Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

  BLACK ANGEL

  A Novel of Chicago Streets

  Thomas Laird

  © Thomas Laird 2013

  Thomas Laird has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2013 by Dionysus Books / Parkgate Press.

  Originally published under the title Desert Storm Heart.

  This edition published in 2019 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  To my beloved wife Marsha, who has returned me to the land of the living.

  To my children, Kathy, Anne, and Andy, and to my grandsons Michael and John, and to the junior member, Margaret Renae Laird, my granddaughter.

  To Matt Fullerty, who wanted to go one more round.

  And to the memory of Robert Raymond Laird, my father.

  He was a man, all in all, and we shall not see his like again.

  “That snowstorm is a sandstorm and I’m stuck in it and I can’t get out and somebody’s gonna kill me and I’m looking for them. And that’s what it is to me. To you, it’s a snowstorm.”

  Dan Brown

  Veteran of the Persian Gulf War, 2013

  (Operation Desert Storm)

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  1

  Kuwait, Desert Storm

  She’d been shot through the right eye, and the left had been scooped out, perhaps with a blunt instrument. Maybe with a spoon. Was that out of King Lear? I got a ‘C’ in Shakespeare in Brit Lit in high school, so I could be wrong.

  It’s the same MO as the first one. The rapes and murders had happened after Iraq folded its tent, after we’d reached Saddam’s front door and didn’t kick it down. But our Fearless Leader in DC had been in the Army Air Corps in WWII, and he sure as hell hadn’t been a Marine. Patton would’ve run Baghdad over with his tanks, but Desert Storm had ended at the portals of the Evil City (depending on whose side you were on).

  I work for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) after having served four years in the Corps, the beloved Crotch. I work Violent Crimes, including Homicide, of course.

  This guy blinds them perpetually with a shot from a .45 automatic, and then he plucks out the other orb with something like a spoon, as I said. He must be using a rubber during the rapes, our Medical Examiner says, because he leaves no trace of semen.

  He also leaves no witnesses. He’s killed their families as well. Four victims the first time, and three the second. He shoots them and then he hangs them inside their dwellings. He finds a beam, or something on the ceilings, and he harnesses them in the main rooms of the houses. Both of the families were well-to-do. Not oil barons, but well-heeled Kuwaitis. The strange thing was that there was no evidence of theft in either of the homes. He doesn’t take anything.

  Except their daughters’ innocence, and their lives. The girls were thirteen and sixteen. The latest victim was the youngest, the thirteen-year-old. She was the prettier of them, too. She would have become a beautiful woman if he’d allowed her to live.

  *

  My tour has come to an end. I’m going back to San Diego, before I go home to Chicago. I’m leaving with a sour taste in my mouth because I have not found that murderer/rapist from Kuwait. I know he was a Marine. I know he was one of us. From all that we’d discovered, Pete Donato (Pete was my partner in NCIS) and I know in our guts and in our heads that he was a jarhead, like the two of us used to be who worked Violent Crimes in Desert Storm.

  I always found it more than a little ironic that we’d come to liberate Kuwait, and then there were criminals in the Crotch who killed little girls, raped them, and maimed them.

  I always thought it had to be an officer who did the kids. The .45 would be unusual for a non-commissioned leatherneck. It’s possible he was a private, but I think he’d be ranked higher, since he’d have more mobility if he were, say, a lieutenant or captain or above. That was just my gut talking because anything is possible in a war. It wasn’t much of a war, I know, but Desert Storm was the conflict I was involved in.

  *

  My brother Sammy picked me up in San Diego, and we drove all the way home to Chicago in my bro’s ’87 Camaro. We stopped in Las Vegas, got very drunk, and drove home in a semi-stupor. Luckily, we didn’t get hauled into jail. Getting arrested after Desert Storm would have been too ironic, even for me.

  *

  I didn’t know exactly what to do when I arrived at Back of the Yards, my family home. We lived just blocks from Comiskey Park in an all white enclave, another chunk of humor, seeing that Chicago is heavily populated by Blacks and Hispanics. I come from German/Austrian stock, but I’m proud to say my ancestors bugged out of Deutschland in 1908, long before Hitler started his Thousand Year Reich. My father, George, was in WW II. He was in the first wave at Normandy. He survived, of course. He never talked about the landing. My mother told me his history, because he never talked about his war.

  I promised myself I’d never talk about mine, either, even though Sammy has already started the interrogation on the way home from Las Vegas. I wound up telling him about the dead girls in Kuwait. It was almost eerie; it was almost involuntary. It spilled right out of my lips and into Sammy’s ears.

  “You never caught him, Will?”

  “No, Samuel. We never did.”

  “Are they still investigating?”

  “The NCIS is very stubborn. Yes. I’m sure someone’s still after him.”

  “You sure it’s just one guy?”

  “No. But I’m fairly certain it was a lone perpetrator.”

