Prayer (26 page)

“So I guess I should be honored that you called me.”

“Not especially. But it being a Sunday and you being on forced leave ’n’ all, I just figured no one else in the Bureau would give a shit if we met up for a while. It’s about that laptop you dumped here last Sunday afternoon. Gaynor Allitt’s laptop? The lady who did the Dutch on the Hyatt Regency blacktop?”

“Jesus, I’d forgotten all about that.”

“Doesn’t sound like the thing anyone forgets in a hurry.”

“I mean the laptop. I’m not likely to forget her brains on the sidewalk if that’s what you mean.”

“Anyway, forced leave or not, Martins, I figured you were going to want to have this shit as soon as possible.”

“Yeah?”

“Meet me at the Red Onion Café at twelve-thirty and I’ll explain everything.”

“What is it, Ken? What have you found?”

“She kept a kind of video diary, Martins. And get ready to be surprised.”

The Red Onion Café was halfway between the RCFL and the FBI field office, on the eastern edge of the Northwest Freeway. A pueblo-style, red concrete redoubt of a restaurant that looked a bit like the Alamo, it was a popular place with agents from the Bureau, except at Sunday brunch, when the clientele was mostly overweight Texas families with a taste for Mexican food.

The waitress escorted me to a table in the back next to a window that looked out onto a parking lot filled with dozens of yellow trucks. Ken Paris was reading the
Houston Chronicle
. There was already a Corona beer and a plate of tortilla chips on the table and next to it an iPad with a pair of headphones plugged into the side that was obviously set up for me to look at Gaynor Allitt’s video diary. As usual, Ken was wearing a loose, short-sleeve shirt that made him look as if he were going bowling. He chuckled as I sat down in front of him. I ordered a Dos Equis for myself and loosened my tie.

“Hey,” he said, “you really did think it was a workday, didn’t you, Agent Martins?”

“At Federal Plaza they used to say that terrorists always work on Sundays and that nothing says holidays like a pipe bomb in Times Square.”

“They do like their fortune-cookie wisdom at Federal Plaza.”

I clasped my hands tightly and pressed them down on the table, thinking it might help to stop me from rearranging the cutlery and condiments, or even reaching for Ken’s iPad. Someone watching me might almost have thought I was praying.

“The diary? Is it on that tablet?”

“I was going to bring you crayons, but then I changed my mind.”

“When I got your call this morning, I was in the process of changing my own mind,” I told him. “I mean about this whole damn case. I’ve been seriously thinking of dropping it on account of how people have been giving me strange looks in the corridors at Justice Park Drive.”

“They’ve been doing that for a while, Gil, before the case, only you didn’t notice.”

“You mean the OCD thing?”

“How’s that going anyway?”

“I’m trying to keep a check on it. Of course, now that I do, it seems a lot worse than I thought it was.” I paused a moment. “Feels really weird, actually.”

“Good.” Ken nodded. “I mean that you’re trying to put a choke on that shit. It’ll be a change to sit and have lunch with you and not watch the sugar packets get fixed into a neat little pile.” He grinned. “The number of times I’ve wanted to reach across and mess it all up for you. Still, you might feel a little differently about the case when you’ve seen the video diary. About chucking it in, I mean.”

“Let’s take a look-see at what we’ve got.”

“Let’s get the important things done here first, okay? I’m starving.” He waved the waitress back and we ordered our food.

“I did you a transcript to save you the trouble of making notes. And I’ve made a video copy for you on a flash drive. By the way, I might have called you before with this, but Gaynor Allitt wasn’t using a plain-text password, but one with a hash value. That’s when you apply a one-way algorithm to a password. Her password had eight characters and, with the hash, that gives you about eight billion combinations. It took our rainbow table software a while to crack. But more significantly, it would have taken someone who didn’t work for the FBI or the NSA forever and maybe even longer than that.”

“So, what does all that stuff mean?”

“The hash? It means she was very well informed about computer security and probably very nervous about someone stealing or breaking into her laptop, which is why she took such an unusually rigorous precaution.”

“She was certainly scared about something,” I said.

“Just who or what that is will probably become a little clearer when you watch the diary.”

“Any evidence of sending self-destructing e-mails?” I asked.

“None at all. According to what’s on the cache memory, I doubt she’s even been on an SDE service site using that computer.” He waited a beat. “As well as shooting the video diary, she liked filming herself naked and masturbating.” He glanced around the restaurant. “But I figured they’re not ready for that movie here in the Red Onion Café.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. You can look at that particular film on the flash drive if you’re inclined. She might also have been using her video camera for Skype. As a matter of fact, she used Skype a lot, but her list of Skype contacts was kind of short. In fact, it had only one name on it, and that’s a Skype name, so it doesn’t mean much in a phone book. You could always try contacting this person by Skype to explain the problem, but that’s got to be your call. Strikes me if she was Skyping while she was jerking off, then that person might be a little slow to reply.”

“See the video diary first,” I said. “Then decide about the Skype contact later. Did she send any of these diary entries as an attachment to an e-mail?”

“Nope. Not that I can see.” He swiped the sliding arrow to unlock the iPad and pressed the video app icon to reveal a still image of Gaynor Allitt sitting in her chair facing the camera; the film was cued up and ready to view. I put the little rubber buds in my ears. Ken picked up his paper again and started to read.

