Prayer (24 page)

“Now it’s you who’s lying, Martins.”

“No, ma’am, that’s the truth.”

“I’ve had three husbands, Martins. It may not rank alongside your own investigative experience of liars in the FBI, but I have an unerring eye for when a man is not telling me the truth.”

“Which of them was the worst?”

“Kevin. Number two. He was a Wall Street trader and the only time he ever told the truth was when he talked in his sleep. I heard him praying in church once and I swear even that was a lie. Can you imagine lying to God?”

“I’ve been doing it for quite a while.”

“Not like he did, you haven’t. This was someone who believed in God. He was a Roman Catholic and I happened to overhear him in confession—”

“Happened to overhear?”

“All right, I bugged the confessional at St. Patrick’s in New York.”

I laughed out loud.

“And listened in at the back of the cathedral on a little short-wave wireless transmitter. I bought the whole kit from Amazon for just eighty-five dollars and recorded everything on a memory card. It worked out to be the most cost-effective of all my divorces. Anyway, I heard him confessing his adultery and he only confessed to one of the other women he’d slept with when I happened to know there were at least three. Can you imagine it?”

“I’m still trying to picture you at the back of St. Patrick’s with your transmitter.”

“But let’s not change the subject. We’ve only just met and already you’re trying to deceive me.” She paused. “Well, aren’t you?”

I said nothing.

“Look, I don’t doubt that what you told me was a lie told with good intent, but it was still a lie. So, please level with me, or I shall think you’re every bit as secretive as J. Edgar Hoover and that will be the end of the beginning of our friendship.”

“All right. And I stand corrected. That list of people I was telling you about? They all have one thing in common—that they are not beloved by the religious right in this country. Up to now, what four of them also have in common is that they’re dead. And I think at least one of them you probably knew: Willard Davidoff.”

“Well, of course, I knew about Willard. We were friends. He taught me biology, at Yale. But the papers said that was an accident.”

“That’s what it looked like. He had a drink, climbed a tree, fell, and broke his neck.”

“Willard always did like his wine.”

“He was sixty-five. Not some kid from the Skull and Bones. I went to Boston and took a good look at that tree. Believe me, I couldn’t have climbed it and I’m thirty years younger than he was.”

“Actually, he
was
Skull and Bones. But I see what you mean. Although, as it happens, he was quite a vigorous sixty-five. Believe me, I know.”

“You mean you and he were . . . ?”

“Yes. For a while. He had a great mind. I like that in a man. And the others?”

“Philip Osborne. Peter Ekman. Clifford Richardson.”

“Peter I knew, too. That was very sad. Although I never went to bed with him, we were quite close for a while. And it’s fair to say there was one occasion when we almost did go to bed.” She shook her head. “Only I thought he managed to asphyxiate himself in his panic room.”

“That’s what the coroner said.”

“But you don’t believe that.”

“No. He went into his panic room even though there were no signs of an intruder. Not only that, he failed to sound an alarm that would have summoned the police. Look, I’ll be honest with you, if any of them were murdered, I have no idea how. I don’t know that and I don’t know—well, let’s just say there’s a lot more I don’t know than I care to confess right now.”

“So, tell me what you do know and maybe I can help.” She shrugged. “After all, I seem to have a vested interest in this case since my name is also on that list.”

“When I said I was checking the other names on that list to see if anyone else has been threatened, you’re the first of those other names I’ve spoken to. I wanted to take a look at you in person and judge for myself what kind you are. See if you’re the kind of person who is easily spooked.”

“I understand.”

So I told Sara Espinosa everything—from the night in O’Neill’s bar when Bishop Coogan had given me his file of clippings and web-page printouts, to the day before in Nelson Van Der Velden’s office in the Izrael Church of Good Men and Good Women when I’d spotted the copy of
Scientific American
containing her article.

“Yes, that does seem to have put the cat among the pigeons. They’ve had a ton of complaints about my piece.” She shrugged. “I suppose that’s why I write them.”

Then I underlined the fact that Richardson, Davidoff, Ekman, and Osborne had all died in fear of something; that Ekman had been in receipt of self-destructing e-mails that threatened his life; that it seemed Osborne had believed he was being chased by something that wasn’t there; that Clifford Richardson had thrown himself off his Washington balcony; and that Gaynor Allitt had been equally fearful of something before jumping off the top of the Hyatt Regency. I made it all sound sufficiently mysterious to warrant FBI involvement and the interest of the Domestic Terrorism Task Force. But at the same time, I spared myself nothing by way of criticism—specifically, how Gaynor Allitt’s “prayer list” was the only shred of evidence I’d found so far that the deaths of these four were anything other than an unfortunate coincidence.

Sara frowned. It looked like the kind of deep frown you deploy to stop yourself from laughing.