  Sammy is taller than I am, and I’m six-two. He’s about six-six, a basketball and football player. Played at Illinois in the Big Ten, left tackle. He goes about 270, fifty pounds heavier than I am. I played wide receiver in high school. They offered me a ride to Illinois for football too, but I went into the Crotch right after I graduated from a Chicago City College. The Corps further educated me. I started off as a Military Policeman, and then I tested out so high I was able to land a spot in NCIS, a fairly elite crew of cops.

  I’d solved every homicide I was given, until this last sweetheart showed up in Kuwait. That’s why I felt frustrated about leaving NCIS and the Corps to come home. The problem was, my dad was in the hospital with a heart murmur, and our mother, Sammy’s and mine, was in the home with Alzheimer’s. Someone had to take care of Dad, and Sammy’s going back to school at Illinois for his MBA. I had to take care of the old man, and I felt privileged to receive the job.

  When I finally got back to my beloved Back of the Yards, I found out that the old guy had recovered fully and that I could’ve stayed with my job. I almost f
elt like re-upping, but for some reason I knew my time in the Marines and the NCIS was over. It was time to move on.

  So I entered the Police Academy the September after the summer I returned from the NCIS, in 1992. I scored high on their exams, and I spent only six months in the streets in uniform. They sent me for more training, and within twenty-four months I had a detective’s shield. I worked Robbery/Car Theft for twenty months after that, and then I got my spot in Homicide. My Captain, Ray Pearce, says I progressed up the chain faster than any young copper he’d ever known. It was an honor coming from Capt. Pearce. He was a Medal of Honor winner in the Vietnam War, and he still is a legend in Homicide.

  “Detective Koehn?”

  It’s pronounced ‘cane,’ like the walking stick or the stuff sugar comes from.

  “Sir?”

  “I see in your jacket that you had one red-liner you never resolved, back in the shit.”

  He’s referring to Kuwait and the rapes, of course.

  “Yessir. One unsolved case.”

  Pearce is a medium-sized man with sparse hair on top. It’s a chestnut brown. His most outstanding feature is his piercing green eyes. They’re almost like a jungle cat’s eyes. I imagine they could stab through any dark alley, out at you. He’s what they used to call nondescript, except for those two green orbs.

  “Too bad they didn’t let Schwartzkopf do his thing. Too bad they didn’t let him fuck Saddam up thoroughly.”

  “Indeed, Sir.”

  I felt a slight grin take shape on my lips.

  “You play any ball, Will?”

  “Football, Sir. Yessir.”

  “Calm down, kid. You’re out of the Crotch. Just call me Captain. Or Ray, if no other brass asses are around me.”

  “Yessir—I mean, Captain.… Ray. I’m sorry. Old habits, Sir.”

  “It’s all right.… This multiple rape thing. Still fucking with your head?”

  “Sir?”

  “Come on, Will. Tell me.”

  I look into his green eyes. They won’t allow a detour or a lie.

  “Yes. I have nightmares. Not about the combat I saw in Iraq. We went along with the jarheads on convoys, sometimes. We saw what the war did to those poor bastards trapped inside it.

  “Like I said. The convoys and the unsolved murders gave me some bad dreams. I went to the NCIS shrink and talked about it.”

  “And what did he tell you, Will?”

  “That the crimes I told him about gave him fucking bad dreams too.”

  *

  I still have those nightmares. I think there’d be something wrong with me if I didn’t.

  I remember the stench of those kill scenes. The heat was terrible. Both of the victims were wealthy enough to have air conditioning in their homes, but the perp had shut off the air, intentionally, I know. He wanted them to decompose quickly. Probably to make us sick. Likely it was a power thing, too. Here’s what I’m capable of, he was telling Pete and me.

  Pete heaved on the two scenes, and he never apologized. He came prepared with Vicks and a mask at the two sites also. The Vicks made me sick, so I gagged on both, but not enough to blast chow.

  Mostly, I remember the girls. I remember the maiming of their youthful faces. He couldn’t just ravage them. He had to destroy them as well. Then he shot and hanged their families, probably before he killed the teenaged girls. That’s my theory, since the families’ time of death was more than an hour before the rape/murder vics.

  I have bad dreams. I see oil smoke above the desert floor. I see oiled up, dead sea birds on the beaches, and sometimes a few miles inland. I see suffering Arabs, innocent of the war, blown up and burning on the roadsides. I see weeping, fatherless and motherless children all along the highways, searching for an adult to shelter them. No one comes for them.

  Just as no one came for the two girls and their fathers, mothers, and brothers and sisters.

  Yeah, I have bad dreams. I wanted to tell Captain Pearce all about it. I wanted to tell Sammy and that well-built babe of a shrink in Kuwait. I wanted to tell my dad about it too.

  “How was it, on the beach?” I asked him about two months after I got back from Desert Storm.

  My father is the source of our size and our athletic ability. He’s six one and built like the veritable brick shithouse. Huge shoulders. Still has a slim waist. Thick thighs, bulging pecs and arms. No fat, no waste. A tough old man whose body refuses to wither.

  “What beach?”

  “Mom’s the one with the Alzheimer’s.”

