by Kyle Mills
Beamon caught the phone she tossed him and put it to his ear. “Hello? You still there?”
“Mark! I’ve been trying to reach you! Where have you been? And who was that?”
“I’ve been around, D. Enjoying my time off, you know?”
“Have you heard what’s been happening here?” she said. Her voice echoed slightly. Because she had cupped a hand around the mouthpiece of her phone, Beamon guessed.
“No, what?”
Jennifer looked like she was getting impatient and Beamon flashed her a quick smile.
“Mark, they’re talking about going public with the fact that they’re looking for you. We’re talking APB. The director’s flying down personally to meet with Layman.”
D. really was the ultimate secretary. If a clerk at headquarters got a paper cut, she knew about it the same day.
“When?”
“The APB? There’s no decision yet, just talk. The director’s coming in on the first, though. I think if Layman doesn’t have something by then, you can count on this thing going public that day. What did you do? You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve been hearing.”
“Oh, I probably would. What time are Layman and the director meeting?”
“I don’t know. Morning. Mark, what’s going on? Are you all right?”
“Sure, fine. Hang on a sec, would you? Someone wants to talk to you.”
Beamon tossed the cell phone back to Jennifer.
“Hello? Yes, ma’am. I just wanted to ask you, is that Mark Beamon? Uh-huh. You’re sure. Okay. And what’s his job there exactly? He is? Thanks. ‘Bye.”
She turned off the phone and slumped into the chair behind her, laying the gun carefully on the floor.
Beamon leaned forward. “Smart, Jennifer. Very smart. I take it I’ve checked out to your satisfaction?”
She seemed to have used up the last of her strength and bravery to grab the gun and confirm his identity. Her head went forward to her knees and her entire body shook as she began quietly sobbing.
Beamon wasn’t sure what to do. He got up and knelt down in front of her. “It’s okay, Jen. You’re okay now. You’re out of there.”
She threw her arms around his neck and pulled him to her.
“Uh, hey, come on. Don’t cry. I’m depressed enough already,” he said, patting her on the back tentatively.
“They were going to kill me, Mr. Beamon!” The words came out in jumbles when she momentarily caught her breath. “They kept me in this room, and I was all alone and they wouldn’t let me out. They were going to kill me!”
She used the sleeve of her sweatshirt to wipe at her running nose and then suddenly jerked back from him. “What day is it?”
“Tuesday. Tuesday the twenty-fifth.”
She pushed him away, jumped out of the chair, and slammed her back against the far wall. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”
“Jennifer, calm down. What’s wrong?”
“It isn’t over. She won’t stop. It’s not time yet.”
Beamon stood and led her to the couch. “Good Friday?”
She nodded. “My grandfather, he … he wanted me to be in charge of the church. But she lied to them. She wants to kill me so it… it’s hers.”
“Who’s ‘she’? Sara?”
Jennifer nodded again.
“It was a religious thing, though, wasn’t it?” Beamon said. “Albert—your grandfather—died too soon and she was able to use that to justify killing you. She said that you were the new Messenger and had to ascend in his place, right?”
She didn’t seem to be paying attention to what he was saying. Her head was moving from side to side as though the church’s forces were going to materialize from the walls at any minute. Hell, maybe they were.
“Jennifer, is what I just said right?”
“Yeah.”
He reached out and gripped her shoulders. “Okay, then. Cheer up. All we have to do is keep you safe till midnight Friday; then you’ll be useless to them, right? That’s only a couple of days—no problem.”
He tried to keep his tone light and to make sure none of his doubts shone through.
“Promise?” Jennifer said.
“Promise. You want something to eat? I’ve got Cocoa Puffs.”
“That stuff’s just a bunch of sugar,” she said, her eyes moving from the door to the window and back again.
He opened the refrigerator. “Well, I’ve got hot dogs. But no buns.”
“I guess I’ll have the cereal.”
“I love this stuff,” Beamon said as he grabbed the box out of a cabinet. “Cuckoo for it.” She actually almost smiled at that.
“Do you know anything about computers, Jen?” She nodded.
“Why don’t you see what you can do with the one over there while I whip this up.”
“What do you want me to do?” she said, sitting down in front of the screen and tapping the mouse.
“Check for voice messages and e-mail.”
“Why don’t I just make the cereal? You know where everything is in here.”
“Actually, I barely even know how to turn the thing on. It’s not mine. I was kind of hoping you could figure out how to work it.”
“Whose computer is it?” she said, looking a bit nervous again.
“A friend’s.”
“Where is he?”
“He had to go home. His father’s been sick for years and he took a turn for the worse a couple of days ago,” Beamon lied.
She looked up at him for a moment and then turned back to the screen. A few moments later, recorded phone conversations were playing over the speakers.
“Hey! That’s me!” Jennifer said when the recording of her call to the Colorado Cyclist came on. Her smile faltered when she heard herself scream and the sound of the brief struggle before the phone went dead.
Beamon laid the bowl of cereal down next to the computer and pulled up a box to sit on. The messages—recordings of the church’s phone tap, actually—were still playing, but he wasn’t really expecting anything interesting. They seemed to be pretty careful about using the phone.
