by Kyle Mills
“So what are we going to do about it?”
Beamon looked up from the drawer and into the innocent face of Chet Michaels. “Nothing. I’ve been suspended. It’s over.”
“Suspended? No way! They can’t do that! You’re the best we’ve got. Everybody knows that.”
“Thanks, Chet. I appreciate that. I really do,” Beamon said, standing and pulling his coat off the back of his chair. “I guess I’ll see you around.”
“Come on, Mark, you know the church is involved. We can’t give up now.”
“Finding Jennifer isn’t my job anymore, Chet. And it’s not yours, either—Layman’s going to take this one.”
“But he won’t—”
“Chet! Let it go. There’ll be other cases. If you don’t screw up here, you’ll still be around to solve them.”
“It’s not just a case, Mark. Have you forgotten Jennifer? What about her?”
Beamon shrugged and picked the box up off the floor. “What about her? Wake up, Chet. I’m just in this for the game. And I lost.”
42
BEAMON PINNED THE BOX FULL OF HIS PER sonal effects against the wall and struggled to get his keys out of his pocket. He glanced back over his shoulder at the condo inhabited by Robert Andrews, his church-appointed spy. The window looked the same as it always did, curtains pulled to within a couple of inches of being fully closed, interior dark.
There was one change worth noting, however. Andrews was standing on the walkway that ran along the front of his building, leaning casually against the railing and staring right at him.
Beamon was too far away to read the man’s expression, but his stance spoke volumes. The church was letting him know that they were responsible for his current situation. That they had filed down his teeth to the point that they didn’t even need to hide their presence anymore.
Beamon turned his key in the lock and threw the door open, sending a shower of snow and ice onto his carpet when it slammed against the wall. He dropped the box on top of the Davis case files covering his sofa and pulled an unopened bottle of bourbon from the top of it.
The familiar weight of it wasn’t as comforting as he thought it would be, but he still pulled what was left of his beer stash from his refrigerator and dumped it ceremoniously into the trash.
He grabbed the carton of cigarettes lying on the counter and dropped into a chair, unscrewing the top of the bottle with one hand and punching the remote next to him with the other. The church’s channel came to life on the screen with a young woman professing how Kneiss’s bible had changed her life. He lit the first of what he hoped would be many cigarettes and watched the smoke curl through the virgin air of his condo.
It had changed his life, too.
He’d always pushed the envelope at work and it had hurt him—personally and professionally. But that had been his choice—to never move very far up in the ranks, to work for men and women whose abilities were inferior to his, to be bounced around from office to office, state to state.
He’d managed to find a delicate but generally durable balance between his often self-destructive impulses and his ability to get the job done faster and more efficiently than anyone else. It was that balance that had allowed him to keep his job. And it was that balance that Sara Renslier had managed to disrupt.
She’d done a hell of a job, too. Not only was he most likely facing early retirement, but he was going to leave the Bureau under a black cloud that would follow him for the rest of his life. It seemed reasonable to expect that the lucrative private-sector job he’d need to feed himself in retirement wouldn’t be forthcoming.
“You want fries with that?” he said to the empty room, raising his glass in salute to nothing in particular. Never too early to start training for a new career.
His thoughts turned to Jennifer Davis as he took his first slug of bourbon since arriving in Arizona. He was dead sure now that the theory that had seemed so farfetched to him at first was correct. Sara Renslier was not going to allow a fifteen-year-old orphan to take her church from her, to strip her of the power that she had spent twenty-five years acquiring and seemed to wield so effortlessly. And if he accepted that fact, then Jennifer had a real problem. Either she was already dead—the granddaddy of all problems, and one historically difficult to fix—or Sara had managed to convince the Elders of the church that Jennifer was the next Messenger. If that was the case, she was going to get rid of the kid in some kind of bullshit religious ceremony that would assure Sara continued control over the church for life.
Beamon downed another slug, feeling the alcohol begin to work its way into his mind. The beer- only diet he’d been adhering to seemed to have wreaked havoc on his tolerance. But then, it was probably good to be a cheap drunk when your career- prospects were looking this bleak.
He decided that if Jennifer was already dead, the church would have stuffed her body in a chuckhole somewhere in Outer Mongolia by now and Sara would be making a real show of cooperating with him, knowing that without a body, he couldn’t do shit.
But she wasn’t cooperating. She was aiming the church’s entire arsenal at him—a senior FBI man—and in doing that, taking a hell of a risk. No, they were playing for time. He looked at the calendar on his watch. Eleven more days.
And that brought up another interesting, but ultimately depressing point. When Good Friday— and Jennifer—had come and gone, Sara sure as hell wasn’t going to wait around for him to gather his notes and write a book. No, once that little girl’s body was safely stowed, it would be time for him to slip on the ice and crack his skull or to have some equally mundane, yet fatal, accident.
There was a knock at the door, but Beamon ignored it and worked on the solution to his problem. How the hell was he going to find Jennifer in the next eleven days? He took another gulp from his glass and felt the liquid burn down to his stomach, then reverse its course and go straight to his head.
His front door opened a crack, creating a bright swath of light that illuminated the curling smoke drifting through the gloom.
