Black Angel

by Thomas Laird

“One of his DIs wrote, though, that looking into his eyes was ‘like looking through a pane of glass.’ He said Anderson was unreadable. And drill instructors are paid to read their platoon of pukes. It’s their job to know their guys.

  “Anderson was a wild card. You never knew where he was, in the deck. You follow me?”

  “You’re talking about a borderline sociopath, Will. Yes?”

  She’s instructing me. She’s patiently sticking the analytical knife in my chest, and she’s loving every minute of this.

  “Not borderline. No. This guy was very clever, very sly. Those are my kinda guys, in series killers. The dumbasses hit you with a fry pan and then get caught because they sit there on scene with blood all over their dago tees.”

  “He’s not a dumbass?”

  “None of the three are or were. They’re all bright boys. Cutie pies. And I don’t buy the oil theory as a motive, not for one goddamned second.”

  “Then what was their motive, even if Anderson is really dead?”

  “They did it for the hell of it.”

  “Come again? I don’t think Dr. Freud or Dr. Jung would buy it.”

  “They’re thrill killers. They do it for the buzz. They do it just to get away with it. They’re just laying down a false track with the oil thing.”

  The thought of Anderson distracts me for a moment, and my desire for Mary is on the wane. Suddenly my own heat starts to plummet. I can feel the room chill, all around us.

  “That was the other thing.”

  “What?” I ask her.

  “We just had a message from the Federales in Mexico City. They’ve come up with two dead families of their own.”

  “Same MO?”

  “Not quite. This time the youngest girl was assaulted and murdered, like ours, but currently they all had something called a Panamanian necktie done to each of them, along with the final hanging. The girls were both propped up as if they were watching their family members being strung up.”

  The Panamanian necktie is indigenous to the drug gangs in South and Central America. The deal with their tongues being yanked out of their throats and tied around their necks is their new signature. The eyes thing has been replaced.

  The author remains the same, however.

  I look at Mary and I feel a rise of temperature, but only briefly. The arousal is replaced by something sad, something gloomy and morose. I feel emptied out.

  And hollow.

  *

  “What about this guy Anderson?”

  I remind Jack about the Captain being one of my “big three” suspects back in Desert Storm. Then he recalls our original conversation about Anderson.

  “How’d he get out of the Middle East?”

  “That, Horatio, is the question.”

  “Who the fuck is Horatio?”

  I want to explain to him about Hamlet’s best friend and sidekick, but I wave him off, and we head to the archives.

  *

  I open the yellowing folder I have kept on my investigations in Kuwait. I made copies when I left NCIS, even though I was supposed to leave everything aboard The Intrepid, my last ship in the Navy cops.

  I read again about his foster homes. I see how his first set of adoptive parents couldn’t handle him, somehow, so he was transferred to another home. In the second house, the adoptive mother suffered a massive heart attack and died not long after Anderson entered the household. The bereaved second adoptive father also could not handle the Captain, so he was sent packing to live with some attorney.

  Anderson went to college, was brilliant academically, like his two playmates, Carl Thomas and Philip Brandon, and then, like the other two, he entered our beloved Corps. Anderson, however, went to a “brand name” university. In the Marines, he apparently was learning to hone his anti-social skills, as all killers are encouraged to do from boot camp onward. But it appears that these three could not step back into their own humanity from all the brainwashing about kill zones and fields of fire.

  Perhaps killing the enemy wasn’t enough. Or perhaps killing the enemies of the Republic was never the idea for them in the first place. The military has spawned its share of nut jobs. We don’t own the license for that kind of thing. Postal workers have had a bad track record from time to time, as have medical doctors. The theory remains hot that Jack the Ripper owned a surgeon’s bag and a surgeon’s skill, and he paid no attention to “first do no harm.”

  The Captain could not have survived the blast in Iraq, the one that melted his vehicle and his two co-riders to ash or less than ash. It troubles me, however, that no trace of his DNA was found on scene. It troubled me back in Desert Storm. It troubled Pete Donato, my partner back then, as well, but there was no physical evidence nor was their anything circumstantial about his “demise” that pressed us to pursue him.

