by Reed Arvin
“This isn’t a joke, Dennehy. Moses and two friends were captured and put in an Arab jail. Their legs were shackled. The two friends claim he simply walked out, got the key, and released them.”
“For God’s sake, Towns, you went to Harvard.”
She stands up off the pew. “I know how legends grow, Dennehy. I studied theology. Every generation embellishes the stories of the last, until they’re deified.”
“Exactly. Daniel Boone will probably be a religion someday.” I pause. “So tell me you didn’t drag me down here to convince me to believe in Moses Bol.”
She shakes her head. “I brought you here to show you of the power of a symbol. Look around, Dennehy. The hieroglyphics. The cross at the front. A preacher, banished and never allowed to return. Wars are fought over symbols like that. A war was fought in this very city over them. They’re immensely powerful.”
“What does this have to do with Bol?”
“Moses is a symbol, too. He’s the symbol of everything that makes these boys who they are. They love him, and if he dies, there’s going to be a catastrophe.”
“Which means?”
“These boys have been hunted since they were little children. They showed up here thinking America was heaven. They found a culture awash in commercialism and advertising. They’re doing their best to understand, but already they’re growing disillusioned. I hold them together now by a thread. But I swear to you, Dennehy, if our system takes their Benywal, they will fall into despair.” She closes her eyes, her breathing deep. “I love them. I love that they aren’t full of our sickness. I love that they are still angels somehow.”
“Angels.”
“Somehow, they’re still innocent, even after all the horror they’ve seen. They were children through all that, and miraculously, some of that survived. But they’re falling away, one by one. We offer them nothing but endless work for possessions they don’t understand or want. Some are drifting into gangs, simply because they don’t know what else to do. It’s bad enough losing them one at a time. If Moses dies, I’ll lose them all.”
The storm outside is still growing; the wind and rain are lashing against the building. “Tell me the truth,” I say quietly. “Not as witness and prosecutor. Between you and me, right here, right now. No bullshit.”
She stares right at me. “He didn’t do it, Dennehy. Moses Bol was here that night with me.”
The rain pelts against the roof and windows. “I don’t like anything about this,” I say. “I don’t like the fact that there’s a raped and murdered woman in my city. I don’t like being hauled into a church in the middle of the night and told ghost stories about people walking through walls.” I pause. “And I don’t like the idea of sending you to jail.”
“Then don’t.”
“I won’t have any choice.”
“Drop the death penalty, Thomas. Do what you must. But don’t take his life.”
She moves closer, and I can hear her breathing. A siren, distant but angry, cuts through the storm. We’re less than a foot apart, and there’s a moment when I know I should move back. We both know it, in fact, but she steps on a footing of one of the pews and balances herself against me, her fingers pressing into my chest. I realize I want to kiss her, which is wrong on a million levels. I know I’m not going to go for it, but I allow myself a moment to imagine it, to pull her into my arms in my mind, kissing her as hard as I can. Her mouth opens against my own, and her legs wrap around me, pressing her hips against me. I’m thinking about how soft her mouth looks, how her lips are slightly parted, and how the fact that I can see she wants the same thing I do is making me feel a little drunk. I’m thinking this right up until the moment one of the huge stained-glass windows above us explodes into a hundred thousand brilliantly colored shards of razor-sharp glass.
THE EXPLOSION RICOCHETS ACROSS the cavernous hall, brittle and angry. The glass showers down from the darkness like diamonds, beautiful as rain, dangerous as daggers, covering us like a wicked snow. I pull Fiona underneath me, covering her with my body. There’s the ting of falling glass on the wooden floor and pews for what seems like minutes. I can feel the glass hitting us and see it gathering on the floor all around us. “Stay down! Stay down!”
We crouch between pews, waiting for the chaos to stop. Finally, there’s an uneasy truce, as the sound of falling glass is replaced by cold wind and rain blowing through the hole where the window had been. “Be still,” I say, my hand on her back. “We’re covered in it.” I stand up inch by inch, letting the glass fall to the pew and floor. “Stay there.” Carefully, I pick glass out of Fiona’s hair and from her back. I look up and see the gaping hole; remnants of glass cling to the window frame, ready to fall with a gust of wind. “We’ve got to get out of here.” We make our way through the debris to the front of the sanctuary, glass crunching under our shoes. The force of the explosion has blown fragments in every direction. When we reach a safe place, I get a chance to look at Fiona. “You all right?”
