The Fifth Angel Read online

  It came to Hanover. Hubble Sanderson was the real name of the man Amanda had killed, the man who’d murdered Marco. Collins, and every other agent who worked on the case, never stopped referring to him as Oswald, the alias he had sometimes used. Hanover just forgot. He had a lot on his mind.

  “So this Charles Wheeler guy was in Angola for assault, but if you read into the arrest report, it sounds like he’s a pervert, same as Oswald,” Collins said. “I guess things got pretty rough for the two of them at The Farm, you know how that goes. Even the bad guys hate a pervert. From what I know, Wheeler and Oswald kept to themselves. They got pretty tight.”

  Hanover smirked at that.

  “Wheeler’s been on the move since Amanda Lee shot Oswald,” Collins said. “We didn’t even know who we were looking for until I did a background on Hubble Sanderson. About five years ago, when these two beauties got out of Angola, Wheeler came into some money. A lot. His grandmother died and left him almost a million dollars and these two fruits started running around Key West.”

  “Fit right in there, huh?” Hanover said.

  “No, not really,” Collins said. “The word I got was they were into some pretty bad shit. Kid stuff and snuff films. They got tossed out on their ass just everywhere they went and then they just disappeared. It wasn’t hard with all that money.”

  “I guess not,” Hanover said.

  “The point is,” Collins said, “he disappeared again. After I found out who he was, and what these two were into, I put my foot on the gas. I figured Wheeler had to be Oswald’s partner.

  “In a way I’m surprised we haven’t had another body yet. Maybe they’re out there and we just don’t know it. Maybe Wheeler’s just being a lot more careful now that he’s alone. I think Wheeler is just as bad as Oswald, maybe worse. He put a screwdriver through some guy’s hand to land in Angola and that’s just what he got caught for. He had a bunch of arrests that never got prosecuted. Perv stuff.”

  “And you can’t find him?” Hanover asked.

  “Not until today,” Collins said. “I guess Amanda’s out on the road, so I thought I’d give it to you so you can track her down and let her know. I mean, I’m all over this guy, but she should know anyway.”

  “Amanda? What’s this got to do with her?”

  “This guy’s now living in a nice little apartment complex outside Alexandria,” Collins said. “It’s about a ten-minute drive from Manassas.”

  Hanover was puzzled.

  Collins said, “That’s where Amanda lives. It’s no coincidence, Ben. She killed his partner. I think he’s out to get her.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Can I help you?”

  He turned around. She was a dumpy little bitch and he didn’t like her. She had no style with her drab pigtails and her bottle-thick glasses.

  “I like these kittens,” he said.

  “They are nice.”

  No shit, dumpy bitch. Do you want to know why I need them? I bet you do. People always like to know my business, but I won’t tell.

  “I want two, and I can’t make up my mind,” he said, thoughtfully stroking his goatee. “One is for my little niece and one is for my nephew.”

  “That’s a nice present.”

  “Their mother is kind of a bitch,” he said, offhand. “But they’re very nice little children.”

  He forced a smile and saw her looking. He ran his hand across the tight black synthetic material. Cycling pants. His fingertips swept across his waist and then danced lightly all the way up to where his nipple rings made little bumps in his suit. The rings were from Hubble. He always liked them.

  “The orange-and-white one is nice,” she said, stepping back a little.

  “I like black, black and white,” he said, turning his attention back to the kittens frolicking in their bed of wood chips. “I like the little black one there and the little white one there. You know, I’ll take them both.”

  “Okay.”

  She took a quick breath and went back down the aisle, taking the long way to get to the back of the display. She took the kittens out and put them in a box.

  He put on his wraparound sunglasses and snaked his way through the mall with his box of kittens. Outside was a big white Tahoe with tinted windows. At the rear, a shiny black bicycle waited on its rack.

  The drive to the bitch’s neighborhood was short. There was a park at the entrance to the development and that’s where he parked his truck. The children liked the swing set there. The little girl spent most of her time on the swings. The boy liked to throw rocks at the metal slide. And there they were.