  Unless he really is the walking dead, a zombie. Anderson was not from the Islands, nor do we have any idea that he practiced voodoo, so that theory flies in the light of reason.

  The alternative is that he faked his death to escape the war and to flee his crimes before we really had a chance to talk to him face to face.

  The Oedipal thing about the blinding of the girls would be something a smart guy like Anderson would pull. I read he took a number of classical literature courses as an undergraduate. It was the same thing I discussed with the teacher back in Evanston at Northwestern. The Captain would be familiar with Sophocles, of course. Oedipus blinded himself, gouged out his own eyes when he discovered he had mated with his biological mother and that he’d murdered his real father at that legendary crossroads. He blinded himself because he could not bear looking at the world he’d been fated and born into. Something like that, if I recall my own lit classes at all.

  Greek tragedy. Has to be a holocaust by the time it winds up. There have to be dead bodies scattered all over the stage. It’s like a requirement of the genre. That’s what my teachers taught me, back in college. Shakespeare pulled the same numbers in his tragedies. The corpses fill the stage before the final curtain.

  If I don’t catch Thomas and Brandon soon, there’ll be more dead people popping up in the local scenery. Now they’re cropping up south of the Rio Grande. He’s tweaking the MO. He’s using the necktie instead of the Oedipal modus operandi. It’s still the same perpetrator. I think Anderson really is alive.

  He got out of Iraq. I’m betting he has money from the lawyer, his third foster father. He behaved like the model son in that household because it was to his best interests to keep straight. He was just letting it build up after the first two foster failures. Smart prick. Bide your time. Wait. Let the pressure cooker heat until the urge becomes unbearable. As it did in Kuwait. As it did here in Chicago, and as it likely occurred in Mexico. Mexico lindo.

  I’ll make some phone calls to the lawyer. I’ll fly to LA if I have to so I can face to face him. I think Captain Pearce is good for one or two round trip tickets to LAX. Jack likes Southern California, anyway. He has relatives in Burbank.

  *

  David Crowley is the lawyer, now retired. He lives in one of those mansions, not houses, in Beverly Hills. He lives among the rich and infamous. Notorious. Whatever you want to call these face-people from La La Land. I liked seeing the Hollywood sign on the side of the hill as we drove the rental over here.

  We get out of the Chevy and walked across his enormous, manicured lawn, and he greets us at the door as if he were expecting us. We did call, so that’s why he’s waiting for us.

  He takes us into his elegant estate, and Jack and I join him in what he calls his “California Room.” It’s glass-enclosed, it’s air-conditioned, and it has a full bar.

  David Crowley has sandy, thinning hair, but he’s in peak condition. I’m certain he has a trainer, making sure no blubber defaces his athletic, fit frame. He is Hollywood handsome too. He’s one of those sixty-year-olds who ages well like corked wine.

  “You’re here to talk about my son, Benjamin,” he smiles.

  “Yes.”
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  Jack is silent, perusing all the goodies in this “California room.”

  “My foster son is dead. I don’t really understand why you’re…”

  “I think.… We think your son might be alive.”

  “Excuse me?” he smiles. The teeth are straight and white and feral. This guy must have been a shark in the courtroom. He has that winning air about him. I’ll bet he never settled. I’ll bet it always went his way.

  “I think he might have deserted and got out of the Middle East. But I think he must have had help, and his only possible source for that kind of money would be you.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “It’s called accessory to a murder, in this case accessory to multiple murders.”

  “I think it’s time for you two to leave.”

  “We can have the LA Police take you in for questioning. I know you know your rights, Counselor, but if you have information on the whereabouts of Benjamin Anderson, once Captain Benjamin Anderson, it’d be to your best interests to divulge that knowledge right now. Because if we find out you financed that desertion, we’ll be back, or someone more local will be.”

  Jack stands, and then I do, and we leave the “California Room.”

  *

  “Maybe Anderson really is dead, Will,” Jack says as he takes the earphones out of his ears on the flight back to O’Hare from LAX.

  We were in Southern California for all of sixteen hours. It didn’t give us much time for sightseeing.

