Defenders of the Faith

by Williamson, Chet

  Paul went inside the house then. The first thing he did was thoroughly clean his revolver. Then he took the empty brass case and put it at the bottom of the garbage. He did not know if the police could match a spent bullet with the case it came from, but he wouldn't take the chance. He made himself a pot of coffee, and when he was done he went to the garage, peeled the tape from over the light button on the door, and wiped off the residue. He reminded himself to wash the car the next morning. Then he went back inside and read the Bible for an hour, still unable to keep his hands from shaking.

  At eleven o'clock, he sat down to watch the news, and was not surprised to find that the shooting was reported. The victim's name was Rafael Santiago. The newscaster said that he had been killed instantly by a single gunshot, and added that several hundred dollars worth of narcotics had been found on the body. Santiago had a long record of drug arrests, and two previous convictions. Police said there was a possibility that rival drug dealers might be responsible for the crime. There was no mention, Paul noticed, of Lee Boller, and apparently no one had been apprehended at the scene.

  He went to bed, thinking that perhaps he hadn't done so badly after all. But what kept him from sleeping was wondering what he would do about Lee Boller.

  Chapter 20

  He washed his car the next morning after breakfast, and took his .38 special to the indoor pistol range at the Rose Point Sportsmens Club and shot several strings, thinking that if he were somehow traced by the police, he would at least have an excuse for his gun having recently been fired. He knew he was being paranoid, but figured that taking care of such details certainly couldn't hurt.

  He spent the afternoon at the store. No one even mentioned the murder, and Paul thought it might be because the death of another Hispanic drug dealer wasn't worth mentioning. Indeed, it probably brightened the day of most decent people who heard about it.

  Still, Paul was startled every time the phone rang, expecting to hear a strange detective's gentle, duplicitous voice asking if Paul minded talking to him concerning a certain... matter. Did they call, he wondered, or did they just show up in person to prevent the suspect escaping? But a policeman was never on the line, and the closest thing to come into the store all day was a county judge who went to Paul's church and bought all his clothes from Paul.

  That night the newspaper implied that the police had no leads and no clues. So that part of it was all right, Paul thought with relief. But how could he look at Lee Boller, the boy he had tried to kill and still thought needed killing, in Sunday school the next day?

  He need not have worried. When Lee came into the classroom the next morning, he did not look at Paul with his customary defiant glare. Instead he came in with his eyes down, and only glanced at Paul for a moment, then looked quickly back at the floor.

  Does he know? Paul could not help thinking. Does he know it was me?

  But there was no other response from Lee Boller, who behaved impeccably. He closed his eyes during the prayer, sang the hymns, and the rest of the time sat quietly, and made no disruptive comments or rude gestures.

  After church, Bill Geyer asked to see Paul as the congregation filed out, and Paul went with him to his office. "I think our problem may be solved," Geyer said with a little smile as he sat at his desk. "Notice anything different in your class this morning?"

  "You mean Lee Boller?"

  "Did he behave?"

  "He...was a saint," Paul said. "What happened?"

  "A miracle, I suppose. A small one. I can't tell you everything he told me, but Lee called me yesterday, said he needed to talk, so we came over here and he sat right where you're sitting, and apologized."

  "What?"

  "That's right. He apologized for the way he's behaved these past lo, how many years. He confessed to having used drugs, and to...doing more. But he's done with that now, so he claims."

  "But...why?" Something was building up inside of Paul, nearly crushing him with a wild elation.

  "He told me that he saw something terrible. I can't say any more than that, I promised him. But he said it was like seeing what was up ahead for him if he kept going the way he was. It was as if he never realized the seriousness of what he was dealing with. Now he knows it isn't a game. Don't mention this to anyone else, Paul. Let's just let them find out about the new Lee Boller themselves, okay? And thank you, Jesus!"

