Authors: Rex Burns
It was six of one and half a dozen of the other; Wager’s mental coin came down tails and he headed for the house on the left. A woman in her midtwenties, with brown eyes and cropped, bleached hair, half opened the door. If Wager had not been so tired he might have been a little more subtle; the Bulldog liked his officers to speak softly and carry a low profile when dealing with Joan Q. Public. But Wager’s baggy eyes felt as bristly as his unshaven jaw, and the wariness in the woman’s expression as she faced this scruffy figure led his hand to his badge case. “Detective Wager, ma’am. Denver Police. I’d like to ask you some questions about the folks next door.”
Her name was Cheryl Johnson and she hadn’t seen anybody at the Wilsons’ house for—oh, at least a week now. Not that she knows them that well—they seemed to stay pretty much to themselves ever since they moved in almost a year back. Renters. They don’t own the house, she knows that, because it had been for sale for a long time before a real estate agency finally bought it and put up a rental sign and the Wilsons came just after that. She’s sure they got it pretty cheap and she’s often wondered if that wasn’t the best way—rent instead of buy. You don’t build up equity, but you don’t have all the worry about taxes and upkeep, either, and if you’re just starting out and don’t intend to stay in a neighborhood anyway …
“Yes, ma’am. Can you tell me anything about the Wilsons?”
Well they always have a whole houseful of people, she knows that, and she has no idea where everybody sleeps. They have relatives visiting all the time—Mrs. Wilson’s two sisters and all their kids. A half-dozen of all ages, but they are real nice and polite, even if they didn’t join the neighborhood walkathon for the March of Dimes. They take real good care of the house, which a lot of renters don’t do. Her kids play with them sometimes, but the Wilsons never leave their yard. Shy—except when they think no one is looking, and then they have their share of fussing and fighting just like everybody else. The oldest Wilson girl baby-sits and she’s real good with kids and real friendly. But she never talks much about herself—you can ask all sorts of questions and she’ll just nod or smile and never give you a straight answer. Shy. And she seems kind of—well—out of touch. Like the way she admires Mrs. Johnson’s dresses and shoes, which aren’t all that stylish; not dowdy, you know, but good quality, and good gracious the cost of clothes these days, and most of them not worth half what you pay for them. Anyway, Naomi Wilson, that’s the girl’s name, is real good with kids, especially little ones, even if she acts like she never saw any clothes other than the cotton things with sleeves that she wears like they were taken in to fit her. But if that’s so, then somebody in that house is a good seamstress because the stitching’s just as straight as a tailor’s; but you know, Naomi never even uses makeup. Now that’s something Mrs. Johnson hadn’t really thought of before, but here’s a teenage girl who’s never even tried lipstick, and wouldn’t you think that in this day and age…
“Yes, ma’am. Can you tell me anything about Mr. Wilson?”
Mr. Wilson is an appliance repairman somewhere, and he must make pretty good money to feed that bunch for as long as they’ve stayed. But except for Mrs. Wilson’s sisters, they never have any visitors of any kind that she, Cheryl Johnson, can see. Not that she’s nosy enough to care, but living right next door like this on a short street, you get to recognize everybody’s car, and when a new one parks at the curb, you know it right away. Like yours—when you pulled up, it was a strange car, and I said to myself, that’s some kind of official car, the way it’s painted so plain and ugly like that.
“Yes, ma’am. Is this Mr. Wilson?” He showed her the touched-up photograph of the corpse.
“It seems a lot like him, but he’s not as old as that picture makes him look. In fact that picture makes him look—oh my God, is he dead?”
“Yes, ma’am. Did the Wilsons ever say anything about maybe moving somewhere? Maybe going somewhere else?”
“Dead? My God! I mean, it’s not like he’s a friend, but he always says good morning, and my God! How did it happen?”
“He was shot, ma’am. Anything at all about where they came from, or any names of friends they mentioned?”
“Shot? Oh my God!”
It took Wager another quarter-hour to find out that Mrs. Johnson didn’t know what the world was coming to when a nice, polite man like Mr. Wilson, who never harmed anybody and minded his own business, could be shot down like that, and what was he—Detective Wager—doing to help make the streets safe? Did he know that she was getting afraid to even walk around the block at night because of all the terrible things that were happening? Shootings. Rapes. Assaults for no reason. Something had to be done, and now that nice Mr. Wilson. What about her children? What kind of world would they be faced with if things kept going the way they were?
