Prayer (14 page)

Mel nodded. “Sure, be my guest.” He glanced up at the blue sky. “Question is, what the fuck is this thing doing all the way out here? With no targets. No hajis. No bathroom windows. Just floating handbags.”

“We had a report from Army CID of a group of terrorists, ex-military, called the HIDDEN, who were trying to get ahold of these weapons.”

“You mean they’re Americans?” said Mel.

I nodded. “That’s right. Americans. The most dangerous fucking terrorists of them all. They’re planning to use these weapons against the local Jewish community.”

“The Jews,” said Mel Karski. “It’s always us. As if we didn’t have enough to deal with from Big T and the Reverend Al Qaeda.”

“My guess is that this was a test flight,” I said. “They could have sat in a Starbucks on Sylvan Beach while flying this bird around the whole of the bay area. Or maybe the vendor arranged a quiet little demonstration for one of the bad guys.”

I had my cell phone out and was about to dial a number.

“Either way, it means I now have to telephone my ASAC to arrange a quiet little demonstration of how the FBI handles a five-star crisis.”

“Uh, no, you don’t. Not here, Agent Martins. Not next to this fucking thing. Better switch it off right now.” Mel turned toward the two cops. “You, too, boys. Just in case. Wouldn’t want a detonation signal hitching a ride on our cell phones, now would we?”

“Can that happen?” asked one of the cops, edging away from the Switchblade.

“Oh, yeah,” said the Gut. “Matter of fact, it happens all the time in Afghanistan and Iraq. More angels get made that way in coalition country than in Bedford fucking Falls.”

I
spoke to Gisela about the abandoned Switchblade and she agreed that we couldn’t afford to wait on the Army CID informer they had working in the HIDDEN group to bring us up to speed with the terrorists’ plans. We had to assume that HIDDEN was now in possession of the weapon and that at any moment it might carry out an attack on Congregation Beth Israel on North Braeswood Boulevard. It was a Thursday and in less than twenty-four hours the synagogue would be full of people. It was imperative that we arrest the group as quickly as possible. At the same time, we knew the HIDDEN group was already heavily armed and, given its military background, it seemed reasonable to assume that the members were likely to put up a violent resistance. All of which suggested that we were going to need full tactical support.

HIDDEN’s leader, Johnny Sack Brown, lived in an apartment complex on South Gessner Road, on the southwest side of Houston. It’s an area frequented by local gangs—the Cholos and the Broadway Sureños—especially at night when the Southside starts to kick off. From the number of five-point stars, black rosaries, and descending pitchforks I saw graffitied on some of the local buildings, I figured the Cholos were in the ascendant. Either that or there were some militant Rosicrucians figuring to move in.

Together with some HPD from the seventeenth district who knew the area well, we checked over the site on Google Earth and Google Maps, and decided to park our vehicles in front of the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany about two or three hundred feet from the target building, and deploy from there. This church looked less like somewhere you’d have met Jesus or St. John the Divine and more like an all-night place where you might get a prescription filled or a hamburger served up. From the church, one team was going to approach the apartment complex from the north, another team would go in from the south, and a third team from the west. On Google Earth, the apartment complex constituted a couple of dozen concrete boxes, each with one small apartment on the ground floor and another identical one on the floor above. Some of the little houses even had chimneys, although it was hard to see how these might ever have been of use in a city as warm as Houston.

When the operation went down at six the following morning, these houses seemed no less unprepossessing. South Gessner Road is a four-lane highway with all the charm of yesterday’s doggy bag. Across the road is a You Lock It self-storage building, and from the general look of the neighborhood, it was a useful facility to have in an area where none of the doors and locks gave the impression that they could have resisted an assault by a determined two-year-old.

Almost as soon as the doors of the bus opened, the team moved quickly into positions with everyone trying to keep their minds on the job at hand. But this wasn’t easy. On average, the Tac Team is called up maybe once or twice a month; and it was an unfortunate coincidence that I had called for a deployment on the morning that another probable victim of Houston’s serial killer had been found in Memorial Park. This meant that several field agents were hauled off duty with Violent Crimes to come and serve on my Tac Team operation with the result that the latest murder investigation, headed by Harlan Caulfield, was immediately stretched to the limit. It made for a very difficult morning and there were rumors of a stand-up row between Gisela and Harlan about which investigation took priority. Harlan was just trying it on for size, of course; once a Tac Team op has been called, it always assumes precedence. No one wants to risk an agent’s life by deploying a half-strength squad. Not for a dead woman in a park.