  The new Lee Boller. Paul pressed a smile firmly on his lips and refused to allow them to part and release the joy he felt. But when he left Geyer's office, he went directly to the empty men's room, where he laughed in soft, breathy bursts. When he was finished, he went outside, got into his car, and talked aloud to God on the drive home.

  "You knew, didn't you? You knew precisely what you were doing! I had Lee Boller in mind, but you had someone else, because you knew that he wasn't beyond redemption. The other one was so much worse -- he was the one who needed to die, and his death changed Lee, saved him. Your hand shook mine, guided the gun. Thank you, Jesus, thank you! Oh Lord, I know now that I may trust you always. I promise to be the instrument of your will!"

  He had heard the proper phrase, instrument of your peace, a thousand times, but did not realize that he had changed it to suit his purposes.

  Chapter 21

  It was a typical wait and see, Olivia Feldman thought on Monday morning. The reports were on her desk, and as she read through them she saw that the investigators hadn't turned up a thing that would lead to an arrest.

  Rafael Santiago had been a worthless piece of scum, a street dealer who occasionally bought and sold larger quantities. The city was far better off without him, and personally she would have been willing to congratulate his killer. But officially, she had to find and prosecute him.

  Her gut told her that the shooter was another dealer. Maybe Santiago was encroaching on his territory, or vice versa. Killings like this weren't uncommon. She'd get a few Hispanic undercovers to sniff around, find out who might have reason to be pissed off at Santiago.

  Her thinking went along those lines until she saw the lab photos of the bullet that had been found in the alley at the base of a wall fifteen feet behind the victim's body.

  It had been ripped up by its passage through Santiago's skull, and flattened by the impact with the bricks, but there was still enough of it left for Olivia to notice something familiar about the land and groove markings. Her memory was not eidetic, but she had looked at the microscopic photos of the bullet from the William Davonier murder often enough that its markings were well embedded in her mind. And now, as she looked at the magnified images of the Santiago bullet, she would have been willing to bet that there was more than a surface similarity.

  She called Tom Fredericks and asked him to put the Davonier and Santiago bullets under the comparison microscope. He came into her office an hour later and confirmed her suspicions. The bullet that had passed through the face and brain of Rafael Santiago had come screaming down the same pistol barrel that had dealt death to William Davonier.

  It was a .38 caliber bullet, and the partial survival of an indented ring at the bullet's tip told Fredericks that it was a wadcutter, the type of bullet intended to leave well defined holes in paper targets. Olivia had used them often on the police department's indoor range.

  She thanked Fredericks, and after he left she sat back in her chair, tossed the ballistics report and photo onto the desk in front of her, and picked up her coffee cup. But she was thinking too hard to bring it to her lips. The same gun that killed Santiago had also killed Davonier more than a decade earlier. And a lot can happen to a handgun in that period of time. It can be sold and bought, it can be stolen...or it could have been discarded by Davonier's killer, unwilling to take any chance that the bullet and gun could be traced to him.

  She would order a search for any reports of stolen .38 pistols in the past thirteen years, although she doubted that Davonier's killer would have reported the theft to the police. Still, murderers could be unbelievably stupid. Her thoughts, howev
er, still tended toward the discard theory, since the cases were so totally unrelated. She could almost see it -- Davonier's killer wiping the gun clean, then tossing it into a trash can, where it was found by...who?

  Then she wondered if the killer would have thrown the bullets away as well. What was a street dealer doing with target bullets? Oh well, she thought, stranger things had happened. There were a dozen reasons why the bullets a street dealer used could have been wadcutters.

  She set the wheels into motion once again, and learned that there were only three cases of stolen .38 pistols in Buchanan County in the past thirteen years. The weapons were recovered in two of the cases, but not in the third. That weapon, however, had been a new Smith and Wesson stolen during a burglary at a small gun shop, so could not have been the gun used on William Davonier.

  The results didn't surprise her, and left two options. The first was that Davonier's killer had tossed the gun back in 1996. And the second, which only occurred to her later, was that the same person had committed the two crimes, thirteen years apart.

