Valley of Shadows

by Cooper, Steven

  Powell kicks him. “Have some respect. We’re in a house of worship.”

  “Hell if I know what they’re worshipping,” Mills retorts.

  The stadium goes dark. The audience goes reverently silent. Then, piercing through the darkness comes a Jedi-like battle of laser lights and a massive ooh and aah from the bedazzled crowd. Next, the choir lifts its voice in a trembling harmony of awe. A cymbal crashes, followed by another, and another, and another. The suspense of the music is no accident. In the murky darkness Mills can see people on the edge of their seats. Then comes something that Mills could not have expected: an army of dancers storms the stage as the music escalates to a thudding beat. They’re dressed like warriors of ancient Egypt, the men in bronze chest plates, the women in sheer gowns and Cleopatra headdresses. All of them wear sandals with straps that serpentine high to the knees. They’re flying, tumbling, twirling. The men spin the woman overhead, and Mills can’t watch because the whole thing is giving him vertigo this high up. “It’s like a fucking Madonna concert,” Powell says to him.

  “What happened to respecting a house of worship?” he asks, smirking.

  And then the music hushes as a booming voice rises. It has the effect of a bass drum, vibrating in Mills’s stomach. “And now,” it says, “please welcome, the one and only, Pastor Gleason Norwood!!!”

  The choir exhales a soaring crescendo. A small circle at center stage opens, and up from below, on some kind of hydraulic platform, rises the man himself. In his cape.

  “Like Beyoncé,” Powell yells into his ear.

  “Sorry, I get an ‘F’ in pop culture.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Gleason says, as his oval elevator stops flush with the stage. “Welcome to this very special night. Tonight is not a night of worship. No. Tonight we open our doors to the public to honor a woman who transformed our church and our community for the better. Tonight we say goodbye to Viveca Canning . . .”

  A flourish of “ahhhs” from the choir.

  “She was a rare angel,” Gleason gushes. “We all know that. She made us better. She set an example. She taught so many of us how to fly. She loved her church. But she loved her valley just as much. And gave so much to help those less fortunate. She touched so many lives. Because she was truly on an angel’s mission.”

  More “ahhhs.”

  Mills winces. This memorial service has all the qualities of a Saturday Night Live parody.

  “Tonight, we’ll hear from some of her beneficiaries, from some of the lesser angels here in the church who came under her wings, and from our friends out in the living world, as well, whose organizations were enabled to do great things because of Viveca Canning’s generosity.”

  A stadium-sized round of applause.

  Mills mostly tunes out during the endless parade of tributes that comes next. Powell nudges him a few times. He knows he should be listening to every word, because in every word there could be a clue. But the words are dripping in the fat and grease of lavish praise, and his colleagues are better with that sort of thing, so instead he studies the faces in the crowd. He can’t see many of them, of course, in this darkened arena where all the lights favor the stage, but Mills can easily determine a commonality among those seated in the middle floor section. No one has an expression. Not a smile. Not a frown. Not a movement. Eyes stoic and unblinking. No one laughs. No one sobs. They simply watch. And watch. And barely breathe. They are not guests here. This is the congregation. They are members, angels hoping to rise. How fucking weird. There will be no communion, Mills suspects; there will be Kool-Aid. The rest of the crowd, the ones up in the balconies, are clearly the guests. He can spot emotion in those balconies, despite the arena’s unreliable light.

  The drums rattle. The cymbals crash. And the invisible voice emerges again. “Ladies and Gentlemen, now a special appearance from Viveca Canning’s own rising angel himself. Please welcome the bereaved but blessed Bennett Canning . . .”

  Applause, drumbeats; the choir cums all over itself.

  The scion emerges from backstage, donning a flowing robe in the same style as Norwood’s cape. The same embroidery. The same unfamiliar symbols. Probably an expression of the church’s own mythology.

  “I feel my mother in this room tonight,” Bennett roars.

  Thunderous applause.

