Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

“I wanted to catch this prick the old-fashioned way. I guess I’m just stubborn. My bad, Jack.”

  *

  Dr. Kurt McGowan teaches Comparative European Literature at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He’s a sometime actor as well and so is very conversant with theatre. He knows the play Equus quite well, he tells Jack and me in his office on campus. Northwestern is the picture postcard of a college campus. It lies near Lake Michigan in a dreamlike, wooded, wealthy neighborhood.

  “He blinds the animals, some say, to shelter them from the cruelties of this world. ‘See no evil,’ get it?” McGowan smiles. “Who knows? Maybe the young man in the play is just an evil son of a bitch.”

  McGowan looks like an actor. Hollywood good looks. He’s in his early forties, tall, about six three, and he reminds me of a leading man type.…

  “He might be exploiting their innocence. That’s a more standard interpretation,” he tells us. “Like most heavy theatre, it’s got endless possibilities. You can pick one, really.”

  I tell him about the MO in our cases.

  “Sounds to me, if you want my amateur opinion, like this guy is blinding them from the horrors of this world—Isn’t that Pacino’s speech in one of the Godfather flicks?”

  “You got me hangin’, Doc.… But it sounds like a possibility. He does the blinding thing on all of them. This is confidential information, so I know you’ll be discreet.”

  He smiles at me. I’ve used his expertise a few times previous. He can keep his mouth shut, and he never talks to the press about our conversations.

  “Have you talked to a licensed therapist?”

  “I’m going to, Kurt,” I tell him.

  “I like my theory about blinding the girls to the evil of the world.”

  “Even though he does the worst evil to them?” Jack asks.

  “You are dealing with a nut, right?”

  Jack laughs at his bluntness.

  “You might characterize him thus, yes,” Clemons smiles.

  “Rational people don’t rape and murder children or adults. But he’s rationalizing his evil deeds when he takes their sight away, even if it is mostly a symbolic gesture, seeing that he’s killing them with the gunshots,” McGowan says. “It’s almost like Oedipus. The Greek rips out his own eyes so he can no longer view the unthinkable ugliness of his life. He has committed incest and he’s murdered his own father.… Maybe this new guy has mommy/daddy issues.”

  McGowan stands to let us know he’s got to go teach his summer-school class. I thank him for his time, and we leave.

  *

  We visit the staff psychiatrist, Dr. Evelyn Cramer. She’s tall and blonde and has twenty years on us both, but I know we both consider her very attractive. She’s not wearing a wedding ring, either.

  But she’s all professionalism. She doesn’t give either of us any encouragement. I know it’s just the sexist in me, but I can’t help feeling drawn to her.

  “I like McGowan’s assessment,” she says. Her face is dead-pan serious.

  “I talk to him about profile issues from time to time. I took a course from him at Northwestern a few summers ago.”

  “You’re in school?”

  “Trying to get a Master’s in American Literature,” I explain. I should probably tell her that I’m mad about poetry. For some reason I want to impress this brainy babe of a shrink.

  “Well, I think he might be right about this perp’s longing to shield these female adolescents from the terrors of this life. He never considers the harm he’s doing, himself. Perhaps he thinks he’s guiding them to an afterlife of oblivion. Of dreamless sleep, without sight or consciousness. It’s a bit of a leap, but this perpetrator seems to enjoy extremes. He doesn’t just execute his victims. He includes a sort of ritual. That’s why he maims them and then displays the family members’ bodies with the hangings or the strangulations.”

  I’m staring at her legs. They’re long and shapely. Like the rest of her. Then I feel the shiver up my backbone as her words finally sink into me.

  “Ritual?” I ask.

  I turn to Jack, but I think he’s eyeing her chest.

  “Gentlemen? Was there anything else? You know where I am if you need me. I’m available, since we all work for the same people.”

  She grins at us as if we’re both young canines in the grips of doggie days.

