whiskey. They do drink a lot of soda pop,” he added. “The kind the church is a major stockholder in.”

“No other motive? Robbery?”

“Hell, Mueller never had a thing but that cabin and maybe a few hundred acres of timberland around it. When he needed a little cash, he’d hire out as a hand. Most of the time he didn’t even bother with that. Look, Detective Wager, I may be just a county sheriff, but by God I been in law enforcement work almost thirty years. I know enough about this business to look for the motive in a killing. And I can’t find one in the Mueller case—no enemies, no robbery, no relatives, no mysterious avenging angels.”