The Fifth Angel

by Tim Green

  “Thanks for asking me in, Mrs. Brice,” he said. “I hate to interrupt your Saturday cleaning, but I need to ask you a few questions. Sit right down there.”

  He helped her into the small booth in the kitchen and, after brushing some toast crumbs off the seat, sat down opposite her and smiled. He was going to twist her until she sang.

  CHAPTER 27

  Isn’t this nice, just you and me?” McGrew asked. “No other police investigators around to make you nervous?”

  Mrs. Brice muttered something and began to finger a ragged hole in the front of her old dress. He could see the blue-green flesh of her breast and his stomach turned a little somersault.

  “I want to know if you ever saw your son with a blond-haired man with glasses, Mrs. Brice,” he said. “Come on now, a sick fuck like Lawrence didn’t have too many friends now, did he? Think hard, Mrs. Brice. You can just nod if you remember. I need to know, Mrs. Brice. Then I can help you. He might want to do the same thing to you that he did to Lawrence . . .”

  That got her attention. The old woman’s eyes darted at McGrew. Their whites had gone yellow long ago, and they had a creamy buildup on them that he found fascinating. He stared.

  “Yeah, that blond-haired man, about five foot ten, maybe six feet. My height, straight blond hair, and little round glasses. You remember him?”

  “He ain’t coming for me?” she said.

  “He might be,” McGrew said, leaning close enough to smell the rancid tomato soup on her breath.

  “I never saw no man like that,” she said, alarmed. “I never did. Lawrence, he never came by with no friends, not since he growed up.”

  McGrew nodded. More of the same crap, but he wasn’t going to be deterred.

  “I think you better start thinking harder, Mrs. Brice,” he said. “I can help you, but not if you don’t help me.”

  “I don’t need no help, do I?”

  “You might,” McGrew said. He shrugged, then looked around the trailer. His eyes came back to rest on her with an accusatory glare.

  “You sure you don’t want to tell me who that blond guy is?” he asked.

  That really set her to mumbling and twisting. McGrew watched her for a time before he got up and went to the door with a sigh.

  “You call me if you do,” he said.

  “I ain’t got no phone,” she said.

  “Where do you do your shopping?” he asked. “For food?”

  “Seven-Eleven up the road.”

  “Well, they got a pay phone there. I suggest you think about all this and use it.”

  McGrew fished a quarter out of his pocket and flipped it across the trailer onto the little table.

  “Then maybe I can help you,” he said. “Maybe I can keep him from coming after you.” Then he left.

  Something about going back to the root of it all stimulated McGrew. The crappy trailer where Brice grew up, the haggard old woman who was his mom, it got him inside their world and that’s where he believed he needed to be to find the answer. He had ruled out the obvious: a drug deal gone bad or a revenge killing. There were no drugs and all the top suspects—the family members of prior victims—all had bulletproof alibis. With all the bullet holes in Brice, some had speculated a crime of passion.

  But everything told McGrew that Brice was a loner. He stocked shelves at a grocery store in town, but spoke to no one. His human interaction was limited to his mom and whatever stimulation he could get over the Internet. McGrew believed the mother didn’t know the blond man. Maybe Brice didn’t know him, either? Maybe, for whatever reason, Brice had been killed by a professional. After all, the scene had been strangely devoid of evidence . . .

  McGrew felt his heart pumping fast. He spun his wheel and headed back for the mansion and his computer. He took his machine out on the covered terrace off the kitchen and placed it atop a glass-topped rattan table. He fired up his machine, plugged in a phone line, lit a cigarette, and got to work. He logged onto his own department’s internal system, and from there into the national Teletype. He was searching for other crimes in the last three years that might create a link to the killing on Longcut Road.

  They had been wrong all along. It wasn’t anyone connected with Brice. It couldn’t be. The scene was too clean, the killing too smooth. Besides the messiness of it, it was exactly how McGrew would have killed someone if he were a bad guy. He should have thought of it before: The absence of shell casings or any other physical evidence had to mean a professional.

