Doctor Gross patted Azra’s hand patiently. “We’ll sort that out, too, in time. Yes, recovered memories and outright fantasies are sometimes hard to distinguish. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. Memories tell us who we were and fantasies who we wish we were. Both tell us a great deal.”
“Don’t equate them,” Azra said, flinging off the doctor’s touch. “I was an angel. Not a human. Not a psycho. I was an angel. The picture of me with the bike, that was only a fantasy. I want so much to be human, my mind concocted a fantasy.”
“Sweetheart,” said Donna, tears standing in her eyes.
“It’s not a fantasy. These memories are the real ones. You are human. You are.”
Doctor Gross rose. “Well, I need to get going. I’ll come back in a few days, and we’ll talk some more. In the meantime,” he smiled sadly, “remember your place of bliss.”
Azra watched him go. Once the teal shirt had disappeared beyond the guard, he spoke to Donna quietly, urgently, “You said you believed in angels.”
“Yes.”
“In fallen angels – in Satan?”
“Yes, in fallen angels.”
“In the Dark Angel who wrestled Jacob at Peniel -?”
“Yes.”
“Then why can’t you believe in me?”
Donna seemed suddenly deflated, and the glow of hope on her features faded away.
Lynda Barnett leaned forward. “I’m going to have to stop this conversation right here.”
“No, you’re not,” Azra said fiercely. “I’m in charge of my own defense!” Lynda rolled her eyes, released a hiss of steam, and slouched back, arms folded, in her chair. Azra turned back to Donna. “Well?”
“Why don’t I believe you?” Donna sought through interior spaces. “Do you know about Herbert Mullin?”
“I don’t.”
“He was a serial murderer in California. He heard his father, who was half a world away in the military, tell him to kill. Vietnam had just ended, and Herbert believed that the casualties of that war had been sacrifices to nature. With the end of the war, nature was growing angry. It was his job to go kill in order to provide more sacrifices and keep California from falling into the ocean.”
“I see.”
“Do you know about Richard Trenton Chase?”
“No.”
“He believed he had soap-dish disease. If you pick up your soap and it is gooey underneath, you have soap-dish disease. It turns your blood to powder. When he was in a psychiatric home, he would capture rabbits in the courtyard and inject their blood into his veins. He was once stopped when leaving an Indian reservation because he had buckets of blood in the back of his truck. It was cow’s blood, but later he hunted humans, drank their blood, and put their livers and kidneys into blenders.”
“Your point is?”
“Both of them were convinced of the supernatural forces that affected them. Both pleaded with those around them to understand, to believe. Both were human. Both died because they could not escape their delusions.”
Azra’s face fell. “It can’t be true, Donna. It can’t. If I was an angel, I was a great servant of God. If I was only human, I was a madman and a monster.”
“Whatever you were before, you’re human now,” she said. “You’re human now. And you have to live.”
“You’re wrong. You’re wrong, and I am going to prove it.”
THIRTEEN
The news got out that the cop who had caught the killer was now sitting beside him in the Racine County Jail, holding his hand while a liberal professor and the public defender appointed by activist judges took part in a seance. They called to angels and to demons to testify in court to free the killer – or so said an unnamed guard. Donna’s phone began to ring; her answering machine filled with death threats. She changed her number to unlisted. Threatening mail arrived, and Donna opened only bills.
Except when a small square package showed up in her mailbox. It was wrapped in brown paper, and its return address simply read, “From a Friend.”
“There’s something about this one,” said Donna, holding it in her hand as she walked into her kitchen.
“Feels – soft.” She got a knife from the drawer and gingerly sliced into the paper. Then she shone a flashlight into the slit. Inside lay something that looked like an old wallet.
No apparent booby traps, no anthrax…
Donna cautiously cut two more slits and lifted the paper away.
Inside was a billfold, worn and brown. She opened it and found an Indiana driver’s license with a very familiar face.
“Mother of God – Azra.”
It was more than a driver’s license. The whole thing was stuffed with ID – Social Security, library cards, video rental clubs, grocery check cards, blood donor cards, grocery receipts, thirty-eight dollars in tens, fives, and ones, and a short shopping list.
“William B. Dance, male, six foot one, one hundred eighty-five pounds, black hair, gray eyes, no sight restriction, Social Security number…”
Donna went into her home office and scooted her chair up to her computer. A few bookmarks, a few passwords, and she was into the Burlington Police Intranet. She began by typing in the driver’s license number. His name is William Dance. The little boy with the bike was named William Dance. In moments, the information began scrolling up:
No record of parking citation.
No record of traffic citation.
No record of misdemeanor arrest.
No record of felony arrest.
She picked up the phone and flipped through her Rolodex. Her fingers stopped on the address and phone number of Jason Knight, IRS inspector. She dialed.
“Extension five forty-seven. Thank you. Hi, Jason. This is Detective Leland from Burlington. Right, the Pizza Hut arson case. Yeah. Oh, fine, how about you?
Yeah, I’ve got a Social Security number I need a check on. Sure. All right? You’ve got it. Okay.” She read him the number, and he repeated it back. “Yeah, that’s it. Okay, I’ll wait.” She leaned back in her chair. It creaked wearily, an extension of her tired body.
“You got it? Good. None whatsoever? This guy is – let’s see, the license says he’s thirty-five. You sure you’ve got nothing? How could he have a Social Security number and never file taxes? Yeah, I’ll wait.” She fiddled with a pen on the desk before her.
“MIA? From what war? Desert Storm? That would have made him… yes. A Marine? Are you sure? That was over fifteen years ago, which would have made him twenty. July 22, 1992 is when he disappeared? All right.
“Well, Jason, if you dig up anything else, let me – oh, wait, have you got his serial number and unit? Yeah. Thanks. Got it. Good-bye. Yeah, the arson for profit scheme was more fun. Sure. I’ll see you. Bye.”
Leland hung up the phone and stared at the ceiling. A veteran, missing in action for fifteen years. A POW. Scorpions and Marines with waterboarding and wires and fists and wounds coming faster than saints…
Oh, Azra. No wonder you forgot everything. No wonder you became a monster.
She punched another number into the phone.
“Hello, this is Detective Leland of the Burlington Police Department. Burlington, Wisconsin. I’m investigating a multiple – that is, I’m trying to find the owner of a lost wallet, and I need some information about a Marine that served during Desert Storm. Yes, the National Personnel Records Center? And the number? Who should I ask to speak to? Thanks. Yeah. I need all the luck I can get.”
She worked past dinnertime and into the night. There was no window in her home office, no skylight to look into and see the speckled blackness of a Wisconsin sky. Only her grandfather’s old wooden cuckoo clock told her how late it was. She had ignored the ten chirps, the eleven, and the twelve. But when there came only one, and then only two, the creeping morning could not be denied.
How many cups of coffee? The stuff had kept her awake but had leant a jittery fear to the process. Most of her work had been the web equivalent of paperwork – online indexes, pentagon records, requests for information, directory searches, postings to recruiters and schools, even a conversation with the military liaison at the American Embassy in Baghdad. Most of the queries came up with no immediate aid, though the Veterans Administration had found Azra on one of their newer lists of “Missing in Action and Presumed Dead.” That list had indicated no known family, and that he’d been recruited out of the enlistment office in Alexandria, Virginia. There, she found a 1991 file that included a grainy photo of a young, thin, dark-haired recruit, and an enrollment record that identified him as William B. Dance.