Storming Heaven (19 page)

Michaels tried to read it, but the dim glow provided by the ice-covered lamp above the door made it impossible. He stuffed it in his coat. “What is it?”

“Probably nothing. A guy leasing a condo near mine. Oh, see if you can get some background on a Sara Renslier. Apparently she runs Kneiss’s church. Again, nothing fa—”

The metal on metal sound of a deadbolt sliding back, followed by a blast of warm air, interrupted him. He squeezed past a slightly startled young woman without a word and into the relative warmth of the building.

“Mark Beamon, “ he said quietly, holding out his hand. She took it as Michaels slipped through the doorway and closed it behind him.

“I’m sorry you had to wait out there,” she said, already starting down the hall. “Some of the people in the office decided to stay late. Follow me, and please be as quiet as possible.”

The initial warmth Beamon had felt seemed to fade as they hurried deeper into the building—though he assumed it was just his imagination. With all the cigarettes, straight bourbons, and chili dogs he’d consumed in his lifetime, morgues tended to put a little too much perspective on things.

The woman in front of him stopped short as the hall came to a T, and Beamon watched as she poked her head around the corner and peered down the hall. She was small—no more than five-three—with long dark hair tied in a ponytail that was pinned under the top strap of the green apron she wore. Something about her reminded him of Carrie. Maybe it was the purposeful stride, or.

“We’re going to go left here, Mr. Beamon. It’s possible that the night watchman could come by. If you hear him, just duck into one of the rooms.”

As she moved out into the hall, Beamon leaned in close to Michaels. “I’m having real dignity problems with this, Chet.”

The young agent grinned silently back at him and tiptoed out into the hall at Susan’s “all clear” signal. He looked like he was having the time of his life. Real cops-and-robbers stuff.

Fortunately, the rest of their journey was a bit less cloak-and-dagger, and in three minutes Susan was locking the door to the examination room behind them.

“All right. We made it!” Michaels gushed.

Susan took a deep breath and let it out loudly. “Sorry about the melodrama, guys. But this could get me in a lot of trouble.”

Beamon hopped up onto the hard slab of the examining table and scanned the grid of metal doors covering the wall to his left. “We appreciate the risk you took, Susan,” he said without enthusiasm. She couldn’t possibly have been more than a year out of college. This was starting to look like an exhausting waste of time. “What have you got for us?”

She walked over to the wall of drawers and pulled out two of them, then unzipped the bags containing the bodies of Eric and Patricia Davis. From his position on the table, Beamon could see the blood-matted hair dried to their scalps and black stitching left by the coroner.

He stuffed a piece of gum in his mouth as Michaels approached the bodies and looked down
at them. To his credit, the young agent managed to look somber and to stifle the cry of “cool!” that Beamon could tell was trying to bubble to the surface.

“I believe that the autopsy report you read was colored by the facts of the case,” Susan said.

“How so?” Michaels said, still struggling to sound the calm professional. Beamon picked up a styrofoam head off the table next to him. It had what looked a bit like a shish kebab skewer stuck all the way through it, beginning under the chin.

“I think we should just have the bodies dropped off and be left to our own conclusions,” Susan explained. “Having the facts of the case just creates preconceived ideas about cause of death.”

Beamon looked back at the two pieced-together corpses, then at the young professionals hovering over them. “Are you going to tell me that the cause of death wasn’t gunshot wounds, Susan?”

She shook her head. “No, it was definitely gunshot. But I think there are some pretty surprising indications about the gunman that didn’t make it to the report.”

“You have my undivided attention, my dear,” Beamon said, hoping she’d move things along. He had just realized that he’d been going nonstop for almost twenty-two hours.

Susan walked over to a large chalkboard on the wall and pointed to a drawing depicting two stick figures. One was aiming a crudely rendered handgun at the other. There was a dotted line drawn from the gun through the victim’s head.

“From what I can piece together,” she tapped
the board, “this is what happened to Patricia Davis.” Beamon shrugged and nodded.

