The Wrath of Angels (13 page)

I flew down to DC and rented a car. It took me less than a day to find Beatrice Lozano. She was holed up in a motel called the Lamplighter in a small town near Chesapeake Bay, the battered rental she had picked up a week earlier from a firm that wasn’t giving Hertz and Avis any headaches about competition parked directly outside the room. When I knocked on the door she didn’t bother to put the security chain in place before opening it. The room was dark, but even when she stepped into the sunlight I couldn’t tell if she was plain or pretty. She was in her mid-thirties and spreading slightly. Her face was pale, her short hair greasy and plastered to her skull, her skin dotted with pimples. There were fresh open cuts to her arms and hands. As we spoke, the thumb and index finger of her right hand moved to her left, and the nails began to dig into the flesh, creating a new wound for her to explore.

Her eyes were dead, and the skin around them was so dark that it looked like she’d been beaten.

‘Did he send you to look for me?’ she asked, after I told her who I was.

‘If you’re talking about your husband, then, yes, he did.’

‘Are you going to take me back to him?’

‘Do you want to go back?’

‘No.’

‘Then I won’t.’

‘But you’ll tell him where I am?’

‘He hired me to find out if you were okay,’ I said. ‘If it’s what you want, I’ll inform him that I saw you, and you seemed fine. It’ll be a lie, but that’s what I’ll tell him.’

‘A lie?’ She frowned.

‘You’re tearing holes in your skin. You’re not sleeping or, if you are, you’re having bad dreams. You’ve been moving from motel to motel, but you haven’t planned what you’re doing well enough to avoid using credit cards. Your husband didn’t seem too familiar with your wardrobe, but he was pretty certain that you hadn’t taken many clothes with you when you ran, so it was a snap decision on your part. You haven’t run away with anybody because I can see only one suitcase in the room behind you, and no sign of a man – or another woman – sharing the room. And if you had run away with someone, I think you’d probably be paying more attention to your appearance. No offense meant.’

‘None taken.’ She managed to raise a smile. ‘You sound like Sherlock Holmes.’

‘Every private detective wants to be Sherlock Holmes, except maybe without the gay undertones.’

We were still standing outside her room. It didn’t seem like the best place to discuss the intimate details of her life.

‘Do you mind if we sit down somewhere to talk about this, Mrs Lozano? It doesn’t have to be your room, if you’d rather keep that private or if you’re concerned about admitting a stranger. We can find a quiet diner, a coffee shop, a bar, whatever you prefer. If you’re worried about your safety with me, you shouldn’t be. I’m not going to do anything to harm you, and if you want to call the police at any time, you can do that and I’ll stay with you until they come. I can also give you the name of a couple of cops in Maine and New York who’ll vouch for me.’ I reconsidered. ‘Well, maybe not New York, and possibly just one in Maine. He might also swear some when you mention my name.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No police.’ She stepped back into her room. ‘We can talk in here.’

Despite the ‘No Smoking’ sign beside the TV, the room smelled strongly of old tobacco. There was no closet, just a rail from which hung three empty wire coat hangers. There were two beds separated by a single nightstand on a carpet the color of pea soup, and one of the skirting boards was coming away from the wall. Mrs Lozano’s case lay on the floor beside the bed on the right. It contained a pitiable array of clothes, some cheap toiletries, and a paperback book. She sat on the edge of one bed, and I sat facing her on the other. Our knees almost touched.

‘Why did you leave, Mrs Lozano?’ I asked.

Her face crumpled. She began to cry.

‘Did your husband hurt you?’

She shook her head. ‘No, he’s a good man, a sweet man.’

I took a paper tissue from the box on the nightstand and handed it to her.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Do you love your husband, Mrs Lozano?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I love him very much. That’s why I ran away. I wanted to protect him.’

‘From what?’

She gagged, as though the words she wanted to say had to be vomited up, not spoken. It took her three tries to produce them.

‘I’m protecting him from my brother,’ she said.

‘Why? What does your brother do?’

This time she did vomit. She put her hand to her mouth and puked bile into the palm.

‘He rapes me,’ she said. ‘My brother rapes me.’

