Angels Burning

by Tawni O'Dell

  My thoughts jump to the piece of jewelry and how alive those legs looked attached to a body that had been grilled like a piece of meat. I feel like I might be sick.

  “Your mother said she heard them have a heated argument about breaking up,” I provide as a distraction, even though it’s Nolan’s claim.

  Eddie gives me the same look he gave me earlier when he mentioned Miranda, a strange mix of something playful and defeated.

  “Then it must be so,” he says, rising to his feet. “Now if you don’t mind, I got somewhere I need to be.”

  Nolan and I stand up, too, both of us knowing this isn’t true. There’s no place Eddie Truly needs to be. This fact could be considered liberating, but I think it’s become his private prison.

  I suddenly understand what he’s waiting for. He’s been doing it since he stepped off that army plane into the sweltering heat of a jungle that must have hit him like an oven door thrown open in his face. He’s waiting to die.

  From where I’m positioned, I can see through a doorway into his kitchen and through a window into his backyard, where there’s an empty kennel.

  “Do you have a dog?” I ask him.

  He follows my gaze.

  “I did. Afraid I didn’t treat him too well.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Don’t know. He might’ve been able to slip off his collar, but I don’t see how he cut through the lock on his kennel door.”

  He looks me square in the face and I know the question he’s asking me. He must know who Tug started working for after his dog went missing.

  “I’ve been to some dark places in my mind,” he says, turning away from me and staring at the empty pen. “Sometimes you mistreat the thing you love best just ’cause it’s there.

  “Wherever he is now, I hope he’s okay. His name’s Hòa Bình.”

  “Hoban?” I repeat uncertainly.

  “Hòa Bình. It’s Vietnamese.”

  He leans down, tears off a corner of the empty pizza box, and writes it out for me.

  “It means ‘peace.’ ”

  He hands me the scrap of cardboard. I take it from him and nod. Tears spring to his eyes. Loss and shame flicker there, then relief.

  chapter twelve

  EVERHART’S WIFE went into labor while Nolan and I were chatting with Eddie Truly. This is his first child, a boy already named Jacob, already nicknamed the Jakester, already photographed more inside his mother’s uterus than I was ever photographed outside of Cissy’s, and already the proud owner of an NFL regulation Steelers football helmet and a sandbox shaped like a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Gen 6 complete with real tires.

  Dewey, my thirty-six-year-old senior officer, has four kids who have all been extensively documented at every stage of life and the proof printed out from digital photos and tacked onto our communal bulletin board. He’s taken Everhart under his wing these past months, training him and filling his head with parental tales ranging from adorable to terrifying.

  Singer and Blonski are too young and too single to have more than a polite passing interest in the procreating of their coworkers. I’m not sure Blonski has even noticed that among our schedules for DUI classes and flyers urging everyone to wear a bike helmet are endless candids of little Deweys blowing out birthday-cake candles and dressed up for Halloween.

  I know Singer has noticed. For all his domestic qualities, raising children doesn’t seem to be something he’s eager to do. When he walks past the board, he eyes the photos the way a shellfish-allergy sufferer regards a plate of shrimp salad.

  Welcoming a new life into the world has provided a temporary distraction from the thought of the life that has been taken too soon. My men may not officially be part of the active investigation surrounding Camio’s death but a murder this brutal and inexplicable brings with it a host of other problems to small towns. Everyone is suddenly on edge, hearing suspicious noises in the night, glimpsing threatening strangers, noticing cars parked where they shouldn’t be, and we have to check it out. People call and drop by with unsolicited insights into the victim and those who knew her, and we have to listen patiently to all of it in the slim hope that we might hear something useful.

  People don’t want to believe someone living in their town could kill a young girl and light her on fire. They want the perpetrator to be an outsider so they can continue to believe evil doesn’t bloom in their own backyards. However, if they are forced to acknowledge that an unsavory element exists right under their noses, a family like the Trulys is an acceptable choice. Not only do they have a track record of less heinous but disreputable behavior, they also don’t have any allies. The Trulys don’t go out in the world and make friends. They bring carefully culled individuals into their tribe for reproductive purposes and create their own network of support and assistance. This works fine for them most of the time until they need something one of their own can’t provide, like a communal benefit of the doubt.

