Avenging Angel (13 page)

Wager hadn’t seen the papers, but he didn’t waste time saying so. If anything in them was important Doyle would repeat it sooner or later.

“I’m trying to keep the lid on this thing until we have some kind of case. So I don’t want any of you people talking to reporters. Be polite”; his blue eyes rested on Wager. “But refer all questions to me. I don’t want anything coming down like all that crap in Atlanta, with newsmen tripping the police and police agencies stumbling over each other’s jurisdiction.”

“Not to mention each other’s asses,” muttered Ross.

“Everything you hear in this room,” Doyle continued, “keep it confidential. And send the reporters to me—it’s one of the reasons I get such a munificent salary.”

Golding chuckled loudly.

“All right, Phil. Tell us what you’ve come up with so far.”

Ross cleared his throat and leafed back through the folded sheets of the tablet until he came to item one. “We have eleven victims, three adult women, the rest apparently juveniles ranging in age from maybe a year to approximately fifteen—five girls and three boys. The oldest was a girl, the youngest a boy. All were shot at close range by a large-caliber handgun, apparently a single weapon. I suspect the killers used a silencer since none of the neighbors remembered hearing shots, and that was a lot of shooting. Since silencers are hard to get, that supports the single-gun theory. Baird guesses they were killed maybe ten days ago, but the coroner hasn’t had a chance to analyze the stomach contents, so we don’t yet know what time of day. We figure there was more than one killer, since the shootings took place all at approximately the same time, and apparently nobody tried to escape. To judge by the location of the bodies, they were divided up into two groups. Let me draw this floor plan for you.”

He went to the portable blackboard and, referring to his notes, sketched the rooms of the small house and its basement, placing X’s for each of the bodies. “Now this isn’t exact, but it’s close enough, okay?”

“Can you give us your reconstruction?” Doyle asked.

“Yessir. We figure it’s likely one killer was at the back door when the other or others knocked at the front. There was no sign of forced entry, except for Wager’s little lock-picking trick. If the killer effected entry that way, any evidence of it has been violated.”

“You think I should have kicked down the door, Ross?”

“We’ll get to Gabe’s part later. Go on, Phil.”

“Yessir. Anyway, it looks like the victims let the killer or killers in through the front door. Whereupon the best guess is the killer pulled a gun and let in his accomplice or accomplices. No one made a run for it,” he explained again to the men, who sat silently at the table looking at the chalk sketch. “If they hadn’t had the exits covered somebody out of all those people would have made a run for the back door or a window.”

“I agree. Go on.”

“We think they then took the three adult women and sat them in the living room under guard, while an accomplice took the older children to the downstairs bathroom, which has no windows or other exit. Who got shot first, I don’t know. But after the women were killed, and maybe the ones in the bathroom, the killers went through the bedrooms shooting the three littlest kids, who were sleeping there.” He turned from pointing at those X’s. “That place was like a dormitory—double, triple bunks everywhere. I don’t know how in hell that many people lived in a house that size without going nuts. Anyway, we spent the whole goddamn day in that place marking and measuring, and we still don’t have too much. Baird and his people are doing what they can with ballistics and fingerprints; the first coroner’s reports should be coming in sometime tonight.” Ross lifted the lapel of his coat and sniffed, making a sick face. “The goddamn smell—”

“Did you find any notes?” Wager asked. “A drawing of an angel with a sword?”

Ross looked down the table. “Your killer angel? Only the one you saw, Wager. Here, we took a picture of it.” He passed along a Polaroid color photograph of the living-room wall. Daubed in brown streaks of dried blood and taller than a standing man, the familiar spread-winged angel towered over the flung body of a woman. Gazing at the picture, Wager saw what he hadn’t had time to notice in his hasty tour through the room before calling in the homicides: this angel had a face. It was dominated by two round circles for eyes, and in the center of each startled ring was a single dot of blood—the pupils of an enraged, maddened stare.

“As you know from the papers, they’re calling it the ‘angel of death’ murders, and they’re doing their best to scare people shitless about it.”

