Storming Heaven

by Kyle Mills

  The young agent’s face fell and he stared at his shoes. “I guess that’s possible …”

  “How ‘bout this?” Beamon continued. “Mr. and Mrs. Davis come inside while Jennifer takes her bike off the car. She’s too young to drive, so she can’t pull the car in, and her mom and pop aren’t anxious to go back out in the cold, so they put it off for a while. In the meantime, our perpetrators just drive up and knock on the front door.”

  Michaels looked up from his shoes. “But then why would the struggle have taken place in the kitchen? It’s not between the front door and the living room.”

  “Maybe they were being forced to prepare omelets against their will.” Beamon broke into a smile and backhanded Michaels in the chest. “Your theory’s best, bud. You just shouldn’t be so damn sure about it. Keep an open mind.” Beamon paused. “But not so open your brain falls out, right?”

  The bright beam of headlights washed through the windows of the living room, prompting Michaels to lean through the kitchen door. “That must be the coroner.”

  Beamon nodded. “Go ahead and give him the tour. Oh, one more thing. Get someone to walk around the outside of the house with a flashlight and look for footprints. This could be nothing more than a botched robbery attempt, and if the little girl was an athlete she might have made a break for the woods. She’ll freeze her ass off if she’s out there lost.”

  The huge wad of gum in Beamon’s mouth was starting to make his jaw ache and he could feel that the smell of the bodies was about to break through his makeshift spearmint barrier. Time for plan B.

  He stepped over the latent print guy, who had sunk from the counter to the lower cabinets, and pushed hard on the door at the back of the kitchen. It scraped against the snow and ice on the deck, stopping dead after moving about a foot. Beamon looked dejectedly at the small gap, then down at his bulging waistline. It wouldn’t be easy, but then, what in his life ever was? He grabbed the edge of the counter and the doorjamb and forced himself through the opening.

  It was a beautiful spot. Large pines filtered the starlight, giving the clean white snow an ethereal glow. There was no wind, and the muffled sounds of the investigation that managed to filter through the broken window in the living room were almost completely swallowed up by the forest.

  Beamon retrieved a bag of tobacco and papers from his jacket and began rolling a cigarette. The cold numbed his fingertips, making the process even more arduous than normal.

  “What are you doing?”

  Beamon jumped, dropping the half-rolled cigarette in the snow and almost losing his balance. Steadying himself against the house, he looked in the direction of the voice.

  Less than ten feet away, a small Hispanic woman, wrapped in a thick wool blanket, sat in a lawn chair. She leaned forward and pulled her knees closer to her chest. “What were you doing there? Aren’t you a policeman?”

  He looked down at himself and chuckled. With the green and red pants and the new parka, he must look like a giant Christmas ornament rolling a joint. “My doctor told me I have to give up cigarettes, so I started rolling my own. It’s such a pain, I smoke half as much.”

  The woman’s hand appeared from behind the blanket and pointed toward the scattered tobacco at Beamon’s feet. “But those don’t have a filter. They’re probably twice as bad.”

  Beamon thought about that for a moment. “No such thing as a perfect plan.”

  He walked toward her and held out his hand. “I’m Mark Beamon. I work with the FBI. I didn’t know anyone was out here.”

  She took his hand. “Carlotta Juarez. I am the Davises’ maid … was the Davises’ maid.”

  “Your hand feels like ice, Carlotta. Would you like to go inside?”

  She shook her head.

  “How about a car? You could go sit in my car and run the heater.”

  “No, I like it out here.”

  Beamon leaned against the house and followed her gaze toward a grove of aspen glowing pink in the starlight. “Are you all right?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her turn back toward him. “I came here from Bogotá. I’ve seen so many horrible things.”

  Beamon nodded and was silent for almost a minute.

  “How long have you worked for the Davises?” he said finally.

  “Eight years.”

  “Do you live here at the house?”

  “No. In town with my husband and five sons. I come every day, though.”

