Angel Fire by Lisa Unger Page B

want to know about them. Her manner was always clipped and professional. People couldn’t believe how little she cared. But in fact she cared too much. The sight of grief, the thought of people being violated, dying in terror and unspeakable pain, was more than she could bear. It cast a light on her soul that crept into dark crevasses where even she was afraid to peer.
    But she felt differently about Christine and Harold, and especially Shawna. It was as if their memories were orphans that no one would take in. As if the worried question “Where are they?” had not been asked by anyone who cared about the answer. She felt a fierce need to shelter and feed these lost souls, to know who they had been. It was a sensitive business, sorting through the debris of an abandoned life. The layers needed to be peeled back with gentle fingers one after another, like the skin on an onion, to reveal the essence of a person true and ripe. She certainly didn’t trust a hack like Morrow to do it properly.
    She wondered if the police had connected the disappearances to one another, if she was the only one who could see the shadow of something sinister behind the collection of strange events. Jeffrey certainly wasn’t convinced by what she’d told him. But this did not deter her; she trusted herself. She just needed more information on the victims, to find out what they had in common, where their paths had crossed, what experiences they might have shared. At the intersections of their lives, she suspected, she would find a madman.
    She began plotting in her mind the various ways she could gain access to the information she wanted—some more legal than others—if Morrow wouldn’t cooperate. She believed her best bet was to see if Shawna’s boyfriend was willing to talk.
    J effrey was watching her from the second-floor balcony that looked down onto the living room, smiling to himself. He could almost see the wheels turning in her mind. She sat on the living room sofa, her back against the armrest, legs tucked up beneath her. She stared absently out the window, biting on her thumbnail. Dressed in black leggings and a pink T-shirt, with her hair wet and no makeup, she looked like a teenager.
    “What are you scheming, Lydia?” he asked.
    She was too cool to be startled; turned her eyes up to him slyly, catlike. “I’m thinking about what you are going to make me for breakfast.”
    “You know,” he said dryly, “you’ve never once made a meal for me in all the time I’ve known you.”
    “That is patently untrue,” she answered with mock indignation. “I cooked dinner for you every night after you got shot.”
    “You ordered in,” he said, smiling as he walked down the spiral staircase.
    “Whatever.”
    “Do you have anything in this house besides coffee and cigarettes?”
    “Eggs and wheat bread. Maybe some milk.”
    “Great,” he muttered, walking into the kitchen.
    Lydia pulled on her sneakers to walk to the mailbox for the paper. Outside, the morning was crisp, the sky blue and close. That was one of the things she loved most about New Mexico.
    Almost thirteen thousand feet above sea level, you dwelled in the sky. It was all around you, not just above. She took the clean air into her lungs, thinking she needed to run later. She would avoid the church.
    She was halfway back up the driveway with the paper in her hand before she glanced at the headline.
    BLOODBATH IN THE BARRIO:
Woman Missing; Presumed Dead
    Lydia ran the rest of the way up the drive and burst in through the front door. Jeffrey was standing at the stove, scrambling eggs.
    “Look at this,” she said, throwing down the paper.
    He turned off the stovetop, took his glasses from his shirt pocket, and scanned the article. The fact that this event had taken place in the late-night hours and was in the first edition of the morning newspaper, coupled with the fact that the police had “no comment,” indicated this story had been leaked to the press. Someone at