Angel of Death

by J. Robert King

  That’s what Kerry had been.

  “He needs me.” Tears pooled in her eyes and ran down her face and onto her pillow. “I can’t just let him go. I can’t lose him like I lost Kerry.”

  The next morning, Detective Leland turned into the alley off Jefferson and pulled her squad into her parking space by the police department only to nearly run over a giant, horseshoe-shaped arrangement of flowers that bore the banner “Leland” and beneath it the slogan,

  “Winning at the Wire.”

  “Mother of God.”

  The onslaught continued inside, where the dispatcher made her give a high-five through the bulletproof glass before buzzing her in. A gantlet of colleagues waited in the hallway beyond, their eyes bright, their cheeks shining, their hands reaching out to shake hers or pat her back or give her a thumbs up. And after greeting each and nodding and thanking them and assuring them that “it was a team effort” and “I couldn’t have done it without you,” she reached the case room. Another oversized bouquet waited on her desk, and above the smiling heads of the flowers hovered a plastic arch that declared “A Job Well Done! ” Worse yet, the night shift had apparently taken it on themselves to devise clever CNN-style crawls and print them out in landscape format in giant type on letter-sized paper and string them along the walls.

  “LELAND TAKES DOWN SERIAL KILLER.”

  “SERIAL MURDER WAREHOUSE RAIDED.”

  “POLICE ESTIMATE OVER 75 VICTIMS.”

  The farther down the wall she read, the worse the crawls became.

  “BURLINGTON NABS HAND-JOB SLAYER.”

  “OFFICER FRIENDLY? OFFICER KICK-ASS!”

  “KILLER ONLY WANTED TO GET A HEAD.”

  Leland pretended to like the hoopla only because her colleagues hovered around her in an eager throng and the two young authors of the crawls jabbed questions at her: “Did you read the fourth one down?” and

  “Don’t you get it?” and “C’mon, that’s funny, right?”

  “Very nice,” Leland said, pushing past them to reach her desk. Beside it stood her boss.

  “Front page news!” Chief Biggs said, rattling a special edition of the Gazette. The main headline read, “LOCAL

  COP NABS NATIONAL KILLER,” and the picture beneath it showed Detective Leland with her feet braced and her Colt leveled at the kneeling figure of Azra Michaels. A closet full of skulls leered faintly behind him.

  “Wow,” was all Leland could muster, reaching to take the paper. The moment her hand touched it, ten flashes went off, and Blake Gaines stepped out of the crowd, lowered his camera, and grinned.

  “Not just front page,” Gaines enthused. “Second page. Third page. Damn, it’s a whole eight-page special edition, with my copy and my shots and your perp!”

  Sure enough, as Leland flipped through, she saw dozens of articles about the case. She was invariably described as a larger-than-life hero, a cross between Agatha Christie and Wyatt Earp. Likewise, the articles cast Azra as an absolute demon. The main headline might as well have read “ANNIE OAKLEY NABS

  BEELZEBUB.” There were also plenty of interviews with sharpshooters and canoe men, sidebars about known victims, and even a contest asking readers to vote on the honorific that Leland should enjoy (including “Officer Kick-Ass”) and the horrorific that should be assigned to Azra (including “Dahmer Squared”). The pictures and articles focused solely on the case, though the paper did take the opportunity to plug some hot deals on cool cars and notify readers of seventy-five cents savings on Charmin.

  “The story’s even gone national!” Gaines declared.

  “AP’s picked it up. Your phone’s going to be off the hook.” He added quietly, “But don’t talk to anybody but me.”

  “Um, chief,” Detective Leland said, laying the paper down beside her bouquet, “could we have a word in your office?”

  He nodded, blushing a little, and then said to the ardent crowd, “Give us a second, would you? I have to confer with the hero.” Setting his hand on her shoulder, he guided her toward his office. Once within, he closed the door, asked her to take a seat, and circled around his paper-strewn desk. “So, what’s up?”

