Last Angel Read online

  Chapter Nine

  He wondered, quietly, as he looked out at the banks of sleazy neon that advertised the peepshow across the way, what they would have thought of their precious God driving around in a blood red, stolen, Pontiac Bonneville with golden licks of flame scorched along its door panels and a horn that whistled Dixie.

  It was loud, and crude, and of course unnecessary, but they were giving him so much to live up to, so many standards to meet, that he had to at least make the effort.

  Not that spending between ten and twelve hours a night living inside a cramped ’87 Bonneville was a good deal, or worth even half the pain. She guzzled juice like a bar-propping lush chasing away the blues on a bad day, reeked with the attar of octane and oil and lived her life among the red-lined sectors of the gauges.

  He was stiff, sore; aches and pains nagging away around the base of his spine and along the length of his shoulders.

  Irritating little nothings.

  It was all a case of patience and picking the moment.

  He smiled into the rear-view mirror. This was his moment. Written in the stars.

  Gunning the engine, he moved on, the Pontiac crawling along the length of the curb like a grubbing snail, and turned a corner. This part of the city seemed to be filled with boarded up shops and abandoned lots, as if the lifeblood of the entire neighbourhood had been drained away and its corpse left out to rot under the glare of the bitter moon.

  The idea had a certain something.

  The sheets of plywood boarding up the shop fronts were covered with stickers for touring rock bands, the stickers over-sprayed with colourful layers of inventive graffiti.

  The Unfortunate stood alone, her eyes stains of ink on her midnight face. Behind her, an oversized banner was plastered across the window of an out-of-fashion carpet warehouse. This grubby little back alley, with its festering garbage and forgotten shops could have been a slip road onto Interstate 101, a road to nowhere.

  Puddles of dull sodium mottled the damp flagstones, highlighting the tumbling food wrappers and sheets of yesterday’s news, where unbroken streetlights still cast their own shine, creating darkness within the mouths of doorways and blackness around corners. The streetlights were few, and very far between.

  The Unfortunate shifted her gaze away from the Middle Distance as the dipped headlights of the Pontiac rolled gradually closer.

  Coming level, he reached across and rolled the window down halfway, stubbing the wet-lipped dog-end of his cigarette out in the flip-front ashtray. The Unfortunate stooped and peered in through the tight opening, her eyes alert and on guard.

  A wry little smile played on his lips as he put on his face for her.

  Close to, the Unfortunate was nothing more than a sad-faced young girl masquerading as a dark-skinned honey with her hair braided into strings of black pearls and lipstick smudged lips the vivid red of sex. It didn’t matter; an artist had carved her face with a delicate chisel, working miracles that make-up couldn’t hide.

  “You looking for another date, sweetie?” she asked, parting those lipstick smeared lips to tease her tongue slowly along the gloss. “I’ve kept that rose you gave me last time.”

  Reaching across to the glove compartment he lifted out a handful of dog-eared dollar bills, the faces of dead presidents crumpling in his hand. “Thought we could go for a ride,” he answered.

  “So, where’re we going?” She laughed, moving around the hood towards the passenger door and climbing in.

  “Straight to heaven, I think…” his smile spread into the toothy rictus of a door-to-door salesman closing in for the kill, lips splitting his face neater than the edge of any knife could.

  He touched the soft curve of her left cheek, tracing the outline of a picture that had been waiting for the canvas of her body before it could be drawn.

  Chapter Ten

  Under direction, he drove the Unfortunate back to the apartment she rented out on the fifteenth floor of a crumbling high-rise that towered over the banks of the Hudson. Riding up in the elevator she had told him to call her Celine, like the singer. Laughing as the doors opened on her floor, she had said she felt happier being a Celine, like she was a different person. It was a way of hiding from reality that suited her just fine.

  He stopped listening to her constant prattle as she struggled with the lock and deadbolt, almost pushed passed her in his hurry to get inside. Didn’t stop walking until his fingers were tapping on the windowsill, scratching the fake wood.

