Murder on Capitol Hill (14 page)

There was no debate when the evening would end. Hughes had to leave to do his all-night show. Slumped in a chair, he asked Ginger to stay until he came back. She said she guessed not.

“You had your shot, you know,” he said as she took her sweatercoat from the closet.

“At what?”

“At me.”

“I’m sure I’ll live to regret it, Mr. Hughes… Well, thanks for the dinner, and don’t bother to get up. I can find the way.”

She rode the elevator to the lobby, nodded to the doorman and went out to the street. She’d been lucky enough to find a parking space only two blocks away and started to walk to it, in the direction of the Potomac and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts… She sensed that someone was walking behind her, looked over her shoulder and saw the figure of a man shrouded in shadow moving quickly toward her. She increased her pace with each step until she was about to break into a run.

“Ginger.”

The voice stopped her in her tracks. She turned… “Harold?”

“What were you doing in the Watergate?”

“I was… it’s none of your damn business. What are you doing, following me?”

“Of course not. I just wanted to see what was so important that you couldn’t see me.”

“Me? You were the one who said you needed space to get your head together about us. I don’t believe this. You were actually following me.”

“You’re crazy. I just happened to see your car and—”

“…and just knew that I was at the Watergate.”

“I was around and—”

“Get lost, Harold.”

“Please, Ginger, let’s talk. There are things I want to say to you.”

“Being followed, at my age.”

“I told you I wasn’t following you.”

“Look, I don’t want to see you again. Do you understand?”

He grabbed her arm, tried to pull her back in the direction they’d come from.

“Leave me alone, damn it.”

“Just an hour. I’ve thought things out and—”

She wrenched free of his grip and stormed off toward where she’d parked her car.

“What were you doing up there?” he called after her. “Who’d you see?”

“The Washington Redskins, all of them,” she said without looking back.

By the time she reached her car she’d softened some about Harold. Obviously he was jealous, which, after all, meant he cared a good deal. She’d think about that, and meanwhile decided she’d been too flip and mean with him about the Redskins. It was, though, a pretty good if nasty line…

She was half-smiling as she unlocked the car door,
slid behind the wheel, started the engine and checked her mirror to see if it was clear for her to pull away from the curb. It was. She stepped on the accelerator and eased into the street. She hadn’t gone ten feet when she realized that something was wrong. She got out and looked at the rear of the car. The tire on the driver’s side was completely flat.

“Damn,” she muttered, looking around for someone to help her. She went to the trunk and was about to open it when she noticed that the
other
rear tire was also flat.

This time her utterances were not as gentle. She realized she couldn’t leave the car in the middle of the street but didn’t want to drive on the flat tires. There was no choice. A few cars had already made wide circles around her, and one of the drivers had yelled something about women drivers who block traffic. Well, he knew what he could do.

She was about to get back into the car and go back to the space she’d just vacated when a man who’d been watching from the shadows of a building suddenly stepped out into the street, came up behind her and brought his fist down sharply across the back of her head. She fell to the pavement. He stepped over her, opened the car door, grabbed her oversized purse from the seat and ran up the street.

A woman who’d witnessed the attack ran to Ginger’s side. “Are you all right?” she asked as Ginger struggled to sit up.

“My head,” she said. “My God…”

“I saw it all,” the woman said as she helped her to her feet.

“Who did it?” Ginger asked.

“I couldn’t see his face, it all happened so fast.”

Ginger suddenly swayed and grabbed the woman for support. “My head,” she moaned.

The woman lowered her to the ground and told a small crowd that had gathered to call for an ambulance.

It arrived twenty minutes later.

The Center for Inner Faith consisted of a large main house and four outbuildings on sixteen acres of gently rolling farmland that sloped down to the banks of the Occoquan Creek. The land around the house was overrun with weeds and thickets. Bent, bare trees formed bizarre sculptures against a pewter sky.

A skinny yellow dog that had been asleep on the front porch raised its head and looked in the direction of Lydia’s car as it moved slowly up a dirt road toward the house. The road was pitted and scarred, and she had to be careful to avoid some of the larger holes.