Beatrice Lozano’s maiden name was Reed. Her older brother was a man named Perry Reed who sold used cars to people who didn’t know what they were buying, and crystal meth, OxyContin, and Canadian prescription medicines to people who did. He also ran a couple of titty bars with dancers who qualified as hookers if you examined the fine print closely enough. Perry Reed was slick, plausible, sociopathically violent, and had begun raping his sister when she was fourteen. It stopped when she was in her late teens and left for college, occurred sporadically during her twenties, and had resumed with some intensity shortly after she got married. Perry would come to the house when her husband was away, although sometimes he would summon her to the auto dealership, or to one of the apartments he owned in and around Harden if it wasn’t being rented at the time. She always went because he had warned her that he’d kill her husband if she ever refused him, or if she spoke a word to him or anyone else about what they did together in their private moments. When her husband accused her of having an affair, something had broken inside her. She’d run away because she couldn’t stay in Harden, and she couldn’t talk to her husband about what her brother did to her. All this she told me, a stranger, in her bedroom in the Lamplighter Motel.

‘Perry has men who work for him,’ she said. ‘They’re as bad as he is. He told me that even if he couldn’t get to Juan, they would, and then Alex Wilder would haul me into the woods, and he and his friends would take turns raping me before burying me alive. And I believe my brother, Mr Parker. I believe him because nobody knows him as well as I do.’

‘Who is Alex Wilder?’

‘He’s my brother’s right-hand man. They share everything. They’ve even shared me sometimes.’ She swallowed. ‘Alex is rough with me.’

I gave her another tissue. She blew her nose in it.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me why I’ve put up with it for so long?’ she said.

‘No.’

She stared at me for a long time. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

After we had spoken for a while longer, I went outside and called her husband. I told him that his wife was safe, and I asked him to pack some clothes in a bag for her and take it to the offices of the lawyer named Aimee Price in South Freeport. I then called Aimee and shared much of what I had heard, leaving out only names and locations.

‘Will she testify?’

‘I don’t know. And it’s appalling, but her brother could always claim it was consensual. It would be her word against his.’

‘I don’t think so. In cases like this, the victim’s testimony is crucial. That’s immaterial for now. She needs immediate help. I know some people in DC, if she wants to stay down there for a while. Convince her to talk to a counselor. Do you know anything about this Perry Reed?’

‘Just rumors, but I plan to find out more.’

That evening I drove Beatrice Lozano to a sexual trauma specialist in Prince George’s County, and she was immediately admitted to a shelter for abused women. One week later, her husband came down to visit her, and she spoke to him of what she had endured. But there remained the problem of Perry Reed, because Beatrice Lozano refused to testify against him. Something had to be done about him.

Something had been done. Two gentlemen of my acquaintance had taken the matter in hand while I was speaking with Marielle Vetters and Ernie Scollay in the Great Lost Bear.

Perry Reed, I heard, was going to lead this evening’s news.

C
hris put his hands on his knees and paused for a breath. The air was so damn still, and it tasted foul. That stink of rotting food was stronger now, and he had lost his bearings entirely. He thought that they’d been following the unknown man northwest, but he could be wrong. He had, it seemed, been wrong about everything else that day. Now the stranger had disappeared from sight, and as far as Chris was concerned they were even more lost, if there was such a thing as gradations of being lost. The flies had grown more persistent too: even the DEET spray wasn’t keeping them away, and he’d been stung on the back of the neck by a wasp, which hurt like hell. He’d killed it under his hand, which gave him some satisfaction. He’d have to look up the life cycle of wasps when he and Andrea got home. Wasps in November was just plain bizarre.

The light had changed as the sun began to set. The lines of the trees were already less clearly defined, as though someone had dropped gauze across the landscape. He no longer had any concept of time. When he looked at his watch, he found that it had stopped. They were trudging through a darkening fairytale world, and he was ashamed to admit that he was afraid.

