by P J Parrish
Delia hesitated. “Mr. Anthony is . . . he’s not given to displays.”
“Meaning?”
“He’s slow to show his feelings, his affections.”
“Did Anthony visit his father here often?”
Delia shook her head. “Not that I saw. He and Mrs. Prince would come pick him up on Christmas and on his birthday. They tried to get him to go out to restaurants, but the reverend told me once he didn’t feel right in the places Anthony liked, that he was happy eating his walleye at Rose’s.”
She paused. “I don’t think Mr. Anthony is bad. It’s just some folk’s hearts are harder to open. Or at least that’s what the reverend always says.” She let out a small sigh. “Said . . . that’s what he always said.”
Louis was silent, watching Delia work through her grief.
“I heard talk,” Delia said softly, “from a friend of mine whose brother works at the church. He said the reverend was strangled. Is that true?”
Louis didn’t doubt that word had already leaked out from the employees. “I can’t talk about the details,” Louis said. “I’m sorry.”
“Such a gentle man should not die such a horrible death,” Delia said softly.
“Do you have any thoughts on who might have had reason to kill him?”
Delia shook her head. “No, sir.”
Though he hesitated to ask, he knew he had to. “Do you think Anthony could have killed him?”
Delia’s eyes widened. “Good Lord, no. He could never do such a thing, because I know just by knowing the reverend all these years that Mr. Anthony was raised to be a good son. Why, he’s a man of God himself.”
Delia stared at him, indignation hardening her eyes. He knew she couldn’t fathom what he was saying, and he let it go.
“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Arnold. I’ll help you carry your things out.”
“No need,” Delia said. “I can get them. Make sure you lock up when you leave. The reverend wouldn’t want some burglar getting in here and disturbing his things.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Delia made her way out and Louis stood there for a moment, thinking. The visit to Jonas Prince’s home had yielded no helpful evidence and no special vibes. He returned to the study for a last look. A discarded sermon and the sudden impulse to create a new message for his congregation. A message on forgiveness.
His eyes drifted to the blanket folded on the sofa.
Insomnia.
Dreams bedeviled, as Delia would say.
That he did understand. What had been keeping Jonas Prince awake at night? And who needed forgiveness?
And he knew—call it the woo-woo vibes or plain old cop instincts—that when he found the answer to that question, he would have his killer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
When Louis got to St. Michael’s at seven the next morning, he was the first one in. He went quickly to the thermostat, turning it up to eighty. Back at his desk, he typed up a summary of the interview with Weems and his analysis of his walk-through at Jonas Prince’s home. He had hesitated to include his opinion about Jonas’s insomnia the night before his murder and his emotional estrangement from Anthony. But in the end, he included everything he saw and thought, woo-woo vibes and all.
He was about to distribute copies to every desk when Tooki came in. He was bundled in a down parka and when he pulled off his wool hat, his black hair sprouted to life with static electricity.
“Morning,” Louis said, dropping a report on Tooki’s desk.
“Ada ka-da-vous-lay,” Tooki gasped.
Louis looked at him, wondering if he heard right.
Tooki smiled. “In Tamil, it means ‘oh my freaking God,’ kinda. Days like this I wish I was back in India.”
“What’s the average temperature there?”
“Ninety-three.”
“In the summer or winter?”
“Both.”
The door opened again, washing the nave with blast of cold air that scattered papers off the conference table. Cam hustled in, followed by Steele.
“Briefing in five minutes,” Steele said over his shoulder as he started toward the loft.
Louis looked at his watch and then at the door. Where the hell was Emily? Then the door opened and she slipped in. She shuffled toward her desk, lugging her oversized briefcase like it was filled with rocks. She shook off her coat and pulled off a wool cap. Her bronze curls were still wet from her morning shower and she looked paler than normal, with circles under her eyes.
Louis thought about asking her if she was okay, but there wasn’t time now. He resumed distributing his reports, but when he got to Junia’s desk, he paused. The desktop was bare. He slid open the middle drawer. It was empty, except for a few a paperclips. Same with the drawers.
Shit. Junia was gone.
The unit was less than a month old and had already lost a member. It took time, sometimes years, for a team to really gel, and turnover interrupted that process. What was the brass going to think of a captain who couldn’t keep a handpicked forensic expert longer than a few weeks?
Steele was coming back down the stairs. “Chairs, please,” he said.
Louis set a copy of his report in front of Steele as he passed him. He took his seat at the conference table next to Emily, who didn’t look up from her notes.
Steele moved immediately to the case without small talk, speaking in a monotone. He was talking forensics, a topic that would have belonged to Junia, Louis noted.
“Preliminary forensics has confirmed Prince was indeed killed in the dressing room. We have kick marks and saliva on the floor. There were no marks anywhere else in the cathedral so we can assume the killer carried Prince to the altar from the dressing room but we still have not located what appears to be the only key to this room.”
Steele looked to Cam. “Have you found anything out about that blue robe?”
“Yeah,” Cam said. “According to his secretary, that robe was his oldest, something he had before he got to Grand Rapids. He saved it only for special occasions. Last time she recalls him wearing it was the funeral of one of the church elders a couple years back.”
