Prayer (7 page)

“Do you honestly think I’m just going to walk out of here without a fight? No way.”

“As you like,” she said. “But don’t you think we’ve done enough fighting? That’s why I’m telling you that you have to leave.”

“This isn’t over, Ruth,” I said, grimly picking up my car keys.

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“We’ll talk about this when I come home tonight.”

“No, we won’t,” she said.

“Yes, we will,” I said. “Not to talk about it. You think that’s what God wants? Not to give me a chance to put things right.”

“You should go,” she said.

W
orking late kept my mind off what was happening at home. Ruth and Danny were no longer there. She was already back with her parents; their home—a twelve-hundred-acre hilltop ranch in Corsicana—was the first place I telephoned when I discovered Ruth was gone, and it was all Bob could do not to sound pleased when he said that she didn’t want to speak with me. He always felt that Ruth could have done better than pick me. I suppose all fathers feel that way about their only daughters; but it’s not often they tell you as much.

Corsicana is less than two hundred miles north of Houston and I thought of driving there to straighten things out, but I stayed in Houston and told myself she’d come home when she was good and ready. After that, I only called her cell and I must have sent her about a hundred texts but she never answered. Every marriage has its ups and downs. I figured that Ruth just needed time and space to get her head around what was important in her life. There was plenty of space in Corsicana.

A couple of times I sent Danny some books and a new Xbox game from Amazon so he’d know I was thinking of him; I knew they were delivered all right, but he didn’t reply, either—or at least Ruth didn’t allow him to send me a text or an e-mail, which struck me as mean. It was odd how quickly I felt removed from them both—almost as if they had ceased to exist, so much so that I started to question just how much I had loved them. Would I have risked the affair with Nancy Graham if I’d been the loving husband and father I ought to have been? Was that how it was for most men when their marriages end? I asked a few of the guys around the office and the consensus was that it wasn’t them who had ceased to exist, it was me. After a while, they said, you’re just some guy who used to live with them but who still pays for stuff and you might as well get used to this. But I certainly didn’t want to.

It helped a lot that I could throw myself into my existing caseload as well as a closer investigation of what was in Bishop Coogan’s file; and in this I was lucky enough to have the assistance of Anne Goldberg, who was by general consensus the best investigative analyst in the Houston field office. As a member of our Field Intelligence Group, Anne handled the collection of raw information such as telephone records, webpages, bank details, and, of course, criminal backgrounds; as someone who’d worked as a journalist, Anne was very good at getting information out of other journalists—they’re always cagey about sharing information with the FBI. So she had several conversations with reporters from
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
, and
The Boston Globe
. Her greatest skill, however, was her ability to see patterns and shapes in assembled data, and this was the main reason why brick agents like me wanted to work with her. No one could make a link chart like Anne Goldberg.

It’s not just bits of information that we like to connect in the Bureau, it’s each other, too. There are no lone wolves at the FBI. The brick agent I worked with in DT was Helen Monaco and, like me, she was ex-Counterterrorism. Helen’s first case had been working undercover on an FBI yacht in the Mediterranean; her role had been to act as the eye candy while a sting on some al-Qaeda Arabs went down. It was plain to see how someone thought she could play that role to perfection. Helen Monaco was everyone’s fantasy desert-island partner. In an effort to play down her looks and be taken seriously, she now wore weak-prescription and possibly unnecessary glasses, little or no makeup, and severe business suits, but no one was fooled by the Betty Bureau shtick. Helen Monaco could have worn a used trash-can liner and she’d still have looked like a hot babe. Not that I entertained any intentions toward her. Besides, I had the strong impression that she’d already been warned about me by Chuck Worrall. He had my card marked as a hustler, and until now, I’d thought that was good. It helped to keep my feet on the straight and narrow for Helen to think of me as someone with whom it wasn’t safe to share an elevator car.

Helen had one other qualification that marked her out as an excellent partner. During the undercover operation on the yacht, she’d shot two al-Qaeda when they drew on one of her colleagues. One of the men she shot died; the other’s driving a wheelchair around the supermax prison yard in Florence, Colorado. Result.

