Avenging Angel
Authors: Rex Burns
A Gabe Wager Novel
Rex Burns
A MysteriousPress.com
Open Road Integrated Media
Ebook
To Granjan
CHAPTER 1
T
HE BODY LAY
face up with that crumpled, unsymmetrical look of death. Its arms were tossed in careless surrender. One leg was twisted under the other in the shape of a 4. The coat, too, was flung wide, showing the bloody shirt that had dried to a wad of dark stain. The trouser pockets, inside out, hung lifeless. Homicide detective Gabriel Wager, Denver Police Department, bent carefully over the sprawled figure and, with a gentle tug, slipped a neatly folded piece of paper from the stiff fingers.
“It’s sure as hell no suicide note.” Max Axton, Wager’s partner, loomed over his shoulder as Wager used the eraser end of a pencil to unfold the page carefully. As Max said, “A man with his chest punched open like that wouldn’t turn his own pockets inside out while he died.”
“Hold the bag open.”
Axton spread the plastic bag with his fingers and Wager slipped the paper in. He pressed shut the ridge that sealed it, and labeled the item with the date, his initials, and the location.
“What is it, some kind of sketch?”
“It looks like a butterfly,” Wager said.
Max peered more closely. “Naw—it’s an angel. The wings are curved at the top. And that’s the robe.” He pressed the corners of the plastic bag to stretch away the wrinkles. “It’s holding something.”
“A sword,” Wager said. “It’s an angel holding a sword.”
Axton nodded and frowned with thought. “I don’t know any gangs with that symbol. Does it ring a bell with you?”
“No.” Wager gazed at the paper with its measured creases and the darkly inked lines of the figure. It wasn’t crumpled or dirty; if a dying man had clutched at it the scrap of paper would have been wrinkled.
“I’ll take the witness,” said Axton.
“Okay.” Behind him, Wager heard the slowing rush of motors as drivers paused to gawk at the line of a half-dozen patrol units and unmarked cars tilted on the road’s shoulder, and at the blue uniforms moving slowly over the corner of weed-choked prairie. When they were past the row of cars, the motors sped up again, pulling the drivers home from haze-shrouded Denver toward the dozens of suburban developments spreading eastward across the plains.
“You guys believe me, don’t you?”
Wager looked at the witness. The bearded young man was suddenly nervous, and beneath his shaggy hair worry pinched his brows.
“Any reason we shouldn’t?”
“No! But … I mean … all these questions … Honest to God, Officer, I was just hitching along here!”
Axton nodded and shifted his weight from one large shoe to the other. “We understand that, Mr. Garfield. We just want to get everything down now so we don’t have to call you up later.”
Garfield sucked in a breath and scratched somewhere up under the blond-streaked beard. “Yeah. It’s just all of a sudden I thought, Jesus, what if you guys think I did it?”
“We don’t know who did it,” Wager said. “Yet.”
“Can you show me exactly where you were when you first saw the victim, Mr. Garfield?”
Wager left Max with the witness and went back to the body.
Jones, the police photographer, was framing the scene from yet another angle. The thin black man took three or four more shots and then capped his lens. “That’s it for the meat, Gabe. What else you want?”
“Get a couple from the witness—where he first saw the body. And one more of the site after the body’s been removed.”
“Sure thing.”
Two ambulance attendants who sat on their stretcher at the shoulder of the road watched in silence. Finally Wager motioned to them. “You people come around this way and take it out the same way.”
“We’ll need some help up this bank,” said the shorter one.
“You’ll get it.”
Photographs, forensics, field work. But no immediate witnesses. Wager would be surprised if any of it told them much at all. The note was supposed to do that. Without that little drawing of the angel, this would look like only one more of the casual stranger-to-stranger murders that were becoming routine in booming, shoving Denver—the tossing away of a human being for a watch, a ring, a few bucks. But for some reason this killer left his signature. For some reason he wanted somebody to know something about this death. An execution? An advertisement? A dope deal gone wrong? Forensics would find out if the victim was a user.
The ambulance attendants, lips tight as though trying to pinch out a bad taste, strained slightly to break the rigor in the corpse’s shoulder joints. The body would not fit through the ambulance doors with the arms spread like that, and they had to strap them, bent at the elbows, across the chest to keep them from lifting open again. The rigor told Wager that the man was probably shot right here. Probably the killer or killers walked the victim straight down the embankment and stood just there while he turned to face them. Wind. Almost always a night wind out here on the prairie east of Denver and its bright glow. Maybe a step or two closer for a good shot. Maybe early this morning before dawn, where the lights of the few passing cars would not splash across the man or the gun aimed at him. Perhaps the victim’s arms were already held out—don’t shoot me, I don’t have anything; perhaps they flew up as the bullet hit his chest like a baseball bat and knocked him flat and numb with shock and dead before he hit the ground. A hole that close to the heart and that big. Soon enough, anyway, so he did not move before he died and stiffened in that awkward angle. The killer may have waited, may even have moved close to look at the victim, to make sure a second round from that heavy-caliber weapon was not needed. Then he—or they—went through the pockets very quickly, not needing a light because of the sky glow of Denver. Careful of fingerprints, hurriedly gathering keys, coins, matches—anything the killer’s fingers might touch while going through the pockets for whatever he was after. Then that note, which was to tell someone why the man was shot, if not who pulled the trigger. Wager guessed that the note had been folded and resting in the killer’s pocket, ready for use. Folded precisely into a rectangle whose edges were flush all around. When you’re in the dark, and in a hurry, and you’ve just killed a man, you don’t take time to align the edges of a folded slip of paper. That’s something you do when you’re carefully planning ahead. Then you put it where you know you can find it, so that when you’re sure the fingers have stopped living you can wedge it high up between them so it won’t blow away. Then back up the way you came, through those broken weeds and the matted earth that left no footprints in the bricklike clay. And, probably, you stepped into your car to pull onto the empty highway, mingling your tire prints with the dozens of tracks that Baird was busy casting in plaster of Paris.