  He didn’t know why. Maybe it had some connection to the smut Brice was into on the Internet. Whatever the reason, if it was a professional, then there would be other killings. A professional by definition never killed just once. So while this particular murderer didn’t leave any physical evidence, he would likely have left the same general footprint somewhere else.

  Somewhere, McGrew suspected, this person, this hit man, had killed other people by riddling their bodies with a 9mm Glock, also leaving no other trace. But that might be enough, at least to find a pattern. From there, other possibilities might show themselves. Who knew? Maybe he’d find a batch of other dead pervs somewhere.

  After two hours McGrew blinked his eyes then stood up rubbing them. He had plowed through six weeks of Teletypes poring over descriptions of murders from all over the country and come up with nothing. There were two other homicides, one in L.A. and one in New Orleans, that came close. Both had been committed with the same type of weapon, but neither was as clean a crime scene as Brice’s. In both instances there was plenty of other evidence to go along with the 9mm Glock. And the pattern didn’t fit. One victim had been shot only once in the head in a barroom fight, the other one took three slugs in the body, all in the back. Neither sounded like a professional job at all.

  McGrew lit up another cigarette, brewing up a cloud of smoke. He squinted at his watch. He decided to get the blood flowing back in his legs with a stroll on the beach. At the end of the teak boardwalk he stopped to survey the long stretch of white sand. It was empty except for a family having a picnic about a hundred yards up. The father had one of the kids on his back and the other two were racing around him like puppies. The mother was unloading a basket of food onto a blanket spread across the sand. McGrew took a long drag and blew the smoke out his nose. That’s one role he didn’t see himself playing: the family man.

  McGrew coughed and hacked up a bit of phlegm, then spit into the sea grass before turning back toward the house. He was going to work right up until Lindsey, the crime scene tech, returned his call about going out for dinner tonight. He’d put in twelve calls to her already, and he just had the feeling she would be ringing him up this afternoon.

  What if she wasn’t calling because she was going to just show up? He’d left a lengthy message all about this place. With her in mind, he stripped off his shirt. A big soaring eagle covered the smooth surface of his chest. Its wing tip dipped down below the waist of his Levi’s; its yellow beak tweaked his armpit. Lindsey would like it. He could imagine what the scene would look like. Bogart and Bacall, her walking in on him. He composed a few lines.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Working.”

  “All day? It’s Saturday, you know.”

  “I’ve got a killer to catch. I haven’t lost on a case yet and I’m not going to start now. Sit down and I’ll be with you when I’m done. By the way, I hope you’re wearing that lace underwear I like.”

  McGrew lit a cigarette and let it dangle from the corner of his mouth. Those lines would sound great coming from him out of a wreath of smoke. He sighed, then hunched down over his computer and got back to work.

  McGrew remained motionless except for his eyes. They darted back and forth across the screen like frantic roaches for nearly an hour. He stopped only to light up again and once to see if his cell phone ringer was on. Still no call.

  Then it happened.

  “I got it,” he said, his voice breaking with the excitement. He pumped his fist in the air. “Cin
cinnati, Ohio. A dead perv shot to shit with twelve nine-millimeter slugs. I got a bead on the son-of-a-bitch now.”

  CHAPTER 28

  If Amanda had been able to know just who would become her new boss at the Bureau, she would probably never have passed up the promotion. She’d never intended to make a mortal enemy of Benjamin Hanover, but it had happened.

  Hanover was in his late fifties. Most of his peers in the Bureau had either moved upward into better positions or to the private sector to make their fortunes. Hanover wasn’t an unintelligent man, but his career was blemished with bungled investigations and embarrassing complaints from inside and outside the agency. Hanover had been in the wrong place at the wrong time more than once.

