Corruption of Faith

by Brenda English

  I paused to give him a chance to respond. Instead, he looked down and picked up the fork again to resume the tapping. It was the wrong thing to do. I reached over and took the fork away, then took the hand that had been holding it. That got his attention. He looked back up at me with very annoyed green eyes.

  “I’ve had a rough couple of weeks,” I went on. “The worst in my whole life. I really, really need a friend. Someone to care about me and how much I hurt right now. I thought that was you, but every time I try to talk about it, you change the subject. You don’t call. You don’t seem interested in how I’m doing. You got up in the middle of the night and left my apartment, as if you didn’t want to be there when I woke up. This is not my imagination. Now, what’s wrong?”

  One possibility occurred to me even as the words left my mouth.

  “Are you seeing someone else?” I asked, uncertain of how I would react if he said yes, but knowing that I wanted the truth.

  “No,” Chris answered, apparently offended enough to pull his hand away. “I’m not.”

  “Then what?” I could see in his eyes that he was trying to decide exactly how to phrase words he was very uncomfortable saying in any form.

  “I guess I’m not ready to move to the next step,” he said finally. “I just don’t want to have to deal with any new demands on my emotions. I’ve always been up front with you about that. If you were looking for something more, I’m sorry. I’ve tried not to mislead you about what this was.”

  “Chris, I’m not asking for anything more than what we have. But you’ve withdrawn even that. You might as well not be there at all. So what is it really?”

  He looked at me some more, saying nothing. Finally, I thought I understood.

  “You want out of this altogether, don’t you?” I asked.

  He took a deep breath.

  “I think so,” he said. “It was fine before… before your sister was killed. I always thought you were strong and independent, like me. I liked things the way they were. But I can’t deal with this… neediness I’ve seen in you since she died.”

  I wanted to throw my iced tea in his face. I was absolutely furious.

  “I am strong and independent,” I told him hotly, trying to keep my voice at something below a shout, “but I’m also human. Somebody killed my sister. Do you have a clue what that means? I’m not asking you for a wedding ring or any other kind of commitment. I’m not trying to trap you or make demands on you. I’m not asking you for a goddamned thing you don’t want to give! But are you so afraid of emotions, of caring about somebody, that you can’t even be there for me when my sister is murdered? Christ Almighty, Chris, I’ve gotten more support from people at my office and strangers from Cara’s church than I have from you. Are you really this afraid of someone needing you?”

  “Stop it, Sutton,” Chris said, now angry, too. “You’re making a scene. This is emotional blackmail, and it won’t work!”

  “Here are your grilled salmon salads,” the waitress said from above our heads. We both looked up at her in surprise, as if we had forgotten all about lunch. She put a huge and delicious-looking salad down in front of each of us.

  “Is there anything else I can get you right now?” she asked innocently, unaware of the quarrel that had developed so quickly between two of her customers, who probably had looked like rational people when they had sat down at her table.

  “Not a thing,” I said, standing up abruptly and almost overturning my chair. “There’s absolutely nothing here I need! Or want!” I reached into my purse and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. “This is for the cold fish,” I said, looking down at Chris, whose eyes were wide in surprise. I threw the money down in front of him and walked away, leaving him, the waitress, and several other diners staring after me.

  Feel better now?

  Jesus, don’t you ever shut up? No, I don’t feel better now. I’m mad as hell, and my feelings are hurt. And I wish the rest of these drivers would stop poking around!

  I was several blocks from the restaurant by now, driving north through the center of Old Town on Washington Street to go back to the office. My anger had carried me out of the restaurant, to where my Bug was parked on the street, its convertible top down in the May sunshine, and away from the man I had foolishly trusted and depended on. Now that anger was directed at the other drivers who moved through Old Town with me, making right turns without giving turn signals, trying to make left turns where signs clearly said not to, and just generally getting in my way.

  Shit, I said to myself, you would think I’d know better. Didn’t I learn anything from Jack?

  Well, at least this guy was better in bed than Jack was.

  Yeah, and that’s just one more thing to be pissed off about, I responded. Now I’m celibate again!

  I could almost swear I heard laughing.

  Twenty-one

  I mentally hashed and rehashed my argument with Chris, as brief as it had been, all the way back to the office and up to my desk. Although there were any number of other reporters who were in the newsroom working on stories or sitting around talking, they all took one look at my face, which must have been thunderous, waved, and went back to whatever they had been doing.

  I threw my purse in the bottom desk drawer and sat down to start going back through all the information that Cooper and I had collected. But Chris’s words still reverberated in my head.

  “Emotional blackmail,” I could hear him saying accusingly, again and again.

  “Hah,” I muttered to myself, picking up the copy of the ledger sheet that broke down the payments given to Daniel Brant by five of his congregants. “Just where does he get off? Emotional blackmail, my ass!”

  That’s when things finally fell into place in my thick head, and the sound was deafening.

  Blackmail. That was what had been staring me in the face all this time and that I had been missing completely.

  Daniel Brant was blackmailing members of his own church, and they had been making him a rich man. They had not been giving him their money willingly for him to launder or invest. They had been paying him to keep his mouth shut.