  At first she gave it no credence, but the more she thought about it, the more it seemed possible. The victim in both cases had been a criminal who, many would say, deserved killing, and the fatal bullet was fired from the same gun with the same type of ammunition.

  But thirteen years apart? What kind of sense did that make? What kind of person would feel inspired to renew a crusade after thirteen years?

  Chapter 22

  The two slayings that Paul Blair had committed seldom disturbed his sleep. William Davonier's death troubled him not at all, though he did at times grieve that he had had to kill Rafael Santiago.

  He had learned later that Santiago was married, had five children, and contributed a great deal of money to St. James' Catholic Church in the fourth ward. Paul had nearly sent an anonymous contribution to the family, but had learned that Santiago's brothers, who were also rumored to make the major portion of their incomes outside the law, had taken the children into their homes. As far as Paul knew, Santiago had never killed anyone, at least face to face. Paul solaced himself by thinking of the lives Santiago might have destroyed with the drugs he sold, and that thought let him drift to sleep on those nights when guilt prodded him.

  By the beginning of summer, he had almost ceased to fear that his identity as the killer of Santiago and Davonier would be discovered. It had been many years since Davonier's body had been found, and the police would quickly cease to wonder who had taken out another pusher.

  So, bolstered by the successes of the past rather than disturbed by them, Paul Blair looked to the future, and continued to look to his charges, the children over whom he watched. Many were now in the midst of the dangers of adolescence, and it was no longer necessary to spy on them in their homes. Some of them were all too willing to be put in danger on their own, as far away from home as they could get.

  Two of the least rebellious of the lot, however, had been Holly Good and Susan Darnell, high school sophomores whose virginity and good intentions were unquestioned. They were best friends, and their proximity seemed to make them resemble each other.

  Both were thin, and of medium height. Though Holly was a blonde and Susan a brunette, they both wore their hair long and straight. The effect on the pale flesh of their faces was pre-Raphaelite, and Paul imagined Rossetti writing poems to them. Neither of them was pretty, nor were they unattractive. They were simply plain, and wore no makeup to hide that fact. Their dress was tasteful, but not stylish, and their manner calm and reasoned. Paul would have been proud to have either of them as a daughter.

  They were also as spiritual a pair of youth as Paul could imagine. Their questions in Sunday school and YF groups indicated that they spent a lot of time thinking and probably talking to each other about belief and morality, and though they occasionally dominated a discussion, they more often steered the dialogue to a deeper, more interesting level.

  The only thing that made Paul uncomfortable was Holly and Susan's interest in faiths other than Christianity. It was not uncommon for either of them to bring up a tenet of Buddhist, Hindu, or even Islamic belief to support a point. One day after Sunday school, Paul mentioned to Holly that she must do a lot of outside reading, and she said she did. "Does any of what you read," he asked, "make you, well, doubtful of your faith?"

  "No," she said. "I guess I just have problems with the idea that someone who's a good person would go to hell just because they don't have Jesus as their savior. That doesn't seem fair. Do you think?"

  "I don't know, Holly."

  "I mean, if somebody's good their whole life, like Mahatma Gandhi or a Buddhist priest or somebody like that, how could God be cruel enough to send them to hell because they don't believe in Jesus?"

  It was a problem Paul had never been able to resolve himself. Would God condemn the virtuous pagan? He hated to think so. But at the same time, if one was offered salvation by the knowledge of Christ and refused it, did not that man condemn himself?

  Lord, it was confusing. With all of Christianity's enigmas and contradictions, it was a wonder that so many young people stayed in the faith, and were not lured away by more simplistic and less demanding belief systems. Perhaps, Paul thought, it was merely that most of them never looked elsewhere, the way that Holly and Susan did.

  But those two did seek, and, to paraphrase Christ, they found.