In any event, not even a single shot was fired. Johnny Sack Brown and his two friends offered no resistance and they submitted to being arrested and driven to a holding cell at the Bureau field office as meekly as if they’d received gold-embossed invitations to go there from the governor of Texas himself. There was, however, no sign in the apartment of a Switchblade, or any other weapons for that matter, not even a sidearm; and the Tac Team went back to the office feeling less than elated. It was only when I searched Johnny Sack Brown’s desk drawers and discovered a receipt from the You Lock It self-storage facility that I guessed where the group was keeping their new toys. Ten minutes later I was on the other side of South Gessner Road with a couple of our newest brick agents, opening an outdoor storage unit with climate control and a roll-up door, and unpacking an arms cache that included not one but six Switchblades.

It was still early. I hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, but I was too psyched to be hungry. I jumped in the car and was driving back to Justice Park Drive with the good news about the Switchblades when my cell rang. It was Bishop Coogan.

“I was at the hospital,” he said. “To pray for Philip Osborne. I called you last night, like you said I should, but you weren’t answering your cell.”

“Sorry about that, sir,” I said. “I meant to call you back only we had something real important going down last night.”

“I’ve seen a good many passings, you understand, Gil. It’s not everyone who dies with the smile of the saints on his face.”

“Meaning what?”

“To be frank with you, Gil, he didn’t look at peace with the world. Sure, there’s a great comfort to be had in a fellow’s last prayer, you know. To die in the arms of the Church, so to speak. And Osborne didn’t have that. I hate to see a soul that’s not at peace when it passes over. And he certainly wasn’t that. You remember that when you pick up your next book by Richard bloody Dawkins.”

“Fair enough, Bishop. Look, you said there was something you wanted to speak to me about. A little local difficulty, you called it.”

“That I did. I need some advice, Gil. Perhaps you could drop round to the house again sometime. Tomorrow, maybe. I’ll be here most of the day.”

“Sure. Come to think of it, I should take some time off. I need to see a real estate agent and look for somewhere to live, among a lot of other things.”

“Are you two kids moving house, Gil?”

“Ruth wants me out of her house, sir. And she wants a divorce, too.”

“Why did she do that?”

“I kept my virtues in one pocket and my vices in the other. I guess that was fine until she started going through my pockets and discovered I wasn’t quite as virtuous as she imagined.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any use in my offering to speak to her on your behalf.”

“Hell, no.” I laughed. “I think she dislikes Catholics as much as she hates heathens like me.”

“You’re no heathen, Gil. You might think you are now. But when you turn away from God, it’s only a circle you’re making and before long that same circle will put you back in front of him. You see if I’m wrong.”

It was hard arguing these things with a bishop, even one as worldly as Eamon Coogan.

My route back to the office took me onto the Southwest Freeway and then north up the 610. About halfway there I saw blue and red lights, and then two FBI Evidence Response Team trucks as they turned off the opposite lanes onto North Post Oak Road and Woodway Drive. They were obviously headed for the serial killer’s latest crime scene, and thinking I might loop around and follow them, I decided to make a right onto Memorial Drive. I placed the cherry on top of the car roof and put my foot down. It wasn’t that I thought I could add anything important to the investigation, but I hadn’t yet seen the killer’s work firsthand and, after all, Harlan Caulfield had asked for my opinion once before, so I wanted to show him that I was still willing to help. Besides, I was still feeling a little guilty about stealing some of his men.

The trucks were easy to spot as they came barreling east along the road and I was quickly on their tail. They veered south onto Memorial Loop Drive and pulled up in front of three practice baseball diamonds, right next to a mobile command center—one of the big blue-gray motor homes with a satellite dish on top that look as if Tom Cruise might be resting inside between takes. Some cops were doing an excellent job of keeping a line of looky-loos at a distance. Already there were several TV cameras set up to scavenge the scraps from the police and FBI tables to make the whole ghastly scene complete. You could almost smell the scent of a fresh kill in the air above the crowd’s eager, bobbing heads.

