Storming Heaven (6 page)

Beamon sighed. Sounded like an okay kid. Strong enough to rise above the less than full deck life had dealt him. Had he become impatient? Wanted it all now?

“You okay, Mark?”

“Yeah.”

“I talked on the phone with a couple of his teachers and they pretty much all described him the same way. Very bright. Mature beyond his years. Not crazy about authority figures.”

Beamon pushed the car door open and grabbed hold of the luggage rack to keep his feet from skidding out from under him as he got out. He knew how he was going to have to play this and was already starting to feel the guilt and regret creeping up on him. Despite the large neon sign in his head pointing to Jennifer and Jamie as the Davises’ murderers, his intuition was telling him that that sign might be pointing in the wrong direction.

The problem was that he couldn’t figure out if that gut reaction was the result of their innocence, or the fact that he just didn’t want to believe they were guilty. There was just no satisfaction in nailing two love-crazed teenagers. Instead of making you feel like you’d won, it just made it feel like everyone had lost.

“Okay, Chet. Let’s get this over with,” Beamon said as he half-walked, half-slid across a wide puddle of ice to a patch of snow that would get him to the door.

The school didn’t look a hell of a lot better inside than out. The walls were painted a uniform faded orange, broken only by an occasional mural, painted with a childlike sensibility that pegged it as the work of the student body. The halls were empty and the doors lining them were all closed. Prompted by a sign that read
OFFICE
, Beamon turned down a hall to his right and walked through the first door he came to.

The woman behind the tall counter jumped up from behind her desk and looked at Beamon with mild expectation. “Can I help you?”

“I hope so,” Beamon said, digging into his jacket and pulling out his credentials. “I’m Special Agent Mark Beamon and this is Special Agent Chet Michaels. We were told we could use one of your conference rooms to talk with a few of your students?”

She looked down at the counter sadly. “I read all about it, but I still can’t believe it. Mr. and Mrs. Davis were such nice people. And Jennifer … Do you have any leads?”

“We’re doing everything we can,” Beamon answered, anxious to get this over with and escape the vaguely musty-smelling building before he started having high school flashbacks. “I’m sorry, but I’m running a little tight on time …”

She spun on her heel and disappeared through a door behind her. A moment later she reappeared with a sturdy-looking gray-haired woman in a tweed suit.

“Mr. Beamon. I’m the principal here. Louise Darren.”

“Nice to meet you, Ms. Darren. This is my associate, Chet Michaels.”

As they shook hands, she motioned toward the door behind her. “Jamie and his mother are already in my office. You’re welcome to use it to talk to them.”

Beamon looked at the cheap hollow-core door that she had indicated, and its proximity to the outer office. “I appreciate that, but I wouldn’t want to put you out of your office. Also, it might be more convenient if we could find something with a bit more privacy?”

She thought for a moment and then pointed down a narrow hall with walls papered in various announcements and lists. “There’s a room we don’t really use anymore down at the end of the hall. It’s kind of full of junk, though.”

Beamon smiled. “No problem. You should see my office.”

“Right though here, Jamie,” Beamon said, opening the door to the abandoned office and stepping aside. There was a dusty old desk piled high with papers and old books centered in the room. Chairs were plentiful, but most had been stacked against the walls.

“Why don’t you and Chet grab us a few chairs and I’ll be back in a minute.” Beamon put his hand lightly on Jamie’s mother’s shoulder before she could enter. He closed the door quietly, leaving Chet and Jamie to rearrange the office.

“I’d like to speak with you for just a moment, if I could … Ms. Dolan is it?”

She shook her head. “Rodrigues. I went back to my maiden name when I was divorced.”

“Excuse me—Ms. Rodrigues.”

She looked up at him with deep concern that bordered on fear. It didn’t seem to be an expression specific to the situation—just the generic powerlessness many poor Hispanics seemed to feel when faced with white male law enforcement officials.