“What about the e-mail?”
Jennifer clicked on a mailbox icon and the sound of dialing momentarily drowned out the conversation playing over the speakers.
“Seven messages,” she said, clicking on the first.
It came up a jumble of letters and characters.
“It’s encrypted, Mr. Beamon.”
“Call me Mark.”
She looked over at him, a dribble of chocolaty milk running down her chin. “You don’t look like a Mark. You look like a Mr. Beamon.”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself. WrathofGod.”
“What?”
“The encryption key. WrathofGod. One word, the ‘W’ and the ‘G’ are capitalized.”
A moment later the e-mails began rolling off the printer.
The first six were pretty mundane—financial directives, mostly. The last was a rather innocuous- looking note including Ernestine Waverly’s address. He wondered if she’d seen it. If she’d known they were coming. His cell phone had rung just before he arrived at the airport. Had it been her calling for help? And if he’d picked up, what would he have done?
“Are you all right, Mr. Beamon?”
“Sorry, I’m fine. Here’s the deal, Jennifer. We need to get you to the FBI. I think you’ll be better off with a hundred people watching you than just one.” He smiled. “Even one as gifted and handsome as myself.”
“But you’re going to go too, right? I mean, a hundred people didn’t find me—you did.”
She really was a clever kid. If they were all like her, he’d have actually considered having children. “I’ll be right there. I’m going to call a friend to help us and this afternoon you’ll have the whole FBI to keep an eye on you till Saturday. You won’t have a thing to worry about.”
She looked around her at the dingy apartment, gripping the table in front of her so tightly her knuckles turned white. “May
be we should just stay here. Maybe that would be better.”
“You’ve already been here too long, Jennifer,” Beamon said, dialing his cell phone. “There are a lot of people looking for you and eventually they’re going to find this place—”
“Hello?”
“Chet! Is that you?”
Michaels’s voice lowered into the same whisper D. had employed to talk to him. “Jesus, Mark. Where the hell are you? We got guys from Phoenix crawling all over the office trying to figure out how to find you.”
“I’ll bet. Listen up, Chet. Do you remember the time you and I went to talk to the guy about that embezzlement case you were working on?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“You remember where we ate?”
“Uh-huh. Mark, what the hell’s—”
“Meet me there at three. Leave like you always do for lunch. Drive around a little, get a bite, and make goddamn sure no one is following you.”
“But you—”
Beamon looked at his watch. “Why are you still talking? I’ve got eleven-fifty-six.”
He heard Michaels sigh over the phone. “I’m walking out the door.”
“Oh, and Chet?”
“Yeah?”
“There are three people who have helped me with the Jennifer Davis case. You’re the only one still breathing. You still want to come?”
There was a long pause over the phone. “You’re going to tell me what’s going on when I get there, right?”
“Yup.”
“I’ll see you in a few hours.”
Beamon turned off the phone and looked into Jennifer’s worried face. “If you want to get cleaned up or anything, you’d better get going. We’ve gotta get out of here.”
She stood and started for the bathroom.
“Hold on a sec,” Beamon said, picking up the shotgun and holding it up so that she could see it. He pointed to the slide under the barrel. “It’s really unlikely, but if anything should happen to me and you would have to actually fire this thing, remember that you need to pull this back or it won’t shoot.”
A look of horror spread across her face. “You mean all that time I was pointing it at you, it wouldn’t have even worked?”
“Strictly speaking? No. But it was a hell of an effort.”
60
IN THE TWO AND A HALF HOURS IT TOOK TO drive from Flagstaff to Phoenix, the outside temperature had risen nearly thirty degrees. The sun that Jennifer hadn’t seen in over a month was beating relentlessly on them through the car’s windshield, finally prompting her to pull Beamon’s parka off her bare legs and toss it into the back seat.
“Can we turn down the heat a little now, Jen?” he asked, wiping a bead of sweat from his upper lip.
“Okay.”
She leaned her head against the window and fixed her gaze on the desert landscape as it sped by, but didn’t really seem to see it. After perking up a bit at the apartment when she’d first discovered she was free, Jennifer seemed to have withdrawn into herself.
She probably wanted to talk, Beamon knew. About her parents, her treatment at Sara’s hands, her future. But he just didn’t know how to get things going. He sighed quietly and thought about Carrie. She’d know what to do. How to help.
“You’ll like Chet, Jen. He’s a lot younger and hipper than me. Just don’t mention his resemblance to Howdy Doody.”
She remained so still and silent that he wondered if she’d even heard him. Call that a swing and a miss.
Perhaps the direct approach might prove more effective. “Is there something out there that’s more interesting than me, or are you just contemplating life?”
He glanced away from the road for a moment and saw that she had turned from the window and was staring right at him. Her face had fallen into an expression of pain and sadness that someone her age shouldn’t have been able to produce.
“I was thinking about Eric and Patty.”
“Who?” Beamon said, and then remembered. “You mean your parents.”
She turned back toward the window. “I mean my keepers.”
Beamon wasn’t sure how to respond to that. He did have an unasked question that had been killing him since she’d regained consciousness, though. “What really happened that night?”
