Storming Heaven

by Kyle Mills

  “I’m the only one who loves you now, Jennifer. I’m the one who takes care of you,” the woman said, reaching into the small shower and turning on the water. She tested the temperature and then turned back to Jennifer, who was standing immobile on the cold tile floor. Jennifer didn’t resist as the woman pulled her T-shirt over her head and then dropped to her knees and slid her panties down her legs.

  She stepped silently into the hot shower, trying to fight off the distorted image of her parents’ shattered bodies swirling around her in the thick steam. She closed her eyes again as she felt the woman begin to run a soapy washcloth along her wet skin, trying to let her mind retreat into the past. She surrounded herself with the memory of her last race, her friend spraying the mud off her with a hose, the look on her parents’ faces as she toweled her hair with the old grease rag.

  “I want to go home,” she said so quietly that the sound was almost completely swallowed up by the running water.

  The woman dropped the washrag into the bottom of the shower and ran a soapy hand slowly down Jennifer’s back. “You are home, dear.”

  13

  THE STOVE WAS PRETTY MUCH COLD.

  Beamon stuck his hands into the open grate and tried to warm them on the few remaining coals glowing dimly through a blanket of ash. The cans lining the walls around him had gone pale white with a thin layer of frost. The door had been wide open when they’d arrived.

  Beamon dropped to his knees and looked under the bed. The shotgun and hatchet he’d put under it were gone.

  “You got anything, Chet?” Beamon yelled, walking down the steps and back into the blinding light of a heatless sun.

  Michaels threw open the door to the generator house, gun stretched out in front of him. He poked his head into it, lowered his gun, and turned back toward Beamon. “Nothing.”

  “Now, where the hell did he get off to?” Beamon said.

  Michaels walked slowly toward him, scanning the clearing. “Do you think he just headed into the hills? His truck’s still here.”

  Beamon shook his head. It had been a bad call. He should have been watching. “I don’t know. Let’s see that fax again.”

  Despite the clarity of the heat signature on the photograph, it was difficult to judge distances with any real precision. Beamon made his best guess as to the location of the possible underground chamber and he and Michaels began kicking through debris-scattered underbrush in a less than scientific pattern to find the entrance.

  “Are you sure that blob on the picture is something underground?” Michaels said, dropping to his knees and peering under an unusually thick stand of thistles.

  “I’m starting to wonder.” Beamon kicked a rotted piece of plywood. It flew into the air and was sent careening across the clearing by a strong gust of wind. “It feels right.”

  Beamon tried to jam his toe under an old sign lying flat on the ground in front of him, but it wouldn’t budge. Thinking that it was perhaps stuck in the ground frost, he crouched down and felt around the edges. Along the back, the rough surface of peeling paint was broken intermittently by the oily metal of hinges.

  “Chet. Over here.”

  Michaels jogged up and looked down at the old sign. “You think this is it?”

  Beamon nodded.

  “You think he might be in there?”

  “Don’t know. His truck’s still here, and it looks like most of his stuff’s still in the trailer. But then, why let the stove die down and leave the door open?”

  Beamon took a step back and pulled his gun from his jacket. “Mr. Passal! David!” he yelled at the plywood sign at his feet. “It’s Mark Beamon with the FBI. I have a few more questions for you. Why don’t you come on up and we can talk.”

  Michaels scanned the treeline nervously. Out in the open like this he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a set of crosshairs tickling the back of his neck.

  “Dave! Come on! Let’s go!” Beamon shouted, giving the makeshift trapdoor a hard kick.

  Nothing. Why couldn’t anything ever be simple?

  “You ready, Chet?”

  Michaels jerked his head in the affirmative and aimed his gun at the sign.

  “Don’t shoot my foot off, now,” Beamon said, finding a place where he could work the toe of his boot under the edge of the plywood.

  “Okay, Dave. Come on out,” Beamon said, kicking the trapdoor open and inching forward with his gun aimed into the hole.

