Desolate Angel (4 page)

I wondered if Danny was losing it completely. He wore no tie and his badge dangled carelessly from the stained lapel of a too-tight navy jacket. His breath was little more than ragged gusts as he rested after laboring up the hill. The paramedics passed him easily, though he’d had a head start: they were not necessarily younger, not all of them, but they were clearly far more fit.

Not that haste yielded them any benefit. The paramedics saw at once that their presence at the scene was useless. They turned back and acquiesced to those whose job it was to help the dead.

Helping the dead. That had been my job once and I had failed at it. To now be an observer, to have the luxury of sobriety and an undefined understanding of the people who moved before me made this death scene seem completely new, though I had been at dozens such scenes while alive. I sat on a log and balanced my chin on my hands, like a spectator in the front row of a theater, watching my old coworkers move about.

They treated the body with tender respect, a ritual, I knew, that they believed protected them against their own demise. Yet I also knew that the body was nothing more than chemicals now, that all essence of the young woman was gone. In truth, they were worshipping a god long since departed.

The old man and his dog had been relegated to the outskirts of the circle where yellow tape held onlookers at bay. The man’s sadness was palpable.

It was then—in the midst of sorrow and death, like a flower blooming among the ashes in the aftermath of fire—that my life-that-was-not-quite-a-life changed for all eternity. All because of her, a woman I had never seen before.

She appeared from behind a stand of trees, ducked under the crime scene tape, and stopped to talk to the old man who had found the body. When she placed a hand on his shoulder to steady him, I could feel his trembling as surely as she must feel it. Whatever resolve he had mustered failed in the face of her sympathy, but she understood and was willing to lend him her strength.

She leaned close to him, murmuring in his ear, then distracted him with rapid questions asked in a detached, official voice. Dredging up memories of authority, the old man reclaimed himself, provided answers, listened closely, and somehow got through it all. He took her business card when it was offered, placing it in his coat pocket for safe-keeping. The woman shook his hand when they were done, knelt to pat the little dog on his head, then helped the old man under the tape and instructed a uniformed guard to escort him down the hill through the darkness. Kindness. She was kindness and she was strength.

I was fascinated by her by the time she began to pick her way though the weeds, coming ever closer to the body, scrutinizing each patch of ground with the help of a flashlight before she put her foot down on it. As she drew closer, I saw that she was in her mid-thirties and had ordinary brown hair that hung to her shoulders limply. She was neither beautiful nor ugly. She was not quite plain, but she was not quite pretty, either. But her eyes were extraordinary. Dark brown flecked with gold, shining with a resolve that made them glow in the reflection of the lights being set up around the perimeter of the crime scene. Her pants suit fit her stocky body as if it had been sewed onto her, rendering her movements effortlessly athletic.

She lived in her body, I realized, unlike most of the people I’d scrutinized since my death. I’d come to learn that people were at war with their flesh, that they lived in their heads, or spent too much time with their memories, or lingered over lost dreams like I did. They did their best to ignore the fluids and corpuscles that bound them. But not this woman. She didn’t just live in her body, she celebrated it with the way she moved, every synchronized sweep of muscle a homage to life. I could not take my eyes off of her. She was gloriously, completely, and irresistibly alive.

She was also all business. She gave no hint of noticing anyone else, not even Danny, as she knelt to examine the body.

“Maggie, Maggie, Maggie,” Danny said, as if he were ashamed of something.

She did not respond.

“Where you been?”

She did not look up as she answered. “Paperwork. Where have you been?”

Danny pulled out a mint and popped it into his mouth, a gesture I had seen a thousand times. “Dinner break,” he mumbled.

“You didn’t get a chance to talk to the old man when you got here?”

“Thought I’d better guard the body.”

Ah, yes, Danny,
I thought,
do guard the body.
Keep watch. Mount surveillance. Do whatever it took to do absolutely nothing. I’d been there. I’d done that. I’d perfected the art of nothingness with him and I was ashamed.

Maggie ignored my old partner. She was shining her flashlight over the dead girl’s body, examining every inch of it, unwilling to concede the interpretation of evidence to the forensic crew. That alone made her a better detective than Danny or I had ever been in all of our years on the force.

“This poor kid can’t be more than nineteen or twenty,” she said to the techs waiting at a distance. She touched the dead girl’s cheek tenderly. “Make sure you get everything.”

Most of the forensic techs were new. I’d never seen them before. At least one of them was affronted.

“When did we ever miss anything?” he complained.

“I’m going to stand watch while you work anyway,” Maggie said pleasantly. “It helps me put things together. I want you to walk me through everything as you bag it.” She diluted her mistrust with a smile that transformed her face into something close to beautiful. And it worked. The techs went to work efficiently, announcing each find, as Maggie scribbled the details in her notebook.

She stood watch for hours as they scraped, plucked, pulled, and bagged. She stood watch with a stillness that approached mine. I could not bear to leave her. She exuded the life that I had lost and a purposefulness I found breathtaking. She epitomized all that I had wanted to be then given up on being. As time passed, I found her plainness to be exquisite. Her ordinary features formed a perfect blank canvas for the nuanced expressions that played across her face as she worked.

During those hours, my attention wavered from Maggie only once—when Alissa Hayes emerged from where she had been waiting inside the nearby grove, less certain than me that her presence could not be detected by the living. She paused in front of me, her eyes filling with tears. Her mouth moved, but, still, no sound came from her. I could not understand what it was that she was trying to tell me. She held a hand out, shoulder high, then pointed toward herself. I shook my head, not understanding, wondering anew why our paths had crossed here. It was not just her old boyfriend, languishing in jail. It was something else. I was still missing something.