The three of us—Anne, Helen, and I—started to work the Philip Osborne case on Monday; and by Thursday, we had enough information to take it to the ASAC. I asked those two along because I figured that all three of us made a more convincing argument in favor of a proper investigation than just one line supervisor. Besides, I had a theory I wanted to test; actually it was Helen’s theory. Helen said that Gisela Delillo always gave me a harder time when there were other female agents present—almost as if she were trying to prove that there was nothing between us.

While I lined some sharpened pencils up in neat little ranks beside my Bureau leather folder, Gisela made all of us coffee and then invited me to make the case against our unsub—the as yet unknown subject of an FBI investigation.

“This is the strangest case for investigation I have ever presented,” I began. “Almost three weeks ago, here in Houston, the writer Philip Osborne suffered an acute shock that has left him mentally impaired, perhaps permanently. No explanation for how that shock came about has yet been discovered. At first it was assumed that he’d been attacked. But if so, it’s not clear how. Or by whom. There were some superficial wounds on him, only these would appear to have been self-inflicted. But there’s a lot that’s not clear here so I’m going to have to ask you to be patient, boss.”

“I’m always patient with you, Martins,” said Gisela, and she grinned at Helen and Anne. “I guess it’s the only way, huh?”

I let that one go. When you’re just a line supervisor, you let it go more often than you pick it up. Besides, my theory about her was already starting to amount to something: in front of other women Gisela liked slapping me down.

“As you may know,” I said, “Philip Osborne was gay and his two most recent books were both about atheism. In the last few years he’s managed to upset a lot of people. But everything I’ve read about him makes me think he gets a kick out of that. At first I wanted to dismiss what happened as a celebrity crack-up. But I was wrong. My friend Dr. Eamon Coogan, who is the emeritus Catholic archbishop of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, drew my attention to a number of recent homicides that display some interesting similarities. The other victims were also what you might call enemies of the conservative right: a senior consulting obstetrician, an evolutionary biologist, and a philosopher and cognitive scientist. But at present no connection has been established between any of these cases.”

“If the other three were relatively well known,” said Gisela, “and you’re arguing a connection, how come the newspapers haven’t done that? They’re usually not slow to spot a trend.”

“Because they all look like natural causes. But Coogan thinks there are circumstances that bear further examination and share common features with what happened to Osborne. And so do I.”

“Is there any other field office interested in investigating a connection?”

“No,” I said. “This will leave Houston as the office of origin.”

“If we take it on,” said Gisela. “Don’t jump the gun, Gil.”

She smiled at me, but that was the second time in five minutes that I’d been whipped. I wondered if Helen and Anne noticed it, too.

“All right. I’m still listening. But start here in Houston. With this Osborne guy. If any of this is connected, he’s what lets us buy the blinds.”

I knew to my cost that Gisela was a skilled poker player, although it was rare that she ever talked like one. But it seemed like another way of reminding me that she was holding all the aces in this meeting.

After setting out the facts as reported by the HPD officers who had attended the scene at the Hotel ZaZa, I described the visit I had made with Helen Monaco to the Harris County Psychiatric Hospital.

“Dr. Andrew Newman, the medical director, gave me a diagnosis of Osborne’s condition. The guy is in a catatonic state. He doesn’t move at all and appears to be in a frozen state of being that Newman thinks is psychological rather than neurological. Specifically, he thinks something induced an extreme fight-or-flight response—a stress response—that caused his adrenal hormones to kick in on a massive scale and induce a sympathetic nervous system dynamic. There’s a third strike after the fight-or-flight pitch: you freeze. You know, the rabbit caught in the headlights kind of shit. But humans do the same thing. And if that isn’t resolved, it builds up, sometimes really quickly, and you enter a shock state that is designed to protect you from something worse, perhaps. Usually you come out of it. Sometimes quickly, sometimes not so quickly. And in Osborne’s case it’s clear Dr. Newman doesn’t have the least idea if he’ll be like that for eighteen days or eighteen months.”

