Angel Fire (26 page)

“Oh my god,” Lydia said.

“What?”

“I was just thinking, when you lose someone you love, if feels like someone has taken your heart.”

“Okay …” he answered, not sure where she was going.

“Remember how we were talking about what that meant? To lose your heart or to have your heart taken?”

“Yeah. So you’re saying maybe the killer lost someone close to him?”

“Right. And maybe that’s why he wants vengeance.”

“Against whom, though?”

She remembered something Juno had said to her on the first day they spoke. He’d said,
“There are many people who believe that I have the power to heal. But there are many that disbelieve it—vehemently. These types of people have perpetrated acts of violence against me and this church in the past, may God forgive them.”

“What if Juno tried to heal whoever it was … but couldn’t?”

W
hen Juno awoke that morning, he knew something was wrong. He lay still in his bed and listened to the air. There was a stillness
like the pause before speech, as if the church had taken in a long breath and was holding it. He had been loath to move, feeling that once his feet touched the floor, nothing would ever be the same again.

As he went about his morning routine, feelings crept up on him, rose within him like a tide. Emotions he had rarely known seared through him—fear, and an unspeakable sadness. He tried to ignore them and go about the business of the morning. The door to his uncle’s room was closed, and Juno almost knocked but he hated to disturb the priest, thinking he might be preparing for mass.

He could feel as he entered the church that the side door to the garden had been left open. He could feel the outside air inside, and smelled the sweet scent of the flowers from the garden. He walked to the doorway but could not bring himself to step outside, remembering when he had fallen in the blood just weeks before. He pulled the door closed and walked to the altar, sat on the stool there to practice his guitar.

So soothed and rapt was he by his own playing that he almost didn’t hear the phone ring back in the office. He thought certainly by the time he reached it, the caller would have hung up, but when he answered, Lydia was on the line.

“Juno?”

“Yes, Lydia, hello.”

“Juno, I have a question for you. The boy you last attempted to heal, what was his name?”

“It seems like a long time ago,” he answered.

“I saw the name when I was searching the Internet before all this started, but I can’t remember it now. Do you recall it?”

“Yes, yes, it was … Robbie. Robbie Hugo.”

“Was he the only person you tried to heal that died?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to his parents?”

“Well, his mother, Jennifer, was a parishioner here. Her husband was not a religious man. I don’t remember his first name or even ever meeting him. She went to Colorado sometime after the boy died and I assume her husband went, as well.”

“Do you know anything else about them?”

“Not really. I’m sorry.”

“Juno, do you have a volunteer or parishioner at the church named Vince A. Gemiennes, someone who might not have been on the list your uncle gave us?”

“Well, I’m not sure who’s on that list. The name does sound familiar. You’ll have to ask my uncle, he’ll know better.”

“Can you get him?”

“He’s preparing for mass,” Juno answered, an odd reluctance overtaking him.

“Juno, this is pretty important.”

He knocked on his uncle’s door and when, after a moment, there was no answer, he pushed it open. “Uncle?” He walked into the room and put his hand on the bed which was made and cold as ice.

He returned to the phone. “Lydia, he’s not here. It’s very odd.”

“Okay, Juno, there should be a squad car in front of the church. Go outside and tell them there’s a problem. If there isn’t a car out there, go inside, call 911, lock the doors, and don’t move until the police get there. Do you understand me?”

“Yes. Lydia, what’s happening?”

“Sit tight and I’ll be there as fast as I can. I just have one thing I need to do first.”

Juno ran, as best he could, twice jamming his foot against he didn’t know what. The world so familiar to him seemed
suddenly like an obstacle course where malicious, hard objects moved themselves into his path to impede his progress. When he finally reached the door, he called out for the police. But he got no answer.

S
imon Morrow was fuming. After the body found in the Savroy’s garden had been taken to the ME’s office, Morrow had come to the hospital to sit outside Benny’s room and wait for him to wake up. Retarded or not, he was involved. There was a body buried in his garden, for Christ’s sake. And that bitch had made him seem like the biggest idiot in the world for thinking Benny was a suspect. He
was
a fucking suspect. And Morrow fully intended to be the first person to get the information out of him.

