Storming Heaven (33 page)

Beamon threw the fax back onto the desk. “Interesting timing.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.”

Beamon sat silently, eyes locked on Layman, waiting to hear exactly what his boss was planning to do about this unfortunate little essay. He didn’t have to wait long.

“I’ve tried to protect you, Mark. But I just can’t anymore.”

Beamon would have liked to know exactly how Layman had tried to protect him, but decided this probably wasn’t the time to ask.

“What they don’t have here, thank God,” Layman said, stabbing a finger at the fax, “is the report that you’d been drinking when you examined the scene of the Jennifer Davis kidnapping, and the fact that you were drunk when your primary suspect was somehow killed.”

Beamon couldn’t seem to work up anything that felt even remotely like anger. He just felt tired. He should have seen this coming, and now he was getting exactly what he deserved for not staying awake. “Come on, Jake. I had a few beers while we were playing golf—you were there, for God’s sake.”

Layman opened his arms and shrugged. “I wasn’t watching. I have no idea how much you drank that day. But I do have a report from two cops who were at the scene that you smelled like a brewery when you arrived.”

Beamon seriously doubted that, since, as he recalled, he had about six pieces of gum in his mouth by the time he got out of the car. “I don’t suppose it matters that David Passal fell down a ladder while I was twenty miles away, trying to
menti some fences with the local cops …” He let his voice trail off. Of course it didn’t matter. He could see from his boss’s expression that he was wasting his breath. No point in making this any more fun for Layman than it had to be. “Okay, Jake. Cut to the chase. What’s this to me?”

“I spoke at length with the director this morning.”

Beamon closed his eyes and took a deep breath. That couldn’t be good.

“We went over the issues I just spoke about, and your recent lapses in judgment …”

“Lapses in judgment?” Beamon said, opening his eyes.

“Your investigation of the Church of the Evolution. The fact that you’ve become obsessed with the Kneissians and that you’ve ignored my repeated attempts to put you back on track.”

“Come on, Jake, you weren’t even keeping up with the facts of the case. Who are you to question my investigative judgment?”

Layman just smiled calmly. “I’m your boss, Mark. Maybe if you could remember that, you wouldn’t be in the position you’re in today.”

Beamon grabbed the fax and held it up. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that this is pretty typical for the church? They probably own the fucking
Flagstaff Chronicle.”

“Typical? Are you talking about the organization that’s built hospitals and schools all over Arizona, and feeds the homeless during the holidays? The organization that gives hundreds of millions of dollars to charity every year? This is what I’m talking about, Mark. You’ve become paranoid. And we think it’s from the drinking.”

He leaned back in Beamon’s chair and began picking at one of his nails. “You’re a competent agent, Mark, and we don’t want to lose you. Whatever help you need, you’re going to get. You might even be able to come back from this if you really focus on getting your problems ironed out.”

Beamon looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath, fighting to keep some kind of emotional distance between himself and what was happening.

“You’re being put on immediate paid leave until we can get this straightened out.”

Portraying as much outward calm as he could, Beamon reached into his pocket and pulled out his FBI credentials. To Layman’s credit, he was almost successful in suppressing his smile when Beamon handed them over.

“We’ve scheduled a physical for you on March twenty-fifth. You’re to report to headquarters on that date. Any questions?”

Beamon managed to push his suspension and the irreparable damage that was going to be done to his reputation tomorrow to an unused corner of his mind. Sara Renslier was going to find that he wasn’t as easily handled as some others.

“What long-distance carrier do you use?”

Layman looked at him strangely and shook his head as he walked around the desk to leave. Beamon grabbed his arm. “You asked if I had any questions. That’s my question. What long-distance carrier do you use?”

“What the hell are you talking about, Mark? Are you drunk now?” Layman said, trying to pull free. Beamon squeezed harder, sinking his fingers into the flesh of Layman’s forearm.

“I don’t know,” Layman said finally. “You dial a code. It’s five cents a minute.”

