3 Angel of Darkness

by Chaz McGee

  I closed my eyes, thinking I had imagined that terrible seraphim. When I opened them again, Parker had settled back down and his mind was calm. The shadow was gone.

  ‘We must do this again,’ Calvano said pleasantly and, though I hated to admit it, I admired his style. ‘Maybe we can get our eyebrows waxed together some time?’

  Parker hissed and tried to lunge at him, but Calvano was already out the door. The black orderly had not changed expression since the interview began, but the red-haired orderly was laughing – and Parker knew he was laughing at him.

  ‘You’re a dead man,’ Parker spat at the orderly.

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ the red-haired orderly said, taunting him.

  Yes, but some of us more than others.

  SEVEN

  I followed Calvano out, still trying to understand what I had seen in the interview room. I was grateful for the late afternoon sun and for every step that took me further away from Otis Parker. I saw my son across the lawn, talking to another kid his age. The boy was wearing a visitor’s pass. I had never known Michael to have friends, although it was just as likely I had simply never noticed. Curious, I made my way over to them. The other boy was thin and pale with black hair that hung to his shoulders. He wore jeans and a work shirt and had a backpack slung over one shoulder.

  ‘Hey, man,’ he was telling Michael, ‘It’s just a couple of weeks and it’s not like you’re missing anything. There’s this essay assignment due and everyone is freaking out, and you’ll miss the science fair, but the same losers are going to win it again this year, so who cares? Plus they canceled the trip to Great Adventure because it would cost too much, so you’re not even going to miss that. You may as well be in here where at least you’ll get a break from school. I’ll visit every day and tell you about all the stupid shit you’re missing, I promise.’

  It wasn’t the most optimistic pep talk I’d ever heard, but it probably would have a bigger effect on Michael then anything his mother could ever say.

  ‘I guess,’ Michael mumbled back. ‘Does everybody know I’m here? They’ll think I’m a freak. Does Darcy know?’

  ‘I don’t think so, man,’ his friend said. ‘Darcy wasn’t in school today, so I don’t know about her, but I started a rumor that you had followed a band to Europe.’ Michael laughed and his friend continued. ‘By lunchtime, some people were saying you had moved to California, but most people were just walking around with their heads up their asses as usual. They don’t even know where they are, much less where you are.’

  ‘You sure?’ Michael asked his friend. ‘You know what people are like.’

  ‘Yeah, I know what people are like.’ The boy hesitated, started to say something and then stopped.

  ‘What is it?’ Michael asked. ‘People are talking about me, aren’t they?’

  ‘No, man. It’s not that at all.’ The kid looked stricken. What was he hiding? He stared at his feet for a moment and then seemed to reach a decision. He looked up at Michael. ‘You’re not the only one who’s been here,’ he said. ‘I was here. A long time ago. It really helped me. I don’t think I would’ve made it without being here.’

  ‘No shit,’ Michael said. ‘When was that? I don’t remember that.’

  ‘It was during the year I dropped out. After my mom died.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ Michael looked embarrassed at forgetting this monumental event in his friend’s life. ‘You were gone from school a long time.’

  ‘I wasn’t here the whole time,’ his friend explained. ‘I was only here for a month. But it really helped me. And I think it could help you, too. I’m not telling anyone you’re here. You don’t have to worry about that.’

  His friend’s admission made all the difference in the world to Michael. He was not a freak after all. ‘I won’t tell anyone either,’ Michael promised his friend.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ the other boy said. ‘I’ve got a crapload of work to do.’

  Michael nodded. Unexpectedly, he put his arms around his friend and awkwardly held on to him for a few seconds. I had never seen my son affectionate with anyone other than his mother and the gesture surprised me. But it also made me glad. My son had felt so alone while walking the halls inside Holloway. That he had someone, anyone, he could trust made me more grateful than I can say to the boy before me.

