Blood of Angels

by Reed Arvin

  I wrench the truck suddenly down Union, cutting into the alley behind the DPC. Towns’s Volvo sits with a couple of other cars in the little lot. I pull into a spot, scanning for Bridges, but he’s nowhere to be seen.

  I go up the steps and down the poorly lit hall, to the pastor’s study at the end. I try the door; it swings open, but the study is empty. I jog back toward the sanctuary and push open the large, wooden door. Above me are the stark, transparent windows that replace the three stained-glass ones that were lost in the explosion. I don’t see anyone in the sanctuary at first, but as I turn to go, I see a shadowed figure three-quarters of the way in the back. “Who’s there?” I call out. Nothing. I walk down the center aisle, and as I approach, the figure raises her head. It’s Fiona.

  She looks at me a moment, then stares back down into her hands. “I went to see Moses this morning,” she says quietly. “They’re moving him this afternoon to Brushy Mountain.”

  I slip into the pew beside her. She looks worn and washed out. “Everybody goes there first. It’s the clearinghouse.”

  “It was horrible seeing him behind bars, in the orange uniform.” She stares up at the sacristy in the front of the church. “I was here praying for his strength and his safety. For his spirit to somehow survive. It would take a miracle.” She looks over at me. “The rest of his life. It’s unthinkable.”

  “So was the crime.”

  She looks back down. “Why are you here, Thomas?”

  “I know about Charles Bridges. The man you call Robert.”

  “So you found out. Are you here to berate me? Or to accuse me of dishonesty?”

  “I’m here to warn you. You think Charles Bridges brought Hale to you. You’re wrong.”

  Finally, she looks up. “I don’t understand. Of course he brought Hale to me.”

  I shake my head. “He was bringing you to me, Fiona. He’s using you. You, Buchanan, and the whole anti-death-penalty movement. He’s hiding behind you to get what he really wants.”

  “And what does he want, Thomas?”

  “To hurt me, because I sent him to jail. Bridges was the EMT at the Sunshine Grocery…”

  “I know,” she says, her voice barely audible.

  I stare, momentarily stunned. “You know?”

  “Charles Bridges is a wreck of a human being, drifting on his own hate. But he paid his debt to society and came here for refuge. I offered it to him.” She turns toward me, her eyes like steel. “Maybe you’re right about him using me. But he’s also telling the truth. His story checks out, Thomas. And if that means nobody else will be killed by the state in a prison again, then I’m happy to be used.”

  “The evil inside Bridges isn’t something you can harness for your own purposes, Fiona. He’s already murdered another person.”

  She looks up, doubt in her eyes. “Murdered?”

  “Just ask yourself one question, Fiona. Didn’t you ever stop and wonder why Bridges only came forward now? He’s been out of jail for more than two years.”

  “He said he was working up his courage.”

  “He was waiting for Owens to be executed. He could have saved his life by coming forward earlier, but he willingly sacrificed Owens on the altar of his hatred for me.” I stand. “You want to believe that even the worst of us can be redeemed. But Charles Bridges is a machine bent on revenge, and he’ll kill anyone who gets in his way.”

  I DON’T KNOW IF IT will make any difference that I warned Fiona about Bridges. I assume she’s out of my life now, and maybe, since Bridges made his point, I’m out of his, too. Rayburn will reopen the Abe Kavner murder, and maybe something will turn out with that. But as I get back in the Ford, I feel in my gut that Bridges has done his homework too well. I see him in my mind, slipping the blade precisely between Kavner’s ribs, the knife perfectly positioned to puncture the lung and heart of the victim. Kavner probably never had a chance to turn around and see his assailant. I step into the truck and fire it up; it starts on the first turn, settling into its familiar, masculine thrum. I pull out into traffic and make my way to I-65 for the drive south to Franklin.