He leaned his head back against the cool plaster and tried to get comfortable in one of the metal-and-vinyl, stiff-cushioned chairs that lined the waiting-room walls. In the background he could hear the quiet rushing back and forth of nurses on soft-soled shoes, the occasional tone that issued from the intercom before a doctor was paged to the ER.

He was tired. He’d barely slept last night.

He had been in the office late, sorting through old records, remembering his last few years on the job. He wanted so desperately to be the one to solve this case. He wasn’t a forensic expert or a victimologist or one of those special high-tech detectives that they had on all the TV shows these days. He was just a regular cop who came of age in the department on the street. He walked the grid, assembled the clues, and made the collar. So he’d gone through every arrest that stuck out in his mind since he’d come to New Mexico. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was forgetting something.

He remembered a time when he had been so sure of himself. No problem he couldn’t fix, no case he couldn’t solve. That was so long ago. A lot had changed.

Even after he had returned to his home and gone to bed, he had stayed awake, thinking, watching the ceiling fan rotate. He had just been drifting off as the sun started to peek in through the blinds, his wife still sleeping soundly beside him. A loud grinding noise woke him suddenly. His retired next-door neighbor was mowing the lawn at the crack of dawn for the second time in a month.
Son of a bitch
, he’d thought, knowing that any hope of sleep was gone.

“Didn’t you talk to him about that?” his wife had murmured sleepily. She had turned over to look at him and he noticed that her pale skin was creased from the way she had slept.

“Yeah, but he said he had to do it in the morning. He’s too old to mow the lawn in the heat of the day. So I suggested he get someone to do it for him. He misunderstood and thought I meant he couldn’t take care of himself. He got all pissed off.”

“We should get a caretaker. That lawn is a bear.”

“How would you know? You’ve never mowed it in all the years we’ve lived here.”

“Yeah, and you’ve never mopped a floor or cooked a meal.”

He remembered the conversation with a chuckle, as he shifted in the waiting-room chair. He snorted, “A caretaker …”

And then Simon Morrow remembered what he had forgotten.

A
s Simon Morrow was stepping into his prowler, his cellular phone rang.

“Morrow,” he answered.

“Chief, we just got a 911 call from Juno Alonzo. He says his
uncle is missing and that the squad car that was supposed to be watching the church isn’t there,” reported the desk sergeant.

“All right. Get a uniform over there and then call Jeffrey Mark and Lydia Strong and ask them to head over. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Can do, Chief.”

He hung up with a pang of guilt. No one was going to take this collar from him. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before. But it didn’t matter now, because he was going to end this thing. And it would be just him.

I
t was funny how God worked. The ignition in his van had been giving him trouble for weeks. That had been partly why he’d rented the Jeep the night he’d done God’s will for Maria Lopez. Also, he had wanted to see how smart Lydia was. She was smart all right, very smart.

He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to pull that off. He could have easily been caught that day, but he’d had faith and God had seen him through. He’d used a fake license, not a very good fake, that he’d made on his computer, and then laminated it at a Kinko’s. And the credit card … he’d actually changed his name to Vince A. Gemiennes with the social security office. He got a new credit card with that name but gave a false address, 124 Black Canyon Road. But he’d never stopped using his old name, never got a new driver’s license. He’d remembered how his wife had changed her name when they were first married but how it was ages before she changed things like her driver’s license, how her paychecks still came in her maiden name. There was never any problem.

But in the end, he’d been scared. He asked the girl if he could
see his file, said he wanted to make sure he had given her the right credit card. She just handed the folder to him because she was busy and he slipped the copies out. She hadn’t seemed especially bright, so he wasn’t worried that she would notice later. Then, when he was done with the Jeep, he just dropped it off and left in his minivan that he had parked in the airport long-term parking lot.