  *

  “Ritual?” Jack asks as we sit at lunch at this North Side White Castle. He’s ordered a half-dozen of these miniature “sliders,” and I’ve ordered four. We both asked for Diet Cokes with the greasy hamburgers, the ultimate hypocrisy or irony, take your pick.

  “I always thought the manner of the killing was important. I always knew that we’d have to pursue it, but I’m just as old school as you are, Jack. You place them at the scene, you nail them with hard evidence, and then no one gives a fuck why, except for the good looking MDs on the fourth floor, like our blonde goddess.”

  “I hear you. Motive is nice, but hard evidence is tastier.”

  “Your theory about a gang is bothering me,” I tell my partner.

  “Geographically, it’s too farfetched.”

  “Not with modern communications.”

  “Meaning?” Jack asks.

  “They’re in touch. Pedophiles have chat rooms. They communicate frequently. Why not killer pedophiles?”

  Jack watches a curvy waitress pass by. He has ketchup on his fingertips, and then he licks them clean.

  “Most pedophiles want the sex, not the murder.”

  I nod and notice the two tiny mustard stains on my tie. I pick up the tie and study the stains. It’s a new tie, dammit.

  “True. But killing them guarantees their privacy, their remaining anonymous.”

  “She said, like McGowan, this guy—these guys—are extreme.”

  “It’s getting more unpleasant, Jack. It’s getting uglier every moment.”

  The curvy waitress walks by again. She has a copper streak in her hair. Jack licks his fingertips again. I’m thinking I need stain remover on my new fucking tie.

  “Butt-uglier,” he concurs.

  8

  I show the little love note to Jack.

  “Why am I seeing this only now?”

  “I apologize. I wanted to bear the burden alone, I guess.”

  “We’re a dynamic duo, remember?”

  He purses his lips as if he’s suddenly disappointed with me. His eyes shift away from me, as if he’s been insulted by my not trusting him.

  “I recall. As I said, my fault. Won’t happen again.… I ran it by Mary.”

  Jack knows about my love life, sort of.

  “And?”

  “Dead end. You knew it would be.”

  “Clever little prick, he is.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Unless he and his buddy are in it together. Thomas and Brandon, another dynamic pair.”

  “It was on my mind, yes.”

  “How’d they pair up?”

  “How does anyone pair up today, Jack?”

  “The Internet, my dear Watson.”

  “Yep. Just like a lonely hearts club. Still no word from Cyril.”

  “I know. He says the standard codes are as fruitless as the tracking of that love note you received from one or both of them.”

  “These two are bright boys. It says so in their jackets. Both college graduates, both cum laude or higher. Both top ten in their high school classes. I’m amazed they joined the Corps instead of working the material, real world. Why the Crotch for those two?”

  “License to kill. But I wish I knew why they’ve gone crazy, back in the world, here in the States.”

  Jack has no glimmer of humor on his handsome face. He’s almost glum, somber.

  “The Corps does teach you how to kill with great prejudice, yes.”

  “But, Will, you’re supposed to kill enemies of the Republic, not little girls and their whole clans. There’s the rub. Can’t blame the green fighting machine for its abe
rrations. Every outfit has them. The Seals join the Navy to blow shit up. They say it just like that when they’re asked. Can’t keep the loons away from ordnance.”

  He stands up and looks out my window. He’s glaring at the buildings in the Loop, rather than sending lasers at me. He holds his temper remarkably. It’s his calm that disturbs me more than some kind of blow-up.

  “I suppose you’re right, but it doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.”

  “What did Mary say, exactly, about the note from Laughing Boy?”

  His cheeks turn bright red from the pent-up anger. But he doesn’t let his voice betray what I know is welling up inside him. He paces from the desk to the window twice, and then he stops and faces me. I can see the skyscrapers through the window behind him.

  “She said it was untraceable. Standard stock copy paper you could buy at any big outlet or department store. Newsprint from the Chicago Tribune. And guess how many copies of that paper come out every day?”

  “So she has no wisdom to share with us?”

  “Only that this guy is taunting me.”