  No answer.

  Beamon lay down on his stomach and slid slowly forward until his head was almost even with the edge. He shook off the mental picture of Passal sitting down there with that damn shotgun and burst forward, shoving his gun hand into the hole. It wasn’t shot off, so he poked his head in and swept his eyes back and forth, scanning for movement.

  “You okay, Mark?” Michaels said nervously. “Is he in there?”

  Beamon pulled back, letting a little more light into the hole and slowing the rush of blood to his head. “Yeah, he’s in here. But he’s seen better days.”

  One of David Passal’s legs was resting on the bottom of the ladder that led into the hole, bent at an unnatural angle. It looked as though it had been snapped when he’d fallen, caught between the 2x4s that made up the rungs.

  Passal’s head was resting in a wide puddle of blood that was beginning to form little white ice crystals across the top. Beamon adjusted himself so that the sunlight could fall directly on the man’s face. His skin was a less than healthy shade of blue and his eyes were frozen wide open.

  “What’ve you got, Mark?”

  “He doesn’t look like he’s got much to say.”

  “What?”

  “Looks like he fell down the ladder, hit his head, and froze,” Beamon said, pulling his lighter from his pocket. He flicked the wheel and the flame sparked to life, improving visibility only marginally.

  The hole was probably only about ten feet square and maybe six and a half feet deep. The clay walls still showed the marks of the shovel that had created them behind wooden shelves.

  Beamon got to his knees and slid into the hole, careful not to disturb Passal’s snapped leg.

  The shelves were a sturdier version of the ones in Passal’s trailer, probably providing structural support as well as storage space. They were covered with neatly stacked cans of meat and vegetables. Large bags of sugar and flour were propped in the corner.

  Beamon leaned over and confirmed his diagnosis. Passal was definitely dead.

  The stack of old lumber he’d landed on had a number of nails sticking out of it. Unfortunately, one of them had lined up nicely with the back of his head.

  The guns Beamon knew he would find were piled on a wide shelf to his left. He stepped closer and examined the black body of an M-16 through the thick, clear plastic bag it was stored in.

  This was all he’d been looking for—he’d never really believed that Passal had the girl, only that he knew something that could help. The threat of being brought up on an illegal weapons charge would have gone a long way toward convincing him to open up.

  “You all right in there, Mark?” Michaels called into the hole.

  “Yeah, fine,” Beamon said, sitting down next to the corpse.

  “You coming up?”

  “In a minute. I need to think.”

  He sat with his back against the cold dirt wall for almost ten, his eyes wandering from Passal to the ladder and back again. The man must have come down it a thousand times—he stored food down here. Why did he decide to fall today? What was different about today than all those other days? Only one thing he could think of. The FBI was poking around asking questions.

  Sheriff John Parkinson pulled his head from the hole and rocked to his feet using his vast stomach as a fulcrum. “Yeah, that’s dead, all right. You say he hit a nail?”

  Beamon nodded and looked around him. The sheriff’s men had cordoned off the clearing—not that this was exactly a high-traffic area—and were all standing around shifting their weight fr
om one foot to the other in an effort to stave off the cold of the approaching night.

  “Right in the back of the head,” Beamon said. “Bad goddamn luck.”

  “Accidents happen out here, Mark. You get a little ice on the ladder. Or maybe you have a few too many snorts before you come out here. And then you’re dead.”

  “You’re probably right.” Beamon clapped him on the back as they started toward the line of cars blocking the narrow dirt road. “But to be sure, I’m going to have a few guys come up and take a look.”

  Parkinson didn’t look excited by the prospect.

  “Me and Chet, though, we’ve got to get out of here,” Beamon continued. “I’d appreciate it if you and your boys’d look after things till my guys get here.”

  “Sure, Mark, whatever you need.”

  “Okay, then. You’ve got my card. If any of our people start being a pain in your ass, use it.”

