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into the apartment's only bedroom.
He found Marilyn chained to her bed, the sheets and the floor below drenched
with blood. Flies buzzed around her. Her body had swollen in the heat, the
skin stained a light green at her belly, the superficial veins on the thighs
and shoulders outlined in deeper greens and reds like the tracery in autumn
leaves. There was no longer any way to tell how beautiful she had once been.
The autopsy found one hundred separate knife wounds on her body. The final cut
to the jugular had killed her: the preceding ninety-nine had simply been used
to bleed her slowly over a period of hours. There was a container of salt by
the bed, and a jar of fresh lemon juice. Her killer had used them to rouse her
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when she lost consciousness.
That evening, after my father returned home, the smell of the soap he had used
to wash away the traces of Marilyn Hyde's death still strong upon him, he sat
at our kitchen table and opened a bottle of Coors. My mother had left as soon
as he came home, anxious to meet up with friends whom she had not seen in many
weeks. His dinner was in the oven, but he did not touch it. Instead, he sipped
from the bottle and did not speak for a long time. I sat across from him and
he took a soda from the refrigerator and handed it to me, so that I would have
something to drink with him.
What's wrong? I asked him at last.
Somebody got hurt today, he replied.
Somebody we know?
No, son, nobody we know, but I think she was a good person. She was probably
worth knowing.
Who did it? Who hurt her?
He looked at me, then reached out and touched my hair, the palm of his hand
resting lightly on my head for a moment.
A dark angel, he said. A dark angel did it.
He did not tell me what he had seen in Marilyn Hyde's apartment. It was only
many years later that I would hear of it from my mother, from my grandfather,
from other detectives but I never forgot the dark angels. Many years later, my
wife and child were taken from me, and the man who killed them believed that
he, too, was one of the dark angels, the fruit of the union between earthly
women and those who had been banished from heaven for their pride and their
lust.
St. Augustine believed that natural evil could be ascribed to the activity of
beings who were free and rational but nonhuman. Nietzsche considered evil to
be a source of power independent of the human. Such a force of evil could
exist outside of the human psyche, representing a capacity for cruelty and
harm distinct from our own capabilities, a malevolent and hostile intelligence
whose aim was, ultimately, to undermine our own essential humanity, to take
away our ability to feel compassion, empathy, love.
I think my father saw certain acts of violence and cruelty, such as the
terrible death of Marilyn Hyde, and wondered if there were some deeds that
were beyond even the potential of human beings to commit; if there were
creatures both more and less than human who preyed upon us.
They were the violent ones, the dark angels.
Manhattan North, the best homicide squad in the city, maybe even in the whole
country, investigated the Marilyn Hyde case for seven weeks but found no trace
of the man in the subway. There were no other suspects. The man at whom
Marilyn Hyde had simply looked for a second too long and who had, it was
believed, bled her to death for his own pleasure, had returned to the hidden
place from which he came.
Marilyn Hyde's murder remains unsolved, and detectives in the squad still
catch themselves staring at the faces on the subway, sometimes with their own
wives, their own children beside them, trying to find the dark-haired man with
the too small mouth. And some of them, if you ask, will tell you that perhaps
they experience a moment of relief when they find that he is not among the
crowds, that they have not caught his eye, that they have not encountered this
man while their families are with them.
There are people whose eyes you must avoid, whose attention you must not draw
to yourself. They are strange, parasitic creatures, lost souls seeking to
stretch across the abyss and make fatal contact with the warm, constant flow
of humanity. They live in pain and exist only to visit that pain on others. A
random glance, the momentary lingering of a look, is enough to give them the
excuse that they seek. Sometimes it is better to keep your eyes on the gutter,
for fear that by looking up you might catch a glimpse of them, black shapes
against the sun, and be blinded forever.
And now, on a patch of damp, muddy ground by a cold lake in northern Maine,
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the work of the dark angels was slowly being exposed.
The grave had been discovered at the boundary of the public reserved lands
known as Winterville. The integrity of the scene had been compromised somewhat
by the activities of the maintenance and construction crews, but there was
nothing that could now be done except to ensure that no further damage was
caused.
On that first day, the emergency team had taken the names of all of the
workers at the lake site, interviewed each briefly, and then secured the scene
with tape and uniformed officers. Initially there had been some trouble from
one of the timber companies that used the road, but the company had agreed to
postpone its truck runs until the extent of the grave had been determined.
Following the initial examination the sandbag levees were strengthened, while
a command post, including the mobile crime scene unit, was established in a
turnaround by the side of the Red River Road, with a strict sign-in policy in
place to ensure that no further contamination of the area occurred. A pathway
through the scene was created and marked with tape, after which a walking tour
of the ground was made with a video camera to indoctrinate the police officers
who would take no direct role in the investigation.
The scene was photographed: overall views first, to preserve the essential
history of the scene at the moment of discovery, then orientation shots of the
visible bones, followed by close-ups of the bones themselves. The camcorder
was brought into play again, this time detailing the scene instead of merely
recording it. Sketches were made, a three-foot-long metal stake indicating the
center point from which all measurements of distance and angles would be
taken. The boundaries of Red River Road were marked and recorded, in case any
widening might occur in the future to alter the territory, and GPS equipment
was used to take a satellite reading of the crime scene location.
Then, the light by now almost gone, the investigators dispersed following a
final meeting, leaving state troopers and sheriff's deputies to guard the
scene. The autopsy team would arrive at first light, when the inquiry into the
deaths of the Aroostook Baptists would begin in earnest.
And in all that they did and in all that would follow, the sound of the
hybrids stayed with them, so that each night, when they returned home and
tried to sleep, they would wake to imagined howls and think that they were
once again standing by the shores of the lake, their hands cold and their
boots thick with mud, surrounded by the bones of the dead.
That night, for the first time in many months, I dreamed, as memories of Grace
and my own father followed me from waking to sleeping. In my dream I stood on
a patch of cleared land with bare trees at its verge and frozen water
glittering coldly beyond. There were fresh mounds of earth scattered randomly
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