Angel Interrupted

Chapter 25

I stood in the center of a maelstrom of emotions as rescue teams swarmed the scene, seeking to squelch the anarchy that had erupted. The firemen crackled with energy and exuded a recklessness outranked only by their courage. The abduction squad was frantic with worry that Tyler Matthews was inside, their confidence shaken that they had not discovered the colonel’s involvement sooner. The feds were grim, as if this latest development was a personal affront to them. Noise, smoke, fear, anger: it all whirled around the house, seeming to whip the flames even higher.
An ambulance arrived, followed by another, disgorging EMTs. They moved through the chaos like beacons of light, their steady focus calming the others, causing them to pause and recover their professionalism.
“There’s another one back here,” a fireman shouted from the top of the driveway. An ambulance crew started toward him on the run, Maggie following behind them.
“Is it a child?” she screamed above the sounds of the fire.
“No,” the fireman shouted back, his face covered in soot. “Adult. Unrecognizable.” With these ominous words, he stepped aside as the EMTs raced past him. The fireman turned away from what he had seen. Having witnessed the agony of the colonel, he could not bear to look at it anymore. Even the EMTs slowed at what they saw: a blackened shape huddled over the steps in the shallow end of the pool, unrecognizable as human, a collage of black char, burnt fabric, and ruined pink flesh.
“Oh, god,” one of the EMTs muttered under his breath. His companion glanced at him and tugged at his elbow, urging him to shake it off. Another human being was in pain, and it was their job to stop it.
They did what they could.
Maggie had returned to the injured young man’s side as soon as she’d heard the second victim was not Tyler Matthews. She knelt beside him, holding his hand and murmuring to hang in there as the EMTs worked over him, assessing his wounds, slowing the bleeding, and containing infection for the moment. His eyes had opened and he stared at Maggie as if she were an angel, but he did not make a sound.
“Can I ride with him?” she asked as they loaded him onto a stretcher and began to race toward the ambulance.
“No room,” the female EMT told her. “You’ll have to follow.”
Maggie was crestfallen. I marveled at the sympathy she was able to show for the man who had, irrefutably, taken Tyler Matthews.
“Come on, Adrian,” Maggie told her partner. “Let’s get out of here before Internal Affairs arrives. Someone’s got to be by the kid in case he says something.”
“You got my gun, right?” Calvano asked.
“Yes.” Her answer was abrupt. “It’s probably going to be a while before you get it back. Nothing I can do about that.”
“Gonzales already knows, doesn’t he?” Calvano asked miserably.
“Probably.” Maggie took notice of Calvano for the first time since the shooting. She, like me, saw that something in him had changed, as if his ego had been popped by the jab of a pin and now hung deflated around him, leaving him with nothing but the saggy vestige to drag along with him. His cockiness, his confidence—it had all disappeared.
None of that had been real, I realized, his self-assurance, his self-centeredness. I had hated him for being someone who did not really exist. It was all a fa?ade. And it all seemed like such a waste of energy now.
“Come on, Adrian,” Maggie said more kindly. “Man up. I need your help.”
Maggie could not ride with the young man to the hospital, but no one was going to stop me. I was inside the ambulance before the crew was, perched on a bench right behind the driver’s seat, where I could watch the EMTs at work. They loaded the young man without any judgment about whether he was worthy of saving. I marveled at their objectivity. They sat on either side of him, checking his vital signs, hooking up intravenous drips, swabbing out what wounds they could. They did not care if he was a criminal or a victim. I could feel in each of the technicians an intense core of determination—as if they had anointed themselves knights sworn to defend all life against death, to the death, regardless of whether someone deserved it. They were not saving lives; they were fighting death.
“Why didn’t you let her ride along?” the male EMT asked his colleague.
“She wants something from him,” the other EMT explained. “She’d pounce on every groan or movement he made, wanting to talk to him. I can’t deal with that. We’re dealing with enough here as it is.” A monitor began to beep and she quickly adjusted one of the clear bags of fluid dripping into one of the man’s arms.
There was little they could do, really, given the devastating wounds, but their vigilance was relentless—and their stubborn refusal to give up on him was keeping him alive. As the young man lay in the dusk between life and death, his life force vibrated like a piano wire, swinging from faint to louder again, then fading away, only to be brought back once more. They were not going to let him die.
I could feel nothing else from him, just that faint thread of life and the remnants of whatever had kept him alive through all the years of the colonel’s abuse: his will to survive. Whatever pain he had felt, whatever memories he held, they were of no importance now. His fight was simple: his body would either live, or it would die. Nothing else mattered.
We raced through the town, sirens screaming and red lights flashing, leaving a wake of chaos as cars pulled frantically to the side and then sought to recover from our passing. I saw the looks of terror on the faces of the drivers as the ambulance raced past. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
We reached the hospital at virtually the exact same moment as the ambulance carrying the colonel, though he was little more than a ruined body. That he was still alive was no testament to his strength, I thought, but rather the judgment of a universe that had decreed he had not yet suffered enough to pay for the suffering he had caused.