  “Your love, your praise, and your tears have brought her back here. And I can’t thank you enough. She is so touched by your outpouring of affection, as am I,” he tells the crowd. “Her death comes as a shock to us. A terrible, untimely end. But she had truly risen here in the church. She had been sent on her mission. She was ready at any time.”

  Mills turns to Powell. “This ain’t the Bennett we know.”

  “He’s possessed,” Powell says. “That’s why. He’s channeling some kind of entity.”

  Mills laughs.

  “Oh no, I’m serious,” Powell whispers. “Ask your friend Gus . . .”

  Mills laughs again and turns to his other side. “Hey,” he says to Gus, “Jan thinks the kid is possessed.”

  Gus shakes his head, as if waking up. “Yeah,” he says.

  “Yeah?” Mills asks him.

  “Something,” Gus says. “I think Jan may be on to something. I’m getting kind of a similar vibe. Except it tells me this whole place is possessed.”

  “Okay,” Mills says. “I’m not sure what to do with this information.”

  “Me either. It’s too soon.”

  The men turn back to the spectacle below. Bennett continues to roar, his arms stretched to the heavens. “Goodbye, Mother,” he chants. “Goodbye, leader, legend, heroine, angel of the angels. Goodbye, Mother. Few earn your mission. May those in your path find your grace. May our paths cross again, Mother, friend, protector, comforter, angel of the angels.”

  The congregants on the floor rise to their feet, swaying. Still facially paralyzed. Under a spell. That’s it. They’re hypnotized. The guests rise to their feet as well, taking a cue from the church members. The posse in the skybox doesn’t move. It should be this way, Mills thinks. They should be seen, if seen at all, as impartial observers, as staunchly indifferent.

  After the ceremony, Norwood’s security team escorts Mills and his colleagues one flight down to a conference room adjacent to the preacher’s suite. They sit and look at each other, nascent smirks on their faces. Sarcasm and Kool-Aid don’t mix, Mills has learned over the years. But shit. This place. Mythology embroidered right into the woodwork. The service, by design, did not reveal a glimpse into what or who these people worship.

  Gleason Norwood enters with a flourish. He’s relieved of his cape, but no less dramatic. Four people file in behind him. “I hope you enjoyed the memorial service,” he announces. “Let me introduce a few members of our board of directors . . .”

  There’s Tucker Charles, a white man, middle-aged, clean-shaven; Christine Triggs, also white, green eyes, white-haired, a beautiful witch; Harris Goodman, African American, handsome as fuck, could play a lawyer on Law & Order; Misty Yee, Asian, young, barely thirty, fingernails that leave her lovers in pools of blood.

  Lesson Number One: The Church of Angels Rising welcomes all the stripes of the rainbow (except gays).

  “Was Jillian Canning here tonight?” Mills asks the preacher.

  Norwood offers a glinty smile and says, “She was invited as a guest, of course, not a member. I don’t know if she accepted the invitation.”

  They talk from the same mouth, these people. Without one inflected syllable, Charles, Triggs, Goodman, and Yee (like an inhouse law firm) all have an enormous amount of nothing to say.

  Charles: “She was a lovely lady who wouldn’t hurt a soul. She had no enemies that I know of. How could she?”

  Triggs: “She reached a level of angelism that eludes most of us. She was that rare. A gem. Who would want to clip those wings?”

  Goodman: “She was adored. We’re in shock. Complete shock. I’m sorry we can’t be more helpful. But there is no one here
in the church, no one in her family, no one in the community who would wish her harm.”

  Yee: “My sister died a few years ago. She was only fifty. She had stage four breast cancer. Viveca took her to doctor’s appointments, to chemo. She stayed with her, with us, during those last days. We don’t canonize people here at the church, but if we did, Viveca Canning would be a saint.”

  Crestfallen faces all around. Except from Tucker. Tucker just sits there staring blankly at the wall, dumbstruck, it seems, by some kind of invisible scripture there.