She stares back at the sanctuary, eyes wide. “Uh huh.”
A siren appears, distant but rapidly growing closer. “The police are coming,” I say. “We’ll be all right.” I put my arm around her and help her through the big double doors into the dimly lit hall. “Where are the main lights in here?”
She gives me a blank look. She’s leaving me. I lean her against the wall and go in search of the main light switch. I find it, and the hard, fluorescent lights flicker on. The siren is close now, and another is coming behind. I pull out my phone and call 911. “This is Thomas Dennehy, assistant district attorney,” I say to the dispatch operator. “I’m inside the Downtown Presbyterian Church. I’m here with the pastor, Fiona Towns. You need to send the EMTs. I think the pastor is in shock.”
“They’re on their way.”
“Listen, try to reach the officer before he arrives. We don’t want to get shot by accident.”
“Roger that.”
I turn back to Fiona, who’s slowly sliding down the wall. I get underneath her arms and lower her into a sitting position. She looks up, her eyes glassy. I try to get a pulse, can’t find it, and try again, on her neck. It’s slow, maybe twenty beats a minute, a sure sign her parasympathetic system is shutting down. I hear the police car pulling into the parking lot, its siren blaring. I sit down next to Fiona, my arm around her. A minute later, there’s the sound of the back door opening. “In here!” I shout. The officer’s wet shoes suck against the tile floor as he approaches, slowing as he reaches the entrance to the hallway.
“I’m inside,” the officer says. “Yeah.” A pause. “Roger that.” The officer creeps warily around the corner, his weapon drawn.
I hold up my ID. “Assistant DA Thomas Dennehy,” I say. “This is Fiona Towns, pastor of the church.”
The officer walks to me cautiously, takes my ID, then holsters his gun. “What’s an assistant DA doin’ down here at this hour?”
“My job.”
He peers at Fiona. “She OK?”
I stand. “She’s not hurt physically. I think she’s in shock. Dispatch says the EMTs are on their way.”
He nods. “So what happened in here?”
“Something blew out one of the stained-glass windows. I was in the sanctuary with the pastor when it happened.”
“Just the two of you?”
“Yeah.”
He raises an eyebrow but nods. “Bomb squad got scrambled. The base is only ten blocks away, so they’ll be here any second. Is there anybody else in the place?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Let’s get her out of here,” the cop says. “This whole place could go up in another blast.” We each take a side and get Fiona out the door and down the steps to the parking lot behind the church. The EMTs are already pulling in, another cop car behind them. We hand Fiona over to the EMTs, who sit her down in the back of their vehicle. She’s conscious but not responsive. One of the technicians gets a pulse and looks up at me. “It’s thirty-five, but
steady.”
“It was slower before,” I say.
He nods. “Yeah, a pulse that slow sounds scary, but we see it all the time when there’s been a traumatic experience. Just gonna take her a while to come back around.”
“I’m OK,” Fiona says, slurring her speech a little. “Where’s Thomas?”
“Right here,” I say, taking her hand. “How are you?”
“I’m OK.” She starts to get up off the back of the truck, but the EMT gently restrains her.
“Hang on a little while,” he says. “You’re not quite cleared for takeoff.” He takes her pulse again and looks up, smiling. “Yeah, she’s gonna be fine. She’s already at forty-two. Give her twenty minutes.”
The bomb squad truck arrives, shouldering its way past the cop cars, and parks, taking up a fourth of the small lot. Six officers spill out, three in dark blue search suits and helmets. Behind them come two yapping German shepherds. Fiona looks at the dogs and turns pale. “Look, let’s put her inside the truck for a while, let her get her bearings,” the EMT says. He leans Fiona back into the vehicle and closes the doors, securing her from the growing crowd of officers.
