Cemetery of Angels (32 page)

“You doing okay, Eddie boy? You make a success of yourself, son?”

He blew out a long breath to break the mood that was overtaking him. Man, this was getting creepy! At his desk, his gaze settled upon the green Mont Blanc fountain pen, a gift from his father those many years ago. Was that what had put thoughts of his dad in his head?

He couldn’t stand watching the Clippers any more. He turned off the television and wondered why his mind was wandering in such bizarre directions. He had a funny feeling. Was it only overwork? Lately it seemed as if there were an invisible pair of hands pressing on his head. It was as if something had held his head at a certain angle so that he would only see certain things. Or pointed his thoughts toward the past.

He felt helpless to see certain things that he wanted to see. Must be overwork, he told himself. It had to be! These past two weeks there were too many questions leading nowhere. He looked at the files that sat on his desk. Here he had two impenetrable cases within a stone’s throw of each other, one at the cemetery, and the other at Topango Gardens; he couldn’t make sense of either.

“Well, one thing’s for certain,” he concluded, muttering aloud. “The cemetery might contain some angels. But Mr. and Mrs. Moore aren’t so angelic.”

Rebecca Moore had flunked key parts of her lie detector test. Bill Moore, that fine and sensitive human being who passed for her husband, still refused to take one. Van Allen had driven by McLaughlin & Company that afternoon, just to nose around, just to see what Moore did when he wasn’t home. Moore had broken a heavy sweat as Van Allen and Double A trundled through the front door. There was even a loud silence upon their arrival and a scurrying to cover “confidential” papers in various offices.

Then there was another thing Van Allen had noticed that day. For an architect, McLaughlin didn’t look like any Mr. Clean, himself, although Van Allen would have admitted that it was sometimes tough to tell with these forty-something counterculture types. In Southern California, he mused further, a lot of things weren’t the way they looked. He knew of at least one law firm, for example, that operated out of Santa Monica and Long Beach, and which consisted entirely of surfers. The firm had a few conference rooms and a lot of laptop computers. When the partners weren’t chasing ambulances and torts, they were catching waves.

The Moores, Van Allen pondered, sitting at his desk and trying to make sense of the material in front of him. What about the Moores?

To Van Allen’s line of reason, both were dirty.

He wondered who was the dirtier of the two: Bill or Rebecca. To make things complete, the FBI had informed him late that afternoon that they had a file on Bill Moore. And the Connecticut State Police had some tidbits, too. Both the Feds and the headquarters for the state gendarmeries in Hartford were sending material to Van Allen by overnight courier. There was too much to fax, and some of it wasn’t yet available via the Internet. But Van Allen couldn’t wait to look at it. From the beginning there was something he didn’t like about the Moores, but he didn’t know what it had been.

The material the next morning, he told himself, would confirm his suspicions. He was of the growing opinion that if he could get loose with a shovel and an ax somewhere under that house, he would find a couple of small bodies, and from there it would be only a matter of hours before he could hang a double infanticide on Mom and Pop.

He cringed. What a horrible crime. How could a woman be part of something like that? Van Allen glanced at the framed photographs of his own son and daughter on his desk and felt a new revulsion for his chief suspects.

He finished his food. He went to his kitchen and found a second bottle of brew and came back to his desk. He sat down again and continued his line of thought. He figured he was only a day away from asking for a court order to force a polygraph upon Bill Moore. And when he did that, which would signal to both of the Moores that they were key suspects in the case, he would also slap twenty-four-hour-day surveillance on both of them.

Nine o’clock came.

Van Allen kept his nose buried in the material on his desk. He drew the files toward him, opening them both and lining the contents up side by side. He set to the task of reconciling his perceptions of the cases with what was established as fact. Two perplexing cases. He asked himself: “
What did he know?”

Fact: The Moores were not telling him the full truth about what had happened in their house. So what were they hiding?

Fact: There was no evidence to suggest that either child had ever left the house at 2136 Topango Gardens. So where were the bodies buried?

