Angel Interrupted by Chaz McGee Page A

As soon as Calvano’s car drove away, she walked through the house, evaluating the men searching through Martin’s belongings, trying to decide which one she wanted. She finally selected a young officer who’d been pulled from his beat because of the manpower shortage—Denny, the young cop who had disturbed the nurse’s crime scene earlier in the day.
    “You,” Noni said, pointing at him. He was peering under Martin’s bed and he froze, startled.
    “Ma’am?” he asked weakly.
    “Come here, young man. I want to have a word with you.”

Chapter 8

    Calvano was doing what he did best: rousting a suspect. I had been a bully, too, because bullying was a lazy man’s best option. Slowed down by hangovers and a perpetual depression caused by constant drinking, I had barely been able to rise and shower each morning, and sometimes had not even managed that. I’d soon discovered that browbeating required no advance work, no investigating, no remembering what you’d done the day before. You just jumped in and started harassing a suspect and hoped it might take you somewhere. Sometimes you got lucky, maybe even enough times to convince them to let you keep your badge.
    But I didn’t want to watch Calvano work on Martin. I’d had enough of Calvano for one day. When a man is dying of thirst, he doesn’t dream of muddy waters, he dreams of a pure mountain stream. I needed Maggie.
    I knew I’d find her at the hospital, working on Fiona Harker’s murder. Once Maggie started an investigation, she didn’t stop until she had solved the case or someone like Gonzales pulled her from it and pointed her in another direction. That had rarely happened to her—Maggie almost always solved her cases, something my old partner and I had never been able to do.
    The dead nurse had no personal life to speak of, so Maggie, I reasoned, would go to the place where she had spent most of her life: the hospital. There was only one in our small town, but it was large, well funded, and served the surrounding county. It was a sprawling, four-story building constructed five decades ago, when architects had designed one public building after another as huge, utilitarian boxes. It had kept up with the times, though. Inside its walls, county residents could be treated for everything from a splinter in a toe to terminal cancer.
    I had not visited the hospital much since my death. For every three people surrounded by loved ones celebrating a successful procedure, there was someone in a bed nearby, alone in the dark, facing their own mortality. The trouble was that I could tell the difference. The dying had a glow about them that grew stronger as their bodies grew weaker, as if their life force was being leeched from their physical bodies and gathered for the transition. Many of them sensed this and met their deaths with so much courage and strength it made me ashamed I had squandered my life when I’d once had it. Others lay fearfully in bed, awaiting the worst. And a lucky few slept, blissfully unaware that they were never to wake.
    They all died in the end.
    It wasn’t the death that bothered me, though. It was my knowing in advance. It was the fact that each of them so far, at least the ones I had witnessed, had moved on to someplace unknown, leaving me behind. That alone made the hospital an infinitely painful place for me.
    But Maggie would be there, at least. I could endure anything for Maggie.
    I found her in a staff lounge on the first floor near the emergency room, talking to a tall man with brown hair. He was unremarkable looking except, perhaps, for his eyes, which were copper. He was thin in that way of doctors who, annoyingly enough, look like they run sixteen miles a day and perform in triathlons every weekend. He was at least ten years older than Maggie, though his voice sounded older than that. I could feel his fatigue as surely as if it were mine. He had been working for many hours in the emergency room, I suspected. Wisps of other