Where Angels Rest (34 page)

“Include her nephew while you’re looking. Find the doctor who operated on his eyes. I’d like to know just how much he sees.”

The woman gave a dramatic sigh—he’d just added to her plate—and Nick went to Valeria. “Is Rosa at Hilltop this morning?”

“As far as I know.”

“Would you call her for me?”

And when Valeria’s eyes got big, he thought to add, “No, no, it’s not about Calvin and nothing’s wrong. I just have a question for her.”

Rosa was on a minute later. “Can you check something?” Nick asked. “Rodney’s here at headquarters, just leaving. I need for you to run out to his place and look in his fridge.”

He explained only as much as he had to, and a few minutes later, she called him back as she went into Rodney’s cabin.

“Whoo,” she said, on a breath.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. It’s just hot in here, that’s all. Smells like dinner.” She paused. “
Dios
. That’s where all those muddy towels came from. There’s a pile of them here on the floor.”

“Rosa, the fridge,” Nick prompted.

“I’m going, I’m going. Okay, right here, Sheriff. MinuteMaid, calcium-enriched orange juice from concentrate. Pulp-free.”

“Is it full?”

“Almost.”

“What’s the expiration date?”

Rosa hummed a note while she hunted for it. “December 15. Four weeks from now.”

Okay. Nick hung up, bullied his brow with his fingers. Miami. Lawrenceville. Hopewell. Even Minnesota. No one else made sense.

Quent walked back in and Nick said: “Rodney says Jack went to Minneapolis for Weelkes’s award ceremony.”

“Really?” He blew out a breath. “Okay, I’ll look. Virginia to Minneapolis, October 2003.”

“Flights, trains, buses.”

“Boats, balloons, carrier pigeons. I’ll check.”

Maggie drove with white knuckles; Rodney sat in the front seat, rewinding and replaying the scene with the sheriff in his mind. Did Mann actually suspect him? Was it possible?

He’d have to keep an ear to the ground. He didn’t want to be caught off guard. Not when there was only one angel left to find.

The thrill of knowing it was almost finished gave him a heady sensation. The threat that Nick might catch up with him before the end too bitter to contemplate. He had to move quickly now.

Then again, there was a fly in the ointment: Lud Ferguson. Damn, he hadn’t counted on that. The newspaper suggested he witnessed the disappearance of Rebecca Engel. Some stupid wino, for God’s sake.

Maggie parked the Saturn and Rodney said, “I’ll be back. I need to go home a while.”

She nodded in that way someone does when they’re not paying attention; still, he swept his cane back and forth until he found his three-wheeler, then headed to the cabin at his normal cautious pace in case she was watching. A lot of legally blind people drove three-wheelers or bikes, even scooters. But they didn’t drive them fast.

Once out of sight, he gunned it to the cabin and went inside. Whipped off the dark glasses and went downstairs to Rebecca.

His breath caught when he saw her, laid out like the dead on a slab in the morgue. One more, almost gone. The sensation was like flying. He looked at the shelf where just two figurines remained. One would die with Rebecca. The other? He still wasn’t sure, but one thing was certain: it would all be over soon.

He touched the mask on Rebecca’s face. Like leather, not like bisque. A couple more hours, then.

He cocked his head, looking at her, then touched her eyelid. It flickered, but barely. Still hanging on. Sometimes, depending how thick the clay was, they could breathe for a good long time. Clay was porous. Usually, they were still alive when he pulled off the mask and shot them through the heart. He liked that best. Easier to handle a body before
rigor mortis
set in.

Besides, the shooting always felt good. Made him feel nostalgic.

He climbed back up the wooden stairway, feeling good, then stopped. Got a
vibe.

Someone here? He looked around, slowly, carefully. There, the kitchen door. He never left the kitchen door closed; the heat from downstairs collected there.

He stepped into the kitchen, scanning every inch. Rodney was scrupulous about keeping everything in its place—he’d learned it as a child when his world was little more than shadows, and even after his sight crept back following the surgery, he kept it up with convincing precision. He liked the order.

He
loved
the ruse. It was a ruse that fooled everyone but the angels.