And he was about to use that unfortunate feeling of powerlessness to the absolute hilt. What a guy.

“Would you mind terribly if we spoke to Jamie alone? Sometimes having a parent in the room makes kids nervous. You know how they are. It’s really important that Jamie be relaxed so that he doesn’t forget anything that might allow us to help Jennifer. I’ve been doing this for a lot of years and I can tell you that the smallest detail can be critical.” He spoke—lied—slowly. Ms. Rodrigues’s English was less than perfect.

Beamon pointed back down the hall toward the outer office. “Why don’t you have a seat out there? We won’t be long.”

As she walked slowly away from him, Beamon told himself for the thousandth time that sometimes the end justified the means. He actually did believe that, it was just that he’d never run into a situation that he was dead sure qualified.

“Sorry about the wait, Jamie,” he said, striding through the door and closing it tightly behind him. “Your mom’s decided to wait for you outside.”

“Okay.”

Beamon took the chair across from the boy and looked him over carefully. His features were generally Caucasian, though he’d obviously inherited his
skin and hair color from his mother. His eyes were a light brown that seemed to fade to dark green and then back again as he moved. His clothes were mostly black or dark gray and had that secondhand look that kids seemed to strive for these days—though based on what Chet had told him earlier, it was probably more of an economic necessity for him than an obsession with fashion.

“I guess you haven’t found Jennifer yet,” the boy said in a tired voice that carried an emotional maturity that should have been impossible at his age.

Beamon shook his head but didn’t answer.

“Uh, do you know who did it?”

Beamon’s silent stare was having the desired effect. What little calm the boy had entered with was starting to fray.

“Other than you? Nope.”

The boy’s eyes widened for a moment and he opened his mouth to say something, but checked himself. It was a moment before he finally spoke. “Why would I want to kidnap Jennifer? She was already my girlfriend. Ask anyone. We never even fought, hardly.”

Beamon cocked his head. “I don’t think you kidnapped her, Jamie. I think you and Jennifer were in this together. I think you finished your little concert and went home. Then I think you sneaked out of the house and took the car to Jennifer’s, where you blew her parents’ brains all over the living room. Then you took Jennifer somewhere where it would be a pain in the ass for me to find her and went home.”

Beamon watched his young opponent carefully.
The boy was trembling, but his eyes were clear and he was obviously carefully considering Beamon’s words. He had to admire the kid—he’d had grown men face down on the table sobbing for less.

Jamie took a deep, shaky breath. “I read that Mr. and Mrs. Davis were found in the clothes they’d had on that day. No way I could have made it to their house before four in the morning—I got a hundred people I don’t even know that’d swear to that. They’d have to sleep in their clothes.”

Beamon shrugged. “I hear you got fifteen-eighty on your SATs, Jamie. I have to say I’d be a little disappointed if you’d just shot ‘em in bed. No, Jennifer would have known exactly what they were wearing and you’d force them to get dressed and come downstairs. My compliments. Not terribly creative, but not bad for a minor. I mean, at least you didn’t shoot the clock to establish a phony time of death, you know?”

Jamie ran a hand through his long black hair, dislodging the sweat from his hairline. Beamon watched as it ran down his face.

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe my mom should—”

Beamon cut him off. “If you’re old enough to shoot two human beings in the face, I think you’re old enough to talk to us without your mommy, don’t you?”

“Why? Why would I kill them?” Jamie said in a pleading voice. “I didn’t have anything against the Davises. I mean, what good would it do me that it’d be worth risking my whole life?”

Beamon leaned back in his chair and scraped an imaginary speck of dirt from under his thumbnail. “Oh, come on, Jamie. Don’t insult my intelligence. Patricia Davis was not exactly shot in the ass with you. In fact, I think she had someone else in mind for Jennifer. Seems to me like a win-win proposition for you. You get rid of Patty and Jennifer miraculously escapes from her kidnappers a few weeks later. Just in time to pick up her inheritance.”