“And the stole?” Steele asked.
“Just as old,” Cam said. “He always wore them together. I’ve left messages for Anthony to get some more info, but seems he’s always tied up.”
Steele gave a tight nod. “Tell us about this witness, Weems.”
Cam recapped the interview, adding that a statewide BOLO had been issued for a middle-aged white man driving an older white Isuzu truck. He passed out copies of the sketch Weems had given the police artist.
“You want this sketch in the papers, boss?” Cam asked.
“Not yet,” Steele said. “I don’t want the subject to know someone saw him. If he thinks his visit to the reverend’s house went unnoticed, he’ll be more likely to stay around and maybe make a mistake.”
Louis eyed the sketch. It looked like a million other forty-something white guys—rumpled, shaggy, shown wearing a dark sweatshirt.
Steele pushed a stack of papers across the table to Tooki. “These are from the tip line,” he said. “I need you to categorize them and get them into the computer so we can analyze them.”
Tooki took the papers without a word.
Steele turned to Emily. “Farentino, background on the Prince family.”
Emily sat up straighter and pushed the curls off her face. “The first reference I found to Jonas Prince is in the 1962 census records for Cass County, Michigan. He and Anthony are recorded as living in Vandalia, a small town south of Grand Rapids. Jonas was hired by the Vandalia Community Church of God after the death of their pastor James Tripp.” She looked up. “Tripp was Violet’s father.”
“Interesting,” Steele said. “Go on.”
“James Tripp was a widower and Violet was only sixteen when he died,” Emily went on. “The Tripp’s house was owned by the church so Violet had nowhere to go. Jonas took her in.”
Louis thought
of what Violet had told him, that Jonas was like a father to her.
“Three years later, the census shows all three living in Jonas’s home in East Grand Rapids,” Emily said. “By then Jonas is pastor of the Beacon Light Methodist Church and Anthony and Violet are married. Soon after, the church incorporates as the Beacon Light Cathedral, though it was much smaller then.”
“Church to cathedral in just six years,” Steele said.
Emily nodded. “Tooki helped me track down financial records that show a clear pattern of Anthony pushing his father into fast expansion in all areas—donor building funds, radio and TV broadcasts, buying up real estate, hiring public relations people and graphic designers to do the programs and newsletters, and public relations.”
Emily paused, frowning, as if she lost her place in her notes. For a long moment, the only sound was the faint wheeze of wind in the organ pipes. Louis let out a breath when she finally went on.
“Anthony studied the demographics,” she said. “He recognized that East Grand Rapids was gentrifying, becoming a hot spot for young families with big bucks. He began a very aggressive recruitment campaign to grow the congregation. Some of the other churches called it poaching.”
“How many members does the church have now?” Cam asked.
“Over three thousand,” Tooki said.
Cam whistled softly.
“You hit a certain size and you become self-generating,” Emily said. “You attract people by your sheer size. People know that the church is that big place they saw on TV. There is a sense of something going on and people love that, want to be part of it. And size itself begets more size.”
“Jonas was against this expansion, right?” Louis asked.
Emily hesitated. “Yes and no. Everyone I talked to said Anthony had to push hard for everything he wanted. Jonas was, by all accounts, a modest man and suspicious of any technology or anything new. Anthony always managed to sway him by convincing him that this was God’s way of getting the gospel to more people.”
Emily looked down at her notes. “Anthony’s secretary told me she heard Jonas and Anthony only argue about one thing. Anthony was big on appearances, you know, expensive suits, capped teeth, styled hair. He wanted his father to wear a suit and tie to preach in, told him he should be more like Jim Bakker. Jonas put his foot down and insisted on his wearing his robes. He told Anthony he had no respect for tradition. Anthony gave up.”
Steele nodded. “Good work.”
“I’m trying to find more about the family before they settled in Vandalia, but so far I’m striking out.”
“Try the name Prinsilä,” Louis said. “I found it on an old certificate in Jonas’s house. It might be the old family name.”
Louis spelled it for her and Emily wrote it in her notebook.
Steele nodded in satisfaction. “Okay, Farentino keep digging into the family history.” He looked at Louis. “Did that radio jock ever get back to you on the surveillance his PI did?”
“Not yet.”
“Lean on him,” Steele said. “Go back to Detroit if you have to.”
“Yes, sir.”
Steele stood and went to the large bulletin board on the altar. It was plastered with crime scene photos and diagrams, along with head shots of Jonas and the suspects they had unearthed. Steele took down the photos of the gay deacon and Bushman and tacked up the Weems sketch next to Anthony Prince. He didn’t need to say anything. It was clear they now had only two primary suspects.
Steele faced his team. “Anyone have any questions?”
“Where’s Junia, sir?” Tooki asked.
Steele hesitated. “We had a disagreement we couldn’t reconcile. Anything else?”
When no one said anything, Steele came back to the table, picked up his folders and walked briskly across the nave. Halfway up the stairs to the loft, he paused, and for several seconds stood still, hand on the rail.
“It was her choice,” he said, looking back at them. “All of you need to understand that. It was her choice.”