  He smiles.

  “Smartass.”

  He smiles again. Even his jaws are muscular.

  “You were close enough to the shit. So I guess you deserve to hear.… I stopped believing in God the morning after the first wave at Normandy. I was alone on the beach with dead men all around me.”

  And he won’t say anything else.

  *

  In October in 1994 while I’m in Homicide, my partner Jack Clemons and I get a call to the far northwest side. It’s a well-to-do, almost suburban neighborhood. A brick house, good sized backyard. Shady trees. Americana. It’s July, and it’s hot. Huckleberry Finn should be rafting down the eternal Mississippi. A murder on this day should not be possible. It’s fragrant. It’s summer. I’d rather be at Lake Michigan, in the water up to my neck.

  The child is twelve. Her right eye is missing. It’s been gouged out. Her left eye has been shot away with a large-caliber bullet, I’m guessing. More than guessing.

  Her parents are hanging from two light fixtures. One in the dining room and one in the adjoining living room. There is arterial spray against the walls. I figure they were shot cowering up against that living-room wall, and then he hanged them after they were dead. It took considerable strength to hoist the father’s body up to that fixture—the killer has to be fair-sized in order to do that kind of lifting. Almost too strong. Weight-lifter strength.

  Jack Clemons is my age. Early thirties. Medium build, but wiry. Thin black hair. I’m guessing his mother was Italian. He’s got that swarthy kind of handsome face that reminds me of a young Dean Martin. His father’s name sounds like Gael—Irish or Scot. The name was Dermott. Jack is also shorter than I am, by about two inches. I’m about six-two, and I go a little over 200. I put on weight since high school.

  “What is it?” he asks as we go outside for some air and as we let the ME finish up inside.

  “It’s that prick I was after in Kuwait.”

  “Say again?”

  I explain the whole story to him.

  “He’s followed me home.”

  *

  I have no dreams tonight. I’m awake in my bedroom in my father’s house. I can hear Dad gently snoring in his recliner chair in the living room. Lots of nights he doesn’t make it into bed because he misses my mother. We see her every other Sunday at the home. It’s all either of us can take. Sammy’s back at school, getting his MBA. He can’t go to see Mom at all. It tears him up too bad, so I won’t let him come home from Champaign to see her anymore.

  I get up and walk into the living room and find my seventy-two year old dad sitting in his chair, his legs up, the TV in front of him on with no sound. When he sees me, he clicks off the tube with the remote.

  “Have a seat.”

  “I couldn’t sleep, Dad.”

  “I never sleep anymore. Not so you’d notice.”

  “I’ll leave you alone, Dad. I’m sorry.”

  “Hell, sit down on the couch. Join the night watch.”

  2

  I get replays of Kuwait frequently—three or four times a week. They come at night, but not always. I’ll be staring off into thin air, and then the video runs right in front of my eyes. The only way the scenario ends is when Jack Clemons, my partner, or anyone else, distracts me.

  “What’re you looking at?” he asks me as we revisit the murder scene of the Milan family on the north side: Sandra Milan, 12, John Milan, 40 and Amanda Milan, 39. The usual yellow crime-scene tape is all around thei
r brick house, and today we are canvassing the neighbors, who will of course have heard nothing. Someone must have heard the loud retort of the .45 handgun that he used to finish all three of them off, but they will have confused the gunfire with traffic noise or with some other sound of the city they’ve learned to live with.

  Jack and I receive no help from the nearby neighbors. We almost never get any aid from them. Mostly, they don’t want to get involved. It’s like the military—it ain’t my yard, a Marine will always explain when asked if he knows anything about a crime done to someone else.

  We drive to the morgue. The doctor, Dr. Fandel, is waiting for us, and he’s standing next to the remains of Amanda Milan, the mother.

  “Asphyxiation. No broken neck. She was unlucky,” the ME pronounces.

  He’s short and dumpy and unflappably calm. He’s explained his demeanor at the morgue logically:

  “No one bothers me at work.”

  He walks over to John Milan’s corpse.

  “This one was luckier than the other two. His neck was indeed broken. Neither of the gunshots killed the parents. He simply disabled them so they couldn’t put up a fight. He made them bleed so he could handle the hangings. The child was killed by the shot through the eye.”

  “As usual,” I say.

  “Pardon?” Dr. Fandel asks.

  Jack is eyeballing me too. I can feel his gaze on me.

  “This is the same MO as a guy I was after in Kuwait in Desert Storm. We never caught him.”

  “And you were saving this information why?” Clemons demands.

  “I wasn’t positive until the doctor confirmed the manner of death.”

  “But you already knew?” Jack says.

  “Yes. I’m sorry, but I had to be sure.… You two are the first to know.”

  *

  Captain Pearce is next to be informed. And standing next to him is Pete Donato, my old partner from NCIS. He’s in Marine uniform.

  “I’m still with NCIS,” he tells me as he shakes hands.

  “You got here fast,” I admit. I introduce Jack Clemons to Pete.