by Kyle Mills
Normally, Beamon would have had to laugh at the sight of a tiny young woman holding a shish- kebab skewer to her head and being held at plastic gunpoint by a guy who looked like Richie Cunningham from Happy Days. But he was starting to get interested despite himself.
Michaels bent his wrist unnaturally but still wasn’t able to get the angle right before the butt of the gun hit Susan in the chest. He stepped back for a moment and circled around her. Holding the gun under her chin from behind put it at the correct angle.
Susan jumped down from the box. “Exactly what I came up with, Chet. It seems to me that the killer would have had to be standing behind Mr. Davis in order to produce the correct bullet trajeetory. I think you’ll agree that you wouldn’t want to be standing that close behind him when the top of his head came off.”
Michaels nodded vigorously.
“Are you starting to get interested yet, Mr. Beamon?”
“Mark, please.” He shrugged. “Interested might be too strong a word. Intrigued, maybe. For now, call me mildly attentive.”
She gave him a sly look and walked over to the two corpses protruding from the wall. “Come on over, Mark. I’d like you to look at something.”
Beamon jumped off his perch and walked slowly toward the corpses as Susan picked up Mr. Davis’s right hand and held it out toward him. She pointed to the pale skin between the dead man’s thumb and index finger. “See these parallel scratches here?”
Beamon pulled his glasses from his pocket and put them on. The scratches were small, but obvious when pointed out. He nodded.
“They precisely match the slide on a forty-five.”
She pulled out a tape measure from the seemingly inexhaustible pocket of her apron and ran it from Mr. Davis’s feet to his shoulder. The tape read four feet eight inches.
Beamon smiled. “Uh-huh.”
“Hold on, I’ve got one more thing.” She rushed into the attached office and came back with a diagram of a man standing slightly sideways aiming a gun directly out of the picture. There were various splotches drawn onto the man’s body in red. Each had a line going from it to some writing at the edge of the sheet. Beamon had no idea what it meant.
“I did some tests on the bloodstains on Mr. Davis. Many of them matched Mrs. Davis’s blood type. This diagram shows those findings. I think you’ll agree that the pattern is intriguing. Her blood is most prevalent on Mr. Davis’s right hand in the pattern that’s shown there.”
“Now we’re getting into some serious voodoo,” Beamon said.
She nodded her agreement. “There are other explanations. I really just did this test to see if it refuted the overall hypothesis.”
Michaels looked at the diagram with a confused expression. “I guess I’m just dumb, you guys. What overall hypothesis are we talking about?”
Beamon took a deep breath of stale, antiseptic air. “It seems that your friend here thinks Mr. Davis killed his wife and then committed suicide.”
“What? No way!”
“Why not?” Susan said confidently.
“Because it’s nuts, Susan. It doesn’t even come close to fitting into what we know.”
Beamon ignored the heated debate that started between them and picked up Eric Davis’s cold hand again. He hoped that on further inspection he could come up with a more plausible explanation for the marks. He couldn’t.
24
SARA RENSLIER LOOKED DOWN AT THE shriveled form of Albert Kneiss and then to the tank that fed his nearly paralyzed lungs oxygen. The room was almost completely dark. The large windows had turned to mirrors, vibrating with the low howl of the storm battering the world outside. Only the light from the heart monitor made it possible to see, casting a flickering glow over the bed and the man lying in it.
She watched silently as the shadows cast across his face shifted and his eyes opened. “Sara?”
She reached out and touched the old man’s cool, dry forehead. He looked so small now, the charisma that had made him such a powerful tool almost completely lost in his withered body.
“Don’t speak, Albert,” she said, running her hand along his scalp and through the few remaining tufts of hair clinging to it. She felt Kneiss’s eyes on her as she pulled a syringe from her pocket and removed the plastic cap covering the tip of the needle.
“What is it, Sara?” he whispered as she slid the needle into his IV tube.
In the semidarkness, she couldn’t see the fluid from the syringe make its way down the tube toward his arm, but she knew that it had reached his bloodstream when the slow rhythm of the heart monitor began to shudder and the old man began to jerk weakly. His right arm came to life, reaching for the IV needle taped into his veins, but Sara held it firmly in place.
“What … what are you doing?” he said, clawing pathetically against the back of her hand.
She knelt down and leaned in close to him. “The church has outgrown its living prophet, Albert. I need one now who can appear to its children in times of trouble. One that can appear to them on their deathbeds.”
The stimulant she had injected into Kneiss cleared his eyes as it began to overload what was left of the systems in his broken body. “What are you doing to me?” he repeated in a stronger voice.
“You’ve never understood, have you, Albert? You’ve never been able to grasp what the church has become. What I’ve made it.” A thin smile crossed her lips as she watched the old man struggle to control his ragged breathing enough to speak. “What could have possibly made you think I’d let you take it away from me?”
“What are you saying, Sara? You … you’ve been my most devoted pupil. You helped Jennifer. After my daughter died. You knew that she—”
“How can you be so naïve, Albert? Your daughter didn’t die. I killed her. She would have poisoned Jennifer against the church—made her useless to me.”