Munn crunched another tablet. “It scares hell out of me, Chief. Anybody killing women and children and decorating the walls with their blood, they got to be maniacs.”

“I won’t argue that. But Wager has some information that’ll tell us what kind of maniacs. It’s what sent him to that address in the first place, and it was a good piece of detective work. But next time, call Technical Assistance; don’t use a lock pick. Go ahead—fill them in.”

Wager was tired of telling the same story over and over and getting the same startled exclamations, “polygamy?” and “avenging angels?” But it was necessary and he did his best to hold his temper even when Golding went off on some half-assed dissertation about religious mania and a modern search for values. It didn’t have one damn thing to do with finding out who butchered eleven women and children.

“So other than this drawing, you found nothing to link the Mueller killing to the others?” Doyle asked to get the talk back to the subject.

“No, sir. I also called Orvis down in Pueblo and brought him up to date, but he still doesn’t have an address for his victim. I’d like to look through any letters or documents that Ross and Devereaux find—these people kept in touch with each other, and I suspect the killers knew that, too.”

“Good God,” muttered Axton. “Not another houseful.”

Doyle made a note on a yellow pad.

Devereaux, who had been murmuring with Ross, caught Wager’s eye. “We didn’t have time to go through everything in the house, Gabe—we went after the more fragile evidence first. But the drawers we did look in were messed up. I think you’re right—I think the killers were looking for some kind of lead to the Pueblo victim, and they obviously found it.”

Ross added, “Baird’s fingerprinting the whole house; with that many people, there’s prints everywhere. He told me it’ll take him all day tomorrow just to get prints from the victims. The kids’, especially, had decayed pretty bad, and he says it’ll take time to build them up. Anyway, he’s still out there dusting the drawers and contents. Probably be half the night before he’ll let us go through them.”

Wager thought a moment. “What about telephone records? With a deuces tecum, we can subpoena a list of long-distance numbers billed to that phone.”

“We could,” said Ross. “And in fact I already thought of that. But one problem, Wager: no phone.”

“All right,” said Doyle. “This is obviously—”

The pop of every transmitter in the room interrupted him as the dispatcher called for the homicide officer on duty. “X-86, you have a 10-32 and a possible victim at Colfax and Emerson. Officers at the scene.”

Munn groaned and answered that he was on his way.

Golding, on the same shift, quickly gathered his notes. “They’re singing my song—sorry, Chief.” And he was out the door behind Munn.

“Obviously,” the Bulldog continued, “this is a case whose brutality makes it especially important. The mayor’s asked for and received the governor’s approval for a statewide task force to pursue the perpetrators. I will head that task force, DPD Homicide will provide the manpower. The attorney general’s office will effect liaison with any and all local agencies we may be led into contact with. We have been assured that every district attorney will cooperate fully in this investigation. The governor has also asked the FBI to provide assistance in case interstate flight is involved, and he has been assured by neighboring states of the fullest cooperation of their agencies if we need it. We will go after these people as priority one. However, we will not let up on our other duties. It means extra work; it means more overtime if you’re willing to give it. With the—ah—union rules, of course, I can’t demand that. But I will find ways of—ah—compensating those who donate. Those who do not will not in any way be penalized, of course.”

That was for Ross, the union rep for this division. Doyle went on to detail the assignments for the remaining detectives, most of which they had thought of anyway. Except maybe for Ziegler, whose Bic pen scratched busily: question every household along both sides of the street; nontechnical assistance for Baird’s understaffed lab people; a central desk for information gathering and communications; visits to every grocery store or clothing store or medical center or pharmacy where the victims might have traded. Anything else that might fill in the routines of the victims’ last day—and with it, anybody who might have seemed interested in them.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL
the next morning, during one of those long, desultory stretches that usually come between two and four, that Wager had a chance to pay attention to the itch that had pestered him even while he sat in the car with Chief Doyle. The two of them had watched the sheeted figures carried out past the crowd of neighbors, the cars slowing to a halt at the distant intersection, the faces mute with shock … something about those faces … That crowded scene had been unlike the vacant streets Wager and Axton were cruising now, where the patrol car’s headlights moved through the dark like prodding fingers touching nothing … Silent and preoccupied, Wager drove, the unmarked car creaking loudly as it bounced across the dips of intersections; Axton, equally silent, gazed at the lights sliding past. Finally he proved to Wager that, as so often in the past, they had been mulling over the same thing: “I still can’t believe it—women, children, slaughtered like that. And for what reason?”