  I followed the other kid out for a while but got distracted by my imaginary family. I saw Harold near the entrance to the long-term unit, enjoying the late afternoon. He had removed his protective helmet and covered the purple and yellow ointments that typically topped his skull with a newsboy’s hat. He was busily plucking the dead petals off the flowers that had withered on the vine over the winter months. These he stored in his pockets as he filled the air with a constant monologue of nonsense. ‘Harold Babbitt endorses the Flower Power Movement with the full force of his mighty power. Harold Babbitt is a rabbit, the king of the rabbits. Hop to it, King Rabbit, and try not to stab it. Dagnabit, you rabbit, dagnabit.’ Harold’s words flowed like the water tumbling over the fountains behind him. It was a never ceasing cascade proving that Harold was alive. Perhaps that was why he did it. Perhaps he just wanted to be sure.

  I checked on Lily, the little girl who suffered from terrible hallucinations and could not be trusted with other children. She was standing with an aide, watching the sun slowly set, clutching the mutilated teddy bear she always toted around. Lily had gouged its plastic eyes out and painted the holes left behind with thick globs of red paint that dried in place like blood. The nose had also been plucked off, leaving a hole that gaped between those ghoulish eyes. I wondered what terrible sights had inspired her to blind her stuffed bear.

  Then I thought back to the malevolent shadow I had seen flickering on the wall behind Otis Parker and I wondered, just for an instance, if maybe Lily’s real curse was that she saw more than most. Was it possible that the ghastly creatures she obeyed were somehow real?

  EIGHT

  I like to wander my town at dusk in the evenings. There is something about that time of day that promises to reveal secrets. That night, I wandered past Shenanigans, the bar where I had spent so many nights drinking away the hours, never realizing how very few of them I had left. Inside, the television set blared sports and lonely men drank their way to oblivion surrounded by the smells of sweat and stale beer. Even the light looked unhappy with its yellowish, anemic cast. Yet I had spent most of my life in there. What had I been thinking?

  I passed by the elementary school where my boys had put on many a play and suffered many defeats and important victories, all without me there to support them. Then I wandered through a park and found myself near the police station. Like a beacon, she had called me to her. I knew Maggie was inside, hard at work on the young girl’s murder. I’d seen her work for forty-eight hours straight when a case was young, and double time after that until solved. Maggie was like a pit bull with a bone when she had an open case. She did not let go or give an inch. Sure enough, she was at her desk, the slender case file open before her as she examined photos of the dead girl. Calvano was leaning back in a chair next to her trash can, his feet propped up on another chair. He was explaining to Maggie what he had felt while questioning Otis Parker.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he was saying, ‘I think the guy is crazy as a loon. But I just have this feeling that he’d been waiting for me, that he knew we would come, and that he was enjoying every minute we spent together.’

  ‘You think he’s innocent of the five murders that put him there?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘Oh, hell no,’ Calvano answered. ‘What I think is that he’s definitely got something to do with this latest one. I just can’t figure out what his angle is and how he’s involved. It drove him nuts when I didn’t mention why I was really there. He wanted to hear about the murder. He was dying to roll in it. He’s playing us for a reason. Could he have had a partner all along, someone who’s still out there?’

  Maggie shook her head. ‘Parker worked alone. I�
�ve been over the earlier case files twice now and I think Fahey and Bonaventura got it right for a change.’

  Um . . . thank you?

  ‘I don’t know,’ Calvano said. ‘I just have this gut feeling Parker’s involved.’

  ‘We can go with your hunch,’ Maggie told him. ‘I trust it. I’ll back you up.’

  ‘For real?’ Calvano said. He wasn’t used to people taking him seriously. ‘It could be a copycat.’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe Parker has a follower doing exactly what he’s told to do. If that’s the case, you can bet there’s going to be another killing soon.’

  ‘But who could it be?’ Calvano asked. ‘He gets no visitors, because he’s a scumbag, and every phone call he makes is monitored. He’s watched constantly, because he’s the unit’s number one badass and they are out to make his life miserable. Whenever they take him out of Holloway, he’s a royal pain in the ass, so they don’t take him out anymore. I don’t see how he can be sending instructions to someone else without being seen. And they haven’t had a patient leave there in over a year. I don’t see how he’s doing it.’

