Prayer (8 page)

Gisela’s quick, poker-player instincts read the tell that was in my eyes and guessed the whole story, or at least half of it.

“Oh, my God,” she gasped. “Gil. Has Ruth left you?”

I shook my head but my face and fluctuating Adam’s apple said different. “I’d really rather not talk about it right now. One way or another, it’s been a difficult week.”

“Look, do you need a minute?”

I took a deep breath.

“No, I’m fine,” I said, and suddenly, for the moment, I was.

“Cliff Richardson lived in the Watergate complex,” I said. “His apartment had a balcony with a view of the Potomac. On Friday, February 21, of this year, Richardson was late finishing work at the clinic. His receptionist described him as unusually preoccupied. After filling the tank of his car at a gas station, he arrived home at about nine o’clock, parked in the underground parking lot, and took the elevator upstairs. Despite what you may have read, security is good at the Watergate. His neighbors reported seeing or hearing nothing unusual. It was a cold night and there was snow on the ground, but not enough to break a man’s fall from the eleventh floor. The following morning one of the gardeners found Richardson’s body in some bushes beneath his balcony. He had a ticket for a concert the following evening and a full refrigerator. The same day he apparently jumped off his balcony he also ordered some books from Amazon that arrived on the same morning his body was discovered.”

“What you’re saying,” said Gisela, “is that none of this behavior was consistent with a man who was going to kill himself.”

“Correct,” I said. “The Metro Police Department attended the scene and—with some difficulty, I might add, for there were several locks on the door—they entered Richardson’s apartment, where they found no suicide note and no signs of a struggle. The TV was still on, and there was a meal cooked in the microwave oven. Because of these contraindications to suicide and Richardson’s previous history, MPD decided to treat the death as suspicious. Inquiries were made in Utah. And people who had been picketing the clinic were interviewed. There’s also a CCTV in the apartment block and everyone who went in and out of the building that day was accounted for and cleared. None of them had any connection with the pro-lifers outside the clinic. Having failed to turn up any leads, the MPD concluded that Richardson had committed suicide and closed the case. But there was one unusual thing the police noticed in Richardson’s apartment. A Torah scroll open on the sideboard in a kind of pride of place. You know? The sort they use in a synagogue, written on parchment paper in ancient Hebrew, with wooden rollers ’n’ all.”

“So?” said Gisela.

“Richardson wasn’t Jewish,” I said. “According to his daughter, he wasn’t even religious. She couldn’t explain why he owned such a thing.”

“It was a Sefer Torah scroll,” said Anne. “They’re expensive. Richardson bought it on eBay about two weeks before he died. And he paid seven thousand dollars for it.”

“Which is strange,” I added, “when you consider that he read not one word of Hebrew.”

“Strange, yes,” admitted Gisela. “But not evidence of murder.”

“Next we have Peter Ekman, a prominent British journalist who became an American citizen after 9/11. He was a former editor of
The New Republic
, the author of many books and an irreverent daily news blog called
Ekman: Hack
that appeared on
The Daily Beast
. Until his death in April this year, his blog was receiving five hundred thousand hits a day.”

“I didn’t even know he was dead,” said Anne.

“Apart from politicians, Ekman regularly went after religion. The week before he died, he wrote a piece about the Baptists that drew sixty-five thousand complaints, which is a record for
The Daily Beast
. Ekman was the kind of guy who would say things no one else dared to say. And he got away with it because he was funny. Famously, he was on
The Volker Walker Show
on HBO with Pastor Ken Coffey, the evangelist, and Coffey got so angry with Ekman that he suffered a seizure and had to be taken to the hospital. That got Ekman in a lot of trouble with the religious right. I once saw him debating with the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Mocatta, at Georgetown University, and he was extremely funny and trenchant. But the biggest stink he attracted was with the Muslims when he blogged about Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, when she gave a press freedom award to Kurt Westergaard—the Danish guy who drew the caricatures of the prophet Mohammed.”

“Always a mistake,” said Anne.

“Actually, Ekman used his blog to compare the Danish cartoons with ones that used to appear in the newspapers in Nazi Germany, but even though he was defending them, he still managed to piss off the Muslims by reproducing the cartoons.”