  I feel the heat rising from my own cheeks. I should have answers for him, but I’m letting him down.

  He paces back and forth between my desk and the window. I’m wondering if he’ll turn around and leap at me like some pissed-off panther. The muscles in his cheeks have tautened to a near-explosion. I feel myself become rigid.

  Then Jack suddenly loosens, and I feel my own tendons relax, slowly.

  “He’s taunting us, now, partner.… Were you a loner like this when you worked with Pete?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I feel the tension in the room diminishing. He’s got that affable, good-guy look on his face, at the moment. The face he shows to his lady friends, just when the moment has arrived. He’s got me, and he fucking well knows it.

  “That makes me feel all better, Detective Koehn.”

  This time he smiles when he says it, podna.

  9

  Kuwait, Desert Storm

  The sky appears yellow, almost golden. The heat makes approaching figures seem almost horizontal instead of vertical. Ironically, the nights are brutally cold.

  Neither of us is sickened by the appearance of the second set of corpses. We have seen too many bodies before, in the sparse days of Desert Storm. It was a war like no other. It was almost embarrassing. No one would count coup in this engagement. It was more like the proverbial ducks in a barrel. The kills came too easily. The Vietnam Vets found no honor in the conflict, other than doing their duty, as always. Semper Fi, motherfucker. That issue never changes. You go where they send you, and you kill the enemy.

  It used to be my mentality too, until I joined NCIS after my hitch in the Marines was over. Then I went to plain clothes, once my training was done. Plain clothes is the attire for Pete and me as we fight the stench of death. A great many vets have written that you can get used to the sight of death, but you never get used to the smell of mortifying human flesh.

  I suppose we should be moved at the sight of dead civilians, especially at the vision of the deceased young female, but we have been hardened to killing by the previous days we when observed the roadside carnage on convoys into Iraq and Kuwait City. It wasn’t our chance to do any rifle time. The convoys were our only chances to get into the shit because both of us were too young for Vietnam, and there was no conflict on the horizon when we originally signed on with the Crotch, a couple years before then.

  I look at the slaughter as if I were walking into a butcher shop. It’s the way we were trained at NCIS. These are cases, not people. We cannot become emotionally entangled or involved. It would detract from our professional detachment, we were taught.

  And it does make sense. If you’re caught up in the gore and mayhem, you can hardly do the job properly. Civilians sometimes just do not fathom that we’re not the Boy Scouts or the Red Cross. We don’t fill up sandbags for flooded river rats every spring, and we don’t go on camping trips to Michigan. In the Corps, we were trained to kill human beings, and now we’re trained to find killers and to send them on their ways to hell.

  I feel a twinge when I look at the ruined face of this adolescent girl. The gunshot from the .45 has blown away the back of her head. Skull fragments are scattered as if they were flung, all over the living room floor. There are blood stains on the walls and on the floors. There are even spatters on the ceilings.

  Then there are the hanged family members. The father’s face is swollen and dark purple. The mother’s tongue is protruding hideously it is purple and horribly swollen. And her eyes bulge almost out of her sockets.

  Then I lose some of my detached air when I see the little boy’s face. The color of his face is almost black, but his natural hue would’ve been light brown. It’s that black death mask that makes my eyes sting. I’m becoming very angry, suddenly. I want instant closure on these cases. I want to see the murderer swing from the gallows. I want to see him before a line of executioners with rifles aimed at his head. I want to see him gasping in a gas chamber or fried by electrocution.

  Punishment is not our task, of course, but I want to see him die multiple deaths in spite of all that Navy training for homicide investigations.

  I have to go outside, into the dawn of the new morning in this fashionable neighborhood in Kuwait City. This is where some of the oil executives call home. They send their children to English-speaking schools. Their kids go to the States and matriculate at Harvard and Yale and Princeton and MIT and Cal Tech—all the best colleges, places Pete and I could never afford.