Trusting in my cherry, the cops waved me on through like I was someone who mattered and I pulled up next to the MCC just as Harlan came out with an e-cigarette in his mouth. With no flame or combustion involved, e-cigarettes were about the only thing you could smoke in Memorial Park, or almost anywhere else for that matter. Harlan took a drag of his tobacco-free, smoke-free, smell-free cigarette. It was just harmless water vapor with a little nicotine mixed in, so you could get the taste without insult to the throat or other people. I didn’t mind offering an insult to anyone.

“I was right about Saint Peter, wasn’t I?”

“What makes you say so, Martins?”

“Come on, Harlan. Everyone in the office knows that’s what the boys in Violent Crime have nicknamed your serial killer.” I nodded at the news crews. “Everyone except them, that is.”

“That’s one newspaper headline I never want to see,” growled Harlan. “So keep your mouth shut about that. I’d better have a word with my team. And stamp on someone’s kiwifruit, very hard.”

“Another victim who was on her way to collecting a halo?”

“That she was.” Harlan sighed. “Caroline Romero founded the Robbie Center when her boy Robbie disappeared. He ran away from home when he was twelve and she’s never seen him again. So she and her husband, Manolo, used some of their not inconsiderable fortune to found the center in order to try to prevent abductions and runaways, and to recover missing children. Since they started fifteen years ago, they’ve helped find more than three hundred missing kids and reunite them with their parents. And if that isn’t worth a damned halo, I don’t know what is.” He took a drag on the cigarette. “She lived on Crestwood Drive, about a mile west of here. Nice house. Nice people. She had other kids, but losing one isn’t something you get over, I guess. She never did anything bad to anybody. That’s what all her neighbors say.”

“How’d it happen?”

“She was shot with a small-caliber weapon, same as the others. Last night she went out jogging and she didn’t come back. No one saw a fucking thing, of course. Leastways, not so far.”

“Is it possible that your killer feels that he’s on the side of the angels? Could the reason he’s killing these people be that he actually thinks he’s doing God’s work?”

Harlan looked at his e-cigarette and shook his head. “You’re taking this atheism a little too far, aren’t you?”

“No, no, Harlan, listen. It makes complete logical sense when you think about it. That is, if you believe in heaven and in God’s rewards for the righteous—the whole nine yards. I mean, if heaven really is heaven, then maybe the killer believes he’s just helping his victims to their reward sooner rather than later. Maybe he thinks he’s doing them a favor.”

Harlan frowned. “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard.”

“You’re not a serial killer, Harlan. You don’t think like a crazy person. But we both know lots of people who do think that heaven is a real place and can’t wait to get there. Didn’t those Muslim terrorists who flew those planes into the Twin Towers believe that they were going to find seventy-two virgins waiting for them in heaven?”

“I never did see the attraction of virgins all that much.”

“Harlan, maybe the killer thinks he’s gathering these victims to the Lord. Admitting them to heaven. Bringing them to their reward. Exactly like St. Peter.”

“You are one sick bastard, Martins. Do you know that?” He grinned and punched me gently on the shoulder. “But frankly, that’s the best theory I’ve heard in a long while. And as good as any other one I’ve heard since I started to work this fucking case.”

“Just maybes is all it is, Harlan. Just maybes.”

“Ain’t you heard? Maybe is how we get this show on the road.”

“Maybe.”

“Uh-huh. You had breakfast?”

“Nope.”

“Good. Then let’s go take a look at the scene.”

Caroline Romero’s murder brought Saint Peter’s death toll to six and had the effect of triggering the use of the Houston field office’s Crisis Management Operations Center, from where the resources of all local law enforcement agencies investigating the killings would in future be coordinated. The CMOC is a large windowless room on the second floor. It’s like the Situation Room at the White House, only bigger and actually better equipped with dozens of PC terminals and flat-screen TVs along the walls so that information is more easily obtained and, more important, shared among the fifty federal agents and cops that the CMOC can accommodate. No one likes to set up the CMOC when another operation is going down. The crisis manager running the CMOC wants to feel that he’s got first call on all of the local Bureau resources, which is why, when we met outside the elevator in the front hall, Doug Corbin thought to tap a nail in my ear.

Doug Corbin had a personality that belonged in a tissue. He’d nailed my ear before and took more delight in doing so than he ought to have done.