“You know, it might all just be an unfortunate coincidence,” she said. “I mean, now and then it’s the nature of coincidence to look like something more than that. People want to believe in something more than just a random series of disasters. They want to see the hand of God in nearly everything abnormal.”

“Well, that’s one way of seeing it,” I admitted.

Finally, she could restrain her grin no longer. “Oh, now wait a minute, this is not some personal crusade you’re on, is it? It wouldn’t be that you’re looking to find a better reason to believe in God again, would it? You don’t seriously think there is actually something occult going on here. Please say you don’t.”

“Not in the sense of how most people use that word—of this being a case involving something supernatural, no. But in the true sense of the word? Of there being something hidden and secret? Yes, I do think there is something occult going on here. All criminal conspiracies are occult until we uncover them.”

“Yes, you’re right, of course. And you’re quite right to remind me of the word’s true meaning. It’s Latin, isn’t it?
Occultus
. I seem to remember my own father using the phrase ‘occult blood.’ Whatever that is.”

“In medicine I think it means that when you find an unexplained anemia there may be hidden bleeding.”

Sara looked pleased that I’d remembered what she’d perhaps forgotten. “Yes, that’s right.”

“Just so you know, I didn’t stop believing in God to start believing in voodoo. Naturally, I’ve considered the possibility that there is no connection. That I’m chasing a ghost up a tree. But the list appears to contradict that.”

“Yes, it does seem to. Well then, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll approach the problem empirically. It’s what you do when you want to test a theory. You carry out an experiment.”

“How? How are we going to carry out an experiment?”

She smiled. “Simple. I’ll be your experiment.”

“How do you propose that’s going to work?” I laughed. “Strap you down on a gurney with a heart monitor on your chest and keep you under permanent observation?”

“It’s a nice thought,” she said flirtatiously.

I felt myself blush a little.

“But no, I was thinking of something altogether more prosaic. I will take extra care in observing the things around me. At home, when I’m driving here. All of the time I’ll be looking out for something unusual. And once a week we’ll keep in touch by telephone. Do you have a business card?”

I took out my wallet and handed one over. “Call me day or night. Whenever you like.”

“Thanks. And if I have anything unusual to report, I’ll tell you and we can take it from there, can’t we? I also propose that we should meet up in, say, a month’s time, and if nothing has happened, then you can sign me off with a clean bill of health, so to speak. Maybe you can give me that shooting lesson, too. Yes, that’d be fun. Meanwhile, I suggest you telephone some of the other names on Gaynor Allitt’s prayer list and see if, unlike me, any of them have anything unusual to tell you. What do you say?”

I nodded. But only half of me agreed with her; the other half believed she was humoring me—cleverly finding a way of removing me from her office without embarrassing either one of us.

“Yeah,” I said. “Good idea.” I stood up to leave. “I seem to have bothered you for nothing. Me and my crazy theories.”

“Really, it was no bother at all.” She stood up. “Here, I’ll walk you out.”

G
alveston was once described as the only city on the Gulf Coast you’d want to visit on a rainy day. Now that felt like an awful, tasteless joke because it had been the rainy day to end all rainy days that had ended forever the island city’s role as a welcome escape for inland Texas refugees. Nearly everything that had once made Galveston an important tourist attraction was gone; and whereas before it had offered the visitor a unique historical perspective on the slave trade and the Civil War—not to mention a few nice beaches and some sophisticated hotels—now it offered only a salutary example of how our modern climate can ruin a place forever. Galveston looked like a plague town, or one of those habitations in Japan or Ukraine that have been contaminated by radiation, nowhere more so than in the city’s restaurants and bars.

The Strand Bar and Grill might just have been the worst bar in Galveston, but I liked it because it suited my mood to be somewhere that felt as fucked up as I did. It was a big empty dance hall of a place with dozens of ugly-looking tables where they served uglier Mexican food. Only the waitresses were less appetizing, which is saying something. Even when the place was half full—which wasn’t often—the place felt abandoned. The Strand Bar and Grill was holding on to the idea of a business recovery in Galveston the way a lost dog in a fast river clings to a piece of driftwood; and no one was fooled: the place was a dimly lit anteroom in purgatory.

Another reason I went to the Strand was that I could walk there and back again, although, to be honest, walking there was always a lot easier than walking back. The bar was just a few blocks away from my rent-free diocesan house, which, now that I was on forced leave, I saw little or no reason to abandon. Besides, the house was more forgiving when I’d had a drink or two and it was less inclined to make me feel uncomfortable. There’s not half as much to disturb a man when he sleeps during the day. Especially in Galveston. No one ever sent any mail here. Or rang my doorbell. So that when one day it finally happened that someone did ring it, the noise was so loud and surprising to me that I almost jumped out of my skin.