  Leland almost laughed, but then she shook her head.

  “Listen, I need some time off.”

  “Sure! You’ve been working hard, I know that. Take a week – on the house.”

  “No, I mean, more than that.”

  “Well, I don’t know… You’re kinda central to this whole case.”

  “That’s just the point. I–”

  “We need you for the conviction,” he interrupted.

  “You’re the one who tracked him down. You’ve got all the evidence the DA’s gonna need. You’ve been following him since Bohner’s Lake.” His bloodshot eyes glowered beneath aggressive black brows. Leland sighed. “I’ll get the evidence all in order in the next few days, get my paperwork done, instruct a replacement in all aspects of the case, but then I want off.”

  “In God’s name, why?”

  “I’m in love with the killer.”

  There are some statements that can end an argument.

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m asking for administrative leave.”

  Biggs chewed on the request, and his lip, for a while before responding. “All right. Of course. Administrative leave. However long you need. You just get all the evidence pulled together and give it to me and...”

  A sudden smile came to his face, and he blushed again. “I guess, all of a sudden, I’m the lead.”

  E L E V E N

  The counsel cell was cinder block and steel, glass fused with metal mesh. Once built, the room had been fastened into an eternal solidity with round-topped bolts as thick as a man’s middle finger. The speckled paint was rosy colored, something like a mixture of blood and milk, left from a time when pink was thought to pacify inmates. To John Doe, it seemed the room had experienced a swift volcanism that had melted every surface and galvanized all into a seamless whole. The rest of the Racine County Jail was the same – homogenized and impersonally antagonistic. Even the guards were fundamentally interchangeable, their eyes neutral and steely. They walked the catwalks and manned their stations with the silent menace of sharks. This was the joyless Sheol in which the Jews had once believed. Yellowish light. Milk-blood walls. Metal bunks. A steel table with a checkerboard scratched into its paint and scraps of paper as playing pieces. The everpresent reek of cigarettes. For a week now, this realm of the dead had been his home.

  But into that homogeneous room of steel and cinder block came something unique: a black woman. Her hair had been straightened and then curled again into a feathery mound on her head. Her face was ageless, as are those of black women, though the mixture of caution, wisdom, and compassion in her eyes said that she had seen much. She wore a kente cloth vest over a shirt of shiny black fabric. A long black skirt finished the ensemble.

  “Hello, Mr Doe, my name is Lynda. Lynda Barnett. I’m your state-appointed defender.”

  John Doe nodded. His features were handsome despite the rings beneath his eyes and the slack hang of his cheeks. “I would rise, but they have attached me to the table.” He rattled his shackles.

  Counselor Barnett nodded noncommittally to that, swung a leather attaché to rest on her end of the table, pulled out a number of loose sheets and manila folders, and settled down on the chair.

  “Now, I find it much easier to defend a man whose name I know. I’ve told you mine; how about if you tell me yours?”

  “I have told the police and will tell you. The closest thing I have to a human name is Azrael Michaels,” the man said quietly.

  “There is no Sergeant Michaels of the Griffith, Indiana, Police Department. The Social Security administration lists only five Azrael Michaelses who would be about your age. Two are dead already, and though the three others are alive and well – they aren’t you.” Her eyes flared. “No birth certificate. No green card. Who are you?”

  “My true name is unpronounceab
le and unspellable.”

  Counselor Barnett blinked once slowly. She tipped her head toward the documents she had brought. “That’s what this report says.” She looked up from the papers. “Already, the press is calling you the Son of Samael. Is that what you want them to call you?”

  “Why not? Samael is the name the Jews give to the Archangel of Death.”

  “Yes,” Counselor Barnett responded. “Muslims call him Azrael, and Christians call him Michael, which is why you call yourself Azrael Michaels – but the papers are calling you Samaele–”

  “I’m not really the Archangel of Death.”

  “No?” she asked sarcastically.

  “I’m just an angel. One of his deputies.”

