Storming Heaven (44 page)

“What about the e-mail?”

Jennifer clicked on a mailbox icon and the sound of dialing momentarily drowned out the conversation playing over the speakers.

“Seven messages,” she said, clicking on the first.

It came up a jumble of letters and characters.

“It’s encrypted, Mr. Beamon.”

“Call me Mark.”

She looked over at him, a dribble of chocolaty milk running down her chin. “You don’t look like a Mark. You look like a Mr. Beamon.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself. WrathofGod.”

“What?”

“The encryption key. WrathofGod. One word, the ‘W’ and the ‘G’ are capitalized.”

A moment later the e-mails began rolling off the printer.

The first six were pretty mundane—financial directives, mostly. The last was a rather innocuous- looking note including Ernestine Waverly’s address. He wondered if she’d seen it. If she’d known they were coming. His cell phone had rung just before he arrived at the airport. Had it been her calling for help? And if he’d picked up, what would he have done?

“Are you all right, Mr. Beamon?”

“Sorry, I’m fine. Here’s the deal, Jennifer. We need to get you to the FBI. I think you’ll be better off with a hundred people watching you than just one.” He smiled. “Even one as gifted and handsome as myself.”

“But you’re going to go too, right? I mean, a hundred people didn’t find me—you did.”

She really was a clever kid. If they were all like her, he’d have actually considered having children. “I’ll be right there. I’m going to call a friend to help us and this afternoon you’ll have the whole FBI to keep an eye on you till Saturday. You won’t have a thing to worry about.”

She looked around her at the dingy apartment, gripping the table in front of her so tightly her knuckles turned white. “Maybe we should just stay here. Maybe that would be better.”

“You’ve already been here too long, Jennifer,” Beamon said, dialing his cell phone. “There are a lot of people looking for you and eventually they’re going to find this place—”

“Hello?”

“Chet! Is that you?”

Michaels’s voice lowered into the same whisper D. had employed to talk to him. “Jesus, Mark. Where the hell are you? We got guys from Phoenix
crawling all over the office trying to figure out how to find you.”

“I’ll bet. Listen up, Chet. Do you remember the time you and I went to talk to the guy about that embezzlement case you were working on?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“You remember where we ate?”

“Uh-huh. Mark, what the hell’s—”

“Meet me there at three. Leave like you always do for lunch. Drive around a little, get a bite, and make goddamn sure no one is following you.”

“But you—”

Beamon looked at his watch. “Why are you still talking? I’ve got eleven-fifty-six.”

He heard Michaels sigh over the phone. “I’m walking out the door.”

“Oh, and Chet?”

“Yeah?”

“There are three people who have helped me with the Jennifer Davis case. You’re the only one still breathing. You still want to come?”

There was a long pause over the phone. “You’re going to tell me what’s going on when I get there, right?”

“Yup.”

“I’ll see you in a few hours.”

Beamon turned off the phone and looked into Jennifer’s worried face. “If you want to get cleaned up or anything, you’d better get going. We’ve gotta get out of here.”

She stood and started for the bathroom.

“Hold on a sec,” Beamon said, picking up the shotgun and holding it up so that she could see it. He pointed to the slide under the barrel. “It’s really unlikely, but if anything should happen to me and
you would have to actually fire this thing, remember that you need to pull this back or it won’t shoot.”

A look of horror spread across her face. “You mean all that time I was pointing it at you, it wouldn’t have even worked?”

“Strictly speaking? No. But it
was
a hell of an effort.”

I
N THE TWO AND A HALF HOURS IT TOOK TO
drive from Flagstaff to Phoenix, the outside temperature had risen nearly thirty degrees. The sun that Jennifer hadn’t seen in over a month was beating relentlessly on them through the car’s windshield, finally prompting her to pull Beamon’s parka off her bare legs and toss it into the back seat.

“Can we turn down the heat a little now, Jen?” he asked, wiping a bead of sweat from his upper lip.

“Okay.”

She leaned her head against the window and fixed her gaze on the desert landscape as it sped by, but didn’t really seem to see it. After perking up a bit at the apartment when she’d first discovered she was free, Jennifer seemed to have withdrawn into herself.

