Prayer

by Philip Kerr

  “I kept my virtues in one pocket and my vices in the other. I guess that was fine until she started going through my pockets and discovered I wasn’t quite as virtuous as she imagined.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s any use in my offering to speak to her on your behalf.”

  “Hell, no.” I laughed. “I think she dislikes Catholics as much as she hates heathens like me.”

  “You’re no heathen, Gil. You might think you are now. But when you turn away from God, it’s only a circle you’re making and before long that same circle will put you back in front of him. You see if I’m wrong.”

  It was hard arguing these things with a bishop, even one as worldly as Eamon Coogan.

  My route back to the office took me onto the Southwest Freeway and then north up the 610. About halfway there I saw blue and red lights, and then two FBI Evidence Response Team trucks as they turned off the opposite lanes onto North Post Oak Road and Woodway Drive. They were obviously headed for the serial killer’s latest crime scene, and thinking I might loop around and follow them, I decided to make a right onto Memorial Drive. I placed the cherry on top of the car roof and put my foot down. It wasn’t that I thought I could add anything important to the investigation, but I hadn’t yet seen the killer’s work firsthand and, after all, Harlan Caulfield had asked for my opinion once before, so I wanted to show him that I was still willing to help. Besides, I was still feeling a little guilty about stealing some of his men.

  The trucks were easy to spot as they came barreling east along the road and I was quickly on their tail. They veered south onto Memorial Loop Drive and pulled up in front of three practice baseball diamonds, right next to a mobile command center—one of the big blue-gray motor homes with a satellite dish on top that look as if Tom Cruise might be resting inside between takes. Some cops were doing an excellent job of keeping a line of looky-loos at a distance. Already there were several TV cameras set up to scavenge the scraps from the police and FBI tables to make the whole ghastly scene complete. You could almost smell the scent of a fresh kill in the air above the crowd’s eager, bobbing heads.

  Trusting in my cherry, the cops waved me on through like I was someone who mattered and I pulled up next to the MCC just as Harlan came out with an e-cigarette in his mouth. With no flame or combustion involved, e-cigarettes were about the only thing you could smoke in Memorial Park, or almost anywhere else for that matter. Harlan took a drag of his tobacco-free, smoke-free, smell-free cigarette. It was just harmless water vapor with a little nicotine mixed in, so you could get the taste without insult to the throat or other people. I didn’t mind offering an insult to anyone.

  “I was right about Saint Peter, wasn’t I?”

  “What makes you say so, Martins?”

  “Come on, Harlan. Everyone in the office knows that’s what the boys in Violent Crime have nicknamed your serial killer.” I nodded at the news crews. “Everyone except them, that is.”

  “That’s one newspaper headline I never want to see,” growled Harlan. “So keep your mouth shut about that. I’d better have a word with my team. And stamp on someone’s kiwifruit, very hard.”

  “Another victim who was on her way to collecting a halo?”

  “That she was.” Harlan sighed. “Caroline Romero founded the Robbie Center when her boy Robbie disappeared. He ran away from home when he was twelve and she’s never seen him again. So she and her husband, Manolo, used some of their not inconsiderable fortune to found the center in order to try to prevent abductions and runaways, and to recover missing children. Since they started fifteen years ago, they’ve helped find more than three hundred missing kids and reunite them with their parents. And if that isn’t worth a damned halo, I don’t know what is.” He took a drag on the cigarette. “She lived on Crestwood Drive, about a mile west of here. Nice house. Nice people. She had other kids, but losing one isn’t something you get over, I guess. She never did anything bad to anybody. That’s what all her neighbors say.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “She was shot with a small-caliber weapon, same as the others. Last night she went out jogging and she didn’t come back. No one saw a fucking thing, of course. Leastways, not so far.”

  “Is it possible that your killer feels that he’s on the side of the angels? Could the reason he’s killing these people be that he actually thinks he’s doing God’s work?”

  Harlan looked at his e-cigarette and shook his head. “You’re taking this atheism a little too far, aren’t you?”

