Angel Fire

by Lisa Unger

  She got up and strode out, throwing a ten on the bar as she left.

  At midnight, the coroner’s office was dead quiet. Maria Lopez’s autopsied body lay covered on the metal examination table. The fluorescent lights buzzed quietly, flickering slightly every few minutes, casting the stark room in a cold eerie light. A leaky faucet dripped rhythmically into the aluminum sink. The sound was measured, not actually distracting, but it was annoying Morrow, who had gotten up from his seat at the conference table in the next room twice to try to tighten the spigot.

  The conference room was bathed in the same cold harsh light. Jeffrey, Simon, and Henry Wizner, the chief medical examiner, sat slouched around a conference table littered with their notes, photographs, and the empty wrappers from the meal they had eaten while working. Long hours of poring over the same material had wearied each of them and it showed in their wrinkled shirts, loosened ties, and the dark circles forming under their eyes.

  Henry Wizner stood over six feet tall, and was so thin as to be gaunt. With ivory skin, large dark eyes, and hair as black as coal, he looked like a ghost of himself. Soft-spoken with a British accent, Wizner exuded the quiet authority of a man who knew he was the best of his profession. His intelligence and wit were as sharp as the scalpel he used to do his job.

  He took pleasure in his work, always marveling at the damage people do to each other and to themselves, at what the human body could endure—and what it couldn’t. Twisted bones, broken flesh, disembowelment, decapitation … he’d seen it all and then some. It had taken on a cartoonlike unreality for him, something that allowed him to sleep at night.

  Maria Lopez was a mess. He’d seen worse cases, but nothing quite so intriguing in a while. “Well, it’s interesting,” remarked Wizner, “because this almost looks like the work of a surgeon. It’s no hack job. It’s not like someone just reached into her chest cavity and ripped the heart out.”

  “And according to your report,” interjected Jeffrey, “she was dead before the incision was made and the organs removed. But alive when he slashed her throat …?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because of the rash around her nose and mouth, you believe that he used chloroform to subdue her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where does one obtain chloroform?”

  “You can get it easily enough over the Internet … if you know where to look. You can also make it by mixing bleach and acetone and distilling it. Chances are, if he knows how to use a scalpel, he knows how to get or make chloroform. It was once used as an anesthetic and they probably still say a word or two about it in med school.”

  “So you think this guy has a medical background.”

  “It would be a reasonable guess.”

  “And where the fuck is her heart?” said Morrow.

  “A couple of years ago, I don’t know if you gentlemen remember,” began Wizner, “an American tourist was beaten to death in South America. She was there to pick up a child she had adopted. The natives had been spooked by a rumor that Americans had been abducting children then stealing their organs for trade on the black market.”

  “I do remember. The Bureau had some men down there,” Jeffrey said, glancing up from the picture of Maria’s body at the crime scene. Lydia was in the shot, and he’d been looking at her, half listening to Wizner.

  Morrow had no idea what they were talking about so he kept quiet, not wanting to seem uninformed.

  “Of course, UNOS was outraged and went to great trouble in publishing reports about these supposedly unsubstantiated claims, claiming it was an urban myth with no evidence to support it. But meanwhile the reports kept coming in; there were television shows airing in Europe; Dateline did a show here featuring a man who claimed his corneas were stolen.”

  “You can’t be suggesting that this is actually happening here. It’s impossible,” said Jeffrey, incredulous. “You can’t just take any organ out of some random person and plug it into someone else. There are strict time constraints, batteries of tests that need to be run. You’re a doctor, you know this.”

  “Clearly it wouldn’t be safe. But I’m not sure it’s as impossible as UNOS makes it sound. It would just take a little corruption and a little organization.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Jeffrey said, too tired for some far-fetched theorizing when he was lacking what he really needed—cold, hard, undeniable facts.