She probably wanted to talk, Beamon knew. About her parents, her treatment at Sara’s hands, her future. But he just didn’t know how to get things going. He sighed quietly and thought about Carrie. She’d know what to do. How to help.

“You’ll like Chet, Jen. He’s a lot younger and hipper than me. Just don’t mention his resemblance to Howdy Doody.”

She remained so still and silent that he wondered if she’d even heard him. Call that a swing and a miss.

Perhaps the direct approach might prove more effective. “Is there something out there that’s more interesting than me, or are you just contemplating life?”

He glanced away from the road for a moment and saw that she had turned from the window and was staring right at him. Her face had fallen into an expression of pain and sadness that someone her age shouldn’t have been able to produce.

“I was thinking about Eric and Patty.”

“Who?” Beamon said, and then remembered. “You mean your parents.”

She turned back toward the window. “I mean my keepers.”

Beamon wasn’t sure how to respond to that. He did have an unasked question that had been killing him since she’d regained consciousness, though. “What really happened that night?”

“He killed her,” she said simply.

“Who?”

“Eric.”

“Your father,” Beamon corrected again.

“He wasn’t my father. My father’s been dead for years. He was just some guy the church hired to watch me until it was time to kill me.”

Beamon wanted to just let the subject drop—he felt like he was forcing her to dredge up memories best left buried. Deep down, though, he knew it was probably better for her to let them out. “So your—I mean Eric—killed Patricia. And then he killed himself, didn’t he?”

She nodded.

“Damn,” Beamon muttered. There had always been a trace of doubt in his mind about that. He’d have to give that cute little lesbian coroner a firm
pat on the back, if he lived to see her again.

“She just stood there, and he killed her,” Jennifer continued. “They didn’t care what happened to me. Neither of them.”

Beamon looked over at her again, amazed at how well she was holding up. He tried to put himself in her place, to imagine what it would be like to be fifteen years old and see something like that. “I don’t think that’s true, Jennifer.”

“You weren’t there. They gave him a gun. He could have stopped them, but he didn’t.” She turned back to the window. “He didn’t.”

“You’re angry right now. And you’ve got a right to be. But given some time, I think you’ll understand that there was more going on there than maybe you see right now.”

A bitter smile compounded the pain etched across her young features. “Patty used to use that on me. ‘You’ll understand when you’re older.’”

“I’m sorry to say, I’ve found that to be a myth. The years come and go and your perspective changes, but I’m not sure you really ever understand more.”

Beamon slowed the car and eased onto an off- ramp. “Your—sorry, Eric and Patricia—believed very strongly in God. They didn’t show you that part of their lives, but it was incredibly important to them. They believed that you were, well, almost divine. When they did what they did, in a way, they did it for you. They wanted you to leave them behind. To become more than they could ever be. I know it’s weird, but really it’s what all parents want for their children.”

“For some psycho bitch to kill them so she can keep her job?”

Beamon slowed the car a bit more and tugged on her arm so that she would meet his eyes. “I’ve spent the last month or so doing nothing but working on this case, Jennifer—I know more about it than anyone in the world, and I’ll tell you right now that your parents had no idea what Sara was planning. No idea.”

“Maybe they should have stuck around and tried to find out.”

The restaurant where Michaels was waiting, thankfully, was just ahead. His first foray into adolescent counseling seemed to have been an unsurprising bust. Probably better to change the subject before he did irreversible damage. “That’s it. The reinforcements should be just ahead.”

Jennifer started to look nervous. Panicked, almost. “Let’s forget this, Mr. Beamon.” She twisted around and looked through the rear window. “Please, let’s just turn around and keep driving.”

Beamon suddenly realized what was probably going through her head. Her parents had pawned her off on the church, and now he was going to pawn her off on the Bureau. “Jennifer, we’re less than three miles from one of the largest FBI offices in the country. I’m not just throwing you to the wolves here. They can protect you better than I can. And when you’re safe, I’m going to stick a knife so deep into Sara Renslier and her church that they’ll never be able to hurt you again. I’m doing the best I can.”

She grabbed his arm. “I want to stay with you. You can’t even run a computer. I could help.”

