Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

  His name is Gerald Fahey. He’s thirty years old, five feet eight, 155 pounds. He is not a veteran of any war. He was 4-F on account of deafness in his left ear, his jacket reads. We are allowed to attend his interrogation at the Loop FBI headquarters. Jack and I are also allowed to ask him questions when Special Agent Ted Delinski finishes his own line of queries.

  After thirty-five minutes, it’s our turn.

  “How’d you meet Carl Thomas and Philip Brandon?” I ask.

  He looks up at me and grins.

  “You said you were going to cooperate, Gerald. Remember our little conversation about the death penalty? We still have one.”

  Gerald’s face sobers.

  “On the Internet. In a chat room.”

  “I know. We broke your code.”

  “So why’re you asking me, then?”

  “Why did you kill the young girl?”

  “It had nothing to do with her,” he says. “We were striking at the establishment. We were making a point.”

  There is no good humor on his face now. There is sober grimness on his visage.

  “We were making a point against the corruption of those who abuse the fossil fuels on this planet. Those who make war for the control of oil.”

  “So you killed the kid, her two brothers and mother and father to make a point.”

  He smiles again.

  “Gerald,” Special Agent Delinski warns.

  “But it’s all true.… How many Americans died in Desert Storm?”

  “Less than four hundred, in combat,” Jack tells him.

  “You make it sound like an insignificant number,” Gerald replies.

  “No. I was just answering your question,” Clemons smiles back at him.

  “And how many Iraqis were slaughtered?” he insists.

  “In the neighborhood of a quarter million,” Jack says.

  “And we’re murderers?” Gerald goes on.

  “Yes. You’re murderers. The others were casualties of war,” I say.

  “So were they.”

  The “they” means the family he wiped out in the Northeast.

  “They were innocents. The girl’s father was trying to make a living.… But anyway… You met on the Internet. You talked in chat rooms. So you might know where Carl Thomas and Philip Brandon are currently,” I tell him.

  “I discussed all that with the Special Agent here. I’ll need to have my lawyer present before I discuss it with you.”

  “Your counselor told you to cooperate, Gerald,” Delinski reminds him.

  A look of bewilderment passes on this creature’s face.

  “All right. Okay.”

  “Death penalty, Gerald,” Delinski repeats.

  “But you said there were no guarantees,” Gerald whines.

  “That’s correct. But being cooperative might help you at sentencing,” the FBI agent explains to him again.

  “We talk in code. Carl sent us the code by regular mail so it wouldn’t get picked off the Internet.… He told us to always use the system when we talked in the chat rooms.…

  “I don’t know where Carl is, but I think Philip is here in Chicago. I think he’s planning on doing another one.”

  “Do you know who?” I ask.

  Gerald shifts his ass in the chair. I smell his stale breath and his oniony underarm body odor. His brows are furrowed and his face looks intent on avoiding my stare. He’s looking for real wiggling room.

  “All I know is that it involves a middle management woman at Traders Petroleum. She’s divorced, with two teenaged daughters. She works in accounting. And that’s all Philip said. Carl planned this one. Carl planned all of them. All we did, in Vermont and California, was carry out Carl’s scheme. I swear it. He thought everything up. He’s the smart one. He kept insisting on how easy it would be, how no one would be looking for an assault on civilians. But he said anyone who takes money from the oil companies is an accomplice to murder all over this globe. And he’s right. Think about it, and you’ll know he’s right.”

  Gerald has a natural leer on his face and a slimy grin to top his visage off. He’s the kind of perp you wish you had in the days when rubber hoses were a part of a cop’s repertoire. He shifts some more in his seat, and the ripe stink permeates the entire interrogation room. He’s making me wish we could take all this outside.

  The smile comes back on his lips, and the interview comes to an end.

  *

  We go straight to Traders Petroleum in Oak Park as soon as we’re done with Gerald. We ask one of the office managers if they know who this woman is—divorced with two grown girls and she works in accounting. The manager, Theresa Mankowski, knows exactly to whom we’re referring. Her name is Hannah Menke.

