Storming Heaven (7 page)

He slowed his pace a bit as his building came into view. As expected, Chet Michaels was sitting at the bottom of the stairs that led up to Beamon’s condo. He had undoubtedly been there for exactly fifty minutes—Beamon was supposed to have met him there forty-five minutes ago and Michaels was always precisely five minutes early for every appointment. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was the little girl who was unsuccessfully trying to catch the snowballs he was gently tossing to her. And the disaster was the auburn-haired woman in electric blue mittens handing him a steaming cup of something or other.

“Chet! You’re early,” Beamon called. “I said seven o’clock.”

Michaels stood and brushed the snow off the back of his jeans as he approached. “You said six, Mark.” He pointed to Beamon’s right hand. “You wrote it on the back of your hand.”

“Oh, yeah. So I did. Sorry.” He turned to the woman standing next to Michaels. “Thanks for keeping him from freezing.”

Carrie Johnstone smiled slyly and crouched down next to her daughter. “What do we do when Mr. Beamon gets home, Emory?”

The little girl ran at him and latched onto his leg. “Hi, Mr. Beamon,” she slurred through a less than full complement of teeth.

“I’m trying to get Mark to relate to children,” Carrie explained as Beamon tried to extract his leg from Emory’s grip. “It’s shaping up to be one of the greatest challenges of my career, but I think I’m wearing him down.”

“What do you do, Carrie?” Michaels said.

“I’m a psychiatrist.”

“Really? A psychiatrist? Wow.” Michaels handed her back the barely touched cup of coffee and started up the steps toward Beamon’s condo. About halfway up he paused and turned around. “You know. Doc, those of us who work for Mark would appreciate anything you could do for him. I’m sure I could take up a collection at the office to cover any fee.”

Beamon glared at the young agent, who said, “Thanks for the coffee,” and disappeared up the steps.

“Before you go up, Mark, could I talk to you?” Carrie said, suddenly looking a little nervous.

“Uh, sure. CHET!”

The young agent peeked over the railing at him and narrowly avoided being hit in the face by Beamon’s keys. “Go on in. I’ll be up in a second.”

Carrie looked at him with a hint of disapproval registering in her expression. “You know, you really shouldn’t leave your employees out on the steps to
freeze, Mark. I tried to get him to come inside, but he wouldn’t. Thought you’d be mad.”

Beamon frowned. Michaels had obviously been busy using that Howdy Doody face to drum up sympathy from Carrie and make him look like an ogre. He’d have to remember to make his life a living hell for the next week or so.

“Couldn’t be helped.”

There was a brief lull in the conversation as Carrie reached one of her mitten-covered hands into her coat and pulled out an envelope. “I, uh, got this invitation to go to a wedding on Saturday and it says Carrie Johnstone and guest.” She held it out as though he’d require proof. “Anyway, it’s probably going to be pretty nice. I was wondering if you might want to go?”

He felt his eyebrows start to rise, but managed to stop them before they got too far from their normal resting position. He had met Carrie the day he’d moved in and had been instantly taken with her. She was intelligent, funny, and had a sarcastic edge that, while admittedly underdeveloped, showed real potential. He’d spent the last month trying to figure out a clever excuse to spend some time with her, but so far his normally devious mind had been a blank.

“Are you asking me on a date?” he said, a hint of a smile playing at his lips.

“Uh, I don’t know if I’d call it a date. I just thought it’d be … fun.”

He nodded thoughtfully and crouched down to bring himself eye-level with her daughter. “What do you think, Emory? Should I go on a non-date with
your mother? Or should I insist on full date status?”

Emory looked at him blankly and then giggled and squealed. “Date!”

Beamon looked back up at Carrie. “Your daughter seems to think I deserve all the rights and privileges afforded a full-blooded date.”

Carrie’s expression turned severe, but he could tell she was trying not to laugh. “We’ll have to talk about what you consider ‘full rights and privileges,’ but I’m willing to compromise. I’d consider an honorary title.”

“I can live with that.”

Beamon knocked the snow off his boots with a couple of violent kicks to the doorjamb and dropped his coat on the floor. Things were starting to look up. Of course, he still had no idea as to the whereabouts of the elusive Jennifer Davis, but he had managed to get a date with Carrie without having to go through the torture of actually asking. Not every day you got something for nothing.