  Never had that been more pronounced than his first encounter with Amanda. After a series of remarkable successes early on, the agency began to use her as a kind of troubleshooter. Hanover had been working with a young agent by the name of Melinda Gross on a case where the killer was using a meat cleaver on his victims. Hanover and Gross were apparently closing in when they discovered what they believed to be the killer’s name on a car rental receipt in some motel trash. But the name turned up nothing. The media began to stir over the butchery. Inside the agency, pressure mounted from above.

  Amanda didn’t consider her assistance as the high point of her career. She had simply asked to see the original car rental receipt. After all, the man staying in the hotel room where it came from matched the description of an unknown man spotted near one of the crime scenes. The name of the man registered in the hotel didn’t match the car rental receipt, and that gave Amanda the unshakable feeling that something was amiss. She double-checked the lead.

  As it turned out, the name on the receipt was Douglas F. Emmons. The name Hanover had searched for in the database was Douglas S. Emmons. Hanover was on a two-day leave to attend his mother’s funeral when Amanda made her discovery. By the time he returned, she and Melinda Gross had arrested Emmons. Amanda said nothing about the error, but Hanover’s partner wasn’t as discreet and before she knew it, everyone knew.

  He became the running joke in the office. E-mails even started going around to other FBI offices around the country.

  Amanda remembered one in particular.

  Hanover goes into an appliance store and asks to buy a TV. The slick-looking salesman says he doesn’t sell TVs to washed-out FBI agents. Hanover goes out and gets himself a dark wig, sunglasses, and some bell-bottoms. When he comes back he points to the TV and says he wants it. The salesman refuses and says he still won’t sell to washed-out FBI agents. Hanover whips off his disguise and says, “What gave away my disguise?” “Nothing,” says the salesman, “but that’s a microwave.”

  Amanda, on the other hand, was celebrated. That case proved she had common sense, too. Because she came out looking so good and he so bad, Hanover blamed her for all of it. When she tried to explain that it wasn’t her doing, he had glared maliciously at her.

  “You’re a liar and a bitch, but you’ll get yours one day,” he’d said, spitting his words at her before he walked away. They hadn’t spoken a word to each other since.

  Amanda parked her car in the garage and took the elevator up to the third floor. She marched down the hallway, nodding and smiling to the familiar faces that she hadn’t seen all summer without stopping to chat. Hanover now had his own secretary and a large office lined with windows. He made Amanda wait outside for twenty minutes in the hall before the secretary finally showed her in. Hanover didn’t bother to get up or even shake hands. Amanda sat down.

  “Are you lost?’’ Hanover asked.

  Hanover had silver hair, tan skin, and a wiry athletic frame in spite of his years. Only the lines of worry around his pale green eyes and the downturned creases in the corners of his mouth hinted at his bitterness. That was, until he spoke. His tone of voice was split evenly between blatant condescension and scathing impatience.

  “I’d like an extension of my sabbatical,” Amanda said.

  “Oh?” Hanover said, raising his eyebrows. He made a temple of his fingertips and placed them beneath his nose.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’d like to extend it for a year.”

  Hanover snorted in amusement.

  “We don’t have sabbaticals that last that long,” he said. “You’ve already used up your sabbatical. I’ll be happy to give you a leave of absence, though . . .”

  A leave of absence meant that Amanda would lose all her seniority. That would cost her in salary, pension, and vacation when she came back. And she definitely wanted to come back. She just wasn’t sure when, and that’s why she was hoping to continue the sabbatical they had given her after Marco’s death. That was before Hanover had become the ASAIC over her.

  “If I come back,” Amanda said, “I’d like to be with Mike Collins.”

  Mike Collins had been the agent assigned to follow up on the Oswald case. Amanda hadn’t completely lost touch with the office during her recovery. The investigation had continued. She really had seen a second man. A witness apparently saw him escape out the kitchen window and down a fire escape after Amanda shot Oswald. If Hanover was going to force her to come back, then that was where she should be, working on that case.