“Some people you can’t help,” said Anne.

“All right,” said Gisela. “Ekman was funny. But he had a smoking-related illness. Emphysema, wasn’t it? And I remember that he had a heart attack. So why are we talking about him?”

“After the Muslims threatened his life, he decided to take some precautions regarding his personal security; and he had a panic room built at his home. The room had its own generator and an alarm button connected to the local police. That should have saved his life. Instead, his wife came back from the city one day to find him dead in there. The police concluded that the room wasn’t properly ventilated and that this caused carbon monoxide poisoning. He was sixty-two.”

“Why was he in the panic room in the first place? Do we know?” asked Gisela.

“No. And he didn’t sound the alarm. Or if he did, it didn’t work and no one came. The front door was locked. So were all of the windows. No footprints in the garden. No broken tiles on the roof.”

“Recent threats?”

“Ekman’s wife told the police he received threats all the time, mostly on the website or in the mail, but that she wasn’t aware of anything out of the ordinary. Then again, she thought Ekman probably wouldn’t have told her if there had been. He tended to treat that kind of thing as an occupational hazard. Anyway, the Tarrytown PD handled the investigation with the assistance of the Bureau of Criminal Police from the New York staties.”

“So, an accidental death,” said Gisela.

“Ekman had a pet cat,” I said. “The cat was found dead, too.”

“It figures,” said Gisela. “Carbon monoxide poisoning. That stuff is invisible and odorless.”

“Except that the cat wasn’t found in the panic room but outside, in the gallery where the panic room was concealed.”

“Maybe,” said Helen, “when the door of the panic room was opened, a pocket of gas came out. Not enough to trouble Mrs. Ekman, but just enough to affect the cat.”

“There you are, Gil,” said Gisela. “I think Helen just solved your felinicide.”

“Hey, I thought you were supposed to be on my side,” I told Helen.

“I am,” she said. “But it just occurred to me. Maybe, unbeknownst to Mrs. Ekman, the cat followed her into the panic room, took a deep breath of the gas, came outside again, and died.”

“All right,” said Gisela. “Let’s try to keep the speculation to a minimum, folks. Gil. You said there was a third case that caught Bishop Coogan’s eye. Why don’t you tell us about that?”

“Willard Davidoff was a professor of human evolutionary biology at Yale University, the vice president of the American Humanist Association, a celebrated author, and a well-known atheist. In 2009 he was listed by
Time
magazine as one of the hundred most influential people in the world. Just before Christmas last year, Davidoff gave a lecture at the Boston Public Library. His subject was ‘The Evolution of Superstition and Religion,’ and he argued that today’s religions are not a matter of divine revelation but of natural selection, in that only the strongest religions have survived by virtue of their fitness, which he defines as their willingness to exterminate other religions.”

“That must have gone down well in Boston,” said Gisela.

I grinned. “Actually, the lecture was a sellout. Afterward there was a party to which all of Boston’s Brahmins were invited. Before it ended, his publisher reported seeing Davidoff on one of the upper floors, talking to himself. She spoke to him and he ignored her. He was known to be an irascible character, so she was used to this and left him alone. No one saw him after that, and it was assumed he had gone back to his room at the Four Seasons. It’s a ten-minute walk. You could do it with your eyes closed. But the following morning a dog walker found Davidoff’s body in Olmsted Park, which is an hour’s walk in the opposite direction. He was still wearing his Rolex and carrying a wallet with three hundred dollars in it, so it was clear he hadn’t been mugged. His neck was broken and he appeared to have fallen out of a tree. His clothes were heavily stained with tree moss and there was bark underneath his fingernails.”

“Was he drunk?” asked Gisela.

“They found about a bottle of red wine in his system,” I said.

“That would sure make me drunk,” admitted Helen.

“The question is,” I continued, “was it the bottle of red that Davidoff drank in the Boston Public Library that persuaded him to walk three miles in the wrong direction on a cold night and then to climb a tree? Or was it something else? Someone on Huntington Avenue said they thought they saw a man answering Davidoff’s description running in the direction of the park at about ten-fifteen that night; and a nurse at a nearby hospital claimed she saw what could have been Davidoff almost getting knocked down by a city cab.”

“So what did the BPD have to say about it?”