“Okay, Chet, what’ve you got for me?”

Michaels leaned back into the sofa and put his feet on the large box that contained Beamon’s coffee table. “She’s really cool. Pretty, too. And a doctor.” He rubbed at his bright red chin. “I think she likes you.”

Beamon opened his refrigerator and pulled out two beers. “You’d better be talking about Jennifer Davis.” He popped the tops off the bottles and walked around to Michaels.

“I was talking about Carrie.”

Beamon sat down in a chair facing the sofa and
took a long pull from his beer. “So what I’m hearing you saying, Chet, is that you don’t actually want to keep your job.”

The young agent smirked and pulled two folders out of the open knapsack at his feet. He pointed to one of them. “Autopsy.” Then the other. “Jennifer’s real parents. Which one do you want to start with?”

Beamon polished off his beer with one more healthy gulp and started toward the kitchen for a refill. “I’m pretty sure the cause of death was their brains leaving their heads at the speed of sound, so why don’t we start with the parents.”

“Good choice. We’ve started to get in the info you wanted on Jennifer’s real parents. James and Carol Passal. James was a grocery store manager in Portland, Oregon—Carol was a full-time mother, as near as we can tell. Both were killed in a fire that destroyed their home when Jennifer was two years old.”

“Where was Jennifer?”

“They found her wandering around on the lawn.”

“She was outside playing when the fire started?”

Michaels shook his head. “The fire started around midnight.”

“Midnight, huh. What caused it?”

“The report’s pretty cryptic. They ruled out foul play, but I’m not sure how, since they don’t give a cause. Also, no one seems to have ever figured out how Jennifer got onto the lawn.”

“Interesting.”

“Oh, it gets way better than that. James had a
brother. He lived in Salem ‘til he left town under a black cloud.”

“And that cloud was …”

“Kidnapping category number three. Suspicion of child molestation.”

Beamon fell back into the chair with his fresh beer. “Now that really is interesting. Was Jennifer involved?”

“It’s possible, but I can’t say for sure. The police investigated briefly, but when David took off, I guess they never got anything concrete enough to warrant bringing him back.”

“Where is he now?”

“I think near Kanab, Utah.”

“Where?”

“It’s on the southern border of the state. Not that far from here, actually. I’m still trying to get a specific address, but the sheriff there said that Passal just lives up in the hills—pretty much keeps to himself.”

“We need to find him, Chet. Now.”

“I’ve called the guys that cover that area, they—”

Beamon pointed at the young agent, cutting him off. “That’s fine, Chet, but the buck stops here. I expect to be face to face with this guy, like, tomorrow. Understood?”

Michaels looked down at the floor and nodded.

“Okay,” Beamon said. “If you run into any problems, call me here or beep me. I’m available twenty-four hours a day for this. Now what else do you have for me?”

Michaels didn’t seem to want to speak,

“Come on, Chet. Out with it.”

“We can’t seem to figure out who Carol Passal was.”

“What, did Social Security lose her maiden name?”

Michaels grabbed his beer off the box/coffee table in front of him. “No, we found her maiden name no problem. We also found another identity prior to that. We’re still trying peel back the layers and get at the original.”

“Really? You’re telling me that she purposefully changed her identity?”

He nodded.

“Only one reason to do that—you don’t want to be found,” Beamon said. “Check the database for any outstanding warrants on someone fitting her description. Maybe she was running from the law. Check with the IRS, too. People just hate paying their taxes. Otherwise, keep after it. Could be she was trying to get away from a psycho ex-husband or something. Anything else?”

Michaels shook his head and scribbled Beamon’s instructions on the back of the folder.

“Okay, then. Hit me with the autopsy report. Just the highlights—it’s getting late.”

“Both Mr. and Mrs. Davis were shot with the same forty-five, Mrs. Davis in the right side of the back of her head and Mr. Davis under the chin. There were minor contusions around Mrs. Davis’s mouth and nose that would suggest that someone pretty strong had grabbed her.” He put his hand over his mouth and pinched his nose shut with his thumb and index finger to illustrate the point.
“Various contusions and a few fresh cuts were found on Mr. Davis, also suggesting a struggle.”