One of the bomb squad officers, a burly-looking forty-year-old man with a flattop, introduces himself. “Victor Yenko,” he says. “What happened?”
I replay the incident, and Yenko nods. “Nothing since then?”
“No.”
“All right. There’s probably nothing else to this, but we’ll go through the building anyway, just to be safe.” Yenko tells his team to enter the building, leading with the dogs. The officers in search suits snap down their ballistic face shields and walk up the steps through the doors. The building is so large—especially the labyrinth of rooms and storage areas on the upper floors—I figure it’ll take at least twenty minutes to search, even with three men. Once the dogs are gone, the EMT opens the back of his truck. Fiona is sitting up, drinking water from a bottle. “She’s doing good,” the technician says. “Another few minutes, she’ll be fine. Not to drive, though.”
“That’s not a problem.”
We sit on the edge of the EMT truck for the next fifteen minutes while I give a statement to one of the officers. Eventually, Yenko comes out of the back door and walks across the parking lot toward us. He holds up a black piece of metal. “Rudimentary pipe bomb, very low tech,” he says. “Not much to it, really. Just some metal, black powder, and pressed paper. You can find directions on how to make it on the Internet in about five minutes.” He looks back at the building. “Figured out how they got it up there, too. There’s a little doorway, leads right to a ledge that runs underneath the windows on the side. They probably used it when they were putting the glass in.” He looks at Fiona. “The lady OK?”
“She’s fine.”
“Well, we’re gonna be here half the night. Got to collect evidence, document everything. A bomb in a church automatically classifies as a hate crime.”
Fiona gingerly steps out of the ambulance and looks up at the building. “Someone wanted to blow us up,” she says quietly. “A house of God.”
“That don’t mean much to some people,” Yenko says. “Look, why don’t you take the reverend here home, if she can travel. Like I say, we’ll be here most of the night. But you’re gonna want to get that window boarded up, soon as you can. If it rains on you, there’s gonna be an even bigger mess.”
“I’m not leaving,” Fiona says. “I need to be here.” She starts toward the church, but a spate of dizziness leans her hard against me.
“Whoa, there,” the EMT says. “What you need is some rest. A good night’s sleep ought to be about right. And don’t let her drive, not until midmorning, anyhow.”
“We can’t let you in the building until we’re finished,” Yenko says. “So all you could do is sit outside and do nothing.”
“They’re right,” I say quietly. “Get some rest, and you can do some good tomorrow.”
She looks up at me. “This is the Nation, isn’t it? They hate me because of Moses.”
“What about it, officer?” I ask. “Think this is Nation?”
He holds up a piece of the bomb. “Low brains, low yield. Right up their alley. And those folks can hold a grudge.”
“Let’s go,” I say, putting my arm around Fiona. “We’ll get you home and get you something to eat.”
She relents, letting me guide her to the Ford. I fasten her seat belt, and she settles into the bucket seat. I come around and get in. “I’m sorry, Thomas,” she says.
“What for?”
“For what happened. You could have been hurt.”
I start the truck. “I will say this, Towns. You’re a hell of a date.”
I back the pickup past the official vehicles and pull back out onto Church Street, heading toward Belle Meade, the old-money neighborhood where the church’s parsonage is located. Fiona leans back in her seat, her eyes closed. I drive a few blocks toward the freeway and hear her breathing steady as she drifts off. Good. Let it go for a while. I drive south down I-65, turn off on Harding, and wander through the ever-increasing property values toward the parsonage. It’s hard to miss the irony of Fiona living in the bastion of a South that really doesn’t exist anymore, a place where wealthy housewives chair brunches for charity and throw money-raisers for the symphony. I turn left onto Glendale and pull to a stop. “Towns? You got to wake up.”
Her eyes flutter open, and she looks at me. “Where are we?”
“The parsonage, or nearly. I know it’s on Glendale, but I can’t recall the number.”
“It’s 625.”