  “Look, all I’m saying is the Lopez heart was removed with skill; it is currently nowhere to be found. One can only hope that it is being put to good use. Don’t look so green, Mr. Mark.” Wizner was smiling and it made him look like a ghoul.

  Jeffrey hated the glib indifference he found so common to those professionals accustomed to the unspeakably grotesque. He had managed to keep his humanity over the years, in spite of the horrors he had witnessed. He wondered why others had not.

  Nonetheless, what Wizner said made a sick kind of sense. But it was too out there at this point to bear any real looking-into.

  He began to roll down his sleeves, which had been pushed up past his elbows. He was getting ready to call it a night. “Morrow, first thing in the morning we should head over to that church. Lydia said the Fox girl had some involvement there, and she seems sure that the crucifixes you found came from there as well.”

  “Most people in this town have some connection to that church. People are pretty religious here, like I said. And that blind healer is a local celebrity. The priest there, Father Luis, is a bastion of this community,” Morrow said.

  “Whatever, it still bears looking-into. If all the victims attended that church, which we don’t know for sure that they did, then it’s possible the killer is connected to it, too. It would really help if we could come up with another body. I suggest you have some of your men comb the park where we found Maria Lopez and see if they turn anything up.”

  Wizner quietly began gathering his notes and photographs with his thin, delicate white hands. He placed the papers in a manila envelope, which he slid under his arm after donning his brown cotton jacket. “I hope you’ll keep in mind what I said, Mr. Mark,” he said, walking out the door without pausing for an answer.

  “I will. Thanks for your help,” Jeffrey said, not noticing that Wizner was already down the hall.

  In silence Morrow and Jeffrey gathered the rest of the materials scattered on the table. Photographs of the missing people, now presumed murder victims, hung on a bulletin board in the corner of the room, similar to the one Lydia and Jeffrey had set up back at the house. Jeffrey paused to look at them again.

  In high school, Jeffrey had always been troubled by The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the novel by Thornton Wilder. Several people crossing a bridge are killed when it collapses beneath their feet, sending them all plummeting to their deaths. Their lives were not extraordinary, neither especially wicked or divine. Their deaths seem just a random selection of fate. What worried Jeffrey was thinking that maybe there was no order to the universe after all—just a series of accidents, lucky or unlucky, determining the course of lives. Not very comforting. Especially in his line of work.

  “Jeff, are you coming?” asked Morrow, after waiting politely for Jeffrey, who’d been standing in front of the bulletin boards for over five minutes.

  “Yeah, yeah … sorry.”

  Lydia sat in her car in the driveway leading into her garage. She could see by the absence of lights on inside that Jeffrey was not there. She wasn’t afraid to go inside, she just didn’t want to. A temporary depression had seized her, and instead she sat and smoked in the dark car, feeling like a hole had been cut in her chest and a cold wind was whipping through. She felt exposed, unprotected: the same familiar feeling she suffered every year as the anniversary of her mother’s death approached, but as disturbing as if it were the first time.

  The New Mexico night sky was riven with stars, close and bright, like diamonds scattered on velvet. She peered at them through her sunroof, her head resting on the seat. The silence was a presence. The shado
ws of mountains rose around her.

  She thought about Mike Urquia and Maria Lopez’s sad union. She had been so judgmental of him, wondering how he could be so glib and cold. But then it had occurred to her that if her Italian friend from the Eldorado had turned up dead somewhere, she would have had less to tell police about the man she’d slept with less than a week earlier than Urquia had had to say about Maria. She was no better than Mike Urquia. The thought made her sick.

  She wondered if Jeffrey would even want her anymore if he knew about this side of her. She imagined trying to tell him about her little sexual assignations, so tawdry and meaningless. Her pathetic attempts to stave off loneliness, her quest for closeness to someone she wasn’t afraid to lose. Jeffrey was so honorable, so upright, how could he ever understand? They never asked each other about their personal lives as far as dating was concerned. It was an understood taboo between them that neither one could stand to know if the other was seeing someone. Jeffrey had had a few relationships when Lydia was in college. She never paid any attention to any of the women in his life because she knew they wouldn’t last. Maybe she’d always known they belonged together and that someday they would be. She couldn’t think about this now, though, with a serial killer on the loose.