“Yes, ma’am. Any kind of address or even just mentioning a town or city?”
No, the family next door never said a word about going anywhere. They were just gone, like that, as quick as they came. My God that poor Mrs. Wilson and her children.
Wager sat in his car, radio off and windows rolled up, to enjoy a couple minutes of silence. Now his ears felt as worn and grainy as his eyes, and beneath the weariness he felt the start of one of those dull headaches that come from too little sleep and no breakfast. And too much housewife’s mouth. Switching on the transmitter, and aware of the gap in Mrs. Johnson’s curtains, he called in for a search warrant for the Beauchamp/Wilson address; a few minutes later the dispatcher informed him that one had been signed and duly recorded. Did he need a copy of it? Did he need Technical Assistance?
“No,” said Wager, “just authorization.” He still had the little tool of hooked and rippling blades that had come in so handy when he was in the narcotics section, and that would make the Bulldog very uneasy if he found out about it. So Wager didn’t tell him.
The front door had a deadbolt lock newly cut into the wood above the original door handle, which had its own lock. It took him two or three minutes’ tinkering before the last tumbler was finally lifted and held in place so he could turn the mechanism. The door-handle latch took half a second with the flat blade. The moment the door swung in, a puff of odor and the sound of busy flies told him that the Beauchamp /Wilson tribe was still at home.
Not even Detective Ross had a smartassed comment. No one who entered the small house wanted to open his mouth to breathe, let alone talk. Wager had been able to make only a quick survey of the main floor before rushing for the less-tainted air of the front porch and radioing Homicide for the new duty watch. The only ones who came prepared were Baird and his assistant; they wore industrial masks over nose and mouth. Ross and Devereaux made do with alcohol-soaked handkerchiefs wrapped about their faces like cowboys. Lincoln Jones held up until he reached the four kids and older girl tumbled over each other in the basement bathroom, where it looked as though they tried to hide. There he puked into the sink, trying not to splatter the small arms and legs tangled in the shower stall or the girl pressing a child between her and the toilet bowl gummy with smears of thick blood. Even Doyle came down to see this one.
“What do you mean they were the man’s wives, Wager? All three of them?”
Tiredly, he went over it for the chief and wished to God that the Bulldog would throw away the half-smoked cigar he chewed on wetly. But Doyle didn’t. Instead he twisted it half a turn and absently brushed away the cold ash that flecked his jacket. “An execution? You’re calling this an execution?”
“That’s right.”
“A religious goddamn sacrifice?”
“An execution for religious purposes. Like Beauchamp. They even drew an avenging angel on the living-room wall.”
“God.”
That he wasn’t too sure of. It took a lot more faith than he had to blame this on a god of any kind. It was simply human, and there the responsibility rested. There, too, the punishment would rest.
Beyond Doyle’s car a second ambulance waited; the first was being loaded with sheeted figures trundled on gurneys down the short step of the front porch. Many of the lumps were small. The attendants worked quickly, pausing at the doorway for a deep breath before plunging back into the house. At a distance on both sides of the street, housewives and small children stood silent or sat on the curbs and watched; a mail truck puttered without moving as the bearded driver stared, and at the nearest intersection cars were already starting to nose toward the crowd of flashing lights. In her doorway hung Mrs. Johnson’s face, mouth finally stilled in a slack-jawed O.
Wager fought another yawn and groaned as he rubbed his watering eyes. He thought the groan had been silent, but the Bulldog looked over at him.
“You were on duty last night?”
“Yessir.”
“Ross and Devereaux can handle it here. Can you come in at five this afternoon? I want every man in the division to go over this thing. This is one of the worst … In over thirty years, Wager, I’ve never …” He plugged the words with the soggy cigar butt and made a faint squishing noise.
“I can be there.”
“Fine—go get some sleep, if you can. Oh—and let me remind you, you’ve already built up more overtime than you can be compensated for. This will have to go under the ‘service to community’ category.”
“I’m not worried about comp time.” Or the goddamn activity forms.