“Now, as you probably noticed from the autopsy report, Mr. Davis was only five-eight, and Mrs. Davis was taller—five-ten. Now, judging from the powder burns on the side of Mrs. Davis’s head, we can infer that the gun was approximately one foot three inches from her head when it was fired. Based on this and the angle of the bullet’s trajectory, we can calculate that the killer had a shoulder height of four feet eight inches.”

Beamon scowled and jumped off the table. He picked up a piece of chalk and continued the dotted line through the killer depicted on the board and drew another stick figure, shorter and farther away. “Come on, Susan, that powder burn stuff is voodoo. You could be off six inches one way or another. It could have been a shorter guy farther away, or a taller guy closer.”

She looked indignant. “I believe that my calculations are quite precise, Mr. Beamon. But even if I’m off your six inches, I think we can be fairly confident that the perpetrator was shorter than Mrs. Davis.”

Beamon looked into her face and, seeing the steady stare and the set of her jaw, sat back down on the table, scratching the back of his head. “Okay, Susan. I’ll give you that one. Why? Because I have no idea where you’re going with this.”

She gave him a polite smile and picked up the styrofoam head that he had been playing with earlier. “This shows the angle of the bullet that killed Mr. Davis.”

She pulled a rather realistic-looking plastic pistol out of one of the pockets of her apron and handed it to Michaels. “Okay, Chet. I want you to shoot me, just like this.” She pulled a matching skewer out of her apron pocket and held it up to her head, mimicking the angle of the one in the styrofoam facsimile.

Michaels stood in front of her and stuck the plastic gun under her chin. Because of their height differential, he couldn’t get anywhere close to the almost vertical bullet trajectory. Instead, the gun was aimed at a severe angle that would have sent the bullet out of the back of her head.

She stepped up on a small overturned crate that she had obviously put there for the purpose. “This makes me roughly Mr. Davis’s height.” The angle moved closer, but was still significantly off.

Normally, Beamon would have had to laugh at the sight of a tiny young woman holding a shish- kebab skewer to her head and being held at plastic gunpoint by a guy who looked like Richie Cunningham from
Happy Days.
But he was starting to get interested despite himself.

Michaels bent his wrist unnaturally but still wasn’t able to get the angle right before the butt of the gun hit Susan in the chest. He stepped back for a moment and circled around her. Holding the gun under her chin from behind put it at the correct angle.

Susan jumped down from the box. “Exactly what I came up with, Chet. It seems to me that the killer would have had to be standing behind Mr. Davis in order to produce the correct bullet trajeetory.
I think you’ll agree that you wouldn’t want to be standing that close behind him when the top of his head came off.”

Michaels nodded vigorously.

“Are you starting to get interested yet, Mr. Beamon?”

“Mark, please.” He shrugged. “Interested might be too strong a word. Intrigued, maybe. For now, call me mildly attentive.”

She gave him a sly look and walked over to the two corpses protruding from the wall. “Come on over, Mark. I’d like you to look at something.”

Beamon jumped off his perch and walked slowly toward the corpses as Susan picked up Mr. Davis’s right hand and held it out toward him. She pointed to the pale skin between the dead man’s thumb and index finger. “See these parallel scratches here?”

Beamon pulled his glasses from his pocket and put them on. The scratches were small, but obvious when pointed out. He nodded.

“They precisely match the slide on a forty-five.”

She pulled out a tape measure from the seemingly inexhaustible pocket of her apron and ran it from Mr. Davis’s feet to his shoulder. The tape read four feet eight inches.

Beamon smiled. “Uh-huh.”

“Hold on, I’ve got one more thing.” She rushed into the attached office and came back with a diagram of a man standing slightly sideways aiming a gun directly out of the picture. There were various splotches drawn onto the man’s body in red. Each had a line going from it to some writing at the edge of the sheet. Beamon had no idea what it meant.

“I did some tests on the bloodstains on Mr. Davis. Many of them matched Mrs. Davis’s blood type. This diagram shows those findings. I think you’ll agree that the pattern is intriguing. Her blood is most prevalent on Mr. Davis’s right hand in the pattern that’s shown there.”

“Now we’re getting into some serious voodoo,” Beamon said.

She nodded her agreement. “There are other explanations. I really just did this test to see if it refuted the overall hypothesis.”