“He came out of the library and walked in the wrong direction. When Davidoff realized he was lost, he chased after a cab, got lost some more, and found himself in Olmsted Park, where he met an accidental death. They picked the obvious explanation because the most obvious explanation is usually the correct one. Which is that Willard Davidoff climbed a tree when he was drunk and became one of the fifteen thousand Americans who died from falls last year.”

Gisela tapped her pen impatiently on her notepad. “And I can’t honestly say that I disagree with that.”

“Come on, boss,” I said. “This is a Yale professor, not some kid from the Skull and Bones. On a cold winter night in Boston, is climbing trees the normal behavior for an internationally famous sixty-five-year-old evolutionary biologist?”

“You know, it might be,” said Gisela. “He was climbing a tree looking for some rare beetle or a piece of fucking tree bark, but it’s what biologists do, Gil. On the other hand, perhaps the tree afforded him an excellent view through an attractive young woman’s bathroom window. That’s biology, too.”

“Don’t you think all of this is a coincidence? Each one of these guys seems like he was afraid of something. Three of them end up prematurely dead within six months of one another. It’s who and what they are that gives me an itch here. And I’m not the only one who wants to scratch it, boss. It was Bishop Eamon Coogan who put me onto this, remember?”

“Need I remind you of something you should have learned at Quantico, Agent Martins?”

That was me being bitch-slapped. Any mention of what I should have learned at the Academy always left me feeling like I was never going to make ASAC.

“Gil, I flip a coin ten times and it comes up heads all ten of them, do I whisper conspiracy? Or do I shrug it off as a coincidence? We’re the Federal Bureau of Investigation not the Foolish Bureau of Ingenuousness. Your request for a case file is an investigator’s Oscar Wilde line. One’s unfortunate, two is careless, and three is Title 18.”

Title 18, of the U.S. Code, Section 351, was what empowered the special agents and officials of the FBI to investigate violations of federal statutes.

“Helen? What do you think?”

Helen shifted uncomfortably on her chair and crossed her long legs, as if that might afford her some time to come down on one side of the argument or the other. I already knew Helen was in favor of further investigation. The question was, would she fold in the face of Gisela’s ace: Gisela was the boss.

“What you said about coincidence makes sense,” said Helen. “But sometimes it seems to me that life shows us what we need to know. Before I came into this room, Gil had me convinced there might be a real fire at the end of this smoke trail. Now I’m not so sure. On the other hand, if it were me, I’d probably trust his instincts, for a while at least. Maybe a week or two. Just to see what his nose turns up. Couldn’t do any harm. Might even do him some good.”

Gisela looked at Anne. “What do you think?”

“I get a nose for things, too,” said Anne. “I like patterns. I believe in them. I see connections where there are no connections. I hear what you say, boss, but I’ve an idea that there will come a time—not too long from now—when computers will make the idea of coincidence and randomness seem obsolete, and we’ll see things for what they really are. Coincidence will seem logical.”

Helen and Anne were right, of course. But so was Gisela. I made it three-to-one in favor of further investigation, although Gisela’s one was more than three, of course. I could tell she was a little disappointed that the sorority had sided with me, but that’s how it is, and maybe Anne and Helen had just had more time to think about the case than Gisela had.

“I have to justify this to Chuck and I don’t want him making me look like some breast-Fed dancing around her handbag,” said Gisela. “Gil Martins is not the guy wearing a new set of balls here. I am, and I want to keep them for a while. If I do decide to green-light a domestic terrorism inquiry, what’s your next step, Gil?”

“Swoop down for a closer look. Helen and I would go to Washington, Boston, and New York. See if we can’t dig up more on those three deaths than the local police did. Hope that the lab guys find something on Osborne’s computer. And pray that we get a lead, I guess. Or maybe another victim. If someone is behind this, I doubt they’ll be satisfied with three deaths and one case of acute catatonia. Either way, I figure we can chase down all the facts in a couple of weeks. As it happens, I think you can spare me. Army CID’s got an informer alongside Johnny Sack Brown and they’re keeping us up to speed with the HIDDEN group’s plans to acquire a Switchblade system. Chicago FBI’s chasing up a lead on those two ELF fugitives.”