Angel Fire

by Lisa Unger

  She didn’t consider herself a prostitute, only someone who took money when it was offered for something she likely would have done for free. Why should they get what they wanted while she was left with nothing but an empty feeling in her stomach and a fake telephone number? At least she could pay her bills and have a little left over. Everybody knew minimum wage didn’t cut it anymore.

  One day her life would be different. She would meet someone, she knew that; have a family and leave this place behind her. Maybe it would be Mike, the man she met last week. He had called her and even brought flowers to her job. She was meeting him at the bar tonight. Who knows?

  “You look good, girl” she said to herself in the mirror. She waved good-bye to her boss as she walked out the door in the cool night air. She did not see the minivan following behind her as she strode up the street, hopeful for what that evening would hold.

  The Albuquerque airport was never crowded like O’Hare or JFK; it was smaller and yet more spacious. Today it seemed like a ghost town, inhabited only by the echoes of greetings and farewells. As she walked briskly down the long corridor, her footfalls echoed loudly. She passed by empty gate after empty gate. Her stomach fluttered with nerves, with the excitement of seeing him, and she braced herself against the wave of happiness and relief she always felt the first moment she saw him. When she arrived, he was waiting for her, sitting on the window ledge, his back against the glass, his arms folded across his chest.

  “How is it that I always find myself waiting somewhere for you?” he asked with a half-smile.

  He was unshaven, his thick, dark brown hair tousled. His muscular chest and arms pressed against his navy-blue T-shirt. Slightly wrinkled gray chinos hung elegantly from his narrow hips and tight stomach. His face was strong and angular around his nose and mouth but soft and laughing around his sweet blue eyes. “You have my favorite face,” she said as she slipped her arms around his waist. She could just faintly smell his cologne, lightly sweet and musky. He kissed her on her forehead and pulled her to him gently, until he could feel almost every inch of her body on his. Lydia felt the seductive wash of safety and comfort.

  “I’ve missed you, Jeffrey,” she whispered, though there was no one to overhear her. “I have so much to tell you.”

  chapter ten

  As they walked through the parking lot to the car, Jeffrey noticed that Lydia looked thin. She had always been on the lean side, but with solid muscle tone, full hips and breasts, as well as a pink fullness to her face. But she was beginning to look a bit gaunt around the cheeks, and her jeans bagged a little around her thighs, and sagged at her backside. Under her eyes there was the slightest hint of blue fatigue. He put a protective arm around her shoulder and she felt small and fragile. Generally, touching Lydia was like grabbing a live wire; you could feel the energy pulsing through her, feel the strength of her body and her mind.

  She could feel him assessing her like a parent would, trying to gauge her physical and mental well-being by how much weight she may have lost. She knew she didn’t look well, that she looked drawn and tired.

  “It’s getting harder,” she said, answering the question he hadn’t asked, as they reached her car.

  “What is?”

  “The anniversary of my mother’s death. It seems to weigh on me more every year.” Her voice was a sliver, almost carried away on the wind.

  “We’ve talked about this. You need to see someone.”

  “I’ve talked to plenty of doctors about this. No one has helped me.”

  “They haven’t helped you because you don’t let anybody in. You go once, you decide the doctor is an idiot, and then you leave and never go back. That’s not therapy. It’s like some kind of psychiatric hit-and-run.”

  Lydia sighed and he could feel his blood pressure rise. He hated it when something hurt her that he couldn’t fix; and her way of acknowledging her flaws but refusing to change was exasperating. But he kissed the top of her head and put a hand on her shoulder. She didn’t look up at him, kept her eyes level with his chest.

  “What can I do, Lyd?”

  “You’re already doing it. You’re here.”

  “So that’s what you wanted me to look into?” he asked as he took the keys from her hand, threw his bag into the trunk of her Mercedes, and climbed into the driver’s seat. “Your twisted psyche?”

  “Possibly,” she answered, smiling. “Possibly something a lot more twisted than that. Why do you always have to drive?”

  “I don’t know. I just like it.”

  “You just like being in control,” she said, fastening her seat belt.

  “And you only mind because you like to be in control.”

  “Whatever.”

  As they drove, heavy cumulus clouds gathered above them and the sky darkened. Lydia recounted for Jeffrey the events she’d come across in the paper, her conversation with Chief Morrow, and Juno’s history. She omitted her dream and the strange end to her encounter with Juno. “The way I see it, there’s potentially a serial killer roaming around.”

  “Whoa, wait a minute. That’s an awfully big jump. No one’s even been killed.”

  “Look, we’ve got three missing persons. Not to mention the animal mutilation and the arson.”

  “Yeah, but it sounds to me like those people were flight risks to begin with. And the whole triad thing, the arson, animal mutilation, and bed-wetting, are childhood signs of a future violent offender. People don’t generally leap from that straight into murders.”

  “I just have that feeling,” she said, looking out the window.

  He had to admit that in all the years he had known Lydia, rarely had her instincts been off.

