by Kyle Mills
Volker tugged insistently on his arm. “Please don’t worry, Mark. I personally guarantee your safety.”
Beamon stood his ground for a moment and then gave up and allowed himself to be led through the crush of people. “What can you tell me about Albert Kneiss?”
“A fascinating figure,” Volker shouted over a deafening round of applause. A man in a dark suit had just walked on the stage and everyone seemed happy to see him. “Born Christmas Day 1913 to a devout Christian preacher. You’re aware that it is believed that Kneiss will ascend to heaven—die—on Good Friday this year?”
“Yeah. Born on Christmas, dead on Good Friday. Just like Jesus.”
Volker nodded. “Interestingly, Kneiss did not immediately follow his father into the spiritual, but studied anthropology and later became a professor at the University of Chicago. He was quite brilliant, but his theories were extremely radical for the time. One—that a number of different species of humans inhabited the earth at the same time—has only recently been adopted. Unfortunately, his approach to anthropology was too much for the university, and he was eventually let go—a laughingstock in the world of science.”
Volker stopped next to a small knot of people in blue polo shirts identifying their home parish as Spokane, Washington. Between them, they held a large banner reading FREEDOM TO WORSHIP.
“This should do, don’t you think?” Volker said, looking up at the man on the stage and gauging their distance. “You probably recognize Senator Tompkins from Massachusetts.”
Now that he looked more carefully, Beamon did recognize him. Tompkins had taken a leadership role in criticizing Germany’s policies toward the church. It was impossible not to see him posturing in the media for the benefit of religious freedom at least once a week.
“Now what was it you were saying about Kneiss?”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Soon after his removal from the university, his wife succumbed to cancer, leaving him with an infant daughter. He disappeared from the eyes of history for a number of years around this time. Eventually he reappeared in upstate New York with his Bible, transformed into God’s messenger on earth.”
“So he just combined his two areas of expertise—theology, which he learned from his father, and science, which was his chosen profession.”
“One would assume.”
“If he was born in 1913 he’s in his late eighties now. Is he still in control of the church?”
Volker shrugged. “I think it’s unlikely. There’s a group of seven Elders who operate the church. A woman named Sara Renslier controls the group.” He pointed toward the stage. “See the rather petite woman with short dark hair sitting at the back?”
Beamon nodded.
“That’s her. It was her appointment some twenty-five years ago that was the turning point for Kneiss and his followers. A formidable woman. She will certainly become the unequivocal head of the organization when Kneiss dies.”
Beamon pulled a pad from his pocket and struggled to overcome the jostling of the people around him and write the name down. “But if he dies on Good Friday, shouldn’t he be resurrected on Easter like he was last time?”
Volker chuckled. “That would be quite a trick, wouldn’t it? But the answer, of course, is no. The Kneissians do not believe that the resurrection of Jesus had any real significance. Nothing more than the last in a long list of what they consider banal parlor tricks that Jesus—Kneiss—was forced to perform to gain credibility in a hopelessly superstitious time.”
“And he’s been doing this since the dawn of humanity—popping in every two thousand years to update the current thinking?”
Volker rose onto his toes to get a better view as two men shook hands on stage. “You really should make it a point to read their Bible, Mark. But the answer to your question is no. They believe that at some time in the distant past, the entity we now know as Kneiss was chosen by God to take the place of the prior messenger, who had gone on to his reward. And one day another messenger will be chosen to replace Kneiss.”
The booming voice of Senator Joseph Tompkins resonated over the PA system, and Volker had to raise his voice another notch to be heard. “This issue has become quite a boon for the senator, don’t you think? The church strongly encourages its members to contribute to his campaign fund every year, and what American doesn’t hold the issue of religious freedom close to his heart?”
22
BEAMON PULLED THE NOTEPAD OUT OF ITS paper sack and stuck it to the inside of his windshield with the suction cup on the back. Damn Volker was making him paranoid.
