Prayer

by Philip Kerr

  There is one last strange and highly unpleasant fact that marks the death of David Durham. When police entered his bungalow at the Golden Spikes Motel, they discovered on the floor a single extruded excrement that was twenty-four inches long. It seems not unreasonable to speculate that, in the same way that burglars defecate on the floor of the houses they’ve broken into, David Durham did the same because he was afraid of something.

  I stopped reading and went to look for my cell phone; not because I wanted to make a call—that was impossible due to the poor reception in that part of Galveston—but because I wanted to look at the photograph of the list of names I’d found in Gaynor Allitt’s house.

  David Durham’s was one of the names on the list, underneath that of Sara Espinosa.

  At Quantico they teach you that people who are irritating are not necessarily wrong, but it’s just common sense to bear in mind that they might be.

  Sometimes you have to hear your own arguments in someone else’s mouth to know how crazy you sound.

  I began to consider the possibility that mine had been nothing more than a contrarian’s argument—an obsessive’s wish to prove that he was right and everyone else was wrong. I wondered if perhaps the detective had caught the same skeptical bug I had; that perhaps he, too, had lost his religious faith and had taken his newfound skepticism to excess. Or if having cut God out of his life, he had found this left a God-shaped hole at the center of his life that he needed to fill with something he could believe in: himself, perhaps.

  The circumstances of David Durham’s death were unfortunate, even bizarre, but it wasn’t unlikely that a man suffering from heart cancer was disturbed at a physiological level that manifested itself in all kinds of eccentric behavior such as shitting on your motel room floor. People do all sorts of weird things when they’re ill and even when they’re not ill. And if not physiologically disturbed, you could argue that Durham was already psychologically disturbed even before he wrote his last book. What kind of evangelist wrote a book arguing that the power of all religions derived from their “rigorous denial of common sense”? That sounded fucked up, by anyone’s standard.

  Of course, Durham’s name was on Gaynor Allitt’s list. Yes, there was that. But for the first time it came into my mind that other groups of religious neo-cons and friends of Fox News might well have compiled similar lists of their ideological enemies and that very likely many of these lists would have overlapped. Hadn’t David Horowitz done something similar in writing his William Buckley–style book.

  People die, of course, and the minute you compile a list of people, it stands to reason that some of them will die sooner than others. I suspected that the odds against five people on Gaynor Allitt’s list being dead within twelve months of one another were lower than might have been supposed. The Portland police file had a list—photocopied from the book—of the one hundred and one professors that Horowitz had described as academics who were poisoning the minds of today’s college students; and when I glanced down at this impressive list of names, I was hardly surprised to discover that almost a dozen of the names on Gaynor Allitt’s list were also featured in Horowitz’s book: namely Noam Chomsky, Eric Foner, Ward Churchill, Peter McLaren, Gayle Rubin, Caroline Higgins, David Barash, Angela Davis, Alison Jaggar, José Ángel Guttiérrez, and Joseph Massad. All of which prompted me to think that maybe it was time I got my act together and, in compliance with Gisela’s wishes, put myself in the hands of the Head Fed, Dr. Sussman. After that, I would report to her office and tell her humbly that she was right and I was wrong and that I wanted to drop the investigation of everything that was connected to Philip Osborne’s death—or, to be more accurate, not connected with his death at all.

  So I shaved, took a shower, hunted down a clean shirt, pressed my suit, polished my shoes—I even did some tidying up around the house—and went out onto the veranda and paused at the top of the steps. Even by the preternaturally inert standards of Galveston, it was a day of extraordinary stillness, without a breath of wind. It was not, however, a pleasant stillness with birds singing or the sea crashing onto the not so very far away beach. The air was a great hushed emptiness of noise. I went down the steps and opened the door of my dust-covered car. The midday sun hung in the blue sky like a burning clock face and it had turned the plastic interior of my car into an inferno; so I started the engine, turned the air-conditioning up to high, and then went back up the stairs and took shelter from the sun under the wooden roof of the porch while I waited. The interruption of that dead silence with the muffled roaring of my car’s air-conditioning seemed to galvanize the whole street like a kind of generator summoning first an emaciated black cat to see what all the fuss was about, then a small lizard at my feet, and finally the sight of my only neighbor—the old man—walking barefoot down the sidewalk toward me. I could hardly believe my eyes, for he was the first person I had seen in the street since moving into the diocesan house.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Not in Galveston.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I must say, you don’t look like a retired clergyman,” he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’m just staying here temporarily until I can find somewhere more permanent.”

  “Permanent?” He sighed. “You won’t find anything permanent around here,” he said. “Not anymore. Not since Ike. This whole damned area feels like it’s about to be condemned to destruction. And probably should be, too. The real shame is that Ike didn’t finish the job. Some of these old houses aren’t safe at all. Still, yours looks not half bad. I suppose the Catholic Church paid for everything? The way it always does. That’s what comes of wearing liturgical vestments: they have very deep pockets.”

  His baritone voice sounded like he was from somewhere other than Texas; there was more than a touch of New York in it—the state, anyway—and something patrician, too, as if he’d been to one of those top universities where they learn how to rule not just themselves but other people, too.

