by Carly Bishop
Tears seeped into her eyes for this man whose spirit was so warped, and now so crushed by events he must have believed beyond his control. “Please. Just tell me what happened.”
He sank to his haunches, covering his face, crying like a brokenhearted child. Kiel materialized somewhere out of sight and walked in. He went to Robyn and put his arm around her shoulders.
She didn’t need protection anymore, she needed his support in the face of Crandall’s grief.
She looked up at him, sympathy glittering in her eyes, and then she turned her attention back to Crandall.
He wiped his bleary face with the arm of his shirt. “I didn’t kill the bastard,” he said at last. “Candelaria didn’t either.”
“Did you know that when my husband was selected as special prosecutor?”
Crandall shook his head. “Not for several weeks afterward.”
“How did you find out?”
His face contorted. “That tire. That frigging damn tire. Spent weeks checking it out, combing through sales records of tire dealers all over the state. I thought it was a flat waste of my time, but there was no way your husband was letting it go.”
“What happened” Kiel asked.
“I sent photos of the tread imprint to state labs. Came back matching the tread of some woman who drove herself off the highway up in Routt County off the Oak Creek Road.”
Robyn swallowed and traded looks with Kiel. “Detective, who was she?”
“Name was Jaclyn Thompson. Another one of Spyder Nielsen’s rejects. She lived over outside of Steamboat Springs. No family, not a lot of friends, either, just family money out the ears. Twenty-damn-three years old.”
“Then everything Trudi said was true?” Robyn asked. “There was a shadowy figure leaving the house that night.”
“Bald-faced lie,” Crandall snarled. “Do you honestly think she arrived home from that little soiree at 12:17 and saw a shadowy figure but didn’t see the car Thompson was driving? I don’t think so.”
Robyn frowned. “Why would she make up that story, then?”
“Because she’s a lying whore—but aside from that, the Thompson woman had to have gotten away clean. Candelaria never saw a car coming back down the mountain when she was on her way home.”
“She wouldn’t have known there was a tire track to be seen,” Kiel guessed.
“Exactly. Candelaria never saw any shadowy figure and she had no alibi after the party. She was making up her story as she went along, lying through her teeth the whole time. And the truth is, she deserved to fry as much as her lover Spyder Nielsen deserved to die.”
Kiel shook his head. “Was the tread a perfect match? You’re certain it was this Thompson woman?”
“Yeah, I was certain.” He laughed unpleasantly. “The tire had a flaw. Chances of it not being the same are about ten billion to one.”
Silence reigned in the cold, unheated building. Robyn shivered. “What happened to Jaclyn Thompson?”
“She spent a few days in Routt County Memorial in a coma.” Crandall picked himself up off the floor and dusted off the seat of his pants. “Died the day Candelaria was arraigned.”
Kiel separated from Robyn, preparing to deck Crandall if he decided to come at them again. “When did you know this?”
Crandall sent them both a look of unmitigated hatred. “Maybe halfway through the trial.”
Robyn shivered again. “You never told anyone?”
“Not a soul. Seemed like a good time to keep my trap shut. Far as I was concerned, real justice was bein’ handed down by the Lord. Nielsen was a goner, his whore was almost there, and the perp that really bashed ol’ Spyder in the head was long since punished, dead and buried. Your husband was doing a fine, upstanding, job, ma’am, and I was happy as a clam to let him do it.”
Her teeth gnashed together. Keller had been lied to and used. “I’m very sorry for what happened to your daughter, Detective Crandall, but none of it justifies putting an innocent woman on trial for her life.”
“Save your judgments, lady,” he snapped. “Trudi Candelaria didn’t get anything she didn’t have coming.”
The vestiges of Robyn’s sympathy for Crandall evaporated. “What about my husband?”
“What about him?”
“Did he finally uncover your lies? Did you have to murder him, too?”
“Well, no. But it was damned accommodating of him to die like he did.” Crandall laughed derisively again. “I was bustin’ his chops and he knew it—he just didn’t know how.”