  ‘I don’t either,’ Maggie agreed. ‘But we better figure it out before someone else dies.’

  Calvano could not resist second-guessing his own hunch. ‘We could have it backwards,’ he said. ‘Maybe Parker has found a way to get out without anyone noticing. Maybe he killed the girl himself.’

  ‘What’s in it for him?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Calvano admitted. ‘Maybe he missed it? Did you hear back from the coroner yet? Is it for sure his signature?’

  Maggie nodded. ‘Doc called late this afternoon.’ She sounded grim.

  ‘What is it?’ Calvano asked.

  ‘He said that if it isn’t the same man as before, they have something in common. They both really enjoy their work. Because after this guy strangled our girl, he did other things to her. The exact same things Parker did to the prior victims.’

  ‘Things I don’t want to know about,’ Calvano said and he meant it. He was funny that way. For a guy on the job who had seen it all, he couldn’t handle the details of what killers did to their victims, not if they were women.

  ‘Definitely things you don’t want to know,’ Maggie agreed.

  ‘Maybe she knew her killer? Picked him up at a bar?’

  ‘Maybe, but her panel showed no evidence of alcohol or drugs in her system. She was clean.’

  ‘Baby daddy?’ Calvano suggested. He tended to head off in predictable directions when it came to an investigation, directions clearly colored by his own life.

  ‘She was definitely not pregnant,’ Maggie said. ‘Doc said she may even have been a virgin, based on—’

  ‘I don’t want to know,’ Calvano interrupted.

  Maggie smiled at him tolerantly. ‘We’ll know a lot more when Doc is done.’

  ‘So let’s find her connection with Parker,’ Calvano suggested. ‘Find out who she is – get to know her and who her friends were – and how she ended up on that riverbank, right? Maybe we’ll find a connection to Parker in there somewhere.’

  Maggie nodded. ‘You know, Adrian, pretty soon you won’t need me at all.’

  ‘I think we both know that’s not true.’

  Make that three of us.

  NINE

  The dead girl was named Darcy Swan and her family had not bothered to report her missing. Maggie learned of her identity when a stammering fifteen-year-old boy who bussed tables at the Freeway Diner called 911 to say that Darcy had failed to report for her shift and he just knew she’d never do a thing like that unless something bad had happened to her. When the dispatcher realized he was describing the girl found by the river, she alerted Maggie. Sometimes, a small town has its advantages.

  Calls to both high school principals in town quickly yielded her photo and address. The dead girl was confirmed to be Darcy Swan and she did indeed live on the wrong side of the tracks, in a shabby rental house down the street from a sprawling Walmart that had taken over that end of Helltown. Maggie and Calvano volunteered to do the notification in hopes of finding out something useful to start their investigation with.

  I hitched a ride over in the back of their car, the ultimate third wheel, shamelessly eavesdropping on their conversation. They had an OK partnership these days – especially considering Calvano made up half of it – and I admit I was jealous. It should have been me riding shotgun.

  The woman who answered the door at Darcy Swan’s house was pushing fifty and proclaimed herself to be Darcy’s grandmother. Like everyone else in Helltown would have been, she was too busy being suspicious of Maggie and Calvano to realize why they might be there. It was clear she had been drinking for hours. Before Maggie could explain why they were there, the old lady assumed that her granddaughter had been caught shoplifting and began ranting about the girl’s shortcomings. The house was already filled with useless objects touted in the front aisles of drugstores every holiday season and I quite frankly could not think of what was left for Darcy to have shoplifted. But granny had a head of steam up and neither Maggie nor Calvano could get a word in as she embarked on a rant about the moral shortcomings of the younger generation. Obviously, she had no concept of what generation she was in: she wore acres of costume jewelry and her hair was teased high in a style considered all the rage back in the 1960s. Her tight black pants ended just above her ankles, and a pair of stiletto heels went nicely with the plunging neckline on her purple top, which didn’t quite hide the matching push-up bra. She looked equally hoochie mama in a holiday portrait displayed on the mantle, a photo that made it plain that this was a family where high school girls had children who, in turn, grew up to be high school girls who had children of their own. Barely fifteen years separated the generations. The neighborhood was full of families just like them. I couldn’t decide if it was sad or a relief that Darcy Swan had not been able to carry on the family tradition.

