Angle of Attack

by Rex Burns

  He stared across the empty desks at the cream-colored wall of the pleasantly quiet office. Controlled acoustics. Controlled temperature and humidity. Carefully neutral in color scheme. Space for each desk measured by some engineer and the square footage written into the building design. But as much as the old headquarters building had depressed him with its indelible dirt, its confusion of noises and crowded bustle, it had seemed closer to the street than this shadowless and efficient box. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before this newness wore off—before the snarled clutter of the street gradually worked its way up the muted elevators, up the wide and carpeted stairwells, to glide like gritty fog into this room with its hermetically sealed windows. A little of it had to come in each time a detective strode through that door; a pinch, a wisp, a slight odor hanging in the creases of a jacket, trailing from the worn rubber heel of a shoe. It was a matter of degree, a matter of balance between order and confusion. But as yet too much order dominated this new office and made him uneasy. One could stay up here and forget the disorder that swirled through the streets outside the building.

  Restless, he stood and looked past the tinted glass down at the rectangles of streets and alleys. To the south of the new police building the roofs were kept low by city ordinance so that people strolling in the parks on the east side could have an unobstructed view of the mountains. Elsewhere thirty-and forty-story towers thrust up to glint in the sun. And everywhere the fragile web of cranes swung gently over new excavations. More office buildings, more commuter space, fewer homes to fill the evening streets with the glow of living-room lights. The city was becoming as functional as a draftsman’s sketch. The starkly efficient plans of engineers, backed by the irresistible pressure of oil money, were creating a new city of smooth plastic façades.

  From up here even the older section, the less-developed swatch of stubby apartment buildings and small houses, seemed as clean and regular as the face of a waffle iron. What would be left to erupt in a city as orderly and functional as a dynamo? What cries or songs would fill the vacant night streets between the empty skyscrapers of the future? Wager, his vision of the future blurred with doubt, did not believe that all happened for the best. It just happened. And if he often hated the things that belched rage and pain into the streets, he also loved the excitement and heat of it. It was a paradox he occasionally wondered about in the silent times in his apartment—how one could love the thing he hated and hate the thing he loved. He was drawn to the street and its hungers up to a point—the point when those hungers became chaos.

  Denver did have its share of truly weird ones, those who moved far beyond excitement in order to open doors to subterranean terrors. Some drifted in from Texas or New Jersey on their way to LA, where they settled in like ticks to start a religion or a revolution. Some were homegrown—native talent to be proud of, like the kid who thumped his roommate to death with a ball peen hammer and then carved him up and wrapped the bits and pieces in neat packages, which he distributed around the neighborhood. Or the woman who went just a tad too far into chemically induced ecstasy and burned her mother to death so the smoke could carry her prayers to heaven. And there was the series of half a dozen killings of young women—rape, strangle, and dump—that was still on the open file, without even a suspect to watch. Those were the ones that made killings like that of the garroted Ellison seem as routine and familiar as tying a shoe.

  Perhaps Denver was no longer to be spared the kind of mass murderer who surfaced in other corners of the country—the Zebra killers of California, some of whom were still at large and still preaching revenge against whites; the Texas murders of forty girls and women—still no suspect a decade later; Gacy in Chicago; the Atlanta ghoul who fed on black children; the Zodiac killer of San Francisco, never caught even with a description of the suspect and the notes left behind for the police—a cross in a circle. The Zodiac notes had not been Xeroxed, and the victims had been chosen at random—which added an even scarier note, as if the black edge of the careless universe had been touched.

  One of the things Wager liked about his job was that while doing it he sought—and often found—reasons behind an act of insane savagery. Sometimes it was only insanity—temporary or otherwise—a term that comfortably covered a lot of explanations in the eyes of the law. But it was an explanation, though a weak one; it re-established the line between confusion and coherence. The law—people like Wager who served the law—traced that line, and maybe it was part of the burden of his occupation that he could see both sides of that line. But he always felt a personal victory when he could explain the motive of an act, even if in terms of insanity. His job was to claim some territory for coherence, even if that effort had once led him to claim more than the law allowed. And in claiming, to lose a partner’s trust. But of late the territory of chaos seemed to grow larger, while Wager’s victories were smaller and smaller in the face of a threat that loomed like the coming night sky. An angel holding a sword. Somehow that message towered over the usual chaos of the street: manslaughter, family slayings, garrotings—even these were dwarfed by that little drawing. Because whoever committed that murder acted from reason, but a reason founded on, and growing out of, the same vast insanity that brought wars—a superstructure of coherence that gathered more and more followers, those who never looked to see that their belief was founded on insanity.

