Storming Heaven

by Kyle Mills

  “Yeah. They had to make some assumptions about how fast the room cooled off after the window was broken.”

  Beamon nodded. “So based on what we have from the neighbors, between ten and three.”

  “Yeah. It would have been tight, but I don’t think we can completely rule out the boyfriend based on the physical evidence.”

  “Yeah,” Beamon sighed. “But I have to admit that I’m having a hard time creating a scenario that includes the kind of struggle you’re describing if it was just him and Jennifer. That would mean, what? Jennifer held her mother while Jamie fought with her father? The struggle took place at two different times? There were more kids involved? I don’t know.” Beamon jumped up out of his chair and clapped his hands, startling the young agent a bit. “Okay, Chet. Get out of here. It’s Friday night and that girl with the tattoos you like so much probably wants to be taken to dinner.”

  “I’m okay, Mark. If you want to, you know, drink a few beers and bat around some ideas …”

  Beamon ignored the hopeful look on Michaels’s face and pointed at the door as he made his way back to the refrigerator. He still had three more beers to put away before he reached his recently self-imposed limit of five per day. “Thanks, Chet, but you should go out and have a good time tonight, because this weekend you’re going to be doing what?”

  “Finding David Passal,” Michaels mumbled as he gathered up his folders and headed for the door. “Oh, Mark. I took a message for you this afternoon from the lab. It’s on your desk, but it said something like, ? year’s worth of hair, no drugs.’ Does that make any sense?”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Beamon said, dropping onto the sofa as Michaels pulled the door shut behind him.

  With his foot, Beamon snagged the coat he’d thrown on the floor and retrieved a tobacco pouch from the breast pocket. The message meant that the hair he’d retrieved from Jennifer Davis’s sink—a year’s growth—showed no narcotic residue. She was clean.

  What was he missing? he wondered as he tapped tobacco into a paper wrapper.

  What would someone want with Jennifer Davis? What good was she with her parents dead? Every time he came up with a plausible answer, there were two or three facts to refute it.

  He finished rolling the cigarette and looked at it longingly for a few moments. No smoking in the house. It was another one of his new and ironclad rules. That rule, combined with the rather majestic local weather, had been instrumental in reducing his smoking from a two packs a day to five or six of these hand-rolled jobs.

  He looked over at his front door. It was rattling slightly as the frigid wind outside battered it. Beamon laid the cigarette on his stomach and decided that gazing at it and drinking a few more beers would have to satisfy his vices for the night.

  9

  BEAMON SHUFFLED THROUGH THE TEETERing stack of personnel files on his sofa, finally finding the one he was looking for in the middle. He gave it a quick jerk and watched the rest of the pile destabilize and topple onto the floor of his living room.

  He kicked them over toward the wall and wondered for the hundredth time if he really had what it took to run an office. He’d spent the last weeks trying to get around to familiarizing himself with the backgrounds of his new staff—something that should have been a simple task. D. gave him the files and he just had to flip through them. Why then, two weeks later, were they strewn across his floor, unread?

  The answer was as obvious as it was unsettling: He owed a great deal of his success to date to his ability to ignore the noise around him and focus all his attention on one task. A wonderful quality in an investigator. A shitty quality in a manager.

  As he saw it, he’d already proven that he made an impossible subordinate. So it was time to get his ass in gear and prove that he made one hell of a good boss. Otherwise, he had serious problems.

  Beamon leaned forward and picked up his glasses. Perching them on his nose, he flipped open the folder in his lap and tried to concentrate on the picture of the young man stapled to the inside cover.

  He was a second office agent—talented, diligent, hard-working. That is, until about a month ago when his wife ran off with the pool guy. Beamon had initially thought that this was an elaborate joke, created to welcome him to the world of management. But it turned out that she actually did. The goddamn pool guy.

