Desolate Angel (20 page)

Danny was staring at Hayes. “I never thought of it that way,” he said.

“Well, you should,” Hayes explained. “I offer the waitress as a case in point. Women spend their entire lives trying to tear men down. That’s what they’re wired to do. They’re weak and they’re helpless and they’re angry at us for being the stronger sex. So they spend their lives trying to destroy us.”

When Danny looked doubtful, Hayes stepped up the pressure. “Just look at your own life. I’m betting there’s a woman there somewhere. Someone who used you, took your money, enjoyed her own life without a thought to getting a job, then left you when things got tough and you needed her. She walked away and manipulated the courts and the system to bleed you dry. Am I right?”

Danny had grown still and his eyes were far away. A silence descended. I could hear the clock on the wall ticking. I could hear Danny’s heart beating. The air had grown thin and every object in the room seemed to appear in ultra-relief. My hearing became acute. I could understand conversations on the other side of the room, I could hear the clink of pans in the kitchen.

It was as if the entire universe was swirling around the eye of a hurricane, and I sat right in the middle of that eye, watching a man weigh his soul. His very salvation balanced on the edge of a razor and the rest of his life depended on what he now chose.

“Detective Bonaventura?” Hayes asked, his voice sounding kind. “I apologize sincerely. Did I hit a nerve?”

Danny shook his head as if to free himself from the past. “No. I was just thinking.” He looked up at Hayes. “I think I have a way to find out when Bobby Daniels gets released from prison.”

“Excellent.” When Hayes smiled, a darkness descended over me. Danny had chosen. Danny was lost. “Absolutely excellent.”

Chapter 21

I spent the rest of the night outside the Hayes house, watching to see if he would go out in search of someone to take his frustrations out on. The next morning, I went in search of Danny, knowing that Alan Hayes would not hesitate to start using him. I had no success. He did not show up for work and I could not find him at any of the usual bars. I backtracked through my memory for every sorry dive we had ever sought refuge in and checked them out. No dice. And though he had been estranged from his family for years, I even stopped by the house where Danny’s ex-wife and his son still lived. The yard was in disarray and the house looked neglected. I knew Barbara was working two jobs to keep her and Danny Jr. afloat. I guess some things just had to slide.

It made me sad to see the deterioration of the yard, a once-tidy lawn where we had sat on summer nights, grilling steaks and raising beers to the future, boasting about our latest successes in solving a case. Danny’s life had slid into the bottle right before his divorce and drowned in it soon after. But I could not pinpoint exactly where it had all gone wrong for me, when my life had taken the last, irrevocable wrong turn. Somehow, when I was not looking, it just had. Perhaps that was just the way it was, that no one ever recognized a moment for what it was—and perhaps it was kinder that we were allowed to hold on to our illusions for just a little bit longer after the point of no return.

I know it had happened to Danny, too, that his life had slipped away from him when he wasn’t looking and that he drank to stave off the realization that it was now too late to get it back—and that nothing would turn out as he had planned. But now? It was one thing to give up on your own life. It was another to destroy the lives of others because you were angry about your own. Oh, it was far worse. Nothing good would come of this. Nothing.

I watched the empty house for a few hours, remembering what had been. A woodpecker lived high in a tree next door and kept flying down to test the tin pipe that dangled from the overflowing gutters to the ground. With a
rat-tat-tat
, he’d probe the metal, fly off indignantly, only to return and try again. I could not decide whether I admired his perseverance or thought he was the stupidest damn bird I had ever seen.

Eventually, I gave up and wandered over to the apartment complex where Danny had rented a unit after his wife kicked him out. Though no one was home, baby paraphernalia and college books were scattered over every available surface of the four-room apartment, telling me that Danny had moved on and other tenants taken his place. I examined a terry-cloth duckling that a chubby fist had flung to the floor. The orange bill was frayed from where it had been gnawed on by tiny baby teeth. It pierced my heart. One of my sons had a duckling just like it when he was a baby. I remembered using it to scrub him in the tub at night. Yet I could not remember which son it had been. How was it possible to forget such an important thing as that?

Enough of the past. I had to keep my mind on the present. I had to keep my mind on the case. Maggie was in danger.

Why would Danny be so willing to hurt Maggie? Why would he be so willing to work with Alan Hayes? Surely it wasn’t because of her rejection of his clumsy advances. The way Danny drank, the terrible care he took of his body—I don’t think he had actually felt desire for anything but another shot of whiskey in years. And though his pride may have taken a hit, he lacked the energy to follow through on defending its honor. I was certain of that.

And did he really care about the Hayes case and being proved wrong? I was certain he had not cared about it even back when it was new. Why would he care about it now? What did he hope to gain? The past? Oh, Danny—to think you could return to the past and reclaim it in some way. Only someone who had given up on the present would ever think in such terms.

I thought back to the days when we had first investigated the murder of Alissa Hayes. Neither Danny nor I had been in good shape; we were both beginning our final slides into the bottle. Danny was still reeling from the breakup of his family, though it had happened a good five years before. And I’d had my own excuse for drinking then, as well, though I could hardly remember the details. It was a promotion of some sort that I had coveted in the more sober recesses of my heart and not gotten. Of course, looking back, I was barely holding on to my present job at the time. There was no way anyone would ever have seriously considered me for more. But we have such power to delude ourselves and I had been deep into delusions back then.

