Prayer (3 page)

“So, what’s your point?”

“I don’t know.” This was cowardly of me, of course, but I thought it was best to defuse the situation, for all our sakes.

“Everyone has doubts now and then,” she said, squeezing my hand fondly. “It’s what makes faith what it is.”

She knelt down beside my chair so that she could put her head on my lap and let me stroke her hair.

“You’re tired and you’ve had a bad day, that’s all. Come to bed and let me make it right.”

“A bad day. Is that how you describe it when someone gets put to death on my call?”

“It wasn’t your call. You talk like nobody else was involved here. There were attorneys and—”

“I can’t excuse the part I played in that man’s death. God knows I’d like to.”

“But God can. That’s the whole point.”

“Maybe there is no God. Maybe
that’s
the whole point.”

“You don’t believe that, honey. You know you don’t.”

“Don’t I?” I sighed. “Actually, that’s something I think I do believe.”

T
he Houston FBI building was just outside the Loop—which was what locals called I-610—in the northwest part of the city. Close proximity to our only near neighbor, a Wells Fargo bank, might have made the people there feel a little more secure until you remembered that it was the FBI HQ in Oklahoma City that Timothy McVeigh was targeting when, in 1995, he detonated the bomb that killed 168 people and injured more than six hundred in revenge for what happened at Waco. I can’t answer for Wells Fargo, but our own security was tight. The seven-story FBI building was made from green-tinted quartzite and was clad in a special heat-reducing glass that was also bulletproof. And that’s a comforting thought in a state where people own more than fifty million firearms.

If mentioning this gun-owning statistic seems like my bitching about it, that’s because, like almost everyone in this hard-baked but quick-witted city, I’m from somewhere else. Houston is somewhere you go to, not somewhere you come from, and this is particularly true of people at the FBI. After graduating from the FBI Academy, most of us go where the Bureau tells us, and not where we would necessarily choose. Consequently, Houston is not a city that I or many of my colleagues know well. Not that there’s very much to know. The city of Houston is just a lot of overheated freeways, underground parking lots, roadside churches, air-conditioned shopping malls, isolated and bone-dry parks, country clubs for rich folks, and boxy high-rise buildings. Galveston is less than an hour south by car, but after the last hurricane, it’s hardly better than a ghost town. The Gulf Coast has little to recommend it but the road north back to Houston.

Approaching the shiny downtown skyline, you would shield your eyes against the reflected sun and, while comparing the cityscape to New York’s and Chicago’s, you might just consider that the need for control of city planning is even more urgent than the need for gun control. It was these tall buildings and not anything involving drugs and firearms that were the biggest crimes in Texas; and our own field office was no exception.

Inside, the FBI building has the cool, unhurried air of a museum. There’s even some indifferent modern art, a few behind-glass exhibits, and a gift shop where you can buy everything from an FBI pen or a set of gold FBI cuff links to a coffee mug. Elsewhere there is more or less all that an agent requires to make life more convenient: a barbershop, a hairdresser, a doctor, a dentist, a bank, and, of course, a well-equipped gymnasium. Thanks to Ruth’s father, she and I enjoyed a membership to the Houstonian Club and the use of a gym that was as big as a car factory, but they didn’t like you bringing guns in there. I never much like leaving my gun in the car, even when I’m playing tennis, so I preferred to begin my day with a workout in the office gym and then breakfast in the Bureau canteen. I was usually at my desk before eight-thirty a.m.

We’re a smart-looking lot in the Bureau. Unless we’re in the field, most men wear white shirts and quiet ties, and we polish our shoes and mind our manners, and to that extent we’re still Hoover’s children. The biggest difference from Hoover’s day is the number of women in the Bureau. We call them split-tails on account of the kind of skirts they usually wear. There are more than two thousand women in the FBI, including my own boss, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Gisela Delillo.

Gisela was from North Beach, San Francisco, and another ex-lawyer, like I am. I’m not sure what Hoover would have made of her, but I liked Gisela. Kind of. She was destined for one of the top jobs. As soon as I had collected my files and notes, I went down to her office for an informal weekly case review. She was ten years older than I am, but I’m still young enough to like that in a woman.

Gisela was sitting in the corner of a long leather sofa with her shoes off and her bare legs tucked under her shapely behind. She wasn’t particularly tall, but she had a very tall way of walking, like a ballet dancer with an attitude. Her hair was as black as crow feathers and heaped on top of her head. She looked like Audrey Hepburn’s dirty sister.