  “No, no, Harlan, listen. It makes complete logical sense when you think about it. That is, if you believe in heaven and in God’s rewards for the righteous—the whole nine yards. I mean, if heaven really is heaven, then maybe the killer believes he’s just helping his victims to their reward sooner rather than later. Maybe he thinks he’s doing them a favor.”

  Harlan frowned. “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard.”

  “You’re not a serial killer, Harlan. You don’t think like a crazy person. But we both know lots of people who do think that heaven is a real place and can’t wait to get there. Didn’t those Muslim terrorists who flew those planes into the Twin Towers believe that they were going to find seventy-two virgins waiting for them in heaven?”

  “I never did see the attraction of virgins all that much.”

  “Harlan, maybe the killer thinks he’s gathering these victims to the Lord. Admitting them to heaven. Bringing them to their reward. Exactly like St. Peter.”

  “You are one sick bastard, Martins. Do you know that?” He grinned and punched me gently on the shoulder. “But frankly, that’s the best theory I’ve heard in a long while. And as good as any other one I’ve heard since I started to work this fucking case.”

  “Just maybes is all it is, Harlan. Just maybes.”

  “Ain’t you heard? Maybe is how we get this show on the road.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Uh-huh. You had breakfast?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good. Then let’s go take a look at the scene.”

  Caroline Romero’s murder brought Saint Peter’s death toll to six and had the effect of triggering the use of the Houston field office’s Crisis Management Operations Center, from where the resources of all local law enforcement agencies investigating the killings would in future be coordinated. The CMOC is a large windowless room on the second floor. It’s like the Situation Room at the White House, only bigger and actually better equipped with dozens of PC terminals and flat-screen TVs along the walls so that information is more easily obtained and, more important, shared among the fifty federal agents and cops that the CMOC can accommodate. No one likes to set up the CMOC when another operation is going down. The crisis manager running the CMOC wants to feel that he’s got first call on all of the local Bureau resources, which is why, when we met outside the elevator in the front hall, Doug Corbin thought to tap a nail in my ear.

  Doug Corbin had a personality that belonged in a tissue. He’d nailed my ear before and took more delight in doing so than he ought to have done.

  “I could use a heads-up, Agent Martins,” he said, standing much too close for comfort, “the next time you try to swat a fly with half the fucking CMOC Team.”

  “Well, sir, it certainly didn’t seem like it was just a fly at six o’clock this morning.”

  “Says who? You? You’re just a line supervisor, Martins, not Bob Mueller.”

  “And I cleared it with my ASAC, sir. Gisela Delillo. Why don’t you take it up with her if you’re unhappy about what happened?”

  “Is that supposed to reassure me that you know what you’re fucking talking about?”

  “We had good intel that the suspects weren’t the kind to give themselves up without a couple of dozen guns in their faces.”

  “Really? The gun cupboard was bare, is what I’ve just been told.”

  “Y
ou heard wrong. I’ve come straight from the lockup, where my subject was keeping six mini–cruise missiles and enough guns and ammo to resupply the Alamo. And neither I nor Gisela knew that the CMOC was open for business when we called the op.”

  “You just make sure you speak to me before you even think of calling an op again. I don’t like opening up a CMOC with just a couple of kids who are straight out of the Academy and a secretary who stinks of fucking mothballs. I don’t like waiting around for people to show up like it was the first day of school. And I sure as hell don’t like you.”

  Toward the end of this conversation, Vijay Persaud—the guy from DCS Net—appeared next to my shoulder.

  I let Corbin take the elevator by himself. The thought of inhaling his lousy breath was too much for me. I’d kind of hoped that Vijay would get into the car alongside him but he didn’t.

  “You should take that up with the AA,” he said. “You know I’m the chapter representative.”

  The AA was the FBI Agents Association.

  “Thanks, Vijay. But I do believe I will forget all about this. I never did like kids who went crying to their mothers because someone called them fat.”

  “Awright.” He paused. “Uh, Gil? We need to talk. Urgently. Remember?”