“So, what, is he just lying on a bed staring at the ceiling?”

“They keep him strapped on a bed for his own safety in case he does snap out of it all of a sudden. But like a piece of Play-Doh, Osborne’s body can be contorted into any posture, which he’ll maintain for several minutes, or until you move his limbs or his head in some other direction.”

I felt Helen shiver beside me.

“And all the time he just stares straight ahead as if he were dead,” I said. “Only he’s not. All his vital signs—heart rate, pulse, blood pressure—seem to indicate that he’s perfectly normal. It’s like he’s imprisoned inside his own body. But there was one thing that was odd, and it ties in with the fight-or-flight response described by Dr. Newman. Quite soon after he was admitted to the hospital, the doctors took a blood sample. Adrenaline is often measured in blood as a diagnostic aid. In any of us right now, the level is probably ten nanograms per liter. That can increase by as much as ten times during exercise and by as much as fifty times during extreme stress, to five hundred nanograms per liter. Osborne’s body contained about ten thousand nanograms per liter, which is apparently the amount they might administer to acute-care cardiac patients with a hypodermic. To inject that amount of adrenaline in a short period you’d need a large Epipen or a cardiac needle; and yet there is no sign anywhere on Osborne’s body of a hypodermic mark. Nor any evidence that an inhaler was used. No Epipen or inhaler was found at the hotel, or the plaza, or on Osborne’s person. Newman hasn’t ever seen that quantity of adrenaline occur naturally, but he says that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen. He hasn’t ever seen a case of acute catatonia like Osborne’s, either.”

“That is strange,” said Gisela, scribbling something down on her pad.

“He also recently applied for a concealed-handgun license.”

“Nothing strange about that,” said Gisela.

“Except that he was a vocal opponent of the NRA and gun ownership in general,” I said.

“So something had him scared.” Gisela looked at Anne Goldberg. “Anything on his telephone records, Anne?”

“Not a thing that shouldn’t be there. All of the numbers were in his address book.”

“E-mails?”

“The guys at the lab are looking over his computer to see if there are any clues there,” I said. “But that’s going to take a little time. Until then, here’s what we know about the other three.

“Dr. Clifford Richardson ran the Silphium Clinic in Washington, D.C. Until his death six months ago, he was one of the country’s leading obstetricians. He was also a former president of the American Gynecological and Obstetrical Society, and an internationally recognized authority on clinical obstetrics. Following threats to his life in Utah during the late 1990s, Richardson came to live and work in the capital, opening a clinic just a few hundred yards north of the White House, on Sixteenth Street where, he assumed, there might be less opposition to abortion.”

“If it wasn’t for people like him,” said Gisela, “I don’t know what women would do in this country.”

“He was wrong,” I said. “About there being no opposition in D.C. The Silphium Clinic has been regularly picketed as a so-called abortion mill by self-styled sidewalk counselors from pro-life groups and D.C.’s Catholic University of America. They try to talk women out of having abortions, and pray for women who are coming out of the clinic having had one.”

“It sounds like harassment,” observed Anne.

“Which is why there are cops on the scene,” I said. “And pro-choice escorts. Or ‘deathscorts,’ as the pro-life people call them.”

“Oh, brother,” muttered Anne. “There are times when I wish we could bring in Jesus for questioning and ask him if he wouldn’t mind disowning some of these stupid pricks.” She looked at me. “Sorry, Gil. I know you go to church.”

“That’s all right. Matter of fact, you didn’t say anything about him that I haven’t been thinking myself. And just for the record, people, I’m no longer a churchgoer.”

Gisela sat back in her chair. “What does Ruth think about that?”

I was about to make a remark about how thought didn’t seem to be part of my wife’s decision when the failure that was my marriage choked the words in my throat. I thought of Danny, and I swallowed hard and felt my eyes begin to blink as if I didn’t quite trust them to stay open without displaying more emotion than was appropriate for a case meeting with my ASAC. There followed a longish silence that grew more revealing and eloquent by the second as I tried to get a grip.