The Edge of Reason

by Melinda Snodgrass

  A desk had been squeezed into the area designated for plain clothes. It was easily recognizable as his because of the surface, naked except for a telephone. The other detectives’ desks sported computers and coffee cups and stacks of paper and folders. A few of the detectives nodded to him. Most didn’t. Richard wondered how many people had been passed over for him to get this promotion. He realized he had set his teeth and a sharp twinge between the shoulder blades reminded him he had braced. He shook off the tension, both physical and emotional. He pushed back the night stick, and heard the cuffs rattle as he sat down. It was going to be strange not to have the weight of the belt, stick, holster and pistol, and cuffs hanging at his waist. He realized he would need to buy a shoulder holster. Or was that too James Bond? Maybe it would be better to stick with a belt holster? But he had the start of arthritis in his hips from years of gymnastics, and it would be nice not to have the dragging weight of a pistol on his hip.

  Stop accessorizing, he ordered, and pulled himself up to the desk.

  The casters on the chair rattled over the uneven linoleum. Lieutenant Weber was on the telephone. He looked up and lifted a hand to Richard. Dale Snyder, who was closing in on twenty years, glared and turned his back.

  Richard’s stomach tightened at the blatant rejection. I’ll work hard. I’ll win their acceptance.

  “What’s up?” Richard quietly asked Joe Torres, a heavy jowled Hispanic whose five o’clock shadow appeared at eight a.m.

  “Guy got cranked on his own product. Shot the six friends he was partying with, his wife and two kids, then decided he could fly. Took a header off an overpass and splattered himself all over Tramway Boulevard. Not exactly heavy lifting on this one. Just a shitload of paperwork,” Torres grunted and turned away.

  Richard went to work. A call quickly established that there was as yet no response to his four-state bolo. Pulling out his Palm he checked the number he’d obtained at the trailer against an Internet database. It belonged to a pay phone in Detroit. That was way outside his jurisdiction. A call to criminalistics earned him a sharp rebuke to the effect that they had only finished processing the trailer at 3:00 a.m. and tests took time to run.

  He drummed his fingers on his desk until an exasperated Shut up from Snyder sent him in search of notepads and pens. He drew a line down the center of a sheet of yellow legal paper. One one side he wrote “Cops.” On the other he wrote “Magic.” Or started to. He glanced left and right and crossed through the three letters he’d written. Underneath he wrote “Imponderables.”

  Under Imponderables he wrote: What is Cross? Who is Kenntnis? Can Rhiana be controlled? Where do her loyalties lie? Where do mine lie? Irritated, he drew an X through the notes and turned to the other half of the page. And then he knew what to do. He had the make on the vans. He knew they were new. He knew they had been purchased yesterday. He grabbed the phone and called the Honda dealership.

  Chapter SIX

  “Yeah, I remember them. Church group,” said the young salesman at Garcia Honda. He was a lean young Hispanic in a slightly shiny suit indicating long wear and insufficient funds to replace it. They stood in the glass-walled showroom surrounded by automobiles. The indulgent scent of new car filled the air.

  The information that there was a religious connection was unwelcome to Richard. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Well, they said they needed the vans to take folks up to a Bible study retreat in Colorado at a sister church in C. Springs.”

  “Do you still have the check or has it been posted?”

  “They paid cash.”

  “Isn’t that a little unusual?” Richard asked.

  “Yes and no. You know churches. Some are swimming in cash. Others scraping along asking for donated junkers. This was one of those fundamentalist groups. They seem to swim. Me, I’m Catholic. The church is rich, the parishes poor.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  “They were gringos, no offense.”

  “None taken. Accents?” Richard suggested.

  “Kind of Texan,” said the young man. He frowned and worried at his lower lip with his teeth. “They bought three car seats from us. That was a little strange; normally people have their own if they’ve got kids.”

  Richard now understood why he hadn’t gotten a response to his bolo. He thanked the salesman and went outside and stood beneath the brilliant and famous New Mexico turquoise sky. He pulled out his cell phone and called the Colorado State Police. It was as he had feared.