Most of the front page was devoted to how the mayor had asked Houston’s law enforcement agencies for a progress report on the serial killer. In spite of the very best efforts of Harlan Caulfield, the reporters had started calling the perp Saint Peter after all. Harlan was not going to be happy about that. For a moment, I pictured him angrily smoking one of his ridiculous e-cigarettes and then pressed the little arrow on Ken’s iPad. But I wouldn’t have minded one of those e-cigarettes myself.

There were several entries over a number of days—all of the entries were conveniently dated on screen—but her appearance always stayed the same, more or less, which convinced me that the look was deliberate and calculated to create a certain impression in whoever it was Gaynor Allitt had intended the video diary for, and if that wasn’t me, then it was almost certainly someone like me.

She wore a red flower behind her ear. It might have been a result of the almost indelible memory I had of her mangled body at the foot of the Hyatt, but the flower looked like a wound, as if she had been shot in the side of the head and the resulting eruption of blood had congealed in a whorl of red stamens and petals. No doubt it had been chosen to match the red nail polish, the red lipstick, and the red dress she was wearing. I wondered if perhaps the red had been symbolic—if she meant to imitate the Scarlet Woman. In the disapproving eyes of the Izrael Church of Good Men and Good Women, what Gaynor Allitt had to say would have guaranteed her the soubriquet even if the way she was dressed did not. It was just possible that she’d dressed like this when she went to church. I had my doubts, but I thought she looked good.

She sat in her study with a small clip-on microphone attached to her bosom. In her hand was a remote control on a cable. Speaking directly into the lens, she seemed nervous at first but quickly gained in confidence, with the occasional hint in her voice of Brooklyn, which was where she had come from before moving to Texas. But it was what she said that was important; and it contrasted sharply with what I’d heard her say at HPD headquarters on Travis Street.

If you’re watching this video, then it means I’m dead, and either you’re a member of the Izrael Church of Good Men and Good Women who has stolen my laptop or you’re someone from Houston law enforcement, possibly wondering what happened to me.

If you’re the first, then fuck you; and please pass on my hate and detestation to that arch practitioner of evil, Nelson Van Der Velden. In my opinion, he and the rest of you represent everything that’s wrong with America and its perverted obsession with apocalyptic religion.

If you’re someone from law enforcement, then welcome to my world and you have my thanks for taking the trouble to find out what happened to me. Hopefully this short film will help to answer questions you might have about my death. Please try to keep an open mind while you watch my video. I am not crazy; and I ask only for your patience while I explain myself. At the very least, make an effort to read the unpublished manuscript of a book written by me that you will also find on this laptop. The manuscript is entitled
Prayer
and you shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking this is some kind of religious tract and dismissing it as irrelevant to your inquiry—assuming that there is an inquiry; and if not, why not, and where the hell have you been? Didn’t any of you notice that people—the enemies of the religious literalists and Christian theocrats—were dying?

I am not a religious nut case. I’m not even religious. What you will have seen in my house is a show of religious conformity in case anyone from the Izrael Church showed up on my doorstep. Nelson Van Der Velden likes to keep tabs on all his followers and employs a thought police called the Shomrin to check up on the members of his church, to make sure that they are paying their tithes and generally living a life of which he approves. Believe me, the consequences of any nonconformity can be drastic, even lethal.

Which prompts me to counsel you to exercise caution in how you deal with these people. They’re armed and dangerous, although not in any way I think you will have encountered before—but I’ll get to that. I am not, however, an atheist. I want to stress that for reasons that will become clear. Yes, I do believe in God, but not for any of the usual mundane reasons.

By the way, at the end of the manuscript you’ll also find a PDF file containing signed release forms that were witnessed in front of an attorney giving you formal permission to use my work as evidence in your investigation.

My name is not Gaynor Allitt, it’s Esther Begleiter and I’m from Brooklyn, New York, where I was brought up as a Jew in a Satmar Hasidic Jewish family. I already knew a great deal about religious fanaticism when I came to live in Texas. I’m no longer in touch with this family so I don’t suppose my death will come as the source of great regret to the parents who long ago gave up hope of my being a credit to them.

As a child, I attended Abraham Joshua Heschel High School in New York, and it had been assumed I would also attend Yeshiva University. But I had other plans, which included escaping an arranged Hasidic marriage with my second cousin because I had realized that I was a lesbian. Lesbians and Satmar Hasidism don’t mix. The Torah views all homosexual behavior as an abomination. I remember trying to discuss this with my mother, who assured me that plenty of Jewish lesbians had put aside their personal feelings in the interests of becoming good wives and mothers. But I wasn’t convinced, so, instead of going to Yeshiva, I broke with my family altogether and managed to get a scholarship to study psychology at Georgetown University.

After graduating, I stayed on to do research. It might have been my background but I had become particularly interested in the placebo effect of religion, which is another way of saying that I regarded all religion as an inert, medically ineffective pill intended to deceive the recipient. Being a psychologist, I was particularly interested in how prayer actually seems to change four distinct areas of the human brain: the frontal lobe, the anterior cingulum, the parietal lobe, and the limbic system. I was also intrigued to investigate claims that a specific amount of prayer each day could prevent memory loss, mental decline, and even dementia or Alzheimer’s disease. It should be added, however, that none of this was prompted by a wish to prove to myself that God really existed. In fact, I was by then more or less convinced he didn’t.