Angel Among Us (5 page)

‘I had been frantic,' he explained. ‘I had not heard from Arcelia in months. She did not reply to my letters and she had stopped showing up for our weekly phone calls at her village's bodega I went a little crazy when I didn't hear from her. It had been so real and then, just as suddenly, I felt like a fool. I called the bodega constantly for a few weeks, begging the owner to find her and get her on the phone for me. He kept saying he had not seen her but I did not believe him. I think he told her parents about me, so they knew she'd had a boyfriend from America. After a few months of trying to get her on the phone without luck, I just assumed she had met someone from down there and moved on. But when her parents were trying to find a way to raise the money for her ransom, they went through all of her things and they found the letters from me. Between the letters and what the bodega owner knew about me, they tracked me down here in Delaware.'

Danny's voice strengthened with anger as he told Maggie and Calvano the next part. ‘My father refused to give me the money. Can you imagine? He said it was a scam. That Arcelia made her living setting up rich Americans by pretending to love them. He could not believe that what we'd had was real. He could not believe that such a thing actually existed.'

‘So how did you get the money?' Calvano asked. He was staring at Danny Gallagher thoughtfully, fighting his own prejudices and trying to keep an open mind as Maggie had asked him to do. I was pretty sure Calvano was warming to Danny Gallagher, too. He loved women in all their many forms and, out of all the people in the room, I think Calvano was the one who believed Danny the most when he talked about the love he and his wife had shared. Calvano understood how great Danny's loss threatened to be if they could not find her.

‘I went to my mother,' Danny explained. ‘She didn't have that kind of money, but she sold a parcel of land on the edge of our farm to a developer who had been itching to get his hands on it. It was just a couple of acres and he paid cash. My mother never doubted me for an instant. She had the money within two days.' His voice cracked as if he were about to cry.

‘Danny went down there personally with the money and brought Arcelia back,' the priest continued for him. He glanced at Danny. It was too much for him to remember. ‘He was asked to leave the money at some tiny shop in a godforsaken village in the middle of nowhere and, in return, they were supposed to leave Arcelia at another village a few miles away. They kept their word. It's better for business that way, you see. If they kill everyone, then no one would ever give them money. Danny and Arcelia returned to the States and I married them the day after they arrived here. That was just over two years ago. Arcelia spent several weeks being treated for her wounds. She does not speak of that time. But she devotes almost every free moment she has to counseling Mexican immigrants who come here, helping them file reports for missing loved ones still in Mexico. She helps them provide identification and DNA and other information whenever the US authorities find the bodies of people along the border that might be missing relatives. She is a very strong woman. She has helped many people in our congregation. You must find her. She's gone through enough.'

‘How did you get over the border?' Maggie asked.

It was clear that Danny had rehearsed his answer. Too quickly, he said, ‘We got married in Mexico before we came back, so legally she was my wife. Between that and the papers I got from the consulate, she was able to come into the States with me. We got married again by Father Sojak, once we got here, just to be safe.'

I'm not sure anyone believed that answer. It usually took years to get travel documents from a consulate. But both Maggie and Calvano knew that they would never get the details out of Danny Gallagher if he and his wife had entered the United States illegally. Besides, there was no doubt that they were married and that Arcelia had the right to be here.

‘Could she have run away?' Maggie asked him. ‘Sometimes pregnant women start to have second thoughts. It's pretty common, in fact.'

‘Never,' Danny said. ‘I think maybe her worst fears came true – maybe the drug gang that took her somehow found out she was pregnant and living in the United States. Maybe they figure I'm rich and will give them even more money now.'

‘You think a drug gang came up here and got her?' Calvano asked skeptically. ‘Why bother? They'd be taking a huge risk for an uncertain payout. And if she had known something, or seen anything that might hurt them, they would have killed her long ago.'

‘I don't know why they would come up here for her,' Danny Gallagher suddenly shouted. ‘I just know she lived in fear, every day, fear that they might come for her and now the worst has happened.'