  Hannah Menke is an attractive brunette in her middle age perhaps forty-five. I’m thinking her ex-old man was a knucklehead for leaving her, if he’s the one who took off first. I’m having difficulty taking my eyes off her, even though I’m in love with Special Agent Mary Janecko.

  “Why are you here?” she wants to know as Jack closes her office door behind us.

  “Have you read about the murder of the Milan family in Chicago?” I ask.

  “Of course. Everyone…Oh, my God!”

  Jack rushes over to her and helps her get seated in her plush office chair.

  “You’re okay,” I tell her.

  “I have two daughters. You’re here because…”

  “We have information that you may be a target for the people responsible for the deaths of the Milan family. But we’re going to be near you until we catch them.”

  “Them? There’s more than one?”

  “We’re not certain, but we think so, yes,” Jack tells her. He’s standing next to her, holding her hand. Only now does her natural color begin to replace the whiteness that covered her pretty face just seconds ago. She has short brown hair. You might call the cut severe, but I think it makes her even more attractive on close inspection.

  “We’ve got people headed to your house right now.”

  They live, the three of them, in Oakbrook, not far from here. We have two squads looking in on the teenagers. They’re at home, we found out. School is still out of session for both.

  “No one’s going to harm you, Ms. Menke,” I tell her. “We’re going to protect you for as long as it takes.”

  “Are you sure they mean to kill me? Us?”

  I nod.

  “But they’re not going to. We know who they are, and they won’t get near you. They thought you’d be an easy.…target.”

  “Target? Us? Why, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Because of the company you work for.… It’s a long story.”

  I explain what we’ve learned from Fahey and the Internet chats.

  “That’s insane,” she says unemotionally.

  “Yes, ma’am. It sure is.”

  “They’re going to rape my daughters and murder us all because I work for a gas company.”

  I look straight into her eyes.

  “Sociopaths don’t really need excuses. They don’t need reasons. If they were reasonable, they wouldn’t be killing people.”

  She stares straight back at me. I can’t help but feel the flutter of romantic attraction to this woman who has probably a decade on me.

  “I’ve never had anything like this ever happen to me before.… Even with the divorce, it was nothing like…”

  “He’s not going to harm you. We’ll catch him first. I promise you. And you’ll never be alone, not you or your girls. I swear it to you, Ms. Menke.”

  “My name is Hannah. My girls’ names are Bethany and Barbara. Bethany is thirteen and Barbara is eleven. Oh.… my.… God!”

  She rises from her desk chair, and then Jack catches her as she pales once more and collapses.

  *

  The Menke house is in a fashionable part of Oakbrook. The lawns are large and so are the backyards. The house is perhaps twenty years old, and it’s well kept. Brick on three sides with siding on the
backside. There is a four foot above-the- ground pool in a fenced-in yard. But there is no security system, no electronic guard dog, and no real pooch either. There are just the three of them: Hannah and Bethany and Barbara.

  Barbara, the eleven-year-old, favors her mom. She has short brown locks and her face is a double for Hannah’s. She’ll be a beauty some day soon. Bethany must resemble her dad. She has golden-blond hair. They’re both good-looking, but not alike at all.

  Jack and I are inside the house. Two uniform squads are parked a half block away from the premises here in Oakbrook, but the four patrolmen are a very short holler from us.

  We stay in the kitchen after the Menke women have their evening dinner. Hannah asked us to dine with them, but we refused politely, saying we’d already eaten.

  Which was a lie. We were both hungry, and I was going to suggest calling out for a pizza after the ladies had retired for the night.

  There’s a small portable color TV in the kitchen where we sit, and we’ve got some news on at very low volume. When the Menkes go up to their bedrooms on the upper floor of this spacious home, we’ll reconvene in the living room. The patrolmen will be covering the area outside by foot, after 10:00 p.m. They’ll be relieved, as we will, shortly after dawn.