She had a cup of coffee balanced on the palm of her hand—a proper little cup with a saucer and a spoon. She took a noisy sip of it and nodded at a neat red espresso machine on her bookshelf.

“You want one?”

I shook my head. “You heard about the Storm Troopers?”

“I read the field report. You must feel terrible.”

“I’ll get over it.”

“That’s why we come to work, isn’t it? Because we’re optimists.”

“Right now my optimism needs glasses. And I’m not just talking about José Samarancho. There’s a lot of hate going around this city. And not enough peace and love. Reminds me. Let’s talk about Deborah Ann Blundy.”

“She’s the Black Liberation Army felon on the Most Wanted, right? Shot and killed a cop in D.C. back in 1975.”

“Since then, she’s been living in Mexico. Only we had a tip-off from someone who used to be in the BLA that she’s living right here in Houston. The
Shaft
and
Super Fly
generation of black separatists don’t have much in common with today’s black activists. But it is possible she’ll try to make contact with them. If that happens, I’m confident my source will let me know.”

“Okay. What else?”

“Did you read the E.C. I sent you about the HIDDEN group?”

“Yes. But remind me what it means.”

“Homeland Internal Defense Delivering Enforcement Now.”

“I can’t see that catching on in a hurry.”

“Okay, it’s not NATO or the IRA, but they’re just as serious. They’re all ex-military. They’ve got contacts and they’ve been trained to use the ordnance they’re trying to get ahold of. The Switchblade. Basically, it’s a tactical drone armed with a three-pound warhead and launched from a two-inch-wide tube you carry around in a backpack. You guide it onto the target via a little camera on the drone’s nose. You just fold it out and fire. With a four-foot wingspan, it’s not much bigger than a toy plane. Yours for just ten grand.”

“Who are they gunning for?”

“Seems they’ve got a beef with the Jews. They believe that the Gulf wars were fought at the behest of the Israelis and that all their buddies who were killed in Iraq were the victims of a Jewish conspiracy. It’s anabolic Christianity. Jarheads for Jesus bulked up with anti-Semitism, Internet conspiracy theories, American exceptionalism, and too much protein.”

Gisela sighed and drained her espresso cup. “Sure you won’t have one?”

“I think I will now. Our information is that they’re planning to fire one of these Switchblades at Congregation Beth Israel on North Braeswood Boulevard.”

“That’s a nice area.” Gisela placed a cup under the dispensing nozzle and pressed a button. The machine made a grinding noise and then vomited a stream of dark brown aromatic liquid.

“It is right now.”

“We got this case from RCFL, right?”

Gisela handed me the coffee cup on a saucer with a little napkin and a spoon.

“From Ken Paris?”

The Bureau has more acronyms than Dow Jones. If it didn’t, we’d be there all day and the bad guys would escape while we were still saying Regional Computer Forensics Lab. Ken Paris was a Special Agent at the RCFL, a few blocks north of Justice Park Drive. He and his team of geeks spent nearly all of their time copying data from a variety of digital devices seized in the course of criminal investigations and then analyzing it for evidence.

“Galveston police arrested some kids who were running an illegal service provider out of an old oil tanker moored in Trinity Bay.”

I sipped my coffee and paused for a moment. “They should put that machine of yours on a crash cart at the DeBakey Heart Center. Gives quite a hit, doesn’t it?”

Gisela smiled.

“After Ken had image-scanned all the servers,” I said, “he started going through the accounts of their illegal clients. In addition to a huge amount of Internet porn, he found the HIDDEN website and their e-mails to and from an illegal arms company in Costa Rica. Army CID thinks that maybe these are the same people who stole a consignment of Switchblades from a military warehouse in California.”

“Tell me they don’t yet have this Switchblade.”

“I don’t think they’ve raised enough money. But now that their illegal Internet provider’s gone, I’d like to get a wire on the HIDDEN leader. A guy named Johnny Sack Brown. The only trouble is we think he’s using Skype for all his communications, which is peer-to-peer and offers no central location for us to get a wire on. At least that’s what Vijay in DCS Net is telling me.”

DCS Net was the Bureau’s very own point-and-click surveillance system—simply a matter of choosing a name and telephone number on a computer screen, and clicking a mouse to tap the phone. It worked on landlines and cell phones and provided near high-fidelity digital recordings.

“Now tell me what’s happening with those Earth Liberation Front people.”

I started polishing my spoon; I’d finished the coffee but it helped to keep my fingers busy.

“Get anything out of them?” she asked.