  Frantically, I shuffled the pieces of paper around, realizing that I already had the puzzle pieces that I needed, until I had them in an order that made sense, at last, out of what I had learned.

  Both Daniel Brant, in his previous life as David Daniel Brantley, and Al Barlow had police records that showed they certainly were capable of blackmail. Whatever Brant’s reasons for starting a church, he eventually had found a much more lucrative scam than any earlier plans he might have had for skimming money off the top of the church donations or padding expense accounts. Whether or not he had started out to steal money from the church, he eventually had tumbled to an idea that made anything else look like petty thievery.

  Somehow, he had learned damaging information about at least five of the wealthier men in his congregation, something so damaging that he had been able to use it to extract millions of dollars from them, something that they would give up everything they had and bankrupt their families and businesses over rather than risk its revelation by Brant.

  Was their secret something in which they were all involved? I wondered. But I still thought Carl Rivers’s apparent surprise when I mentioned the other men had been real. So Brant must know something different about each of them, which would explain why they hadn’t felt enough safety in numbers to threaten Brant with exposure of his own treachery. Each man thought he was alone. And so he paid. And paid.

  The money was going to the Caymans, all right, as I had said to Rivers, but it wasn’t going in the victims’ names. It was going right into the numbered accounts, no doubt, of the Brants and Barlow. And, I suspected, John Brant’s frequent “business” trips that Marlee had mentioned were actually runs to the Caymans, cash in hand. His computer company simply gave him a way to pass himself off as legitimate and to make airport officials less likely to be suspicious of all his comings and goings.

  Bu
t what would happen when the men who were being blackmailed ran out of money? I felt certain that Brant was busy lining up some new victims to take their places. Still, he couldn’t afford to have men with nothing left to lose telling what he had done, in some misguided effort to explain to their families or business partners why all the money was gone.

  Granted, if Brant were lucky, his victims might commit suicide, as the police believed Kelton had. Even Pursell’s plane crash and Marshall’s car wreck could have been suicides disguised as accidents. But I didn’t think that Nash Marshall’s fury, which even Marlee Evans had witnessed the day he confronted Brant at the church, sounded like a man who wanted to kill himself. He would have been far more likely to have threatened to kill Brant, I suspected, if Marshall had been as angry as Marlee had described.

  And that was the argument Cara had heard. Had she heard Marshall refer bluntly to the fact that Brant was blackmailing him? Did she hear him threaten Brant because Brant had taken everything Marshall had? Was that why Marshall’s death had been so distressing for her—because she had understood what Brant really was and suspected that he might even have taken steps to keep Marshall quiet? The reality of Daniel Brant’s Jekyll-and-Hyde life must have appalled Cara. Did Marshall’s subsequent death make her fear for her own safety as well? Feeling sick, I knew that it must have.

  There was no question in my mind now, as I looked at the pages spread out in front of me, that Cara had seen the list of names on John Brant’s computer and had understood immediately at least something of its significance. She had stood there for the few extra seconds needed to print it out, and the delay had kept her in his office just long enough for him to see her as she came back out. And when John realized what Cara would have seen on his computer screen, he also must have understood immediately the problem she presented. No doubt, his father had already apprised him and Al Barlow of the fact that Cara had overheard the argument with Marshall. If there was any chance she had seen the list, or worse yet, the ledger sheet that tracked the blackmail payments, they couldn’t run the risk of having her make the connections or tell someone else what she knew. Cara suddenly had become a liability that couldn’t be tolerated. They would have had to do something about her.

  And one of them had. In spite of their alibis, one of them had murdered Cara.

  I sat back in my chair, numb with shock at the cold-bloodedness of what I knew they had done. It made me want to run home, to lock my doors and crawl under layers of covers, where I would be safe and warm and hidden away, and where I could cry hysterically for days, in pain at my sister’s fear and disillusionment and in outrage at what these venal sons-of-bitches had done to her. Except that I had no time to fall apart now. They had killed my sister, and now I had to prove it.

  It was, I decided, time to put in a call to Carl Rivers.

  I could tell by the tone of her voice when I identified myself that Mrs. Singletary, Rivers’s secretary, had yet to forgive me for finding a way to get around her earlier. But the impact of whatever I had said to her boss must have been clear enough on his face for even her to see, so this time she put me through to him without argument.

  “I thought I should call,” I said to Rivers when he got on the line, “to see if you might have changed your mind about talking to me about the money you’ve paid Daniel Brant.”

  “I told you before,” Rivers said, his voice firmer now, as if he had had time to convince himself that I was guessing or that he could bluff his way out, “I have nothing to say to you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Let’s not play these games, Mr. Rivers,” I said back to him, even more firmly and not put off by the change in his voice. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. I’ll admit that I’ve been a tad slow in putting it all together, but I finally have.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked reluctantly, as if he really didn’t want to know.

  “I mean that I now know the money you’ve been giving Daniel Brant is to keep him quiet. He’s blackmailing you, Mr. Rivers. I haven’t figured out yet with what, what it is he has on you, but I’ll find it out eventually. What I do know is that he’ll keep on blackmailing you if you don’t help me stop him, until he’s squeezed you for every cent you have.”