“Mark, have you seen this?” Chet Michaels said, running into the office without his customary nervous pause at the door. “A friend of mine just sent it to me.” He slapped a bad fax copy of the offending article on the desk.

Beamon nodded and continued picking through his drawers, occasionally dropping an item or two into the box at his feet. He hadn’t been there long enough to accumulate much junk. Usually this operation took days.

“It’s the church, isn’t it? What do you want to bet the guy who wrote that article is a member?”

Beamon shrugged.

“So what are we going to do about it?”

Beamon looked up from the drawer and into the innocent face of Chet Michaels. “Nothing. I’ve been suspended. It’s over.”

“Suspended? No way! They can’t do that! You’re the best we’ve got. Everybody knows that.”

“Thanks, Chet. I appreciate that. I really do,” Beamon said, standing and pulling his coat off the back of his chair. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

“Come on, Mark, you know the church is involved. We can’t give up now.”

“Finding Jennifer isn’t my job anymore, Chet. And it’s not yours, either—Layman’s going to take this one.”

“But he won’t—”

“Chet! Let it go. There’ll be other cases. If you don’t screw up here, you’ll still be around to solve them.”

“It’s not just a case, Mark. Have you forgotten Jennifer? What about her?”

Beamon shrugged and picked the box up off the floor. “What about her? Wake up, Chet. I’m just in this for the game. And I lost.”

B
EAMON PINNED THE BOX FULL OF HIS PER
sonal effects against the wall and struggled to get his keys out of his pocket. He glanced back over his shoulder at the condo inhabited by Robert Andrews, his church-appointed spy. The window looked the same as it always did, curtains pulled to within a couple of inches of being fully closed, interior dark.

There
was
one change worth noting, however. Andrews was standing on the walkway that ran along the front of his building, leaning casually against the railing and staring right at him.

Beamon was too far away to read the man’s expression, but his stance spoke volumes. The church was letting him know that they were responsible for his current situation. That they had filed down his teeth to the point that they didn’t even need to hide their presence anymore.

Beamon turned his key in the lock and threw the door open, sending a shower of snow and ice onto his carpet when it slammed against the wall. He dropped the box on top of the Davis case files covering his sofa and pulled an unopened bottle of bourbon from the top of it.

The familiar weight of it wasn’t as comforting as he thought it would be, but he still pulled what was left of his beer stash from his refrigerator and
dumped it ceremoniously into the trash.

He grabbed the carton of cigarettes lying on the counter and dropped into a chair, unscrewing the top of the bottle with one hand and punching the remote next to him with the other. The church’s channel came to life on the screen with a young woman professing how Kneiss’s bible had changed her life. He lit the first of what he hoped would be many cigarettes and watched the smoke curl through the virgin air of his condo.

It had changed his life, too.

He’d always pushed the envelope at work and it had hurt him—personally and professionally. But that had been his choice—to never move very far up in the ranks, to work for men and women whose abilities were inferior to his, to be bounced around from office to office, state to state.

He’d managed to find a delicate but generally durable balance between his often self-destructive impulses and his ability to get the job done faster and more efficiently than anyone else. It was that balance that had allowed him to keep his job. And it was that balance that Sara Renslier had managed to disrupt.

She’d done a hell of a job, too. Not only was he most likely facing early retirement, but he was going to leave the Bureau under a black cloud that would follow him for the rest of his life. It seemed reasonable to expect that the lucrative private-sector job he’d need to feed himself in retirement wouldn’t be forthcoming.

“You want fries with that?” he said to the empty room, raising his glass in salute to nothing in particular. Never too early to start training for a new career.

His thoughts turned to Jennifer Davis as he took his first slug of bourbon since arriving in Arizona. He was dead sure now that the theory that had seemed so farfetched to him at first was correct. Sara Renslier was not going to allow a fifteen-year-old orphan to take her church from her, to strip her of the power that she had spent twenty-five years acquiring and seemed to wield so effortlessly. And if he accepted that fact, then Jennifer had a real problem. Either she was already dead—the granddaddy of all problems, and one historically difficult to fix—or Sara had managed to convince the Elders of the church that Jennifer was the next Messenger. If that was the case, she was going to get rid of the kid in some kind of bullshit religious ceremony that would assure Sara continued control over the church for life.