A young man with a shaved head, wearing a soiled, long white tunic, had been sitting by a front window. He, too, saw her car, sat up and shifted a .22 caliber rifle from his lap to a more ready position.

Lydia stopped twenty yards from the house, turned off the ignition and took in her immediate surroundings. She was overwhelmed by the bleakness and desolation of it all. If the Center for Inner Faith were, indeed, a church, it was not exactly advertising
it. There were no signs, no crosses, no nothing but an old farm, its buildings weather-beaten, its land scarred by years of exposure and neglect.

As she got out of the car Lydia noticed the young man in the window. She clutched her briefcase beneath her arm and went to the porch. The dog did not growl, nor did it get up to greet her. It stayed where it had been sleeping, its head raised. It had a sad face, or was that her imagination?

“Hello there,” Lydia said as she climbed a decaying set of wooden steps. “Good boy.” Calm down, she told herself. She needed it more than the dog… wrong, he needed it too.

A low, guttural growl made her stiffen. “Easy boy, easy… me Lydia, you friend—”

The front door suddenly opened and the young man who’d been observing her stood just inside, the rifle hanging loosely from one hand. “Miss James?” he asked in a high-pitched voice.

“Yes.”

He stepped back to allow her to pass. She cast a quick, final glance at the dog and stepped inside. Immediately to the right was a large room furnished like an office. Logs burned brightly in a fireplace. A man sat behind an elaborately carved desk. He, too, had a clean-shaven head. He was considerably older than the one who’d let her in, and smaller. The massive desk dwarfed him even when he stood. “I’m Francis Jewel, Miss James. Please come in and warm yourself by the fire.”

She entered the room. Jewel extended his hand and she took it. The touch of him was not pleasant. His hand was small and cold; it felt like wax.

“Thank you for allowing me to come.”

“There seemed little choice,” he replied, pointing to a ladder-back chair next to the desk. “Would you care for coffee or tea? I’d recommend the tea. We make it with cinnamon, herbs and honey.”

“The tea sounds fine.” Jewel motioned to the young man at the door, then resumed his seat behind the desk. He leaned back, his tiny hands crossed on his chest, a weak smile on his lips. “Well, now, I suppose you’d like to see Mark Adam.”

Lydia nodded.

“I’ll have him summoned in a moment. Before I do that, however, I must ask whether your interest in him is solely because of his father’s death or because you have a parallel interest in our church.”

Lydia wasn’t sure what he meant and told him so.

“It’s a reasonable question, Miss James. After all, when you’ve tried to serve God for years despite vicious attacks by those who do not share your faith and who feel threatened by it, you tend to become… how shall I say it, you become gun-shy.”

Lydia crossed her legs. “I’m not threatened by your beliefs, Mr. Jewel. I’m here because of my work with a Senate committee charged with the investigation of Senator Caldwell’s murder. Any personal interest in your church, if there were any, would be based on curiosity.”

“You’ve read the untrue things said about us, I presume, heard them on television.”

“Some, yes.”

“And?”

“And how have I responded? Again, like most people. I do question some of the practices I’ve heard
about, the means of raising funds, the alleged control exerted over church members.” She almost said cult instead of church and was glad she hadn’t. She was also disappointed in herself that she’d so quickly been drawn into a discussion about the cult in the first place. “I really would rather not discuss your church, if it’s all right with you. That’s not my purpose here.”

“But you will take away with you certain impressions of us. I think it only fair that I have an opportunity as the executive director to present a more balanced picture… Oh, here’s our tea.” It was poured from an elegant silver teapot into antique china cups. Lydia tasted the tea, nodded her approval.

“I’m glad you like it, Miss James. That will be all, Richard.” The young man left the room, closing a set of sliding doors behind him.

“Now, Miss James, while we enjoy our tea and the fire, allow me to tell you a little about the Center for Inner Faith.
I
will tell you the truth. I hope you are ready to hear it.”

“I’m not sure it matters whether I am or not.”