But I did not miss the irony: I was a ghost haunted by another ghost.

Alissa stared at me. I could feel her despair. But her thoughts were cloaked in darkness. I tried to communicate, but could not penetrate beyond. She turned abruptly, frustrated, and disappeared down the hill, her departure marked only by me.

Maggie never looked up. She had never stopped watching the body as it was processed, photographed, and finally, moved. Danny had long since trudged down the hill, having never even taken his notebook from his breast pocket.

And, I realized, having never once said a word to his new partner about the connection between this murder scene and Alissa Hayes so long ago. Had he truly not noticed the similarities? Was he that far gone?

Or had he simply been unwilling to admit to Maggie that he—that we—had made a terrible mistake?

Maggie gave no notice of Danny’s leaving. She had eyes for the dead girl only. When the body was finally lifted onto a gurney, Maggie examined the spot in the weeds where the girl had lain. She got down on her knees, joining the forensic techs, running her fingers over the ground, placing the flat of her palm against the earth as if she was gauging the heartbeat of the world itself. When they were done, she let the others go, but seemed reluctant to leave the scene herself. She walked toward me and I froze. But she did not sense my presence. She sat down on the log next to me, inches away, her hands placed neatly on her knees as she stared straight ahead, absorbing the stillness of the night.

An exquisite shock ran though me. I experienced a sensation like that of losing my breath. It was the closest to being human I had felt in six months. I stood abruptly, fearful of her nearness, but she did not react. I touched her hair. Not a muscle twitched. Her head was tipped back now, her face to the stars, her features still. Was she searching the heavens? Smelling the air? Listening for the sounds of another?

She was alone except for a uniformed officer who stood guard further down the hill. Being alone did not seem to bother her. Unlike every other human I had watched over the last six months, she fit her solitude and her solitude fit her.

I touched her shoulders, unable to resist. She shivered and pulled a cell phone from her pocket. With the press of a button, she had someone on the line. I wondered if it was a lover.

“It’s me,” she said. “It’s a bad one this time. A student, I think.”

She was silent as she listened. “Yes, I was careful. No, he didn’t stay long. It’s going to be up to me.”

She was silent again, then said, “I never knew the guy. But I doubt he was as bad as Bonaventura. I don’t think anyone could be as bad as Bonaventura.”

She shook her head in response to something she heard. “I’m not going to judge him,” she said. “He did the best he could. Let him rest in peace.”

She mumbled a good-bye and stored the phone back in her pocket as a shameful realization washed over my being:
Maggie had been talking about me.

Chapter 5

I could not bear Maggie’s sympathy—nor the thought of what she might think of me when she found out I’d helped convict an innocent man. I had to make it right. I could not leave a man in prison for a crime he did not commit. Nor could I allow the evil I had felt in the clearing on the hill to roam free.

I would need help to make it right. But who among the living could help me? Not my wife. I had tried to communicate with her for months and failed. Maggie had not seen me, either. No one living had, except for the dying boy, that one time. Who, then, could help me set things right?

With shame, I recognized my best hope—the person I had been most like when I was alive—and set out to find him.

I discovered Danny in Shenanigan’s, a dive bar off La-Salle Street a few blocks from the house where Connie and my sons lived. Danny and I used to stop there for a pop whenever we got called out on a run. It was a low-rent hole-in-the-wall, filled with old men pickling themselves to death and tired women who looked older than they were, yet probably felt even older than that.

I used to feel so at home when I pushed through the front door. The warm air would wrap around me, beckoning me inside. The old men would look up and call out my name, gesturing for me to join them. I was a hero in there, a man not yet put out to pasture. I had thought of the bar as a cocoon that protected me from the disappointments waiting outside its doors.

Now it seemed like little more than a waiting room for death, a place of false hope and seductive inertia. A place where life leaked away and people squandered the time they had left. A place to give up, then deaden yourself against the knowledge that you had given up.

The air was suffocating, heavy with the smell of unwashed clothing and stale beer. The regulars sat hunched on their stools, staring into glasses of liquor or beer, occasionally glancing up at an old television that flickered images without sound. Even time seemed to slow in some cruel show of power. So you wanted it all to end? Well, sit down, buster, and take a number. Because you’ve got a long wait ahead of you.

Danny sat at the far end of the bar. It was not yet ten o’clock in the morning, but he had three empty shot glasses arranged in front of him and two more on deck. He’d taken a break from the bourbon to nurse a pint of beer. I remembered just how the beer tasted: slightly bitter, slightly flat—as vaguely disappointing as the life you were trying to forget.

Had I really looked that beaten down when I had been one of them?

Danny spoke to no one. He never even looked up. I waited, perched on an empty stool nearby, trying to get a sense of what he was thinking, what he was feeling, trying to find a way in that I could connect to. All I could discern was blackness, as cold and unfathomable as the bottom of the sea. I knew I would never be able to penetrate his thoughts. He was too far gone. To me and to the world. He would be of no help in bringing justice to Alissa Hayes and the girl who now lay on a steel slab in the morgue, name unknown, attended to by strangers. I could not even tell if Danny saw the connection between the old and new murders.

Danny was darkness. Danny was lost to me.

I checked out the other customers. There were half a dozen patrons this early in the day, only one of them a woman. She was drinking alone in a corner, smoking cigarette after cigarette, determined to fill her body with enough poison to take her away from whatever it was that caused her such pain. Watching her, I experienced a stab of compassion so acute it was as if a knife blade had penetrated the core of my heart and scooped out a slice to offer her. I was filled with a deep and abiding love for what she had given the world and failed to receive in return.