“Mark?” Carrie’s reddish-brown head snaked into the room. “There you are. Why didn’t you answer?”
Beamon lit another cigarette with the embers of the old one. “What’re you doing home in the middle of the day, Carrie?”
He turned back to the TV as Carrie closed the door quietly behind her. A well-dressed young man was asking for donations to buy food for the starving children from one of those starving-children countries.
“Chet called me and told me what happened. He’s really worried about you, Mark.”
Beamon let his head loll back on the chair as he remembered the look on Michaels’s face when he’d left him standing in his office. What he’d said to him about only being in it for the game had been pretty harsh, but what choice did he have? The kid was too damned ready to get dragged down with him.
“Are you all right?”
“It’s not as grim as it sounds, Carrie,” he lied. “Just politics, you know.”
She moved the box containing most of his life and sat down on the arm of the sofa. “Switching from beer to liquor isn’t going to help your case any,” she said, nodding toward the bottle in his hand.
He laughed bitterly. “My strict program of self- improvement doesn’t seem to have done a whole hell of a lot of good. I figure, why close the gate after the horse has bolted?”
She was silent for a moment and then said, “You didn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t remember you asking one.”
“Are you all right?”
“Sure. I’m fine. Things like this happen.”
She looked at him compassionately. “You’ve never married, have you, Mark?”
“Excuse me?”
“Married. You never married. Why?”
Beamon shrugged, wondering if that was kind of a bizarre change of subject or if he was just more buzzed than he thought. “I guess I never found the right woman. I’ve had a career that’s pretty much been on
e crisis after the other. There just hasn’t been much time.”
“You’ve given a lot to the Bureau. What is it now? Fifteen or twenty years of putting it before everything else. And now the Bureau’s turned its back on you. That must be hard.”
Beamon grinned and shook his head. “Jesus, Carrie. Now I am depressed, do you have a rope on you? I thought psychiatrists were supposed to make you feel better.”
“That’s a myth, I’m afraid. We help people identify their problems and then we force them to confront them.”
Beamon’s slightly fogged mind conjured up the pale, expressionless face of Sara Renslier. “Oh, I’ve identified my problem, Carrie. I just haven’t figured out a way to confront it and come away with my skin.”
She walked over and knelt by his chair. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
He put down the bottle and ran his hand gently through her hair. “Not right now. I just need to sit here and think for a while. We’re still going out tomorrow, though, right? We definitely need to talk.”
She pressed his hand against her cheek. “I guess you’re going to want me to pay for dinner now, huh?”
43
“WE’RE GOING TO GET THOSE SONSOFBITCHES for you, boy,” Jack Goldman shouted, swinging his cane wildly to punctuate his point and inadvertently knocking over a stack of books next to him.
“Would you be careful with that thing! I’ve got expensive equipment here!” Ernie hollered back at him.
“Come on, guys. Calm down,” Beamon said, trying to bring the noise in the room to a level that wouldn’t split his head open. He adjusted his sunglasses on his nose and began restacking the books at Goldman’s feet, trying to ignore the nausea gripping him and the fact that he was the only member of his “team” who was capable of completing this simple task.
“If this is your new FBI,” Goldman continued in a quieter voice, “you can have it. When Hoover was alive, they wouldn’t begrudge a man a drink! Now all they want to do is hire a bunch of pansies who aren’t afraid to cry and then send ‘em to sensitivity training. No one would’ve dared—”
“Where’s your bathroom?” Beamon asked, cutting Goldman off before he got too warmed up to his subject.
Ernie pointed behind him. “Down there, your first right.”
She looked a bit confused as he sat down and dug a handful of Advils from his pocket. His stomach rolled over at the prospect of sending anything down to it, but he forced a couple of tablets anyway. “Don’t need it now,” Beamon explained to her. “Just wanted to get a fix on it.”
“Drinking never solved anything, Mark.”
Beamon let out a short, painful laugh. “I said the same thing to Mr. Goldman here nearly twenty years ago.” He looked up at the old man. “You remember what you told me?”
“I told you that sobriety never solved anything, either.”
“That’s right.”
Goldman waved his cane around again, but this time in a more controlled pattern. “It’s time to get off our asses, Mark. We’re letting ourselves get screwed here.”
“The suspension’s done,” Beamon said. “It is what it is. They’re trying to get me to take my eye off the ball.”
“Jennifer,” Ernie said.
Beamon nodded. “The FBI won’t be pursuing the church angle, so they have no chance of getting her back before her time’s up. We’ve got to do it. I’m open to suggestions as to how.”
Ernie leaned forward in her wheelchair as far as her bulk and the straining banana-print fabric containing it would allow. “The church doesn’t have that many places where they could be holding someone against their will, Mark. Maybe you could search them.”
Beamon shook his head. “I can pretty much guarantee you that Jennifer’s being held at Kneiss’s ompound, Ernie. I don’t think we need to look any further than that.”
“Then why don’t we—”
“How?” Goldman cut in. “I looked at that place. It’d take an army to get in there with all that security.”
“Mr. Goldman’s right, Ernie. There’s no way in there. Do you think they might move her? If we’re right, don’t you think Sara would have to invent some kind of ceremony for her death? Where would they do something like that?”