Kneiss’s heart rate notched higher. “No. No, you couldn’t have. You believe. I gave you my trust. My love.”
Sara gripped his arm tighter until she could feel the slight movement of the IV needle as it vibrated with the old man’s heartbeat. “I know you did, Albert. And I gave you what you most wanted—an audience.” A tear ran down his nearly paralyzed cheek and she wiped it away with her thumb. “I thought I needed Jennifer—that someday I might have to use her to help me maintain control of the church. But I already have control, don’t I? You gave it to me. She can only cause problems now, Albert. Confuse my followers.”
Kneiss was finding it increasingly difficult to speak. “You can’t. The others—they know about her. They won’t let you harm …”
“You still don’t understand, do you, Albert? You’re dying. Right now. Not on Good Friday. Now. What does that mean?”
He just stared up at her with that supernatural expression of pain and despair that had sucked in so many. The rock she’d built her church on.
“You know, don’t you, Albert? It’s in your Bible. Your brilliant Bible. If you die before Good Friday, your time as God’s Messenger is done.” She smiled. “And I’ve helped Him choose your successor.”
Kneiss’s hand closed on hers again, but she couldn’t tell if it was intentional or just the final random firing of his dying nerve endings. “No. Sara, you don’t know what you’re doing. There’s still time for you to stop this.”
“It’s your fault, Albert. If you had just slipped away quietly like you were supposed to, none of this would have to happen. But you didn’t, did you?”
“Not her, Sara,” he gasped. “Please.”
She felt his hand fall away from hers and his eyes fix on the ceiling above him. “There’s nothing that can stop it now, Albert. Your granddaughter will take your place on Good Friday—God’s new Messenger. I have a beautiful ceremony planned for her ascension. I think you’d approve.”
Sara released his arm and turned away, staring into the darkness of the room and listening to the increasingly erratic tone of the heart monitor. The church was hers now. Hers.
She hea
rd a low moan from behind her and turned to see Albert Kneiss struggling to lift his head one last time.
“I prayed for you, Sara. Just like I prayed for all the others.” He began to sink back onto the pillow. “But every time must have its Judas.”
The pulse of the heart monitor slowed, finally fading to the steady tone that signaled the end of the Messenger’s time on earth and a new era for her church.
25
MARK BEAMON TOOK ANOTHER SIP OF HIS coffee and continued to watch the young man through the window of the cafe. He was impeccably dressed—blue topcoat, white shirt, red-and-green- striped tie. And he had the look of clean-cut optimism Beamon had come to expect in the followers of Albert Kneiss. That confident but solicitous carriage that proclaimed, “I know something that you don’t.”
Beamon scraped up the last of the cream cheese that had dribbled from the bagel he had just wolfed down and popped it in his mouth. It wasn’t biscuits and gravy, but he was actually starting to get used to the things.
The young man’s pattern hadn’t changed since he’d taken his position on the sidewalk across the street almost an hour ago. Eye contact, a confident sentence or two, hand the pedestrian a pamphlet, then attempt to shake hands and engage them in conversation.
From the looks of it, he worked that comer regularly. He’d received and returned at least a hundred silent nods from the early-morning foot commuters, bantering with some he knew well, thanking those who refused a flyer, and giving an occasional impassioned speech to anyone who stopped and expressed interest.
He wasn’t doing too badly, either. In the last hour or so, three people had been interested enough to let him lead them through the stained-glass door of the Church of the Evolution bookstore/office behind him. Within a few minutes, he would reappear out front, but without the interested party.
Perhaps they had already been sacrificed in some hedonistic ritual that involved snakes and naked virgins? Only one way to find out. Beamon tossed back the rest of his coffee and went out through the doors of the cafe and into the cold Flagstaff morning. The clouds had parted and the sunlight was beaming through the thin mountain air with an almost tangible force. Beamon slipped on his sunglasses as he jogged across the street and began walking up the sidewalk toward the despicably enthusiastic young man.
“Have you read the latest on human evolution, sir?” he asked, establishing forcible eye contact.
Beamon stopped and took the proffered flyer. The first page was a glossy reproduction of the cover of a recent National Geographic containing a story relating to the anthropological discovery that many years ago, various species of humans shared the earth. Across the bottom a quote had been artistically superimposed on the cover:
Humanity’s path had become confused, with many species competing for the eye of the Lord. But it was only one, Sapiens, that had begun the journey toward enlightenment. God sent his Messenger to them, to teach them to see as He did.
NATURE 3:14
THE HOLY BIBLE/KNEISS EDITION
Beamon flipped through the pamphlet’s reproduction of the National Geographic article, now modified with occasional italicized passages from Kneiss’s Bible corroborating the theories described there.
“People laughed when they first read the New Bible, just like they mocked Jesus and his teachings. But now science is catching up with us, proving that our truth is the universal truth.”
The boy’s voice carried a deep sincerity, but Beamon suspected that if he were at a Kneissian recruiting station in New Zealand instead of Flagstaff, he’d be getting precisely the same well-thought-out spiel. It wasn’t cocky or condescending, it stayed cozy with the science that people had come to trust and rely on, and finally, it smoothly worked in Jesus so as not to scare off America’s devout Christian contingent.