  As I explained to Nolan earlier, I don’t think a family member did it. He’s not completely convinced yet. He wasn’t even won over by the reformed Uncle Eddie.

  He asked and was granted permission to send a team to search Eddie’s house and vehicle. I don’t think he’s going to find anything and that includes Camio’s cell phone, which has taken on new importance since I discovered the discrepancy in her final texts to Zane.

  Nolan agrees with me that those texts have provided two important probabilities about the killer. Whoever sent them might not be too familiar with smartphones, but this fact doesn’t help much. Even my grandmother, who’s in her nineties, has one. Her arthritic fingers make it difficult to use the keypad, so I got her a stylus that she’s constantly misplacing; when she does use it she taps with the capped end of a pen instead. She loves to send me messages that are made up entirely of emoticons. I’ve become an expert at deciphering them.

  Birthday cake / microphone / sleepy face = We did karaoke for someone’s birthday at the home today and now I’m tired.

  Soup bowl / thumbs-up / revolver / angel = Thank God the soup’s good today or I was going to have to shoot someone.

  Face with eyes X-ed out / monkey with eyes covered = Someone died and I know nothing.

  Face with eyes X-ed out / monkey with mouth covered = Someone died and I’m not saying anything.

  A line of ten birds = Lots of birds outside my window today.

  The English flag / bag of money / clock = Can’t talk now; Downton Abbey’s on.

  More important, the other clue the texts provide is that the killer seemed to be trying to frame Zane. Why else pretend to be Camio and get him to meet her around the moment she was murdered? This all but rules out the psycho-stranger theory since the killer would have had to know about Camio’s relationship with Zane even to the point of knowing where they liked to hang out. It doesn’t completely rule out someone like Lonnie Harris, who, although not closely acquainted with Camio, could have stalked her.

  But why frame Zane of all people? The ruse could be personally motivated: the killer hated Zane and wanted to get him in trouble. If this is the case, then every member of the Truly family is back at the top of the suspect list, since they all disliked the boy. Or it could be because he’s an obvious choice. Boyfriends and husbands are always the first suspects in a female’s murder. If this is the reason, our killer is not only vicious and resourceful but smart, too, an unfortunate combination for those of us trying to catch him. Or her.

  There’s a chance two people were involved. It would’ve been difficult for one person to move the body although not impossible, but Nolan and I both find it strange that parts of the comforter were burned and bits of the synthetic elements of the fabric were found melted onto her skin. This almost certainly means someone covered her with the blanket again after the fire started. Could the killer have changed his mind and decided leaving her in a sinkhole out at the Run would be concealment enough, or begun to feel some sort of remorse and decided he should just let her be? Or was th
ere a second person who never wanted Camio dead in the first place and couldn’t stand to see this final atrocity visited upon her? We don’t have anything to back up our hunch about an accomplice, but if he or she exists, he or she might have been the one who sent the texts to help cover up for the one who did the actual deed.

  Chet Shank told me Lucky thinks I accused him of killing my mother to protect Gil. He couldn’t be further from the truth.

  I wasn’t prepared for this teenage girl’s murder to bring up so many memories of my mother’s. I suppose it only makes sense that thinking about one should make me think about the other, but I’ve investigated a few homicides before and dealt with many accidental and natural deaths on the job and I’ve never been affected this way.

  As I’ve been obsessively mulling over the facts of Camio’s case today, each one has brought me back to some long-forgotten detail of my mother’s crime scene: her perfume bottles and jars of lotion gleaming and glittering in the sputtering candlelight; the bloody bathwater tinting the clouds of white bubbles pink like cotton candy; her one lovely naked arm wedged against the side of the tub rising out of the water like a swan’s neck.