  “Well, go ahead and talk, Vijay. This is the FBI, not the locker room at the Houstonian Club.”

  “Actually, no. We have to do this in private, I think. Would you mind if we found a meeting room and talked there?”

  I hesitated.

  “Like I say, it’s urgent.”

  “Okay, Vijay. I hear you. But right now I got something urgent of my own waiting for me in the interview room downstairs. Probable terrorist by the name of Johnny Sack Brown. He was planning to fire a guided missile through the window of a synagogue right here in Houston. So why don’t I come and find you when I’m through with him?”

  “Awright. Please do, Gil. Like I already said, it’s kind of urgent.”

  I let that one go. But I wanted to tell him that in the FBI it’s always fucking urgent.

  Johnny Sack Brown was a “No comment” kind of guy with muscular folded arms and a rolled-up newspaper of a manner. With almost every question Gisela and I asked him over the course of the next two or three hours, he clenched the fist that was manacled to the table and then politely uttered his mantra of antipathy and estrangement. On his chest was a tattoo of startling obscenity featuring an old and presumably divine figure with a long beard and the sentiment “God has a hard-on for Marines,” while on one forearm was an American eagle clutching a banner on which was written “jesUS our sAvior.” These tats intrigued me, and for a moment I sought to turn the one-sided conversation away from the Switchblades I’d found in the lockup on South Gessner Road, in the hope that I might get Brown to talk about anything—anything at all.

  “I’ve often thought about getting a tat myself. Only I can’t seem to think of a sentiment that I like enough to endure the pain.”

  Brown stared us both down like we were the ugliest dogs he’d ever seen.

  “I assume you wouldn’t have those tats if you didn’t believe in God. Is that right?”

  For once he did not reply “No comment” to a direct question, and thinking to press ahead with this line, I added, “No, I guess you can hardly say ‘No comment’ about a question like that. Not without denying your religious faith. Although, of course, because of Miranda, a court can construe silence as a tacit denial. Perhaps you didn’t know that. So, I’m going to ask you again, sir. Are you a Christian, Major Brown?”

  After another long moment, he said: “I’m a Christian, Agent Martins. What of it?”

  “I sure didn’t mean any disrespect to your faith. I used to be a Christian myself.”

  “What are you now?”

  “Oh, I’m an atheist, sir. But you know, I can’t help wondering what God would have made of what you were planning to do. I can’t figure how your God can have a hard-on for Marines who are prepared to murder his chosen people.”

  “God punishes his people when they do wrong.”

  “It’s one thing to chase the money changers out of the temple; it’s another thing altogether to fire a guided missile through the temple’s fucking window.”

  There was a cold steadiness about Brown I found daunting. He was hardly the fanatic I had imagined. He gave the impression of a man who had thought a great deal about what he had planned to do. And he didn’t look in the least bit troubled by his situation. He was going to be a hard man to break.

  “I tell you what I don’t understand,” said Gisela. “What I don’t understand is how someone as intelligent as you could plan to commit the mass murder of men, women, and children just because they were Jews. It just doesn’t follow.”

  “Isn’t that for you to find out?” said Brown. “You and your shrinks from Behavioral Science.” Then he smiled, leaned back, and folded his arms as best he was able and said not another word.

  We tried asking more questions but without result; and after a while, we concluded the interview, switched off the tape, and Johnny Sack Brown was taken into the sally port and handed over to the custody of the United States Marshals Service for transport to a federal detention center.

  “We’ll let them all boil over the weekend in FDC,” she said, reclaiming her gun from its locker. “The shrinks can assess our friend Johnny on Monday. There’s nothing like a couple of nights behind bars in the detention center to make a man more talkative.”

  I stifled a yawn.

  “You need to go home,” she said. “You were up half the night working on the Tac Team op. Go home and I’ll see you on Monday.”

  I sighed and shook my head. “I can’t. I’ve got Vijay Persaud from DCS Net who wants to talk to me about something.”

