Storming Heaven (9 page)

“How do you mean?”

“Well, if you believe very strongly in any particular religion, that dogma is going to affect your perceptions and therefore your mental outlook. Let’s compare a very devout Muslim woman with a devout Kneissian woman. Now, many Muslims have very strong beliefs that keep women as sort of second-class citizens. This might create, for instance, problems with self-esteem.”

Beamon thought about that for a moment.
Seemed to make sense. “And the Kneissian woman?”

“Well, the Kneissians are at the other end of the spectrum. They are almost completely lacking in institutional chauvinism. On the other hand, they are very focused on financial and political success. So a Kneissian woman might have self-esteem problems just as severe, but they would relate to, say, a lack of success in her job.”

“I’ll buy that.”

“Obviously, that’s an oversimplified example. Here’s a better one. How old do you think the bride and groom are?”

Beamon shrugged. “I have no idea. They looked like kids to me, but then, so does half my staff.”

“I’d guess that they were just out of high school. For some reason, Kneissians get married very young and have an extremely high divorce rate.”

Beamon nodded thoughtfully. “Recruitment.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s why they marry early and get divorced,” he said. “Recruitment.”

“I don’t think I follow you.”

Beamon grabbed another shrimp. “What’s the purpose of religion?”

“That’s a pretty complicated question. To make people feel less alone?”

Beamon scowled. “No. That’s the purpose of God. The purpose of a religion is simply to force everyone into its way of thinking.”

“Why, Mark. You’re a cynic. I never would have guessed.”

Beamon ignored the jibe. “Seriously. The Church of the Evolution doesn’t miss many opportunities to
tell you it’s the fastest-growing religion in the world. How do you think they achieved that?”

She pushed a dirty plate out of her way and leaned against the table. “I think they’ve created a pretty attractive belief system that fills a lot—” The expression on Beamon’s face made fier stop. “You’re going to tell me that I’m overthinking again, aren’t you?”

He smiled and nodded furiously. “They’re growing faster than any other religion ‘cause they’ve been more scientific about recruitment. Take our young couple today. Let’s assume a perfect scenario for the church. The boy was, I don’t know … Buddhist. He converted in order to marry the girl, who was Kneissian. They have a couple of kids and get divorced, say five years from now. Our groom likes the church and decides to stay. They’re both single for a few years, then he finds a nice Baptist he wants to marry and she converts. Same thing happens to our bride, but maybe she converts a Protestant. Both new couples have two more kids. How many new Kneissians have we just created?”

Carrie counted on her fingers. “Uh, nine?”

“Sounds about right.”

She held her glass up in salute and took another sip of her wine. “I have to say, Mark, that’s got to be the most malignant piece of deductive reasoning I’ve ever heard.”

“Thank you. Are you ready to take me to dinner?”

She folded her arms across her chest and gave him a stern look. “That offer was
instead
of the reception, not in addition to. Besides—you have to
have eaten a hundred shrimp already.”

The way her eyes crinkled at the edges when she smiled really was dazzling. The truth was, he really wasn’t hungry—and the shrimp and cream cheese he’d eaten had definitely not been on the new and improved Mark Beamon diet—but he didn’t want the evening to end just yet. “Yeah, but they weren’t very good.”

The silk of her dress gathered and dispersed the dim light of the room hypnotically as she stood. “Okay, Mark. You win. Since you seem to have elevated cynicism to the level of a religion, I think I might be able to write the check off on my taxes.”

“H
ELLO?
” B
EAMON CALLED INTO THE EMPTY
reception area of the Kane County, Utah, sheriff’s office. No answer.

He leaned his head into the half-open window centered in the wall. “Hello! Anyone home? I’m Mark Beamon from the
FBI.”

There was a moment of silence, then a disembodied voice. “Wait in the conference room.”