I went to the door expecting to find Bishop Coogan on my porch and braced myself for an awkward conversation with him. The newspapers were full of Father Breguet’s escape and the role the Roman Catholic Diocese of Houston and Galveston had allegedly played in that. Instead, I found a FedEx guy standing there with a box in his hands.

I signed for the box and watched the driver go away. It gave me something to do. The brightly liveried FedEx van was probably the most color and noise they’d had in that street all year and I was surprised that one or two of the neighbors didn’t come out to investigate the commotion. Actually, I wasn’t entirely sure if it was one neighbor or two who were still living nearby; there was an old man who occupied a dilapidated blue house about ten doors down from me and another old man a little farther on from him, but they might easily have been one and the same. Besides, the old man probably thought I was another Roman Catholic priest and I could hardly imagine that priests were all that popular in a place so obviously deserted by God. Then again, the old man might just have been one of Galveston’s many ghosts. In a place like this it was hard to tell just who was alive and who was not. I had the same problem whenever I looked in my bathroom mirror. I wouldn’t say that I’d completely let myself go, but when you’re only grooming for the benefit of the patrons of the Strand Bar and Grill, there are times when it hardly seems worth the effort of opening a package of razors—or, for that matter, a FedEx box from the Portland, Oregon, police. Especially when most of the time you’re drunk. So I tossed the box onto the sofa, and after it disappeared under a pile of unwashed laundry, beer cans, and old newspapers, I forgot all about it.

I’ve only ever been to Portland, Oregon, once. I went there to interview a suspect and I was in the city for less than eighteen hours. It seemed an attractive enough sort of place and they make some good beer there, but more than that I can’t say. I don’t know anyone who actually lives in Portland. But clearly someone knew me. I opened the box and emptied out a large envelope that contained a police file and a long cover letter. I fetched a cold one from the refrigerator, lit up a cigarette, and started to read.

Dear Agent Martins,

I hope you’ll forgive this intrusion on your vacation and for circumventing the usual investigative channels. I am a police officer with the Portland police, a detective with twenty years on the force. Helen Monaco at your field office gave me your current home address so that I might send you this police file concerning an investigation we’ve been conducting here in Portland into the recent death of the Reverend David Durham. Maybe you already heard about this case because there’s been a lot about it in the media—most of it wild speculation.

On the face of it, his death seems to have been a freak accident—certainly that’s the official conclusion of this investigation—but there were several features about it that struck me as more than a little strange. I’d heard about the death of Peter Ekman in NYC, and when I contacted the local PD to discuss one or two similarities between his death and that of David Durham, they told me about your own investigation.

I’ve been ordered to close the case and, in the absence of any real evidence that will satisfy my superiors that Durham’s death was not accidental, that is what I will have to do; but I don’t feel comfortable about that. Consequently, I have decided to bring the very peculiar circumstances of his death—these are mostly unreported by the media—to your attention, albeit in this underhanded and off-the-record way. For all the reasons I just mentioned, I have to remain anonymous; I am nearing retirement and would very much like to reach the end of my service with an unblemished record; this would not be the case if it became known that I had deliberately disobeyed the order of my superiors.

The facts are these:

Four weeks ago the workers at the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant here in Portland discovered the body of a forty-one-year-old Caucasian male floating in its new dry-weather clarifier. It’s a sedimentation tank designed to remove solids from dry-weather sewage flow. This followed a report to the local police that a homeless man had been seen hiding in a storm drainpipe in the Columbia Masonic Cemetery in the Maywood Park district of the city, about nine miles west of the treatment plant. When police reached the cemetery, they arrived in time to witness the man taken by a flood that followed a very sudden squall of heavy rain. Until then, we’d been having the driest summer in Portland since 1968, with record low flows in the streams and rivers. That sudden squall meant that about an inch of rain fell in just five minutes, which was enough to wash him away.

Eight hours later, after police had combed the nearby Columbia River and its canals, the body was found at the local sewage plant as described. The man was initially identified as George Gresham but later as David Durham, who’d been living under an assumed name at the Golden Spikes Motel a mile or two east of the cemetery. It’s not clear why he was staying under an assumed name any more than it was clear why he had chosen to get inside a drain. At the time, however, the drain was dry; and it seems fair to conclude that he was hiding from something.

Durham was not from Portland and it seems he had no connection with the city. Prior to his arrival in Portland the previous day, he had been living and working as an evangelical pastor in Toronto. But he was very possibly the most controversial preacher in North America. His religious beliefs had already put him at odds with a lot of evangelical Christians when, in 2000, he was appointed as a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Later, he published a bestselling biography of Jesus entitled
The Jesus Lie
in which he argued that the gospels were inaccurate, that Jesus was not the son of God, that he was not resurrected, and that heaven does not exist. His unorthodox reputation was cemented when he appeared in David Horowitz’s 2006 book
The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.
Following an incident in which Durham burned Horowitz’s book on the university campus—an act for which he himself later apologized and described as a Nazi act—he was dismissed by the university.