Beamon nodded. “We saw the aftermath of all that in the kitchen.”

“Yeah. Uh, no evidence that either of them was tied at any time, no evidence that either body was moved postmortem.”

“Time of death?”

“They’re putting it between eight
P.M
. and three
A.M.”

“That’s kind of broad. The window?”

“Yeah. They had to make some assumptions about how fast the room cooled off after the window was broken.”

Beamon nodded. “So based on what we have from the neighbors, between ten and three.”

“Yeah. It would have been tight, but I don’t think we can completely rule out the boyfriend based on the physical evidence.”

“Yeah,” Beamon sighed. “But I have to admit that I’m having a hard time creating a scenario that includes the kind of struggle you’re describing if it was just him and Jennifer. That would mean, what? Jennifer held her mother while Jamie fought with her father? The struggle took place at two different times? There were more kids involved? I don’t know.” Beamon jumped up out of his chair and clapped his hands, startling the young agent a bit. “Okay, Chet. Get out of here. It’s Friday night and that girl with the tattoos you like so much probably wants to be taken to dinner.”

“I’m okay, Mark. If you want to, you know, drink a few beers and bat around some ideas …”

Beamon ignored the hopeful look on Michaels’s face and pointed at the door as he made his way back to the refrigerator. He still had three more beers to put away before he reached his recently self-imposed limit of five per day. “Thanks, Chet, but you should go out and have a good time tonight, because this weekend you’re going to be doing what?”

“Finding David Passal,” Michaels mumbled as he gathered up his folders and headed for the door. “Oh, Mark. I took a message for you this afternoon from the lab. It’s on your desk, but it said something like, ? year’s worth of hair, no drugs.’ Does that make any sense?”

“Yeah, thanks,” Beamon said, dropping onto the sofa as Michaels pulled the door shut behind him.

With his foot, Beamon snagged the coat he’d thrown on the floor and retrieved a tobacco pouch from the breast pocket. The message meant that the hair he’d retrieved from Jennifer Davis’s sink—a year’s growth—showed no narcotic residue. She was clean.

What was he missing? he wondered as he tapped tobacco into a paper wrapper.

What would someone want with Jennifer Davis? What good was she with her parents dead? Every time he came up with a plausible answer, there were two or three facts to refute it.

He finished rolling the cigarette and looked at it longingly for a few moments. No smoking in the house. It was another one of his new and ironclad rules. That rule, combined with the rather majestic
local weather, had been instrumental in reducing his smoking from a two packs a day to five or six of these hand-rolled jobs.

He looked over at his front door. It was rattling slightly as the frigid wind outside battered it. Beamon laid the cigarette on his stomach and decided that gazing at it and drinking a few more beers would have to satisfy his vices for the night.

B
EAMON SHUFFLED THROUGH THE TEETER
ing stack of personnel files on his sofa, finally finding the one he was looking for in the middle. He gave it a quick jerk and watched the rest of the pile destabilize and topple onto the floor of his living room.

He kicked them over toward the wall and wondered for the hundredth time if he really had what it took to run an office. He’d spent the last weeks trying to get around to familiarizing himself with the backgrounds of his new staff—something that should have been a simple task. D. gave him the files and he just had to flip through them. Why then, two weeks later, were they strewn across his floor, unread?

The answer was as obvious as it was unsettling: He owed a great deal of his success to date to his ability to ignore the noise around him and focus all his attention on one task. A wonderful quality in an investigator. A shitty quality in a manager.

As he saw it, he’d already proven that he made an impossible subordinate. So it was time to get his ass in gear and prove that he made one hell of a good boss. Otherwise, he had serious problems.

Beamon leaned forward and picked up his glasses. Perching them on his nose, he flipped open
the folder in his lap and tried to concentrate on the picture of the young man stapled to the inside cover.

He was a second office agent—talented, diligent, hard-working. That is, until about a month ago when his wife ran off with the pool guy. Beamon had initially thought that this was an elaborate joke, created to welcome him to the world of management. But it turned out that she actually did. The goddamn pool guy.