With neither one of us sober or focused enough to work the Hayes case properly, we had simply followed the path of least resistance, one that had ended in an innocent man sitting in a jail cell. Yet, that was neither the first nor would it be the last case of injustice caused by incompetence, or even by our incompetence. It wasn’t like Danny had intentionally steered us wrong or had anything to do with Alissa’s death.

So why would he want to stop Maggie from doing her job?

I had no way to find Danny to ask him, no way to move forward in figuring out what it all meant. And so I returned to Maggie for the afternoon. She would have someone to watch over her.

Maggie was working furiously on a warrant application, entering paragraph after paragraph into the computer. A cold cup of coffee and forgotten salad sat unnoticed beside her as the hours passed. Occasionally, she would pick up the phone and speak to Peggy upstairs in the lab, double-checking the spelling of some of the more technical terms before entering them into her report.

By three o’clock she was ready to submit the report to Gonzales. She walked it upstairs herself. Seeing her approach, he waved her inside. I followed like an invisible puppy, watching the two of them intently, wondering if Danny’s suspicions had been right, fearing they had something going on.

But Gonzales did not give her a second glance when he took the papers from her. There was nothing between them but professional respect. I was ashamed to have thought like Danny, even if for only a second.

Gonzales read through the application and the file beneath it quickly, frowning the entire time. When he was done, he stared at Maggie intently.

“What?” she asked defensively, her fatigue starting to show.

“Where’s Bonaventura?” he asked. “He’s AWOL and I’m pissed off about it. When’s the last time you saw him?”

“Last night,” she said, still protecting Danny. She would not tell Gonzales about how Danny had barged in on her visit to the Hayes house. She would not betray the brotherhood, even if the brothers did not consider her fully one of their own. “We went out to dinner,” she explained. “I thought I might be able to get something out of him about the case.”

Gonzales looked skeptical.

“I know,” Maggie added. “It was stupid. He had nothing to give me. I’m not sure he even remembers the case. And he was plowed.”

“Did he try to put the moves on you?” Gonzales asked abruptly.

Maggie looked shocked.

“I’m asking for a reason, Gunn,” he reassured her. “I’ve had complaints about him from other women in the department.”

She shrugged it off. “It’s not anything I can’t handle.”

Gonzales shook his head, disgusted. “He’s a human train wreck and he’s not going to stop until he’s taken others down with him. But if I can him now, I lose the respect of one hundred and forty fellow officers.”

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

“So what did he have to say about the case?” Gonzales asked. “Did he happen to explain how they ended up putting the wrong man in jail?”

Maggie suppressed a smile at his sarcasm “No, sir. Basically, he tried to put the blame all on Fahey.”

“He would,” Gonzales said. “But don’t believe it. Fahey let the bottle get the best of him his last couple of years, but inside he still had something left. Did you know that he gave me a run for my money in the academy? He could have been a great cop. He could have been sitting here where I am if things had been just a little bit different.”

I felt a jolt of adrenaline, as I always did when I heard someone mention my name. It always made me realize anew that I had once been among them, living as one of them. It seemed a thousand lifetimes ago.

Gonzales tapped the file with a fingertip. “You’ve left some things out of this. Most requests like this summarize the first investigation more . . . critically, shall we say? They usually provide more evidence of sloppiness.”

Maggie shrugged. “Just trying to save you some trouble slogging through it all, sir.”

“How bad was it?” he asked. “Just tell me.”

“They were . . .” She hesitated and I loved her for it. “They were sloppy, sir.”

“How sloppy?”

“Very sloppy.”

“Who’s fault was it? Fahey or Bonaventura?”

“Sir, you’re asking me to judge a dead man.”

“Just tell me.”

“You’re right about Fahey. He was better on his end, but maybe moved too quickly with his suspicions. Bonaventura was supposed to take the family, but by the time he got around to it, the boyfriend was already in custody and both of them stopped looking into any other alternatives at all.”

“And you really think the girl’s father has something to do with this?”

“Sir, it’s not Bobby Daniels. He’s been in prison and the murders are identical. Alan Hayes is a common link between the two girls—I checked and he lied about not knowing Vicky Meeks. She monitored a class he taught last summer. Plus he is frequently around the kind of lapidary dust we found on both victims, he knows the areas well where both bodies were found, and besides all of that, something is very wrong in the Hayes house. You know that I can’t put a hunch in the report, but if you even walked in the front door, you’d know there was something wrong in that family. I promise you. At the very least, we need to look into it.”

“Anything in his past?” Gonzales asked.

“Nothing provable yet. But girls went missing from the three colleges where he taught before coming here. At the same time he was living in each area.”

“Statistically speaking?”

“Statistically speaking, at a rate well above what you would expect in a college town. And I’m still waiting on some jurisdictions to get back to me.”

“His employers?”

“It’s hard to get anything out of them. They’re afraid of lawsuits. But he’s bounced around a lot, been denied tenure twice, and left one college before the issue even came up. That’s a bit odd. I’m hoping someone outside human resources will crack and give me something off the record. I’m still working on it. I have a contact inside one chancellor’s office. If she gives the go-ahead, I’ll hear something next week. All I can get from them so far is that it was a student complaint about unprofessional conduct that led to his leaving.”

“Okay then,” Gonzales conceded, having the sense to trust a good cop when he met one. “You’ve given me enough to push the search warrant through. O’Malley will approve it. It’s yours.” He looked up at her more kindly. “How’s your father doing?”

So he knew her personally after all.

“Better, sir. He gets out every now and then. That’s progress.”