  Five miles out of downtown, I pull out to pass a slower car. The engine seems a little weak; I can feel a misfire. I have to gun it to merge back into traffic, but the truck responds lazily. The engine straightens out again for a while, and I think it might just be some bad gasoline. A couple of exits from my house, however, the truck begins losing power. It crosses my mind I might not make it home. Shit. I’m surrounded by rush-hour traffic, and pulling across four lanes of traffic without power would be dangerous. Dammit. What is this? I watch my mirrors, calculating my move, the truck slowing all the time. I push my way across traffic into the right lane, the truck struggling to run thirty-five miles per hour. At the Franklin exit, I pick up the smell of something burning. I consider shutting off the ignition, but I’m less than two miles from my house, and I want to get the truck home. I limp on, but as I turn on my street a tongue of flame shoots out from underneath the hood. Fuck this. I switch off the ignition, shove in the clutch, and let the car glide downhill. The flames grow under the hood, and smoke starts pouring into the interior. It’s risky staying with the truck, but my only chance to get a fire extinguisher on it is to get home. I roll into the driveway, slam the brakes, and hit the garage door opener. The engine compartment is burning fiercely now, flames pouring around the hood opening. I run into the house, grab the CO2 extinguisher from under the sink—it’s pitifully small for the job, I instantly realize—and run back to the driveway. There’s a loud whoosh of air, and the Ford is engulfed in flames. The metal creaks and buzzes as it contracts, and sparks fly from the interior and engine compartment. I empty the extinguisher, but it’s too little too late. The truck is a total loss. Eventually, even the tires ignite and melt onto the driveway, sending an acrid, black smoke into the sky.

  When the engine compartment cools enough, I wrench open the hood and see a blackened heap: everything that isn’t metal has melted into a sickening, foul-smelling mess. I start working my way through it, looking for a reason for the fire. Wearing heavy gloves to protect myself from the melted chemicals, I spend two hours going through every fitting and component. Eventually, I pull up half of a steel fuel line; it’s been severed. There’s residue visible at the cut, and though I can’t be sure, it looks like epoxy. Finally, a simple straight pin has been driven into a spark plug wire, which would cause it to arc across to the engine block. I lower the hood and stare at the truck’s remains. I started the truck, and the gasoline began dissolving the epoxy. Fifteen miles later the epoxy gave out, and the fuel began spraying all over the engine compartment. The truck is running badly, but the fire starts when the pin arcs a spark across the fuel vapor, and the truck goes up in flames. Tools required: small hacksaw, straight pin, tube of epoxy. Total time: less than five minutes.

  I am more angry than I can ever remember. More angry than I was over what happened to Indy; angrier, even, than when I first heard Rebecca say the name Michael Sarandokos. I have no doubt that Bridges is behind what happened, and I realize that he isn’t going to be satisfied merely with destroying my reputation as a lawyer. He wants to destroy everything that matters to me, and he has now proven he knows enough about me that he knows my points of maximum pain. Bridges and I are not finished, which means I have to call Bec.

  BEC ANSWERS MY CALL warily. “What’s going on, Thomas? It’s getting late.”

  “Listen, Bec, I need you to keep Jazz this weekend.”

  “Thomas, we’ve got…”

  “She can’t stay here,” I say, and that’s all that’s required. She knows.

  “Are you OK? I thought the big case was over.”

  “Yeah. It’s just…things need to settle down a little bit.”

  Her voice turns petulant. “Things are never going to settle down, Thomas. Not as long as you take those kinds of cases.”

  “Look, Michael will love it. It’s more time for him to take my place.”

  S
he ignores the jab. “She’s eleven, Thomas. She’s getting too old to lie to. What am I supposed to tell her?”

  “I don’t know, Bec. I’m out of town. Something.” I close my eyes. I can’t tell her more, not without making things worse. “Listen, Bec, I’ve got to run.”

  “It sounds like it.”

  “I’ll make it up to her.”

  “Good-bye, Thomas.”

  I hang up and look out at my deck. I’ve prosecuted more than a hundred defendants. Ninety-eight were convicted or took pleas. I have received more than a dozen death threats, mostly mailed from prison, a few left on my phone machine, two in person while the defendant was dragged from court. But it has taken a pissant army dropout with delusions of grandeur to finally get inside my life.

