Blood Of Angels (8 page)

At the entrance to the park, Jim pulled over. A gateway affair — two grey metal poles with a board held between them over trailer height — confirmed this was indeed Benboro Park and not Bel Air or heaven or the best of all possible worlds. On the other side, the road split. In the centre of the division was a trailer painted the same red as the sign on the main road. This was Site No. 1, and in it lived the woman who ran the park. Hannah, her name was. Assuming she was still alive.

He got out of the car. The clouds were heavier now, charcoal and frosted and pregnant, but the rain had still not begun to fall. Jim hoped it would sooner or later, if only for the sake of the old boys perched at the counter in Marsha's, to whom it had sounded like a big deal. Though it would spoil the fun of a little girl he now saw, playing by herself in the road outside a trailer down the right-hand fork. She was singing to herself, quietly. It was a nice sound.

As he walked over to No. 1 he reminded himself of the story he'd told long ago. He had just gone through a long and arduous divorce, that's right, and this was everything he'd been able to save for himself. Wasn't much, but it had sentimental value. He wanted it somewhere safe, away from lawyers and their familiars. He was on his way down to Miami. Friend of his said he might be able to get him a job in a hotel there. Failing that, he might head for Arizona, or Nevada, try his luck further west.

He knocked on the door, listening to the sounds of television from inside. Before very long the door was opened.

'Yessir?'

It was the woman he remembered. Additional years of pickling in a trailer full of cigarette smoke had turned her skin the non-colour of a once-white dishcloth. Dry, grey-brown hair was pulled into a ragged ponytail that said she knew she looked like shit, and honestly didn't care.

'Hi,' Jim said, smiling broadly. 'Hannah, right? Don't know if you remember me?'

'Can't say that I do, no. You're not from the park.'

'That's right. I rented storage space from you a little while ago. I need to get to it.'

'Okay,' she said. 'What's the number?'

'Seventeen,' Jim said, keeping his voice steady.

She wandered off towards a cataclysmically untidy office area in back. This was the point, Jim knew, where things could get sticky. He waited just outside the trailer, eyes on the road. The little girl had disappeared.

A couple of minutes later Hannah came back. 'Little while ago is right,' she said. 'It's been twelve years. You only left enough for five.'

'I got held up,' he said.

She nodded. 'You the fellow who was heading off to Australia?'

'Miami. That's right.'

'No good?'

'It's okay. Kind of hot.'

'Hot? Don't talk to me about hot. This summer was a bitch, and it still ain't rained. You owe me money.'

He gave her the bundle of bills he had prepared. She counted it.

'I haven't allowed for inflation.'

She laughed. 'Ain't no inflation round here. We can't afford it.'

Jim smiled. 'I want it for another year, if that's okay.'

'All right by me, and I see the money's here.' She handed him a small, rusty key. 'Goodnight. Leave the key on the step.'

Then the door was shut, and Jim was finished.

As he drove through the park, heading for the far side, he was bemused at how easy it had been. He had arrived late, that night twelve years ago, and in an intense frame of mind. His cover story sucked, and yet Hannah had actually given him a ride back to Benboro so he could catch a bus for Miami. He had booked five years and then disappeared for over twice as long. You'd have thought she would be… well, whatever. He'd evidently just made a good choice, that was all, divining correctly that storage turnover out here would not be high. Or perhaps she'd just sold his belongings long ago and was sitting in her trailer now, door bolted, laughing over his money.

He parked outside the third of the big sheds, and walked along to the fifth big door. He used the key to unlock it, and went inside.

Space 17 was a simple rectangle partitioned off within the big interior, ten feet wide by twenty deep. It was immediately evident that it still held what Jim had left behind.

He pulled the cover off and let it fall to the ground. Then just stood and looked at it for a moment. He had meant to be businesslike about this, but he could not help but pause.