  Cross-in-circle, angel-and-sword. Wager caught himself assuming that there would be more angel killings. He could feel the promise of some kind of pattern in these killings, which was why he was certain there would be more: someone was following a path that led to specific victims. Those notes—symbols of the killer’s triumph—were meant to be seen by future victims.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE THIRD ANGEL came almost a week later as Wager, elbow-deep in a new set of time-study forms, tried to classify his activities for the previous six months into little boxes that the computer could scan. The little boxes indicated the number of cases handled, the types, the number of hours each demanded, the range of support areas utilized, and something called “other” which the computer couldn’t break down into component parts. Then a highly paid consultant would come in and read the form that he had designed, point to the quantified evidence, and tell Doyle where his people were screwing up. Pretty soon they would be solving forms and not solving cases, because there was nothing to mark on the form that quantified the way victims looked and smelled or the wide-eyed numbness of relatives or the tight-lipped worry of arrested suspects. Those kinds of data couldn’t be put into little boxes with a number two pencil, and to Wager’s way of thinking there wasn’t much of real importance that could be, except the number of cases pending and the number of cases cleared. You didn’t need a consultant or a computer to figure that. But along with the department’s brand-new building had come new ways of administration, and instead of being out on the pavement with Axton where he should be, he was here scratching paper. Wager sighed and filled in another little square and moved to the next query. This afternoon Max was to fill in his form and Wager would make the rounds.

  His telephone rang: the Bulldog. “Wager, another one of those angel drawings came in the mail this morning. Can you come up?”

  “My time-study’s due at noon, Chief,” said Wager sweetly. “You sent out a memo on it.”

  There was a slight pause. “That can wait.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  This time Chief Doyle’s fingers tapped on his intercom box while Wager read the letter that had come with the copy of the sketch. The letterhead said “Grant County Sheriff’s Office, Loma Vista, Colo., 81321.” It was a small town on the Western Slope; Wager had driven through it on a fishing trip years ago. The letter described the homicide and asked for any help DPD could give. It was signed Daryl Tice, Sheriff.

  “This is a little different from the other two,” said Wager.

  “How’s that?”

  “They know who the victim is, for one thing.”


  Doyle nodded and gazed out the window. His view looked across the shallow bowl of the South Platte toward the front range of mountains with their newly cut construction scars orange in the morning sun. “There’s probably no more than fifteen thousand people scattered around that whole county. In a population that small, it would be surprising if they didn’t know everybody.”

  That made some sense, and besides, Wager had been a cop long enough to know that any pattern he imagined might not be the one a criminal had in mind. True, this victim had been shot in the back of the head rather than in the heart, but the type of weapon was the same—a large-caliber handgun. “Was the angel Tice found a Xerox or an original?”

  “You know as much as I do, Wager.”

  The letter didn’t say. “I’ll give him a call.”

  “Do that.” Doyle didn’t lean back as he usually did when a conference was over. Instead, his gaze stayed aimed at the window, holding Wager by its stillness. Finally he said what Wager had already thought. “That’s number three. God knows how many more there might be.” Then, “I take it you’ve got nothing more on our angel killing?”

  “No, sir. Neither has Pueblo on theirs. I called Orvis to check just before coming up.”

  The Bulldog nodded and said, more to himself than to Wager, “Three in a month. All over the state.” His eyes turned to Wager and he asked mildly, “What’s this I read in the paper a few days ago—that article by Gargan on the barbed-wire strangling. Are you the homicide detective he meant when he called one of our people ‘nasty, brutish, and short’?”

  Wager stifled a grin. “He mailed a copy to me.”

  “I don’t like that kind of relationship with the press. They’ve got their job and we’ve got ours. If we work together, it’ll be easier on both of us. A personal animosity between the press and one officer can hurt us all, Wager.”

  “Gargan wanted information on that killing. I told him everything I knew at the time that wasn’t classified. Just like the op manual says. He wasn’t happy with it. Tough shit.”

  Doyle said “um” and his fingers started their light dance again. “Everybody’s shorthanded. Us. Pueblo. Everybody.”

  That was true, but Wager wasn’t sure what the Bulldog was working toward.

  “But DPD’s got the most people. We can best absorb a temporary loan.”

  Wager got the idea. “Why me? That Gargan thing?”

  The Bulldog nodded. “He’s on a special assignment by the Post to look into the whole Crimes Against Persons section, Wager, to enlighten the public why the serious crimes keep rising and the convictions keep falling. That means you two are going to run into each other. He’s going to spend the next couple of days head-hunting, and I don’t want you antagonizing him.”

  Doyle didn’t want Wager to antagonize Gargan!

  “Moreover,” he went on, before Wager’s open mouth could close around an angry word, “you and Axton are due for the night shift. We can get by with one man on the night shift for a day or two.”

  “It’s my case,” said Wager, unwilling to be shoved aside because of someone like Gargan.

  “That’s the real reason, isn’t it?” Doyle agreed mildly. He picked up his telephone and punched a series of numbers. “Crowther? This is Doyle. I’ve got a man for special assignment outside the jurisdiction. Sure—he’ll be right over.” Hanging up, the Bulldog said to Wager, “Get over to Personnel; they’ll issue your vouchers and certification. And Wager, you’ll be pretty much on your own over there.” Doyle leaned back in his chair like a man settling into a marshmallow. “But you like that, anyway.”

  “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.

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nbsp; “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?”