A nurse came running in at the sound of Danny Gallagher's cries and she looked at Maggie and Calvano with disgust. ‘He needs his rest,' she told him sternly.

‘I can arrange for him to talk to you again as soon as he is able,' the priest told them. ‘I give you my word.'

A priest's word was good enough for Calvano. He stood, stowed the notebook back in his pocket and extended his hand to the priest once again. ‘Thank you, Father Sojak.'

‘Call me John,' the priest said quickly, shaking Calvano's hand. He held out his hand to Maggie, suddenly shy. I had seen it in priests before: the younger ones, fresh from the seminary, often had little experience with women. I wondered if that was what was making Father Sojak so nervous. He had a direct, forthright manner that I thought few people could resist, and yet, I could feel that he was hiding something from them. Was it Maggie or his omissions that made him so nervous?

‘Father,' Maggie said respectfully as she left the room. She, too, had been raised a Catholic, though I knew she no longer attended church and preferred instead to spend her Sunday mornings running along the shores of our town's reservoir.

The doors had barely shut on the elevator before Calvano asked Maggie, ‘Did you see the eyes on that priest? I bet the nuns go crazy over him.'

‘Yeah, I saw his eyes,' Maggie admitted. ‘And I could tell from them that he was hiding something. So was the husband.' She sounded grim. She was not looking forward to telling Gonzales how she felt.

‘You think he did it,' Calvano said almost triumphantly.

Maggie gave him a look of half disgust and half affection. ‘I didn't say that. I just said he was hiding something.' She stared at the floor numbers lighting up as they descended toward the ground floor. ‘If I had to put my money on it, I'd say he was innocent. What about you?'

He shrugged. ‘I don't think he did it, either. But I definitely don't think drug cartels would send someone to Delaware to snatch a kindergarten teacher.'

‘I don't think so either,' Maggie said. ‘But they might if she was more involved than she told her husband. For all we know, she's the kingpin.' She realized what she had said and started to laugh. ‘A beloved preschool teacher would be a good cover, right? I really don't think that's the case, but I do have a friend at Quantico I can call. She'll run her name through the system and let us know if it's popped up in an investigation before. That will allow us to at least evaluate whether that angle is a real possibility.'

‘Without actually having to work with the FBI, right?' Calvano said. He, like Maggie, believed that the answer to virtually every case that crossed their desk could be found locally, and that locals were the best people to find out the truth.

‘Right. What did you think about the priest?' Maggie asked. ‘You two seemed to hit it off, you brown-noser, you.'

Calvano looked vaguely ashamed at what he was about to say. ‘He's lying about something. But I think it's probably got to do with how Danny brought her back over the border. I'm not buying that story.'

‘Me either,' Maggie said. ‘And I think Father Sojak is a lot more involved in this whole thing than he lets on.'

‘You don't go to church any more, do you?' Calvano asked.

‘What's that have to do with anything?' she said.

‘I never met Father Sojak until today, but I've heard about him. The nuns at St Michael's and St Raphael's all think he has the touch.'

‘What the hell is the touch?' Maggie asked.

‘He can heal people just by laying on his hands. He can reach people in comas. He can communicate with people close to death and reassure them before they go. They say he's filled with the light and has the gift.'

‘That sounds a little New Age for any of the nuns I know,' Maggie said drily. Her view of nuns tended toward the unfavorable. I had eavesdropped many times on her conversations with her father and her memories of Catholic school were mixed.

‘It happens,' Calvano said, a little defensively. His faith was pretty important to him. ‘A lot of the saints were rumored to have a gift like that when they were mortals.'

‘You think Father Sojak is a saint?' Maggie asked skeptically.

‘No. I just think it's possible he has powers we can't understand and I definitely think it's possible he knows something he's not telling us.'

‘Which all leads us to one conclusion,' Maggie said. ‘Arcelia Gallagher was not taken at random or by a Mexican drug gang going way off the reservation.'