Ernie shook her head. “There’s no one place, Mark. The chapel in the compound would be as good a place as any.”
“I doubt they’d dispose of the body on Kneiss’s property,” Goldman said. “Ground’s frozen anyway. Maybe we could get them red-handed when they bring her body out Easter weekend?”
Beamon stood and began pacing back and forth across the room, the motion settling his stomach a bit. “No. No way. I refuse to be responsible for this girl’s death. We’re going to get her before anything happens to her.”
“Then we’re back to Jack’s wiretap,” Ernie said.
That was exactly where they were, Beamon knew. He’d spent most of his career at the FBI being a pain in the ass, completely unconventional, and occasionally even sneaky. But he’d never done anything illegal. “How long, Mr. Goldman?”
“Now you’re talkin’, son. You and me, tomorrow night. It’ll be fun.”
Beamon unbuckled his seatbelt and leaned out the car window to get a better look at the screen of the cash machine. It was heavily overcast, but he was still unwilling to take off his sunglasses and that was making it even more difficult to read the small letters.
UNABLE TO PROCESS TRANSACTION
He tried again, with the same result.
Beamon pulled his car into a space close to the door of the bank and went inside. He walked down the long line of teller windows and slid his ATM card to a young girl with bright pink barrettes in her hair. “I seem to be having some trouble making a withdrawal from your machine. Could you check my account for me?”
“Of course.” She held the card up and examined it carefully. “Sometimes the magnetic strip on the back of these things gets messed up. Do you keep it in the little sleeve?”
He shook his head as she punched his account number into her terminal. An expression of mild confusion spread across her face as she looked at the screen, giving Beamon a not-so-unexpected sinking feeling.
“This is kind of weird,” she explained. “You’re showing a zero balance. Could you hold on a second?”
She hopped off her stool and hurried to an older woman standing at the end of the counter. The woman returned with her and, with a brief smile acknowledging Beamon’s presence, began punching buttons on the keyboard.
“Could I speak to you over here, please, sir?” she said after less than a minute. Beamon followed her to a deserted area at the edge of counter.
“Mr. Beamon, your accounts have been liened by the IRS. They’ve ordered us not to accept any further transactions on any of your accounts.”
Beamon felt his jaw tighten and he closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, the woman had stepped back a couple of feet.
“I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do,” she said nervously. “Except give you the number of the local IRS office so you can get this straightened out.”
Beamon walked out of the building to his car, looking carefully around him at the people in the parking lot. He was sure he hadn’t been followed to Ernie’s house, but now, in this busy part of town, it was possible that they could have reacquired him.
Satisfied that he wasn’t the subject of any undue attention, he reached under the seat and ran his fingers along the envelope containing the five thousand dollars he’d withdrawn last week. All the money he had in the world now.
He wondered if he’d get a chance to spend it.
44
BEAMON STRAIGHTENED HIS TIE NERVOUSLY and then forced his hands to his sides and tried to look casual. If someone had bet him that he’d one day dread a date with Carrie Johnstone more than any he’d ever had, he’d have lost a lot of money.
Despite a substantial effort on his part, Beamon hadn’t been able to come up with a single credible lie as to why
he had to stop seeing her for a while. It looked like he was going to have to fall back on a rough approximation of the truth and hope he didn’t scare her off. That is, if this morning’s newspaper article hadn’t already done that for him.
Beamon knocked again, this time a bit harder. Emory wouldn’t be asleep this early—Carrie was probably in the back with a blow dryer running or something.
“Come on, Carrie,” he said to himself. It was starting to get cold, and he was getting more nervous by the minute.
Carrie finally answered the door dressed in an old pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, just as he raised his hand to knock again.
Beamon pointed to a splotch of faded paint on the sweatshirt. “I was suspended with pay, Carrie. I was actually planning on springing for a nice restaurant.”
She remained silent and took a step back in a way that was clearly not an invitation.
Beamon noticed that her eyes were tinged slightly pink. The aftermath of tears that had recently dried up. “Carrie. Are you all right? Did something happen to Emory?”
His words seemed to sting her. More than that, actually. They seemed to stagger her. She reached down to the small table next to the door and picked up something that looked like a business card.
“Carrie, what’s wrong with you?”
In answer to his question, she held the card out to him at arm’s length, tensing visibly when he reached for it.
“What is this?” Beamon asked, looking down at the clean white card with the words Child Safety Administration printed on it in authoritative black letters.
“Two men came here today,” she said in a voice so strange that Beamon had to look up to make sure she was actually the one speaking. “They told me that you’re being investigated for child molestation.”
Beamon felt his heart twitch as a quick burst of adrenaline surged through him. He started to take a step toward her, but stopped when she moved back again. “Carrie, this is bullshit. Look, I’m investigating a very powerful organization and they’re doing everything they can to discredit me. I was going to tell you about it tonight.” He held up the card. “I mean, Jesus Christ, there’s not even a phone number on this …” He let his voice trail off. She wasn’t listening. The tears he had thought were exhausted earlier started to shimmer in her eyes again and he remembered. She’d left her daughter with him.