  At ten, Hannah Menke comes into the kitchen and announces they’ll be heading off to bed. I smile at her and tell her we’ve got it under control. I don’t think she believes me for a second.

  *

  At 3:00 a.m., I’m sitting in the kitchen alone. Jack’s in the living room, keeping an eye on the front door. The air conditioning is on because it’s late August, and it’s hot and muggy.

  Brandon would have to unlock an upstairs window for entry, after getting past the four uniforms outside. I wish he would sneak past them. I wish he’d climb through that upstairs window and then come downstairs here in the kitchen and catch sight of my nine millimeter in his face. I wish he’d try to escape so I could put six slugs in his back and then save Cook County some millions of dollars in trial fees.

  But I know I just arrest them; I don’t execute them.

  The night passes uneventfully, and I don’t think Brandon’s coming. He’s probably sniffed us out. Gerald didn’t have the chance to tip him off to the fact that we know he’s coming, so we should have surprise on our side. But his partner Carl seems to have that extra sense about danger. I remember the Yamaha biker and that futile chase. These pricks are sly, but just how cute they are is yet to be determined.

  I’m thinking about the oil connection in Kuwait. I’m thinking I didn’t recognize it there because everyone in those neighborhoods in Kuwait City seemed to be tied to petroleum and the big gas companies.

  But when they pulled the job here in Chicago, it all clicked after I heard from FBI-Mary, and after all those years of missing something so obvious. If I were Captain Pearce, I could imagine him telling me it was an obvious mistake to be made—they were all about oil, back in the Middle East where the murders occurred.

  I should have pursued it back then anyway. You’re supposed to hit all the leads. But I didn’t and now the Milans are dead. It’s partly my fault, then. Maybe I could have nailed Thomas and Brandon in-country and I could have stopped the holocaust at the Milan house.

  I know I’m being too hard on myself. But it’s no use. I feel responsibility. I felt liable, culpable, even before we connected the dots with Brandon and Thomas and the two others, in California and Vermont. It might have been avoided, this last one.

  It might have been, and that’s what sticks, midway to my center.

  12

  Gerald is caught with his pantaloons about his ankles. He hasn’t been as clever as Carl Thomas and Philip Brandon. (He swears he doesn’t know the real name of the copy-cat killer out in Auburn, California.) He took a lick of his female adolescent’s thigh. He left a saliva trace on her leg, and they’ve matched the DNA positively. It seems Gerald simply couldn’t resist somehow touching the girl, flesh to flesh. So he’s going to get smoked, and now he’s being very cooperative, indeed.

  But Philip Brandon remains in the shadows. He hasn’t appeared anywhere near Hannah Menke and her daughters. We’ve been on shift three days straight Jack and I doing the third shift, 11-7—and there hasn’t even been a strange sound at night. And nothing doing during the other two shifts, either. Pretty soon we’re going to be removed from keeping the watch here, and I know Hannah will be badly frightened when we have to leave. I’m becoming fond of her two kids, Bethany and Barbara, as well. I’m beginning to become overly fond of Hannah, too, and it’s bothering my sense of professionalism, along with troubling my sense of loyalty to Mary Janecko, the woman I thought I was in love with.

  She sits down with me at the kitchen table on this late evening in early September. The heat has still not fled the Middle West. It’s been in the 90s the last two weeks, with no sign of relief, according to the forecasters.

  She has spectacular brown eyes. They’re her best feature. She is lanky and athletic-looking. She told me she works out in a gym four times a week—mainly to forget about her husband, Bob, the guy who left her for a younger woman of twenty-eight.

  “He’s an idiot,” I blurt out, sitting across from this beautiful brunette.

  “Pardon me?”

  She breaks out in an abrupt guffaw. Her cheeks redden, and her eyes blaze directly into mine, as if I’ve come right out of left field at her. She stands, and then I see her legs are an outstanding feature of a very eye-catching package.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “But you’re right. Bob’s an idiot.”

