Avenging Angel (7 page)

“Well I didn’t need chalk for something like that.”

“But the slug should still be here somewhere.”

“I looked. Sheriff Tice looked. Even the coroner. Every crack in the logs, floor, even the roof. The only thing we can figure is it angled off Mueller’s skull and out that window.” He pointed to the small hinged square of panes. “It was open. I had to close it to keep varmints out.”

Wager eyed the screenless window from where he stood. It was a possibility—faint, but possible. If the killer had stood over by the stove, the possibility was more likely, but the location of the body wasn’t quite right for that. And the coroner’s report said the body had not been moved.

“Did you go over the place for fingerprints?” Wager lifted the cover on the Indian Head pad to reveal a penciled scrawl of numbers and a painfully totaled column reading $24,974.00, heavily underlined twice.

“Yep. But the only good ones found was Mueller’s. The front door was messed up—everybody coming in the place put their hand to the latch.” He watched Wager scan the tablet. “That make any sense to you?”

“Just numbers. Income, payment, who knows?” He looked around the jumble of the room. “You found no other recent documents? Nothing to show what he was figuring on?”

“Only that angel drawing.”

Wager nodded.

“You want to look around outside?”

He followed Yates back into a sunshine which, after the dimness of the cabin, needled the eyes with glare. A worn path led around the corner to an outhouse that tilted forward enough to hang the slatted door open to reveal its empty bench. A black Dodge pickup, 1950s vintage, sat at the end of two well-worn ruts beside the cabin. A large spread of oil-soaked earth showed where Mueller habitually worked on the rusted truck.

“You couldn’t find any tire impressions or footprints?”

“It’d rained.”

“You have any guesses why he was shot?”

“Just that drawing. Mueller didn’t have a damn thing anybody’d want. You can’t graze a goat on most of his acreage, and the timber’s not worth that much either. Nobody figures he had any money to hide, and he wasn’t tortured or nothing, like somebody was trying to make him talk. Besides, the place looked just like it does now— it’s a mess, but it’s not tore up like somebody was looking for something. I’ve tried and I’ve tried, Gabe, but all I come up with is that angel.”

And Wager had seen enough.

On the way back to Loma Vista Wager finally asked, “What can you tell me about the avenging angels?”

Yates concentrated on the highway’s snaking, downhill curves. “Mister, you might laugh. I know Sheriff Tice does. But I believe in them.”

“Why?”

“Because most of the people around here believe in them. If they believe, by God, so do I.”

He tried to follow the deputy’s reasoning. “Suppose they believe in Bigfoot or flying saucers?”

Yates’s yellow-brown eyes slanted his way. “I’d have to go along with them, Gabe. I mean, look, I been here almost ten years; same northern half of the county, same roads, same patrols, damn near the same pay. But every day I find out something new about the people around here. We got folks living back in the hills or over on that benchland that’ve been here since Christ wore diapers. Some of them don’t even send their kids to school because they don’t want nothing to do with the state. Others I just know about from the county tax rolls, and they never call on the law or anybody else for a damn thing. If they get into a hassle they settle it themselves and nobody comes running to me about it.” He braked slightly and glided around a fishhook bend. “And I don’t go out bothering them if there’s no call to. I guess what I’m trying to say is that things go on around here that I never see and a lot of times never even hear of. And some of the families that have been in these hills since before Colorado was a state were on the side of, or fought against, the avenging angels when the Mormons moved in here. They’re the ones that act like the angels are real. Some of them are scared shitless, I swear.”

It still sounded like a lot of crap to Wager. “Tice said he found no connection at all between Mueller and any Mormon group.”

“That’s right. I never heard of any either. But like I say, Gabe: there’s a hell of a lot about these people that I plain don’t know. And just because I don’t know something, I’m not about to say it’s impossible.”

They rode in silence until the deputy turned the Jeep onto a paved county road leading into a narrow valley. “I’ll run you through Rio Piedra—it’s not too far out of the way. You might as well get the fifty-cent tour.”

