Fallen Angels 03 - Envy (11 page)

“Jim Heron. We spoke on the phone. These are my partners, Blackhawk and Vogel.”

“Thomas DelVecchio.”

As they shook, Veck felt a strange kind of charge, and he stepped back. “This is Officer Reil y. You want to come in with us?”

The agent narrowed his eyes on the house. “Yeah. Thanks. My partners wil wait out here.”

Good idea. It would be hard to fit the three of those boys in a front hal smal er than a footbal stadium.

As they went up the brick walk to the front door, one of those seasonal flags waved casual y in the spring breeze. The thing was pastel and had an egg on it that was half lavender and half pink with a bright yel ow band around the middle.

Easter had come at the end of March this year. Right around the time the daughter had gone missing. No doubt the flag had been forgotten . . . or perhaps they were praying for a resurrection of their own. Either way, ruination had come to this house, even though it stil had fr wal s and a roof: This girl was dead. Veck knew it in his bones, even though he wasn’t one for prescient shit.

Doorbel .

Wait.

Wait.

He glanced back at Reil y. She seemed sad as she leaned back and scanned the windows on the second floor—and he wondered whether she was trying to imagine which one had been Cecilia Barten’s. Behind her, Heron was doing an excel ent impression of a statue: towering and unmoving, his eyes were focused on the front door as if he were seeing through it into the house.

Veck frowned. There was something off about the guy. Clearly not competence, however; the agent radiated a militaristic precision about everything from the way he flashed his creds to his walk to how his body settled at rest. Stil . . . what the fuck was it—

The door opened with a soft creak and the woman on the other side looked like she hadn’t slept or eaten wel in a long time.

“Good morning, ma’am, I’m Detective DelVecchio. This is Officer Reil y and Agent Heron.”

Everyone flashed their credentials.

“Please come in.” She stepped back and motioned with her arm. “May I get you anything?”

“No, thank you, ma’am. We appreciate your taking the time to speak with us.”

The house was beyond spotless and smel ed of Pine-Sol and Pledge. Which suggested Mrs. Barten cleaned when she was stressed.

“I thought maybe we could talk in the living room?” she said.

“Please.”

The room was done in keepsake and heirloom, with wal paper that had flowers on it, and two couches that did not. As Mrs. Barten sat in an armchair, and everybody else took a sofa cushion, Veck got a good look at the woman. She was in her late forties, with a lot of blond hair that was pul ed back and twisted around a scrunchie, and a long, thin body that had needed the weight she’d recently lost. No makeup, and she was stil pretty. Stare was empty, however.

Shit, where did he start.

“Mrs. Barten,” Reil y cut in, “can you tel us about your daughter. Things she liked to do or was good at. Memories?”

Glancing over at his new partner, he wanted to mouth a thank-you.

Especial y as some of the tension left the woman’s shoulders and the hint of a smile appeared. “Sissy was—is . . .” She col ected herself. “Please forgive me. This is hard.”

Reil y moved closer to the armchair. “Take your time. I know this is a lot to ask of you.”

“Actual y, it helps to talk about her. It takes me out of where we al are now.”

In a halting voice that gradual y gained momentum, stories started to rol out, painting a picture of a highly intel igent, slightly shy good girl who would never have walked into trouble if she’d seen it coming.

Yup, Cecilia Barten had most definitely been murdered, Veck thought to himself. This was not one of those drug-related runaways, or an abusive-boyfriend-gone-haywire nightmare. Stable family. Happy young woman. Bright future. Until destiny’s equivalent of a car crash had slammed into her life and wiped it out.

“Mind if I look at the pictures over there?” Veck said when thee was a pause in the narrative.

“Please.”

He stood up and went across to the built-in bookcases on either side of the bowed windows that faced the street. Two kids. The other was a younger sister. And there were shots from graduations and birthday parties and track meets and field hockey games . . . family reunions and weddings . . .

Christmases.

He was curiously in awe at the display. Man, this was the very best that “normal” had to offer, and for no particular reason, he thought of how, growing up, his house had had none of this stuff—the happy times or the photographs to show it off. The moments that he and his mom had had to share were nothing you wanted other people to see. Nothing you wanted to remember, either, for that matter.

