Damage Control (18 page)

“We are here for a difficult task,” Palma went on. “Your village had visitors tonight. They are known murderers, and wanted by the police. I asked Father Perón for details, and he refused to give them. Now he has to pay the price.”

A man stepped forward from the crowd. Palma recognized him as Roberto Gonzalez. “I know who took the truck,” he said.

“Many of you know who took the truck,” Palma replied, “Father Perón among them. Even I know the truth of who took the truck. But I need to know it from this man.”

The parishioners had difficulty looking at their pastor in this condition. They diverted their eyes.

“Bring the cross forward,” Palma ordered.

Sanchez and Corporal Martinez walked up onto the altar to the life-size crucifix and pulled the statue of Jesus from its mountings. They brought the cross downstage and poised it next to Father Perón.

“Please don’t do this,” the priest whispered. He didn’t want to beg in front of his congregation, but neither did he want to suffer the agony that lay ahead for him.

Palma watched the crowd. They were appalled, but they were with him. Palma had found it to be a quirk of human nature that the torture of others served two masters. On the one hand, witnessed agony transferred as a negative—a fear-inducing event—to those who watched, even as it provided a sense of relief that the torture was being endured by someone else, and therefore brought a measure of peace.

Watching others suffer bred fear, and fear brought cooperation. People needed to understand that actions had consequences, and if the consequences were brutal beyond proportion, the cooperation was even more guaranteed.

Because today’s victim was a priest—and no matter how jaded to violence a soldier became, there was always a special place in the heart for a man of the cloth—Palma decided to drive the nails himself. With the hardwood cross on the floor, they forced Father Perón to lie with his shoulders at the spot where the horizontal members met the vertical members. Sergeant Sanchez literally sat on the priest’s chest to hold him in place while Palma stretched one arm as far out to the side as it would go. Planting a knee on Perón’s wrist, he pried open the priest’s fingers and pounded the four-inch twenty-penny nail through the flesh of his palm, directly below the space between the second and third knuckles.

That was when the priest screamed for the first time—the moment when the nail pierced his flesh and the oak with the same hammer blow. In Palma’s mind the scream was one of fear more than it was one of agony. How much could it hurt, after all? Palma had taken care to avoid bone and tendon, and he’d done this enough to be very skilled.

The wood was harder than Palma had anticipated, though. It took seven hard blows with the carpenter hammer to sink it deeply enough to serve its function. At that, he left half an inch of the nail head exposed so that the villagers could later remove it.

As he moved to the other hand—the priest’s left—Father Perón started to spew information. “Two men took the truck,” he said. “Three Americans.”

“You’re giving me information that I already know,” Perón said around the nail he had poised between his lips like a cigarette about to be smoked. He pulled on the left arm and kneeled on the wrist.

“I know that they’re going to Juárez,” Perón said.

Palma pried open the fingers, noting that the priest had rough hands, the hands of a man who was used to physical labor. “How are they getting across the border?”

As he placed the point of the nail against flesh, Father Perón started speaking faster. “Please don’t,” he said.

Palma raised the hammer high over his head.

“I don’t know,” the priest blurted. “I swear to all things holy that I don’t know.”

Palma smiled. The hammer remained poised in the air. “I believe you, Father,” he said.

“Thank you.”

And then he drove the nail through his hand.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

V
enice lay on the white leather sofa in her office, neither awake nor asleep, waiting for something to happen. As the clock closed in on 9 AM, she recognized that it was time for her to be functional again. Her twelve-year-old son, Roman, had already called to ask if he could go to the pool at Resurrection House—the answer was yes—and she’d already taken her tongue-lashing from Mama Alexander for putting work above family. Mama knew that that was not the case, but sometimes she had a hard time controlling herself. It was as if a lecture was born out of the ether, and it was Mama’s mission to make sure it got delivered. And who better to deliver it to than her only daughter?

Beyond the doors to The Cave, Venice heard the sounds of arriving employees. Part of her wanted to greet them—nearly half of them worked for her—but she didn’t have the energy. She was closing in on thirty hours without meaningful sleep, and no one needed to witness that.