Kiel had never heard the term ‘busting his chops’ before, but he divined from Robyn’s experience that was what the Feds called it when informants or perps were lying to them.
A righteous anger burst into flames inside him, anger that went back to the core of Keller Trueblood’s integrity. Without so much as a blink, using only the force of his will, Kiel slammed the detective against the wall.
Robyn clapped her fingers over her mouth to stifle her cry, but Kiel’s outrage only magnified. He seemed to grow larger than life and his beautiful bronze-colored hair lengthened. His jeans and sweater were gone, his body was cloaked in a gleaming white robe, tied in the middle with a purple cord.
His wings appeared then, glorious, powerful, more mind-numbingly beautiful than on the night he had taken her to the stars and back. He hovered three feet above the ground; the mighty and fearsome glow around him emanated power. From his eyes he struck a jagged and noisome bolt of lightning at the clumsy, stumbling feet of Detective Crandall.
“Behold, the judgment of the Almighty,” he commanded, his voice lifting to the rafters of the old carriage house.
Spellbound by the terrible majesty of Ezekiel, Avenging Angel of the Lord, Robyn watched Crandall slumping to the ground, sobbing for mercy, for his life to be spared, begging to be allowed to turn himself in.
The awesome specter of the angel Ezekiel faded, and in the place where he had rendered the judgment from on high, Kiel stood staring at the pitiful visage of a cop who no longer held himself above the law of his fellow mortals.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, a beautiful fall Monday morning in one of the most visually stunning and spiritually bereft places on the earth, Kiel and Robyn went to the press conference set up by the district attorney’s office.
The word had been put out far and wide that there was a new and stunning development in the old murder case of Spyder Nielsen. Kiel didn’t want to make a spectacle of it, but Trudi Candelaria had lately been the woman the public most loved to hate, and the story was big news. Also, the integrity of Keller Trueblood was at stake.
Kiel moved around, feeling more wooden than Pinocchio had been. He was stiff, lifeless and without a single excuse, a solitary reason, why Robyn should trust him or believe in a benevolent God.
He knew she was close to snapping.
He knew her heart was broken and bleeding.
He knew, now, what he had long suspected. That it had been the cruelest of deceptions to try to hide from her the fact that he had been Keller Trueblood. It was true that he had only intended to spare her losing her soulmate twice in one lifetime, but the purest of intentions had not saved her from that fate.
What he should have done was to tell Angelo to take a flying leap at another universe. There was no way that Robyn Delaney was going to fail to recognize her soulmate in whatever guise.
No way.
But he’d gone along with it, and he knew why—because he was just an unevolved-enough angel that there was no way in heaven or hell he was going to pass up another chance to be with the woman who was his soulmate. The decision had been his, not Robyn’s, and the responsibility for putting her through this—again— weighed squarely on him.
Robyn was taking it all like the class act she was. She could have flatly refused to let him speak at this press conference. She could have refused to stand by his side while he explained that Trudi Candelaria, the target of the special prosecutor in the case of Colorado v. Candelaria, had in fact
been an innocent woman. These were things, as Keller Trueblood’s widow, that she had a right to express on his behalf.
Kiel needed to do this because it was his immortal soul and his integrity, human or angel, that needed restoring. The truth needed to be told, and he was the one to tell it, to clear the names of Trudi Candelaria and Stuart Willetts.
People still whispered. Aspen was still known as the place where John Denver lived and Don Johnson gave wildly expensive parties and Indian princes built gargantuan houses that were a blight on the earth…and where Trudi Candelaria bashed in the head of the great Spyder Nielsen. That lie demanded to be set to rights.
Kiel turned to Robyn at the last second before he stepped up to the podium. She looked so hauntingly beautiful to him it made his sore heart ache. Her shining black hair was pulled back tightly in a French braid.
She wore a deep blue suit and a high-necked, buttoned-down, don’t-touch-me white blouse. Everything about her said to him and to anyone looking at her, don’t-touch-me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t dare hurt me again.
