Storming Heaven (14 page)

“Thanks a lot, Mark. I have a feeling I’m going to be spending a lot of time on the phone with that woman.”

Beamon handed Michaels the envelope she’d given him and settled into the chair behind his desk. “Better you than me, son. When you get a few minutes, look over the stuff in that envelope. My guess is she’s going to quiz you on it when she calls this afternoon. Now, what have you got for me on Passal?”

“I haven’t talked with the guys in Utah yet.” Michaels said.

“I have. Inconclusive on all counts. No evidence that Jennifer was there and nothing pointing in any particular direction on his death.”

“We had a mechanic go over Passal’s truck,” Michaels said. “The thing looks like it has a top speed of thirty miles an hour and it gushes black smoke.”

“Any record of him renting a car?”

“None. We circulated his name and description to all the agencies in the area. Nothing. Preliminarily, a check of signatures on rental contracts for the time period we’re looking at doesn’t match his handwriting. The guy didn’t even have a credit card.”

“Figure out what roads he could have taken to Flagstaff and call the state cops. See if anyone remembers seeing a pickup like his crawling along the highway billowing smoke,” Beamon said, then leaned back in his chair and began tapping out a rhythm on the desk with his pen.

“What’re you thinking, Mark?”

“Wondering. Based on my conversation with Passal, I’d be willing to bet that he knew more than he was telling us. But what did he know? Who did he think we were when we got there and how did he suddenly figure out that we weren’t them? And last, why the hell did he pick this week to go to that big trailer park in the sky?”

“You think maybe he wasn’t involved directly, but knew something and was killed for it?”

Beamon shrugged. “I think it’s possible. I mean, we go and talk to him and suddenly he falls off a ladder he’s been down a thousand times before? You
see, Chet, there are only a few reasons people die—”

“Wait a minute. Let me write this down. I can’t keep up with all your lists.”

“What lists?”

“Why you kidnap, why you die …”

Beamon chuckled. “I didn’t realize I had so many. Tell you what, though. This one’s easy. You give it to me. There are four.”

Michaels chewed on his eraser. “Okay. Murder, accident, natural causes.” Pause. “And, uh, um.”

“Suicide.”

“Right. Suicide.”

“For the sake of argument, let’s rule out natural causes. It’s possible, of course, but kind of boring.”

“Uh, he had a nail in the back of his head, Mark. Doesn’t that kind of automatically rule out natural causes?”

“No. What if the autopsy finds that he had a heart attack on the way down that ladder? Dead before he hit the ground?”

Michaels looked at his shoes. “You’re right.”

“Where was I? … Oh, yeah. Suicide. I like suicide from a motivational standpoint—FBI’s on to him, so he kills himself. But the logistics of throwing yourself backward off a ladder onto a nail are pretty complex. You’d probably die of tetanus before you hit the thing right. So that leaves accident and murder. And accident seems like just too much of a goddamn coincidence to me.”

Beamon stopped tapping his pencil and pointed to the blue folder that Michaels had put on the desk when he’d come in. “Okay, enough mental masturbation. What’s in the folder?”

Michaels grinned and picked it up. “This is really going to destroy your day, Mark. We finally tracked down Jennifer’s mother’s real identity. She’d changed her name illegally four times before she was married—each time relocating geographically.”

“Did you check to see if she was wanted?”

“Yup. But she wasn’t.”

“So who was she?”

Michaels paused dramatically. “Her name was Carol Kneiss.”

Beamon raised his eyebrows. “As in nice day or as in our local messiah?”

“As in our local messiah. You’re going to love this—Carol was his daughter. Jennifer’s his granddaughter.”

Beamon stared over the young agent’s shoulder and watched through his window as two workmen sorted through a thick stalk of brightly colored wires dangling from the ceiling.

“So, what do you think, Mark? Is there a connection?”

Beamon let out a deep breath and turned his palms up. “Shit, I have no idea. Don’t know that much about the Kneissians. They serve good food at weddings.” Beamon pointed across the desk at Michaels. “You’re from Tucson. You must know something.”