At this point in his career, he accepted an unlikely offer of a job as pastor at the Tre Fontane Evangelical Church of Canada in Toronto in 2007—a church that had already become internationally known for its progressive-liberal views. This was largely based on its racial diversity and the important role it played in providing services for the poor and the homeless and also for its support for Toronto’s gay and lesbian community. This had often put the Tre Fontane Church at odds with evangelical religious orthodoxy and so it was probably a good fit for Durham to go there. Especially since he was an experienced public speaker. Preaching had always been at the heart of the ministry at Tre Fontane and Durham quickly established a name for himself there as the most radical preacher in North America. He once went on Canadian television and told the audience that he doubted that God would ever have arranged a virgin birth or allowed Jesus to walk on water; in the same interview he described the physical resurrection as a conjuring trick and the Book of Revelation as the “pathological ravings of a madman.” But while he always remained a very popular figure in Toronto, he was soon a hated figure among religious figures in the United States; his life was threatened on more than one occasion.

This summer he went on a lecture tour of the United States to promote his new book
The Unnatural Nature of Theology.
And because of the death threats he had received from both Christians and Muslims, his publisher took the precaution of hiring an armed guard to accompany him. But the tour had to be cut short when, at a reading in Philadelphia, Durham appeared to suffer a nervous collapse that his publisher attributed to his busy schedule. He returned to Toronto, where, almost immediately, he resigned from the church and disappeared.

A week after his resignation, he arrived here in Portland.

Durham was divorced and lived alone. His girlfriend in Toronto, Cassandra Hendrikson, told Portland police that prior to his disappearance he’d been worried by something; but when she tried to speak to him about it in a restaurant, he bawled her out and so she left. She had no idea why he went to Portland; he’d never mentioned Portland before. It wasn’t even on his book tour. He bought his plane ticket at the airport on the same day he traveled. This was not a ticket for Portland, however; it was a ticket for Anchorage. That flight was subject to a lengthy delay, and instead of waiting for it like everyone else, Durham canceled his ticket and bought a second one, this time a first-class ticket for Portland. It almost seems not to have been very important to him where he went and how much he paid as long as he went to the opposite side of the country as soon as possible. He was only carrying hand luggage, which was also a little unusual for a journey of that length.

On his arrival here in Portland, he told the immigration officer that the purpose of his visit was tourism. Apparently, he seemed very tired and could hardly keep his eyes open long enough for a retinal scan. At the airport, Durham rented a car. The rental clerk almost didn’t let him have the vehicle because he seemed distracted; he was also sweating a lot and seemed out of breath. The only reason the clerk finally parted with the car was because Durham was able to prove he was a church pastor.

After leaving the airport, Durham checked into three different hotels in the space of twenty-two hours: the Nordic Motel on Northeast Sandy Boulevard only four miles from the airport; the Palms Motel on North Interstate Avenue; and finally the Golden Spikes. He paid cash up front at each one. At the Nordic, he took a two-room unit because that was all that was available, but he was told to leave by the management. It was drawn to their attention by the guy in the next room that Durham had piled all the furniture in front of the door. At the Palms Motel, he panicked when there was a power outage that lasted only a few minutes, and he checked out immediately. As he drove away in the rental vehicle, he took the side mirror off a parked car. From the Palms, he seems to have driven around for an hour before he stopped at the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard and demanded to be taken into custody. When the desk sergeant asked Durham what for, he answered that he’d killed someone; and when the sergeant asked him who he’d killed, Durham replied that he’d killed Jesus and that he bitterly regretted it now, at which point, rather comically, the sergeant told Durham to leave before he got himself into trouble. And then he left.

The desk clerk at the Golden Spikes Motel noticed nothing unusual about Durham other than he asked for a bungalow as far away from the road as possible. After checking in, he left his car in the parking lot and then walked west along Northeast Sandy Boulevard to the Columbia Masonic Cemetery, which is about three miles as the crow flies. There’s a Best Western Pony Soldier Inn nearby, and before he went into the cemetery, he asked if he might look at a room. They showed him a room and he said he would come back. Then he went across the road into the cemetery where he spent the next few minutes lifting a storm drain cover. At the Sacred Grounds Espresso Bar across the road, John Philips and his wife, Carol, were having a coffee. It was his birthday and she’d just given him a pair of new binoculars, which is how he happened to see Durham in the cemetery across the road. He alerted the manager to what was happening and the manager called the Multnomah Sheriff’s Office, which sent a patrol car and the two officers who witnessed the accident.