  The cheap Renaissance Faire goblet was long gone. Since she’d married Gil, she drank her wine out of crystal. The glass lay shattered on the tile floor. She must have been holding it when she was struck.

  I stood there in the Dove-scented air looking down at the unharmed features of my mother’s perfect face partially submerged beneath the sticky red water and knew Grandma would be pleased that the killer had struck her from behind and she could still look pretty in her casket.

  One of Lucky’s empty beer cans had missed the mark when he tried to toss it in the wastebasket and had rolled beneath the radiator. I was only fifteen and had no interest in police work at that time but I still remember thinking, Fingerprints. Neely was nowhere to be found. Grandma arrived too quickly. “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor was playing softly on the radio; I remember thinking, Not this time.

  I LEFT WORK as early as I could and ran to Shop ’n Save. I tried to concentrate on my grocery list for tonight’s dinner but my mind was full of lifeless human limbs—Camio’s bare legs, my mother’s bare arm.

  I’m relieved to get home. I almost expect to see reporters outside my house—they’ve been popping up everywhere these last few days—but no one’s out except for Bob standing in his driveway, talking on his phone, and smoking a cigarette. His mildly annoying presence is somehow comforting in its constancy.

  “Hey, Chief,” he calls out while I unload the groceries from my trunk. “Did you catch the guy yet?”

  His switch from the all-inclusive “bad guys” to the specific “the guy” disappoints me. I’d like to think there’s at least one person around here who isn’t caught up in Camio’s murder, and if there could be anyone that oblivious it would be Bob, but no such luck.

  “Not yet,” I call back.

  I suddenly realize part of the reason why Camio’s case is reminding me so much of my mother’s might be the notoriety attached to it, although Camio’s is a much more public crime because of the times we now live in.

  This town hasn’t seen a scandal to compare to my mother’s death until now but no matter how horrible and lurid the circumstances surrounding her demise, it remained Buchanan’s private business. She was murdered in 1980, back before the Internet and social media existed, before twenty-four-hour TV news channels and reality crime shows. Hers was a sleazy, bloody tale motivated by rage and lust, yet news of her death didn’t even spread as far as the other side of the state.

  Camio’s death has already gone viral. Forget Scranton and Philadelphia, people in Beijing and Dubai have heard about the girl who was torched and left to burn in a town that’s been on fire for more than fifty years.

  People have been showing up at Campbell’s Run to see the place where she was found, so I’ve had to start sending a cruiser by every now and then because the area is dangerous. All I need on top of everything else is for some meddling interloper snapping pictures with a phone to go plummeting three hundred feet into a smoldering mine tunnel.

  An LA graphic artist has whipped up a poster of a charred zombie girl with glowing green eyes wrapped in chains made of sparkly hearts crawling out of a flaming ditch and captioned it: Coal Town Cutie. Singer and Blonski found it online and showed it to me. The guy’s selling it framed for three hundred dollars.

  This unwanted spotlight has made not only the Trulys and the Masseys defensive but the whole town. We’ve started circling our wagons, trying to protect our good name along with Camio’s memory.

  This didn’t happen with my mom’s murder. People didn’t want to own it; they wanted to shoo it away.

  “A lot of people are saying it was her boyfriend or her dad,” Bob calls out to me.

  This is the most he’s said to me since I got my promotion and had my deck put on. Bob thinks he’s an expert at home improvement even though I’ve never seen him attempt any.

  “Really? And why are they saying that?”

  “Because that’s who usually kills teenage girls if it ain’t a psycho.”

  He pauses.

  “It ain’t a psycho, is it?”

  “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a psycho,” I assure him, and note the relief that passes over his face.

  He gives me a big smile and raises his cigarette in a salute before going back to his phone call.

  Once inside my house, I’m able to put aside all thoughts of either murder and think about something almost equally troubling: my brother, Champ.

  I’m happy he came back but also worried. A person doesn’t disappear from his hometown and cut all ties with his family for twenty-five years, then suddenly return for no reason other than a flimsy claim of wanting to take a cross-country road trip with his son.