  Lydia was so young when they first met, just fifteen years old. Even so, there had been a bond between them from the first night. It would have been inappropriate then for him to have a friendship with her, but he kept in touch with her through her grandparents. Lydia’s grandfather, especially, had taken a liking to Jeffrey and was impressed by his concern for Lydia. And Jeffrey made a point to head up to Sleepy Hollow to see Lydia and what remained of her family whenever he was in New York City on business.

  Initially, Lydia’s grief, her tragedy, had haunted Jeffrey. He kept in touch with her because he felt responsible for her somehow. But as she got older and seemed to adjust to her mother’s death, he came to see her more as a young friend, or a little sister. When she moved to Washington, D.C., to attend Georgetown University, Lydia’s grandfather asked Jeffrey to keep an eye on her, which he did gladly. During their regular Thursday evening dinner and movie “date,” he observed her closely, making sure she was well and happy.

  But even though she seemed to have adapted to university life well and was thriving academically, there was always something about her that worried him. An inner silence, the merest hint in her voice and her eyes that there was more pain in her still than she would admit to anyone. He noticed over time that she didn’t seem to make friends easily, was more focused on her role as the school newspaper editor than she was on parties and boyfriends. She just didn’t seem to ever have any fun.

  “You should get out more, Lyd. There’s more to life than going to class,” he suggested one night over pizza.

  “The paper takes up a lot of my time. I’m busy,” she said, avoiding eye contact.

  “There’s more than the paper. College is about letting go, getting to know yourself. You’ll never have so much freedom again. Take advantage of it. I mean, what about guys? Do you date?”

  But he was glad when she told him that she wasn’t seeing anyone. He suspected that few men her age were worthy of her, would handle her as gently as she needed to be handled. “They’re all so shallow, so arrogant. Even the ones that pretend not to be,” she’d said.

  After nagging her a couple of times and watching her withdraw from him, he let her be. After all, he had never listened to anyone when he was her age either. But he kept a careful watch on her, always ready to come to her rescue should she n
eed him—even if that just meant a late night beer when she was stressing over finals.

  But toward the end of the last semester in her senior year, she called him very late, her voice sounding small and scared.

  “What’s up? Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. There’s something weird going on in my building. I think someone’s been murdered.”

  A few nights earlier, as she sat studying, she had heard what she thought was the quick staccato of gunshots. But since she had never heard a gun fired before, she couldn’t be sure. She had looked out the peephole of her door but saw nothing. A few minutes later her phone rang and she forgot about the incident. But she had “a feeling” about it, she told Jeff. “What kind of feeling?” he asked.

  “I can’t explain it, Jeffrey, except to say that it was the same kind of feeling I had in the parking lot that day when I saw the man who killed my mother.”

  Over the next few days, she had noticed that the mail belonging to the woman who lived across the hall was piling up in her box. And on the night she finally called Jeffrey, she could hear the woman’s cat crying mournfully. She knew in her heart that her neighbor had been killed.

  She lived alone off campus in an apartment in Georgetown. It was a nice building in a good part of town. But since she never overreacted to anything, he went right over, much to the displeasure of the woman sleeping in his bed—who left, incidentally, and never spoke to him again.

  When Jeffrey arrived at Lydia’s apartment, they knocked on the neighbor’s door. Even as he stood outside, he caught the unmistakable smell of death. Since this was not an FBI case, Jeffrey had no right of entry. They called the local police.

  The police arrived and Lydia’s fears were confirmed. The woman had been shot in the head, had been lying dead on her floor, her hungry cat gnawing on her fingers. Rather than being terrified and upset, as Jeffrey had expected, Lydia began asking questions of the police. Were there signs of forced entry or a struggle? How long did they think she had been dead? She intended to cover the story for the Georgetown University newspaper. Jeffrey was more worried about her lack of emotional response than he would have been if she had had a breakdown. That, at least, would have been more normal.

  Jeffrey brought her back to his apartment. She hadn’t said a word on the way in his car, hadn’t shed a tear. She just stared out the window. Once she didn’t have anything to say professionally about how she would cover the story, or questions to ask of him about the possible motives, she had nothing safe to say at all.

  “Are you all right?” he’d asked as he closed the door to his apartment.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “I thought you would be more upset than you are.”

  He knew as soon as he said it that it was the wrong thing to say, that it sounded judgmental, accusing. She turned on him.

  “What did you expect? Do you want me to curl up into a ball and start crying for my dead mother? You know, I’ve been on the receiving end of every fucked-up thing this world has to offer. I have my own way of dealing with things.” She did not yell but her voice was a white flame, sizzling with anger.

  Then she sank into the couch and put her head in her hands.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  “I’m sorry, Jeffrey,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  He sat down next to her and put his arm around her. She looked up at him; he saw the same look he had seen when he had first met her on her mother’s front porch. But these were the eyes of a woman, a beautiful, grown woman.

  She wound up selling the story to the Washington Post, tying the story to a larger feature about women who were murdered by ex-boyfriends, as had turned out to be the case with her neighbor. Lydia graduated a month later and was offered a staff writing job at the Post. That night was the beginning of her career, and of Jeffrey’s love for her.