  And now, as the new Assistant Special Agent in Charge-Flagstaff, this was his problem. He had to figure out a way to straighten this kid out before he did or didn’t do something that would permanently fuck up his career. The question was, how? Tell him to cowboy up? Walk it off? No, wait—how about, “There are a lot of fish in the sea?”

  Christ.

  Beamon dropped the folder on the couch and let the Jennifer Davis problem creep back into his mind. While he was sitting around worrying about the sexual trysts of his staff’s spouses, her clock was ticking. The statistics on this kind of disappearance were clear—every day she was missing, his chances of finding her alive got cut in half.

  “I’m sorry, I was expecting Mark Beamon. What can I do for you?” Carrie Johnstone said, stepping back to better take in the full impact of what stood before her.

  Beamon tugged uncomfortably at the lapel of his suit. The silky-smooth wool felt strange beneath his fingers. “C’mon, Carrie. Give me a break. I feel weird enough as it is.”

  “Weird?” she said, motioning for him to come inside. “Why would you feel weird? You look fantastic! I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in a suit that fit you and didn’t have holes in it.”

  Beamon nodded self-consciously. “It was a gift. I mean, it’s a great suit, but it makes me look like I mugged a European tourist,”

  She reached around the back of his neck and yanked his collar up. “Hugo Boss? Someone gave you a Hugo Boss suit?”

  “Yeah. A mob boss in New York, actually.”

  “I see,” Carrie said as she sat down at a small writing desk in the living room and started scribbling on a Post-it note. “Should I be concerned that my tax dollars are paying the salary of an FBI agent who receives expensive gifts from organized crime?”

  “Probably,”

  Her dress was a deep maroon that seemed to change color magically as she moved. High-quality silk, Beamon knew—he’d become something of an expert at identifying different fabrics on an investigation involving a bomb planted in a clothing-filled suitcase.

  What was important, though, was that it clung to her body perfectly. Not too tight, but suggestive in all the right places. Her auburn hair swayed slightly as she wrote, revealing brief glimpses of the smooth skin of her back.

  She looked much younger than she did in the business suits and heavy sweaters Beamon normally saw her in. He made a mental note to try to devise a clever way of ferreting out her age over the course of the evening.

  “When did you start wearing glasses, Mark?” Carrie asked without looking up.

  “I got them a few months ago, but I don’t wear them much. Having kind of a hard time getting used to them.”

  Carrie finished what she was writing and looked down a hall to her left. “Stacey! We’re leaving now. I left some instructions on the stuff in the oven and my cell phone number in case there are any problems. Don’t call me unless it’s an emergency, okay, hon? I’m going to be in a church.”

  Beamon heard a muffled reply and Carrie, apparently satisfied, grabbed her purse and slid an arm into his.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” Beamon said, having a little trouble holding onto coherent thoughts as she brushed against him.

  “Why are you having a hard time getting used to them? I think they look very distinguished.”

  “Oh, it’s not the glasses per se, it’s more the clarity. I’m not sure I didn’t like the world better with softer edges.” Beamon reached out and opened the door for her. “By the way, have I mentioned how incredibly beautiful you look tonight?”

  “No, you hadn’t, actually.”

  “Well, it’s because I was tryi
ng to find a more artistic way of phrasing it.”

  She smiled as they walked out into the silence of the snow-covered courtyard. “I think most women would settle for ‘incredibly beautiful.’”

  Beamon had read somewhere that the construction of a church pew was actually an art of some subtlety. The craftsman had to strike a perfect balance between intense discomfort—so your less fervent worshippers wouldn’t fall asleep—and ergonomics, so the truly devout wouldn’t suffer crippling back and neck injuries.

  Fully an hour into a ceremony that didn’t seem to be in any danger of wrapping up, Beamon managed to find a position that briefly relieved the pressure on his spine. Permanent damage might yet be avoided.

  His chiropractic distress momentarily eased, Beamon was able to turn his attention back to the ceremony, which he had to admit had been very educational.