  “You live farther up the street, don’t you Mr. . . . ?”

  “I don’t know that you could call it living exactly,” said the old man. “It’s more of a day-to-day existence. Subsistence, you might say. In fact, I have kind of got used to the idea that this whole street was my own private hell. Like that dreadful play by Jean-Paul Sartre.”

  “I don’t go to the theater very much.”

  “Quite right. Neither do I. Always hated the theater. My ex-wife used to say, ‘Charles Hindemith, you don’t have the patience for the theater, they should ban you from everything except Shakespeare and Stephen Sondheim.’ These days I don’t enjoy any entertainment you can’t stop with a button on a remote control. Everything else thinks it’s fucking art and there’s nothing entertaining about art. Art is something you have to endure. Like piles.”

  He was handsomer than I had expected—distinguished even—and not nearly as old as I had supposed; his silver hair shone in the sun like a newly minted coin but he hardly seemed to notice the searing heat. His navy blue cotton shirt was unstained by any sweat. He didn’t even wince under the sun’s malevolent yellow eye, as was my own habit.

  “Are you actually living here on your own?” he asked, with something close to incredulity.

  “Yes. I am.”

  “Then you must be mad. Young fellow like you stuck out here in this godforsaken ghost town. I’m old. Abandoned in this purgatorial place. It’s expected that I should be here on my own. For all I know, I’m damned. But you’re a handsome young man, with your whole life ahead of you. And living here is like being sent to Alcatraz Island. Are you mad?”

  “My name’s Martins,” I said, ignoring the question. “Gil Martins.”

  “That isn’t what I asked,” he muttered.

  I came down the steps of the house and held out my hand for him to shake, but he looked at it indifferent
ly and only shook his head.

  “Now really, what’s the point of that?” he said. “There’s no point. I mean, there’s no point if, as you say, you’re just staying here temporarily.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Well, no, not anymore,” he said sadly. “Anyway, it’s not you I came to see.”

  “Father Dyer is in an old people’s home now,” I said helpfully, although I could more cheerfully have told the old man to go fuck himself; he had that kind of manner. “In Texas City.”

  “After Galveston, that sounds like it could be an improvement.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know the address. But I could easily find out where it is if you wanted to visit him.”

  “No. That wouldn’t be a good idea at all. I might actually like the place and want to move in there, too. Look, I didn’t mean to disturb you. You’re obviously about to go somewhere. I was just strolling by and I heard the car start. There’s not much that starts around these parts. Plenty that finishes, of course, but not very much that starts. Suffice to say that it’s plain you’re not nearly ready for me. Not by a long way.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t follow you.”

  “No,” he said pompously. “But you will. Give it time. You will.”

  And with a twinkle in his eye, he walked off.

  “What happened to your shoes?” I called after him.

  “Who needs shoes in Galveston?” Without turning his head, he waved back at me.

  “Asshole,” I muttered, and went down the steps and climbed into the car.

  I drove north across the Galveston Causeway. This and the toll bridge over San Luis Pass to the southwest were the only two ways off the island. The toll bridge was nothing more than an improbable two-lane highway across the bay that connected one spit of shifting sand with another. In winter, when bad weather blew in off the Atlantic—which was often—it was altogether less reliable than the wider, higher, north-leading causeway.

  As before, the minute I drove onto the mainland my cell phone rang. It was Ken Paris from the computer forensics lab.

  “Ken,” I said brightly. “Gee, it’s good to talk to someone human again. Galveston is like solitary confinement in a desert island penitentiary. They’ve got me on forced leave so I can see the house shrink. I guess it was that or the bughouse.”

  “Yeah, Helen told me. How’s that working out?”

  “Matter of fact, I’m on my way in to see Dr. Seuss now.”

  “On a Sunday?”

  “It’s a fucking Sunday. I had no idea.”

  “I knew Galveston was cut off from the real world, but I assumed they still had television and newspapers.”

  “I wouldn’t think it was safe to assume even that much. So if it is Sunday—then what the fuck do you want, Ken? Don’t you know better than to ring a guy when it’s Sunday?”

  “I don’t tell everyone, but I like to work on a Sunday. The telephone doesn’t ring. Nobody sends me any e-mails. And I don’t get jerks coming in here with a plea for help because junior lost his homework on the fucking laptop.”

  “So I guess I should be honored that you called me.”

  “Not especially. But it being a Sunday and you being on forced leave ’n’ all, I just figured no one else in the Bureau would give a shit if we met up for a while. It’s about that laptop you dumped here last Sunday afternoon. Gaynor Allitt’s laptop? The lady who did the Dutch on the Hyatt Regency blacktop?”

  “Jesus, I’d forgotten all about that.”

  “Doesn’t sound like the thing anyone forgets in a hurry.”

  “I mean the laptop. I’m not likely to forget her brains on the sidewalk if that’s what you mean.”

  “Anyway, forced leave or not, Martins, I figured you were going to want to have this shit as soon as possible.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Meet me at the Red Onion Café at twelve-thirty and I’ll explain everything.”