A team of doctors and nurses rushed to meet us as we pulled up to the emergency room entrance. As my luck would have it, the great Christian Fletcher was back on duty, newly refreshed, and the first to take control. He took one look at the colonel and ordered him taken upstairs to the burn unit for “pain control.” There was nothing else that could be done for him.
The young man was another story. Within seconds, the EMTs had summarized his condition to Fletcher and handed over the paperwork. As the young man was wheeled inside the hospital, a squadron of nurses fulfilled every order that Fletcher barked on the run. His authority was absolute; his concentration even more so. When Maggie and Calvano arrived a moment later, Fletcher was too engrossed in saving the young man’s life to even notice that Maggie was watching.
Have I been wrong about him? Could a man so devoted to saving lives take a life, as someone had taken Fiona Harker’s? As she watched him in action, it did not seem possible. And were he and I really all that different from each other? He fought to win the battle of the flesh. I fought to win the battle of the soul.
They were moving the young man into a trauma room. The nurses had changed from the warm, nurturing women I had observed days before into steel-strong instruments of efficiency, ruthless in their competence. They worked together as one, removing the boy’s clothing and sterilizing the wounds. Fletcher did not even have to ask for an instrument or suggest an adjustment in the equipment now surrounding the man’s body like a crowd of robotic onlookers. The nurses always seemed a step ahead of him, anticipating his needs.
Fiona Harker had once been one of them, I remembered. How ironic it would be, I thought, if the young man before me died because Fiona Harker was not here to help save him. She had been the best, the medical staff insisted, but if she had been better than the nurses I saw before me . . . oh, how very many lives she must have saved before hers was taken.
Maggie pulled aside one of the attendants and was outlining the situation in an urgent whisper, explaining the need to talk to the injured man as soon as they could, that he might be the only one who knew where the missing boy was. The attendant nodded, understanding, but jumped and then froze—as did everyone in the entire area—when the emergency room doors banged open and the federal agents stepped inside, looking like a posse of gunslingers about to take over the town.
“Get them out of here,” Christian Fletcher ordered immediately. He glanced at Maggie and Calvano and I realized he had, indeed, registered her presence all along. “Those two can stay.”
It was one of the few places in town where the feds were outranked and their outrage could not save them. They were swept from the treatment area by a pair of intractable nurses, but quickly abandoned the fight once one of the nurses told them the colonel was still alive and in a burn unit upstairs. They raced for the elevator instead.
Yeah, good luck with that one, boys, I thought. The colonel’s not going to be able to help any of you. He’s busy fulfilling his fate.
A nurse showed Maggie and Calvano to the staff break room and told them to wait there. She did not seem to agree with Fletcher’s assessment that they could stay, and made a conspicuous point of removing a pile of patient records from a counter before she left the room. Neither Maggie nor Calvano noticed. They were too preoccupied with their troubles. They paced the room, both lost in their own fears. Maggie’s worries were for the young man and for Tyler Matthews, who might have died in the fire. Calvano’s worries were for himself. He knew his career was over if the man who had taken Tyler died with bullets from Calvano’s gun in his back.
But Maggie’s fears, at least, were lessened when Gonzales was shown into the room by an attendant. In my town, there was no force that could keep Gonzales from going where he pleased. He outranked God. I thought Calvano might crap in his pants when the commander walked through the door, but Maggie ran to him like a sinner seeking salvation. “What did they say?” she asked.
“No other bodies,” Gonzales told her, grabbing her arm and holding her gently in place. I felt Maggie grow calm as relief and his steadying presence swept over her.
“Are they sure?” she asked.
He nodded. “The fire was contained pretty quickly. It’s mostly smoke damage in the interior, except for a couple back rooms. They checked those carefully and searched the basement. There is no attic. And there are no other bodies. Which means Tyler Matthews may still be alive. Has the arsonist said anything?”
“No,” Maggie said, sitting down abruptly and trapping her hands between her knees to steady them. “I’m not sure he’s going to.”
For the first time, Gonzales seemed to notice Calvano, although I knew he had been aware all along that he was waiting, stricken, in a corner of the room for his judgment. Ignoring him had only been the prelude to what awaited Adrian Calvano.
“You,” Gonzales said, pointing straight at Calvano. Oh, this was bad. He was not even going to call him by his name. Calvano knew it, too; his face drained of all color. “Get out of here. Go back to the department and wait. A car’s outside to take you. I don’t want you getting near any case files or within two floors of the squad room. Sit in the lobby waiting area and wait. Talk to no one. IAD will be there when they can.”
“The public waiting area?” Calvano asked, mortified. “The media can’t be far behind. I’ll be crucified.”