“You know, I read something about this awhile back,” Beamon said in as earnest a tone as he could conjure up.
“Then you’re familiar with our beliefs, sir?”
Beamon shook his head. “Not really. I’m just visiting Flagstaff. I’m from Kansas City. I wish I could remember where I read …”
The boy stroked his chin thoughtfully. “There’s been a lot of publicity about this lately. Could have been almost anywhere. The fact that science has turned a hundred and eighty degrees to agree with the Bible isn’t a common occurrence.” He gave a short, self-assured laugh that made Beamon feel like he was in on the joke.
“So, Albert Kneiss wrote this stuff over fifty years ago?” Beamon said, looking down at the pamphlet.
“I’m really not as much of an expert as some of the people inside. If you’ve got a few minutes for a cup of coffee, I’m sure I can dig up someone who could answer your questions with a lot more authority than I can.”
Beamon shrugged. “Sure, I guess I have a minute.”
The boy grinned and led Beamon through a set of double doors and into the tastefully decorated outer office. “This gentleman would like to speak with someone about the article,” he said to the woman behind the counter and then turned back to Beamon. “I’m sorry, I forgot to ask your name.”
“Mark.”
He offered his hand. “Todd.”
Todd hung around and chatted until a woman came out and politely stood off to the side until Beamon finished what he was saying.
“Mark, this is Cynthia,” Todd said. “Cynthia, Mark.”
Beamon turned to the woman and took her hand. “Very nice to meet you, Cynthia.”
She was quite striking, with a long, straight nose and blonde hair covering her shoulders in a tumble that somehow didn’t look random. Just by looking at her, Beamon would have put her in her early thirties, but the way she carried herself made him adjust upward a bit.
She led him through the door of a spacious but cozy room full of antique furniture and pleasantly worn rugs and offered him a chair next to a roaring fire. As he settled into the soft leather, she slid a tray with two steaming mugs on it toward him. He ignored the cream and sugar on the platter as he reached for one of them.
“Me too,” she said- “I’d go intravenous if I could.”
Beamon smiled and took a sip. He expected it to be good, and it was. He pulled out a cigarette he had rolled at the bagel shop, more to see her reaction than anything else. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all.”
As he lit it, she opened a thick leather book and laid it on the table between them. “Would you care to sign our guest book?”
He hesitated, once again to judge her reaction. “I’d rather not. Not just yet.”
“That’s fine,” she said with an easygoing flair, closing the book and sliding it down next to her chair. “So, Mark, how familiar are you with our church?”
“Not very, Cynthia. I mean, I know the basics. That you believe Albert Kneiss is a messenger from God who comes down to earth every couple of thousand years to teach.”
“That about covers it. Want to join?”
They both laughed. Beamon was confident that if he had actually been there for the reason she thought, the remark would have done exactly what it had been designed to do—relieve any tension he might have felt.
“Seriously, you’re right,” she continued. “But in order for someone to teach, he or she has to take into consideration the abilities of the students. You don’t try to teach a toddler calculus.”
Beamon nodded his understanding, prompting her to go on.
“So when God’s word was first written down in a coherent way—in the original Bible—a lot of parables and analogies were used. God revealed of himself only what the people of that time could digest.”
The woman was starting to look a little peaked from his smoke, so Beamon tossed the cigarette into the fireplace. “Just can’t seem to completely kick the habit.”
“We have wonderful programs for that,” she said. “I’m told they have the best success rate of any in the world.”
Beamon took a sip from his mug, washing the taste of tobacco from his m
outh. “So the new Bible—your version—tells the whole truth. Throws out the superstition and cuts right to the chase. The nature of God, what He wants from us, why we’re here.”
She smiled engagingly and shook her head. “Oh, no. We’ve come a long way in the last two thousand years, but unfortunately not that far. We still aren’t prepared to fully understand God. Albert has simply given us God’s teachings in the current context, so that we can understand more about Him. In another two thousand years, Albert will be back, under another name, to explain as much as he can based on what we’ve learned over the next two thousand years.”
She was good. She exuded the calm confidence and sense of belonging that everyone was after. On another level, she was very attractive and roughly the right age for Beamon. He wondered if his spirit guide would have been some dashing hunk if he were a woman.
“I’ve read a few articles about your church in Germany. That they seem to think you’re breaking the law—some kind of threat.”
She looked sadly into the fire for a moment. “Obviously, the Germans have a poor history of accepting diverse faiths. Our followers have had to struggle there, it’s true. We’re giving them all the help we can, but as you know, not all countries put the same premium on freedom that we do.”
A perfect answer, Beamon concluded. It attacked the attacker instead of defending the victim and it brought up the rather intangible concept of freedom that was guaranteed to get any American’s red blood pumping.
“I have to admit, though,” she continued, “we are a pretty close-knit group. The church provides business networking, counseling if you need it, help for the needy, health care, and hundreds of other things. Do you have children?”
Beamon shook his head.
“Too bad. We’ve built some of the finest schools in the country. We’re really dedicated to education—probably more than anything else, we cherish that.”