  “I felt the presence of Viveca’s husband,” Gus says.

  “Is that a question?” Goodman asks him.

  Mills turns to the psychic, transmits a signal in his eyes to tread lightly.

  “No,” Gus replies to the church member. “Just an observation.”

  “If that’s the case, we have nothing to say,” Goodman tells him.

  Mills leans forward to all the church members and says, “Why? Did Mr. Canning have some kind of falling out with the church?”

  Gleason Norwood lets out a belly laugh and waves his hands in the air. “Of course not. They were a wonderful couple. Devoted to each other and the church. We pray their missions intersect.”

  “I felt like there’s something unresolved,” Gus tells the room.

  “That could mean many things,” Yee says. “And we can’t sit here speculating, can we?”

  Mills and his colleagues press these people further, but get very little else but rehearsed incantations of reverence. Reverence doesn’t get this thick without some kind of bullshit leavening. How these people think they can fool a room full of detectives is beyond Mills, but he sees right through their obsequious smiles. Outside, he says as much. First he exhales, like he’s releasing the bullshit from his adrenal glands, and he shakes his head vigorously. “Wow. Just fucking wow. That was quite a performance,” he tells the group.

  “The board of directors? Or the memorial itself?” Preston asks.

  “Both,” Mills says. “Did anybody get anything I might have missed?”

  “There was nothing to miss,” Powell assures him. “It was completely rehearsed.”

  “Or maybe they really are that catatonic,” Mills says.

  Preston says, “Probably.”

  Gus digs his foot into the pavement and says, “What is angelism?”

  “Huh?” Mills asks him.

  “Angelism. The white-haired lady mentioned angelism.”

  “I caught that,” Preston says.

  “Is it a religion or a practice?” Gus asks the group. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it. I mean, in my line of work, I’ve run into lots of people who believe in angels and seem to practice it as a religion. But not an organized religion with churches and all. You know?”

  “Right,” Mills says. “Gleason referred to Viveca on an ‘angel’s mission.’ Bennett said she was the ‘angel of the angels.’ Obviously, the whole ‘angels rising’ thing leads their doctrine, defined, I’m guessing, by ‘angelism.’”

  “Sounds like a fake religion to me,” Powell says. “Like somebody dreamed this up and turned it in to a business.”

  “The common criticism is that the church is a cult,” Preston reminds them, “but maybe Powell is right.”

  Mills lifts his head and looks up to the prism, lit solely now from the inside. “Or, more likely, it’s both. Based on what I’ve read.”

  Gus shuffles around them, pacing, his lips moving. This makes Mills nervous, but he knows better than to interrupt a man on a psychic tightrope. Gus had once explained that sometimes it’s a tightrope because often he’s tethered to earth on one end and the cosmos on the other; the trip across is fraught with risk. There’s plenty of opportunity to lose his grip and slip into a purgatory of the ill-defined. Which is why, he’s told Mills, he doesn’t use the tightrope often.

  Mills notices the others regarding Gus with curious if not dubious stares. “Hey, just let him do his thing.”

  Gus makes one more orbit around the detectives then rejoins the circle. “As for the woman’s murder itself,” he says, completely lucid, “I don’t think church doctrine has anything to do with it. All this angel rising stuff is just low hanging fruit. And it has the feel of a tacky façade.”

  “Wow, that’s quite an interpretation, Gus,” Powell says, her voice dusted with sarcasm.

  “It’s not an interpretation,” he tells her. “Just an observation. I don’t know if you think the church is somehow involved, but there’s a tug of war going on in what I call the psychic layer of my consciousness.”

  “Tug of war?” Preston asks.

  “Yeah,” Gus says. “I think both the business and cult-like aspects you perceive here are worthy of a closer look. Her money. What she knew. What they wanted. And I think you’re going to find that she was scared of doing something, but decided to do it anyway. I definitely sense fear here. Huge fear. Right there at the center of the spectacle. Right there embroidered into the façade.”