“No!” Jamie protested. “Mrs. Davis liked me. That thing with Billy had been going on for years. Jennifer wasn’t interested.”

“That’s not what I hear, son. What I hear is that she was putting a lot of pressure on Jennifer. That she hated you. She apparently thought that Jennifer could do better than a …” Beamon paused imperceptibly, choking a bit on the phrase, “halfspic living in a trailer park.”

Jaime’s face flashed with anger. “Fuck you, man.” He jumped to his feet and pushed a book lying on the desk in front of him as hard as he could, but Beamon stopped it easily before it hit him in the chest.

“Sit down,” Beamon ordered, raising his voice for the first time in the “interview.” The boy glared at him, his breath coming like he’d just run a race.

“I won’t tell you again. Sit.”

Jamie looked over at Michaels, whose wide-eyed stare seemed frozen to his face, and then sank back into the chair.

“Look, Jamie. You’re underage. You love Jennifer. Maybe she even talked you into this? Been
there. It’s hard to say no to the woman you love. You start talking to me right now and I’ll do everything I can to make things go easy for you. At this point, I think we can keep this in Juvenile—keep you from being tried as an adult.” Beamon dropped the front legs of his chair to the floor loudly. “You keep fucking with me, though, and I’m going to make it my mission to get you. You’re a smart kid. You go look up some articles on me in the library. You’ll find that the people who come up against me end up in prison for the rest of their lives. Or dead.”

Tears clouded the boy’s eyes for the first time. “I didn’t do it, man. Don’t you think I want her back? Don’t you?”

He ran past them and out the door, slamming it behind him. Beamon didn’t bother to stop him.

“Jesus, Mark.” Michaels said in a loud whisper that sounded a bit panicked. “You just threatened to kill that kid!”

“Did I?” Beamon pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to shake the feeling that he’d have made a hell of a Gestapo agent. Ripping into a seventeen-year-old kid with a history of abuse—and who was probably lying awake at night imagining his girlfriend being raped in the back of a van or something—was right up there with clubbing baby seals on the fun meter. There were times when he really hated this job.

“So what do you think, Mark?”

Beamon sighed. “I got a bad feeling about that kid.”

“Really? You think he did it?”

Beamon shook his head. “No, that would be a good feeling. It’d mean I found our man—boy—and was on the verge of finding Jennifer. I’m afraid that he didn’t do it. And if that’s true, I don’t have a fucking clue where that little girl is.”

M
ARK
B
EAMON SLAMMED HIS FOOT AGAINST
the brake pedal and slid into a stand of snow-covered pines. The impact, slow as it was, knocked the snow off the trees and buried the front of his car. Apparently the snow-driving learning curve wasn’t real steep for Texans. At least not this one.

The condominium complex that had been his home for the past month sparkled as the beams of widely spaced floodlights bounced off ice clinging to the sides of the buildings. It had been the first place his realtor had taken him. The FBI had relocated him more times than he could remember—in fact, someone had recently pointed out that he might be closing in on the record. And with that many moves under his belt, the monotonous chore of looking for housing had become almost physically painful.

Of course, he had no one to blame for his career as the FBI’s tinerant lawman but himself. There was always some new office anxious to take on the man heralded as the best investigative mind in the Bureau. And there was always an office just as anxious to get rid of the man heralded as the biggest pain in the ass in the Bureau.

But that was the old Mark Beamon. He was the new, vastly improved Mark Beamon. He stepped
from the car and kicked his front tire. Satisfied that he’d be able to get out the next morning, he started along one of the meticulously shoveled brick walkways that connected the forty units with the main office, frozen swimming pool, and each other.

Each building was configured with two units upstairs and two downstairs, and all faced out onto expanses of grass, trees, and flowers—or at least that’s what he’d been told. Any landscaping that existed had been long buried when he’d arrived in January.