  She considered heading over to the church to talk to Juno again, maybe have a word with Father Luis, whom she had yet to meet. A glance at her watch told her it was approaching one A.M. Too late for a visit. But she’d have to go tomorrow; the answer was there somewhere, somehow. Did they know their parishioners were missing? Had they missed Shawna? They must have. Could they somehow be involved? A blind, psychic healer/serial killer, that would be a first. She began to laugh and couldn’t stop. It felt like hysteria, the tension she had felt for the last few days catching up with her. She was still laughing when Chief Morrow and Jeffrey pulled up behind her. She stepped out of the car to greet them, wiping her eyes and chuckling.

  To Jeffrey it looked like she was sobbing. He pushed the door open and jumped out of the squad car before it had fully stopped moving. “Lyd, what’s wrong?” He grabbed her by both arms, and looked into her eyes.

  “Nothing, nothing, Jeff. I just had a funny thought and couldn’t stop laughing. I think I’m a little punchy.”

  “Oh. You scared me.” He spoke slowly, unconvinced.

  “Is everything all right?” said Morrow, stepping out of the car. Lydia thought how he looked a little like “the Commish,” and she almost started laughing again but controlled herself.

  In an unusually pleasant tone she answered, “Yeah, everything’s fine. Have a good night.”

  “I’ll pick you up at eight,” Morrow said to Jeffrey.

  “Thanks, Chief.”

  Morrow got back in his car, glad to be on his way home. He wondered as he pulled away, not for the first time, if Lydia Strong wasn’t one card short of a deck.

  “We really need another body to turn up if we are going to get anywhere,” Jeffrey concluded after he had summarized the day’s findings for her.

  “Why did he take her heart?” Lydia wondered aloud. “What do you think it means to him?”

  “Well, what does it mean to most of us?”

  “Love, metaphorically. Maybe life. Medically it’s the organ that pumps the blood, keeps us alive.”

  “Could he be keeping it as a trophy?”

  “No, it’s too complicated a behavior for it to be only that. Taking the heart is his whole agenda, or at least a significant part. He obviously has a place somewhere dedicated to its removal. We know that Maria was subdued with chloroform, so we know he did not intend to kill her at her apartment. He wanted to kill her at another location and remove her heart. It may be the whole reason why he kills them.”

  “Or how he kills them.”

  “The medical examiner said the incision was made after she died.”

  “But he didn’t expect to kill her so soon.”

  “So what does it mean, then, to lose your heart or to have your heart taken?”

  “To lose someone you love. To lose hope. To lose faith.”

  “Perhaps each of these people offended him or slighted him in some way. Perhaps he was attracted to the women—say Harold was just in the way—and each of them turned him down or was rude to him, in his perception. He took their hearts, the way they took his.”

  “But all the women are so different. Usually when that’s the case, the killer has one physical type that attracts him. There’s one woman in his past that has deeply traumatized him, usually his mother, and he kills her over and over again.”

  “Okay, so let’s think about it—why their hearts? I mean, assuming that we eventually discover Shawna, Harold, and Christine in the same condition we found Maria. What was it about these people that made the killer want to take their hearts?”

  He was tapping his pen on the kitchen tabletop, a gesture Lydia had picked up from him years ago. Lydia was curled up in the window seat, wearing a thick gray sweatshirt, black leggings, and white socks. She arched her back and moved her head side to side to relieve the tension that had settled there. The teakettle whistled hysterically and Jeffrey rose to make them some chamomile. She liked to watch him in the kitchen, his strong shoulders and big hands dealing not with guns and fistfights but kettles and potholders. He looked sweet and somehow irresistibly masculine. She smiled to herself.