His gaze touched the counters. Nothing different. He opened a cupboard, started to go through them, then remembered: The orange juice.

A smile blossomed, and he cocked his head. Really, Sheriff?
Really?

He opened the refrigerator already knowing what he’d find. Sure enough, the OJ was on the second shelf. Not where he’d left it.

Rage began to swell but it morphed into excitement. Nick Mann was watching him.

Nick Mann
was
Number Ten.

A thrill shot through his veins. After all these years, taking the angels out one by one, it was finally coming to a close. The end of an era. From here, no one would follow him. No one would sit in the heavens keeping watch.

The Angelmaker smiled. The finale would be spectacular.

E
RIN WENT TO
Leni’s after the fire and stayed through the night, talking to Leni and waiting to talk to Katie. When the newspaper hit the front porch, she couldn’t believe the headlines: L
OCAL
D
RUNK
W
ITNESSES
E
NGEL
D
ISAPPEARANCE
; C
ALLOWAY
D
OUBLE
M
URDER
C
ONNECTED TO
M
ISSING
W
OMAN
; F
IREBOMB
A
TTACK ON
S
HERIFF’S
D
AUGHTER
; FBI T
AKES
O
VER
C
ALLOWAY
C
ASE
; C
OLLEGE
C
ONDUCTS
S
EARCH FOR
S
TRING OF
M
ISSING
S
TUDENTS.
The stories, both on TV and in the paper, were melodramatic and, Erin thought, had the amazing ability to tiptoe around the truth while slogging through conjecture and speculation. She was starting to sympathize with Nick’s hatred for the media when Katie wandered down from her room, looking shaken and exhausted.

“Hey,” Erin said, straightening.

Katie jumped. Looked at her. Her gaze scanned the room until she saw her mother’s toes peeking from the end of the sofa in the living room, then she looked back at Erin. “Dr. Baker said I wasn’t allowed to talk to you. Sheriff Mann said you weren’t allowed to talk to me.”

“Things have changed,” Erin said, and took a tentative step forward. “The sheriff was worried that my campaign against Huggins would taint anything you said to me, but we can’t worry about that anymore.” She paused. “Rebecca’s not with Ace.”

Katie’s face went slack. “She isn’t?”

“I’m sorry, no. They found him last night.”

Her gaze veered to the living room, to her mother again. “Does Mom know?”

“Yes. She was up most of the night.”

“Oh, God.” Her eyes filled with tears. “What happened to Becca? Where is she?”

Erin herded her into the kitchen, hoping to let Leni sleep. “Ace says Rebecca was planning to meet him outside yesterday morning, after your mom went to work. When he came to get her, she was gone. The sheriff found her suitcase in a dumpster behind some grocery store.”

Katie pressed her fists against her eyelids. “Oh god, oh god, oh god.”

“Katie,” Erin said, her voice stern, “you’re the one who knows the most about Becca and what she was doing the past few weeks. You have to think. Think about where she might have gone, or who might have taken her.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know…” Katie was losing it. Erin wanted to pull her into her arms and tell her she didn’t have to do this. No teenager should be responsible for keeping a sibling safe. It was too big a load. Too heavy.

But Katie wasn’t going to confide to Andrew Baker. Erin was good at this. She knew psychology and she knew the court system; Katie was drowning in both right now.

“It might be something you heard her say, something you remember… It might be the key to finding—”

A sob rose from her gut and she whirled. “Stop it. Leave me alone.”

She ran upstairs and slammed a bedroom door, and hopefulness drained from Erin’s chest. She turned, surprised to see Leni standing in the doorway.

“I have to get to the restaurant,” she said, “But you can go on upstairs.”

“I don’t think Katie will welcome me into her room right now.”

“That’s the point,” Leni said, a little hope in her eyes. “She’s not in her room. That was Rebecca’s door that slammed just now.”

Erin knocked on Rebecca’s door and got no answer. “Katie?” she said. “I’m coming in.”

She pressed the door open and stepped in as if expecting snakes to be hiding in all the crevices. Katie was curled up on an old daybed, a huge book in her lap. She wasn’t reading it, just staring, rubbing her hands over it. When Erin sat down, the words tumbled out.