  But Hanover was smiling.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know someone of your incredible talent probably didn’t realize it, but the FBI just kept going. Even when you had a breakdown.

  “Let’s see,” he said, picking a folder up off his desk. “I have a homicide detective from Long Island, New York, and I’ve been told to begin a joint investigation. He has a very important uncle. That would be good for you. You could curry some more favor . . . or given your fragile condition, maybe you’ll take that leave of absence.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” Amanda said. “Maybe I will.”

  “Should I start the paperwork?” Hanover said with mock concern.

  “No,” Amanda said, rising from her seat. “I’ll let you know when I’m sure. I’ll decide, not you.’’

  Without a good-bye he picked up the phone and began dialing as if Amanda were already gone.

  She stomped down the hall and into the elevator. Those who knew her busied themselves as she stormed past.

  She looked at her watch. She had to hurry. Teddy had forgotten his lunch and she had to drop it off at baseball camp, then pick Glenda up from her horse riding camp the next town over. How important was that really? She was a taxi service.

  Oh, it hurt when she missed certain things. There was the time her flight from Minneapolis was late and the school play had ended, Glenda teary-eyed in her Pumba costume when Amanda finally met them at Dairy Queen, Parker going on and on about how she could see it all when they got home. He kept tapping his stupid VHS camera, which was sitting on the tabletop next to a leaky banana boat sundae.

  But what about the three girls she found tied up in a cabin in the backwoods of Minnesota? Wasn’t that more important? Couldn’t everyone see that? Hers wasn’t just that same old middle-American dilemma: the financial need for two incomes. Her job was important. She was out there, finding killers and stopping the worst kind of monsters, protecting families like her own so they could have their little costume plays and ice cream sundae celebrations.

  Parker had played that tape over and over for a week and it did something to Amanda. Their life in the bedroom went to hell. They were partners the way two former friends might share a vacation home between their families. They worked things out. They got along for the good of everyone. But she knew her prowess ate his heart out. Without saying so, both of them knew he wasn’t half the man that she was.

  When she arrived at home, Parker was in the driveway washing his Humvee. The sale was final, and as it turned out, Parker had paid too much. For him to try to sell it to someone else now would cost them even more money. The shiny black paint showed through beneath the swirls of white suds. A green chamois cloth hung from his back pocket. She rolled down her window.

&n
bsp; “Hi,” she said.

  Parker looked pointedly at his watch.

  “I’ve got a big poker game tonight, remember?” he said.

  “And?”

  “Well, when the hell are we going to eat?” he asked.

  This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Little incidents from the past month popped into the forefront of Amanda’s mind. By themselves they were just dots. A complaint about the bathtub ring. A charred hamburger. Running out of tissues. Coupons for laundry detergent. Teddy blaming her for a frog that got away. Glenda saying shut up. All together, they painted a portrait of a highly educated and very talented woman who was squandering both. A wifelike character out of some television program about the 1950s.

  Parker’s words to her just now and his attitude had just put her over the edge. This was not going to be her life.

  She slammed her car door without another word and went into the kitchen, where she proceeded to fill a mixing bowl with cornflakes. She caught herself wondering what the case with the homicide cop from Long Island was all about. She wondered how many other school plays she would miss. How many games? How many Brownie meetings? Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled freely down her cheeks and still, she called Parker in to his dinner with a smile. In her mind, she was already back in the game.

  CHAPTER 29

  The vista of mountains and sky was suddenly lost as the Saab descended a twisting curve in the empty two-lane highway, but another unfolded, equally stunning: a dark lake bordered by an army of cedars. Reflected in the still water was the perfect mirror image of the cedars and the sky.

  “Looks like a Wyeth painting,’’ Beth said, almost to herself. The wind was beating her hair through the open window.

  The top was down and her head was covered with a black-and-gold silk scarf. Both of them had on jackets for the trip. Although it was a sunny day, the air in the mountains was cooler than the balmy late-summer air so close to New York City.