He looked back. Andrea was struggling. She indulged his amateur’s taste for outdoor pursuits, but she had never really embraced them. She suffered through them because he enjoyed them, and also for the promise of luxury at the end of a day in the wild. Maybe it was the Catholic in her. She was the religious one. She still went to church on Sundays. He’d given up on his faith a long time ago; in a way, the child abuse scandals had provided him with an excuse to feel better about himself and his reluctance to sacrifice an hour of his weekend to the religion of his childhood. He did occasionally feel a lapsed believer’s pang of guilt, and was not above making the odd plea for assistance in times of trouble. Now, as he watched his wife drink thirstily from her water bottle, he offered up a prayer for their safe return to Falls End, or anywhere that even resembled a settlement.

‘Lord, I can’t say that I’m going to return to church, or that I’m even going to be much of a better man, but we need some help here,’ he whispered. ‘If not for my sake, then for hers, please: get us safely back to civilization.’

As if in answer to his prayer, their guide – if that was what he was – appeared among the trees again. He lifted his arm, enjoining them to follow him.

‘Hey, where are we going?’ Chris called to him. ‘Talk to us. We can’t keep doing this. We’re tired. Jesus.’

Andrea joined him. She pulled down the collar of his jacket to expose the wasp sting, and hissed in sympathy.

‘That looks bad,’ she said.

She slipped her pack off and found the tube of antiseptic lotion in the small first-aid kit. Carefully she applied it to the sting.

‘You’re not allergic to wasp stings, are you?’

‘You know I’m not. I’ve been stung before. They don’t affect me badly.’

‘Uh, this one is really big, and it seems to be spreading.’

‘I swear, I can feel it in my spine.’

‘I have some lorazepam in my suitcase,’ she said. ‘That should help. You might need to see a doctor if it doesn’t start going down.’

In the distance, one more thin shape among the trees, she could see the man watching them.

‘How long have we been following him?’

‘I don’t know. My watch has stopped.’

‘Stopped?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Mine too.’

They compared watches. The time on Andrea’s watch showed five minutes later than her husband’s, but Andrea always set her watch five minutes fast. Both watches had stopped at the same time.

‘That’s weird,’ said Chris.

‘This is all weird,’ said Andrea. ‘And it’s going to be dark soon.’

Her voice cracked slightly on the word ‘dark’. She was holding it together, but only barely.

‘We could go back the way we came, but what good would that do?’ he said. ‘We’d be back in the same position that we were in earlier. We have to trust him.’

‘Why?’

‘Because that’s what people do when they have no choice.’

‘He means us harm.’

‘Come on, not this again . . .’

‘I’m telling you. And I’d swear he’s leading us in circles.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I don’t
know
it, but I
feel
it.’

She saw the stranger’s head tilt slightly, as though he had heard what she said. She couldn’t get over how dark his silhouette was. Even when the light had been good, she’d been unable to tell how he was dressed, or discern the lineaments of his face. He was like a shadow given life.

‘What’s he doing now?’

The man’s gestures had changed. He was pointing to his right, jabbing a finger in that direction. Once he was sure that they’d seen what he was doing, he raised the same hand and waved them farewell, then disappeared into the trees, away from whatever he had been pointing at.

‘He’s leaving,’ said Chris. ‘Hey, where are you going?’

But the man could no longer be seen. The shadow had been absorbed by the greater shade of the forest.

‘Well,’ said Chris, ‘we may as well go see what he was pointing at. Could be a road, or a house, or even a town.’

Andrea adjusted her pack on her back and followed her husband. Her eyes kept returning to the patch of darkness into which the stranger had vanished, straining to penetrate it. She wanted him to be gone, but she was not certain that he was. She sensed him waiting in there, watching them. It was only when her husband spoke that she realized she had stopped walking. She willed her feet to move, but they wouldn’t. She wondered if this was how vulnerable animals reacted when faced with a predator, and if that was why they died.

‘He’s gone,’ said Chris. ‘Wherever he was taking us, we’re almost there.’

The hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end. Her skin prickled. He isn’t gone, she wanted to tell him. We can’t see him, but he’s still out there. He’s led us somewhere, but it’s nowhere that we want to be.

The slightest of breezes arose. It was almost a blessing until they smelled the stench carried upon it. There were birds in the air now: crows. She could hear their cawing. She wondered if crows were attracted by dead things.