Beamon stepped back and scanned the missing persons posters taped haphazardly to the glass. Jennifer Davis smiled out from one of them, posing selfconsciously alongside a bicycle with a big red bow on the seat. The other lost souls had similarly cheerful expressions and stood with jumping dogs, new motorcycles, and loved ones, oblivious to their current plights.

Those frozen images were all that was left of most of them, Beamon knew. Few would ever be found, and most of the ones who were would be discovered because some lost hiker tripped over one of their sun-bleached bones.

“This is it,” Chet Michaels said, pointing to an open door in the hall to Beamon’s left and breaking him out of his trance.

They waited in the large conference room for almost twenty minutes before the sheriff finally strutted in, flanked by two deputies.

That was probably a bad sign. It was Sunday afternoon and all he needed was directions to David Passal’s place. He could have just taken them over the phone, but it was his practice to meet the locals before he started prowling around their jurisdiction.

One of the deputies hopped up on the counter running along the edge of the room and tapped his hand rhythmically on the edge of the sink next to him. The other just leaned against the wall next to the door and tried to look as imposing as possible.

“You Beamon?” the sheriff said, standing near the end of the conference table and looking them over carefully.

Beamon had decided to make this trip a casual-dress affair. He was wearing an old pair of jeans and a pair of cowboy boots that hadn’t seen his feet since his days as a firearms instructor to the Nevada police. No point rushing into Kanab looking like a cross between an IRS agent and a funeral director. Made people uncomfortable.

“Yeah. Call me Mark.” Beamon considered standing and offering his hand but instead just motioned to his right. “I think you spoke to Chet yesterday.”

The sheriff nodded curtly. He had that impossible build that seemed so common in rural America. His face, arms, and legs were lean—thin, almost—but he had a great expanse of a belly that had wrestled his gray-tan shirttail out of his pants and was now covering up the ornate tooling on his leather gunbelt.

“What do you FBI boys want with Dave Passal?”

Beamon wasn’t anxious to stand around posturing with the locals, but he didn’t really have a choice.
He had no idea how to find Passal, and you never knew when you’d be desperately in need of some quick firepower.

“Would you know where we could find him?”

“Nope. He don’t come into town much. Could be anywhere.”

His backup snorted quietly.

“David’s Jennifer Davis’s uncle. Her only living blood relative,” Beamon said. “I thought he might know something that could help me.”

The sheriff—who still hadn’t introduced himself—tried not to let his surprise show. “You think maybe Dave might have been involved?”

Beamon put on a bored expression. “Drive all that way to kidnap a girl he hadn’t seen or spoken to in twelve years? I doubt it.” Not exactly the truth, but he had no idea if the sheriff was Passal’s hunting partner, brother-in-law, or best friend.

“We had a bank robbery here awhile back,” the sheriff started. “Teller got killed. Nice kid. Bunch of your boys came up from Salt Lake. Started givin’ half the town the rubber hose treatment. You know what they found in the end?

“Actually, I have no idea,” Beamon said.

“Nothin’. Turned my town upside down and inside out, then they just packed up their stuff and left.”

“Look, Sheriff …?”

“Parkinson.”

“Sheriff Parkinson. It’s just me and Chet here. We want to see if this guy knows anything, then we plan to ride off into the sunset. With a little luck, we’re talking
tonight’s
sunset.”

Parkinson nodded silently. Suspicion was still etched clearly across his face, but the hostility seemed to be fading a bit.

“Don’t see much of Dave, but I reckon he’s still up there.”

“Up there?” Michaels prompted excitedly.

The sheriff raised his hand lazily and pointed in a generally eastward direction. “Got a place up in the hills about an hour outside of town. Doesn’t come down much. Just to get supplies every now and again.”

“Could you give us directions on how to get there?”

“Why don’t I just send a couple of my boys up there with you.” He looked into the innocent face of Chet Michaels. “I’d hate to see the paperwork if I let a couple of you FBI boys get your asses shot off.”