He reached out and picked up one of the five-by-sevens. Cecilia was standing next to her father, her arm through his, her hand resting on the back of his.

She was mostly like her mom, only a little like her dad. But the lineage was clear.

“. . . cal ed home?” Reil y said.

Veck retuned in to the conversation.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Barten said. “She left around nine. I’d just had my foot operated on—hammertoes. . . .” For a moment, the woman appeared to ruminate, and he was wil ing to bet that she was thinking about how much she wanted to go back to the time where al she had to do was worry about the way her shoes fit.

And maybe she was blaming herself, too.

She shook her head and refocused. “I was pretty immobile. I’d given her the shopping list and . . . she cal ed from the store. She didn’t know whether I wanted green or red peppers. I wanted the red ones. I was making . . .” The tears came and were blinked away sharply. “Anyway, that was the last time anyone heard from her.”

Veck returned the photograph to the shelf. As he went to sit back down next to Heron, he frowned. The man was staring at the victim’s mother with the intensity of a film camera, like he was reading and recording every twitch of her eye and purse of her mouth as she spoke.

As Veck’s radar started pinging like crazy, it was unclear whether it was about the missing girl or her sad, lovely mother or this massive man who looked like he could start a fire with that hard, burning stare of his.

“If I can interject,” Veck said, “did she have any boyfriends?”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Heron’s hands tighten on his thighs, cranking down tight.

“No. She had friends that were boys, of course, and a prom date here and there . . . nothing serious, though. At least, not that she told me—and she was general y open about her life.”

Those hands released abruptly.

“Do you have anything you want to ask,” Veck said to the agent.

There was a long stretch of silence. Just before it got truly awkward, the man said in a deep, low voice, “Mrs. Barten, I’m going to bring her home to you.

One way or another, I wil get her back for you.”

Veck recoiled, thinking, Shit, don’t go there, buddy. “Ah, what he means is—”

“It’s al right.” Mrs. Barten clasped the base of her throat. “I’m not fooling myself. I know that she’s . . . not with us anymore. A mother feels the cold in the heart. We just want to know what happened and . . . have a chance to lay her to rest properly.”

“You wil have her back. I swear it.”

Now Mrs. Barten choked up—and why wouldn’t she. The guy was like a warrior with the vengeance routine, more avenger than agent.

“Thank you . . . al of you.”

Veck discreetly checked his watch. “If you’l excuse me and my partner, we’re going to head over to the supermarket. The manager said he was leaving early today.”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

Agent Heron helped Mrs. Barten up by taking her hand. “Would you mind if I take a look at her bedroom?”

“Sure—I’l lead you right up.” She turned to Veck and Reil y. “If you need to go now, you can always come back.”

“Thank you,” Reil y said. “We’l do that.”

“And we’l see ourselves out the door,” Veck murmured.

As Agent Heron and the victim’s mother hit the stairs, Veck paused in the front hal and watched them ascend together. A window on the landing above cast il umination on them, the shaft of sunlight hitting them both square on the face and acting as a beacon for their—

Wait a minute.

Veck glanced over into the living room . . . where the golden rays were pouring in from the west.

Impossible. You couldn’t get that effect from opposite directions, front and rear of the house.

“What is it?” Reil y said softly.

Veck swung his eyes back to the staircase. Heron and Mrs. Barten were nowhere to be seen, and the light on the landing was gone now, too, the window showing nothing more than the budded branches of the maple tree behind the house and the clear blue sky above it.

“I’m going up there,” he told his new partner. “Just for a minute.”

A
s Jim fol owed behind Sissy’s mother, he was out-of-body overwhelmed. In a dim corner of his mind, he knew he had to keep tabs on Veck, but this opportunity was not going to smoothly present itself again anytime soon.

Turning the corner at the head of the stairs, the volume of the house was cranked up to Slipknot levels. Everything from the subtle creak of the carpeted floor beneath his boots to the soft talk down below in the foyer to his own breath in the back of his throat, it al seemed to scream in his ears.

