When I was sure the coast was clear I came out of hiding. I was out of luck on the dope: he’d left something behind, all right, but it wasn’t marijuana.
I took a look through the telescope to see what he’d been spying on. I was expecting the girls’ locker room, something like that, but the guy’s tastes turned out to be weirder than I’d thought. The telescope was aimed at this little picnic area about a quarter mile south of the school. It was nothing fancy, just a turnaround by the side of Route 99 with some wooden tables and a tire swing. The place doubled as a make-out spot, and on a Friday or a Saturday night I suppose there’d have been plenty to keep a Peeping Tom interested, but at the moment the only people there were this tourist family: Mom, Dad, two boys, a golden retriever, and an RV plastered with Disneyland stickers.
I didn’t see the attraction. I mean, there’s no accounting for perverts, but this family just didn’t strike me as, you know, masturbation material. So I was trying to puzzle it out—was it the mom that turned him on? Was it the dog?—when I heard a door slam. And I’m like, oh crap, he’s coming back, but it wasn’t the door in the hall, it was the school’s front door. I looked out the window and saw the janitor down in the parking lot. He walked over to this brown van, got in, started up the engine…and just sat there, idling.
Then after another minute I noticed smoke wafting out of the driver’s-side window: the son of a bitch had fired up another joint. That got me mad, because I was already thinking of it as my dope, so I started sending out mental vibes to any of Officer Friendly’s country cousins who happened to be in the area, begging them to drive by and bust this guy.
Well, of course that didn’t happen. But who did drive by, a few minutes later, was the family in the RV. And no sooner had they passed the school than the van’s taillights finally winked out; the janitor pulled onto the highway right behind the RV and started following it.
Was that when you began to suspect that the janitor was the Angel of Death?
No. The guy was a creep, obviously, but at that point I was still thinking voyeur, not psycho killer. I figured he was tailing them because he wanted to whack off some more—or maybe he was hoping to steal some panties, or a chew toy.
Then the next morning, I went out to catch my ride and Se?or Diaz was driving the car, which had never happened before.
“What’s going on?” I said. “Is it the Rapture?”
“The death angel,” said Carlotta. “He grabbed another kid yesterday, right outside Modesto.”
Modesto was north, the same direction the RV had been headed. That should have been enough to start me thinking, but the lightbulb didn’t go on until Carlotta said: “Get this. He didn’t just take the kid this time. He killed the kid’s dog, too.”
“Dog?” I said. “What kind of dog?”
“I don’t know, a big one I guess. They think the dog tried to protect the kid, so the angel, like, gutted it.”
“What about the boy? Did they find his body yet?”
“Yeah.”
“Where?”
Carlotta looked excited. “You’ll see.”
A half mile out from school, we hit a traffic jam. This was something else that had never happened before—the road was usually empty at this hour—but when I saw the flashing lights up ahead, I immediately understood.
“The state police found him around two in the morning,” Carlotta said. “Mrs. Zapatero from the motel was coming back late from visiting her sister and saw them roping off the crime scene. She said the kid was laid out on one of the picnic tables, like a human sacrifice.”
As we got closer to the turnaround, Carlotta and I rolled our windows down and leaned out, hoping to catch a glimpse of the corpse. Se?or Diaz yanked us back into the car and gave us each a swat on the head. “Show some respect!” he demanded, adding, to Carlotta: “You see why I don’t want you walking?”