I wanted to ask him what he did when he dealt with illness that only faith would cure, or dangers that only belief would protect him from, but I didn’t. He’d made his choice; if the Big Guy couldn’t persuade him to join the fold, then nothing I said was going to change that. I know I’m supposed to want to convert everyone I meet to the one true way; trouble was I wasn’t sure it was the only way into Paradise. I hadn’t been sure since I was about nineteen.
“I respect your choice,” I said at last.
“I take it that you are religious,” he said.
“You could say that.”
He looked at me as if he expected me to say more. I just smiled at him.
“What, you’re not going to try to convert me to your path of faith?”
“Me talking about my personal belief in God isn’t going to help Detective Gimble.”
“Don’t you mean personal belief in Deity, Detective Havelock?” said a deep voice from outside the curtain.
I smiled and said, “Sorry, Lieutenant Charleston, I forgot my political correctness for a second.”
A large, dark hand parted the curtain and my boss, Lieutenant Adinka Charleston, stepped through. The rest of him matched the hand. He was as tall as the doctor but built more like me. He’d gone to college on a football scholarship and played pro as an offensive lineman for two years before injuries took him out. He was a little thicker around the middle than he had been in the NFL, but not by much. Other than the hair going gray he looked pretty much like the pictures in his office when he was in uniform for the Denver Broncos.
“Don’t forget again, Detective. We wouldn’t want the doctor to think we were insensitive.” His voice sounded serious, but I knew that he thought the new PC vocabulary regulations were a crock of shit, which was what he’d called them when he was forced to give us the lecture about using them. I didn’t know why he was pulling the doctor’s chain, or maybe mine, but I knew he was.
“Yes, Lieutenant,” I said, but I gave him a sideways look to see if I could figure out what was up.
He looked down at Gimble, who looked even smaller lying in the bed surrounded by the three of us. All traces of the smile faded from Lieutenant Charleston’s face. “So, what are you going to do to wake up my boy here?”
“If he truly saw an angel, then he shouldn’t be in a coma, but he is, so if we can figure out what did this to him, then we can put together a course of treatment.”
“Did the angel touch him?” Charleston asked.
I shook my head. “No, if it had he’d be dead.”
“I thought angels healed with their touch,” the doctor said.
Charleston and I both shook our heads. “You explain, Havelock, you’re our angel expert.”
“If they are sent from God to heal, they can, but angels that are pure spirit like the flame we saw, they mostly follow orders, and he wasn’t there to heal.”
“What was he there for?”
“To deliver a message,” I said.
“To the patient?” the doctor said.
I shook my head. “No, not for Gimble.”
“Doc, I need to talk to my detective alone for a few minutes.” Charleston smiled at the doctor as he said it, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. They showed that he was smiling for social convention and nothing else.
Dr. Paulson seemed to understand, or maybe he had other patients with less complicated complaints; whatever the reason, he gave us the room.
Lieutenant Charleston’s smile faded until his expression matched his eyes, sort of unfriendly and taking no shit. “So, the angel had a message for you?”
“It gave me the message,” I said.
“Don’t play word games with me, Havoc. One of my detectives is lying in a bed unconscious and no one knows why, or how to wake him up. Answer my damn question.”
I told him what little information the angel had given me. It sounded even less helpful than it had at the crime scene.
“So, the murderer isn’t a demon, but it’s somehow part of the Devil’s plans?” Charleston asked.
“The Adversary, yes.”
“That’s just another term for Satan, right?”
“It’s what I was taught to use at the College of Angels,” I said.
“Just making absolutely certain we’re talking about the same being.”
“It’s the same,” I said.
“Could the murderer be possessed?”
“The angels are aware of what a possession is, Lieutenant. This was something new, or unusual, and whatever the murderer is, it’s something that the angels don’t understand, and that is powerful enough that it can hide its movements from Celestial powers.”
“If it’s not a possession, then the hot lead I was going to tell you about just got colder.”
“What lead?” I asked.
“There was a security video in the parking area across from the apartment building. The camera caught a man leaving the building at the right time to be the murderer. Looked like there might even be blood on his clothes, but if we’re looking for something supernatural this kid isn’t it.”
“Kid, so you have an ID?”
“Mark Cookson, nineteen; his grades have fallen in the last semester enough that he’s on academic probation at UCCA, University of California, City of Angels. He got some complaints by female students for being overly persistent in his attentions after they’d made it clear they weren’t interested; nothing violent, nothing illegal, just socially awkward and bordering on stalking. He’s definitely a creeper. One of the students that had complained about him was our victim.”
I looked at him and felt that eager rise when everything starts to fall into place on a case. “Did you find him yet?”
“He’s not in his dorm and his roommate changed schools midsemester so no new roommate to question.”
“Is there anything in the dorm room that says he’s into black magic, or demonology?”
“Had to send someone else to see the dorm room and try to find any friends he might have, because I got a call that one of my detectives was in the hospital.” He gave me a look.
“Sorry, Lieutenant.”
“Mark Cookson sounds like he could be good for this, Havoc, but your angel makes it sound like we are looking for someone a lot more dangerous than a horny teenager with bad social skills and no criminal record.”
“If they find things in his room that say he’s been messing with black magic, then he may still be the guy.”
“But if he is, then we’re looking for him right now. He’s from an upper-middle-class family, he’s not going to know how to hide from the police. We will find him, probably soon, which makes me think he’s not it, because if he was, why would we need a message from the angels?”
“I don’t know. The angel shouldn’t have given the message to me at all, Lieutenant. It should have gone to an Angel Speaker at the College, then they would have given the message to their handler, they would have given it to the administrative assistants, and they would have contacted the prophet on duty.”
“How long would all that have taken?”
I thought about it. “Hours, maybe a few days.”