Michaels pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I remember all the publicity when they chose Flagstaff as a base—I was in junior high or something. There was a real uproar from the born-agains. Blasphemous cult. Satanists—you know, same thing they say about
everyone. But it seems like as soon as the Christians got on a roll, they suddenly shut up. Decided that keeping Kneiss out of Arizona would be un-Christian, I guess. Since then, the Kneissians have bought up half of Arizona and three-quarters of Flagstaff. And then, I suppose you know about Kneiss’s ascension.”

Beamon rolled his eyes. There was no way to live in Flagstaff and not hear about that at least once a day. “This is the year that Kneiss is going to take his seat at the right hand of God. On Good Friday, right? Translation: They can’t keep the old fart alive any longer. He must be, what? About a hundred and fifty?”

Michaels shrugged. “He’s pretty old. I don’t think he’s been seen in public for years.”

“Does Kneiss have any living relatives other than Jennifer?”

“Not as far as I can tell.”

Beamon downed the last of the lukewarm coffee in his cup and walked across the office to get a refill. “I don’t know, Chet. It’s worth following up on, though. What if some Kneissian zealot found out about Jennifer? Kneiss has scheduled his own death for a month from now and this guy goes nuts. Can’t handle it. Figures Jennifer’s the next best thing.”

“You never know,” Michaels said enthusiastically. “Religion can get people to do things they’d never normally do.”

“Tell you what, Chet. Why don’t you
quietly
gather some information on the church? Just stuff available publicly, no inquiries. See if we can put a scenario together that makes sense.” Beamon wiped
up a small spill with his last paper towel as Michaels stood and gathered up his folders. “Oh, and Chet? Let’s not talk about this with anyone just yet. If the papers get hold of this I’ll have every weirdo in Arizona camped out on my front lawn.”

B
EAMON SWUNG HIS CAR INTO A LOVINGLY
shoveled driveway next to an old but well-maintained Ford Explorer. Almost a half-hour late, he hurried toward the small white house, patting his pockets to confirm that he had brought his pad and pen. The door opened before he had a chance to knock.

“Mark Beamon. How was it that I knew you’d be late?”

He’d only met Marjorie Dunham once, years ago—at a retirement party for a mutual friend—but she hadn’t changed a bit. Her light brown hair was still cut straight and off the shoulder and her face was almost completely unlined. If he remembered her right, the smooth skin was probably the result of breaking into a smile only about once a year.

“I’m from Texas,” Beamon said, trying to sound apologetic. “Haven’t learned to maneuver in the Arizona arctic zone yet.”

“Uh-huh. Well, come in before you freeze.”

Beamon used a boulder next to the door to kick the snow off his boots and stepped into the modest entryway of her home. A moment later, two labradors pounced on him.

“They like you,” Marjorie said. “Most guests, they just rip their throats out.”

Beamon rubbed the two dogs’ heads vigorously
and padded off behind the woman in stocking feet. The labs followed along right behind him, having identified him as an easy mark for a good head scratch.

“Have a seat,” Marjorie said, pointing to a worn sofa against the wall and pulling a rather uncomfortable-looking chair up to face him.

The dogs curled up at his feet as he sank into the old couch and looked around the cluttered but obviously well-organized den.

“So I hear you’ve already managed to turn my old office completely upside down,” she said.

Beamon sighed and shook his head. Until about a month and a half ago, Marjorie had been the supervisor of the FBI’s Flagstaff office. When she’d retired, they’d turned it into a bogus ASAC position and thrown it to him as a bone. “Not me. Layman and the director are behind that. At first I thought they were just trying to make my getting an office look respectable—but now I think they’re trying to kill me with paint fumes.”

“I wouldn’t put it past them,” she said humorlessly. “So what can I do for you? I know you can’t be having problems figuring out my filing system.”

“No, D. seems to be pretty much on top of things. Actually, I wanted to talk to you about the Church of the Evolution.”

“Really. What are you doing with the Church?”

Beamon had thought long and hard about how to answer that question on the drive over. “Nothing very interesting. We’ve got a lead on a guy who might be embezzling from them. When I started digging into it I found out how completely ignorant
I am about the church and I figured you could help me out. You were here, what? Five years?”

“Six. I would have thought you’d be wrapped up in this Jennifer Davis thing,” she said, obviously probing for gossip.