  “I heard back from Jacob a little while ago.”

  “I didn’t know you had spoken to him.”

  “Yeah. I called him after you left this morning. He ran some checks on Christine and Harold. No activity on bank accounts or credit cards. He checked some rehab clinics around the area but nothing there, either. No arrest records in surrounding towns. I guess I was really hoping you were wrong, that these people were just going to turn up. I should know better than to question your instincts.”

  “I’m sorry about today, Jeffrey.”

  He paused, surprised that she had apologized. “It’s all right, Lyd. I’m sorry, too,” he answered as he put honey in the tea, keeping his back to her. “I know you’re worked up about this.”

  “Still, I shouldn’t have bit your head off.”

  “Which time?” he asked, smiling.

  “Any time,” she answered solemnly.

  He placed the tea in front of her and touched her face with fingers warm from the cup he had just held. She reached for his hand and put her mouth to his palm. It was a warm and passionate gesture. He stood still as she held his hand to her mouth, wanting so much but too afraid to touch her for fear the moment would pass too soon.

  Inside, she struggled against herself. How close he is this moment, how easy it would be to surrender. But she released his hand finally, stared down at her teacup. He sat in the chair across from her, not wanting to speak, afraid his voice would fail him.

  “They were alone,” she said, slicing the tension between them.

  “Who?”

  “Maria Lopez and the others. No one cared about them.”

  “I know. It makes you think, you know? Well, it makes me think.”

  “Think about what?”

  “About loneliness.”

  She looked over her teacup at him with surprised, questioning eyes. “Are you lonely, Jeffrey?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  She rose quickly from her seat and walked over to the refrigerator, opened the door, and looked in for nothing except an escape from his eyes.

  “What does this have to do with anything?” she said defensively.

  He took off his glasses and rubbed the point on his nose where they rested and leaned back in his chair. “I’m so fucking sick of this.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of this little dance we do. I approach you, you back away. You come back a step, I move in again, you take two more steps back. Who are we kidding?”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked the milk carton.

  He got up and gently turned her around from the refrigerator. The frustration tha
t had been building inside him was reaching a level that was getting hard to ignore. “Oh, come on. Are you going to pretend there’s nothing between us? Are you going to pretend you don’t know how I feel about you?”

  “Jeffrey, please …” she said.

  He looked into her eyes and saw fear there and he instantly hated himself. He pulled her into a tight embrace which she returned with equal passion.

  “If we … I couldn’t … Oh God,” she said into his shoulder.

  Suddenly the dim kitchen was flooded with light, startling them both. The outside floodlights, triggered by the motion detectors that surrounded the house, had turned on. He walked over to the window and peered out to the driveway. Had someone just stepped out of his sight? Or was it his imagination?

  “Do you still have that Glock?”

  “Yeah …”

  “Go get it.”

  She ran quickly to her office, punched a code into the keypad lock on the safe beneath her desk, and withdrew the heavy semiautomatic pistol. Beside it was a .38 Special, a revolver favored by older cops, less powerful but more reliable. She had been trained to use both during her stay at the FBI academy but had never fired them off the range. She liked the way the Glock felt, cool and heavy in her hand. She returned to the kitchen, where Jeffrey had turned off the light and was peering out the window. She handed the gun to him.

  “Loaded?”

  “Of course.”

  “Stay here,” he said sternly, knowing her instinct would be to follow him.

  He walked out onto the driveway, gun level. He heard nothing but he sensed a presence, something or someone, waiting. He walked toward the trees that edged the house, his ears pricked for even the slightest noise. He could see nothing through the trees, just an impenetrable darkness.

  “Do you see anything?”

  He spun around to see Lydia standing directly behind him, hugging herself against the chill, still in stocking feet. A less-experienced marksman would have discharged his gun from the jolt she gave him.

  “Jesus Christ, Lydia, I told you to stay in the house.”