  Since then most of her instincts had been dead-on. Still this all seemed like a reach. She was so intense, so wound up about it. Usually she maintained a cool air of disinterest, of objectivity about her work. She could be like a dog with a bone about a story or a case, obsessive and unyielding, going days with minimal sleep and food. But that was not the same thing as caring personally about the outcome. As she recounted her findings, she spoke rapidly, gesticulating passionately. When she recounted the stories of the missing persons, her voice was angry. He could see she was dangerously in it. And that concerned him.

  “What did Chief Morrow say?”

  “That man is an idiot, but even he knows something is going on.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “No. But I could sense that he was hiding something from me. He told me that there were no pictures taken of Lucky in the garden. But Juno told me that the police took photographs while they were there.”

  “Well, that might be something,” he said, more to quell the intensity with which she was trying to convince him of her theory. He wondered if she was just in trouble emotionally, needed him to be here for her, and had created this whole scenario subconsciously because she was too stubborn to admit that she needed anyone. Or maybe he was only hoping that was the case.

  “Jeffrey, trust me.”

  “You know I trust you.”

  As they pulled up her drive, the clouds had not delivered on their threat of rain and had cleared to reveal a blanket of stars visible through the treetops. An amber light clicked on as they reached the garage door.

  “Motion sensors. I like that. Very secure,” he said as Lydia opened the garage door by remote control. “Maybe you’re learning a little caution in your old age.”

  “It’s really more for convenience, Safety Man,” she answered, smacking him lightly on the leg, and added, “I just had them recalibrated because they were turning on every time a squirrel ran across the drive.”

  “Did you have that alarm system put in that I recommended?”

  “Actually, yes,” she answered as she punched in the numbers on the keypad beside the door leading into the house from the basement.

  “Impressive. The fan club finally getting to you?”

  “Oh, come on, they’re not so bad,” she said, taking his bag from him and walking upstairs to the guest room.

  Lydia’s first book, entitled With a Vengeance, had been about Jed McIntyre and his thirteen murders, her mother included. Tracing McIntyre’s history, detailing his crimes and his motives, had comforted Lydia somehow, had given some order to the chaos of her pain. She was able to understand him, see how the horrible events in his life had made him what he was, though she still felt nauseated by the sound of his name or any name that resembled it.

  The book was a narrative account of Jed McIntyre’s crimes, featuring Jeffrey as the main character. Lydia had conducted interviews with the victims’ families; McIntyre’s psychiatrist; Jeffrey’s former partner, Roger Dooley … anyone who would talk to her. Jeffrey compiled his notes for her, along with files, videotaped interviews, transcripts from the trial.

  What resulted was a detailed, graphic true story that read like fiction. The book raced to the top of the best-seller lists, and Lydia, a previously little-known writer for the Washington Post, was catapulted into the national spotlight. A fan club of dubious distinction formed. Psychotics, angry victims, criminals, the world’s unsavory began to deluge her with mail. She was forced to change her e-mail accounts and phone numbers frequently because somehow they always managed to get out. Though Lydia’s physical safety had never been threatened, Jeffrey believed it was only a matter of time before some psycho’s attraction turned to obsession. He had encouraged her to secure the Santa Fe house because it was so isolated, but had assumed she would ignore him.

  The desert air was cold that night, so when she returned downstairs she made a fire in the living room. Jeffrey had opened a bottle of Clos Pegase chardonnay he’d found in the kitchen. They both lay on their stomachs, facing the fire, resting on fat, cotton-covered down pillows.

  “How
’s your shoulder?” she asked.

  “Good as new,” he lied. He didn’t like to talk about his pain, didn’t like to seem weak or vulnerable—especially to Lydia. He never wanted her to think he couldn’t be strong for her, with her.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  He sat up and faced the fire. He didn’t want to look in her face when he was lying to her. She always knew.

  “I’d expect nothing less,” she said.

  He smiled. “Well, it gets a little stiff.”

  She sat up and moved behind him, began gently massaging his shoulder. “You haven’t said what you think about all of this.”

  “I don’t know what to think. It seems pretty thin. But I believe you, you know that. We’ll check it out.”

  “Good enough.”

  She didn’t blame him. She realized her ideas must sound crazy to someone like him, so solid, so grounded. She knew he needed hard evidence to be convinced of the truth. She also knew that sometimes the truth left only a scent on the wind.

  She rubbed his shoulder carefully with the flat of her hand, feeling the tense muscle relax slightly under her touch.

  Jeffrey could feel the heat of her body against his back. Only the gravest discipline kept him from turning around, carrying her to bed, and making love to her until the sun came up. He knew about discipline, about control. He hadn’t survived this long without it.

  Jeffrey was an army brat, raised on military bases across the country. Because his family had moved almost every two years and because he was an only child, Jeffrey had learned to rely on himself at an early age. His father was a hard man with no time for tears or tantrums. A high-ranking decorated officer, Jeffrey Mark Sr. was a man of honor. Jeffrey remembered his father with respect but not affection.

  When Jeffrey and some of his friends stole his father’s car and were brought home to their parents by local law enforcement, Jeffrey’s father decided to send him away to military school. In spite of the hysterical protests of his mother, Jeffrey left his parents’ home the following fall. He was glad. He wanted to get away from both of them.