  The Staties had stopped the vans just outside Colorado Springs, and learned they were with the Faith in the Rock Church on their way to a retreat. Seeing two men and four women with attendant toddlers rather than the two men and two women described in Richard’s bolo, they had sent them on their way. It had been the perfect cover.

  He assumed it was a made-up church, but just to be certain he went back into the dealership and asked for the Yellow Pages. He then stared in disbelief at the listing for Faith in the Rock. There was a quarter-page picture ad with a smiling pastor in front of a utilitarian building adorned with a cross. More shocking was the small notice at the bottom of the ad that the church was affiliated with the World Wide Christian Alliance.

  Richard’s family was active in charitable work so they had crossed paths with the WWCA. Because of the Oorts’ Washington connections they had even met its founder, Mark Grenier. Richard tried to recall what he could of the man.

  Grenier had risen to public prominence some fifteen years back when one of his parishioners had become president. Grenier had become the presidential spiritual adviser, displacing the Graham family. He had actively and agressively pursued the title of the “Face of American Christianity” in the press. Grenier led worldwide crusades bringing the Word of God to millions, and funneled millions to conservative causes. Though they were devout, the Oorts were a liberal family, which put them at odds with the fundamentalism currently sweeping the country. Richard was well aware of Grenier’s efforts to stop funding for stem-cell research and how WWCA lobbied against various pure science projects like the super-collider.

  And now an affiliated church in Albuquerque had knowingly or unknowingly transported a bomb to a sister church in Colorado Springs.

  It seemed to support the view of reality described by Kenntnis, and Richard didn’t like that reality at all.

  There was a call from criminalistics when Richard got back to the office. They had some preliminary findings. He went down to the lab. It was next door to the morgue and the scent of formaldehyde and dead flesh came out of the heating vents. During the walk Richard had realized he was hungry. The smells in the lab took care of that.

  Since he’d been a beat cop he hadn’t had any occasion to deal with the chief coroner, but he had heard the stories. He found Angela Armandariz in her office. It was a temple to paper, both bound and unbound. Books crammed the utilitarian metal shelves, files formed stalagmites rising from the cracked linoleum floor and towers on the desk. Single sheets of paper fluttered like the wings of dismayed birds as Richard pushed the door open. Armandariz flipped the pages of a report with one hand while with the other she wielded chopsticks shoveling lo mein into her mouth. The noodles hung briefly over her chin like a walrus’s mustache, then were quickly sucked into the bud-like mouth with a loud slurp. It was amazing that such a tiny person could produce such an amount of noise.

  Richard stared down at the elfin figure curled in the big office chair. Armandariz glared up at him from beneath dark brown bangs, and defiantly sucked in another mouthful of noodles. “What?” she demanded. She had a cute round face, rich cocoa-colored skin, the cheeks tinged with russet, and deep brown eyes.

  “I had a message. You had some results for me.”

  “And who the fuck are you?” The voice drilled out.

  “Oort.”

  “Any relation to the astronomer?” she asked.

  Richard was surprised. Most people just reacted to his unusual name, never connec
ting it to the Dutch astronomer who had discovered the cometary cloud at the outermost edges of the solar system.

  “Some kind of distant relation. My family’s been in the country awhile.”

  “I’d bet a long while based on that candy-ass accent you’ve got.” She pushed aside the noodles and opened a file in front of her. He caught a brief glimpse of a photograph of the disintegrated trailer wall, and packets containing ash, tufts of the stained green carpet, the trimmed wires, and other less identifiable substances and objects.

  “Okay, so we found definite traces of C4 in the joint. The glass in all the mirrors had been silvered. Don’t know what caused that.” She raised her dark gaze to meet his and spun the photo of the trailer’s back wall across the tops of several files. He caught it before it launched itself off the desk. “And I have no fucking clue what did that. Despite the ash there’s no trace of heat damage. No explosive residue. The wall just fell down. That help?”

  “Not particularly. Did you find any matches on the prints?”