He didn’t know what to say to her. He knew she didn’t know what to say to him. It was killing her, having Keller, not having Keller.
“Just make your statement, Kiel.”
He could only nod and look for forgiveness in her.
She rolled her eyes and swallowed hard and pursed her lips to keep from crying, and reached to fuss with the knot in his tie. “Don’t forget to make yourself photographable.”
The knot in his tie was less than perfect. He hadn’t cared. But he would have forgotten about the cameras until it was too late, and then he’d have to go around to countless photographers, imprinting his image where it should have been but wasn’t on their negatives. Even now this mortal woman was looking after his best interests.
He trapped her hands with his against his chest. “Robyn, you know if this is the injustice I was meant to resolve, I will…I won’t be…I’m trying to say I can’t stay when this is all over.”
She hadn’t cried. Not once, but her beautiful doe brown eyes filled now and a tiny noise caught in her throat. She tried to take back her hands but he couldn’t let her go.
“I w-won’t grieve for you again, Keller. I won’t do it. I won’t.”
He knew it was a lie.
“Robyn.”
“Oh…Keller.” Her eyes brimmed. “Don’t go. Please.” Her voice was useless, a whisper. An agony. A prayer. “Don’t go again, don’t leave me again. I won’t be able to stand it.”
He bowed his head and shut his eyes and clung to her hands. How could he say to this brave and good and honest woman whom he loved beyond life, who loved him, that he must turn away from her and do what he must do to restore justice—because although the pain in him was more fierce than the instant of his death in that accursed mine more than a year ago, he wasn’t human and couldn’t stay?
“Robyn.”
She knew then. Knew he would leave her again. He wasn’t human, but dear God, his hands were, and his lips and his eyes and his body, surely they were.
Just as surely, not.
She straightened her shoulders and sniffed and accepted this ultimate blow to her heart and took her hands away. This time he let her go. She touched her fingertips to her lips and then to his, and to her credit, through her own human strength, not that of the power vested in an Avenging Angel, Robyn backed away.
Kiel Alighieri knew to his core, then, what Dante knew—all about the inferno, about paradise lost and the bonfire of vanities.
He had to find the strength Robyn had, and so he turned to speak to the assembled crowd, to say into the microphone and on camera, on Keller Trueblood’s behalf, the truth.
That the office of the special prosecutor in the matter of Colorado v. Candelaria had determined that the defendant, Trudi Candelaria, had stood wrongly accused of the murder of Spyder Nielsen, that this fact had been raised and unflinchingly supported by Trueblood’s co-counsel Stuart Willetts, and that the woman whom they now knew had in fact committed the murder had driven off the road in Eagle County that fateful night and been killed herself.
Kiel went on to state that an investigation had shown Detective Ken Crandall had obstructed justice in this matter, and that his prosecution would be upcoming in the district attorney’s office. He thanked Judge Vincent J. Ybarra, the Aspen police department, the county sheriff’s department, and lastly, he thanked Trudi Candelaria and Stuart Willetts, who would not be filing civil suits for any and sundry damages to their reputations.
At every moment, in every syllable he spoke, Kiel followed the progress of Robyn Delaney through the assembly of media to her car. She waited, listening, until he was finished. When she left, when she drove away, he was finished. He turned and shook hands with Ybarra and Willetts and Trudi Candelaria, and after he walked away and turned a corner down a long empty echoing hallway in the county courthouse, no one saw Kiel Alighieri again.
Chapter Fourteen
Robyn drove back to The Chandler House Bed and Breakfast in a blur of tears. Her hosts, a seventy-year-old man and his seventy-two-year-old wife, having listened on the radio to the announcement Kiel made, each gave her a hug. Neither understood her tears.
She let herself into her suite with the key, tossed it on the hearth, then picked it up and put the key in the dish on the table by the door because that’s what neatnik Keller would have wanted her to do.
More empty and alone now than in her worst nightmare, her tears dried up. She paced back and forth, and everywhere her glance happened to fall was a memory of Kiel waiting to clean her emotional clock again.