“He killed her,” she said simply.
“Who?”
“Eric.”
“Your father,” Beamon corrected again.
“He wasn’t my father. My father’s been dead for years. He was just some guy the church hired to watch me until it was time to kill me.”
Beamon wanted to just let the subject drop—he felt like he was forcing her to dredge up memories best left buried. Deep down, though, he knew it was probably better for her to let them out. “So your—I mean Eric—killed Patricia. And then he killed himself, didn’t he?”
She nodded.
“Damn,” Beamon muttered. There had always been a trace of doubt in his mind about that. He’d have to give that cute little lesbian coroner a firm pat on the back, if he lived to see her again.
“She just stood there, and he killed her,” Jennifer continued. “They didn’t care what happened to me. Neither of them.”
Beamon looked over at her again, amazed at how well she was holding up. He tried to put himself in her place, to imagine what it would be like to be fifteen years old and see something like that. “I don’t think that’s true, Jennifer.”
“You weren’t there. They gave him a gun. He could have stopped them, but he didn’t.” She turned back to the window. “He didn’t.”
“You’re angry right now. And you’ve got a right to be. But given some time, I think you’ll understand that there was more going on there than maybe you see right now.”
A bitter smile compounded the pain etched across her young features. “Patty used to use that on me. ‘You’ll understand when you’re older.’”
“I’m sorry to say, I’ve found that to be a myth. The years come and go and your perspective changes, but I’m not sure you really ever understand more.”
Beamon slowed the car and eased onto an off- ramp. “Your—sorry, Eric and Patricia—believed very strongly in God. They didn’t show you that part of their lives, but it was incredibly important to them. They believed that you were, well, almost divine. When they did what they did, in a way, they did it for you. They wanted you to leave them behind. To become more than they could ever be. I know it’s weird, but really it’s what all parents want for their children.”
“For some psycho bitch to kill them so she can keep her job?”
Beamon slowed the car a bit more and tugged on her arm so that she would meet his eyes. “I’ve spent the last month or so doing nothing but working on this case, Jennifer—I know more about it than anyone in the world, and I’ll tell you right now that your parents had no idea what Sara was planning. No idea.”
“Maybe they should have stuck around and tried to find out.”
The restaurant where Michaels was waiting, thankfully, was just ahead. His first foray into adolescent counseling seemed to have been an unsurprising bust. Probably better to change the subject before he did irreversible damage. “That’s it. The reinforcements should be just ahead.”
Jennifer started to look nervous. Panicked, almost. “Let’s forget this, Mr. Beamon.” She twisted around and looked through the rear window. “Please, let’s just turn around and keep driving.”
Beamon suddenly realized what was probably going through her head. Her parents had pawned her off on the church, and now he was going to pawn her off on the Bureau. “Jennifer, we’re less than three miles from one of the largest FBI offices in the country. I’m not just throwing you to the wolves here. They can protect you better than I can. And when you’re safe, I’m going to stick a knife so deep into Sara Renslier and her church that they’ll never be able to hurt you again. I’m doing the best I can.”
She grabbed his arm. “I want to stay with you. You can’t even run a computer. I could help.�
�
Beamon eased into the parking lot and spotted Michaels standing in the open door of his car. He pulled into the empty space next to the young agent and looked carefully around him. The lot was nearly full of cars but almost devoid of people. The restaurant’s lunch rush was probably pretty much over and dinner hadn’t yet begun. Most of the cars probably belonged to the patrons of the shops that were lined up neatly across the street.
Michaels’s eyes jerked to the left as Beamon stepped from the car.
Shit.
Beamon fell back into the driver’s seat, reached behind him and pulled his gun from the exposed holster in the small of his back, but it was too late. Two men with compact machine pistols held low had already stepped from opposite sides of an old panel van.
He looked behind him. Jennifer had slid from the seat and crammed herself in the small floor space in front of it. She was clutching at the armrest on the door, trying to hold it shut as a similarly armed man tried to open it. Beamon grabbed Jennifer under the arm and dragged her over the seats and out the driver’s-side door with him.
“I swear they didn’t follow me, Mark. They were already here when I got here.”
“Shut up,” the man Beamon’s gun was aimed at said.
“You shut up, fuckhead,” Michaels said angrily.
Beamon winced. That wasn’t productive. He felt Jennifer’s arms wrap around him. “Take it easy, Jen. We’re okay.”
That wasn’t entirely true, of course. The man who had been trying to get at Jennifer though the passenger-side door had circled around and now there were three men, spaced at about five-foot intervals, facing him. Michaels was between them, looking fantastically pissed off.
Beamon looked around him. There was one other person in the parking lot about fifty yards away, but she was oblivious to what was happening, more interested in getting her key into her trunk without having to put her packages down. If they had to, these guys could shoot him and Michaels, throw the girl in the van, and be two blocks away before anyone knew what had happened.
“You’re to come with us,” one of the men said.
Beamon adjusted his aim toward the man’s chest. He looked a couple of years older than the other two, but he probably still hadn’t seen his thirty-fifth birthday.
