Angel Among Us (6 page)

‘What the hell is the matter with you?' Calvano asked. ‘You almost made me chip a tooth.'

‘I can't believe he's here,' Maggie muttered. She inched the car along, following the handsome man as he strode along the sidewalk, the hapless camera crew scurrying after him like ducks. He was wearing tailored pants and a really expensive sport shirt, the kind television reporters wear when they want to look like regular people. There was definitely something about the guy that I absolutely and completely loathed on the spot. I think it was the way he walked, as if he owned the world and everyone else was just there to serve him.

‘Who is that guy?' Calvano asked. He craned his neck trying to get a better look, but Maggie was going so slow that they had yet to pass him. ‘He looks like a giant freaking G.I. Joe doll. How many plastic surgeries do you think he's had?'

Maggie glanced over at Calvano. ‘Zero. He was born that way.'

‘You know him?' Calvano asked.

‘Yeah, I know him,' Maggie said grimly. ‘His name is Skip Bostwick.'

‘Who the hell is called “Skip” at our age?' Calvano said. ‘That name is as fake as he is.'

‘Oh, it's real. He's been called that since he was a kid. His real name is Sydney.'

‘How do you know so much about him?' Calvano asked curiously. ‘Don't tell me he's one of the disastrous choices you were just talking about?'

‘Oh, he is
the
disastrous choice.' Maggie was silent for a moment, trying to decide how much she should tell Calvano. ‘He's my ex-husband, Adrian. He's why I moved back here. He's what I was trying to get away from when I left Wilmington.'

‘No shit!' Calvano shouted, unable to help himself.

I felt exactly the same way. Maggie didn't have a personal life, at least not one I had been able to discover after many months of trying. I knew she had an ex-husband and that he had acted badly, I'd heard snippets of that disaster in conversations with her father. But I had never thought of the ex-husband as real. I'd thought of him more as a figure fading away in her rear-view mirror. To see him now, standing six feet tall and so inertly good-looking he may as well have been a wax figure in that London museum, well – I couldn't process it. Neither could Calvano. He just sat and stared at the guy.

Maggie didn't want to talk about it. ‘It's true, and we are definitely going in the back door. I'd crawl through the air vent to avoid him if I had to.'

‘We'll have to tell Gonzales,' Calvano said. ‘If he finds out, he'll read you the riot act about not talking to the guy or giving him any information.'

‘There is absolutely, positively no chance in hell that I will ever talk to him,' Maggie said. ‘Trust me on this one, Adrian.'

But it was Calvano's turn to look surprised. Maggie had pulled even with the station house, giving them a clear view of the news crews that had set up camp on the sidewalk in front. ‘Oh, Mother Mary. Gonzales is going to shit a brick. Look who's here.'

Maggie was trying to avoid a cluster of pedestrians who had started to gather to stare at the television cameras. ‘Who?' she asked. ‘Son of a bitch, get the hell out of my way.' She blasted her horn and a fat man taking his sweet time trundling across the street shot her the bird. Nice. Already, people were posturing for the cameras.

‘It's Lindsey Stanford,' Calvano said, pointing at a stocky woman in a butt-ugly brown pants suit who was holding a microphone and practicing her intro while the sound man checked his levels. Middle age had hit her hard since I'd last seen her on TV. She had interesting features, if you were in a charitable mood, and a mean face if you were not. Snarling was her preferred expression. She also had one of those awful bowl haircuts that are round at the top like a Nazi war helmet. Her hair was dyed a frosted blond. But regardless of her looks, she was one of the most popular crime commentators in the country. She had her own show on a cable outlet and if Lindsey Stanford was here, it was Gonzales's worst nightmare come true. Every single element of the Arcelia Gallagher case would be subjected to Lindsey Stanford's ruthless speculation about who was to blame. If past history was any indication, she would zero in on someone and persecute them on air, contaminating the investigation and causing witnesses to invent details just for a little air time. It was not good news that she was in town.

‘Why the hell is she here?' Maggie muttered.

‘The mayor,' Calvano guessed. ‘It's just like Gonzales said. He's called in the media to put pressure on us.'