  I put on the brightest piece of clothing I own to balance out my somber mood, a sleeveless sundress of smiley-face yellow with big orange daisies splashed across it. The skirt has a little flare and hits midthigh. I suppose I’m too old to wear something this short and skimpy. I never questioned my clothing choices during my forties, but now that I’ve rounded the bend into my fifties I second-guess everything. I don’t want to look my age, but I also don’t want to look like I’m trying to look some other age.

  I give a quick twirl in front of the mirror. If I had a giant lollipop and a pair of patent-leather Mary Jane tap shoes with lace ankle socks I could pass for an oversize Shirley Temple. It’s not a dress I’d wear out, but I’m entertaining at home.

  Along with steaks and some steamed green beans from my garden, I’m making homemade mac and cheese and my world-famous potato salad. Mason can’t object, since I don’t use a mayonnaise-based dressing. Mine is white wine, olive oil, white wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, minced shallots, and lots of fresh parsley tossed with diced boiled red potatoes and Jarlsberg cheese.

  I made sure to avoid everything on Mason’s list. Especially cupcakes.

  He and his dad and Neely arrive at my front door looking exactly the way they did when I left them. One more red flag goes up in my assessment of Champ. The first thing I’d want to do after driving hundreds of miles for many days is take a shower and change my clothes and I’d make my child do the same but Champ and Mason remain rumpled, battered, and bleary-eyed.

  Neely’s still in jeans and a gray T-shirt, but she’s shed the old, faded brown work shirt she was wearing over it earlier and traded her navy blue K-9 Training Corps ball cap for a red one advertising a dog food brand. This is about as dressed up as she gets.

  She stops short when she sees me and eyes me up and down.

  “What is wrong with you?” she asks exactly the same way she would if I were one of her human students who has just revealed she lets her dog sleep on her bed instead of crating him.

  “I feel festive,” I reply.

  “Wow,” Champ laughs.

  He takes me by the hand and spins me around.

  “I feel l
ike I should take you salsa dancing.”

  Champ still has the same infectious smile he had as a kid. A few good nights’ sleep and a little fattening up and he’d be what I’d call a good-looking man. I study his features anew. I’ve lived my entire life in this town, and I have a very public job and personality. I know everyone, but I’ve never been able to track down Champ’s father. I’ve searched the faces of every man I’ve ever met who would be the right age, but I’ve never found a resemblance to anyone.

  “I like your dress, Aunt Dove,” Mason chirps up.

  I glance down at him standing next to Neely, holding his binder under one arm.

  “You remind me of the ladies painted on the walls in a Mexican restaurant we went to in Arizona,” he goes on. “They had good tacos. Remember, Dad?”

  “I sure do, bud.”

  He rips open his binder, rustles through his folders, and comes up with a cheap paper menu for Manny’s Mexican Food. He hands it to me.

  “Dad tried to talk to the waitress in Spanish,” he goes on, cracking a big smile. “It was a disaster.”

  “What do you mean?” Champ teases him. “¿Dónde está el baño?”

  Mason dissolves into giggles.

  “She was from Cleveland,” he can barely get out.

  I skim through the menu and give it back to him.

  “What’s for dinner here?” he asks. “I’m starving.”

  “Steaks, mac and cheese, potato salad, and green beans.”

  “I love all those things!” he gushes, his big dark eyes growing even bigger and darker. “I’m so happy to meet you.”

  He sticks out his hand. I shake it, then he takes off to explore my yard.

  “How old is he?” I ask Champ.

  “Nine going on sixty-two.”

  “He’s a nice kid. You’ve done a good job with him,” Neely says.

  “Yeah, well. What can I do to help?” he abruptly changes the subject.

  “How are you at grilling?”

  “I’m a master griller.”

  “Great. Then you’re in charge of steaks. I’ll bring them out. Neely can come with me and get you a beer. Go ahead and start the grill.”