  It’s after eleven before the wrecker arrives. The driver steps out of the truck and stares. “Shit, man, when you said, ‘burned,’ I didn’t know you meant burned.”

  “Just get it out, please.”

  “You got it, boss.” The driver hooks up chains to the underside of what’s left of the truck and prepares to pull it up onto the inclined ramp of his wrecker. “This is probably gonna leave some marks on your driveway, boss,” he says.

  “Get it out.”

  He yanks down the lever, and the chains start grinding forward. The truck rolls uncertainly on its molten tires, scraping its rear bumper as it begins its ascent onto the wrecker. Once it’s up, the driver secures it to the flatbed for the trip to the scrapyard. “I’m all set,” he says, nodding. “Appreciate the business.” The wrecker’s diesel engine clatters to life. The driver pulls out, and I watch the remains of my father’s truck disappear into the night.

  CHAPTER

  20

  THAT NIGHT, I DON’T SLEEP WELL. I wake in the night several times, the last time in a dream about Rebecca. We are back in Florida, on the beach where we honeymooned. But she’s too far out in the surf and can’t get back to the beach. She’s calling to me, but my feet won’t move. It’s the classic, my limbs like lead, shoes rooted to the ground. The surf carries her out to sea, and the last thing I see is her hands flailing wildly on a sheet of foam before she disappears. Then I wake up, heart pounding.

  I rise, make coffee, and wash down the day’s Zoloft. The thing they don’t tell you is that you need to be a robot to do this damn job. For a while, I don’t move. I just stand there, thinking that today is going to be my last day as a prosecutor, and I wonder once again what I’ll do with the rest of my life. There aren’t any easy answers, and they all lead through coming to terms with the fact that I sent the wrong man to the death chamber.

  I drive into town like I’m going to a funeral, which is an apt analogy. It is the funeral for the Davidson County DA’s office, and for the careers of many fine men and women who, rightly or wrongly, will have the stink of this debacle attached to them for years to come. I give the office until closing time before it shreds apart in a blaze of recriminations and regrets. And at the center, I will stand and take my medicine. Halfway to town I’ve almost completed my resignation letter in my mind. By the time I walk into David Rayburn’s office, I have determined to personally apologize to every jury member and to the family members of Wilson Owens. This will be a grinding, humiliating experience, but if it can take a measure of guilt off the jurors and remove an ounce of pain from Owens’s family, I have no choice.

  I park and take the elevator up to Rayburn’s office alone. When I get there, Dolores has, for the first time in my memory, an absolutely defeated expression on her face. She nods me in, and I walk through without speaking. When I open the door, I see Carl and the DA, and also, surprisingly, Paul Landmeyer. Paul is in the middle of a sentence when I come in, and Rayburn waves for silence. “Keep going, Paul. So you were up all night.”

  Paul nods. “Right. Buchanan’s people went home after we got the result. They were good, by the way. Very professional.”

  Rayburn nods. “Go on.”

  “Well, like I said, there’s no doubt about the gun being the one used in the murders. But I didn’t want to leave anything on the table, so I stayed around, trying to break things down another level.”

  “Good man,” Carl says quietly.

  “The barrel was wiped clean, so there wasn’t any human evidence there. And the ballistics were conclusive. What’s left?”

  “No fucking idea,” Rayburn says.

  “The gunstock,” Paul says. Everybody’s always focused on the barrel, which is understandable. But I got to thinking. You bury wood seven years, it gets porous. The one on the Browning was so soft I could just pick off splinters. So about ten o’clock last night I take a few off and examine them under a polarized light microscope. And what do you think I find?”

  “What?” Rayburn demands.

  “Organochloride crystals.”

  “For God’s sake, Paul, speak English.”

  “It’s pesticide,” Paul says. “At some point the gun was exposed to the chemical, and it dried, leaving the crystals behind. At first, I didn’t think much about it. I mean, the gun’s been buried in the ground. There are residual pesticides in a lot of the farmland around here, and if you want to test hard enough, you can come up with a few parts per million most anywhere.”