Beamon eased into the parking lot and spotted Michaels standing in the open door of his car. He pulled into the empty space next to the young agent and looked carefully around him. The lot was nearly
full of cars but almost devoid of people. The restaurant’s lunch rush was probably pretty much over and dinner hadn’t yet begun. Most of the cars probably belonged to the patrons of the shops that were lined up neatly across the street.

Michaels’s eyes jerked to the left as Beamon stepped from the car.

Shit.

Beamon fell back into the driver’s seat, reached behind him and pulled his gun from the exposed holster in the small of his back, but it was too late. Two men with compact machine pistols held low had already stepped from opposite sides of an old panel van.

He looked behind him. Jennifer had slid from the seat and crammed herself in the small floor space in front of it. She was clutching at the armrest on the door, trying to hold it shut as a similarly armed man tried to open it. Beamon grabbed Jennifer under the arm and dragged her over the seats and out the driver’s-side door with him.

“I swear they didn’t follow me, Mark. They were already here when I got here.”

“Shut up,” the man Beamon’s gun was aimed at said.

“You shut up, fuckhead,” Michaels said angrily.

Beamon winced. That wasn’t productive. He felt Jennifer’s arms wrap around him. “Take it easy, Jen. We’re okay.”

That wasn’t entirely true, of course. The man who had been trying to get at Jennifer though the passenger-side door had circled around and now there were three men, spaced at about five-foot intervals, facing him. Michaels was between them, looking fantastically pissed off.

Beamon looked around him. There was one other person in the parking lot about fifty yards away, but she was oblivious to what was happening, more interested in getting her key into her trunk without having to put her packages down. If they had to, these guys could shoot him and Michaels, throw the girl in the van, and be two blocks away before anyone knew what had happened.

“You’re to come with us,” one of the men said.

Beamon adjusted his aim toward the man’s chest. He looked a couple of years older than the other two, but he probably still hadn’t seen his thirty-fifth birthday.

“Yeah? Screw you!” Michaels said.

“Jesus, Chet,” Beamon said quietly. “Could you maybe try and be a little more constructive?”

Michaels frowned and bobbed his head as if he’d just been scolded for not taking out the trash.

Beamon looked around him again. The woman with the packages was driving away. The lot was now empty except for them and a bunch of ownerless cars. The man who had spoken a moment before had his firearm aimed at Michaels. The other two guns were on him.

They wouldn’t kill her—Beamon was sure of that. Without the religious mumbo jumbo Sara had attached to Jennifer’s death, she would just be murdering her messiah’s only living relative. A poor career move, particularly with her main enforcer’s recent decision to stop a couple of Beamon’s bullets with his chest.

Interestingly, he himself was safe from immediate execution, too. Sara wanted the Vericomm tapes and undoubtedly planned on making his life unpleasant enough to get him to tell her where they were.

Now, Michaels had problems. His life expectancy had just gone from fifty years to less than an hour.

“Let’s go,” the man said. Ignoring the fact that Beamon had a gun trained on him, he reached out and grabbed Jennifer’s arm, pulling her to him.

“No!” she whimpered, tightening her grip around Beamon’s waist until it actually made it hard for him to breathe.

Beamon grabbed her hand and peeled her off him, letting the man drag her away with a satisfied smirk. “Not quite the man I’d heard you were, Beamon. I expected some theatrics, at least.”

“You sonofabitch,” Jennifer said, glaring at him. “You promised.”

Beamon didn’t see that he had many options. Desperate times demanded desperate measures. In one smooth motion, he cocked back the hammer on his revolver and adjusted his aim to center Jennifer in his sights.

The eyes of the man holding Jennifer widened, but not as much as hers did.

“I got it figured this way,” Beamon said calmly. “You’ve been told not to hurt the girl and to bring me back in one or two pieces—but alive.” He looked over at Michaels. “Him, well, you’ll probably just kill him the minute we get in your van.”

“Great,” Michaels said in a mildly irritated tone. He sounded like he’d come out of the restaurant to find that someone had scratched his car.

Beamon ignored the interruption and continued. “I know what you’ve got planned for her. She’ll be dead on Friday morning and in the days until then, you‘ll have her drugged in some room, alone and scared.” He shook his head. “If I let you guys
take her, I doubt I’ll live to find her again. Maybe it’s better that we just end it here. Quick.”