Desolate Angel (34 page)

Bobby looked at her, puzzled. “Why?”

Maggie’s fear filled the room. She knew what she was up against—and I knew she was right to fear it, because I had felt it, and I knew it had the power to snatch your soul right out of your body and smite it into cinders.

“Alan Hayes is missing,” she explained. “He hasn’t come home since we searched his house. No one knows where he’s gone. And I think your life is in danger because of him. I think he was at the Double Deuce last night.”

Bobby stared at her. “What if I remember something else that might help?”

“Then you call me,” Maggie said, handing him her card. “But don’t tell anyone else but me where you are. Do you understand?”

He nodded solemnly.

“You must protect your parents,” she explained. “They’re in danger, too. He knows your father can see through him. He’d have picked up on that. And if he hears you’re part of my investigation in any way, all of you are in danger.”

“So you do think it’s him?” Bobby said. “My father was right?”

“Yes,” Maggie said. “Your father was right. The world is full of more terrible things than anyone of us will ever know. There are people that walk this earth, who walk among us, who feed on pain and who exist solely to destroy the happiness of others.”

“I knew men like that in prison,” Bobby said softly.

But Maggie shook her head. “Not exactly. Those men are in prison because some part of them, somewhere, wanted to be caught. So they made a mistake. But Alissa’s father? He won’t make a mistake. Because your father’s right: there is something missing in him. And you don’t want to know what it is.”

“I do want to know,” Bobby said. “I need to know. I need to know what happened to Alissa.”

Maggie looked sadder than I had ever seen her look. I thought my heart might break for what she was feeling. She didn’t just empathize with people, she fed on their pain before they could, offering herself as a receptacle for the terrible unknowns of what their loved ones had gone through so that they would never have to imagine the unimaginable themselves.

“Bobby,” she said firmly. “You don’t want to know what happened to Alissa. Go on with your life, remember all the beautiful things about her, and don’t ever look back.”

He stared at her.

“Not ever, Bobby,” she whispered. “Not ever.”

He wanted to ask more, he would have asked more. But the room exploded with noise as two uniformed cops burst through the door, a harried administrative assistant close behind them.

“He’d want to know,” one of them was saying, but he stopped short and stared when he saw Maggie.

“What?” Maggie asked sharply.

“We heard you were in a wreck,” the patrolman explained, sounding confused. “At an intersection a couple blocks up Independence. It just came over the radio—”

“Peggy,” Maggie cried as she jumped to her feet. She was out the door before anyone else could react. I was right behind her.

Chapter 34

The intersection was in chaos. Maggie’s car had rolled over several times and come to rest smashed against a telephone pole. The roof and driver’s side door were crumpled in and the hood was jackknifed against the front windshield. A fire hydrant nearby had been sheared off and water sprayed out in a wide arc over the scene. Oil swirled over the surface of growing puddles nearby, creating miniature rainbows of incongruent beauty.

Two fire trucks and four patrol cars had responded to the scene, with more arriving every minute. All were being frantically cleared away to make way for the Jaws of Life rescue team with their portable engine and strangely oversized hydraulic tools that looked like weapons out of a science fiction movie. They worked with choreographed determination, positioning the spreader, attaching the piston rod, and readying the cutter nearby. They used the spreader to pry the front door open and a rescue worker placed a ram against the driver’s side floor. He began extending the piston rod, working frantically to push the dashboard up to create enough space to free Peggy from the car.

A growing crowd formed a shield around the wrecked car. Policemen were starting to direct cars around the scene and were pushing back the curious that stood in a ring around the wreck. I scanned the crowd eagerly wit nessing the disaster, trying to find Maggie, and recognized several faces: the two men and the woman who had been at the Double Deuce the night before, staring at the bloodied victims of the fight, as if waiting for death to arrive.

Unless that’s exactly what they were.

The watchers felt my presence and looked up at me, furtive at being caught. No, it was more than that. They seemed almost frightened that I had spotted them. Just then, a car drove by the scene too fast and had to swerve to avoid by- standers. People screamed and I looked away at the sound. The car recovered and sped on, the crowd unharmed, but when I looked back at the wreck, the watchers were gone.

Who were they?
What
were they? And why did they fear me?

Did this mean that Peggy would live?

An angry murmur was starting to run through the crowd like an electrical current: Maggie was shoving her way through the onlookers. There was no way she would be stopped. The patrolmen guarding the perimeter recognized her and let her though. She pushed to the front of the rescue group and I caught a glimpse of her face as she reached out to Peggy, still trapped in the car—and what I saw in her face, oh, what I saw in her face. It could not be good. Whatever Maggie had seen in the car, I knew it could not be good.

What I saw next made it all worse. I saw Danny. He stood half a block away, staring toward the chaos, staring at Maggie, mouth open. And he was covered with blood. Blood smeared his face and stained his shirt, and his hands were drenched in it as if he wore long red gloves. He stood as if he were in a daze—had he somehow been in the car with Peggy? No, I had seen Peggy drive off alone. That could not be the case. But he had gone to her after the wreck; that was where he’d picked up the blood. Had he been the one to call it in?