“Just a few blocks, then.” Fiona pulls herself up in the seat and presses her hair back behind her ears. “You OK?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
It’s less than a minute before we pull into the parsonage’s driveway. The house, an expansive, single-story, stone home on a large, level lot, is set back from the street by about forty yards. The driveway is circular, and I follow the curve halfway and stop by the front door. “Nice place for a radical like you,” I say, putting the truck in park.
“It came in handy, getting Moses out.”
“Yeah. Handy.”
We sit in the silence of the truck for several seconds. I can’t help thinking that I’m days away from taking her apart on the stand, and if I do my job well, I will probably send her to prison. It seems intolerable, but there’s no way out. Recusing myself from a murder case now would send a message to every defense attorney in town that the department has lost its nerve, and worse, lost its faith in the very death penalty it has asked juries to invoke more than a hundred times in the last thirty years. And even though the woman sitting on the other side of the truck has moved me, I’m still not convinced she wouldn’t lie to save Bol’s life. “Well,” I say, quietly. “Here we are.”
She looks over at me a moment, then leans over and kisses my cheek. I feel her lips on my face, warm and soft. She opens the passenger side door of the truck. “You don’t really believe in the death penalty, Dennehy. You can’t and be the man you are.”
I stare ahead without blinking. “If you take the stand for Bol, I’ll do what I have to do.”
I feel her watching me for a long time. “I know that,” she says, at last. “And it breaks my heart.” She steps out of the truck. “I’ll get my car back from your place on my own,” she says. “Don’t worry about it.” She shuts the door and walks away.
CHAPTER
12
BY MORNING THE RAIN clears out, leaving behind a stifling, humid mist. One day’s relief, and it’s back to the sweatbox. I make a light breakfast and wash down the day’s Zoloft with coffee. It’s a weekend, so I would normally have Jazz with me. It turned out to be a blessing she went to Orlando with Dr. Knife; at least she wasn’t here while her daddy was almost getting blown up. I check my watch; pretty soon she and her mother will be starting their second day of theme park attractions while the good doctor gets his lunch bought by the New and Improved Liposuction Co
mpany. I shake my head. Bec will be back tomorrow night, and she’ll find out what’s happened soon enough. I can picture her response: See, Thomas? That’s why I left you. Dr. Knife hardly ever gets blown up.
Fiona’s Volvo is no longer in my driveway; somehow, she’s already retrieved it. At ten I call Rayburn and tell him what happened last night. He freaks, predictably, but I get him talked down. “It’s just some Nationites pissed off about Bol,” I tell him. “They want to make a statement.”
“But I don’t get why you agreed to go down there in the first place,” he says.
“She asked me. I said yes.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
“Because Buchanan’s not smart enough to pull off the Hale thing on his own. He looks good, but he’s kind of a lightweight.”
“Yeah, I had the same impression.”
“On the other hand, Towns has guts, brains, and principles. So I played along to get some answers about what’s really going on.”
“And?”
And I almost kissed her, I think. “All she wanted to do was beg me to drop the death penalty on Bol.”
“I assume you made it clear that ship has sailed.”
“Yeah. I made it clear.”
Rayburn pauses. “All right, dammit. I’m not going to start second-guessing you now. But for God’s sake, Thomas, watch your ass, ok? We don’t want any more confusion than we already got.”
I click off the phone and walk to the glass doors looking out on the backyard. I stare into the trees behind the house, thinking about what I would do if I quit the DA’s office. I have thirty-eight thousand dollars in the bank. It would tide me over until I sorted things out. I run through the usual midlife crisis suspects: bonefishing captain in the Keys, inner-city school teacher, back to college to study something else. None of them feel right, since I’m a prosecutor, expert at what I do, trained to point the state’s finger in a court of law. “So,” I say to the living room. “It’s as clear as mud.”
I get dressed, head to Dad’s truck, and let its sweet V-8—a well-tuned engine being the answer to most male conundrums—solve my problems, at least for a while. I hop in the truck, fire it up, and gently give it some throttle, just to listen to the engine respond. Hell, yeah. Let’s go, Pops. You and me. Lemme tell you how I ported the cylinder heads on this baby. And you can tell me what to do with the rest of my life. Deal?
