Angel Interrupted

Chapter 17

My town was in turmoil. That much was evident everywhere I went. It had been invaded by the media and infused with a hysteria you could feel on the streets. Not even the missing boy’s mother, Callie Matthews—already a widow and now facing every parent’s worst nightmare—was spared the ugliness of speculation. And this from people who knew her, not strangers.
I knew all this because I searched for Maggie at the dead nurse’s cottage first, then stopped by the park looking for my little otherworldly friend in hopes he was up for another playground session. I needed some respite from the evil I’d sensed in the cedar-shingled house near the lake. Instead, I found a group of mothers, heads bent together as their children played nearby for television crews with nothing better to film than cheesy re-creations of Tyler’s last moments before he was taken.
“She’s unstable, is my point,” one of the mothers was whispering to the others. “She’s taking a lot of pills. Who knows what that can do to a person?”
“Tyler is her life,” another disagreed. “She’s not going to hurt him.”
“She couldn’t fake what she’s going through,” another agreed. “She’s devastated.”
“They’re all devastated when people are watching,” yet another mother insisted. “She could easily have lost it if he disobeyed her. You’ve seen how she gets. Was Tyler even here yesterday? I don’t remember seeing him. Neither does Chelsea, and she is a very observant child.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, he was here,” a stocky woman said with disgust. She walked away from the other mothers, ignoring the cameras, called her child to her, and left the park, probably wondering, as I did, what it was about tragedy that made people salivate and become so anxious to believe that even the best among us were capable of evil. I sympathized with her frustration, but I watched her go with sadness—her obvious rebuff of the group could cause a permanent rift. Crimes like this had a way of sending out fractures like earthquakes lead to fissures, carving divides that separate people and spread out in unpredictable directions, driving a wedge of destruction between friends and loved ones.
I left the park behind and went in search of Maggie. She was not at the station house, which was besieged by media vans. My guess was that Callie Matthews was inside being interviewed by the feds and that Gonzales would emerge as soon as the cameras were set up and the frenzy of reporters had reached the size of a large wolf pack. He’d appear, get his next five minutes of fame, then disappear back inside to cover the department’s ass and plot his next move toward fame and fortune.
I kept going.
Maggie is a predictable creature, and she leads a solitary life. I know her routine like my own, in part because the patterns of her life fascinate me. She lives alone in a condo and is friendly to her neighbors, but never stops to chat with any of them; she works out at a gym four times a week whenever she can, depending on her caseload; she shops at a small market owned by a Korean couple who save the best fruit and produce for her behind the counter; she seldom buys anything that comes in a package, as she is careful about what she eats, and her body shows it: she is not a thin woman, but she is in superb condition and the epitome of health and strength. It is one of the reasons I remain so enamored of her after other infatuations have come and gone. Everything about her celebrates life. She is impossible for someone like me to resist. I am a moth to her flame.
I checked her condo, then the market, the gym, and a coffee shop she sometimes frequents for skinny lattes sweetened with a shot of sugar-free vanilla syrup. When none of those spots panned out, I knew she had to be at her father’s. She always ended up there at one time or another during a difficult case, as well she should. Her father, Colin, had spent ten years on the streets as a beat cop and thirty more as a detective, rejecting all promotions and attempts to pull him onto the department ladder in favor of working the front line. He’d been allowed to stay on well past standard retirement age and had only left when, eventually, the ill health of his wife forced him to. Maggie’s mother had died a few years ago and, though I had been too drunk and self-centered to notice it then, I felt the sting of her loss in both daughter and husband. Maggie and her father carried their sorrow around like internal wounds that time did not seem to heal. Perhaps she had been the glue that bound them.
I had not worked much with Colin Gunn when he was on the force. Looking back, I realized it was because I had not passed his worthiness test. Like dozens of burnouts before me, I had been placed in a category he avoided, because he was too busy getting the job done—including the jobs I was failing to do. He didn’t waste his energy on losers like me. I can’t say he was wrong.
Maggie was a lot like her father. She kept her head down, she never gave up, and she didn’t waste much energy on the inevitable segment of the force that failed to pull its own weight, a group that included her partner, Calvano.
It was too bad Calvano was such a lousy partner. Maggie was not a talkative person by nature. She preferred to listen and to watch others talk; it told her much more about them than their words alone ever could. The exception was when she was working a difficult case. She liked to talk her way through the data, seeking a path among the collected evidence. If she’d had a decent partner, he would have been the perfect choice to listen, but since Gonzales always saddled her with losers in hopes of bringing them up closer to Maggie’s level, she had started to turn to her father for advice.
I found them sitting on the front porch of Colin’s house, his wheelchair pulled up next to Maggie’s rocking chair. To my surprise, Peggy Calhoun was with them, a brown bag lunch open on her lap. She, too, had probably sought refuge from the media madness and left her lab for the quieter quarters of Colin Gunn’s world.