Then, without his even realizing, God had led him to Greg Matthew’s garage. It was the closest to his home, so he’d stopped in there because he couldn’t have the ignition being hateful that way. He had a lot to do and a long way to go and he couldn’t risk another rental. So he’d brought the minivan to be fixed. It wasn’t until Greg had come out and seen him that he realized who Greg was, the boyfriend of Shawna Fox. He didn’t know what to do; he had been very scared. He was sure that God had led him there for a purpose, but he couldn’t see why. Then God showed him the way again. When he saw Greg writing down his license-plate number, he reached for an old piece of pipe he saw leaning against the garage and neutralized the threat to his plan.

The time was almost here. He fairly quivered with the rapture of doing God’s work. Though everything had been taken from him, in the place of all that was lost he had become God’s avenger, His warrior, His angel of death.

Standing in his son’s room, he said his farewell to the place where his son had dwelled in life. A feeling of power coursed through him. He remembered the feeling from his surgery rotation as a second-year intern. The ability to save a life, the knowledge that one mistake could end a life. To have a human body sliced open, vulnerable before him, was a thrill that heightened all his senses, made him feel infallible, omnipotent. All that had been taken away from him was being returned to him now.

The room really was a masterpiece—a shrine, in a way, to his
son. The cool wind blew in through the window, billowing the baby-blue curtains and ruffling his sandy-blond hair. The air was never cool like that in rural South Carolina where he grew up. The heat was like a live thing wrapped around him, raising sweat from his brow and entering his lungs, expanding there like wet gauze. He pushed the hair back from his face. It was ugly to remember his childhood, horrible to remember what he felt like when he was ten, always angry, always afraid. He stared at his hand. It was his father’s hand, white, roped with thick blue veins, big hard knuckles like stones buried beneath thin, dry skin. He remembered his father’s touch so well, dirty and violent, but something craved nonetheless.

He rose and walked over to the tray of surgical instruments by the metal table and picked up a scalpel. Its sharp edge and what it could do made him think again of Lydia Strong. She was in his thoughts more and more. He needed her to complete his mission. Without her, all that he had done for God would mean nothing. He would let her know her role soon and she would be powerless to deny him. Because that was God’s will. He knew just the bait to draw her to him.

He walked from the room and moved slowly down the hall to the living room, where the flickering blue light from the muted television set cast an ugly strobe on the nearly empty room. There was a vague odor of beer and garbage.

He looked at his watch. It was almost eight. He slammed the door behind him as he left the house, but he didn’t lock it. After all, he wouldn’t be back.

“
O
kay, we’ll be there as soon as we can,” Jeffrey said to the cop he was speaking with on Lydia’s cell phone.

“What happened?” Lydia asked when he hung up.

“Looks like Juno wound up calling 911 to report his uncle missing like you told him to. The squad car that was supposed to be there was not. Morrow wants us to go to the church.”

“Where’s Morrow?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“We’ll go as soon as I talk to Greg. I don’t want him to find this out from someone else. I need to be the one to tell him,” she said, anxious now for Juno, as well.

They were pulling up to Greg and Joe’s Auto Repair and as soon as she saw the building, she knew something was wrong. There was an air of desertion to it. When she had come the first time, there was an aura of activity. She’d been able to hear music playing from an old radio, see lights on inside the garage, smell paint and gasoline. Today the door was closed, the lights were off, there was an unnatural quiet.

“Busy place,” said Jeffrey. “I hope he has time to see us.”

Lydia pulled her Glock from the glove compartment.

“What are you doing?”

“There’s something wrong. It’s the middle of the morning and the garage isn’t open.”

“So maybe he took the day off.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

Jeffrey unsnapped the holster on the .38 special at his waist as they stepped out of the car. Ever since things had started to heat up, he’d regretted leaving his own Glock in New York, wanting to avoid the hassle of getting it on the airplane. They walked to the garage door, which, as they got closer, Lydia could see, was ajar.