For something that looked so luminous, the object in Space 17 was remarkably prosaic. It was an old VW camper van, in white: a vehicle in neither good nor bad enough condition to draw the eye. There was the big window in front, for optimum visibility. None in the sides. The quarter-height one in back was obscured by a thick white blind. You couldn't see the interior but it held a minuscule kitchenette and a tiny divided-off sleeping area at the back which ran the width of the van, and was just about feasible if you weren't too tall and didn't mind lying on your side and drawing your legs up a little. It was everything a travelling man needed. This particular travelling man, anyhow.

Jim walked back to his car and got the two bags out. He opened his small suitcase, put his hand into the shoebox, and pulled out the old set of car keys. Felt funny with them in his hands, with the worn plastic fob, a free gift advertising a school craft fair eighteen years ago. He was becalmed by it for a moment, remembering that afternoon, recalling buying it. Another life.

Back in Space 17 he unlocked the camper's driver-side door and threw the lighter bag across to the passenger seat. Then he carried the heavy bag to the back of the vehicle. He drained the small amount of gas still in the tank and replaced it with new. He removed the van's battery and swapped it with the one in the second bag, then carried the dead one back outside and stowed it in the trunk of the car. Walked back to the van.

It was time to see. Could be the electrics had gotten damp. The oil would have settled. It had been a very long time.

He climbed in the front, feeling the seat settle under him like an old friend. Stuck the key in and turned it without ceremony.

A click, and nothing.

Turned it again. The van coughed, farted, and then chugged gamely into life. Jim shook his head fondly, not the first person to admire the efficiency of Volkswagen's engineers.

'Welcome back, old horse,' he said.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Ten minutes later he placed the key on the step of Site No. 1 and walked back to the quietly chugging van. He sat in the front and waited while a middle-aged couple wandered across the road. Neither gave him a second glance. A more-or-less white van. Whatever. And of course Jim was over sixty now, and men of that age are seldom assumed to be up to much. The car he had arrived in was in Space 17, covered with the tarp. Inside it were the clothes Jim had been wearing. He was now dressed in black jeans and a faded denim shirt, purchased at the outlet mall. Not the kind of thing Jim Westlake wore. More the style of someone called James Kyle, a teacher and householder and all-round regular guy.

The little girl was back out in the street again, still playing by herself. Jim frowned. Someone should be keeping an eye on her. Some adult should be sitting on the step, drinking a beer if necessary, but keeping her within view. The people who lived in Benboro Park probably knew each other pretty well but that wouldn't always be enough. It was easy for bad things to befall the young. Too easy. The ease of it was depressing. The world should be organized so that the innocent and unblemished remained so, should be configured and maintained so that every person lived their span and got to its end thinking, 'Well actually, that wasn't so bad.' How often did it work that way? Everyone spent their time staring in the wrong directions. Instead of caring about corner offices and tidy lawns, about this season's hot shoe style or diet or celebrity; instead of obsessing over what other people think of them or over what they thought about themselves, people should be paying attention to other people, to each other's kids and parents and wives and pets. They should be dedicating themselves to protecting these magical things, the living loved ones, because only when something is gone or broken do you realize how wondrous and unique its completeness was. But people didn't consider this ahead of time, because they were stupid. They didn't, because life holds many distractions. They didn't, just because.

It was one of the reasons he had done what he did, in the old days. To show them what they should be caring about. To commune with the essential, the one. Or so he had told himself, occasionally: but he told himself a lot of stuff back then and most of it wasn't true. In that regard he had been just like everybody else. Inside, he thought, we are all two people, lying to each other. The only difference is the size and deadliness of the falsehoods we tell.

Within a few miles the van had warmed up well, and seemed to be enjoying being back on the road. Jim retraced his route until he could rejoin 321, and then continued north into the twilight, storm clouds still following after.

Nina stood in Raynor's Wood wishing the men would be quiet so she could concentrate. She had spent the morning in the Thornton police department being briefed and looking at endless black-and-white photographs of a dead man who had been found six feet from her current position. Much of this had been superfluous. After Olbrich had left them to head back to Los Angeles, she and Monroe had done little on the journey east but talk about the case. She was prepped. There were not too many facts to go around. The more you repeated them the more they bloated, like bread left out in the rain, swollen and fundamentally substanceless. Monroe was now standing twenty feet away down by the stream with a gaggle of cops, rehearsing the same stuff. She tried to tune him out but immediately began to hear another voice, this one much closer.