Fact: No ransom note had ever been received. No relative had ever been contacted. No indication existed suggesting that the children might have run away. What did that say about the possibility that a kidnapping or a runaway had ever occurred?

Then Van Allen looked studiously at the Billy Carlton file and tried to make a transition.

Fact: Carlton had died at a young age and under suspicious circumstances. Had a murder been committed many years ago?

Fact: There was no apparent motivation for desecrating Billy Carlton’s tomb. No ransom request had been received by anyone concerning Carlton’s remains. So why did the body snatching parallel the kidnapping?

Fact: Two crimes had occurred within days of each other within a few hundred yards of each other. Didn’t this put a charley horse in the long arm of coincidence?

Van Allen analyzed and tried to draw parallels. Parallels, he knew, solved crimes. Parallels always betrayed a perpetrator’s way of accomplishing things. Find the methods then match the perpetrator to the methods.

So what were the parallels? Better, what was the most jarring parallel?

Both incidents, he concluded, revolved around impossibility. A grave just didn’t blow open. And children just didn’t disappear into thin air. There was something else going on in each case, something unseen that Van Allen had not yet grasped.

He wrestled with it. He asked aloud a key question. “
Why would Rebecca Moore kill her own children? Or consent to having them killed?”
Were they in the way of her career? Or her relationship with her husband? Or compromising a relationship with a lover? He agonized over it. A full hour passed. Then a second hour. On the corner of Van Allen’s desk was a Timex digital watch. It chirped twice to tell him that it was eleven o’clock. But Van Allen kept digging. Yes, there was new material coming tomorrow from both Connecticut and Quantico. But he scoured the material he already had, trying to see what he had missed, if anything.

A few minutes before midnight, he was jarred by a sound from the next room. His head shot upright from his reading. The front door to his apartment had opened! His son and daughter had keys. So did the building superintendent. But it was almost midnight! Who would walk in at such an hour, except in an emergency?

“Hello?” he called.

No answer.

His instincts took charge. His hand went to the automatic pistol that was on his belt. His palm stayed upon it, waiting to draw it if necessary. Van Allen stood from his desk and spoke again. “Hello? Who’s there?”

Again no answer.

He moved to the door of his den and looked. He took one step forward.

The front door was half open, as if knocked loose by the wind. Yet there wasn’t any wind, and he had securely latched the door. He had even put a drop bolt in place.

He could see the entire room. There was no visitor that he could see. But he had a creepy feeling. His scalp tightened, and he waited.

Then an event occurred that he would remember for his entire life. Before him, there were slow footsteps. Like a man walking in heavy boots on the wooden floor of Van Allen’s living room. At first Van Allen thought he was imagining the sound. Then to his shock, he knew he wasn’t.

The footsteps were approaching him. Footsteps of an invisible intruder.

Van Allen held his ground. A good soldier: he didn’t retreat. But broke a sweat all over his body. His heart was ricocheting. He felt as if his chest would burst.

The footsteps continued toward him while, very faintly, he caught an echo of that piano music, like a distant roll on an old upright player.

Then the footsteps were within ten feet of him. Then five. Then they stopped. Van Allen cringed. He felt something strange, as if something like a warm blast of air was trying to press past him. He inclined against the invisible force. It didn’t hurt. And it almost soothed him as it pushed past.

Again, he held his ground. He was sweating profusely, but he managed to stand perfectly still. A moment passed. Then he was jarred by a tremendous crashing sound that had come from the room behind him, his den, from which he had just exited.

He turned toward the sound. Initially, he wondered what had suddenly fallen over. He went back to the door and stared into the room. He felt a rush of fear within him as he stared at something that could not possibly have happened.

The entire top of his desk had been swept completely clean. Everything on it —telephone, papers, books, framed portraits of his son and daughter, coffee cup and lamp — had been propelled from the top of the desk by some abrupt violent force. The various items had flown around the room and were in disarray. The lamp and one of the picture frames were broken on the floor. The wood beneath them was scarred from the impact.