“Oh, I am. But with the church as politically connected as they are around here, I can’t exactly ignore their problems.”

“Well, that’s probably wise. What
do
you know about the church?”

“I’m embarrassed to say almost nothing.”

“Do you know any of the church’s followers?”

“Don’t think so.”

Beamon didn’t really see that he had much in common with the Kneissians. He found their fresh-scrubbed optimism and well-pressed look a little irritating, if the truth were to be known. The human equivalent of Wonder Bread.

“So you don’t even know what its members believe?”

He shrugged. “That this Kneiss guy is God and he’s going to die next month and rule over heaven or something?”

“Hardly,” Marjorie said. “The premise of the religion is that every two thousand years God sends a messenger to earth to teach humanity about Him and His will.”

“And Albert Kneiss is that messenger?”

She nodded. “Each messenger was at one time human and is chosen to serve God for some period of time before he or she is sent to his or her reward. The—call him an archangel if you like—that appears to us now as Albert Kneiss also appeared two thousand
years ago as Jesus. Before that he had other names, but no record has survived of his prior incarnations beyond a few mentions in the Kneissian Bible.”

Beamon rubbed the back of one of her dogs with his foot, trying to digest what Marjorie had told him. “So God sends Kneiss down here and he writes another Bible. Isn’t that redundant? What’s wrong with the one he wrote two thousand years ago?”

“That’s a little more complicated.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “Let me see how I can explain this clearly … okay. It’s really just a matter of context. We,” she pointed to herself and then Beamon, “as humans are still too limited to truly understand the mind of God.”

“I’ll buy that.”

“But we’re not as limited as the people Jesus taught two thousand years ago,” she continued. “That is to say, as a group, we’re more enlightened than they were.”

“I’d argue that point,” Beamon said.

“Let me rephrase. We know more than they did—about ourselves and the world around us.”

“Okay, you’ve got me hooked again.”

“So when the archangel that we now know as Kneiss appeared as Jesus, he had to put the teachings of God into the current context. And that, uh, dumbing down of God’s message is what has created all the paradoxes and inaccuracies in the regular version of the Bible.”

Beamon’s rubbed his chin. “Okay, yeah. It works on the principle that you can’t explain the Big Bang
to people who think flatulence is caused by evil spirits crawling up their behinds.”

Marjorie let a rare smile pass her lips, but it disappeared too quickly to cause wrinkles. “I’ve never heard it expressed quite that way, but you’re exactly right.”

“And so now Jesus has reappeared as Albert Kneiss,” Beamon started. “And he’s rewritten the Bible to take into account what we’ve learned in the last two thousand years.”

“Precisely. The spirit of Kneiss’s version of the Bible isn’t that different from the traditional Bible. But the way it’s laid out and the way it embraces current scientific, psychological and sociological thinking is radically different.”

“It’s pretty far flung now, isn’t it?” Beamon said.

“The church? Very much so. It’s increased its membership geometrically in the last decade or so. It’s up to around eleven million members now. Something like that.”

“Pretty impressive,” Beamon said.

She leaned forward in her chair. “Unprecedented, really. It seems that there are a lot of Christians out there who are having trouble with the obvious inaccuracies in the traditional Bible. Kneiss’s message—that God wasn’t wrong, we were just too dumb for Him to tell us the whole truth—has proved to be very attractive.”

“And are we watching them?” Beamon asked.

“We meaning the FBI? No. Why would we?”

There was no reason, Beamon knew. It was just that he had always been a little suspicious of large religious machines. Organizations bigoted by definition
and full of millions of people whose motivations were very strong and, to him, very murky. “Remember a few years back when we busted those people at the IRS for browsing through people’s returns?” Beamon said. “Weren’t they Kneissians? Did we ever follow up?”

She shook her head. “Three of the four convicted were members of the church. But what if three of the four had been Catholic? Would we have gone after the Vatican?”

“I might have,” Beamon responded.

“Well,
we
didn’t. Very dangerous politically in a country that was founded on the principle of religious freedom.”

“What about the Germans?” Beamon asked. He’d read numerous articles about Germany’s persecution of the Kneissians. It seemed that having an organization as rich and powerful as the CotE operating independently within its borders wasn’t sitting well with its government.