WHY HAS THE FALLEN ANGEL GONE ON A KILLING SPREE?

In the following excerpt from The Last Angel To Fall, Jubal Stone, Thad Coleman and Asheba Rain are directed to a crime scene under the control of Michigan State Police Detective Charles Goldstein.  This is the moment they realize that the escaped rogue angel has gone on a killing spree.  They have no idea why, and they don't know how to stop him.

Professor Martens' House, Brooklyn, Michigan
December 21 – Approximately 8:45 AM

By the time we got inside the house my head had cleared. I made a concerted effort not to look at Asheba too directly. The killer's path was illuminated with a glowing dust that was fading by the minute. Straight ahead was a short hallway, to the right a closet and stairs to the second floor. “We don't know if this glowing shit was deliberately left behind or not, but so far we haven't even been able to identify what it is, so be careful,” the detective said.

Asheba nodded to us to indicate that this was definitely residue from the Angel. Goldstein didn't seem to notice. He pressed himself against the wall to avoid stepping in the residue and led us carefully around it and into the hallway. He turned left into the kitchen and continued past to the entrance of the living room. He stopped and turned to us, deliberately blocking our path.

“I'm sure you have witnessed your share of dead bodies, but you might want to prepare yourselves for this. It's a particularly bad scene. The worst I've come across in my twenty-seven years as a cop.”

I nodded for him to proceed. Goldstein turned and led us into the living room. We stopped cold, but Asheba walked past us. She raised her head and sniffed the air.

At first I couldn't process what I was seeing. There was something astonishingly wrong here. We were standing just inside the living room, a room that had been turned into an abattoir. There was red tinged black blood smeared everywhere. More blood than I had ever seen. There were strange things, too, things that looked disturbingly familiar. Things I had seen only at autopsies or in medical
textbooks.

Human organs, ripped from someone's body, and strewn across the room at intervals as if they were tossed at random.

The room looked like some kind of abstract painting, something Pablo Picasso might do if he were to use the entire room as his canvas. It was a macabre horror out of Rod Serling's “Night Gallery,” uncensored and obscene, but it wasn't a painting at all. It was the remains of a human being squashed, shattered and smeared across the walls, ceiling, furniture, fixtures and floor. I quickly put my sleeve to my mouth to stop myself from vomiting. I took a quick short breath and stopped breathing through my nose to shut out the smell.

Coleman's eyes were closed and he was holding his nose shut with his thumb and forefinger. He shook his head as if to erase the image from his memory. He opened his eyes and took it all in again.

Asheba was still sniffing the air – and licking her lips – as if the scent was palpable and she was tasting it. I was really starting to worry about her.

I could see what looked like the man's heart on the blood-streaked loveseat. And that looked like brain matter on the coffee table, splattered all over a handful of books. My heart was racing.

“Victim is believed to be retired Professor Edward Martens,” Goldstein said.  "Just turned seventy. He did a lot of work for government agencies and the United Nations over the past twenty years. He was some kind of government negotiator and had taught at the University of Michigan. His wife died a few years ago and he lived here alone.”

I was unable to look away now. The scene held me spellbound. Who – what – kind of person or being could do such a thing to someone? No reason could possibly justify a gruesome display of this magnitude. Suddenly I didn't care about my orders. I didn't care that this Angel was important to some kind of peace process. I just wanted to make him pay for this atrocity. If the perpetrator had been before me right then, I would have extracted some justice.

“I can't find the right words to detail this,” Goldstein said. “The cold clinical terms I use for reports can't do justice to this crime. Whoever did this has to be caught fast.”

I whispered to Coleman to avoid being overheard by Detective Goldstein. “Tell me, Coleman, was our poor friendly little Fallen Angel confused when he turned this seventy year-old man into a pizza?”

Coleman was staring at the carnage, but his eyes were fixed on a particular spot. The end table near the window. There was a chessboard with red and gold pieces.

I made a beeline for it and stopped abruptly. I leaned in for a closer look. It was just like the chess set my wife had been given for her “groundbreaking” genetic research work. Supposedly custom-made and given only to those who worked on that top-secret project, whatever it had been. Why did this Professor Martens, a government negotiator, have a set just like it?

“That significant?” Goldstein asked, studying me instead of the chess set. He walked over to me, never taking his eyes off me. “What is it, Agent Stone?”

Asheba leaned in to study the chess set. She stared at the gold king which represented God.

I watched her closely, wondering what it represented to her, if anything. “My wife got a chess set like this.”

Asheba looked up at me. She frowned, then turned away.

Goldstein took a step closer, his interest piqued. “Yeah?”

“Let's check the rest of the house, Jubal,” Coleman said softly.

“Just a minute,” Goldstein said, stepping in my path. “I've got a murder here, a real bad murder. Where did your wife get this chess set?”

“It was a gift for her work on genetic research. From the National Institutes of Health.”

“Federal government, huh? Professor Martens worked for the federal government, too. What kind of work does your wife do?”

I looked at the floor. I didn't want to get into this. I didn't even want to think about Jessie right now. It had been difficult trying to push her from my mind so I could focus on this mission.

“Maybe I'd better have a talk with her,” Goldstein said.

“His wife is dead, detective,” Coleman said. “There's no connection there.”

Asheba turned back to me abruptly. She looked surprised and confused. Evidently she hadn't been given too much information about me and Coleman. I was grateful that she didn't know much more about me than I did about her.

Goldstein had a look of recognition on his face as if a light bulb had suddenly been switched on. He stepped aside. I followed Coleman to the door.

“You go ahead, but you know the rules. The gloves stay on, and don't touch anything you don't have to. Stay out of the professor's home office until forensics is finished.”

Only now did Goldstein look down at the chess set. “Good and evil. It all seems so simple, doesn't it?”