  “It’s late,” said Gisela. “Chances are he’s gone home himself. Forget about it until Monday. If he’s still around, I’ll speak to him.”

  “And Corbin’s been chewing my ear about taking agents from the CMOC for the Tac Team.”

  “Fuck him,” said Gisela. “Tac Team ops come first. No dead feds. That’s standard protocol. I’m going to take this up with Chuck. I’m tired of that fucker Corbin trying to ramrod my agents. Just because he’s the crisis manager doesn’t mean he runs this field office.” She smiled. “So, go home.”

  I went to the men’s room and washed my hands and face carefully. Questioning suspects has that effect on me.

  THIRTEEN

  It was early on Saturday morning. Somewhere along Driscoll Street a dog was barking, but mostly I had only the noise of my own shallow breathing and the death-watch ticking of the travel alarm on the bedside table for company. It sounded like a frenetic metal beetle chewing into the rotten wood of my life. My sense of being on my own now was always worse at that time of day. I was lying in bed and staring across the wasteland of a king-size mattress separating me from Ruth’s pillow where her blond head ought to have been. I hadn’t slept well since she had left. For the last hour I’d lain awake, making plans for one and trying my best not to feel sorry for myself. The weekend was shaping up nicely to be a piece of shit. But for the fact that I urgently needed somewhere to live, I’d have gone to the office.

  Probably it wasn’t a good idea, but in the absence of any better ones I decided I was going to go to Lakewood the following morning. Not to make my peace with God, but in the hope I might meet and make peace with Ruth. I’m not sure where she was, but she wasn’t in Corsicana. Someone had told me he’d seen her and Danny in church the previous Sunday and I thought that while she was there maybe she might be more inclined to do unto others—i.e., me—as she would have others do unto her. But it seemed like a slim hope and most of all I just wanted to catch a glimpse of Danny. I figured Ruth would be more disposed to give me the time of day if I was able to tell her that, as requested by her lawyers, I’d moved out of the hous
e. So, before driving to see Bishop Coogan, I put some clothes in a bag with the intention of moving into a motel while I looked for a place of my own to rent. I had plenty of ideas about that. I just didn’t have plenty of money.

  I took a last look at the house, remembering our life there. Mostly I just stood in the doorway of Danny’s room and stared at his little bed and the less favored toys he’d left behind when he and his mother took off. Coming back downstairs, I reflected that I’d never liked the place that much—mainly because I’d had so little to do with choosing it—but for a while, until I fucked things up with Nancy and my new atheism, we’d been happy there. Hadn’t we? And now? Did Danny ever miss home? Or me? I wondered about that: at his grandpa’s house in Corsicana there were horses and ponies for him to ride, a tree house and a swimming pool the size of a wheat field. A small boy can forget about a lot, including his absent father, when he has his own pony.

  I drove slowly away and steeled myself not to look back, as if I were Lot himself. I just fixed my eyes on the road ahead and then put my foot down. I headed northwest to the bishop’s residence on Timber Terrace Road, which was off Memorial Drive. It was a sprawling modern house in a quiet leafy part of Houston close to St. Mary’s Seminary where, when he wasn’t working at the chancery of the archdiocese, Coogan performed some occasional academic function for which the house was the reward, I suppose. And a handsome reward it was, too, with a wide curving drive, a satellite dish on the roof, and a kidney-shaped pool, not to mention access to the Cardinal Beran Library, where Coogan was researching a book he was writing.

  A housekeeper—possibly a nun—holding a duster and canister of furniture polish in her hand, opened the bishop’s heavy wood-and-glass door and admitted me to a comfortable book-lined study that smelled strongly of cigars and beeswax; outside the library’s elegant bay window a sprinkler hissed like a snake, hard at work keeping a carpet of emerald lawn well watered.

  Coogan appeared in the doorway, mopping his brow with a handkerchief as big as a pillowcase; as usual, he looked like a fat Elvis trying out a strange new all-my-trials-Lord costume for a one-off show at the Vatican. We shook hands. In Coogan’s big mitt mine felt no bigger than a cat’s paw.