  14

  JENNIFER DAVIS STOOD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE room, bunching the light cotton of the pants she’d been given in her still-damp fists. She was strangely transfixed by the sight of the open door and the simple hallway on the other side of it. Transfixed and terrified.

  All the little things that made up her life had disappeared overnight. Everything she knew—all that was familiar now—was in this room. What would she find outside of it?

  “I … I can’t,” Jennifer said, her voice quivering slightly.

  The woman’s eyes flared as she strode across the room and put her hand on the back of Jennifer’s neck. “There are people who want to hurt you, Jennifer. I’m going to do everything I can to stop them, but you have to help me.”

  “Yes, but I’m afraid. I …”

  The woman was behind her now. She couldn’t see her anymore, but felt an arm slide around her stomach and pull her close. “I’m taking you to someone, Jennifer. He’s going to talk to you, ask you questions. When he does, you will answer simply and directly. Before you speak, though, I want you to look at him very carefully. To see how weak he is. He can’t protect you, Jennifer, only I can. But only if you follow my instructions very carefully. Do you understand?”

  She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand anything anymore. Was this woman telling the truth? Every time Jennifer felt her touch or looked into her eyes, she felt hopeless and afraid.

  Her head began to throb dully, making thought even more impossible. “I … “

  The pressure around her stomach increased, silencing her.

  “Do you understand?” the woman repeated quietly.

  Jennifer fought back the tears that she felt coming and nodded.

  Unlike hers, the room she was taken to was enormous—so far across that you’d have to shout to be heard by someone on the other side. The ceiling was more than thirty feet high, with heavy-looking moldings around the top. Three of the walls were blank, but the fourth had tall, heavily tinted windows that filtered the light from outside into long, jagged shadows.

  It was daytime, Jennifer realized as the woman steered her toward the far wall, where there was a small bed surrounded by light gray medical machines. They stopped a few feet from the side of the bed and Jennifer looked down at its occupant.

  Was he dead? His closed eyes had sunk so deep that she could see the outline of the round holes in his skull. The color of his skin wasn’t much different from the color of the machines humming around him, except that it was occasionally broken by bright red sores or the spidery tracks of broken blood vessels. Long tufts of white hair still clung at random to the rice-paper-thin skin of his scalp.

  The woman’s hand dropped from the back of Jennifer’s neck, and she took a syringe from a stainless steel tray next to the bed. Jennifer took an involuntary step backward but realized it wasn’t for her as the woman inserted it into an IV tube taped to the man’s forearm.

  Jennifer watched the man’s face as the sound resonating from the heart monitor turned erratic and then fell back into a livelier partem. His eyelids fluttered slightly and then opened into a blank stare. He stayed that way for almost a minute until, finally, his head lolled over and his gaze settled on Jennifer.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he breathed through cracked and peeling lips. “Come.”

  His left hand turned palm up and edged to the side of the bed, but she didn’t move. A moment later, the woman’s hand took its place on the back of her neck again, and she felt herself being pushed forward.

  “Please. I won’t hurt you,” he said. His voice had strengthened a bit, but was still almost completely lost in the expanse of the room and the humming of the machines surrounding them.

  The pressure on her neck increased, and she reached out and placed her hand in his. It felt like a cold bag full of chicken bones.

  “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  Jennifer struggled to overcome her fear and forced, herself to look into the old man’s eyes. She was surprised at what she found there. A strange spark, dimmed by time for sure, but still there. An incredible depth of emotion. Kindness. Strength. Suffering.

  “This must be so hard for you,” he said. “To have to leave your parents and come here; everything so unfamiliar. You’ll understand soon, though. You’ll understand everything.” He looked at the woman standing behind her. “Listen to Sara and the others. They have so much to teach you. I wish I could do more, but I’m so tired.”

  His voice was losing what little strength it had had a few moments before. Jennifer leaned forward, unconsciously squeezing his hand.

  “Sara,” the old man said, turning his head toward the woman behind him. “I want to talk to you and the others. It must be soon.”