  Beamon slipped his hands under his armpits. “Five sons? That must be a handful.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Have you had a chance to walk through the house, Carlotta? Does it look like anything’s missing?”

  “Nothing that I could see.” She paused. “Only Jennifer.”

  Beamon looked up at the stars. “Tell me about her.”

  “She’s a wonderful girl. Bright, kind, thoughtful.” Her voice trailed away. “How could someone do this?”

  He ignored the question, having asked himself that same thing at crime scenes all over the country and never coming up with a good answer. “Does she have a boyfriend?”

  “Jamie Dolan. He’s a senior at Jennifer’s high school.”

  “Anything unusual going on lately, Carlotta? Strange phone calls? People you didn’t know coming over?”

  She shook her head.

  “How about between Jennifer and her parents? Were they angry at her for something? Maybe they didn’t like her boyfriend?”

  “Mrs. Davis always wanted Jennifer to see their neighbor’s son Bill. But I don’t think she disliked

  Beamon peeled his back from the frozen side of the house. “I appreciate your help, Carlotta. Oh, and I apologize in advance for the people who are going to ask you all the same questions.” He turned and began tugging at the door to the kitchen. “Don’t freeze out here, okay?”

  A couple of brief, but harrowing, expeditions into his sister’s room decades ago had given Beamon his only image of a teenage girl’s natural habitat. Apparently it was hopelessly outdated.

  The wall of dolls and full-sized poster of Shaun Cassidy that he halfway expected to find had been replaced by bicycle parts hanging from the ceiling and posters of what looked like young homeless men. A closer inspection of the posters revealed that they were music groups with names like Gas Huffer and Mudhoney.

  Beamon wandered across the room, stepping over the clothes and towels strewn across the floor, occasionally pausing to look into a drawer or box. Nothing leapt out at him as particularly significant so he ducked into the attached bathroom. The counter was covered with various tubes and vials that, as a lifelong bachelor, he found completely baffling. He stepped over the cord of a blow dryer and pulled a few blonde hairs out of the sink. Wrapping them up in a length of toilet paper, he headed back downstairs.

  “I’m out of here, Chet!” Beamon yelled from the front door.

  Michaels jogged out of the living room and caught Beamon shuffling around the roped-off area on the front porch.

  “You’re not staying?” He sounded shocked that anyone would choose to spend an evening at home when presented with the opportunity to hang around a house full of blood and death.

  Beamon waved his hand dismissively as he cleared the cordoned-off area and made a beeline for his car. “You seem to have it under control, Chet. Call me at home if you run into any really earth-shattering problems. I’m not available for little glitches and snafus ‘til tomorrow morning, though. Right?”

  4

  BEAMON MADE IT THROUGH THE DOOR OF THE FBI’s Flagstaff office just as the wall fell.

  He saw the expressions of the young agents crammed into the small room converge on resigned annoyance as they covered their coffee cups and computer keyboards. A white cloud of plaster dust enveloped two men in coveralls and billowed slowly across the room.

  Beamon stepped over a pile of acoustic tiles and headed for his office, shaking his head. Director Calahan didn’t take defeat lightly. When he had finally been
shamed into giving Beamon a management position, he’d been overcome with another one of the flashes of complete idiocy that had become the hallmark of his tenure at the Bureau.

  He’d decided to take a small resident agency, expand it enough to make it look good to the press, and put Beamon in charge. In the director’s mind, giving Beamon the somewhat imaginary title of ASAC-Flagstaff would make him a laughingstock. And as an added benefit, it would separate Beamon from his old cohort Laura Vilechi before he could bring her over to the dark side.

  Unfortunately, the expansion of the office was going to cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars and leave quite a few agents who owned homes in Phoenix with a long and utterly pointless commute. Welcome to the FBI.

  “Think we should rename the office Jericho, D.?” Beamon said, ignoring the door to his outer office and walking through a gap in the newly framed wall.

  His secretary stood and followed him as he passed by her and went straight for the coffeemaker next to his desk.