  Counselor Barnett stopped and took a deep breath, looking infinitely weary. “Look, Mr Doe, just because I am an overworked public defender handling the cases of people who are broke and desperate doesn’t mean I ignore my research or do a slapdash job. I’m a damned good attorney, but you’re going to have to meet me halfway on this. Drop the insanity act just long enough to give me your name, Social Security number, birth date – that stuff.”

  “This isn’t insanity,” John Doe replied calmly. “Nor is it an act. I truly am – truly was the angel of death for this area.”

  The lawyer sighed wearily. “What area?”

  “The Chicago-Milwaukee metropolitan area, stretching from Lake County, Indiana, up to the northernmost suburbs of Milwaukee.”

  She wrote. “And how long have you been assigned this area?”

  “For almost fifteen years.”

  That, too, was noted. “And how many people did you kill in that time?”

  “That is a difficult question. Do you mean how many deaths did I approve, or how many did I arrange?”

  “How many did you arrange?”

  “About four hundred thirty per month.”

  She stopped writing. “The cops have been through this before with other drifters of your stripe. If you’re planning to delay your trial while police haul you from state to state for questioning about various unsolved murders, you’re sadly mistaken–”

  “Murders? Ah, well, many of the ones I arranged were accidents, not murders. If you are asking how many murders I arranged, that’s more like about ninety-five per month.”

  Ms. Barnett looked stunned. “You want me to believe you killed, what…? Three people a day for the last fifteen years? That’s, what, a thousand per year…

  about fifteen thousand murders before getting caught?”

  “First of all,” John Doe returned quietly, “I did not kill them. I arranged their murders. Others did the actual killing. Secondly, you are right: A mortal could not have slain so many without being caught.”

  She nodded. “If you are an angel, why don’t you just blink out of here?”

  “I’m no longer an angel,” the man said. “I’ve fallen.”

  “What sin made you fall?”

  “Love.”

  With that, she slid the papers back into her leather satchel and stood. “Mr Doe, regardless of what you were, we both agree that you are human now, and that you are on trial for multiple murders in a human criminal justice system. Either you come clean with me so I can provide you the best possible defense, or you get multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole

  – and get stabbed to death by an inmate with a broomstick. Who says Wisconsin has no death penalty?”

  She turned and walked from the room.

  Counselor Barnett arranged a competency hearing. She wanted to take away my right to determine my own defense, but I didn’t cooperate.

  In court, I was the picture of sanity and was declared fit for trial.

  I lay on my bunk. It’d taken me two weeks to consider this body to be truly mine, not a mere convenience to make me visible to humans. Now, I knew it. It was my body that lay on the thin mattress. It was me.

  A defense. I needed a defense. My mind would not settle on the idea.

  Perhaps my situation was temporary. Perhaps my fall from grace was a kind of warning from God. In my line of work, I had orchestrated numerous near-death experiences, in which a living person dies briefly, has a vision of the beyond, and is returned, chastened, to life. Perhaps I was having the opposite, a near-life experience. Now, I waited merely to be returned to heaven, chastened. I would regain my divinity, but would have to vow never again to dabble in human hearts. That would be a very difficult vow. Love cannot be simply shut off. I had used my one phone call to talk to Donna. She said she’d come to see me soon. She said I’d be okay. She said she’d bring a friend to help us sort everything out. I couldn’t wait to see her. I had no idea the boredom and tedium of being trapped in space and time, or the agony of being trapped in love. I told my cell mate about my plight. He was a fiftythree-year-old white businessman whose well-trimmed graying hair and narrow, sensitive eyes made him look distinguished even in a shapeless orange jumpsuit. Derek Billings was his name, an embezzler. (I hadn’t asked his crime. The first time I had asked someone’s crime, I’d gotten a black eye. Billings told me of his own accord.)

  I told Billings my crime, too. He looked very alarmed. I kept talking, relating my angelic past. My voice was low and gentle, my manner polite and deferential. Billings slowly calmed. White-collar criminals are that way, comfortable among well-educated, soft-spoken psychotics. The inmates that Billings feared were the uneducated but sane ones.