‘Definitely not,' Calvano agreed.

Maggie looked thoughtful. When the press found out that Arcelia Gallagher's disappearance was not a random kidnapping, they would go after her husband with a vengeance. A beloved preschool teacher killed by a husband who had close family ties to the mayor in town was a way better story than a drug king kidnapping or whatever the truth might be. Everyone in town would become part of the spectacle. The television cameras would be around for a long time to come, which meant that Gonzales would be looking over Maggie's shoulder for just as long.

I
rode with Maggie and Calvano back to the station, listening to their easy banter and wishing that I'd had the chance to experience a partnership like theirs when I was alive. But it's tough being a good partner when you're drunk all the time and your partner is either joining you in alcohol-fueled lunches or looking at you with disgust because it's either judge you – or take a hard look in the mirror.

The closest I would ever get to having a real partner would be as an unseen observer in the back seat of their patrol car, feeding on their camaraderie as a bird might fall upon seed.

Maggie was telling Calvano about the emergency room doctor she had met during a case a year before. He had been the first person Maggie had felt like dating since her divorce four years previously but as she could not take the witness stand and say she was involved with another witness, they'd put the relationship off. Eventually the realness of what they had felt faded into the past and the potential of what they could be had withered under the long wait until trial. She sounded resigned about it – and that worried me. She had the tendency to make work her whole life. I had started to hope for more for her. In my opinion, when Adrian Calvano is your closest friend and your partner, you are in trouble. I knew Maggie didn't like people to get close to her, but she was too young to go through life alone and way too supportive of others to not know what it felt like to have others want to support her.

‘You'll just have to date enough people for the two of us,' Maggie was telling Calvano. ‘It's a sacrifice, I know. But you're up to it.'

‘Are you being sarcastic?' Calvano asked. ‘Because you're not usually sarcastic and it indicates a level of bitterness about my love life I did not realize you had.'

Maggie smiled. ‘I was only being half sarcastic. Please, date away. I wish you the best of luck.'

‘Do you believe in all that stuff the husband was saying?' Calvano asked. ‘The part about true love and seeing someone and knowing instantly that they were meant for you?'

‘Maybe. But I don't hold out much hope that it's going to happen to me.'

‘Why do you say that?' Calvano asked. ‘Any guy would be lucky to have you.'

‘You know, Adrian, that is so sweet. I will say this for you – you're a gentlemen. But my choices in love so far in life have proved to be disastrous and I hate making mistakes, so I prefer to avoid it if at all possible.'

‘That's terrible,' Calvano declared, shaking his head. ‘How can you work all the cases we work and see all the things we see, and not believe in something good to counteract it?'

‘I didn't say I didn't believe in love,' Maggie corrected him. ‘I just don't believe it for myself.' She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘What about you, Adrian? You go out with an awful lot of women. I'm guessing you haven't been hit by the thunderbolt yet?'

‘I might have been hit by the thunderbolt. She just wasn't hit by one in return.'

‘Seriously? The way all those women throw themselves at you, you're telling me you have never really been truly, madly, deeply in love?'

Calvano was just about to answer when Maggie screamed, ‘Son of a bitch!' and slammed on the brakes.

Calvano lurched toward the dashboard and stopped himself just in time. ‘What the hell, Gunn?' he complained.

Maggie didn't hear him. She was staring at a well-muscled man with feathered brown hair and that kind of square jaw I thought only existed on cartoon superheroes. He was directing a camera crew down the sidewalk toward the front doors of the station. The guy was handsome in that weird way that makes him almost uncomfortable to be around because you can't help but think he is either shallow or, possibly, plastic.

Maggie was staring at the man with an expression I could not decipher. Not admiration, that much I knew, because I could feel the turmoil in her roiling at the sight of him. It was more like an explosion of emotions – anger, sadness, confusion and more. I had never seen her so rattled.