Michaels looked at the diagram with a confused expression. “I guess I’m just dumb, you guys. What overall hypothesis are we talking about?”

Beamon took a deep breath of stale, antiseptic air. “It seems that your friend here thinks Mr. Davis killed his wife and then committed suicide.”

“What? No way!”

“Why not?” Susan said confidently.

“Because it’s nuts, Susan. It doesn’t even come close to fitting into what we know.”

Beamon ignored the heated debate that started between them and picked up Eric Davis’s cold hand again. He hoped that on further inspection he could come up with a more plausible explanation for the marks. He couldn’t.

S
ARA RENSLIER LOOKED DOWN AT THE
shriveled form of Albert Kneiss and then to the tank that fed his nearly paralyzed lungs oxygen. The room was almost completely dark. The large windows had turned to mirrors, vibrating with the low howl of the storm battering the world outside. Only the light from the heart monitor made it possible to see, casting a flickering glow over the bed and the man lying in it.

She watched silently as the shadows cast across his face shifted and his eyes opened. “Sara?”

She reached out and touched the old man’s cool, dry forehead. He looked so small now, the charisma that had made him such a powerful tool almost completely lost in his withered body.

“Don’t speak, Albert,” she said, running her hand along his scalp and through the few remaining tufts of hair clinging to it. She felt Kneiss’s eyes on her as she pulled a syringe from her pocket and removed the plastic cap covering the tip of the needle.

“What is it, Sara?” he whispered as she slid the needle into his IV tube.

In the semidarkness, she couldn’t see the fluid from the syringe make its way down the tube toward his arm, but she knew that it had reached his bloodstream when the slow rhythm of the heart
monitor began to shudder and the old man began to jerk weakly. His right arm came to life, reaching for the IV needle taped into his veins, but Sara held it firmly in place.

“What … what are you doing?” he said, clawing pathetically against the back of her hand.

She knelt down and leaned in close to him. “The church has outgrown its living prophet, Albert. I need one now who can appear to its children in times of trouble. One that can appear to them on their deathbeds.”

The stimulant she had injected into Kneiss cleared his eyes as it began to overload what was left of the systems in his broken body. “What are you doing to me?” he repeated in a stronger voice.

“You’ve never understood, have you, Albert? You’ve never been able to grasp what the church has become. What I’ve made it.” A thin smile crossed her lips as she watched the old man struggle to control his ragged breathing enough to speak. “What could have possibly made you think I’d let you take it away from me?”

“What are you saying, Sara? You … you’ve been my most devoted pupil. You helped Jennifer. After my daughter died. You knew that she—”

“How can you be so naïve, Albert? Your daughter didn’t die. I killed her. She would have poisoned Jennifer against the church—made her useless to me.”

Kneiss’s heart rate notched higher. “No. No, you couldn’t have. You believe. I gave you my trust. My love.”

Sara gripped his arm tighter until she could feel
the slight movement of the IV needle as it vibrated with the old man’s heartbeat. “I know you did, Albert. And I gave you what you most wanted—an audience.” A tear ran down his nearly paralyzed cheek and she wiped it away with her thumb. “I thought I needed Jennifer—that someday I might have to use her to help me maintain control of the church. But I already have control, don’t I? You gave it to me. She can only cause problems now, Albert. Confuse my followers.”

Kneiss was finding it increasingly difficult to speak. “You can’t. The others—they know about her. They won’t let you harm …”

“You still don’t understand, do you, Albert? You’re dying. Right now. Not on Good Friday. Now. What does that mean?”

He just stared up at her with that supernatural expression of pain and despair that had sucked in so many. The rock she’d built her church on.

“You know, don’t you, Albert? It’s in your Bible. Your brilliant Bible. If you die before Good Friday, your time as God’s Messenger is done.” She smiled. “And I’ve helped Him choose your successor.”

Kneiss’s hand closed on hers again, but she couldn’t tell if it was intentional or just the final random firing of his dying nerve endings. “No. Sara, you don’t know what you’re doing. There’s still time for you to stop this.”

“It’s your fault, Albert. If you had just slipped away quietly like you were supposed to, none of this would have to happen. But you didn’t, did you?”

“Not her, Sara,” he gasped. “Please.”