  He got out and took down his bike, then walked with it and the box of kittens to a place in the grass. It was later in the day. People were everywhere. There were other bikers and runners, too. He wasn’t the only one in tight clothes.

  He sat down and crossed his legs, opening the box like a picnic basket, plucking out the kittens and setting them down on the grass where they immediately began to wrestle.

  The girl came over first, then the boy.

  “Would you like to pet them?” he asked. His voice trembled with excitement. His fingers danced across his chest.

  “You look scary,” said the boy.

  “I do?” he said, pointing at his own chest.

  “Yeah,” the boy said, reaching down to pet the black one.

  “We don’t talk to strangers,” the girl said.

  “You’re very good children,” he said.

  “I’m the good one,” the girl said, “Teddy always gets in trouble. Dad says he’s a smartass.”

  “Glenda,” the boy said with a scowl, “you said my name.”

  “So what?” she said, picking the white one up and sticking her little finger into his mouth so he could bite it. She gave a little shriek but hung on.

  He just looked at them. He didn’t have to say anything. He knew that. Children loved kittens.

  CHAPTER 42

  The Indian summer was now gone. Cool air was dropping down on the Northeast from Canada. The sun hadn’t shown its face in the last four days, and from the thickness of the gray morning clouds Jack supposed that today would make it five. The sound of wet tires kissing the street outside the Holiday Inn was muffled by the drizzle drifting down from the overburdened sky. Jack pulled his raincoat tight around his shoulders. The ache from the gunshot wound was nothing more now than a reminder of what he’d done to Tom Conner. The bleeding had stopped several days ago, alleviating the need for a bandage or a dressing.

  He hurried across the street dodging irritable morning commuters with coffee cups in one hand and steering wheels in the other. One horn blared but Jack never looked back. He crossed the parking lot of an old diner with a stainless-steel shell and a red neon sign that proclaimed its name: TROY DINER.

  Inside, Jack was greeted not only by the warmth, but the friendly sound of clinking plates and glasses and the rich smell of fresh coffee riding a wave of seared breakfast meat and steaming eggs. He took a paper off the rack and dropped two quarters on the counter. A plump middle-aged woman in a pink-and-white-striped outfit smiled and led him to a small booth along the window in the back. Jack ordered his breakfast and began turning through the pages of the Albany Times-Union. On page three his heart leapt into his throat. The headline read: ADIRONDACKS SLAYING: NO SUSPECTS. He reached into the pocket of his coat that he’d hung on a hook at the end of the booth, removed the ubiquitous blue bottle, and took several big gulps.

  It had been a little more than a week since Racquet Lake. In the background of his mind, he recalled the events that occurred when he arrived back at Steffenhausers’ that crazy night. He wasn’t proud of lying to Beth again, but the bottom line was that it worked. After his arrival he had quickly convinced her and the old man that he had taken a spill in the woods and gashed open his shoulder. Instead of disturbing the Steffenhausers for a second time that night, he told them he’d gone to look for a twenty-four-hour pharmacy.

  “You’d have to go all the w
ay to Utica to find that,” the old man had said.

  “I know,” Jack said. “I just kept going and going, you know, thinking the next town would have something.”

  Jack then insisted that Steffenhauser call the sheriff’s department to say that it was a false alarm. Steffenhauser had. Luck was with him. The deputy in the area was still in the midst of sorting out a bloody bar fight outside of Inlet. He hadn’t been able to respond immediately anyway. When Jack heard that news, it only furthered the growing sense that he was merely a player in some divine plan. He knew what he’d done was dangerous, maybe even stupid, but he couldn’t help the sense that some preordained fate was at work.

  That was why now he was taking such care with his next victim.

  Dante Pollard was a fifty-three-year-old three-time loser. Jack knew firsthand that human filth like Pollard never stopped. If they were caught and convicted of assault, or kidnapping, or rape, they did a few years at most. That was if they were convicted of everything they’d done. Unfortunately, this was all too rare.