  “You need one, D.?” Beamon asked, dumping a couple of teaspoons of sugar into his cup.

  “No thanks. How went the golf game?”

  Beamon flopped into the worn leather chair behind his desk. “Jake shot like a four hundred or something,”

  His secretary grimaced.

  “And that was for twelve holes. I took off before they teed up the thirteenth.”

  “You know what they say, Mark. The best-laid plans …”

  He threw his hands up in a gesture of frustration and grabbed the neatly folded newspaper off his desk.

  “Two things, Mark. First, you still need to review and sign off on this year’s pro forma budget. It’s past due.”

  Beamon pretended not to hear. He hadn’t yet built up the willpower to wade through that ocean of paper.

  “Second, Chet Michaels has been walking by every five minutes or so for the last hour. He looks like he’s going to burst. Should I send him in?”

  “Ten minutes, D. Hold him off for ten minutes. Give me a chance to at least skim the newspaper and get a little caffeine into my system. And I promise I’ll go through your budget at home tonight.”

  She nodded and started back for her desk.

  “Hey, D.?”

  She stopped and turned back toward him, her sharp, youthful features melting into a sly smile.

  Since Beamon’s first day in Flagstaff, his secretary had steadfastly refused to tell him her given first name, preferring to be called by her first initial. Of course, he could have looked in her personnel file, but what would be the fun of that?

  “I was listening to this Johnny Cash song on the way to work today …”

  She shook her head sadly. “Good try, Mark. But it’s not Delia.”

  “The old saying is wrong,” Beamon said, poking an index finger into the open newspaper spread across his desk. “Kill all the journalists.”

  From his position at the door to the office, Chet Michaels took it that his boss’s sacred and absolutely inviolable ten minutes were up.

  “Look at this headline,” Beamon said. ‘“FBI Baffled by Double Murder/Kidnapping.’ Shit.”

  “You aren’t?” Michaels said as he sat down in one of the three chairs lined up in front of Beamon’s desk.

  “There are a few things that baffle me, Chet. Serial killers? Occasionally. Women? More often than not.” Beamon looked down at the stained concrete floor of his office. “Why they ripped up my old carpet when the new one isn’t due for another couple of weeks? Definitely haven’t figured that one out. But kidnappings? No way. At worst I’m briefly perplexed.”

  Michaels laced his hands across his stomach and leaned back in his chair. “Well, they were probably talking about me, then. If you’ve got this thing figured out, I could really use some help.”

  Beamon spun the paper around so Michaels could see it and slapped his palm on a picture of Jennifer Davis. “Voilà.”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What?’ She did it.” Michaels’ bright red eyebrows rose. “The little girl?”

  “Honestly, Chet. Sometimes your lack of cynicism disgusts me. Answer me this: Why do people kidnap?”

  “I dunno. Lots of reasons, I guess.”

  “No. There are only three. Financial benefit, blackmail, or you want the kid. Of course, each of those categories has a subheading or two.”

  Michaels remained silent as Beamon took a slug from his coffee cup. “Okay, Chet, let’s start with number three—you want the kid. Why?”

  “Uh, ransom?”

  Beamon shook his head. “Ransom fits in under financial benefit. No, most often you want the kid because you’re a parent that didn’t get legal custody. Now, Jennifer’s a little old for that kind of nonsense—no one wants to steal a kid they’re going to have to put through college in a couple of years. Besides, weren’t the Davises still on their first marriage?”

  Michaels glanced at the blue file lying in his lap, but didn’t open it. “I think so.”

  “That brings us to subheading number two. You’re some crazy pervert. What do you think? Pervert?”

  Michaels’s eyes scrunched up for a moment. “I doubt it. The facts don’t support the theory that one lone person did this. Sex offenders don’t usually work in teams.”

  “I’ll buy that,” Beamon agreed. “Besides, you told me that this girl races bikes. If I were your garden-variety weirdo, I’d just snag her when she’s all alone on some trail in the woods.”