“It’s crazy,” Maggie was telling her father as I settled into my favorite spot, a seat on the front step where I could lean back against a pillar and pretend to be a part of their family. Maggie never sensed I was there, but Colin? Sometimes, when he and I had the exact same thought at the exact same time, he’d look over to where I was sitting as if he could actually see me. It was an unconscious gesture on his part, but a thrill would zing through me nonetheless as I sensed a possibility coalescing in his mind before it was just as swiftly dismissed—Colin Gunn was not the type of man to believe in ghosts. He would not even allow himself to entertain the possibility.
I guess the joke was on him.
Maggie was frustrated in that charming way she gets when others are blocking her path. “You would not even believe what the quartet from Quantico are like,” she told her father.
“I can believe it, Maggie May,” he interrupted. “Trust me, I can believe it.”
“Gonzales has told me to steer clear of them, but to keep poking around into the boy’s disappearance, using the nurse’s death as a cover.”
“That’s Gonzales for you. He wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Always has. He’s a smart one. Smarter than me, god knows.” Her father smiled proudly. “He likes you, Maggie. As he should. Keep it that way. He’s going to end up owning this town. He’s a good man to have on your side and a terrible man to have as an enemy.”
“I can try,” Maggie protested. “But I don’t see how anyone can do their job when we’re tripping over television cameras every time we turn around. And you should see the mother. They’ve had to dope her even more than usual just to face all those lights and shouted questions. It’s insane. It’s cruel. She’s like an animal on display in a zoo. How is anyone going to find the boy with all of that in the way?”
Wow, she really was frustrated. This was not like my Maggie.
“I know,” her father said sympathetically. “But that’s the way it works these days, and all you can do is try to turn it to your advantage. Think of it this way: the whole state knows what little Tyler Matthews looks like now, as does most of the country, I’d imagine. That’s a good thing.”
Maggie’s face clouded over. She hated to say what she was about to add to their conversation. “But you know he’s unlikely to be alive, Dad. You know how long it’s been. He probably didn’t survive the first twenty-four hours.”
“There’s always hope, Maggie. There’s always hope. What is this? We’re Irish and we Irish have nothing, if not hope. What leads do you have?”
“Robert Michael Martin was able to give us a little to go on in terms of a description,” Maggie explained. “Now Calvano is going through a list of license plate numbers while the rest of the special team is wading through an unbelievably long list of names that some former-military, overbearing, self-styled hero who runs some operation called KinderWatch has given them. Supposedly, it’s a log of anyone seeking underage contact online in a five-state radius or some such nonsense. Everyone calls the guy ‘the colonel’ and he sits in his wheelchair like he’s sitting on a throne, issuing orders like we’re his grunts.” She thumped the side of her father’s wheelchair. “Trust me, you could run circles around him.”
Colin Gunn looked at his daughter. “Are you saying we cripples need to learn to sit quietly and behave ourselves?”
“It’s not that, Dad,” she said, looking ashamed. This was a new look for her. It was adorable. “It’s that he sits there, casting aspersions on everyone but the mayor, suggesting so-and-so might be doing this or that, and though he hasn’t the proof, he’s pretty sure they’re dirty, and then, after pointing the finger at six dozen people . . . he just sits there, while everyone else runs off and does all the work. It’s annoying. And it’s counterproductive. But the feds are taking him and his list very seriously.”
“I guess you’re over your love of men in uniform?” her father asked, but a glance from Peggy warned him to say no more. I wondered what that look had been all about. Maggie’s past was a mystery to me.
“He acts like everyone is under his command. You’d hate him, too.”
“I’m surprised I haven’t met him,” Colin said. “There’s only one wheelchair accessible VA van for the ride to Trenton. What’s his name again?”
“Colonel William Vitek, retired, US Marines Corps.”
“I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for him, and hate him on sight when I do meet him. Of course, hating authority is a bit sticky when you have to depend on the Veterans Administration for your health care.”
“Oh, you would hate him if you met him,” Maggie said stubbornly. “Trust me.”
“Rosemary D’Amato came into the station house again,” Peggy told Colin, deciding it was time to change the subject. I was intrigued by the familiarity of her tone toward Maggie’s father—had she been visiting the old man without Maggie around? I watched them for a few minutes until I was sure. She had. Why, that little vixen.
I enjoyed watching the way Colin Gunn looked at Peggy. To some, she was just a woman of a certain age with improbably red hair, cat’s-eye glasses looped around her neck on a chain, and that ill-advised orange lipstick that always, inevitably, ended up on her teeth. But she was also a remarkably dedicated woman, who knew the mysteries of the earth’s most minute worlds like no one else I had ever met. Her weapon was her microscope and she found justice for many families on that tiny battlefield. She was a scientist, but she was a wizard, too, one whose empathy for those who were grieving knew no boundaries. It had taken death to make me appreciate Peggy Calhoun, but appreciate her I did.
So did Colin Gunn, I thought to myself as I watched the way he looked at her and responded. One man’s old lady was another man’s younger woman, I reminded myself. I think I liked knowing that about the world.
“That was a sad case,” Colin remembered. “Little Bobby D’Amato. Your old partner, Bonaventura, caught part of it,” he said to Maggie. “He and Fahey.”
Maggie looked up at my name and my heart soared.