“I don’t think either woman is interested in a plea bargain. I showed them the CCTV footage of them setting fire to the Galveston Island ranger station and the housing development next to the bird sanctuary. They’re both clearly identifiable, but they laughed in my face.”

She nodded. “Okay. Now I’ve got something for you.”

“If it’s another coffee, I don’t think my heart can stand it.”

She shook her head. “When you first came to the Houston field office, you worked Violent Crimes, didn’t you?”

“I haven’t forgotten. I still get the interesting dreams.”

“Gil, I want you to go see Harlan Caulfield. He seems to think there might be some religious aspect to these serial killings.”

“Is Harlan looking to dump this on DT?”

“He’s looking for some new ideas, perhaps.”

“Are you sure about that? The last new idea they liked here in Texas was lethal injection.”

“An irrational attitude directed against any class of citizen could affect your security clearance, Martins. And you might try to remember that Harlan is from Texas.”

W
here the fuck is San Saba anyway? Is it near anywhere?”

Harlan Caulfield leaned back in his chair and clasped his big hands behind his pear-shaped head.

“Is it near anywhere? San Saba is the pecan capital of the world, son. Otherwise it has no special characteristics.”

“I’m glad I asked.”

“We’ll make a Texan out of you yet, son.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

“How’s your stomach these days?” he asked, coming around the desk. He was holding a PowerPoint wireless presenter in his fingers.

“Are you about to show me some of your clients, sir? Because if you are, I think you need to offer me a caution first. Never did much like the sight of a dead body.”

Harlan grinned. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t like you, Gil Martins.” He sneered. “I’ll tell you when you’re going to see some heavy shit, okay?”

He pressed a button. A series of faces, male and female, appeared on the monitor of his PC.

“Kimberley Gaines, Gil Kever, Brent Youman, Vallie Lorine Pyle, Clarence Burge, Jr.”

But I already knew who and what they were. Their smiling yearbook faces appeared regularly on the front page of the
Chronicle
; these five were the victims of a killer who was still active in the Houston-Galveston metropolitan area—all of them shot dead over the last sixteen months.

“What all of these people have in common is that they were all good people. And I do mean good people. Normally serial killers tend to prey on the weak, the disadvantaged, or the delinquent. But these five were not only upstanding members of the community, they were also a lot more than that.

“Kimberley Gaines was a member of the Unification Church and a registered nurse. A former Peace Corps volunteer, she recently returned from Haiti, where she’d been involved in a relief fund’s cholera treatment center. At the time of her murder, she was about to travel to Somalia as part of a United Nations effort to help the victims of a food crisis in the Horn of Africa.

“Gil Kever was the founder of a drug-and-alcohol rehab center for homeless people here in Houston. He was not a member of any church or faith-based initiative. As well as running the center, he also raised all the money. Two years ago Kever received a humanitarian award from the Texas chapter of the Drug Free America Foundation.

“Brent Youman was America’s only barefoot doctor. In China, where the idea originated, barefoot doctors are essentially farmers with paramedical training who act as primary health care providers at the grassroots level. Brent Youman was a fully qualified M.D. who walked around Texas treating people who couldn’t afford a doctor. Which is probably everyone who isn’t a member of the Houstonian Club.” Harlan frowned. “You’re a member of the Houstonian, aren’t you, Martins?”

“My wife, Ruth,” I said. “She’s the one with all the money. If it wasn’t for her, they would kick my ass out of there.”

Harlan closed his eyes and smiled. “You’ll forgive me if I hold that picture in my mind for a moment.”

I smiled. “Drop by sometime and we’ll have a game of tennis.”

“My days of playing tennis are behind me.” His eyes narrowed. “Brent Youman. Just before his murder, he’d been nominated for some prize for people who have made an outstanding contribution to public health. He won the award posthumously and it was presented in absentia at a special ceremony during the World Health Assembly.”

I shook my head and moved my BlackBerry at right angles to my pen and my notepad; there wasn’t anything really wrong with the way it was lying there before, but I can’t abide my stuff looking any other way than neat and tidy; besides, it was something better to do with my hands.

“Sounds as if he was a helluva guy.”