  “No, he’s alive. He’s not close to Dad, though. My guess is that he’s in Mexico, killing new folks. You know, expanding his repertoire. He’s adjusting his technique, tuning it up for some big opus. It’s like he’s in training.”

  “And maybe he got blown to snot, back in Iraq.”

  I smile at my partner, and then he plugs himself back in to his onboard movie.

  “Nope. This fucker’s a zombie. A walking corpse, straight out of the grave. The undead,” I grin.

  Jack hears me through his soundtrack.

  “Boogedy boogedy,” he says, straight-faced.

  19

  The FBI got a phone tap okayed in Peoria, Illinois, and Carl Thomas made the mistake of calling his sister there, and now we have a number in Tinley Park, a southwest suburb.

  The Feds want to join us on the raid in Tinley Park, and it’s good etiquette to say yes, since they did the legwork in Peoria with Thomas’s sister. Jack and I and six uniforms head from The Loop toward Tinley Park at 9:45 P.M. We’ve waited until dark, and we’ve been assisted by the Tinley Park cops in clearing the nearby houses and apartment buildings. They said they’d do it quietly, and when we arrive forty minutes later, the area seems tranquil. There are streetlights on these blocks, but the lighting remains dim. We pull up to the curb in our unmarked LTD, and the uniforms park a quarter block down behind us.

  The address is 1616 Melborne. He’s supposedly on the uppermost of a three flat apartment building. The name on the box is Smythe, I see, as we pass the mailboxes in the hallway. The entry is locked, so Jack uses his illegal burglar pick to pop it open in seconds. The three FBI special agents accompanying us, two men and a woman, are not enthused with Jack’s picking the lock.

  “Son-of-a-bitch was broken open,” Jack lies to them over his left shoulder.

  Then we ascend the flights of stairs to the third floor, guns drawn. We’re all wearing vests, Feds included. We’re all carrying nine millimeter weapons, but the FBI woman carries a pump shotgun.

  She doesn’t appear soft or feminine, either. I imagine she’s used the shotgun before. She has the look of a hunter on her plain, not unpretty face. She simply looks like a female cop, I’m saying. The two males are standard, buzzcut Fibbies, both wearing dark suits underneath their vests.

  We arrive at Thomas’s door. The two uniforms pass by the FBI personnel and Jack and me. They’re the ones with the swinging sledge. I stop them, and I listen by the door, but I don’t linger, because I don’t want to get shot at through the door. I’ve had that happen in my NCIS career, and pulling out splinters from your face is no joy. The vest only protects your chest and torso. Nothing stops the damage to your melon.

  I hear nothing, so I shout through the door as I stand with my back to the wall.

  “Thomas! Police! Open the door! Now!”

  Jack aims his weapon head-high at the door.

  Still no sound.

  I nod at the two uniforms with the swinging sledge.

  They take a fierce backswing, and then they splinter the door and its frame with one mighty blow. We’re through the entry, and we crouch, guns pointed into the darkness. We search the living room first. There appears to be no furniture. The place looks barren, less than spartan.

  Our next stop is the bedroom. Again, no furniture, not a single stick. No bed, no anything.

  The FBI agents are into the kitchen, after we split up by the bedroom. The woman calls for us. We see the light she’s turned on in the kitchen. The Feds are surrounding a man lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood.

  It’s Philip Brandon, and he looks like he’s just about tapped out.

  *

  We rush him to Mercy Hospital, back by the Loop. The paramedics arrived at the Melborne address within ten minutes, so Brandon is still breathing, but just barely. He’s hanging on by a spider’s thread.

  They hurry him into ER, and then the ER surgeon dismisses us. We post two uniforms by the room in which they’re examining him. Jack and I head for the cafeteria because neither of us has eaten since 11:00 A.M. this morning. I get a Diet Coke and a wrapped submarine sandwich. Jack opts for coffee and a cheeseburger.

  “Do you have hypertension yet, partner?” I smile at him as we sit in a booth.

  “Not yet, but I’m working on it,” he smiles back at me.

  “Do you think he’ll live long enough to talk to us?”

  “No. I think he’s four quarts low.”

  “Gunshot, don’t you think?” I ask.