The items from the desk had been knocked away with a force almost exceeding anything a strong man could do.

Instinctively, Van Allen’s hand started to raise his service weapon. But then he released it. Deep down he knew it would be useless to even draw it.

He scanned the room. There was no other human there, and he knew it. But something had hit that desktop like an invisible meteorite, or an angry superhuman arm, sweeping everything away. And Van Allen knew that, too. He recoiled from the room, stepping aside from the door. He hoped his deference would allow whatever presence was there to be on its way.

“You’ve made your point,” he whispered softly. “You’ve made your point.”

He felt like a madman mouthing those words. But he had no choice, because to see was to believe. So for several seconds he stood there, barely moving, hand upon his weapon. Nothing else in the room moved. He lost track of time. The longest minute of his life came and went.

Van Allen then felt a deep, gripping chill, something akin to particles of ice flowing through his veins. It nearly paralyzed him to have to come to the conclusions that were forced upon him. But he bravely stood his ground.

Then something invisible and powerful, cold as an iceberg and strong as the devil, rushed into him, through him, and past him. Van Allen had the sense of standing firm against a strong wind. Several random images tore through him at the same time, and for an instant, he thought he was sure that he had been transported to the Cemetery of Angels.

In his mind, he could see Carlton’s tomb, set right again. But then the invisible thing was gone. And Van Allen felt as if a great burden had been lifted.

His gaze found the cluttered floor of his den again. He decided which he would pick up first. The words formed.
My son and my daughter
, he thought, looking at the shattered picture frames.

Then to his considerable relief, he heard a pair of footsteps behind him. Then there was a comforting sound from the next room.

It was the front door to his apartment. This time, the door was closing.

Van Allen went back to his desk and slumped in his chair. He looked at the mess around the room and felt his mouth, dry and parched. He wondered if he had imagined everything that had transpired and if he had blacked out and caused the disarray himself.

But he knew to the contrary.

He knew, because he trusted his own senses. He thought back to the recent nights of bad dreams, of imagined intrusions in his apartment, and of the time he felt that the covers had been ripped off his bed as he had slept. He spent the night there in his chair, not even rising to gather the two scattered files. Instead, he tried to put this new reality in place until sleep overtook him.

At dawn, dopey, shattered with fatigue, his eyes burning, he thought he had it. He thought he had the philosophical twine that would bind the Moore case and the Carlton case together.

An invisible assailant, as he had witnessed it, had been the perp in both jobs. Consoled by this notion, he then leaned forward onto his desktop, folded his aching arms, and slept.

He awoke four hours later to a nasty jangling telephone. Alice Aldrich’s worried voice was on the other end of the line. He assured her that he was fine and would be on his way to the office shortly.

Shortly: which meant as soon as he could unscramble his brain. His frontal lobe felt like an egg sizzling in a frying pan.

And his eyes still roared with tiredness and his brain now refused to assimilate the impulses of the previous evening. Instead, he told himself, the two cases had driven him to the edge of a nervous breakdown, and he must have imagined the footsteps and the phantom visitor of the night before.

The mess on the floor, he further told himself, was the result of one clear swipe of his own arm, not one from another dimension.

He told these lies to himself again as he shaved, washed, and changed clothes. He looked in the mirror and was convinced that there were entire streaks of graying hair in his head that hadn’t existed twenty-four hours earlier. And a whole new road map of lines surrounded his eyes, as well.

Age, age, age, he told himself. Age and dementia were creeping in on little crow’s feet. When he got to work Double A asked him what was new. He lied again. “Nothing,” Ed Van Allen said.

Then she left him alone. And he played with his own thoughts as he waited for yet two more visitors, the professional couriers who would bring him police reports from Connecticut and Virginia, reports which would anchor him back in reality and —he hoped to God! — offer him a more prosaic explanation of what was transpiring.

A haunting
, for a rational man, was a tough concept to swallow.