Beamon downed another slug, feeling the alcohol begin to work its way into his mind. The beer- only diet he’d been adhering to seemed to have wreaked havoc on his tolerance. But then, it was probably good to be a cheap drunk when your career- prospects were looking this bleak.

He decided that if Jennifer was already dead, the church would have stuffed her body in a chuckhole somewhere in Outer Mongolia by now and Sara would be making a real show of cooperating with him, knowing that without a body, he couldn’t do shit.

But she wasn’t cooperating. She was aiming the church’s entire arsenal at him—a senior FBI man—and in doing that, taking a hell of a risk. No, they were playing for time. He looked at the calendar on his watch. Eleven more days.

And that brought up another interesting, but ultimately depressing point. When Good Friday—
and Jennifer—had come and gone, Sara sure as hell wasn’t going to wait around for him to gather his notes and write a book. No, once that little girl’s body was safely stowed, it would be time for him to slip on the ice and crack his skull or to have some equally mundane, yet fatal, accident.

There was a knock at the door, but Beamon ignored it and worked on the solution to his problem. How the hell was he going to find Jennifer in the next eleven days? He took another gulp from his glass and felt the liquid burn down to his stomach, then reverse its course and go straight to his head.

His front door opened a crack, creating a bright swath of light that illuminated the curling smoke drifting through the gloom.

“Mark?” Carrie’s reddish-brown head snaked into the room. “There you are. Why didn’t you answer?”

Beamon lit another cigarette with the embers of the old one. “What’re you doing home in the middle of the day, Carrie?”

He turned back to the TV as Carrie closed the door quietly behind her. A well-dressed young man was asking for donations to buy food for the starving children from one of those starving-children countries.

“Chet called me and told me what happened. He’s really worried about you, Mark.”

Beamon let his head loll back on the chair as he remembered the look on Michaels’s face when he’d left him standing in his office. What he’d said to him about only being in it for the game had been pretty harsh, but what choice did he have? The kid was too damned ready to get dragged down with him.

“Are you all right?”

“It’s not as grim as it sounds, Carrie,” he lied. “Just politics, you know.”

She moved the box containing most of his life and sat down on the arm of the sofa. “Switching from beer to liquor isn’t going to help your case any,” she said, nodding toward the bottle in his hand.

He laughed bitterly. “My strict program of self- improvement doesn’t seem to have done a whole hell of a lot of good. I figure, why close the gate after the horse has bolted?”

She was silent for a moment and then said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t remember you asking one.”

“Are you
all right?”

“Sure. I’m fine. Things like this happen.”

She looked at him compassionately. “You’ve never married, have you, Mark?”

“Excuse me?”

“Married. You never married. Why?”

Beamon shrugged, wondering if that was kind of a bizarre change of subject or if he was just more buzzed than he thought. “I guess I never found the right woman. I’ve had a career that’s pretty much been one crisis after the other. There just hasn’t been much time.”

“You’ve given a lot to the Bureau. What is it now? Fifteen or twenty years of putting it before everything else. And now the Bureau’s turned its back on you. That must be hard.”

Beamon grinned and shook his head. “Jesus, Carrie. Now I
am
depressed, do you have a rope on you? I thought psychiatrists were supposed to make you feel better.”

“That’s a myth, I’m afraid. We help people
identify their problems and then we force them to confront them.”

Beamon’s slightly fogged mind conjured up the pale, expressionless face of Sara Renslier. “Oh, I’ve identified my problem, Carrie. I just haven’t figured out a way to confront it and come away with my skin.”

She walked over and knelt by his chair. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

He put down the bottle and ran his hand gently through her hair. “Not right now. I just need to sit here and think for a while. We’re still going out tomorrow, though, right? We definitely need to talk.”

She pressed his hand against her cheek. “I guess you’re going to want me to pay for dinner now, huh?”