He groaned quietly as he forced his still-sore legs to jog through the snow toward the office of his condo complex. The light was still on, and Beamon could see that the property manager was stuffing papers into a large leather briefcase in preparation for calling it a day. He tossed a half-smoked cigarette—his first of the day—into a snowbank and slipped through the door.
“Tina! How goes it?”
She flashed him that broad smile full of straight white teeth that always seemed to take the chill off. She was such a cute little thing, just out of college and surrounded by the healthy glow that seemed specific to the inhabitants of America’s mountainous middle section.
“Mr. Beamon! What brings you out in this weather?”
“I was wondering if you could help me with a little information.”
“Have you been smoking?” she said, sniffing at the air.
“Just one,” Beamon said proudly, electing not to volunteer that he’d been in either Hans Volker’s car, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, or an airplane since eight that morning. All locales under the ruthless control of the smoking Nazis.
She looked at him with mock severity. “I’ll let it go. But just this once. You absolutely must quit. Okay?”
He gave a noncommittal nod.
“Okay. Now, what can I do for you?”
“I need some information on a few of the renters here.”
“Which ones?”
Beamon ran his finger along the full-color map of the complex taped to the counter. “Anyone from buildings A, C, F, or H.”
“That’s a lot of people,” she said, obviously anxious to leave for the day.
“Let me narrow it down. I’m not interested in any leases signed before I got here, so just people who moved in January fifteenth or later. And I’m not interested in anything shorter-term than, say, a month.”
“Well, you’re in luck,” she said, turning and crouching down next to a cardboard box on the floor. “I hate filing and tend to put it off forever.” She pulled out a stack of folders and began sorting through them, tossing a few on the counter but dropping most back in the box. When she was finished, she neatened the stack of five folders lying on the counter and centered them in front of her. “These are all the ones signed in January and February for those buildings.” She flipped open each folder and threw three of them back in the box. “These two are the only ones that aren’t short-term.”
Beamon opened the first one. A family of four had signed a one-year lease. The second was a single male. Robert Andrews. Also a year. Beamon ran his finger down to the “employment” line. It simply read “self.”
“Could I get copies of these, Tina?”
“Sure.” She looked at him slyly. “Fugitives from the law?”
Beamon laughed. “Nah. Just haven’t hit them up for the FBI raffle yet.”
As usual, the phone was ringing when he stepped through the door, leaving him no time to take off his shoes. There was a visible trail of mud and water emerging on his carpet.
“Yeah. Hello,” he said, grabbing the phone “Mark! It’s Chet. Man, I’ve been trying to reach you all day! I thought you were supposed to be back at two.”
“It was a more elaborate trip than I bargained for. What’s up?”
“Hey, have I ever told you about that friend I have at the coroner’s office? Susan Moorland? You know, the girl I went to school with.”
Beamon thought for a mo
ment, but his brain was already in shutdown mode. He just wanted to get into his beer rations and then into bed. “Sure,” he lied. “Seems like you’ve mentioned her.”
“Well, she called me this morning. Apparently she helped do the work on Jennifer Davis’s parents when they came in. She wants to talk to us about it.”
Beamon peeled off his parka and cradled the phone with his shoulder. “I’ve read the report, Chet— and we both saw the bodies. If she wants to make an amendment, that’s what fax machines are for.”
“She didn’t ‘do the report, Mark. Her boss did. And she disagrees with his conclusions—strongly, judging from her phone call. I guess he’s normally pretty receptive to what she has to say, but this time he freaked out when she contradicted him. I can pretty much guarantee she isn’t going to put anything in writing.”
Beamon sighed. “Let me guess. She wants me to haul my ass out there in the middle of the night and stand around in a refrigerator with a bunch of corpses.”
“Uh, yeah. Tonight, actually. I know how you feel about morgues, but she’s got the bodies there still and she can’t keep losing their paperwork forever. Come on, Mark—meet you at the back door at nine? Please?”