  “What is it, Ken? What have you found?”

  “She kept a kind of video diary, Martins. And get ready to be surprised.”

  The Red Onion Café was halfway between the RCFL and the FBI field office, on the eastern edge of the Northwest Freeway. A pueblo-style, red concrete redoubt of a restaurant that looked a bit like the Alamo, it was a popular place with agents from the Bureau, except at Sunday brunch, when the clientele was mostly overweight Texas families with a taste for Mexican food.

  The waitress escorted me to a table in the back next to a window that looked out onto a parking lot filled with dozens of yellow trucks. Ken Paris was reading the Houston Chronicle. There was already a Corona beer and a plate of tortilla chips on the table and next to it an iPad with a pair of headphones plugged into the side that was obviously set up for me to look at Gaynor Allitt’s video diary. As usual, Ken was wearing a loose, short-sleeve shirt that made him look as if he were going bowling. He chuckled as I sat down in front of him. I ordered a Dos Equis for myself and loosened my tie.

  “Hey,” he said, “you really did think it was a workday, didn’t you, Agent Martins?”

  “At Federal Plaza they used to say that terrorists always work on Sundays and that nothing says holidays like a pipe bomb in Times Square.”

  “They do like their fortune-cookie wisdom at Federal Plaza.”

  I clasped my hands tightly and pressed them down on the table, thinking it might help to stop me from rearranging the cutlery and condiments, or even reaching for Ken’s iPad. Someone watching me might almost have thought I was praying.

  “The diary? Is it on that tablet?”

  “I was going to bring you crayons, but then I changed my mind.”

  “When I got your call this morning, I was in the process of changing my own mind,” I told him. “I mean about this whole damn case. I’ve been seriously thinking of dropping it on account of how people have been giving me strange looks in the corridors at Justice Park Drive.”

  “They’ve been doing that for a while, Gil, before the case, only you didn’t notice.”

  “You mean the OCD thing?”

  “How’s that going anyway?”

  “I’m trying to keep a check on it. Of course, now that I do, it seems a lot worse than I thought it was.” I paused a moment. “Feels really weird, actually.”

  “Good.” Ken nodded. “I mean that you’re trying to put a choke on that shit. It’ll be a change to sit and have lunch with you and not watch the sugar packets get fixed into a neat little pile.” He grinned. “The number of times I’ve wanted to reach across and mess it all up for you. Still, you might feel a little differently about the case when you’ve seen the video diary. About chucking it in, I mean.”

  “Let’s take a look-see at what we’ve got.”

  “Let’s get the important things done here first, okay? I’m starving.” He waved the waitress back and we ordered our food.

  “I did you a transcript to save you the trouble of making notes. And I’ve made a video copy for you on a flash drive. By the way, I might have called you before with this, but Gaynor Allitt wasn’t using a plain-text password, but one with a hash value. That’s when you apply a one-way algorithm to a password. Her password had eight characters and, with the hash, that gives you about eight billion combinations. It took our rainbow table software a while to crack. But more significantly, it would have taken someone who didn’t work for the FBI or the NSA forever and maybe even longer than that.”

  “So, what does all that stuff mean?”

  “The hash? It means she was very well informed about computer security and probably very nervous about someone stealing or breaking into her laptop, which is why she took such an unusually rigorous precaution.”

  “She was certainly scared about something,” I said.

  “Just who or what that is will probably become a little clearer when you watch the diary.”


  “Any evidence of sending self-destructing e-mails?” I asked.

  “None at all. According to what’s on the cache memory, I doubt she’s even been on an SDE service site using that computer.” He waited a beat. “As well as shooting the video diary, she liked filming herself naked and masturbating.” He glanced around the restaurant. “But I figured they’re not ready for that movie here in the Red Onion Café.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. You can look at that particular film on the flash drive if you’re inclined. She might also have been using her video camera for Skype. As a matter of fact, she used Skype a lot, but her list of Skype contacts was kind of short. In fact, it had only one name on it, and that’s a Skype name, so it doesn’t mean much in a phone book. You could always try contacting this person by Skype to explain the problem, but that’s got to be your call. Strikes me if she was Skyping while she was jerking off, then that person might be a little slow to reply.”

  “See the video diary first,” I said. “Then decide about the Skype contact later. Did she send any of these diary entries as an attachment to an e-mail?”

  “Nope. Not that I can see.” He swiped the sliding arrow to unlock the iPad and pressed the video app icon to reveal a still image of Gaynor Allitt sitting in her chair facing the camera; the film was cued up and ready to view. I put the little rubber buds in my ears. Ken picked up his paper again and started to read.

  Most of the front page was devoted to how the mayor had asked Houston’s law enforcement agencies for a progress report on the serial killer. In spite of the very best efforts of Harlan Caulfield, the reporters had started calling the perp Saint Peter after all. Harlan was not going to be happy about that. For a moment, I pictured him angrily smoking one of his ridiculous e-cigarettes and then pressed the little arrow on Ken’s iPad. But I wouldn’t have minded one of those e-cigarettes myself.