  He knew criminally little about the fledgling Church of the Evolution and its leader Albert Kneiss, especially considering that it was headquartered right in the middle of his new back yard. It was the fastest-growing religion in the world and it was unpopular with the German government. Other than that, his knowledge consisted of a bunch of unconnected factoids.

  There was really no excuse for his ignorance. The Kneissians had brought countless jobs to the area, built hospitals, schools, and museums. Beamon seemed to remember reading somewhere that their numbers had swelled to over eleven million members worldwide, and their influence over the Flagstaff area, and Arizona in general, continued to expand.

  He turned to Carrie to ask her a question about the progress of the ceremony, or more accurately when the hell it would be over, but she seemed to be lost in the thoughts she was scribbling into the notebook on her lap. He sighed quietly and looked around him.

  The cathedral surrounding them had been only recently completed, but the architecture and carefully chosen materials gave it a look of permanence usually reserved for buildings hundreds of years old. The complex grid of arches supporting the ceiling were hewn of a light wood and tipped with ornate geometric carvings that dangled into space like stalactites. That touch of vaguely Scandinavian informality was countered by the heavy stone of the walls—a few of which had water running down their mossy faces into marble pools.

  Despite its size, the church was packed. With few exceptions, the congregation had that well turned out but unimaginative way of dressing and impeccable grooming that the world had come to associate with followers of Kneiss.

  At the altar, the bride and groom were passing their hands ceremoniously through the flame of an ornate candle held by a pious-looking man spouting some mumbo-jumbo about purification.

  Beamon looked over at Carrie, who was still scribbling furiously, and decided to interrupt her. He had never been much for long religious spectacles. By now, even God had to be about ready for a couple of stiff drinks and a cocktail weenie.

  “Nice ceremony,” he whispered.

  She looked up from her pad and smiled.

  “Uh, about how much longer do they generally go on?”

  “Don’t really know, Mark. I’ve never been to one of these.”

  “Really? You mean you’re not….”

  “A Kneissian? No.”

  Beamon nodded silently but decided to exercise a little more of his curiosity while he had her talking. “What’s that you keep writing?”

  She looked around conspiratorially and leaned so close that he could feel her lips brush against his ear. “I’m doing a study on how religious affiliation can influence various psychoses. I don’t really know that much about this faith, and I thought this would be helpful.”

  Beamon let that process for a moment.

  “Lucky you knew a Kneissian who happened to be getting married this weekend,” he said hopefully.

  Her expression went blank for a moment.

  “We’re crashing this wedding, aren’t we, Carrie?”

  “‘Crashing’ is such an ugly w—”

  The congregation stood and the sound of rustling clothes and dropping Bibles drowned out the rest of Carrie’s sentence.

  Beamon smiled politely and waved at the young couple as they walked elatedly down the aisle, followed by their attendants. He leaned over to Carrie again. “They make such a nice couple. And what a beautiful wedding. I can’t wait for the reception.”

  “I wasn’t really planning on going to the reception,” Carrie said. “I think that might be pushing it.”

  “Are you kidding? There’s no way I’m sitting through an,” he looked at his watch, “hour-and-twenty-minute wedding ceremony and not going to the reception.”

  “I thought maybe I’d take you out to dinner instead,” she said, starting to sound a bit apprehensive.

  Beamon shook his head. “Wouldn’t be much of a substitute, would it?”

  Now this was fun. Already it had completely made up for that endless ceremony.

  The conference room of the Radisson, lined with balloons and paper streamers for the occasion, had been set up with countless small round tables, each surrounded by tipsy wedding revelers. The band at the other end of the room had just started and the table where he and Carrie sat had been abandoned at the first chords of “Louie Louie.”