“That’s what I figured.” When Doyle joined over thirty years ago, cops were on call twenty-four hours a day and never asked for compensatory time. That was before the union, the one Wager still hadn’t joined. In some ways he and Doyle understood each other.
Wager heaved the car door open and was half out when he heard a familiar voice tell someone, “Get the house—wait until they’re bringing out another one, and then get a full face of the house. What’s all this about killer angels, Wager? What’re you trying to hide from the public this time?”
“Screw you, Gargan.”
“That’s enough, Gabe,” said Doyle. “You’re off duty. I’ll see you at five.” Then to Gargan, “I’ll be liaison with the press on this one, Mr. Gargan. But let’s wait until the television people get here so I only have to go over it once.”
Wager slept. It was the total, motionless sleep of exhaustion, the kind you dive into as you drop onto the bed, and when your eyes shut you hear it coming fast, like an approaching train, and it roars over you. The next thing you hear is the alarm. You drag yourself across the bed to grope for the sound, your gummed lids sorely trying to squint open against the splintery feeling in your eyeballs. With one hand wrapped around the still-quivering clock, you take a few deep breaths and open your eyes a blink or two, a little longer each time, until they stay open enough for you to focus on the clock without tears blurring the red glow of numbers: 4:15. A steaming shower, a frozen dinner heated up to perfection, a hot and traffic-snarled scramble across town, and Wager stepped out of the elevator and into the eighth-floor conference room five minutes early. Max was already seated at the lower corner of the long table, where he could have room to sprawl his knees and elbows.
“Jumping Jesus, Gabe, you look awful.”
“I don’t feel awful. I feel pretty damn good.” Which wasn’t a lie, though it didn’t help to have someone say he shouldn’t.
Munn put some kind of tablet in his mouth and chewed it slowly. It left a little white scum at the corners of his mouth. “He don’t look so bad.”
Down the glossy table Ross sat busily jotting things on one of the yellow tablets that Doyle’s secretary had sprinkled around the table. Ross’s partner—the one Wager could stand, Devereaux—gazed out the window toward the distant mountains with sad and unseeing eyes. He was a Catholic, one of the few family men left in the division, and he had four kids about the age of some of the victims.
“Where’s the coffee?” Wager asked.
Max shook his head. “Doyle’s secretary hasn’t brought it yet.”
“She won’t,” said Munn. “Doyle thinks we drink too much coffee. The police doctor said that, collectively, we have higher blood pressure than any other group of public servants.” He belched softly. “Something more to worry about.”
Golding bustled in, nodding to everyone at the table, even those who didn’t nod back. He was followed by the section’s new man, Ziegler, recently transferred from Burglary and still a little uneasy at division meetings.
“Max—” Golding whispered loudly down the table. “Max—I got something new you’ve got to try. I don’t know how I ever got along without it. It’s the greatest thing in the world for getting rid of tension: a biofeedback machine.”
“A what?”
“Biofeedback. You plug yourself into it, see, and then you concentrate on relaxing different parts of your body. You get a sonic readout on these earphones that tells you how relaxed you really are. Man, I had tensions I didn’t even know I had. But with this machine, you can actually hear your tensions leave. It’s amazing, Max; you really got to get yourself one.”
“This machine relaxes you?” asked Munn.
“No. You do that yourself. The readout only tells you when you do it right. It’s amazing how much tension we have and we never even know it. This machine tells you things about your own body that you’d never learn otherwise—it really works!”
“Well,” said Munn, “with my luck, I’d probably electrocute me.”
“Naw, there’s not that much juice in it. Look, I’ve tried TM and est and even went to some Personal Relations Seminars, and none of those worked as good as this machine for letting you know just where you’re at. And it’s purely organic.”
“How can a machine be organic?” Wager asked.
“Because it projects your inner being. It’s like watching what your soul is doing on television or something. It’s a … a religious experience! You come out of that kind of relaxation, you feel like you’ve been reborn.”
Wager would have been happy to be reborn with a cup of coffee, but just as he shoved back his chair to get one, Doyle entered.
“All right, gentlemen. You’ve all seen the afternoon papers; you know the press reaction to this slaughter. It’s the biggest local story since the tornadoes, and the wire services have picked it up nationally.”