  The finding came with the arrival in Buchanan of David Compton and the girl called Ananda. At the beginning of April they leased what had previously been a locksmith shop and opened the Infinite Harmony Book Store. Paul went into the shop on his lunch break the first week it was open, hoping that they specialized in books about music, but was disappointed to find that it was instead a New Age store. Even if he hadn't looked at the shelves, David Compton's appearance would have given the game away.

  The man was imposingly tall and broad. Though his face was deeply lined, the flesh was tanned and healthy looking. His dark blonde hair was tied in the back, and he wore the resultant ponytail over his shoulder and halfway down his chest. The cloth of his shirt was a bold, flowered pattern of red and orange, and over it he wore a dark blue cape decorated with white symbols. Paul recognized only one of them, what he thought was called an ankh. The man's eyes were of a blue not quite as dark as his cape. Paul guessed his age at anywhere from thirty-five to fifty.

  "May I help you with anything?" he said.

  "Just browsing," Paul answered. "I thought maybe you were a music store."

  The man chuckled. "Just the music of the spheres. Feel free to look around. My name's David, if you have any questions."

  There were sections of books on astrology, crystals, spiritualism, sects, UFO's, dream interpretation, reincarnation, herbs, holistic cooking, psychic phenomena, and a section in the bookcase behind the cash register marked Wicca. Glass jars held incense and herbs, and there was also a rack of greeting cards. The crudity of the art work told Paul they were not Hallmark. In the middle of the floor were two wire racks filled with magazines, no titles of which Paul recognized.

  As his visual circuit of the room ceased, he felt annoyed at such concentrated foolishness. Just then a beaded curtain parted and a young woman stepped through. For a moment, she stopped Paul's heart.

  Her skin was the delicate creamy white of old and precious china, and her hair fell in smooth waves over her bare shoulders. Her features were full and soft and regular, with no sharp lines or angles, a face on which a lover's kisses would rest as if on a pillow. She wore a simple white shift made of homespun cloth, and a half moon, its horns pointed upward, hung from a gold chain around her neck.

  "Hi! Findin' what you need?"

  She looked like a woman, but when she spoke, Paul started breathing again. Her voice was that of a little girl, tiny and piping, and he felt ashamed of feeling such carnality toward a child. But then she stepped behind the counter, and David kissed her so proprietorially that there was no mistaking the relationship. This was not, Paul real
ized, a father and daughter.

  "This is Ananda," David said proudly.

  Paul nodded. "Hello, Amanda."

  "No, Ananda," she said. "It's the peace that comes through self-renunciation. Like in the Vedanta system?"

  He half-smiled and shook his head. "I'm sorry."

  "The Upanishads," David said.

  "Oh, the, uh, Hindu religious book?"

  David grinned. "Now you got it. Ever read them?"

  "No."

  "We got a good translation. Sort of a 'Best Of' volume. Brahma's Greatest Hits."

  "No thanks. Do you have anything on Christianity?"

  David sucked his lower lip. "Christianity...oh yeah, I remember that one. No, not really. We can't hope to compete with the Christian bookstores around here. We're mostly alternative."

  "Alternatives to Christianity?"

  "Should I apologize?"

  This man, Paul thought, would never apologize. He answered his smile with one of his own. "Not to me," Paul said, and left the store. As he pulled the front door closed, he heard the girl, Ananda, laugh in superior disbelief, and could predict the conversation that would follow about the weird old guy, and how it takes all kinds, and how he'll never be back in here again.

  That much was true. He wouldn't. There was nothing in that store for Paul Blair, only disbelief and foolishness and superstition, the kind of things that people used to replace Christ. Paul had read articles about New Age beliefs, about the possibility of Satan and his demons lurking behind the apparently benign guises of eastern mysticism and its myriad philosophical and religious offspring, Islam being the prime example, but he wasn’t sure of the truth of those charges.

  Just as he was not so naive as to think that everyone who used the name of Christ was a Christian, he couldn’t imagine that everyone who espoused the doctrines of reincarnation, occultism, and spiritualism were all tools of some living Satan who walked unseen among men.