  Beamon swirled a shrimp in a blob of cream cheese and popped it in his mouth. One thing he had to say about the Kneissians—they could really throw a party. Great food, and enormous open bar with only top-shelf stuff, and man, were they friendly. At a minimum, twenty-five people had approached them and struck up a conversation. And thankfully, due either to the nice suit and glasses he was wearing, or the dim light and booze, not a single person had recognized him as the man who had been recently besieged by the press over Jennifer Davis’s disappearance.

  Of course, his anonymity had been helped along by the fact that he told everyone who approached him that he was hard of hearing and really only Carrie’s date. She was the one intimately acquainted with the bride.

  Thus had started a rather long and painful evening for Carrie Johnstone. She’d delighted Beamon for the last hour with a string of confused lies and brief outbursts of nervous laughter as she discussed the bride from childhood to present.

  The blue-haired woman who had been chatting with Carrie through a smile that looked like it was held in place by fishhooks finally straightened up, waved a good-bye to Beamon, and began weaving though the crowd toward the bar.

  “Shrimp?” Beamon said, holding a cream-cheese-doused shellfish in Carrie’s general direction.

  “I’m going to get you for this, Mark. I don’t know how. And I’m not sure when. But I will.”

  Beamon slipped into his most innocent smile. “You’ve just spent an hour conversing with your test subjects, Carrie. I thought you’d be thanking me.”

  She held out her hand and scowled. “Give me the shrimp.”

  She popped it in her mouth, then sucked down half the glass of wine in front of her.

  “C’mon, Carrie. You can’t tell me this hasn’t been even more productive than the ceremony. I’ve learned volumes just sitting here. As venues for people-watching, wedding receptions are right up there with …” He was about to say “strip bars,” but caught himself. “Uh, public parks.”

  She took another gulp of her wine. “Well, what I’ve learned is that you can’t be trusted. I assume from my conversations that you’ve been telling people that you’re just my date and that you don’t know anybody here.”

  “Uh, I think I used the words toy boy, actually. Oh, and there was that deafness thing.”

  “Right, a few people mentioned your little hearing problem. You’ll be happy to know that I told them it was the result of untreated syphilis.”

  That probably explained the strange looks on the faces of a few of the people Carrie had spoken to and their furtive glances in his direction.

  “Touché,” he said, surprised at the depth of the relief he felt when her face broke into a beautiful smile. He’d had no idea how she would take his little prank. So
me women seemed so perfect, but then you found out that they couldn’t laugh at themselves.

  Beamon scooted his chair closer to her and looked around to make sure no one was within earshot. “Serves you right. Getting the head of the FBI’s local office to aid and abet you in crashing a wedding. At least tell me what the paper you’re writing is about.”

  “It’s about the way religion affects people’s mental health.” Beamon could hear the excitement creep into her voice as she started to explain her work. Another mark in the Carrie Johnston plus column. He loved people who were passionate about something. Didn’t really matter what.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, if you believe very strongly in any particular religion, that dogma is going to affect your perceptions and therefore your mental outlook. Let’s compare a very devout Muslim woman with a devout Kneissian woman. Now, many Muslims have very strong beliefs that keep women as sort of second-class citizens. This might create, for instance, problems with self-esteem.”

  Beamon thought about that for a moment. Seemed to make sense. “And the Kneissian woman?”

  “Well, the Kneissians are at the other end of the spectrum. They are almost completely lacking in institutional chauvinism. On the other hand, they are very focused on financial and political success. So a Kneissian woman might have self-esteem problems just as severe, but they would relate to, say, a lack of success in her job.”

  “I’ll buy that.”

  “Obviously, that’s an oversimplified example. Here’s a better one. How old do you think the bride and groom are?”

  Beamon shrugged. “I have no idea. They looked like kids to me, but then, so does half my staff.”

  “I’d guess that they were just out of high school. For some reason, Kneissians get married very young and have an extremely high divorce rate.”

  Beamon nodded thoughtfully. “Recruitment.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s why they marry early and get divorced,” he said. “Recruitment.”

  “I don’t think I follow you.”