Twenty minutes later he’d gone through what Lydia was certain was a canned speech, filled with positive images of The Center and its goals. He pointed out that cult members were in no way restricted in their movements. As long as they were faithful to the cult’s beliefs, he told Lydia, they were free, actually encouraged to mingle with the outside world and to carry their faith to others.

Lydia realized that he was at least technically correct
… members of the cult were often seen in town, handing out leaflets, stopping passersby to tell their story and, of course, to solicit funds. Physically, at least some of them seemed free. The extent of mental control was another matter, which she was tempted to raise but didn’t.

Jewel also said that he was only the administrative head of the church, and that its spiritual leader, the Reverend Sylvan Quarles, was the pivot point around which everything revolved.

Lydia knew about Quarles from what she’d read in the papers. He was in his late sixties, tall and charismatic, with a stentorian voice and flowery vocabulary, an impeccable dresser whose eyes, they said, blazed when he spoke. It was also said that he could mesmerize his audiences, although a psychiatrist friend had once explained to Lydia that the real power was within the listener. This psychiatrist used hypnosis in his practice for behavior modification, for smoking and obesity, and told Lydia that each person had an inborn capacity to enter a hypnotic trance. The ones with a high capacity were most easily persuaded. They tended to suspend critical judgment, surrender it, when confronted with an authority figure.

Throughout his lecture she nodded when appropriate, asked a few questions to clarify points even though she wasn’t interested in having them clarified, and patiently waited for him to finish so that she could get to Mark Adam Caldwell.

“Any questions, Miss James?” Jewel asked as he finished his spiel.

“No.”

“This administrative center is one of four sanctuaries in Virginia. We have centers in eleven other states, and have recently opened them in Germany and France.”

“That’s very impressive, and I might like to discuss it further with you at some later date, but I do have a time problem today. Could I please see Mark Adam Caldwell now?”

Jewel went to the door, said something to the young man, who’d kept a vigil in the hallway. Jewel returned to the desk and, moments later, Mark Adam entered the room. He wore the same sort of robe worn by the other young man, except that his was freshly laundered and ironed.

“Hello, Mark,” Lydia said, standing.

His face was blank as he took two steps toward her, extended his hand and gave her a single nod of his head.

“Sit down, Mark,” Jewel said. The boy took a chair on the opposite side of the desk and stared straight ahead, past Jewel and out a window.

“I told you that Miss James wanted to speak to you,” Jewel said, “and I agreed that she could. I’ll be here with you all the time.”

It appeared to Lydia that Mark Adam was either drugged or in some unexplained state of altered consciousness. She felt as though she’d entered a mental institution and was visiting a patient. “How are you?” she asked Mark.

Slowly he turned his head and looked at her, as though to get a fix on her identity, then said in a near monotone,
“I’m very well, thank you. I’m very happy. How are you?”

“I’m fine, Mark. It’s good to see you again.”

He returned his attention to the window.

“Mark, are you feeling well?”

“Mark is doing wonderful work here at the center,” Jewel said. “He’s found an increasingly close relationship with God and serves him with all his spirit. Isn’t that right, Mark?”

“Yes. God gives me the day and night, and I use them for his glory.”

Lydia cleared her throat, opened her briefcase and pulled out a yellow ruled legal pad on which she’d written the questions she wanted to ask. “Mark, as you may know, I’ve been appointed special counsel to a Senate committee to investigate your father’s murder. That’s why I’m here. You’ll be called to testify before the committee sometime in the near future, but I wanted to have a chance to talk with you first. You don’t have to, you know. If you’d like, you can ask for a lawyer to be with you whenever you say anything about your father’s death.”

“I know that.” He said it with more animation than before—a sullen-voiced animation.

“I discussed it with Mark,” Jewel said, “and he realizes his rights. We have his best interests at heart here. We’re all one large and loving family.”

Lydia ignored Jewel. “Mark, do you know anyone who might have wanted to kill your father?”

He shook his head.

She hesitated, then asked matter-of-factly, “Did you want to see him dead?”

His face again took on a hint of animation. He looked directly at her. “No.”