Beamon rubbed at his eyes. He was dying to say no. Michaels and his little friend had undoubtedly tripped over a molehill and built it into a mountain while he was in D.C. But he knew that the kid would be devastated if he passed. “All right. You win. Nine o’clock. Anything else?”
“Uh, I don’t think so. No, wait. I got the stuff you wanted on Jennifer’s adoption. Nothing very interesting—quick and easy. She was only at the foster home for a couple of days when the Davises started paperwork.”
Beamon perked up a bit. “Really? Now, how does that work? Is it like buying a car? When the foster home gets in something they think you’d like they give you a call?”
Michaels laughed. “You make it sound so cheap. I don’t know if that’s how it usually works, but it’s not the way it went in this case. The Davises hadn’t ever tried to adopt before.”
Beamon nodded into the phone. “The ever- present impulse purchaser.”
“You’re a sick man, Mark. I don’t know why I hang out with you.”
“I sign your paychecks.”
23
BEAMON STAMPED HIS FEET LOUDLY ON the icy concrete and thrust his hands deeper into the pockets of his parka. The mercury was down around zero, but on the bright side, the cold was keeping any strange smells from escaping the dumpster they were using as a windblock. No telling what those creepy coroners threw in there.
“Jesus Christ, Chet,” Beamon said, staring at the firmly locked side door to the newly constructed Flagstaff morgue. “If I knew we were going to spend a couple of hours out here I would have brought along a couple of Huskies and some firewood.”
Michaels put his finger to his lips, but Beamon refused to take the hint. He’d lost the feeling in his toes five minutes ago. “You know, Chet, they might let us in the front door, since I am, well, the goddamn head of the FBI here.”
“I told you, Mark,” Michaels said in an exaggerated whisper. “Susan’s really going out on a limb here. She already wrote a contradictory report and her boss went nuts and threw it in the shredder. If he knew she’d called us she’d probably lose her job.”
“Uh-huh,” Beamon growled as he dug Robert Andrews’s lease agreement out of his pocket and handed it to Michaels. “Get me what you can on this guy, Chet. Nothing fancy, just a quickie.”
Michaels tried to read it, but the dim glow provided by the ice-covered lamp above the door made it impossible. He stuffed it in his coat. “What is it?”
“Probably nothing. A guy leasing a condo near mine. Oh, see if you can get some background on a Sara Renslier. Apparently she runs Kneiss’s church. Again, nothing fa—”
The metal on metal sound of a deadbolt sliding back, followed by a blast of warm air, interrupted him. He squeezed past a slightly startled young woman without a word and into the relative warmth of the building.
“Mark Beamon, “ he said quietly, holding out his hand. She took it as Michaels slipped through the doorway and closed it behind him.
“I’m sorry you had to wait out there,” she said, already starting down the hall. “Some of the people in the office decided to stay late. Follow me, and please be as quiet as possible.”
The initial warmth Beamon had felt seemed to fade as they hurried deeper into the building—though he assumed it was just his imagination. With all the cigarettes, straight bourbons, and chili dogs he’d consumed in his lifetime, morgues tended to put a little too much perspective on things.
The woman in front of him stopped short as the hall came to a T, and Beamon watched as she poked her head around the corner and peered down the hall. She was small—no more than five-three—with long dark hair tied in a ponytail that was pinned under the top strap of the green apron she wore. Something about her reminded him of Carrie. Maybe it was the purposeful stride, or.
“We’re going to go left here, Mr. Beamon. It’s possible that the night watchman could come by. If you hear him, just duck into one of the rooms.”
As she moved out into the hall, Beamon leaned in close to Michaels. “I’m having real dignity problems with this, Chet.”
The young agent grinned silently back at him and tiptoed out into the hall at Susan’s “all clear” signal. He looked like he was having the time of his life. Real cops-and-robbers stuff.
Fortunately, the rest of their journey was a bit less cloak-and-dagger, and in three minutes Susan was locking the door to the examination room behind them.
“All right. We made it!” Michaels gushed.