Or had he been the one to cause it?

Gonzales had arrived. He strode through the crowd like a conquering hero, people parting before his authority and gawking at his uniform. Danny saw Gonzales, too. He turned and walked rapidly away. I followed. His car was parked farther down the block. It had been pulled so hastily to the side of the road that two of its wheels were propped up on the sidewalk and the driver’s door still hung open. Danny hopped inside, anxious to get away before he was spotted. As he pulled from the curb, I saw that his old clunker was just as dented and dirty as ever—but not more so. He had not run Peggy off the road.

But someone else had. I knew with a certainty that someone had tried to kill Maggie. And Peggy had paid the price.

And Danny had been nearby. He would know who had done it.

I walked back toward the wreck, scanning the crowd and the cars crawling down the street, hoping to catch a glimpse of Alan Hayes. But there were too many people, too many lights flashing, too much newly descended dusk, and way too much confusion to separate all the sounds and sights and voices coming at me. Hayes would be long gone by now, anyway. He’d have left, thinking he had succeeded in stopping Maggie.

I thought about how Hayes had not tried to take her or torture her, as he had the others. He had not had the courage for that. He had simply tried to stop her as expediently as possible.

He was afraid of her.

It gave me some satisfaction.

Rescue workers had extricated Peggy from the car and were securing her to a spinal board. The shards of glass embedded in her cheeks and forehead glittered in the glare of the overhead streetlights.

Maggie was crying openly and holding her friend’s hand, murmuring to Peggy as the emergency medical technicians transferred her to a waiting stretcher. No one dared tell Maggie to step away. No one stopped Maggie from climbing inside the ambulance with Peggy. No one even stopped her when she drew her gun and took a seat by her unconscious friend, then placed her gun across her lap and scanned the crowd, as I had scanned it, searching for Hayes.

She, too, had put it all together. She would be on her guard now.

Hayes had made a mistake in failing when he tried to take Maggie out. With someone like Maggie, that one mistake might be all she needed to survive—and to conquer. She would be looking for him now.

Gonzales stood near a rear bumper of the wrecked car, staring at it without inspiration. He seemed distracted, irritated at his job being made once more, somehow, harder, just when he thought he had contained the damage.

An older couple stood behind him on the sidewalk, taking it all in, and a third figure huddled in the shadows behind them, looking like a man trying to disappear from a too-jangled world: Bobby Daniels and his parents.

The older Daniels was examining the crowd methodically, his eyes alert, an odd look on his face. It was a look I thought a man could easily come to fear.

He knew, I thought. He knew, somehow, that Alan Hayes had caused all this. He felt it, too. He could feel when Hayes was near.

With that thought, a wild hope shot through me. I was not alone. I was not the only one who saw Alan Hayes for what he was. I was not the only one who would be trying to help Maggie.

For once, Alan Hayes would be the hunted.

Chapter 35

Where would Hayes go? He could not go home—his house was being watched. Nor would he dare return to his office at the college. He had to be wherever he took his victims. His hidden safe house was nearby somewhere.

I made my way to a pond the town had dug several years before in the center of its downtown park. I was always alone there at night. No one else felt safe there, far from civilization—and far from screaming distance—once the office workers had all packed up and gone home. At this time of year, not even the bums sought a good night’s sleep on the benches that rimmed the pond. But I did not need to fear muggers, or the night. I liked to sit on the bench at the far end of the pond, just beyond a spotlight cast by a street-lamp overhead on a circle of rippling water near the intake pipe. The ripples sparkled in the night, reflecting stars and clouds, creating a patch of endless universe undulating on the water’s surface that fascinated me. This was where I felt connected to all things; that patch of water was a portal into infinity for me. This was where I liked to think. I sat, surrounded by silence, contemplating every move Alan Hayes had ever made, reviewing every word he had ever uttered, cataloging every scrap of information others had offered on him. I was trying to find a clue about where he might have gone.

I knew it had to be there somewhere. And I knew it was my job to find out where. Maggie would be at the hospital with Peggy, Gonzales was distracted—there was no one left to lead the team. But Hayes would be moving, and he’d be moving swiftly, to complete whatever dark ritual he felt the need to indulge in. I did not want to even think of his possibilities. Where would he go? Where would a man like him feel safe? I had to find out for us all.

It took me over an hour replaying all I had heard about him, over and over in my head, before it came to me: a comment Bobby Daniels had made a few hours earlier, when speaking to Maggie privately: “He acted like he owned it,” Bobby had said, speaking of how Hayes acted about the hill at the far side of town.
He acted like he owned it.

He’d be hiding near that hill. He thought of it as his.

His hill. His daughter. Alan Hayes certainly had a sense of entitlement. But in his anger over having either claimed by others, he had a made a mistake. By forbidding Bobby Daniels to even tread on that hill, he had tipped his hand.

I thought of the grove Maggie had discovered the day after Vicky Meeks had been discovered and of the hidden watcher who had run away when Alissa Hayes appeared to him.

It had been Alan Hayes. His lair had to be nearby. I would find it.