  “One young woman, Naomi Parsons, took the LSATs. Not your usual profile for a mad bomber.”

  “I think most of them were students,” Richard said.

  “Then I’d go talk to UNM,” Armandariz suggested.

  “Oh, right, duh.” Richard could feel the blush.

  The criminologist suddenly grinned, revealing the thin line of a retainer. “Promoted today, I hear.”

  “Yeah, looks like I have a big learning curve.”

  “Bigger than you think, Dutch. My team didn’t have a warrant.” Sudden nausea filled the back of Richard’s throat. Some of the shame and guilt must have shown on his face because Armandariz’s expression softened. “I caught it last night, and we found Judge Blackman and got the paper.”

  “Oh, God, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, but now you owe me.” It was more than just a simple remark, significance rode on every word.

  “Okay, and what’s the payment?”

  “If you find out what took down that wall, let me know. It isn’t often I come across something new, interesting and puzzling.”

  By the time Richard finished at UNM it was pushing four-thirty. It had been a productive few hours. He had addresses for Alice Rangold, Naomi Parsons and Dan Douglas and, having learned his lesson, he had requested that APD’s judicial liaison make the request for search warrants. He had family contact information and he had a list of their classes. Of Josh Delay there was no record. He had put in a call to Social Security, but it would be tomorrow before he learned if Delay had a number.

  He sat on the edge of the dry fountain in the quadrangle between Popejoy Hall and Johnson Gym, and the brick was chill through the fabric of his pants. Brown brick and flagstone set in patterns swept away to meet the brown stucco walls of the buildings. After three years in New Mexico, he was beginning to appreciate adobe architecture, but UNM’s faux-adobe style didn’t really work. In fact he thought many of the buildings looked like dirt clods dropped randomly across the campus.

  Reviewing his notes he noticed that the two girls had been in a comparative religion class together. Richard decided to see if the professor was in his office. As the sun set, the cold intensified. He decided to cut through the music building and get out of the cold. The New Mexico Symphony performed in Popejoy so he knew the building well.

  He turned down a hall leading away from the concert halls. He was walking past practice rooms, and since the soundproofing wasn’t very good he moved in and out of pockets of muted music. Violin, piano, and then a soaring baritone voice practicing the death aria from Don Carlos. Grief tightened his chest and he leaned back against a wall.

  If he’d had more courage maybe he could have resisted the familial demand that he amount to something and this would have been his life. For an instant Richard was back in Professor Zanetti’s office in Rome, lost in the music and the caress of the keys beneath his fingers and the stretch of the muscles across the back of his hands as he reached for the chords. He had been a good singer, but an exceptional pianist, and standing in the dim hallway of a second-rate university music department he suddenly realized why. He had felt safe behind the barricade of the piano. When he sang there was nothing between him and the world. Richard turned that revelation, studying it from every angle, and wondered if it would have made a difference in his singing if he’d come to that understanding earlier. A sharp head shake dislodged the regrets. He had chosen his course.

  Professor Bernard was a spare, ascetic-looking man with shoulder-length brown hair and deep brown eyes. A jutting blade of a nose divided the face. Deep lines cut on either side of his mouth. Richard thought they suggested a life lived in pain, and then noticed the metal crutches propped against a filing cabinet. The office was the size of a large walk-in closet and the walls lined with bookcases and books gave the sense they were teetering and about to fall inwards under the weight of paper and binding.

  “This is rather eccentric,” Bernard said as he studied Richard’s uniform. The voice was dark velvet so warm and rich that it left the listener feeling breathless. Richard dropped his gaze from those amazing brown eyes. “Am I in trouble?”

  “No, sir, I just wanted to ask you about a couple of your students. Naomi Parsons and Alice Rangold.”

  Bernard closed his eyes briefly and his brow furrowed. “Oh yes, Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:00 to 10:30 a.m. They haven’t been in class for the past two weeks.”

  “Any idea why?” Richard asked.

  “They’re big kids. I let them make their own choices and mistakes.”