  In Jack’s daughter’s case Tupp had been convicted only of second-degree rape. After excluding the abduction van from evidence, Tupp’s attorney was able to knock out almost everything that proved Tupp not only had raped his daughter, but was also the man who’d abducted and tortured her. Without the van there was almost no way to prove those other elements of the crime. It appeared to Jack that Dante Pollard had committed a very similar crime and like Tupp, he had been sentenced to less than four years for a crime that Jack thought deserved death.

  Eugene Tupp. He would be out of jail in less than a year. Jack had to be careful. If he kept taking wild chances, he’d be caught. He’d seen it as a prosecutor—criminals becoming emboldened by their success, growing sloppy. If there was something at work in his subconscious, some part of him that secretly wanted all this to stop, Jack had to keep it at bay at least until Tupp got out.

  His breakfast arrived.

  “Here’s your omelet, honey,” the waitress said. “Broccoli and cheese.”

  Jack began to eat. He chewed mechanically and counted each mouthful. He would be certain to take at least ten. He had to stay strong. Between tallying the mouthfuls with a pen, he sketched out Pollard’s home on the same napkin. He drew the trailer, the driveway, and the thick hedge along the road. He put an X where he’d be hiding. He added Pollard’s car in the driveway, the moment he’d come home. Jack drew an arrow from the X to the car, then swallowed down number ten.

  He spilled some coffee on the plan and then crumpled it up into an indecipherable wad. He left with most of the omelet uneaten, paid the bill, and crossed the street back to the hotel parking lot and his rental car. The rest of the day he spent working out of a conference room in the law offices of Hiscock & Barclay, finalizing the last few steps for the purchase of a nearby steam station by a power company from Baltimore. One of their lawyers politely asked him to dinner.

  “No, but thank you,” he said. He told the lawyer he wasn’t hungry. That was the truth.

  The trailer where Dante Pollard lived was in the country, a few miles outside the small town of Bennington, Vermont. Jack slowed down and rolled past. A single streetlight illuminated a battered black mailbox and a deep culvert beneath its harsh glow. It was the only light for miles and it marked the beginning of the long straight gravel drive that cut through the tall hedge Jack had drawn on the napkin. If you went slow enough, you could catch a glimpse of Pollard’s seedy white trailer. It lay like a decaying cocoon in the midst of an overgrown field.

  Jack stopped and closed his eyes for a moment. He imagined the sound of his own knocking on Pollard’s door. He could see the startled expression on Pollard’s face as the serial rapist saw the gun and began to feel the hot lead ripping through his body.

  Jack opened his eyes. Soft yellow light came from a broken light fixture hanging by its bare wires just above the tattered screen door. A dirty silver tank of propane was attached to the trailer’s side like a swollen tick, but the big gold Chevy Impala that normally presided over the scene from its patch of dirt was gone. Something was wrong.

  CHAPTER 43

  Jack felt his stomach heave. He quelled it and kept on going.

  A quarter mile from Pollard’s trailer he pulled off the rural highway and into a small abandoned gravel pit. In total silence he changed his clothes. There was a bottle of Maalox in his bag. He removed it and stuffed it into the pocket of his black jacket before tucking the Glock into its holster and walking furtively down the road. Except for the broken porch light, the trailer was dark. Pollard should be there, but he wasn’t. Something told Jack to leave.

  He had watched Pollard on and off for over a week. He knew the man worked during the day at a tree nursery in Bennington and would typically return to his trailer after a fast-food meal and a couple of hours in the video arcade at a nearby shopping mall. Not once had Jack seen him vary from that routine, so he was unsettled by Pollard’s absence.

  But Jack had prepared for this night in detail, so he decided to wait. He walked back down the rural road, cut up into Pollard’s driveway and into the cover of the overgrown hedge. He was impervious to the cold drizzle and the wet leaves that soaked him as he pushed his way into the thick darkness of the foliage. Despite the weather, Jack felt warm and alive with anticipation. After a time his stomach began to hurt. Jack took a couple of swallows from the bottle in his jacket, then removed Janet’s school photo from his wallet, the antidote that he could always count on to keep him going when he got nervous. He hunched over to protect the photo from the rain.