  The only reason an embezzler was put in with alleged murderers and rapists was the scope of his crimes. Billings had embezzled thirty-five million dollars, had stashed it away in coded accounts he still would not divulge, and had already made one attempt to flee the country. The judge at his arraignment had bent quite a few guidelines to establish bail at thirty-five million dollars. Apparently, the judge believed Billings could be trusted not to flee only if he no longer had the money to flee with or to. Billings confessed to me that the judge was right, and so kept his stash a secret. We made a perfect team, the polite white men whose soft-spoken manners belied the enormous crimes we had committed – allegedly. Further, the prosecutors were sure that we both hid the key to our crimes locked away in our brains – Billings with the location and numbers of his accounts, and me with the human name and past that I couldn’t divulge since I didn’t have them.

  “Well,” said Billings as he sat beside me on the lower bunk, “they want you to have a name and a past, so why don’t you give them one?”

  “None of it would check out. There are no records of me anywhere – no birth certificate, no immunization sheet, no school performance, no family, no friends.”

  “The documents, you can forge,” he replied. He made a motion as though he were smoking, one of his few joys in life, though he had been denied any money to buy cigarettes. It didn’t matter. The air was rank with smoke, anyway. “I know a good guy. He’s expensive, but he does good work.”

  “It doesn’t matter if I have the documents. One call to the hospitals or schools to verify, and the forgery would be obvious.”

  “Not if the hospital was torn down or the school burned,” Billings said easily. “For a little extra, my guy can slip your stats into the archives of existing hospital computers and school archives. Investigators will stop there. They don’t want to look too deep.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t pay your guy. Angels don’t have money. Never needed it.”

  “I have money,” said Billings, releasing a long draw of imagined smoke from his lungs. “It’d be tough to get to, but we could buy you a past.”

  “Well, thank you for the offer, but I don’t see how a name and a past are going to help me out of this.”

  “Easy. Right now, you’re just an uncommunicative, uncooperative psycho who’s damn-near certainly responsible for five gruesome slayings–”

  “Much more than five,” I said, “though they have evidence only for those.”

  “You’re just a monster. That’s all people see. But let the people see yo
ur past. If you’ve got to create one, make it a good one – one that explains why you are who you are, what happened to you. Everybody looks at you and sees Darth Vader. Let them look and see Anakin Skywalker. You’re not a monster anymore, John. You’re a tragic hero.”

  “A fallen angel.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “Well, then, what do you suggest?”

  He gathered his legs up before him, scooted back on the bunk, leaned against the cinder block wall, and took a long drag on his invisible cigarette. “It shouldn’t be sexual abuse and incest. Folks are sick and tired of those. The Menendez brothers buried that defense deep. Post-traumatic shock disorder won’t work either. Most folks with that just get silent and sullen and suicidal – though a couple suicide attempts would be helpful – show you were willing to kill yourself as well as others.”

  “What about MIA? What about if I had been in Desert Storm and was MIA in some Baghdad rape room for thirteen years?”

  “How old are you?”

  “I don’t know. How old do I look?”

  “Thirty-five. Forty at a stretch. That’s about perfect. Young man signs up to fight in George H.W. Bush’s war for oil, gets shot up pretty bad–”

  “I do have an old bullet wound, one that was part of this body when I created it.”

  “Good. So, you get shot up, and before the medics can find you, some Republican Guard fighter drags you into a living room and hides you until you can be given over to Saddam and his sadist sons. They interrogate you, torture you, put you up in a rape room for thirteen years, the only permanent resident – keep you just to kick around–”

  “I’ve got a surgery scar, here, too–”

  “Wow. That’s gold. Nobody gets scars like that now, with arthroscopic surgery. That can’t be from surgery. It’s got to be torture – one long cut from hip to hip –

  evisceration! Vivisection!”

  “Yeah. A disemboweling torture, done with a hook?”