  “You’d think. Ripe big hole under his right shoulder. Large caliber, maybe a .45. Might be a .38 magnum. Ballistics will tell all.”

  “I’m betting on the .45.”

  “Yeah. It sounds logical. You think Thomas shot him?”

  “Thomas was the guy receiving those calls at that address, according to the tap. The FBI says he identified himself to his sister from Peoria.”

  “Could have been anyone else?”

  “Maybe, Jack. But I think it was Thomas.”

  “Why shoot his fraternity brother—the oil Mafia hitman?”

  “Family feud. Who the fuck knows,” I say.

  I put down the sub sandwich. It’s dry and tastes suddenly like ashes. We expected to collar one of our principals, and we end up with a stiff-to-be.

  “One jump ahead of us, Jack, and I’m getting real fucking tired of it.”

  “I hear you.… But Phil might hang on after all. Give the piece of shit a chance.”

  *

  “Hello, Philip,” I tell the man lying on the hospital bed.

  He blinks.

  I look over to Jack and then at the tough-girl FBI agent who’s here to listen in for the Bureau.

  “How’re you doin’?”

  Brandon groans.

  “You need a stronger drip in that morphine thing?” I ask him.

  He looks right at me.

  “Get…out,” he murmurs, just audibly.

  There’s a doctor watching the proceedings. He’s eyeballing us very carefully. We’ve got all of three minutes.

  “Who shot you, Philip?” Jack asks.

  “Yeah. That’s what I was going to ask you,” I add.

  “Get out,” he says, a little louder.

  “He left you for dead, guy,” I explain. “Don’t you want to make him pay?”

  He looks at me as if something has registered.

  “He…came…back.”

  “Who? Who came back?”

  He stares at me with an appeal on his ashen fa
ce.

  “I was supposed to meet…Carl.”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “He came back.”

  “Who was it, Philip? Who came back? Who shot you?”

  “I…”

  Suddenly he shoots straight up in bed as if he’s going to try and jump at me. The nurse who just now entered the room screams, and the doctor grabs her by the arm, holds her back, and then releases her and rushes toward Brandon, who’s still having spasms on his bed.

  The doctor yells for us to clear out and the nurse composes herself enough to help him get Brandon back down flat on the mattress. We all leave them to work on Philip.

  *

  Ten minutes later the doctor re-emerges and tells us that Philip Brandon has expired.

  *

  “What did ballistics say?” Jack asks me, six hours later. We’re way over our regular shift, but Pearce wants us to locate the shooter.

  “Forty-five, just like you said,” I report. “But he picked up the casing and dug out the slug. Probably with a big knife, like a k-bar,” I explain.

  “No wonder he bled out.”

  “The ME said he did a nice job of removing the bullet. Almost surgeon-like.”

  “But he made him bleed a lot worse, digging into him.”

  “That was his intention, Jack.”

  Clemons grins at my sarcasm.

  “Indeed,” he smiles.

  *

  No prints on Brandon’s body. In Peoria they bring in Carl’s sister and threaten her with accessory to whatever crimes they can come up with, but she lawyers up and shuts up, and there’s nothing forthcoming out of her.

  Whoever shot Philip might have missed who he was really gunning for, I’m thinking. I’m thinking he might have come looking for Carl and found Philip there instead. Brandon and Thomas seem to have been a pair, so to speak, ever since Kuwait. One was always somewhere in the vicinity of the other. They were partners in the ‘terror’ plot against the oil guys, and they were true believers. The guy who shot them obviously has no sense of semper fi. He shot one of his own kind, it seems to me. I think it was the zombie from California. I think he was coming to fix Thomas before he fixed Philip Brandon. I think it was Captain Benjamin Anderson, recently deceased, who has come back from the land of the dead, like Odysseus in The Odyssey, to live once again in the land of the mortals after he’d learned the secrets of the Underworld. It’s Captain Benjamin Anderson, recruiter of young maniacs like Carl Thomas and Philip Brandon and our boy Gerald from the Northeast. It was Anderson all along who was giving the orders, and now he’s fixed himself up with a little trigger time, here in my hometown.