  Jennifer tried to move away as the woman-Sara, he’d called her—stepped closer to the bed, but the old man’s hand tightened around hers and she was afraid she’d hurt him if she pulled away.

  “Of course,” Sara said. “As soon as I can.”

  “She’s your responsibility now, Sara. You have to teach her.”

  15

  MARK BEAMON TURNED THE KEY IN THE LOCK and pushed the icy door to his condo with his shoulder. It flexed slightly but held fast as a faint ringing on the other side became audible.

  He stepped back and gave it a short kick. Not the full-on door kick that had made his Quantico instructor so proud, but enough to shatter the thin film of ice gleaming in the complex’s floodlights and allow him to throw open the door and run for the phone.

  “Beamon,” he said, mouth not yet within optimal range of the handset.

  “Mark? It’s Trace.”

  Trace Fontain ran the FBI’s lab and had reluctantly agreed, as a personal favor, to go to Utah and supervise the extraction of Passal’s body.

  “Trace! How are you feeling?” The Utah winter probably had Fontain’s bronchitis well on its way to full-blown pneumonia by now, Beamon thought with a pang of guilt.

  “Not so good. I think this could be turning into pneumonia.” He coughed loudly into the phone, and Beamon felt the pang turn into a twinge at the sound of Fontain’s inhaler.

  “I’m really sorry, Trace. Couldn’t be helped. I’ve got this little girl missing out here and I can’t seem to put the facts together so they make any sense. I needed the best.”

  Another fit of coughing. The rattle in his lungs sounded like static over the phone. “I’d hold off on the flattery till you hear what I’ve got to say.”

  “What’ve you got?”

  “You’re going to be pissed.”

  “Come on, Trace. You have to have something.”

  “I don’t know what happened here.”

  Beamon pried off his snow-covered boots and grabbed a beer out of the fridge. “What is it exactly that you don’t know?”

  “Well, I don’t know whether your Mr. Passal was murdered or whether it was an accident. And I don’t know for sure whether Jennifer Davis was ever here.”

  “Let’s start with the first one. Why isn’t it murder?”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t. I put a
couple of mattresses on the ground and pushed one of the local cops down the ladder about twenty times. Figured out how you could do it—one guy behind the ladder grabs his foot and pulls it through the rungs, the other grabs his face and the shoulder of his jacket and pulls him down onto the nail. Once you got the technique down, it wasn’t too hard.”

  “Wouldn’t there be contusions on Passal’s face or stretched material on his jacket, then?”

  “Don’t think so.” Cough. “The victim is in the air, so the attacker’s got all the leverage. Wouldn’t really have to exert much force. Besides, Passal was wearing one of those heavy wool hunting jackets. I don’t think it would be possible to stretch it with your hand.”

  “So it’s possible that it was murder, but likely it was an accident.”

  “That’s the way my report’s going to look.”

  “Moving on, then. What about Jennifer?”

  “We’ve gone over the trailer, the generator house, and the pit with a fine-toothed comb and we’ve got nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Well, we’ll run it up more thoroughly when we get back, but I brought some equipment along and I doubt the main lab’s gonna tell me anything different. No blonde hairs at all. Hell, we haven’t found any that don’t look like they came directly from Passal’s head. Or some game animal.”

  “He was apparently kind of a hermit,” Beamon said.

  “That would explain it. With very few exceptions, we’ve eyeballed all fibers as belonging to stuff in his closet.”

  “And the exceptions?”

  “They look old. Probably stuff he got rid of. In any event, I seriously doubt we’re going to find any matches in the wardrobe of a fifteen-year-old girl.”

  “Prints?”

  “We found two sets that weren’t his on the formica table in the trailer and one set on the doorknob. They’re in pretty good shape, and …”

  Beamon finished his thought. “They’re mine and Chet’s.

  “That’d be my guess. We’ll confirm when we get back.”