Lisa Miscione - Angel Fire

“I’m going to go to bed,’’ she announced.

He nodded toward the pile of clippings and the information Lydia had printed out from the Internet. “I think I’ll sit up for a while, look over those articles.’’

“Good night, Jeffrey.’’

“Good night, Lyd.’’

“You can make a murder into art,’’ Sting and the Police sang from the car radio. The irony was not lost on him but the heat was cranking and his legs were getting cramped. He rubbed his eyes and put the copy of With a Vengeance by Lydia Strong in his lap. The cover was bent and cracked and the pages coming loose from the binding, he’d read it so many times. But he had been looking at the same page for the last hour.

He knew that for many killers, Jed McIntyre included, stalking was half the game. But he hadn’t been enjoying it. He found it boring. He’d been waiting in front of Maria Lopez’s small dilapidated apartment building in the barrio for almost three hours and he was starting to lose his patience. He stared at the plastic Madonna and Child his wife had stuck to his dashboard years ago.

“‘Please God,’’’ he said, “‘how long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart. How long will my enemy triumph over me?’’’

He turned off the ignition and was glad for the silence. A moment later, like an answer to his prayer, he saw the man that the whore Maria had taken home leave through the front door, get into his black pickup truck, and speed off. He waited a few minutes, let the adrenaline stream through his veins. Then he donned a pair of surgical gloves and a black ski mask. From a plastic bag on the passenger-side seat he took a terry washcloth that had been soaking in chloroform. He patted his pocket, checking for the scalpel and the picklock he would use to get in the building door.

But when he got to the building, the door had been left ajar so there was no need to pick the lock at all. He walked up the one flight to her apartment, and then knocked lightly on the door, knowing she would assume it was the man who had just left.

He stood to the side.

“Forget something?’’ she called, and flung the door open carelessly. He grabbed her by the throat, almost lifting her small body off the ground with one arm and shoved the washcloth covered in chloroform over her nose and mouth with the other, before she even had a chance to scream. When he felt her body grow limp, he uncovered her face. But it must not have been for long enough, because her eyes fluttered, she saw him, and she started screaming and thrashing. He threw her hard through the imitation Oriental screen that separated her bed from the rest of the small studio apartment. But she got up and scurried away from him as quick as a mouse, her face a blank mask of terror.

Maria Lopez had fought for her life. With every inch of muscle, every ounce of strength she possessed she went down fighting. And it showed. But her body was nowhere to be found.

The white-and-blue checkered curtains and their fixtures lay in a heap on the floor. A white ceramic lamp shattered next to the toppled table on which it had sat. The imitation Oriental screen that separated her bed from the rest of her small studio apartment looked as if someone had been thrown through it, a large hole pouting in the center panel. The checkered sheets of her bed, which matched the curtains, were drenched in blood, soaked through to the mattress.

This is where he got her, thought Chief Simon Morrow, as he touched a gloved finger to the blood. A sharp instrument to a major artery – the throat, the leg…he couldn’t be sure. He could imagine the faceless killer on top of her, his knee on her chest. He winced at the image in his mind, in spite of having seen worse. Her fear echoed in the tossed-up room.

He got down on his knees, tucked the bedskirt up between the mattress and the box spring and shone his flashlight under the bed for anything that may have fallen under there in the struggle. He reached for a small wooden crucifix he saw there. He could see where it had fallen from, by the bare nail and the cross-shaped clean space on the dirty white wall above her bed.

“Jesus Christ. Shit.’’

He wondered how long the neighbors had heard the screams and the banging before they called the police. How he had got her out of the apartment after that. There was no way she walked out, not with all that blood on the bed.

One of the uniformed officers walked in the front door.

“Anybody see anything?’’the chief asked, knowing the answer already.

“No. No one I spoke to saw or heard anything, Chief. But some people didn’t open their doors.’’

“Figures. I’ll send a detective out in the morning. In fact, page Keane right now, tell him to get over here.’’

Morrow knocked on the wall with a pudgy callused hand.

“These apartments might as well be separated by cardboard. Jesus Christ,’’ he muttered.

If there had been any doubt in his mind that the two prior missing-persons cases on his desk were somehow connected, and connected somehow to the dog and the surgical-supply warehouse, he was sure now. The other cases on his desk were cold. No leads. No witnesses. No family or even friends to interview. Those people had dropped from the face of the earth, leaving no trail behind them to follow. But Maria Lopez had made sure her departure was not silent like the rest. There had to be something in this mess. Hair, fibers, prints, something – anything. She had to have been cut very deeply with something razor-sharp for that much blood to be spilled, possibly with a surgical implement. Maybe the same type of instrument used to slice up the German shepherd and remove its organs, an act that had been completed with precision. Lopez was the fourth person missing in two months in a sleepy town that saw little violence. Something was definitely going on.

Morrow still had the crucifix in his hand, was clenching it so hard the edges were hurting him through his latex gloves. He’d found one of these in the home of each of the missing persons – a detailed Christ figure, highly varnished wood. Did it connect them? He couldn’t be sure. People were very religious here – especially those who had little else to live for.

“Call in Homicide and Forensics from State,’’ he said to the uniformed officer standing closest to him. “We need to treat this like a murder, with or without a body.’’ If these cases were connected, he was going to have to call in the FBI. If he did it too soon, he’d look like a yokel who couldn’t handle a few missing persons. If he did it too late, if someone else disappeared…

He’d had to make this call before and things had turned out badly. When he was the St. Louis police chief, three prostitutes had turned up dead in a five-month period. He had been reluctant to call it a serial murder case, because johns killed whores all the time in big cities. So when Lydia Strong had paid him a visit to inform him of the striking similarities to unsolved cases in Chicago, he’d disregarded her as a flake. She had told him about an alleged white-slavery ring that an escaped prostitute had reported to her and which she was investigating for an article for Vanity Fair. But he basically shut the door in her face.

He had been unaware of her reputation and her connections at the FBI. By the time the Bureau finally got involved, two more women had turned up dead. The early St. Louis cases provided key evidence in solving the crime. It turned out that the Russian mob was bringing girls into the U.S. illegally, promising them careers as models. When the girls arrived, they were held prisoner in whorehouses and forced into prostitution. Morrow’s failure to report the murders to the FBI was a blunder that took on national significance due to the article subsequently published. He resigned from the St. Louis police force.