Louis waited until Steele disappeared then turned back to look for Emily. She had just emerged from the coffee room, cradling a mug. She sat down at her desk, paused, then folded her arms and laid her head down. Neither Tooki nor Cam seemed to notice her. Louis went over to her desk.
“You all right?” he asked.
She raised her head, and it took a moment for her eyes to focus on him. She opened the middle drawer of her desk, took out a pair of blue-framed glasses and put them on.
“What happened to your contacts?” Louis asked.
“My eyes hurt too much this morning to put them in.”
She began to sort through some papers. Louis slipped into a chair. “Emily, what’s wrong?” he asked.
She kept arranging the papers then finally gave up and stacked them in a corner. “I’m adjusting to a new medication,” she said softly.
“Medication? Are you sick?”
“No, not the way you mean anyway. I’ve gone back on my anti-depressants and my doctor is trying a new one. Zoloft.”
He sat back, not a clue as to what to say.
“You’re looking at me weird,” Emily said.
“I’m sorry,” Louis said. “I’m just surprised. You always seemed so—”
“Normal?”
He smiled. “No, so confident and in control.”
“Well, thank you,” she said. “But I’m not. No one is really. I’ve been on and off anti-depressants most of my life, but I was able to get off them six years ago. I was doing great but with all the changes in my life this year, I guess I should have known it would catch up with me.”
“Is it this job?” he asked. “Are you sorry you left the FBI?”
“No, God, no. It’s something else.”
He waited for her to offer more. Behind him he could hear the tap-tap of a keyboard and the whirr of the copy machine.
“Talk to me,” he whispered.
Emily sighed and extended her left forearm to him, pushing up her sweater. At first he didn’t know what he was supposed to see but then he did—a tiny white scar across her wrist.
“Oh Jesus,” he said softly. “How old were you?”
“Sixteen,” she said. “It wasn’t a serious attempt, really, and I haven’t even thought about ever doing it again, but it changed everything. It cost me everything.”
“How?”
She closed her eyes for a second. “I was struggling in school. My boyfriend had just broken up with me and my best friend moved away. I thought maybe . . . somehow, someway, cutting myself would make things better.”
He touched her hand and she gently drew it away and tugged the sweater back down over her wrist.
“Anyway, a friend took me to the emergency room,” she said. “They called my parents to come get me. On the way there . . . they were broadsided by a truck. They were killed on impact.”
A chill crawled across his skin. For a teenage girl, this was guilt at its worst, the kind of guilt that defined an entire life.
“So that’s it,” she said, before he could say anything. “I still see a therapist every so often, take my pills and try to live as they would have wanted me to. Most days, I’m good.”
He still didn’t have any words and his face must have shown his discomfort because Emily leaned close.
“I’m good, okay?” she said. “Just let it drop, please. I don’t need this getting around.”
Louis saw her eyes flick up toward the loft then quickly settle back on his face. “You think Steele knows?” he asked.
“I was off meds by the time I started with the FBI. And I’m paying for them myself, not going through our insurance plan.” She shook her head. “He never would have hired me if he had known.”
“Lots of cops see shrinks,” Louis said. “I had to once, after a shooting.”
“That’s standard procedure.” She shook her head again, more vigorously. “Steele hand-picked us, Louis. You think he’d tolerate any cracks in his precious
team?”
Louis was quiet, but his mind was churning. Something was bothering him, like he was looking at pieces of a puzzle and not seeing how they fit together.
Cracks . . .
His foster father Phillip was in his thoughts suddenly, and something Phillip had told him one day when they were talking about Phillip’s experiences in Korea, how the military changed men, how some men just lost it.
We called them cracked jugs, Louis. They’re okay except for a tiny crack that you can’t see. You keep filling them up, pouring in more water, and everything’s fine. Then, one day, without warning, the crack gives way.
Louis looked over at Junia’s empty desk. When he turned back to Emily, she had resumed sorting through her papers.
“Emily, did Junia mention anything to you about wanting to quit?” he asked.
She set her file aside, glanced up at the loft then lowered her voice. “No, but something weird happened yesterday when you and Cam were in Grand Rapids.”
“What?”
“I noticed Junia over by the bulletin board. She was holding a file, but she was just standing there, like in a daze, staring at something. Then suddenly she went charging up to the loft. Steele was up there and they were trying to keep it down but I heard her say something to him like, ‘Don’t screw with my head.’ He kept telling her to calm down and suddenly I hear papers flying.”
“She threw the file folder at him?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that a few seconds later she’s out the front door. I was here all day yesterday and she never came back. She must’ve come back late last night to clean out her desk.”
He wanted to talk more, but Emily’s phone rang and she picked it up. Louis sat there, his eyes going from Junia’s empty desk up to the bulletin board. What had Junia been looking at that had set her off?
He rose and walked to the altar. He took a quick look at the items tacked to the front of the bulletin board, but it was just the same material on the Prince case that they had all been looking at for weeks now.
Louis stepped around the back of the bulletin board.
Nobody had bothered to take it down. It was all still there, just as it had been that first day they had all set foot in the church. Five photographs, each with a simple description beneath.