Abruptly, Veck appeared behind them and made some kind of an I’m-only-here-for-a-minute comment. Jim nodded at the guy—and promptly forgot he was even there.

“Sissy’s room is this way.”

The three of them went to the right, and when Mrs. Barten hesitated at the closed door, Jim raised his hand to put it on her shoulder . . . and then couldn’t quite make the contact.

“Would you like us to go in alone?” he asked.

Mrs. Barten opened her mouth. But then just nodded. “I haven’t been in there since . . . that night. It’s the way she left it.”

At that moment, the phone rang, and there was visible relief in Sissy’s mom’s face. “I’l just go get that. Feel free to open the drawers and the closet, but if you have to take something, wil you let me know what it is?”

“Absolutely,” Veck answered.

As she hurried across the landing and disappeared into what he assumed was the master bedroom, Jim cracked the door.

Oh . . . the scent.

Slipping inside, he closed his eyes and tried not to feel like a letch as he breathed in deep. Perfume. Body lotion. Dryer sheets.

It was . . . extraordinary.

And he did not belong in this room. He was an adult male who had done things that shouldn’t even be passing thoughts in a room like this—and the representations of those evil deeds were in the ink that covered his back. Plus he had weapons on him. And then there was that shit he’d pul ed with the demon the night before.

He felt like a stain.

As Veck did his own recon, Jim opened his lids, and went over to the built-in desk by the front window. The flat stretch and shelving were painted white, but the chair was a blue to match the gingham drapes and the striped wal paper. Carpet was an area rug with braided fringe. Bedspread was a quilt made from different strips of blue and white fabric. Handmade. Had to be.

The books that were lined up were orderly and girlie. She liked Jane Austen, but there was also a whole shelf of Gossip Girls—probably left over from when she was thirteen. Couple of 4-H ribbons, red and blue. Track trophies.

On the desk there was an Apple laptop along with two textbooks, one on calculus and the other on . . . advanced trigonometry?

Huh. His Sissy might wel be smarter than he was.

There was also a magazine.
Cosmopolitan
—from this month.

Okaaaay, the cover with the word
ORGASM
in seventy-four-point hot-pink print didn’t exactly jibe with the rest of this land of innocence and schoolwork

. . . but then, she’d been growing up, hadn’t she.

Pivoting, he al but ran into the foot of the twin bed.

Shit, now he knew why her mother didn’t come in here. That blue quilt was pul ed back and the pil ows stil dented as if Sissy had just been napping.

“I’m going to take off,” Veck said. Which made Jim wonder how long they’d been in the room.

“See you soon,” Jim said with distraction.

“Roger that.”

When he was left to his own devices, Jim’s hand shook as he reached out to touch the sheets. Brushing what had touched her skin, he thought about Devina and what that demon had done to this girl . . . and her family.

Adrian and Eddie were wrong. If they wanted him focused on the war, this was exactly where he needed to be. This was motivation to win if he’d ever seen it: Sissy was never going to lie in this bed again. She was not going to finish whatever article she’d been reading. And no more crunching numbers.

Ever. But he could at least find her a better place to wait for her parents’ and her sister’s passings so they could al be reunited for eternity.

And then he could make Devina pay a thousand times over.

On the bedside table, there was a white alarm clock, another magazine—
In Touch
this time—and the remote to her little white television. He had the feeling that even though she was in col ege, she came back on a lot of weekends, and a peek into the closet confirmed this. Given the number of blouses and pants and skirts and dresses, it didn’t look like the thing had been mined for favorites, but instead was on the ready. Plenty of shoes on the floor.

He left the bureau’s drawers alone, because he wasn’t sure which one held her . . . underthings, as it were. Probably either of the top two, but he was not running the risk of guessing wrong. He was a voyeur here already, because he’d come not in hopes of finding something that helped him help her.

God knew, there was nothing on earth that could do that. Instead, he’d just wanted to . . . be close to her.

Right. Fine.
This
was the sort of shit that Ad and Eddie were worried about.

On that note, it was time to go. Again, he didn’t know how long he’d been here. Could have been two minutes or two hours, and the last thing he wanted was Sissy’s mother feeling like she had to knock on the door to see if he was okay or whether he’d already left.