“I tried to stop her. She wouldn’t listen to me,” Katie said miserably. “If I’d just told Mom. If I’d told someone about her and Calloway, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Katie—” Erin reached for her hand but she snatched it away.

“You don’t know,” she wailed. “You don’t have any idea what it’s like to be the reason your sister might be dead.”

Erin’s skin constricted around her. “Let me tell you about Justin.”

She did—about the beatings he took growing up, the emotional gorge he fell into after the man he both loved
and hated disappeared, and the evidence against him she’d unwittingly given police. “So you see, Katie,” she said, “I don’t think you win the award for worst sister.”

Katie had tears rolling down her cheeks. Erin moved to the daybed and took her hand. “We both have a sibling we’re trying to save. Mine has until tomorrow night. I don’t know about yours, but I do know this: We’re going to have to do this together.”

Lud Ferguson. The Angelmaker hadn’t counted on some drunken bum witnessing Rebecca’s disappearance. It wasn’t insurmountable, but timing was key. Mann was too close. The orange juice, the chair. He was starting to see.

Had to be now.

He reached up to touch the knot at the back of his head; it felt strange. He yanked the whole wig a little to the left to try to center it, then tucked a few stray strands back up into the knot. His own hair was white-blond and to let it show would draw attention for sure. It had lost all its pigment in the weeks after his mother died. Rodney didn’t remember that part, but then, he hadn’t been able to see it happening the way others could. He didn’t know what color his hair had been to start with. Brown, he guessed.

But he did remember his mother, and her fucking little angels. Rodney couldn’t see a thing but always knew the angels were there. Every damn birthday, a new one.
To watch over you another year.

Because she certainly didn’t. She was too ashamed of him, too afraid someone would see him.
Mama’s special,
she’d told him.
Men pay for that. But they won’t pay for a blind little boy…

And so he went to school, far away. Saw his mother only at Christmas and got another fucking angel every year.

Then Mother got in the car with John Huggins one night. After that, there was no more “special.” No more men to keep her, or money for far-away school. Rodney came to live with her, in a smelly little apartment in New Orleans. For a year they lived together, and in that whole time he only had two memories of her: One was convincing her to go to Mardi Gras when he bummed a mask for her from their landlord.

The other was trying to kill her.

It should have been so easy. She’d been lying on the bed drunk, sobbing, sobbing with the Mardi Gras mask in one hand and a pistol in the other. He’d run his hands over hers and felt the gun, and all he’d had to do was press it into her chest and squeeze the trigger.

But she did it first.
Pop.
The wailing ended. She denied him even that.

He spent two days with her body, living on saltine crackers, thinking, planning. When he was ready, he wandered outside toward the sounds of the cathedral. A nun found him wandering outside: a ten-year-old boy, blind and scared, his hands smeared with blood and the thick makeup he’d smoothed over his mother’s scars. Rodney had always thought it was the smeary hands that had been the crowning jewel in his plan—a nice touch. The nuns just about tripped all over themselves taking care of him, and when the police came, it was the same with them and then the same with Maggie.

Rodney became important. For the first time in his life, he was the center of a universe.

He wasn’t going to give that up for sight. The corneal
transplants worked—not instantly, but over the next several months—but he wasn’t willing to give up the power. Having sight only made him stronger: He still controlled everyone around him, and they didn’t even know it.

Now, he tugged at the wig and reminded himself
not
to pretend blindness. Today, he would pretend to be Leni Engel.

He looked nothing like her, of course, but with a big coat and hat and wire glasses, and the hair in a bun, anybody who saw him driving Leni’s car would simply
assume
it was Leni.

Lud Ferguson had been to Hilltop House once, on one of those rare occasions when he had temporary employment. He’d worked with a yard service hired to landscape the area east of the barn. It had been a couple of years since Rodney had seen him, but he thought he could pick him out. Getting him to a safe location was the only issue.

Finding him wasn’t hard. Rodney knew where to start, even this early in the afternoon. Everyone knew Lud Ferguson’s passion, and on the fourth phone call, Rodney found him at a bar called The Pub.