Desolate Angel (16 page)

But he was not concerned with being caught. He knew he would not be caught. I could feel his certainty that he was in control. That nothing would interfere with what he wanted to take from the girl.

The girl.

I stood as close I could bear to Hayes, wary of his spiritual poison, still trying to probe his thoughts. Emotions slipped out of his unnatural control every now and then, occasionally shifting like the currents of a spring-fed lake, colliding, adjusting, running hot and then cold. I felt triumph flare prematurely for an instant, a steadier flickering of desire, a vein of fury that threaded through them all, and beneath that, an utterly self-congratulatory assurance that he had dominion over his quarry.

The girl entered the back room of the house, holding a bowl of popcorn and a can of diet soda. She was wearing a pale blue tank top that revealed the thin straps of her pink bra beneath. The gym shorts she had changed into were barely larger than a bikini bottom and of a material so worn they were nearly translucent.

She placed her snack on the floor by a rumpled old couch, arranged the pillows just so, then flopped down and flicked on the TV. As a soap opera emerged from the static, she draped one of her impossibly long legs over the back of the sofa, freed her hair so it spread out behind her in a fan and settled down into the cushions as if she did not have a bone in her body. Sprawled on the old couch, watched, she thought, by no one, she was completely without guile—making her seem even younger than her years. The girl in the woman emerged from beneath the stern eyes and scathing wisdom about men. She was an ever-changing chimera, moving from one form to the other in seconds, depending on your desire, from girl to woman, from woman to girl and back again. The effect was, I admit, charming.

For Hayes, it was something else. He was dancing with a desire that raged inside him, warring with his self-control. So far, as he gazed through the glass at the girl, his self-control was winning. I could feel his heart beating steadily in his chest, skipping only when she shifted and rearranged her long limbs across the couch. His breathing, shallow and excited at first, had grown steadier with each passing moment. He drew inside himself, his strength turning inward, thoughts lost in some unfathomable fantasy.

His pulse did not hasten. His pulse did not waver.

He was where he wanted to be. This was what he had craved: the watching, the waiting, the wanting but not having, the exquisite torture of desire.

He was deeply excited, and I could feel the lust moving through his blood but I could not tell what it was he lusted for. I only knew it was not love or even sexual in a sense I could understand. It was far more primal than that.

The young girl, bored with her show, grew restless. She began to eat her popcorn with disinterested motions, then glanced at a computer in one corner of the room and back to the television set. She spilled some soda on her tank top and made a face before pulling its hem up to her mouth to suck at the stain. Her torso was long and muscled and the color of honey, remnants of a summer tan.

Hayes groaned again. It was little more than a sigh, but I heard it and it frightened me. It was a whisper of warning: he was not always in control.

And this was a girl barely older than his daughter, a girl remarkably like his daughter, in fact, in so many ways.

I could not leave her to him.

I stood beside him, the ugliness of his need washing over me, the dark urgency of his excitement infiltrating my being, and the power of his predatory stasis filling me with despair.

This was a man to be feared. This was a man in waiting. This was a man who knew exactly how it would all end.

The girl was gazing out the sliding doors now, distracted by something she saw. She rose, walked barefoot across the thick carpet, and unlocked one set of doors. Hayes began to breathe more quickly. Had she looked to her left, she would have easily seen him, but she did not look and he was as still as the spruce shrubs that flanked him. Even the air around him did not move. It seemed to collapse inward, as if he were a dead spot in a sea of wind. Hopelessness. No escape. Death.

The girl pulled one of the glass doors open and stepped out onto the back deck, where she stood on tiptoe to check the contents of a bird feeder hanging from the branches of a tree planted close by. Her thigh muscles stretched and Hayes flinched, his right hand trembling, before he regained control.

The girl scolded a squirrel that was sitting triumphantly on the branch behind the bird feeder and munching on tiny fistfuls of grain. He chewed, unconcerned, as she reached down beside a set of back deck stairs, where a row of plastic trash cans were lined up. She opened the first one and bent over to retrieve a bag stored inside it, her back turned to the house.

Hayes stiffened, his entire body poised as if for flight. He was gauging the distance between the corner of the house and the open back door. He took a single step forward, arms tensed at his side.

A phone rang inside the house.

The girl popped her head up from the trash can, listening for the sound, then hurried back inside to a cordless phone by the computer. She knew who it was before she even picked up the receiver and launched into a soliloquy that was half exasperated and half loving.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said as she returned to the deck. She cradled the receiver between her shoulder and ear and attempted to refill the bird feeder while she talked. “I’m fine. Yes, I got home safely. No, I didn’t flunk the test. Yes, I’ll water the flowers. No, your package didn’t come. Yes, I know I have piano at six. No, I don’t want to eat Indian food tonight.” She paused and then laughed. “Okay, so I can’t read your mind completely. I’ll have a chicken burrito. But stop worrying. I’m home and I’m fine.”

A frown crossed over her face. “Okay,” she conceded. “I think you left it by the front door. Give me a minute and I’ll call you back.”

She placed the phone on the railing of the deck, finished filling the bird feeder, then good-naturedly left a pile of seeds and nuts for the squirrel along a far railing. “Stop being a pig,” she admonished it. “There’s plenty for everyone.”

The squirrel ignored her. His body had grown still. He’d spotted Hayes in the bushes and his black eyes glittered like tiny black beads as he stared at us.

The young girl did not notice. She put the bag of grain back in place, retrieved the phone, and headed inside, pulling the door shut behind her.

She did not lock it.

Hayes saw it all. His breath, which had been as controlled as a yogi’s, became a series of rapid gusts. He leaned forward, risking detection, as he tracked her movements through the room. She replaced the phone in its cradle, headed for the door to the hallway, then stopped and turned toward the sliding doors again, looking uncertain.