  He could see out onto the Hudson, a strip of Riverside, down to the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, and along, to the skeletal span of the George Washington Bridge lit up in the misty distance. Naked girders and stacked up slabs of concrete surrounded the body of another half-made building. It looked like an exposed ribcage. All bones and wounds too deep and too wide for it to live. Life in negative. Where life was being poured into it, it looked as if the towering skyscraper was caving in and dying on its shaky feet.

  Celine didn’t join him at the window.

  He hadn’t heard her stop talking, but when he turned he saw her fingers slip the shoulder of her blouse back on the feverish flesh of her shoulder, the fabric rustling like the silken rush of snow as it fell to the floor. She smiled at him, unsure. His eyes drifted over the black lace, lingering on her belly as if it were the most erotic treasure she had to offer. She stepped out of her jeans. The light danced across the gentle swell of her hip, half-gleaming; the skin beneath freshly waxed with some kind of body oil. Tangles of black curled onto her thigh, too long and too thick to be attractive.

  “You should shave,” he said.

  “Ain’t no refund, pal,” Celine replied, turning on the CD. John Popper’s harmonica cut the cooling air and she began to dance, a kind of shiver that seemed to squirm the length of her body in a teasingly painful performance. From toes to waist, hips to head and back down again. “Now,” she said, hands resting on the mocha flesh of her thighs, massaging just a few inches from those tight black curls. “Are you gonna fuck me or not?”

  “Come here and unbuckle me,” was his answer, that smile sneaking back. The kill so close… “It’d be a crime to waste that lip gloss, sugar.”

  She laughed her laugh and there was no innocence in that bell as she went down on her knees, fingers dragging over the teeth of his zipper before they tugged at the belt. Fingers curled around him, brought him to her lips.

  He forced her head to take him in too deeply, pressed as he looked down at the top of her head, then at her eyes as she looked up at him, that desperate need to please in her ink-stain eyes.

  He let her make him come, kept his hands braced on the back of her head while he skull-fucked her until his semen was dribbling out of the corners of her wet mouth.

  “Nice. But not worth a hundred and fifty bucks.” He said, putting himself away. “I need a drink and ten minutes so I can get my money’s worth. Where’d you keep the liquor?”

  “Through there,” she said, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth, cleaning up his mess.

  He left her on her knees and went through to the kitchen. In a second he had found what he was looking for, the Saran wrap; it sat on a wooden chopping board beside the skillet. Quietly, so as not to be heard, he tore off a strip long enough for what he had in mind and walked back into the lounge.

  Celine was still on her knees, her hand still raised to her lips as if his semen had somehow burned her and she was feeling out the blisters left behind.

  He walked up behind her, “You should call yourself Felitia,” he said and laughed at his own joke. As her head started to turn his laugh turned into the harsh bray of a mule. He snatched up a fistful of her hair and jerked her backwards onto her back, not caring that she screamed against the unnatural angle he forced her legs into before he kicked them out from under her. He slapped her across the face.

  Before Celine could start to get up, he dropped onto her heaving chest. The breath leaked out of her like a balloon going down. He pu
nched her in the throat. Hard. Her eyes bugged and those chiselled layers of flesh reddened as she gagged, gasping for air that wasn’t there.

  In his hand the Saran wrap had folded on itself, wrinkling up.

  Celine squirmed, wriggling her body about like a lizard trapped in a sardine tin, but his knees kept her arms pinned and his weight held her chest.

  Taking his time, he peeled the Saran wrap away from itself, opening the sheet out again, and doubling its thickness so she couldn’t somehow suck a breath through it, he stretched it taught across Celine’s mouth and nose.

  Her flattened lips paled as her body bucked and thrashed about wildly under him but he rode her until there was nothing left, Celine’s face cold and dead against his groin, where the whole erotic dance had started.

  Standing again, he peeled away the Saran wrap and took out his knife, began cutting, cutting, cutting… carved the shape of a tree into her belly, opened her up lips to lips and unravelled her, laying the grey coils of intestine out like so many umbilical cords looping back to the tree of life… carved the image of a pregnant man on her left cheek, smeared the blood into a halo… The Father, Son and Holy Ghost…

  Finally, he dipped his hands inside her, sank himself into the bottom of Celine, feeling out every inch of her insides, brought his bloody hands back up to his lips, hands pulsing with an incandescent light that was everything vile in the world, and tasted her sweet, secret flesh the way God had meant him to.