Susan took a deep breath and let it out loudly. “Sorry about the melodrama, guys. But this could get me in a lot of trouble.”
Beamon hopped up onto the hard slab of the examining table and scanned the grid of metal doors covering the wall to his left. “We appreciate the risk you took, Susan,” he said without enthusiasm. She couldn’t possibly have been more than a year out of college. This was starting to look like an exhausting waste of time. “What have you got for us?”
She walked over to the wall of drawers and pulled out two of them, then unzipped the bags containing the bodies of Eric and Patricia Davis. From his position on the table, Beamon could see the blood-matted hair dried to their scalps and black stitching left by the coroner.
He stuffed a piece of gum in his mouth as Michaels approached the bodies and looked down at them. To his credit, the young agent managed to look somber and to stifle the cry of “cool!” that Beamon could tell was trying to bubble to the surface.
“I believe that the autopsy report you read was colored by the facts of the case,” Susan said.
“How so?” Michaels said, still struggling to sound the calm professional. Beamon picked up a styrofoam head off the table next to him. It had what looked a bit like a shish kebab skewer stuck all the way through it, beginning under the chin.
“I think we should just have the bodies dropped off and be left to our own conclusions,” Susan explained. “Having the facts of the case just creates preconceived ideas about cause of death.”
Beamon looked back at the two pieced-together corpses, then at the young professionals hovering over them. “Are you going to tell me that the cause of death wasn’t gunshot wounds, Susan?”
She shook her head. “No, it was definitely gunshot. But I think there are some pretty surprising indications about the gunman that didn’t make it to the report.”
“You have my undivided attention, my dear,” Beamon said, hoping she’d move things along. He had just realized that he’d been going nonstop for almost twenty-two hours.
Susan walked over to a large chalkboard on the wall and pointed to a drawing depicting two stick figures. One was aiming a crudely rendered handgun at the other. There was a dotted line drawn from the gun through the victim’s head.
“From what I can piece together,” she tapped the board,
“this is what happened to Patricia Davis.” Beamon shrugged and nodded.
“Now, as you probably noticed from the autopsy report, Mr. Davis was only five-eight, and Mrs. Davis was taller—five-ten. Now, judging from the powder burns on the side of Mrs. Davis’s head, we can infer that the gun was approximately one foot three inches from her head when it was fired. Based on this and the angle of the bullet’s trajectory, we can calculate that the killer had a shoulder height of four feet eight inches.”
Beamon scowled and jumped off the table. He picked up a piece of chalk and continued the dotted line through the killer depicted on the board and drew another stick figure, shorter and farther away. “Come on, Susan, that powder burn stuff is voodoo. You could be off six inches one way or another. It could have been a shorter guy farther away, or a taller guy closer.”
She looked indignant. “I believe that my calculations are quite precise, Mr. Beamon. But even if I’m off your six inches, I think we can be fairly confident that the perpetrator was shorter than Mrs. Davis.”
Beamon looked into her face and, seeing the steady stare and the set of her jaw, sat back down on the table, scratching the back of his head. “Okay, Susan. I’ll give you that one. Why? Because I have no idea where you’re going with this.”
She gave him a polite smile and picked up the styrofoam head that he had been playing with earlier. “This shows the angle of the bullet that killed Mr. Davis.”
She pulled a rather realistic-looking plastic pistol out of one of the pockets of her apron and handed it to Michaels. “Okay, Chet. I want you to shoot me, just like this.” She pulled a matching skewer out of her apron pocket and held it up to her head, mimicking the angle of the one in the styrofoam facsimile.
Michaels stood in front of her and stuck the plastic gun under her chin. Because of their height differential, he couldn’t get anywhere close to the almost vertical bullet trajectory. Instead, the gun was aimed at a severe angle that would have sent the bullet out of the back of her head.
She stepped up on a small overturned crate that she had obviously put there for the purpose. “This makes me roughly Mr. Davis’s height.” The angle moved closer, but was still significantly off.