  The sound of the gold Impala with its cracked muffler could be heard from a great way off. Jack jumped up, flexing his fingers. They had begun to chill beneath the damp leather of the gloves. He had plenty of time. He needed to relax. He put the school photo back in its place and took out his pistol. Maybe he could use Pollard’s late arrival to his advantage. He remembered Tom Conner, skulking around the back of his house, getting the jump on Jack. Wouldn’t it be best to kill Pollard before he could get back inside the trailer? It would.

  When the car’s headlights swung past the hedgerow, Jack slipped out of the thick cover and, crouching low in the high grass, made his way quickly toward the trailer. When the car came to its usual resting place, Jack was just twenty feet away, the Glock in his hand, ready to spring forward from beyond the glow of the porch light and the cover of the waist-high grass. But instead of going toward the trailer, when he got out of the car, Pollard looked nervously around and made for the Impala’s enormous trunk. Pollard was dressed nicer than usual in dark slacks and a white button-down oxford shirt beneath a black leather bomber jacket. His large round eyes, long straight nose, and the gentle wisps of thinning brown hair gave him the look of a kindly if nervous schoolteacher.

  Jack stayed where he was but kept his eyes just above the tops of the overgrown grass, his gun directed at Pollard. If the man should see him, Jack would simply open fire. He preferred, however, to close the considerable gap, knowing that he was no marksman when it came to shooting the pistol. When Pollard reached the trunk, he turned his back to the night once again and Jack, his heart pounding, used the opportunity to sneak closer still. Pollard fidgeted with the lock and the trunk swung up, opening wide like the mouth of a cave, a small light winking from within. Jack was close enough now to strike. He half stood, raising the Glock above the level of the grass as the man bent down into the trunk.

  Jack froze, unable to fire. His entire being was upended by the sight of Pollard as he removed from the trunk the frail, struggling form of a young teenage girl, bound and gagged with thick silvery bands of duct tape.

  Jack was so stunned that he felt an enormous breath of air rush into his chest; he was momentarily helpless. The wide-eyed horror of the girl as she fought against her bonds and the look of wicked delight that lit Pollard’s face registered in Jack’s brain simultaneously, overloading his capacity to think or react.

  Pollard turned and
made his way toward the trailer, too consumed with the object of his perversions to notice Jack’s dark form beyond the halo of light. Shaking, gasping for breath, Jack stood helpless, his limbs still frozen and useless as if he were in some terrible dream.

  CHAPTER 44

  Pollard was at the door now, and still Jack was unable to move. Horror and agony had overrun Jack’s mind and incapacitated his body. He felt the terror of his own little girl, and now the girl before him, and every human being ever abused by a fiend like Pollard. The nightmare came back. The nightmare was real. The weight of guilt and despair—his own, this child’s parents, and every other parent helpless in the struggle to keep their own safe from these monsters—was crushing him.

  A cry of total madness escaped Jack, giving him away. Pollard spun in a panic, dropping the young girl into the mud. Pollard fumbled for his key, already in the lock, and struggled with it, cringing at the same time. Jack raced toward him. The door finally sprang open and Pollard fell into the blackness of the trailer. Jack leapt over the thin girl, landing on the top step.

  Pollard had disappeared. The inside of the trailer was as dark as a pit. The light from the yellow bulb outside the door did nothing more than nick the edge of the blackness. Jack looked right, and then left. It was silent. He stood still, listening. His own breath came and went in noisy buckets. He tried to calm himself, but his heart was a rabid machine. He groped the wall for a switch, but found none.

  Was there a noise? He thought he’d detected just the hint of a sound to his left, the scratching of paper or the wheels of a drawer. Jack crouched and aimed his gun, waiting. Not wanting to be a target himself, he eased into the darkness.

  Something whistled past his head and he turned involuntarily as something shattered behind him. Jack spun back and fired wildly into the dark. He was promptly bowled over, knocked to the floor of the trailer by the frantic Pollard, scrambling for his life. Jack sensed him dash out of the trailer. He jumped to his feet, the gun still in his hands, and charged for the door. Pollard was sprinting across the gravel, past his car for the road. His left arm dangled uselessly. Jack aimed and fired. He missed.