  I don’t begrudge them their money. I have no love for oil people or their offspring, but this goes beyond my preference for people. These murders were deserved by no one, no matter what their fathers do for a living. No one deserves to die the way these Kuwaitis did. No human creature needs to suffer as they did.

  So I put an American face on each of the vics, and it gives me a better perspective on how to do my job. I know I’m not supposed to differentiate one dead body from another, and that way I will use my reason better. I will accomplish this task more efficiently if I do not assign individual personalities to the bodies laid out and hanged before me.

  We saw other bodies on the roads. We saw the oil fires billowing from the derricks. We saw dead men and women scattered like ragdolls inside and outside their blown and burned vehicles. SUVs. Mercedes. Lexus. All the brands were in front of our eyes. All that money couldn’t save some of them because we got there too late. No, it wasn’t our fault that we couldn’t arrive in time. But it didn’t relieve the disgust and the horror of what we saw on those roads.

  It gave some of us the conceptual materiel to meet and destroy the enemy, the Iraqis, Saddam Hussein and his personal crew. But it was a short war, as I said. That was the good news. We got it over quickly.

  The bad news is the mess some of us made in our triumph. Yes, there are always messes in combat, but there is no explanation for these murders, other than one:

  This, what we beheld on the crime scenes, was evil. I was not a practicing Catholic. I had been baptized a Catholic, but I did not attend very often, and now I didn’t think I could ever stomach a Sunday in the pews. I didn’t think I could father any children. Not with the carnage I’d been witness to. I couldn’t expose an innocent to this kind of vileness.

  When I was in grade school and high school, I think I was a typical adolescent and teenager. I played games, I dated girls when I passed puberty, and I went to classes. No one ever prepared me for this job. Not my regular teachers, not my NCIS instructors. Nobody explained the gut-wrenching nausea that holds you when you enter a killing zone like the one Pete and I were in the middle of.

  It’s the way it is in homicides. Yes, the stink of death is something you can never get used to. The conventional wisdom is accurate. But the sight of death gives you the willies, the nightmares, the night sweats. It’s the picture show that remains with you forever. The frame-by-frame reenactments sta
y with you for long after the bodies are bagged and tagged.

  *

  Col. Patrick Casy is our commander, our commandant. He’s ex-Marine also, so he has empathy for us, for Pete and me, I think. He isn’t the usual gruff prick you run into at headquarters. Our headquarters are aboard The Intrepid. When we have to see the boss, we have to meet him aboard that vessel. The intelligence area is aboard our ship. We travel to other places, but Kuwait is our current jurisdiction.

  “You have suspects?”

  He already knows I have a list that includes lieutenants and above, but he’s not convinced our perp is an officer and a gentleman.

  “Same as before, Sir,” I tell him, after the salute.

  “Cut the shit. We’re all civilians here,” he jokes.

  “Yes.… Yes, Colonel,” I grin. Pete is grinning also because we both like our boss.

  “I am receiving the usual flow of shit from the top on this, as you might imagine,” Casy informs us.

  “I hear you, Colonel,” Pete says, straight-faced.

  “It’s not our fault, but it is our problem, gentlemen.”

  There’s no good humor on his face now.

  “I understand, Colonel Casy. We’re doing everything we can, but this guy is cute. He leaves nothing behind. Nothing but bodies.”

  “It is very bad public relations to murder and rape indigenous personnel, especially since we have come to liberate these motherfuckers.”

  Pete can’t help but guffaw, but he sees Casy’s genuine anger, and he makes himself cease.

  “This is no joke, boys.”

  “I’m sorry, Boss. It’s just the way you.… express yourself.”

  “Roger that. Excuse my levity, because there ain’t anything humorous about this cocksucker and what he’s up to. I’d like to scope him and smoke him myself. So you have to do the honors for me.”

  “That’s an affirmative, Sir.”

  “Get your asses off this ship and corral this rat-fucking, mule-molesting son-of-a-fried-bean son-of-a-bitch.”

  We salute in spite of his informality, and then we disembark from The Intrepid.

  *