“Which was a disaster,” Colin went on. Ouch. “I went to the chief when I heard and he pulled it and gave it to another team, but by then it was too late. We’d lost the first day and had to play catch-up from then on out.”
Double ouch.
“Their son being taken split the D’Amatos up,” Colin said sadly. “They stayed married, but in name only. That’s always the way it goes. A child gets taken and you sit back and wait, knowing the marriage will never be the same, not when it’s a reminder of what they’ve lost.”
“She still lives in the same house,” Peggy told him. “Still comes into the department to see if they have found anything new.”
“That was a long time ago,” Colin conceded. “But it’s worse when you don’t find a body. People can live the rest of their lives without being able to put it behind them.”
“I don’t want that to happen with Tyler Matthews,” Maggie said. “God knows, I don’t. But I’m not seeing what I can do.”
“Maggie,” her father said firmly. “Your job is to leave the boy to the others.” He raised his eyebrows at her when she started to protest, and that alone caused her to remain silent. “There are plenty of people working that little boy’s case, doing more than you could ever do for him. If anything breaks, Peggy here can tell you.” He looked up and Peggy nodded. “Your duty is to that dead nurse. Where is she in all this?”
“Forgotten,” Maggie said promptly. “Who cares about a dead thirtysomething woman with no husband and no children? It makes for a lousy sound bite.”
I think it is safe to say that everyone else on that porch, including me, heard the things that Maggie did not say in that sentence: she was a lot like Fiona Harker.
“It is frightening,” Peggy agreed. “I could not get over the loneliness of her house. But, Maggie, she isn’t you.”
And this isn’t you, I wanted to say. It was not like my Maggie to be sitting around, whining, when she could be relentlessly pursuing a lead.
Colin picked up on my thoughts. “Have you got any leads?” he asked his daughter. “Surely you’ve been interviewing her coworkers?”
Maggie shrugged. “I have gossip and innuendo.”
You have Christian Fletcher, I wanted to shout. He’s a big, fat lead if ever I saw one.
“Doesn’t every lead start with gossip and innuendo?” her father asked gently.
“The nurses think she was having an affair with a married doctor.”
“There you have it,” her father said, spreading his arms. “A place to start.”
“Except she likes the guy,” Peggy said abruptly. They all let the comment lie there for a moment. I wanted to jump up and wave my arms and start shouting at Maggie: No, leave that guy alone.
“She likes what guy?” Colin Gunn finally asked.
“The doctor all the nurses think the dead nurse was having the affair with,” Peggy said flatly. “When you told me about it, I could tell from your tone of voice that you liked him, Maggie.”
“Traitor,” Maggie muttered.
Peggy felt no need to apologize. She wanted the old Maggie back as much as I did.
“You cannot let your personal feelings interfere,” her father told her. “Take yourself off the case.”
“I can’t,” Maggie explained. “There’s no one left to take it. They’re all too busy running around in circles looking for the boy.”
“Then get off your ass and go to the hospital,” Colin suggested. “I don’t care who you like or who you don’t like. What is that nurse’s name again? The victim?”
“Fiona,” Maggie said. “Fiona Harker.”
“Who?” Colin asked.
“Fiona Harker.”
“Say her name one more time,” her father ordered.
“Fiona Harker,” Maggie said more loudly.
“Good. Now don’t you forget she has a name. And don’t you forget that this Fiona Harker is depending on you. You are all she has. Without you, she has no hope of justice. Without you, her killer gets to walk this earth free. And he will do it again. You and I both know that when someone gets away with murder, it eats at him and it invites him to try to get away with it again. It becomes as addictive as any drug. Getting away with murder is impossible to resist. You have to stop him, Maggie. You can’t afford to have personal feelings, not about who might have done this.”
“I know,” she said, sitting up straighter. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
Peggy smiled ruefully. She knew. She knew all too well: Maggie was lonely. All those days of working long hours deep into the night, breakfasts alone in a silent house, nights spent with plenty of room on either side of her in bed, no one to share her triumphs and problems with . . . it was all taking a toll. I’d never understand why some people, like my new friend, Noni Bates, could embrace their solitude and not feel loneliness, while others, like Robert Michael Martin, felt it eating away at their sense of self, pulling them out to sea like an undertow.
My Maggie had become one of the lonely ones.
“Do your job,” her father told her. His voice was kind. “First, do your job.”
Maggie stood and kissed her father on the cheek. “I love you, Pop. And thanks. I needed that. I’m heading over to the hospital now.”
“That’s my girl,” he called after her as Maggie skipped down the steps, inches from me. I wanted to touch her, but she slipped past as gracefully as a breeze.
“What did I teach you?” Colin Gunn yelled after his daughter.
Maggie turned, hands on her hips. “Fiona Harker,” she said distinctly.
“That’s right,” her father said. His voice was full of pride. I realized that Colin missed the hunt and that Maggie was his surrogate. “Bring it home for Fiona.”
As Maggie drove away, determined to regain her stride, Peggy affectionately ruffled Colin’s thick hair. “She needs someone in her life,” Peggy told him.
“But you don’t,” Colin said with a grin. “Not anymore.” They kissed and then he smiled at her, his eyes twinkling with the light of a much younger man.