Maggie pulled into a parking spot as far away from the cameras as she could get. ‘You know what, Adrian?' she asked. ‘I'd give my eye teeth to find out that, in the end, Mayor Gallagher was involved in his daughter-in-law's disappearance. Because he deserves payback for this, big time.'

‘Look out,' Calvano said, pointing to a cluster of reporters who had rounded the corner and were heading for their car. Maggie's ex-husband led the pack. ‘We've been spotted.'

‘I'm not doing this,' Maggie decided. She put the key back in the ignition and revved the engine. ‘Where are the other teams right now?'

‘Tom and Terrence are at the elementary school, talking to the kids. Elton and Sandy are canvassing the neighbors.'

‘Then we're going to the school,' Maggie decided. ‘Better hold on.'

Calvano knew enough about Maggie's driving to take the warning seriously. He braced himself as she accelerated toward the main exit of the parking lot, then took an abrupt U-turn and screeched out the side entrance, leaving the news crews standing in a cloud of exhaust. They stared after her dumbfounded.

‘Nice move, Gunn,' Calvano said. ‘Way to make your ex eat your dust.'

‘He's lucky that's the only thing I'm making him eat,' Maggie snapped back.

I was suddenly very glad that I had never been in a position to get on her bad side.

T
he school where Arcelia Gallagher taught was crowded with families waiting in the hallways to talk to the police. It seemed as if everyone wanted to find Seely. I was not the only one who had been captivated by her.

The children were still too young to understand what might have happened to their teacher. They raced up and down the hallways playing and their parents were too distracted to stop them. They had been forced to hurry past a gauntlet of television cameras as they entered the school with their children in tow and the experience had driven home the realization that Arcelia Gallagher's disappearance was real.

Two of the classrooms had been converted into staging areas where the detectives could question the children in the hope that at least one had seen something that might prove useful in the investigation.

The two men questioning the kids seemed an unlikely choice at first glance, but if you knew them, like I did, it made sense. One was tall and gaunt with a cadaverous face, but he was the father of four children, the last I'd heard, and comfortable with their fanciful flights of imagination – all of which had to be sorted out from the truth to reveal useful leads.

The other officer was a bear of a man whose father owned the Polish restaurant in town. Terrence Palicki must have eaten at it five times a day growing up because he was well over six feet tall and as wide as a grizzly. He was also a gentle giant. I remembered him as one of the few people who had been unfailingly kind to me back when I was alive and bumbling through my cases. He didn't have a mean bone in his body. At the moment, he was questioning a small boy with a remarkably round head and runny nose. Two of his classmates stood nearby, gazing at Terrence with awe.

‘What did he look like?' Terrence was asking the little guy, who mostly seemed interested in the gold badge pinned to the detective's jacket pocket. Maggie and Calvano were waiting against one wall for Terrence to finish before they checked in. Both were the subjects of unabashed staring by a line of five-year-olds. Maggie barely seemed to notice their presence, but Calvano winked at a few and flashed his gun at a row of little boys. He had a lot of nieces and nephews and was comfortable with humans that barely reached his waist, even though he had none of his own.

The little boy with the round head picked up a crayon and bashed it into the top of the desk, enjoying the opportunity to smash something. ‘I don't know,' he told Terrence, concerned solely with the destruction of his crayon. ‘He looked like my dad.'

Now if it had been me, I would've torn my hair out long ago and left the task to someone else, but Terrence had unlimited patience. ‘What does your dad look like?' he asked the child. ‘What color hair does he have? Is he taller than me?'

The little boy stared at Terrence. ‘No one is taller than you.'

‘What about his hair? What color was it?'

‘Like mine. I look like my daddy so my daddy looks like me,' the boy explained proudly.

Terrence sighed. He had limits after all. He shifted in the chair, which was way too small for him, and the whole room seemed to tremble. ‘You have blond hair,' he pointed out. ‘Did the man you saw at the fence also have blond hair?'

The little boy nodded, but one of his classmates could no longer stand by and listen to his nonsense. ‘Liar!' an Hispanic boy with a buzz cut interrupted. ‘The man had brown skin like mine and his hair looked like mine.'