  “Could you give me a sense of them?”

  “Desperate to have meaning,” the professor replied dryly.

  “How is that different from anyone?” Richard asked with equal dryness.

  Bernard blinked several times and then seemed to actually focus on Richard. “You’re an odd sort of policeman. I rather thought you would say huh.”

  “And you’re making assumptions based on intellectual superiority and stereotypes,” Richard said gently.

  “Fair enough, officer. My impression is that Ms. Parsons and Ms. Rangold came into my class seeking answers and a support for faith, but faith shouldn’t require either support or proof. If it did then it wouldn’t be faith, would it? They didn’t like the fact that my course deconstructs religions, shows the fundamental similarities and traces how religions change based on human and societal development.”

  “The idea that man creates God in his own image?” Richard asked.

  “In a nutshell, yes.”

  “So I take it they didn’t find meaning from you?”

  “No, but they found it somewhere. The last few times they were in class they were positively argumentative and they had the air of people who shared a great big secret that put them well up on everyone else.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  Bernard looked thoughtfully off into space for a moment, then nodded. “We were discussing Abraham and Isaac. They argued that rather than being a testament to faith on Abraham’s part or an example of mankind moving away from the idea of a capricious, bloodthirsty god, this was an example of a man shying away from true understanding and great power because he couldn’t make the hard choice. Alice said that sometimes sacrifice was necessary if humanity was going to take the next evolutionary step. I confess to being rather sarcastic. I pointed out that she might not feel so sanguine about human sacrifice if she were the sacrificee rather than the sacrificor. They walked out in a huff.” Bernard’s eyes darkened. “I remember they stopped at the doors, looked back at me, and laughed. At the time I was annoyed. In retrospect I realize it was all rather threatening.”

  “And you don’t know the root of this?”

  “No, sorry.”

  Lean Cuisine hefted light in the hand as if the contents of the package were as cardboard as the box. Richard hooked open the crisper drawer of the refrigerator with the toe of his shoe. Fresh bok choy, peppers and ginger flashed color and
guilt at him. He would cook. While the microwave hummed, defrosting chicken, he slowly chopped up the vegetables. He was glad he was making the effort; it was helping with the memory of his last phone call before leaving work that evening.

  Emma Parsons’s valiant effort to mask terror and desperation under a bright insouciance had been heartbreaking. No, she hadn’t known where her daughter was right now, but you know young people. You’ve got to give them the opportunity to try their wings even if they fall and bump their noses.

  She described Naomi as passionate and spiritual, always seeking the hidden meaning. According to her mother, Naomi was dissatisfied with what she called the sterility of the Presbyterian Church. She had opted for a more fundamentalist church. Richard hadn’t been surprised to hear it was Faith in the Rock. Emma told Richard that three months ago her daughter had told her that she had been one of the select few to attend a retreat where many of her questions had been answered. She was evasive about just what those answers had been, and began to drift away from her mother. But Emma wasn’t worried. It was perfectly natural. Then had come the question and the fear had shown through.

  “Do you know where my daughter is? Is she all right?” And Richard hadn’t had an answer for either question.

  He splashed sesame oil into the wok and set it to heating while he went to the bedroom to change. There was a sharp pang of regret and fear as he hung up the uniform. Truth was he was finding his first day as a detective harder and more emotionally draining than fantasy had made it. As a beat cop he issued tickets, responded to wrecks, bar fights, domestic disturbances. Upsetting, sometimes sickening, but he rarely dealt with the collateral damage caused by the fight or the wreck. Now he was searching for three lost children, and their parents’ desperation was like a physical blow.

  He set his pistol on top of the dresser, dressed quickly, and returned to the kitchen. Passion, rage and fear had driven him into police work. Because it was so much more than a job he needed it to be pure, almost a sacred calling. That many of the men and some of the women who joined the police did so because they liked to drive fast, beat up people and shoot off guns, as Lieutenant Weber had said, had been a sobering and depressing realization. But despite it all Richard still believed that the police held back the darkness.