Yeah, dude. I kind of think that’s the point. I was suddenly very glad I’d been so low on Gonzales’s radar while I was alive that he’d not ever even bothered to judge me.
“Then call your union rep and work it out,” he told Calvano, unconcerned. “I’m busy. Just get out of here.” Gonzales turned his back on Calvano. He was done with him. It was a devastating dismissal for someone who needed his approval as badly as Calvano did.
Humiliated, Calvano slunk from the room. I felt no satisfaction. I remembered all too well what it felt like to screw up that badly and, at least in my case, I’d had alcohol to blunt my mortification. Calvano would be facing his disgrace stone-cold sober.
Maggie’s mind was already miles beyond Calvano and his well-deserved fate. “If Tyler wasn’t at the house, where the hell is he?” she asked out loud.
“That’s what I need you to find out,” Gonzales said, pulling up a chair so he faced Maggie directly. I could feel his peculiar, supple energy reaching out to Maggie and wrapping around her. Gonzales was a chameleon. He could become whatever you wanted him to be, and he often did to further his own aims. He was going to be Maggie’s father, a seasoned, older detective, treating her like a colleague who was just a little bit smarter than she was. And it was going to work.
“The feds will be raining down an army of people to find the boy,” he explained. “But they aren’t going to find him because they aren’t from here, Maggie. You are. We can’t count on that young man in there pulling through and telling us where the boy is. And Vitek is barely alive. He’ll tell us nothing. He’s in a medically induced coma, and we’re not going to be able to countermand that order. He could die at any moment. The feds don’t know that, so he’s distracting them for at least a few hours. I need you to think, to think hard, on how we can find the boy.”
Some people become detectives for the challenge: they thrive on puzzles and outsmarting criminals. Others love the ego trip. But some, like Maggie, do it for the victims. She was in it for Tyler Matthews, and her mind was uncluttered by anything but how best to find him. Gonzales was smart enough to know that, and so he had come to her. She would make him look good.
“The first thing we have to do is find out who that man is lying in the other room and why he set the fire,” she said quietly as her mind began neatly cataloging her options. She was an amazing force at times like this, the human equivalent of a Porsche built for speed, beauty, and absolutely flawless performance. “He had no ID on him, so we need to find out how he got to Vitek’s house, and then search his vehicle. The license plate is probably on the lists Martin took down near the park the morning before Tyler was taken. We can run the plates and see who it’s registered to.”
“Good,” Gonzales urged her. “Go on.”
“He’s probably using a fake name—and so is Vitek, for that matter—so we need to find out who both of them are. Vitek’s beyond fingerprints, but the boy isn’t. And we can run DNA for both. And let’s find out who owns the house where Vitek was living and how he ended up there.” She was just getting started. Like Gonzales, she wanted a victory, and she wanted that victory to belong to the department, not to some faceless men in suits who looked down on the hometown squad.
“What else?” Gonzales urged her. “All that is going to take time.”
“The disks,” she said, looking up. “We have the files Robert Michael Martin brought into the station. The ones he copied off of Vitek’s hard drives. If the boy is in some of them, maybe there’s something in the background that will help us pinpoint the location?”
“They found footage of the boy a few minutes ago,” Gonzales confirmed. “But there was a lot of material and they’re still looking through it.”
“Then we need to bring in Tyler’s mother, sir,” Maggie told him. “Have her look at the footage we have of her son. See if she recognizes anything in the house where he’s being held. Stranger abductions are rare. Chances are good she knows whoever took him or that they at least had contact before. We need to bring her in again.”
Gonzales nodded, but reluctantly. Callie Matthews was not in good shape. Seeing her son alive on Vitek’s video files might reassure her, but it might also put her over the bend. I thought Gonzales might protest, but he didn’t. Like me, he had noticed Maggie’s expression, and it puzzled him. She looked almost shamefaced. I wondered what on earth she had to feel so guilty about.
So did Gonzales. “What is it, Gunn?” he asked.
“I apologize,” she said quietly. “About Fiona Harker. Every time I think I’m getting somewhere, I get pulled onto the Matthews case. I haven’t forgotten about her, sir. I will find out who killed her.”
Gonzales looked bemused. “Gunn,” he said, shaking his head. “The dead can wait. Let’s just find the boy. But in the meantime, I’m giving you a direct order. I want you to go home and get some rest. I’ll set the wheels in motion on everything else. I’ll need you fresh in the morning. So go home, shower, and rest.” His voice was surprisingly kind for someone whose entire existence revolved around self-interest.
His cell phone rang and he glanced at the caller ID. “Gonzales,” he said into the phone, with the tone of voice he reserves for people more important than he is. He held his hand over the receiver and mouthed four words at Maggie: “Do what I say.”
Yeah. As if that would stop Maggie from doing what she thought she needed to do.