  The others just look at him soberly.

  “What kind of façade?” Mills asks.

  Gus squints at him, says nothing.

  “You mentioned a façade twice,” Mills reminds him. “I know you well enough . . .”

  “Right,” Gus says. “Something worth probing. It’s a door or a wall, maybe. But I need some time. Can I take a day or two and focus on that?”

  “Go for it, Guster,” Mills tells him, offering a handshake. “And thanks for coming.”

  The rest of them turn to their cars, but Gus calls for them to turn back. He’s staring at the peak of the prism above the cathedral. “What is it?” Mills asks.

  “I will say one thing about angelism, whatever it is,” Gus tells them. “It was a slip.”

  “A slip?” Preston asks.

  “That woman was not supposed to mention that word. If there is a cult to be investigated, whether or not it has any connection to your victim’s death, it certainly lies beyond the door of angelism.”

  Then, the spell of the prism broken, the psychic turns away, leaving the rest of them to ponder murky images of doors and façades and angels.

  16

  It’s about noon the next day when Morty Myers appears in Mills’s office.

  “I’m obsessed with this woman,” Myers says.

  “It’s about time, Morty! All grown up. Who is she?”

  Myers snickers. “Very funny. She’s dead. Her name is Viveca Canning.”

  Mills gestures for him to take a seat. “Oh. I wasn’t kidding, buddy. I thought you’d finally given up the video games for dating.” “Whatever, Alex. Her story keeps getting better and better.”

  Mills is genuinely interested. He had been studying his notes from last night’s memorial service, but now he shifts those aside and looks at Myers earnestly. “How so?” he asks.

  “She revised her will. I’ve been digging deeper into her computer all morning, and I found a different version of the will. More recent. It was simply named ‘revision,’ but I was opening all the files I could find, and it turns out she’d nullified the bequest to the church. That’s exactly what it says in the revision. It says, ‘I hereby nullify the previous will and the bequest of my designated assets to the Church of Angels Rising.’ I sent you the PDF a minute ago.”

  “Thanks, Morty. Where does the money go now?”

  “Back to the children,” he says. “The art is still going to the museum, but the value of her estate will be split evenly between her children.”

  Mills nods, then rests his chin into a hand. “Something must have happened to change her mind. I’m not going out on a limb to suggest that ‘something’ could be a critical piece of the puzzle.”

  “Probably so.”

  “And if her kids knew about the revision to her will,” Mills says, “they had a motive to kill her, right? So, we have to take a more serious look at them. I think you need to call Viveca’s attorney and find out which version of the will is the most recent.”
/>   “I can tell by looking at when the files were created.”

  “No,” Mills says. “We have to find out when they were signed and dated.”

  “Will do,” Myers tells him. “Where’s Preston at with the phone records?”

  “As soon as you vacate my office, I’ll be calling him.”

  “Is that a hint?”

  “Go call the attorney, bud.”

  Between Myers and Preston he has about five minutes to take a leak, refill the sludgy coffee with more sludge, and text Kelly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Preston’s standing in the doorframe. Mills waves him in. Ken sits and describes some key findings of Viveca Canning’s phone records. “I’m not done going through them,” he tells Mills. “Just so you know.” “That wasn’t my expectation.”

  Preston describes a series of unsurprising phone calls between the dead woman and her children, a few more to Jillian than to Bennett, but not a significant difference. She also made routine calls to the main phone number at the Church of Angels Rising. To whom she spoke is not clear from the records, but probably not worthy of further probing considering her relationship with the church. A series of calls between Viveca and Gleason Norwood, the detectives agree, would not be remarkable. “But then there’s a few calls to a real estate development company in French Polynesia. I can’t get my head around that one. We know she transferred money there, but we don’t know why. I’ve tried calling the company.”

  “And?”

  “Even when I’ve synched up to the right time of day in the right time zone, I get voice mail.”