  Maggie and Calvano could not get a word in and, after a while, stopped trying. They accepted the old lady’s ceaseless complaining as a gift and Calvano began taking notes. They learned that Darcy attended the same high school my son Michael was assigned to and I wondered uneasily if my son and Darcy had been friends. Soon, the old dame launched into a well-practiced and unflattering description of both Darcy Swan and her mother. Despite the fact that they were her flesh and blood, both of them were proclaimed to be selfish, deluded, upstarts who didn’t work hard enough to support the old lady and would learn in the end that there was nothing more to life than the fact that it was hard, and maybe then they’d understand why she couldn’t work at the beauty parlor any more and would take better care of her.

  I started to feel sorry for the woman. I knew that once she found out her granddaughter was dead, she would remember her bitter words and they would likely haunt her for a long time. There are some things that even the most selfish of people can’t escape.

  Maggie and Calvano finally gleaned that Darcy’s mother worked at the new Walmart. Convinced her granddaughter had been up to no good, the old lady gave them meticulous directions to the deli section and asked that they convey a ‘told you so’ on her behalf. Maggie and Calvano left to break the news to Darcy’s mother that her daughter was dead, but I’d had enough of Darcy’s family for one day. Instead, I decided to take a look at the block where Darcy Swan had lived. Darcy had to have met her killer close to home, in school or at the diner. Her life had ended at those meager borders.

  I took off on my own for a tour of Helltown. It had been a while since I’d walked its streets. I was startled to see a familiar face half a block down from Darcy’s house. The young man who had visited my son Michael at Holloway was sitting in the dark on the open gate of a red truck parked in the driveway of another cheap mill house. His hands were trapped between his knees for warmth as he stared up at the sky. The stars were exceptionally bright and sprinkled like diamonds across the night horizon, a reminder that there was a whole universe out there bey
ond. I wondered if that realization helped the boy or only made him feel more trapped. He did not seem happy at all. He seemed as lost and depressed as my son, and for just a moment I had a vision of all the lost sons wandering in the darkness together, wondering when their turn might come.

  A door slammed behind the boy and a deep voice bellowed for him to get his ass inside. The boy barely twitched as a stocky man in a wife-beater tee shirt and plaid boxer shorts appeared in the doorway, holding a beer can in one hand and a cigarette in the other. ‘Your grandmother needs to be changed,’ the man shouted, knowing his son was somewhere near in the darkness. ‘I’ll be damned if I’m going to do it.’

  The door slammed shut behind him as he ducked back into a brightly lit living room, where the sounds of the television blared almost loudly enough to disguise the bleating of an old lady crying for help. The boy hopped down from the back of the truck and trudged inside, resigned to his fate.

  This was the kid comforting my son?

  I could only hope that Michael offered him comfort back.

  TEN

  Helltown depressed me. By morning, I was sorely in need of therapy. Not my own, of course. I had missed that boat while I was alive and there was nothing I could do about it now. But I could sit in on therapy sessions at Holloway, puzzling out the mysteries of the human soul and reassuring myself that I was not the only one who had lost his way in life.

  I’d hoped to learn more about my son, even if it ended in another session consisting of reviewing my failures as a father, but Michael was in group therapy that morning and I could not tolerate being in the same room as a dozen awkward, depressed teens. Just seeing them slumped in their chairs, staring at the clock, staring at their feet, staring anywhere but at each other, made me feel so self-conscious that I had to leave them to the guidance of a tall man with glasses who had been handed the thankless task of trying to get them to open up.