The first boy looked at his classmate with scorn. ‘I think I can tell the difference between a Mexican and a 'Merican.'

Oh yes, it started young.

‘So you saw the man at the fence talking to Seely, too?' Terrence asked the second boy.

The boy nodded. His skin was the color of dried autumn leaves. His eyes were huge and he stuck his thumb in his mouth for comfort as he contemplated Terrence's size.

‘Was this a few days ago?' Terrence said encouragingly, his voice gentle as he tried to wheedle more information out of the boy.

‘No,' the little boy said stubbornly. ‘It was the day we had the birthday cake for Amy.'

Terrence sighed and wrote something down in his notebook, but the first little boy felt his honor had been maligned and was not going to let the matter stand.

‘Edgar's lying,' he said, glaring at his classmate. ‘I saw the man and he had blond hair like me.'

‘Did not!' Edgar shouted back.

Terrence was starting to sweat. Two little alpha boys were about to go at it and he was trying to figure out what he could do about it, given that the stun gun and pepper spray were out of the question.

‘Boys are so dumb,' a high-pitched voice interrupted. A little girl with curly red hair stood a few feet away, arms crossed as she shook her head at them like she was their mother.

The little girl looked from one boy to the other. Her voice dripped with scorn as she said to Terrence, ‘Did you ever think that maybe there were two men at the fence. Huh? Did
any
of you think of that?' She was actually tapping her foot on the floor, a caricature of a movie mother. She was going to make someone miserable one day.

‘Good point,' Terrence told the little girl. ‘Why don't you come over here and talk to me some more?'

Like I said: infinite patience.

With Maggie and Calvano's help, they finished questioning the children within an hour while I amused myself by making faces at the little squirts – to no avail, as they could not see me – and then wandered outside to haunt the media crowd for a while. Maggie's ex-husband, Skip Bostwick, was there, being an even bigger jerk than he looked like. He was sucking up to the better-known newscasters with a zeal that only lifetime brown-nosers can achieve. I wandered back inside where the families were gradually trickling out, until just the detectives were left in the classroom discussing what they had learned. The only possible lead they had uncovered came back to the two little boys and their belief that the missing teacher had been talking to a man, or two men, depending on who you believed, through the back fence of the playground at various times the week before. One boy insisted the man had been blond and that Seely had been angry at him, shouting at him to go away and leave them all alone. The other little boy had stuck fast to his insistence that the man had been Mexican and that his teacher had seemed sad, not angry, after she had talked to the man. Neither boy, nor the red-haired girl, knew more and their classmates had not noticed anyone talking to their teacher at all.

‘It's not a lot to go on,' Maggie said with resignation.

‘Better than nothing,' Calvano said. ‘And it might mean something.'

‘Did any of the parents know anything?' Maggie asked.

Terrence shook his head. ‘We didn't have time to talk with them one-on-one, but I asked anyone with information to come forward and I gave them plenty of opportunity to do so. I am sure they would have spoken up if they had anything. There is not a parent in the school who doesn't love that woman. I don't know what else she had going on in her life, but our missing girl must've been one hell of a teacher.'

Maggie's frustration was obvious. She glanced out the window where the camera crews were starting to pack up in the distance.

‘What's that all about?' Terrence asked. ‘The camera crews got here soon after we did.'

‘Apparently, there is nothing else going on in America right now,' Maggie said bitterly. ‘We're the main show until some moron who thinks he's smarter than everyone else kills his wife and hides her body.'

‘You sure that's not what happened here?' Terrence asked.

‘We're not sure of anything,' Maggie admitted, shaking her head in dismay.

D
anny Gallagher was ready to go home, but home was out of the question. I had claimed the back seat of Father Sojak's car when he arrived at the hospital to pick up Danny later that night. I thought I might learn something useful if I tagged along with them. Unfortunately, Danny sat silent, still in shock, throughout the entire ride and Father Sojak turned out to be the kind of person who doesn't like to push someone into sharing. The silence had been heavy and depressing. Now, the three of us were staring at a gauntlet of media blocking the entrance to Danny's farm.