The valley twisted close to a stream that foamed whitely until the walls of pine and aspen opened; then it stilled into dark pools behind weathered beaver dams. Wide, shallow pools like these used to be Wager’s favorite fishing spots, and he half wished he had brought the rod and reel and tackle box that were gathering dust in his apartment closet. He remembered how the trout could be seen as dark, hovering shadows halfway across a pond, and how you had to keep low and move gently to get close enough for a cautious flick of the light line, a gentle touch of the fly on the still surface.

“We get good fishing along here earlier in the spring. Fish and Game stocks this area. By now the tourists have about cleaned it out; it’s too close to the road and all.”

“I see.”

The valley began to widen, and up ahead Wager spotted a road sign with two nameplates on one pole,
RIO PIEDRA
. Among the trees a handful of buildings made up the town: a worn gas station whose rusty pumps stuck out of a muddy drive like tree stumps, a windowless board building converted from a storage shed to a cafe with a pink Coors sign hanging on the closed door, some log cabins black with time and dampness that, except for wood-smoke, looked abandoned. Dirt roads led off to either side toward more thin trails and half-hidden cabins.

“My hometown,” said Yates. “Actually I got an A-frame up on the side of the mountain there—gets a lot more sun than down here.” He waved a hand at the shaggy mountain flank that still caught the lowering glow.

“How in hell do these people make a living?”

“Some work for the county—road crews, school-bus drivers. Some of them take in each other’s wash, I guess. And we got some goddamn hippies that live off food stamps and rich parents. A couple of them are okay, but most ain’t worth a damn.” He pointed to the shadowed mountainside, where tongues of broken rock spilled down the slopes, and sagging mine buildings crumbled slowly. “Used to be a pretty big place in the 1890s—ten, twenty thousand people working the mines and services. Some of these people were born here and never left. God alone knows why.”

To Wager, the remnants of the town were more lonely than the empty forest surrounding it. There, in the sprawling national forest, you expected isolation; and anyone found there was a transient fragment of humanity, with ties to someplace else where there were people. But here, the pitted stone foundations poked like rotted teeth above the weeds, and the time-stained cabins that remained were like stray seeds that cling to the poorest soil simply because that’s where chance dropped them and they took hold. “You like living here?”

“Tell you the truth, Gabe, I’d a hell of a lot rather be down in Loma Vista. Me and the wife both. But here’s where I’m stationed, and God knows the rent’s cheap. Besides, it ain’t as empty as it looks—there’s maybe eighty, a hundred people in all, counting the ones back in the woods.” Yates swung the vehicle roughly across a stony lot and headed back down the valley. “And this place might come back again, too.”

“You mean the mines?”

“No, I think they’re pretty much played out. They’re mostly silver, anyway, and the price isn’t that high. No, I mean oil shale—they found oil shale not too far away on the benchland, and this is the closest town if they ever start to develop it.”

“Any Mormons around here?”

“They’re mostly over the pass on the desert side. I don’t know, there may be a few in this valley. No Mormon stake house, though. That’s what they call their meetinghouse. No church of any kind, as a matter of fact.” The deputy pushed the vehicle through the gears. “Let me get you back to Loma Vista before dark.”

T
HE DEPUTY’S
J
EEP
pulled away into the early dusk. Wager stood a moment outside the cinder-block sheriff’s offices and watched the boxy vehicle go down the single main street. Two traffic lights shone brightly on the almost-vacant avenue, and over it all the wide sky was dark with evening cumulus clouds and a green twilight. In Denver, Wager didn’t often get a chance to see a sky like that, and this minute of stillness reminded him of when his father had died. When he had learned that neither trees nor earth nor sky nor anything beyond would give him the slightest answer. This absolute indifference had frightened him when he first discovered it; now it was simply another statement of the isolation that all shared until, still alone, one faced death. But if every man’s death would come when it would, it was Wager’s job to hunt down those who hastened death for others. He wasn’t being paid to stand in the street and gaze at a darkening sky, or to feel this embarrassing return of some forgotten childhood fear.

Nonetheless, he gazed a moment more; but the twilight had drained of meaning and become just a fading color.

Centuries ago some Anasazi—some local cliff dweller—had probably stood and watched the same shading of green into purple and black, and heard the same raucous squawk of the wheeling nighthawks. And perhaps the Anasazi asked the same questions—and received the same silence in return. It was nothing new.