Dom strode into her office without knocking, looking every bit as exhausted and harried as she. He carried a manila folder in his hand. “I’ve got it,” he said. Despite the overall exhaustion, he seemed completely energized. “The secret isn’t in who the hostages are. The secret is in who they aren’t.”

Exhaustion was playing tricks on Venice. Dom’s statement no doubt made sense, but she had no idea what it meant. She waited for it.

The priest dialed it back, settled himself with a breath. He walked across the office and helped himself to one of the guest chairs near her desk. She rose from the sofa and walked over.

“I’m sorry,” Dom said. “I’m so tired I don’t even know if I’m speaking in complete sentences.”

“That makes two of us.” Venice sat at her desk and leaned in, signaling her desire to hear what Dom had to say.

Dom met her halfway. “I pretended I was you last night,” he said. “I started searching through the historical record, just trying to find some clue as to who was betraying whom and why. Did you know that there were originally supposed to be seven pilgrims on this trip? Two more than the five who showed up?”

Venice shrugged. She hadn’t thought much about it, one way or the other.

Dom opened his folder and extracted a sheet of paper that looked like a printed news story. “This is from three months ago,” he said. “A news story from the
Phoenix Sun
. It announces the pilgrimage to Mexico, and in so doing lists seven names. We know who five of them are, but there are two more, as well: Bill Georgen and Bobby Cantrell. Those two apparently dropped out.”

Venice scowled. “And?”

“I just thought it was strange,” Dom explained. He pulled another news story out of the folder. “Look at this. Two weeks before the trip, another news story, this one from a local weekly, lists the same kids.”

“So, they got sick,” Venice said. “Or they lost their nerve. How is this an answer?”

“We’re following the money, remember? We’re trying to decide if there’s a payoff among all those contributions.”

“Okay,” she said. Good lord, she needed coffee.

Dom settled himself again. “I’m not being clear. I’m sorry. I got to wondering how many people in a church organization would have to know if the pastor sold out a missionary trip. I’ve no way of knowing that, of course, but I have trouble believing that Reverend Mitchell could truly act on her own in something like this. I’d think there’d have to be a presbytery or a board of governors or something. I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be
somebody
in a position of authority who would be involved, if only as a second opinion.”

Venice shrugged one shoulder and sort of nodded. Dom smiled as he handed over the next sheet of paper. “Here’s a list of the Board of Governors for the Crystal Palace Cathedral.” He waited for Venice to absorb it. Then he helped: “In alphabetical order, you’ve got Gordon Cantrell, Bobby’s father, and Eric Georgen, Bill’s father. As coincidences go, how do you like those?”

Venice’s eyes grew huge. “They were part of the plot,” Venice said.

Dom smiled. “I believe so.”

“But why?” Venice asked. “Why would anyone endanger children like this?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Dom said. “Maybe in their minds, they
weren’t
endangering the children.”

“With all respect, Father, they were
kidnapped
.”

Dom had obviously thought this out. “Maybe the kidnapping was just part of a show. Maybe they thought that no one would get hurt.”

She got it. “Except Jonathan,” Venice said.

“Right. Plays to the notion that he was really the target of this thing from the very beginning.”

Venice sat back in her chair and tried to take it all in. If Dom was correct—and his theory felt right—the board of directors for one of the most famous churches in the country was funding an effort to have Jonathan and Boxers killed. Digger had the personality and the work history that collected many enemies, but how was it possible for anyone to get this angry at him? And how was it possible that mere money would be enough incentive for Reverend Mitchell to so vastly betray her trust?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Dom said. “It’s not that big a jump from humiliating yourself with an underage boy to endangering people for money.”

Venice was stunned that he’d so closely read her mind. She pressed her hands flat against her temples. “Think about what you’re saying, Dom. Think about the depth of the conspiracy.”