  We both laugh reflexively.

  “I don’t want to keep you from your work,” she says.

  She has amazingly full lips. Not too big, just full.

  “You’re my work. Remember?” I smile.

  I think my face is aflame, and I’m becoming self-conscious.

  “Will you excuse a personal question?” she asks.

  “Sure. Go right ahead.”

  “Are you seeing anyone?”

  I begin my fidgeting act. My fidgeting act annoys me as much as it embarrasses Hannah, apparently, because I’ve brought out a blush on her dazzling face. I feel like twitching some more, just to get her to stay that alive, radiant color.

  “Yes, I am.… But I don’t think it’s happening.”

  “Why’s that? If you don’t mind talking about it. If it’s too personal…”

  “No. It’s okay. She’s a federal cop. She doesn’t want us to get in the way of either of our careers.”

  I intertwine my fingers so I’ll stop the spastic bit. I can feel the pulse of heat creeping up behind my ears. She never takes her eyes from me. And now I can smell her scent. I have no clue about women’s fragrances. I have no idea what it is that she’s wearing, but I know I’m in love with it. She smells like an acre of wild flowers. It’s as if I’m out in that field, and it’s April, and the rain has cleaned the air and everything is fresh and breathing.

  “And you want it to progress.”

  I find myself staring into her eyes.

  “Do you?” she asks again.

  “I did. I don’t know, now.”

  I look up and all I can see is Hannah. I’m locked onto her brown eyes, and there’s nothing else in the room. I want to keep our eyes locked this way, but I have to break her spell or I’ll get lost in her house and I’ll never walk out of here.

  “Good thing you didn’t marry her, Will. Good thing you’re sorting it all out before you commit. Maybe it’s for the best.”

  I’m beginning to sweat. It’s not that the room is hot. It’s all internal combustion. She makes my ears and neck light up as if someone’s standing behind me, torching the back of my head.

  “Would you take him back?”

  “Bob, you mean.”

  I nod.

  “No. No way. That’s over. I can’t trust him, ever again. He wants a younger model, fine. To hell with them both.…
That sounds mean, doesn’t it.”

  There’s a profound look of hurt on her, now. I’ve brought up the taboo subject. I’ve reawakened the anger in her, the betrayal, and I can see the passion of hatred flicker in her eyes. I’ve entered no-man’s-land, with Hannah, and now there’s no retreating.

  “Not really.”

  “You were in the military?”

  “Yes. Marines, for four years after I graduated college. Then I joined the NCIS, just in time for Desert Storm.”

  I stand up and walk toward the window. I look out at Oak Park, and I see the trees and sidewalks and houses that make this a suburb and a contrast to the gray ugliness of some of the barrios in the city just east of here. This is where people move to get the hell out of the nastiness of the blocks where I grew up. This is the reverse of the inner city where I do a lot of business.

  “Was it bad?”

  “It was short. I was a cop, not a combatant. But I saw lots of dead people, I’m sorry to say, and they weren’t all job-related. We drove the highways with Marine convoys. It was pretty awful, actually.”

  Those convoys and bodies and horrors flash past me as I look out her pretty window at her pretty neighborhood. Oakbrook is a place to move into, not out of.

  “I don’t want to dredge up bad memories.”

  I’m still deep inside her eyes, and my color must be scarlet, right about now. She has to have noticed my flushed face.

  “You’re not. All the shrinks I’ve talked to, all the profilers I’ve met, have told me it’s good to talk about it occasionally. I don’t want to bother you with war stories, though.”

  “I don’t find you boring at all.”

  I have to look away from her. And then I raise my eyes toward hers again.

  “You mind a personal question?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Are you… dating anybody?”

  Her smile is warm. I don’t feel humiliated, not as I thought I would, asking a damn-fool question like the one I just posed.

  “Are you asking me out, Will?”

  I try to answer, but the words won’t come out.

  “That would be unprofessional, if I were to.… You know. Ask you out.”