Hayes stepped back into his hiding spot and held his breath. She hesitated, still staring at the sliding glass door. My mind raced through every horror movie I had ever seen, willing her to remember what happened to foolish young girls who failed to lock their back doors.
Come on,
I willed her across the divide of space and glass,
give me a thought I can hang on to.

I was too agitated, too frightened to make contact with her. That infinitesimal interval of two seconds seemed an eternity before she finally walked across the room, checked the door, and finding it unlocked, locked it with a nervous smile, as if thinking herself foolish for worrying.

I was filled with an overwhelming relief. Not today, at least. Not today.

But he knew where she kept her key and I knew the day would come when he would no longer be able to wait.

The fury in Hayes flared with frustration, but he shut it down at once. He was too much in control to let a small setback stop him. And, I suspected, this watching was as exquisite to him as foreplay. He did not want to hurry this stage, even though part of him did, and so he accepted his loss of opportunity without rancor. He glanced at his watch, then stepped calmly from his hiding place, checking the driveway and sidewalks for privacy first. He made it back to his car unseen by anyone but me.

I realized then that he had never once hurried, had never once displayed hesitation or confusion. His timing was perfect, his movements precise, his presence undetected by anyone.

Hayes had done this many times before.

Chapter 18

I left Alan Hayes, my mind troubled by what I had learned about him. Following a young girl didn’t prove he’d killed Alissa, but I had felt what he was capable of and it scared me. How could I let Maggie know that there was something off-kilter about Hayes, regardless of what Danny thought of him? He was no grieving father. He was a predator who needed to be stopped. Not rehabilitated. Just stopped. I had met his kind before, though rarely. Men like him were dispassionate enough about their crimes to evade capture for decades. But they always went back to the well. They had to. They could not survive without tasting the humiliation of others.

I thought back to the case files from the investigation that Danny and I bungled so thoroughly. Would anything in there put Maggie on to Hayes? Would his behavior last night be enough to alarm her? Could Danny somehow be persuaded to raise the issue himself?

Would Danny be of any use at all? He’d been stupid enough to interfere with Maggie’s investigation. What else might he try? And why was he trying to block a new investigation? I had to find out.

Maggie had not told Gonzales about Danny’s appearance the night before. If she had, he’d be gone. You did not defy Gonzales directly like that. Ever. Instead, I found Danny at work, where he had been relegated, sitting at a desk in the Found Property section—a department where his surliness would be tempered by the public’s joy that their stolen possessions had, miraculously, been recovered. Plus, there was very little work, as virtually nothing of value was ever reported as found. Gonzales was smart. It was the perfect place for Danny to wait out the five months until he retired. There would be little asked of him and even less that he could screw up.

But Danny, being Danny, did not intend to make things easy on himself. As always, he loved to invite disappointment. He sat at his desk, in full view of others, reading skin magazines and sneaking sips from a flask in his top drawer, occasionally begrudgingly taking a message from some hopeful victim wanting to know if his bike or lawn mower had been recovered. Few people noticed Danny’s blatantly antagonistic behavior as coworkers had long since learned the best way to endure Danny was to ignore him. Perhaps that was why he had escalated his apathy in recent years, flaunting his disregard for what others thought. He had a deep need for attention, and he did not care if it was positive or negative attention. Ever since his life had failed to measure up to his dreams, he’d been driven by a compulsion to provoke and spread his unhappiness. I knew because I had seen that compulsion take root and grow.

But something else was tormenting him that morning, something beyond being reassigned by Gonzales. Was it the night before, the scene with Hayes, or the barely disguised accusation of cowardice Gonzales had thrown at him? I did not blame Danny for my death. I had died of my own incompetence and no one else’s. That didn’t mean Danny saw it the same way.

I sat and watched my old partner for a while, wondering how well he had investigated Alan Hayes and whether he would ever be willing to admit that he had blown it. Danny’s agitation grew steadily as he sat at the desk, finally becoming so severe I wondered if he was taking something. I‘d known him to rely on speed—or worse—before. He began to flip more rapidly through the pages of his magazine, not even bothering to glance down. Finally, he gave up entirely and threw the porn in a bottom drawer before booting up the department’s computer network. This act alone astonished me. Danny had treated anything related to the computer with contempt, maintaining that all it did was add to his workload. Yet there he sat, searching through computerized records, checking out who in the department was online, following some unknown cyber trail with a determination I had not seen from him in years.

He was tracking Maggie. As he pulled up our old case files, at least the ones that had been computerized, I realized he was checking the dates to see the last time they had been accessed, trying to determine whether Maggie had reviewed each file or not. He was wondering how much she was checking up on him and whether Gonzales had ordered her to do so.

What a fool, I thought. Did he not realize that he was leaving his own trail of having been in those files? That Maggie could just as easily track him in return?

Oh, Danny. That was my partner in a nutshell. Always so busy thinking of his own grandiose plans that he never stopped to consider what someone else might be doing.

I left him and drifted upstairs to Maggie’s desk to wait for her arrival. She showed up in late afternoon, freshly showered, smelling of oranges, crackling with energy. Oh, my Maggie. She did not need me to tell her that something was wrong with Alan Hayes. The encounter the night before had been enough for her. Within ten minutes, she was deep into the computer, bringing up all the data she could find on Alissa’s father, downloading his curriculum vitae from the college site, tracking his lecture appearances at conferences around the world, chronicling all the places where he had studied or taught—in short, compiling a list of everywhere he had been and everywhere he had lived over the past twenty-five years. It was astonishing how much information she pulled from the Internet, her attention so absolute that hours passed before she even noticed that almost everyone else in the detective division had left for home or dinner.