Michaels leaned forward over the table. “So you think he’s armed?”

Beamon winced and Parkinson’s deputies giggled.

“Hell yeah, he’s armed, son. Probably kills most of what he eats. That and he always struck me as one of those paranoid types. You know, thinks there’s a Russian behind every tree. I doubt he gets many visitors and I reckon he likes it that way.”

Beamon sighed quietly. If Passal was involved, the last thing he needed was a couple of the sheriff’s lackeys standing around siding with the man. They’d be there all week. “I appreciate the offer, Sheriff, but I don’t really think it’s necessary. We aren’t after Passal, we just want to talk to him for a few minutes and then we’re gone.”

The sheriff looked strangely pleased that Beamon had declined his offer. Probably curious to see what Passal would do to the city slickers from Flagstaff. “Your call,” he said with a condescending shrug of his shoulders.

Beamon managed to open the car door about a foot before the wind blew it shut again. Chet Michaels’s quiet laughter was silenced when his door was torn from his hand with the sound of bending metal.

“You mind? I’m still making payments on this thing,” Beamon said, putting his shoulder into the door and successfully escaping the car before the wind blew it shut again.

They’d stopped just as the road crested a hill and disappeared into the darkening sky. In the near distance Beamon could see a column of smoke rise above the dense pine forest and then suddenly disperse in the swirling wind.

Better to finish this trip on foot, try to get close to Passal before he had a chance to dust off his grenade launcher.

“Okay, Chet, here we go. Why don’t you walk up the road and knock on the door. See if anyone’s home.”

The young agent looked apprehensive. “What’re you going to be doing?”

“I was going to sit in the car and have a smoke. It’s freezing out here.” Beamon smiled. “Relax. I’ll be right behind you. I’m going to walk up through the trees here. Just in case.”

Michaels reached for his gun, but Beamon stopped him. “Think friendly, Chet. Just going up there to borrow a cup of venison jerky, right? No need for anyone to get upset.”

Michaels reluctantly flipped his sweater back over the butt of his gun and looked up at the road, trying to gauge the distance to the fading column of smoke.

“Wait about three minutes, then get moving, okay, Chet?” Beamon could feel the cold penetrating his parka and wanted to get moving before he started to get sluggish. “No, on second thought, give me about ten minutes. I think I’m going to take it easy.” Michaels nodded as Beamon slid his new glasses onto his nose and pulled out his .357.

It was slow going. Utah’s drought year and constant sun had kept the roads and endless miles of sagebrush relatively clear, but in the shadows of the trees, the snow and ice had accumulated. Beamon concentrated on every step, scanning the ground carefully and occasionally bypassing an area where the shadows had grown too deep to see well. He guessed he was about halfway to the source of the smoke they’d seen earlier when he saw the fading sun glint off something he’d hoped not to find.

A thin piece of fishing line about three inches from the ground blocked his path. It spanned about four feet between a small sapling and a dense tangle of sagebrush.

Beamon knelt down, ignoring the jagged edges of frozen pine needles beneath his knees, and leaned forward until his ear was almost to the ground. He gently pushed away a dead branch and exposed a simple but undoubtedly efficient mechanism involving a gas can and a road flare.

He stood and stepped carefully over the fishing line, scanning the ground for secondary trip wires.

The darkness was coming fast as the sun dipped behind a butte to the west. Beamon knew he was moving too quickly, but according to his watch, Michaels had been making his way up the road for
almost a minute now. And sending him in alone to face down a man who obviously had no qualms about setting trespassers on fire would definitely take him out of the running for manager of the year.

Two minutes and one more trip wire later, Beamon could see the faded white of a trailer through the woods. He stopped just before the edge of the clearing and hovered behind a deformed pine.

It was about what he’d expected. The single-wide looked like it had been patched together with plywood and duct tape, and the only thing holding the roof on was a mismatched collection of old tires piled two high across the front edge.