  Chapter Eleven

  Clean, he walked back out into the city, past the Pontiac and away, whistling softly to himself as he went… All Along the Watchtower…

  Thin gossamer threads of vapour, like finely crafted webs of spiders silk, licked at the worn down heels of his Neubuck boots, something like ice cracking on the sidewalk in his wake.

  A fallen angel of no particular age, like so many other fallen souls in the twilight city; dressed in faded Levi’s and an off-white shirt; very much alive to the many possibilities of the long night.

  Just another one of the crowd.

  Chapter Twelve

  That dream again, the almost-face and the battering winds.

  This time Gabriel tried to recapture it in pen and ink after he woke. An impossibly tall monolith. He wasn’t brilliant, but he was good. Every unsteady inked line caught and reflected another aspect of the serpentine twists and frenzied architecture of his dream tower, laying down a mass of sky-catching reflections amid the elongated walls of plated glass as they stretched higher, toward the circlet of marshmallow cloud hidden beyond the beckoning edge of the paper.

  The drawing took most of the morning, and it was made more difficult by the pain in his hand whenever a careless movement stretched the healing wound. Bob Dylan told him he made love just like a woman, which put a smile on his face while he drew.

  Still smiling, Gabriel added a crudely drawn stick man at the top of the tower, unconsciously changing pens to ink in a red outline.

  Marooned amid the bleak whiteness of the paper, set safely on the tower of reflections, the stick man twisted its head as if to look up at its creator.

  It’s still part of the dream; Gabriel told himself, the ache in his hand denying him even that small comfort. The part that should have died when the sunlight touched my eyes. That’s all it is, a part of the dream…

  Gabriel dropped the pen. Dylan stopped singing. The featureless face pressed against the barrier of paper, a writhing jumble of red lines struggling to breach the containing weave. For a second, between songs, he was faced with the irrational fear that the paper would split open and the thing from his dream would reach through to seize him by the throat with greasy, scaled claws…

  Through the pregnant swell of the paper-face Gabriel saw the repulsive mambo of squirming maggots, their bodies splashed with the semi-gloss sheen of red. Slick with blood. The face began to pulse in time with the thunderous heartbeat booming against his eardrums.

  Even as he stared, the weave of the paper began to slowly unknit: thin, fibrous strands of woven pulp peeling back on themselves rather than going up against the press of the nightmarish paper-face. Radiated light, red, like the leprous paste of blood, squeezed through the tiny cracks as, heartbeat by heartbeat, the face began to unknit itself.

  Great Spirit, First Father, help me, “Go! Go! Back to the dream,” he hissed, fingers pressing painfully into his temples as his eyes screwed up, refusing to see.

  The eyes of the paper-face went wide, a fissure cracking its cheek like the track of a shed tear, re-knit, and the stick man’s coloured body started on a final, deadly plummet, arms windmilling wildly as it plunged out of the cartoon sky…

  Without looking back, Gabriel turned away, leaving his drawing to die its unnatural death.

  Chapter Thirteen

  He arrived at the Westwood Precinct an hour before the preliminary on The Trinity Killer’s Number Nine, Father Joseph D’Angelo, was due through from downtown. Didn’t talk about the dreams or the stick man’s suicide plunge.

  Mannelli swallowed a mouthful of tepid coffee and put down the Styrofoam cup, a warm wet circle ringing the after-face of Maria Massey, the hooker with a heart of gold. Number One. Where the before-face was pretty, not stunning but enough to bring the eye back for a second look, the after-face was a mess of bloody carvings washed clean and cut deep. It was easy to see patches where the ruined skin had started to swell, which made Mannelli think she had still been alive when the cutting began.

  According to the reports, four of The Trinity’s eight confirmed victims — Caroline Öberg, Jessica McMahon, Lindy Matther and Anna Selvin — showed signs of sexual activity, not the bruising of abuse, mild haemorrhaging, and low T and White Cell count, cognisant with the first pernicious touch of the HIV virus.