  “Cut to the chase, Paul,” Carl says. “What are you driving at?”

  “Well, about five this morning, it hit me. That gun was found at a state park. The ground there has been fallow since the fifties.”

  Carl nods. “Makes sense.”

  “I tested the ground samples we took from around the gun for the same chemical. It wasn’t there. It’s only in the gunstock.”

  “Which means it couldn’t have been absorbed from the ground around it,” I say.

  Paul nods. “There’s no doubt that gun was used to commit those murders. But there’s also no doubt that it was buried somewhere else first. It was moved to the park later.”

  “Owens lived in Sumner County,” I say. “That’s one of the biggest tobacco-producing areas in the state.”

  “There you go, then,” Paul says. “He probably buried the gun a few miles from his house, like most criminals would do. Somebody moved it to Montgomery Bell to give Kwame Jamal Hale’s story credibility.” He looks at Rayburn. “He’s lying, David.”

  Rayburn looks hopeful, but cautious. “Is this enough to stick, Paul? Pesticide in the gunstock?”

  “The chemicals were deep in the wood. It’s not incidental contact. It would have taken a long time to absorb to that extent. Years, probably. I’ve wracked my brain, but I honestly can’t think of any other explanation than that the gun was buried somewhere for a long time, and only recently moved to where it was found. And if that’s true, Hale’s story falls apart.”

  Rayburn sits thinking a moment, like he’s almost afraid to believe what he’s hearing, then exclaims, “Holy Jesus, Paul, you saved our asses!”

  “You might want to check around Owens’s residence at the time. See if he lived near an agricultural area. Knowing Sumner County, it’s pretty likely.”

  “Look, do Buchanan’s guys know about this?” I ask.

  Paul grins. “They were asleep in their hotel rooms, dreaming about their consulting fees.”

  I look up at Rayburn. “Better and better.”

  Paul lays a sheet of paper down on the DA’s desk. “I’ve put together a page of details so you can go over them before your press conference. I’ll be there to make a statement too, if you want.”

  Rayburn collapses back in his chair. “God damn,” he says, looking at us. “God damn.”

  Carl reaches over to me and shakes my hand. “You OK now?”

  I’m strangely numb. It’s like we just missed a horrible car wreck by an inch, and the adrenaline is still coursing through our bodies. “I don’t know. I still can’t believe it.”

  Carl looks at Rayburn. “What do you say we put our heads together and write up a new statement?”

  Rayburn nods. “You know something, gentlemen?”
he says. “When this is all over, I’m going to have Professor Philip Buchanan’s ass.”

  HAVING SO RECENTLY COME within a gnat’s ass of losing nearly everything important to him—position, career, purpose—and, equally important, because he despises Philip Buchanan so utterly—David Rayburn is determined to orchestrate the professor’s reversal of fortune down to the smallest details. Written statements, featuring Paul’s findings about the pesticide, will not be made available before the DA appears before the cameras. Popping the professor’s bubble is something Rayburn reserves for himself, not a curious reporter flipping through the written materials before the press conference begins. The statement will be brief, and there will be only ten minutes of questions. The plan is to attack, destroy, and leave as quickly as we came. “Then let Buchanan have his damn press conference,” Rayburn says. “That ought to be fun.”

  We drive together over to the New Justice Building at 10:45. We carry with us one hundred copies of a tidied-up version of Paul’s findings, including graphics of the actual crystals under a polarized light microscope, and the count spectrum from his X-ray diffractometer. The Justice Building is ringed by news vans, including Court TV, Fox, CNN, and all the local affiliates. From here they’ll travel the five miles to Buchanan’s conference at the Maxwell House. We park underground, come up the back side, and move together down a private hallway that leads to the press room. Rayburn walks like Patton arriving in Sicily, ready to kick ass. We stop just outside the side entry to the front of the press room, watching the crowd cram in on a closed-circuit monitor.