Lisa Miscione - Angel Fire

Chief Morrow rubbed his balding head. He honestly couldn’t tell if he was being offered a helping hand of if he was being threatened. Was Jeffrey saying, Let us in or I’ll call the FBI myself? Whether it was a threat or not, if Morrow could avoid involving the FBI, even if it meant working with Lydia Strong, he would be happy. He was smart enough to know that trouble was brewing and neither he, nor anyone in his department, had ever handled a serial case. Hell, he had to go through the state police department to gain access to VICAP and the other FBI databases.

“I’ll send everything over to you later today. Where are you staying?’’

“With Lydia. Do you know where her house is?’’

He nodded his head.

“In the meantime,’’ Jeffrey said, “make sure no one else talks to the press. There’s already too much information out there.’’

“One of the cops guarding the scene leaked the Lopez story to his girlfriend, who is apparently a reporter trying to make a name for herself at the local paper. He’s being reprimanded. But they don’t know everything.’’

“Like what?’’

“This, for starters,’’ he said, handing Jeffrey an evidence bag that contained a hand-carved wooden crucifix. “At each of their homes, I found one of these, different shapes and sizes. It might not mean anything, though. People are pretty religious around here.’’

“Left there by the perpetrator, or as part of the victims’ belongings?’’

“Part of their belongings.’’

“What else?’’

“Lucky, the dog. The paper mentioned that the dog’s organs had been removed. Well, we found most of them in a pile by the body. It looked like whoever was performing the ‘surgery’ was interrupted when the blind man came out into the church garden.’’

“‘Most of them’? What didn’t you find?’’

“The heart.’’

Lydia expected boxes of files to be carried in by the cop that arrived at her house later that afternoon. But instead there were just four moderately thick manila envelopes. The lives of Shawna Fox, Christine and Harold Wallace, and Maria Lopez had been reduced to a few piles of documents. What kind of life, Lydia wondered, leaves only a paper trail in its wake?

There were voices inside the files, though. Voices with stories to tell, with secrets to reveal. Voices that had been silenced. Lydia regarded the files and paused before opening the one on top, as if it were the lid to Pandora’s box. She looked over at Jeffrey, who was sitting on her couch, feet up on the coffee table, reading through his notes from Morrow’s noon meeting as if he were reading the newspaper, cool, disinterested. She envied him. She was about to step through a portal to another time and place, about to take a journey into some dark and unknown world, while he could remain here on earth, a beacon for her safe return.

“Let’s make the boards,’’ Jeffrey said, putting down the notes. “I can’t think straight without them.’’

Lydia slipped three 4-by 10-foot pieces of corkboard from behind the bookshelves and Jeffrey pulled easels from the closet to the right of her desk. They set them up in front of the plate-glass window-wall. They wrote the names of each victim on index cards and made columns for each on one board. On the other they pinned a map of the area. And on the third they pinned newspaper articles, clustered together by subject.

“Let’s see what we have here,’’ said Lydia, opening the first file.

Shawna Fox had been trouble for just about everyone she met: her teachers, her foster parents, her counselors. She was a discipline problem, a poor student, a runaway. A ward of the state since her parents had died when she was five, Shawna was a child who had never known a happy home. She had been arrested three times – once for driving drunk without a license in a car stolen from her boyfriend when she was fourteen; once for selling marijuana to another minor; and once for prostitution in Albuquerque.

A psychologist’s evaluation read: “Shawna is reticent, unemotional and yet prone to violent outbursts. She seems to have no remorse for anything she has done. Is not able to see that her behavior is self-destructive. When asked why she behaves the way she does, she replied, ‘I do what I have to do to stay alive.’ She would not elaborate. More than likely the victim of abuse from one or more of her foster parents. A tragic case, seems that there’s little hope for a turnaround.’’

Unlike the last three times Shawna ran away, the final time she took nothing with her and stole neither money nor possessions from her foster parents. An ongoing investigation turned up no leads. An anonymous tipster told police he had seen a lone girl walking on the highway toward Albuquerque. When he had pulled over to ask her if she needed help, she ran into the desert. He drove on. It was dark so he could not be sure if she matched the description he read in the paper.

The police also had had a visit from Shawna’s boyfriend, Greg Matthews, an eighteen-year-old dropout who worked at his father’s gas station. He insisted that Shawna never would have run away without telling him; that she loved him and was going to marry him. Greg had had a rap sheet of his own as a juvenile, but had been clean since working with his father for over two years. He had been investigated as a possible link to Shawna’s disappearance but no evidence of any foul play was uncovered. He provided a color photograph of Shawna, a close-up of her pixielike face, framed by short-cropped boyish blond hair. She had sparkling green eyes, and a pug nose, pierced with a small gold hoop. She wore a bright smile and a look in her eyes that told Lydia she was in love with whoever had snapped the photo, presumably Greg. Photographs of living people now dead always made Lydia angry. They were cold, eerie reminders of how easily life was lost, how vividly alive people remain in the memories of those who loved them, and how grief is the slick-walled, bottomless abyss between those places.

A month after her disappearance, Shawna was still missing. There were no leads.

“So why are we assuming that this girl didn’t just run away again?’’ asked Jeffrey.

“One: She didn’t take anything with her like before; she had a habit of stealing from her foster parents before taking flight. But this time, nothing of theirs and not even her own belongings. Two:

She had a boyfriend who clearly loved her. Show me one damaged teenage girl who runs away from love, probably more love than she’s ever had.’’

“What makes you think he loved her? Maybe he beat her. Maybe he killed her.’’

“Maybe, but it says here he visited the police station three different times to check on progress, insisting that she wouldn’t have run away.’’

“A lot of serial killers insinuate themselves into an investigation.’’

“He’s too young to be a serial killer. And he doesn’t fit the typical profile. Not smart enough, not antisocial enough.’’

They pinned Shawna’s picture on the board, and below it they placed index cards listing everything they knew for a fact to be true about her, vital statistics, date last seen, address. On the map board they placed a red pushpin at her last known address.

Christine and Harold Wallace had had a troubled marriage, according to a state-appointed abuse counselor. Both frequently unemployed, both recovering methamphetamine addicts, their life together had not been an easy one. Pulling each other back and forth into and out of addiction, their relationship had been violent, ranging from a slap in the face to a brutal beating which left Christine in the hospital for three weeks, to a stab wound that just missed Harold’s vital organs.

In the ten years they had been together, only three years had seen both of them out of prison or rehabilitation clinics at the same time. But at the time they went missing, they both had been off drugs for a year, both were holding down work-fare jobs cleaning the park in the middle of town, and there had been no incidence of abuse in more than eight months. Christine was studying for her GED.