  “Why does any of this concern you?” Rivers asked, somewhat faintly now. His bluster had died quickly in the face of my newest accusation.

  “Because my sister is dead, Mr. Rivers. She was killed two weeks ago by someone who tried to make it look like an ATM robbery. But I think she was killed because she accidentally learned what a sleazebag Daniel Brant really is, what he has been doing. To you and to at least four other men who used to attend the Bread of Life Church.

  “Let me lay out your future for you as clearly as I can,” I went on. “Brant already has extorted more than six million dollars from the five of you. There’s just one problem. Three of his victims ran out of money, and those three are now dead. I’m talking about people you knew, Mr. Rivers. About Nash Marshall. And James Kelton. And Neal Pursell. So you know I’m not making this up. The police think their deaths were accidents or suicides. But I know better, and now you do, too. You not only are going to lose everything you have before Brant is finished with you, but it’s possible your life is even in danger.”

  Rivers was silent.

  “I think we can help each other, Mr. Rivers,” I concluded. “If you can confirm that what I believe is correct, you may be able to help me solve my sister’s murder. And I may be able to help you extricate yourself from Daniel Brant’s grip.”

  It went without saying that it would require him to come forward and tell the police about the blackmail, to risk public exposure of the secret—whatever it was—that Brant knew about him, the very thing he had been paying through the nose to keep hidden. I wouldn’t have wanted to be faced with the decision I’d just put in front of him.

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you,” he answered finally, sounding thoroughly defeated. “I’m sorry about your sister, but there’s nothing I can do.”

  Whatever he was hiding, whatever Brant had learned about him, Rivers’s fear of having that secret exposed apparently was greater than his fear of Brant.

  “All right,” I told him. “I can understand what a difficult decision this must be for you. If you change your mind, you have my card. Call me anytime, day or night. But, Mr. Rivers?”

  “Yes?”

  “Just remember. I followed a trail of bodies, including my sister’s, to find out what Brant is doing and to get to you. For your sake, I hope you have plenty of money left.”

  I heard him hang up the phone and break the connection. I had meant what I said. I hoped he didn’t come up empty-handed before I could do something to stop Brant. I put my own telephone receiver down in frustration.

  Carl Rivers was frightened. I could hear it clearly in his voice, even over the telephone line. I didn’t like thinking I had added to his fear, had put him between the Scylla of public exposure and the Charybdis of wondering if his life was in danger if his money ran out.

  Can’t you just say between a rock and a hard place like everybody else?

  “Piss off,” I muttered, and went back to my calculations.

  I couldn’t see that I had had any choice but to upset Rivers. I wasn’t going to unravel the mystery of Cara’s death by being nice. I needed to find a chink in Brant’s defenses. I had hoped Rivers would be it. I didn’t know if I could convince Detective Peterson otherwise that I wasn’t imagining things.

  What could Brant be holding over Rivers and Ulm? I wondered. What had he held over the three dead men? Whatever it was, it was so serious that each was willing to bankrupt himself and his family to keep Brant quiet. So serious that Rivers even could entertain the possibility of being killed once his money ran out rather than risk having anyone else know his secret.

  And how could Brant have learned whatever it was he knew about his victims? But I suspected I knew the answer to that, too. He was a
minister. People liked and trusted him; that was part of the reason they came to his church, part of the reason it was so successful. That also explained why the men themselves probably told Brant whatever it was he had turned against each of them. Although most Protestants don’t use a formal ceremony of confession as Catholics do, I knew that many Protestant churchgoers rely on their ministers as secular as well as spiritual counselors. Ministers often find themselves in the role of marriage, career, or behavioral therapist, whether they are qualified or not. It was entirely possible that each of the men had been the unwitting author of his own downfall by unburdening a guilty secret to Daniel Brant.

  Brant must have congratulated himself regularly on the genius of his scheme. He was in the perfect position to learn from their own mouths the worst secrets people in his church carried around in their hearts. And when he preyed on that, when he turned their weaknesses and their secrets against them, their only recourse was to leave his church and pay up—for as long as they had the money to pay. Brant needn’t worry about word getting out to the rest of his congregation. Whatever the men had told him about themselves was so damning that they wouldn’t risk revealing it by trying to warn others away from the Bread of Life Church. It all apparently had worked well for almost two years, according to the payments sheet. Even the three deaths, which I was convinced were Brant and Barlow’s doing, had been passed off successfully as accidents and a suicide. Other than his victims and his partners, no one, absolutely no one, had had the slightest clue about what Daniel Brant was doing. Until Cara.

  Detective Peterson had been right in a way. Cara had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it wasn’t when she was abducted and taken to the ATM. There was absolutely nothing random about that. It was when she had sat at her own desk, in the office of the church she loved, and overheard the words that would end up putting a bullet in her head.

  I knew, without any doubt whatsoever, that I finally had pieced most of it together. But what I believed and what I could prove were still two different things, at least by the standards Peterson required. So now what do I do? I wondered.