“I have,” he said. “That’s why I haven’t slept. Beyond the depth of the conspiracy, I think about the breadth of influence. How many people in the world are powerful enough—or wealthy enough—to invest millions of dollars in a charity for the sole purpose of committing this kind of a crime?”

“We don’t know that that happened,” Venice corrected. “That’s the theory, but there’s real danger in ignoring other possibilities.”

Dom nodded unconvincingly. “Fine. I suppose. But I haven’t seen anything yet to convince me—or even make me think seriously—about an alternative scenario. And whoever is that powerful and that wealthy also, according to Wolverine, has the power to influence law enforcement agencies in two countries.”

It was almost too much. “You start saying this stuff too loud,” Venice said, “and you start sounding like those wackos who’ve been abducted by aliens.”

“We need to talk to the Georgens and the Cantrells,” Dom said.

“And ask them what?”

“Get them to tell what they know.”

Venice laughed. “Would you tell what you knew if you were them?”

Dom smirked. “Maybe I would if the motivation was strong enough.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I don’t know exactly,” he confessed. “But these are essentially religious people. They know right from wrong. I’m guessing that they got to this place in their lives via a route that they’d do anything to overturn. Between my psychologist’s hat and my priest hat, what do you bet that I can make that happen?”

“I don’t think Digger’s going to go along with it,” Venice said. “Let’s let Gail talk to them while she’s in Scottsdale.”

Dom shook his head. “She’s going to play cop with them. That will lock them down. Scare them.”

Venice tickled the keys and used Jonathan’s GPS signal to find him on the map, and then fiddled with the imagery from SkysEye to zoom in to see if she could get a peek at their vehicle. She was surprised at how short a distance they had traveled since the last time she checked up on them. It looked like only fifty or sixty miles.

“Father Dom, you know I love you, right? So I say this with all the respect I can muster. Your business isn’t about going face-to-face with killers.”

He stood. “I’ll call you from Scottsdale.”

Her eyes snapped up from the screen to see him striding toward the door. “Oh, come on, Dom. Let’s at least talk about this.”

He waved without looking as he walked through the door.

Venice slammed her desk with the heel of her hand. Digger bred this kind of impulsiveness in his friends and associates, and it drove her crazy.

When the satellite image refreshed, Digger’s truck and his team showed up as a hot spot among the blur of tree cover, absent any detail to even indicate that the heat was coming from a vehicle.

Now that she’d found them, she pulled the image back some to reveal more details of their surrounding location. Accessing publicly available geographic data, she was able to superimpose contour lines that revealed them to be on the edge of a steep slope that fell away to the west, their left. That probably explained the slow going.

When the image refreshed again, something had changed. Venice squinted at the screen for a better look, and then it was obvious.

“Oh, no,” she said aloud, reaching for the satellite phone. “Oh no, oh no, oh no ...”

Gail Bonneville had taken the earliest flight out of Washington Dulles and was able to be at the front door of Reverend Jackie Mitchell’s Crystal Palace Cathedral when it opened at nine o’clock. Because it was the middle of the week, she didn’t have to deal with the flood of parishioners that she would have faced on a Saturday or Sunday, but tourists still flooded in by the busload to
ooh
and
ah
over the ultra-modern icon of Protestant devotion.

The place was huge—easily fifty thousand square feet—constructed of towering glass walls held in place by technology that she didn’t begin to understand. The sanctuary—the part you saw on television—was just the very tall first floor of a white skyscraper.

Unlike so many other places she’d seen in real life after coming to know them via television, the Crystal Palace Cathedral was actually larger than she’d expected it to be. Nowhere near the scale of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome—nor as robustly reverential—the Crystal Palace was closer to Gail’s vision of Hell than her vision of Heaven.

Entering the giant front doors along with the first wave of tourists, she paused in the massive lobby—really, that was the best name she could call it—and looked around for a place to start. The overall feel of the cavernous front area was more office building than place of worship. Accordingly, she made her way to the security desk, where two uniformed contractors seemed thoroughly engaged in a passionate discussion about the Houston Astros, who, according to the larger of the two, had no business calling themselves a professional baseball franchise.