Inside the now-quiet sheriff’s offices, a different woman sat at the radio console, the clipboard of logged calls propped in front of her, a photo-filled National Enquirer spread on the desk beside it.

“Hi,” she said. “Can I help you?”

“Is Sheriff Tice around?”

“He’s home, but I can get him on the radio if it’s an emergency.” She peered closely. “Are you Detective Wager? From Denver?”

Wager nodded.

“I’m D.L.’s daughter-in-law. He told me to tell you that he reserved a room at the Mesaland Motel if you need it—he was worried they’d be filled up before you got back. Do you want to talk to him? His home number’s right here.” She pointed to a sheet taped to the desk top.

“It’s not that important. Can I use this phone? For an official call?”

“Sure.” She watched him settle behind one of the secretaries’ desks with a polite smile of approval until he started to dial; then she turned back to her gossip sheet to show Wager that she wasn’t at all interested in what he had to say.

Max should be awake by now. Eating, probably. He went on duty at midnight, and when Wager had that shift he was always up and messing around by seven. He gave the operator his Denver office number and the code that let him charge the call to DPD, then waited while the line clicked and finally rattled.

Polly answered, a strain of cautious anxiety in her voice.

Wager asked for Max, and the anxiety went up half a note. “Yes, Gabe, he’s up. I’ll get him.”

And, a moment later, Max’s voice. “Gabe! How you doing out there? Anything helpful?”

He told Max about the avenging angels.

“Mormons? You think the victims have something to do with the Mormons?”

“I don’t know, Max. Most of the people here think the drawing means the avenging angels. The one found with Mueller is identical to the one we found.”

“Well, it’s an approach we haven’t tried. There’s still no missing persons on either victim. Or identification. The dental charts have been sent around here and in Pueblo, but you know how that goes.”

The dental charts were circulated when other means of identification had failed. Usually it went slowly, and sometimes not at all, because response by the dentists was strictly voluntary, and some didn’t feel like wasting their time. “Mueller had no known connections with the Mormons or any other church group,” Wager told Max. “And the method wasn’t the same.”

“How’s that?”

“He was shot in the back of the head instead of the chest. He wasn’t robbed. He was known. He was left in his home.”

After a pause Max asked, “So the only real similarity is that sketch?” Then, “What about the slug? Ballistics finally matched the two from Denver and Pueblo—their report came in today: same weapon.”

“They can’t find a slug.” Wager dropped his voice, glad for the brief spurt of radio traffic that drew the girl’s ears away from him as she responded to a deputy’s query. “The training out here is amateur—almost as bad as the rent-a-cops.”

“The sheriffs office doesn’t have a detective?”

“Hell, no. The county can’t afford one. I don’t even know if his deputies are certified.”

“Was the trip a waste then?”

Wager didn’t know that either. “We found out about these avenging angels. Maybe something will come out of that.”

“I hope so … but it’s a hell of a long drive just for that. Listen, I’ll see what I can turn up when I go in tonight. You driving back tomorrow?”

“No reason not to.”

“Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow night.” Max added, “Kolagny’s settling for a reduced plea on the barbed-wire killing.” His voice masked his disgust; only the fact that he mentioned it told Wager his disappointment.

“What the hell for?”

“He thinks he’ll have trouble with intent. The defense is claiming they only wanted to scare Ellison, not kill him.”

“They made threats!”

“They claim they didn’t.” Wager heard a shrug in Max’s voice. “It’s their word against Linton’s, Kolagny says, and he wants a sure thing. What the hell, he’s the prosecutor. And a sure thing makes the stats look better. Say, Gabe, can I tell Polly you’ll be coming to the barbecue?”

“I—ah—haven’t asked Jo yet. I’ll ask her when I get back.”

“Sure, Gabe. See you tomorrow.”

Damn Prosecuting Attorney Kolagny and damn the barbecue. He hung up the telephone and, without seeing, gazed at the closed door of the sheriff’s private office. What Max said was true: the only real similarity between Mueller’s shooting and those in Denver and Pueblo was the angel drawing. But it was also the only tie they had to anything at all, and even if it made no sense it was better than nothing. Maybe. He hoped it was better than nothing.