She should have packed her things and left, but she couldn’t make herself change a single thing from the way it had been before she and Kiel left it this morning. Three hours into nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to talk to, no angel to berate, she pulled out her notebook computer and sat down to do the only thing that ever took her outside herself.
She began to write. Furiously.
It began as a Dear God letter, akin to a Dear John one, and grew from there. A cutting indictment against the system whereby injustice flourished and justice was rendered by his Avenging Angels in what appeared to her to be the most random and haphazard of manners.
But, seventeen single-spaced pages into spilling her venom, emptying her soul, of bellyaching and preaching and blistering invective, three hours after she had begun, she stopped.
Her head throbbed and her eyes burned, but worst of all, she knew this Dear God letter was wrong. Keller had not been murdered. The collapse of the Hallelujah was a terrible freak accident, nothing more.
Kiel had been sent to save her life and redeem the injustice perpetrated by Detective Crandall on an innocent woman wrongfully accused—and on Stuart Willetts. Kiel had done both, and she hadn’t gotten such a raw deal.
She had loved and been loved and made love with an Avenging Angel. With Kiel. Her heart was still broken, but her mind was clear.
With a few keystrokes, she obliterated the scathing Dear God letter from her computer. In a few days, a few weeks at most, she might take up her vocation and begin again. But there were details here to clean up, like the office in Lucy’s building. She shut down the power on the computer and put it away, then changed quickly into slacks and a sweater and walked in the bright midday sun down to Main Street.
She stopped in the Treat Boutique, bought herself a latte, and then walked across the street. On impulse, she turned aside from the door into Lucy’s building and continued on instead another three blocks down Main to the newspaper office.
Though the office door had a Closed sign in the window, she tried the door and it opened. She poked her head in. A bell hanging over the door rang out. The owner and editor, Margaret Hollings, came around from behind an old mahogany partition.
“Robyn, hello! I was so hoping you would stop in this morning. Where is your friend Kiel? What a stirring speech he gave this morning!”
“It was, wasn’t it,” Robyn
murmured. “From the heart. I’m not really sure where Kiel went to.” She did, but how did one explain that an Avenging Angel moved on? “He’s not one to hang around.”
“Well, we need his kind around here. To keep our moral compass, you know,” Margaret pronounced, serious as could be. “Let me get those photocopies for you, while I’m thinking about it.”
She ducked back around the partition and invited Robyn to join her. Enjoying the sights and scents, the ambience of the old newspaper office, Robyn went happily.
“Here’s the file of articles I copied for you. Why don’t you sit down and go through them—then if there’s anything else you want, we can dig out the microfilm now.” Margaret offered her a chair at an antique rolltop desk.
“Are you sure I won’t be in the way?”
“Most definitely not. I’ve work to do in the back, and everybody knows we’re closed on Mondays. You just sing out if you need anything.”
“Thanks, Margaret. I’d love to get started.” She hadn’t intended to stay. The boxes in Lucy’s offices needed packing up, but they could wait a little while. The distraction for a few hours couldn’t hurt.
She sat down and began to go through the articles dating from December 1892 through April 1893. The passions and rhetoric ran high those days. Amused by the overblown tone of the reporting, which was as blatantly partisan as any she had ever seen, Robyn started a time line on the back of one of the less-informative copies.
She read through all the articles quickly, then settled in to read each again with an eye toward filling in her time line and keeping tabs on how the quotes attributed to Lucien Montbank on the side of the sideliners, and Jerome Clarke for the apexers, changed in those months.
In sociology, the technique was called caving. The acronym CAVE stood for content analysis of verbatim explanations. Robyn used CAVE as a sort of time machine where what people said could be proven to predict what they would do. Despite losing the lawsuit in Denver to the superior claims of the apex claimants, which should have been a devastating blow, Lucien Montbank, in his comments to the press, seemed to become more and more optimistic, even elated, over the possibility of a compromise and a return of prosperity to the town of Aspen.