'See the bushes? That's how come nobody saw it earlier.'

The speaker was Joe Reidel, a stocky young homicide detective. He was one of a number of cops out of the Cathridge County Sheriff's office who'd been in Thornton working the case since the previous morning. The local police did not seem to resent the CID presence at all. They seemed cool about the FBI too, though it had been Reidel who'd initiated the contact. It was easy to gain the impression that this town didn't much like having dead bodies turning up, and would be happy for someone else to make the problem go away. Reidel was the only man who had not yet told Nina the facts his own way, given them his own special spin. Maybe if she let him do so then they'd all
shut up
and let her get on with thinking her own thoughts.

'I see,' she said. Raynor's Wood curled around the north side of the town. A flat stream ran through the middle of it and much of the ground on either side was prone to bogginess, settling out into still pools above which clouds of midges hung. The body had been found half-in and half-out of one of these, a few yards to the side of an odd hump in the ground. A stand of bushes had obscured it from the path down by the stream, and Nina dutifully stood and observed this conjunction for a moment. 'Still — not a major attempt to hide the body.'

'No. And this is a popular walk.' Reidel pointed up the rise to where the wood thinned. There was a small parking lot at the top. 'They don't actually call it "Lovers' Lane", but that's what it's for.'

'Though it's actually not as nice as all that.'

'It's a small town. I guess you work with what you've got.'

'Still no sign of the guy's clothes? No blood?'

'Nope.' The detective indicated around. 'It's a tough scene because of the leaves and twigs and general forest crapola, but I'm pretty sure it was undisturbed before our scene-of-crime techs got on it. The couple who found the body kept well clear.'

'Forensics on the stab wounds in the chest and stomach indicate the victim was dressed at the time of death?'

'Very likely. Fibre traces in several of them. Though there are two in the groin area which are notably clean. So maybe…'

'… a sex act was under way when the attack started. Right.'

Nina reached into the envelope under her arm and pulled out two of the pictures of the victim
in situ.
The first was a general view, largely replicating, she supposed, the sight the discovering couple had come upon. A body, in a wood at twilight. It was large and pale and just lying there. It was so incongruous that at first you barely registered its sex, though the body was completely naked. It was lying on its back, legs out sturdily straight. There were cut marks over its belly and chest. It was a male chest.

The second picture was from closer in. It showed that the victim's head was partly under water, only the chin and nose breaking the surface. The eyes were open under the surface, and the mouth too. The photo was sharply focused and you could see how the hairless parts of the body had a clammy-looking texture, like a piece of raw meat which had been lying on the counter too long. The body's left arm was out to the side, as if in sleep. The right was cocked upwards slightly, breaking the water like a fallen branch. There was nothing at the end of it.

'No sign of the hand yet?'

Reidel shook his head ponderously. He did not have the air of a man who was going to wander off anytime soon.

'Clean, too,' Nina said. 'Seventeen stab wounds, plus the amputation. Yet the body is not smeared with blood. And no rain the night before, or during the day until it was found.'

'Which suggests the victim was murdered elsewhere, stripped and mutilated, and then brought here. Maybe.'

'Time of death sometime the night before last?'

'Correct. Body dumped then too, the pathologist thinks, determined by the relative density of bugs and micro-organisms on it. And the amputation was postmortem. Which helps with the lack of blood. Leave it until the guy's dead to cut off his hand, it's a lot less messy.'

'Though still hard work,' Nina said. She flicked through the notes once more. Hand removed with two or three chops from something heavy and sharp, rather than a sawing action. Still waiting for a full blood workup to come back. 'And the nearest place you can park is that lot up the slope, correct? Long way to carry a two-hundred-pound body. Especially for a woman.'