“You’re beginning to get it. Look, nobody deserves to be murdered. Well, maybe a few. But there are some people whose behavior leads you to suppose that they deserved better than a bullet in the head. Vallie Lorine Pyle and Clarence Burge, Jr., were no different. Vallie Pyle was the founder of Kidneys ‘R’ Us. That’s not a joke, by the way, but an altruistic kidney donation network based here in Houston. Since donating one of her own kidneys to a complete stranger, Vallie Pyle had organized the donation of almost seventy kidneys before she was murdered. Clarence Burge was a Catholic priest from Texas City. After Hurricane Katrina, he gave up the church and set up a construction company to rebuild schools that were destroyed. Working mostly by himself, he succeeded in rebuilding five.”

“What do the behavioral science guys have to say?”

“That the victims were picked because they were morally distinguished. That the perp is someone who hates good people. Or is someone jealous of their goodness, who would like to be good himself.”

“A crime like this makes a lot more sense if the perp thinks of himself as someone evil fighting against the forces of good. A sort of hellfire club, devil’s disciple sort of guy.”

“Which means what?”

“I used to be interested in that kind of shit,” I said. “You know, books about devil worship?”

“Are there any Satanists or devil worshippers around that you know about?”

“Oh, I’m sure there are. This is America and there’s a First Amendment right to practice any kind of religion.”

“I’m not talking about religion, Martins,” said Harlan. “I’m talking about witchcraft and shit like that.”

“Under the First Amendment, anyone has the right to call more or less anything a religion. Today the Salem witches could probably claim protection under the Free Exercise Clause, even if they were guilty. But there aren’t any such groups I know of in Texas that demonstrate predication—whose ideology would make them federal meat. But I can look into it for you, if you like.”

“I’m all out of good ideas on this one. Lousy ones, too, if I’m honest. So, go ahead.”

I collected my stuff off his desk and started to get up from my chair.

“Wait a minute,” said Harlan. “You don’t get to leave until you’ve seen the whole show.”

He picked up the PowerPoint presenter and started to move through some grisly-looking mortuary shots. All of the vics had been shot at close range several times with a small-caliber weapon—that much was plain from the entry wounds in their heads and faces. Brent Youman had taken one bullet through the eye, which had burst out of its socket like an oyster hanging off the edge of its shell. The exit wounds were rather more spectacular; the back of Vallie Pyle’s skull had been blown clean away to reveal a whole damn butcher’s counter of brain and tissue.

“They were all shot with a .22-caliber Walther,” said Harlan. “Firing a flat-nosed short round from a weapon fitted with a Gemtech sound suppressor. He almost always shoots at night or first thing in the morning and operates just out of range of any CCTV cameras.”

“So he doesn’t want to get his picture in the newspaper.”

“Oh, I’ll get him. Even if I have to walk around the city in a nun’s habit singing hymns, I’ll get this sonofabitch.”

I thought about making a joke about that and then flicked the idea away. Harlan was much too unpredictable to meet head-on with a joke about cross-dressing FBI agents.

“I see the first victim was shot on June 29,” I said.

“What about it?”

“It’s the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul. In the Roman Catholic calendar of saints, it’s a holy day.”

Harlan handed me a printed sheet of paper. “Any of these other dates mean anything to you?”

I glanced down the list. “No.”

“You a Catholic, Martins?”

“You could call me an atheist who goes to church. Or maybe an agnostic. I don’t know.”

Harlan grinned. “My wife, Molly, is the one who’s sweet on Jesus. I just go along because it’s easier than having an argument and missing Sunday dinner. By the same token, she comes along to see the Astros although she stopped believing in them a long time ago.”

“That’s the kind of atheism it’s easy to understand.”

Harlan let that one go; the case for believing in the Houston Astros was, by any measure, indefensible.

“Which church is it that you go to, son?”

“Lakewood.”

“The hell you say. Lakewood’s my church.” Harlan smiled again. “How come I never saw you there, Martins?”

“That’s a little like asking how come you never see me at the ball game. Astros would be glad of a regular crowd like the one they get at Lakewood.”

“Is that how you and your wife met? At Lakewood?”

“We met as law students at Harvard. We were neither of us particularly religious then. Until we lived in Houston. We started going to Lakewood Church because we were both believers then. Me included. Although in my case, I’ve really forgotten why.”

“Now I get it. You blame Texas for giving her the sweet talk about the Lord’s love, don’t you? She’s got her pussy all wet for Jesus and you figure it’s us who have messed her panties up.”

“No.”

“Sure you do. It’s as obvious as a turd in a punch bowl.” He shook his head. “Let me tell you something, son. This has got nothing to do with Texas.” Harlan grinned. “Plenty of Texans don’t believe in God. Haven’t you figured it out? That’s why we have so many guns. In case he’s not there.”