  Beamon batted away a thick cable hanging from his ceiling and put his feet on his desk. “So, moving right along. Category number two—blackmail. What do you think of that theory.”

  “Can’t blackmail a dead person.”

  ‘“Nuff said. Number one, then. Financial benefit. Ransom?”

  “Not very practical at this point.”

  Beamon grinned. “To say the least. So who benefits from this thing?”

  Michaels leaned forward in his chair and braced his elbows against his knees. “I know what you want me to say, Mark. That Jennifer lined her parents up and shot them so she’d inherit all their money. That she’s gonna show up in a few days with some crazy story about the whole thing.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t feel right to me.”

  Beamon pointed again to the picture of Jennifer in the paper. “Are you kidding? Look at her!”

  Michaels laughed and picked up the paper for a closer inspection. “Come on, Mark. My girlfriend’s got a nose ring. Couple of tattoos, too. Doesn’t mean anything. It’s just, you know, fashion.” A wide grin spread across the young agent’s face. “Your parents probably said you looked subversive when you came in with a bunch of grease in your hair and your cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve of your T-shirt.”

  Beamon rolled his eyes. “I’m only forty-three, you little bastard.” He paused for a moment and watched two men in the outer office trying to lift a scaffold over a group of file cabinets. “Okay, it’s not a great theory,” he admitted. “But it’s the best one I can come up with. Could be that this was a botched robbery. The perps had just arrived—didn’t have time to take anything—and the Davises came home. They shoot them, then decide to take the girl for some fun and games.”

  Michaels perked up a bit. “That sounds possible.”

  “I don’t know. A house that you can’t see from the street—you’d have to be watching it. No sign of forced entry would suggest they’re pros. If the Davises had gone to this race and five miles into their trip remembered they left the iron on and come back, I’d say we’ve got a great theory. But they were gone all fucking day. All our friends had to do was slip in after the maid left at five and they’d have had time to clean the place out and watch a ball game on the Davises’ big-screen TV.”

  Somewhere in the office, a table saw started.

  “When are we gonna get a report on the physical evidence and autopsy?” Beamon shouted over the roar of the saw.

  “Should start trickling in tomorrow,” Michaels yelled back
.

  “Okay. Keep thinking about it, Chet. We’ve missed something, and I’m briefly perplexed as to what it is.”

  Michaels stood and turned to leave.

  “Oh, and Chet! Tell that guy out there that if he doesn’t shut that saw off, I’m gonna use it to remove his foot.”

  5

  A WAVE OF HEAT WASHED ACROSS JENNIFER Davis, instantly covering her in tiny beads of sweat. She kicked the covers off the bed, and for a moment the cool air meeting her damp skin eased the nausea that had gripped her since she woke up.

  And how long ago had that been? An hour? Two?

  The comforting glow of the clock on her night-stand and the gentle creaking of her house as the immense logs dried and settled were gone. Everything was gone. There was no blue-white glow from the snowdrifts beneath her window, no light filtering in from under the door. Just a dizzying blackness.

  Jennifer felt another surge of heat overtake her and she rolled on her side, clenching her teeth and struggling to not throw up.

  The memories returned slowly, retracing themselves in her mind over and over again until she could see faceless black-and-white outlines moving purposefully across the background of her home. She could feel the strong arms holding her and the adrenaline-surge panic as her air was cut off by a hand damp with perspiration.

  It didn’t take long for the outlines to sharpen and collect color and sound. The pale woman with dark eyes kneeling in front of her. The shadows crisscrossing her father’s face as he raised the gun to his wife’s head. The crack of the pistol and the strangely insignificant jerk of her mother’s head before she fell, doll-like, to the ground.

  No. It couldn’t have happened. It was just bad dreams. She must have been coming down with a bug before the race and the effort and dehydration had played tricks on her in her sleep.

  She reached out for the lamp beside her bed, but her hand just hung uselessly in the empty air, confirming what she already knew but hadn’t been able to fully face. She wasn’t in her room. She had no idea where she was.