“Detective Wager?” One of the uniformed officers picked his way through the tangles of Russian thistles. “We been all over the grid twice—didn’t find a thing.” He watched the ambulance attendants and two policemen scrabble the heavy stretcher up the embankment.
Wager nodded. The fact that nothing had been found outside the ten-foot radius fit the feeling he had about this killing: it was a quick and efficient assassination. And by this time, the killer could have run anywhere.
“You gonna want us for anything else? The shift’s due off in a few minutes.”
“No—send your people back. Thanks, Clark.” No sense wasting the overtime; the city council already screamed at the cost of police work at the same time that it screamed about the rising homicide rate.
“You and Max stop by for coffee next time you’re in the district.”
“Thanks.”
Only half aware of the retreating sergeant, Wager let his mind play over the scene again, trying to see it from the angle of the victim. Then from that of the killer. Night. Over there, beyond the straggling line of officers working their way back toward the cars, a few distant lights from one of the newer housing developments. A car or two heard in the distance, passing across the dim haze of city lights. That’s what the victim would have seen: the glare of Denver’s lights against the sky, and in front of that the killer’s black shape. A fraction of an instant before it hit him, he may have seen the belch of flame start to spread toward him. He would not have felt the heat. The bullet would have been in front of the heat. The killer would have moved a step or two closer, with maybe a pause to check for movement. Then pulled the pockets inside out, taking everything—no empty wallet flung aside, no half-used package of cigarettes or gum, or comb with the stray hair snarled in its teeth. The killer wanted time to look over everything found in those pockets. Something in those pockets would say things the killer knew the victim would not tell him while he was alive. Then he placed the square of paper.
Finally Wager walked up toward Baird, who was now standing to stretch his sore back as he watched the plaster harden in its frame.
“I got Garfield’s statement, Gabe. Clark says one of his people can give him a ride over to I-225.”
“That’s where the kid was going?”
“Yeah. He lives out in Aurora.” Axton folded his notebook closed with a hand that almost hid the small book. They watched Jones come back to the spot of flattened weeds and lean over the stained earth to flash the Speed Graphic. Jones pulled the film slide and jotted down the number and time and location of the picture.
“Tomorrow morning soon enough for these?”
“Sure.”
“Ciao.”
“Did Baird find any footprints?” asked Max.
Wager shook his head. “The ground’s too hard.” He rummaged in the small kit for the tape measure and a handful of flat cardboard boxes. “Let’s do it while we’ve got the light.”
“Right,” said Axton.
Together, they began to pick over the area around the stained earth. They stepped carefully through tangled grass and bent to peer for the occasional scrap of paper or cigarette butt. They picked up the item with tweezers and put it in one of the boxes, then taped the box shut and labeled it with their initials and the distance and direction from the stain. It was garbage. It would be screened in the lab for weathering and age and potential usefulness, but Wager guessed that all of it would be tossed out as useless, because this murderer had come here knowing what he was going to do, and he had been careful when he did it.
But there was always the chance. That’s what following procedure meant: you used routine like a net to sift for those stray chances. So they would search and pick and label until there was nothing left in that three hundred square feet except the earth and weeds and the stain.
After a while, Axton and Wager traded ground, moving back over the sectors from the opposite direction like, it crossed Wager’s mind, a pair of well-trained hounds ranging for spoor. Wager’s triangular shadow, disproportionately wide at the shoulders and tapering quickly to his feet, lengthened to absorb the crisp lines from twigs and stems; Axton’s broad shadow stretched beyond Wager’s in a patient, slow ripple. Neither man found anything the other had overlooked; neither said more than was necessary. But of course that wasn’t from concentration alone. That was because almost a year ago Wager had set up a scumbag called Tony-O. At the time Axton had called it lynch law and said it was the wrong thing for a cop to do and tried to talk Wager out of it. But Wager knew then and knew now that the execution was just. Not legal, maybe, but just; and he’d be damned if he’d apologize to Max or anyone else for doing that to a man who had violated more than the criminal code.
“Satisfied?”
“Yeah,” said Wager.
They scraped off a sample of topsoil into a plastic bag and labeled that; then they packed the kit and trudged up the bank toward their car, the only one remaining this late after quitting time. As a final effort, they followed the likely path of the killer, but nothing more was found there either.
“How many John Does we had this year?” sighed Axton.
“Seventeen.” Of which thirteen had been cleared because someone had eventually identified the victim, traced his last movements, and, with a lot of walking and talking, finally found someone who remembered something. Something that led to a suspect. “But none of them plastered with angels.”
“Right,” sighed Axton again. “Our first angel.”
He grunted slightly while wedging himself behind the steering wheel. The department had gone to smaller-sized cars, and even with the seat jammed against the backstops, Axton’s frame was cramped. Wager rolled the window down to let in the peppery air of evening, its lingering heat blowing dry and not yet refreshing across his ear.
“Gabe—ah—you got any plans for the fifteenth of next month?”