  Mannelli pulled a clean sheet of foolscap from a large legal pad and wrote himself a summary of all the murders to date, with basic details for each killing and a few sketchy suppositions of his own. Where the bodies were discovered, by whom, injuries, clothing. The idea of a Gay Plague killer was there, beside it a ringed picture of the pregnant man which they had all assumed was part of the Holy Trinity.

  The four HIV girls backed up the theory as far as the two cops, Seth Lawson and Ben Sheldon, but then the idea died. A response to a reported breaking and entering in above a 7-Eleven in East Tremont.

  Four prostitutes, two cops, a college boy, a city woman and a partridge in a pear tree…

  Barring victims, times and dates, he was left with eight seemingly unrelated murders.

  Some of the killings involved sexual assault, but not all of them. Four, the HIV virus was eating away at the corpse. One involved robbery gone haywire. Two drugs. In some cases the victims’ bodies showed evidence to suggest extreme tortures undergone before death, in others they were almost untouched. Almost.

  Only two facts remained anchored amid a sea of floating variables; the cause of death in each case, despite the variety of wounds: asphyxiation. The trademark: the Trinity tattoo on the left cheek, Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

  No matter what other cruel and unusual punishments had been meted out, mutilation, slashing, dismemberment, these two constants proved that the same man had perpetrated each of the seemingly random killings.

  Precious little, and nothing they didn’t already know.

  There were no fingerprints to go on, but in three cases there was semen. Caroline Öberg’s body had yielded three different traces; Lindy Matther’s two, both recent; and Anne Selvin’s, four, one a match with Caroline Öberg. The matching samples had been recovered from girl’s throat in both cases.

  His handwriting covered three pages by the time he’d finished transcribing everything he knew about The Trinity Killer’s modus operandi. There were too many question marks and blind alleys where things that should have simply didn’t link. They were missing something…

  Mannelli had pretty much given up hope that they would find it.

  It wasn’t going to be that simple.


  He walked over to the window and braced his hands against the wooden windowsill, fingers skirting the peeling emulsion as he looked out from his ivory asylum onto the city below. His breath frosted on the pane of glass.

  The window reflected his worn face; the dark puffs under his reddened eyes and the gloomy, growing crack between his neck and shirt collar.

  Behind him, Gabriel looked at the reflection, seeing the face of a friend slowly decaying into a pale shade of its self, a good man’s soul being sucked dry, and shivered. His own photograph of Celine lay on top of the coroner’s report for Seth Lawson, the ghost of that damned tattoo taunting their helplessness.

  On the other side of the closed door, with the faint background chorus of Christmas Carols, Jack Delgado fielded another crank call. His in-tray held fifty-six memos, each headed up ‘Trinity Killer’, each one a phoned in confession from someone desperate to get their sins off their chests. Next to the confessions he had a pile of ‘Could-Be’s’ and psychiatric evaluations, two hundred thick; the results of concerned neighbours, wives, girlfriends, employers, and friends eager to account for the whereabouts of loved ones, friends and subordinates. The simple process of feeding the useless facts into the database would take days, and there were no guarantees that the precious model winging its way down from Quantico would be any more use than a fart in a wet hole. More spurious facts were coming in by the hour.

  Mannelli turned away from the window, leaving his half-cup of cold coffee behind as he walked back to the desk. Face up was the preliminary case report on Rebecca Scott, Number Six. Two red words, ‘Trinity Homicide’ were scrawled in Jack Delgado’s handwriting across the manila cover.

  He knew the Scott girl’s case by heart: death by asphyxiation; mild contusions on the cerebral cortex, consistent with a rain of heavy blows to the head — mating with the forensics report on the iron fire poker found at the scene — a ruptured spleen; wounds carved to a depth of 5 millimetres depicting a gravid male body surrounded by more cuts that might have been some kind of aura; universal bruising and lesions around the base of the spine and lower torso; series of shallow, cosmetic scratches around the vaginal entrance; and mild haemorrhaging — the latter probably the result of excessive shock.