“The killers are God’s angels,” said Wager. “They go around doing favors for God.”

Axton’s thin whistle rode over the sporadic queries and replies on the radio.

“Don’t you think, Gabe, that if the killers had found an address leading them to Pueblo we’d have heard about it by now?”

“If I hadn’t known where to look, the Beauchamp family might still be rotting there.”

“Yeah. You’re right. Crap.” Then Max added, “The Kruse family probably know how to hide as well as the Beauchamps. For all the good it did them.”

Which is what sharpened the little itch: the Beauchamps had been good at hiding. Clever people. In the first place, they were adept at masking their way of life from even their closest neighbors; and they were practiced at evading the hunters they knew were on their trail. Yet they had kept in touch with the others—they wrote to Zenas Winston, perhaps called the Kruses in Pueblo from pay phones. They must have kept in touch with the Kruses down there because the killers had found something to lead them as far as Kruse himself. Letters—the mailman with his little blue and white cart putting from house to house and stopping to stare with the rest of the neighborhood at the ambulances and the line of sheeted figures. The Beauchamps must have written letters and received letters, but they stayed hidden …

“You in a hurry to get home after work?”

“Why?” asked Max.

“Post box,” said Wager. “If I was Beauchamp and wanted to be sure nobody knew where to find my family I’d use a post office box for an address.”

Axton heaved a deep breath of agreement. “Yeah. And under a different name!” Then, “Central Post Office?”

“We can start there.”

They did, after turning the watch over to Ross and Devereaux, who were on their way out to the Beauchamp neighborhood to begin canvassing for any witnesses they had not yet interviewed.

“You don’t want to tell Ross where we’re going?” Max asked innocently.

“The case started with us,” said Wager.

“Right,” said Max. “And them with brains gets the gains.”

The Central Post Office was not far, but the drive through heavy morning traffic, tangled by the streets blocked for construction of the new downtown mall, took over half an hour. By the time they arrived at the Greek-style building with its stone lions and columns, lines of people had formed in front of slow-moving clerks, and Axton groaned, “Christ, it’ll take all day.”

“The hell it will. We’ve already put in a day’s work.” He led Max past the mail windows and the long wall of post boxes toward a small corridor bearing the sign SUPERINTENDENT. In an anteroom a secretary looked up without smiling.

“Yes?”

Wager flashed his badge. “We’d like permission to show this photograph to your clerks. It’s a homicide victim.”

“Well I certainly can’t give that kind of permission!”

“Yes, ma’am.” Axton smiled. “But what about the superintendent?”

“He’s not in yet.”

They waited, Wager feeling both the night’s weariness and his anger rise as the slow minutes passed. At a quarter past nine the superintendent came in, a florid man who assumed that any new face in his office meant one more problem he could do without. “My clerks? You want every one of my clerks to see if they recognize this guy?”

“It’s related to that mass murder in the papers yesterday—the women and children,” said Wager.

“I don’t care if it’s related to World War III, those people out there are busy. And,” he pointed out, “this here’s a federal building, and you’re not the FBI.”

“The FBI has offered to help if we need it.” Wager himself heard the Spanish lilt in his voice. “But I wouldn’t want to call them down here just because you did not cooperate on a routine request. They’ll have reports to file, letters of explanation. The kind of thing that goes in personnel records.”

“I don’t give a damn—”

“All we need to know,” interrupted Axton gently, “is if anyone remembers renting a box to this man.”

“That’s all you want? Hell, you don’t need to pester all my clerks for that—we got only two windows that rent boxes. Next time say what you want.” After a brief, angry silence he flapped a hand at his secretary. “Take them down there, Ann.” The door to the inner office slammed shut behind him. She eyed Wager and Axton as if they had spoiled the office picnic. “Follow me.”