Corruption of Faith

by Brenda English

  “Hey, Sutton, you’re back,” Rudy said, smiling, when he looked up and saw me crossing the newsroom toward him.

  “Hi, Rudy,” I replied. “Yeah, I’m back. I finally got Cara’s stuff packed up yesterday and out of the apartment. I figured work would help me keep my mind off things. And speaking of things, any more developments with the cops?”

  “About your sister? No, nothing. I checked with Peterson this morning about the apartment, but the evidence guys haven’t come up with anything helpful.”

  “I didn’t expect they would,” I told him. “Whoever did this knows enough not to leave fingerprints all over the place.”

  “Yeah, the cops are pretty frustrated over it,” Rudy agreed.

  “They’re not the only ones. So would you keep me posted if you hear anything?”

  “Sure thing, Sutton.”

  “Thanks, Rudy. I appreciate it,” I told him, and I did. It gave me another ear to the ground where the police were concerned. And now that Peterson was put out with me, I figured I might need all the friendly ears I could get.

  During my long afternoon thinkfest the day before, one of the people I had decided to go to for help was Cooper Diggs, the News’ head research librarian and a computer-phile and hacker. Cooper had been told in no uncertain terms to confine his hacking to his own time, I knew. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t plenty of useful information that he could get for me through legitimate channels. And if I needed more clandestine help, I suspected he would be up for whatever electronic snooping I needed done outside the office.

  When I arrived at Cooper’s corner of the second-floor library, where he had laid claim to extra space that once had housed research interns, he was wearing his usual path from the two computers he used to a printer/fax-modem/copier. He had a chair, of course, but I rarely saw him sitting in it. Most of the time he walked, back and forth across his area. Cooper said it kept his blood circulating and his brain working up to speed, but it drove the other two library staffers crazy. That little idiosyncrasy, coupled with the fact that he could extract more information from the electronic ether in two hours than most people could in two days, explained how he had managed to convince the powers that be to create his own personal fiefdom within the library. A set of tall office dividers gave him a modicum of privacy and kept his constant movement from distracting the rest of the staff.

  I stuck my head around the end of a divider and knocked. Cooper stopped in mid-stride and turned in my direction, a concerned smile on his face.

  “Hey, Sutton,” he said, walking over with the surprisingly graceful and always appealing amble that I’ve noticed on many tall, lanky men who are not self-conscious about their height.

  “I need your help, Cooper,” I told him.

  “Name it,” he said, pulling out his desk chair and offering it to me. He, however, chose to prop his lean frame against the desk on which stacks of files and computer printouts competed for space.

  Cooper Diggs gave the lie to just about every stereotype ever promulgated about computer jockeys. There was nothing nerdish about him. No glasses with tape around the frames. No pocket protector full of pens. No pizza gut from too many junk-food meals at the computer terminal. Instead, Cooper looked like what he was: the tastefully dressed eldest son of an upper-class family whose antecedents went back more than two hundred years in a small South Carolina town near Charleston. He wore immaculately clean and perfectly pressed white shirts whose roominess spoke of Brooks Brothers or J. Press, tucked neatly into gray pin-striped suit pants and set off by maroon-and-navy-striped suspenders and a similarly colored silk tie. On an oak coat tree in the corner hung the jacket that went with the pants. He spoke with the lilting accent of his roots, with the perfect grammar and diction of an educated man delivered in the slow, sweet vowels of the deep South. His longish blond hair, which he constantly raked back with his fingers, and his blue eyes could have belonged to a California surfer. If you saw Cooper on the streets of D.C. at lunchtime, you would assume he worked at some high-powered law firm in one of the many marble-foyered buildings scattered throughout the power districts of the capital.

  In fact, although he had studied both library science and computers in college, he had dropped out before completing his degree. That helped explain why his relationship with his family, which boasted several attorneys and physicians, was rather strained and why he was in the newspaper’s library and not with some up-and-coming computer company. But here again, appearances were deceptive. His title at the News belied not only his expertise, but also, I suspected, his salary. For the truth was that Cooper’s slow-spoken manner was less an indicator of what went on beneath the hair than was his inability to sit down. Behind those blue eyes was one of the fastest, sharpest minds I had ever met. A lot of reporters at the paper owed significant portions of the information in their best stories to Cooper Diggs’s abilities.

  “I need background on some people,” I told him. “It may or may not have something to do with my sister’s murder. I won’t know until I see what comes up.”

  Unlike Marlee, there was no need to ask Cooper to keep it to himself. It went without saying with Cooper that whatever he was working on for any particular person, no one else on the staff would hear about it.

  “I spent my first eighteen years in a family and a place where some of the biggest influences in your life are the family secrets that you don’t talk about,” Cooper told me once. “Secretive is my middle name.” It was another reason reporters liked him, and in a perverse way probably helped explain his desire to travel the electronic highway to places he wasn’t supposed to go.

  I handed him the typewritten list I had put together at home the night before. On it were the names of Daniel Brant, John Brant, Al Barlow, Brantlow, Inc., and Nash Marshall. Cooper scanned the list and whistled softly. Given his job, I was sure he knew immediately who Marshall was, if not the others.

  “Are you serious?” he asked incredulously. “I can’t wait to read the story that goes with this,” he said. “Nash Marshall and your sister’s murder?”

  “Actually, I doubt if there’s any connection at all,” I said. “But his name came up in a conversation involving something my sister was worried about, and I thought I should find out more about him. Daniel Brant is the minister at the church where she worked. The other Brant is his son, and Barlow is his assistant of some kind or other. And as you can see from the company’s name, Brant and Barlow own it.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Cooper said, folding the sheet of paper in half and putting it on the desk behind him. “I might have something before you leave today.”

  “I’ll take whatever you can find,” I told him. “I think it’s probably a wild-goose chase or a needle in a haystack or one of those metaphors, but I figured it’s smart to check it out and make certain there’s nothing there. Oh, and I understand from the police that Barlow has a record. Bank robbery. Although he apparently has an alibi for the night Cara was killed.”

  “I’ll call you as soon as I have something,” Cooper assured me. “And by the way, Sutton, I was really sorry to hear about your sister. It must be pretty hard for you, losing her like that.”

  “I can’t begin to tell you how hard. The only way I can stand it is to tell myself that I can help make sure they find the person who did it.”

  Cooper nodded in understanding.

  “Thanks, Cooper,” I told him as I got up to go back to the newsroom.

  “Anytime.”

  Back in the newsroom, I saw that Mary Blaine had come in, so I spent the next hour getting a fill-in from her on what had been happening with the schools. There wasn’t much. It was May, and over the next three weeks all of the school systems in the area would be getting out for the summer. There were a couple of controversial speakers scheduled at high-school graduations, but most of the arguments from the winter and spring, over the next year’s school calendars, budgets, and teacher salaries, had been settled, at least until the fall.


  Mary had ten years’ experience on general assignment, which was what she wanted to cover. She was good and fast and knew a lot about a lot of things. Every time some editor tried to get her to consider one of the specialized beats, she declined, explaining that covering the same thing day after day would soon drive her to consider a career change. But there wasn’t much in the way of beats that she couldn’t handle with little advance notice, as long as no one expected her to do it permanently. I thanked her for filling in for me with no advance warning. Like everyone else, she offered her condolences and asked about the investigation. I gave her my now well-practiced answers. Then I went back to my desk and began a series of phone calls to follow up on a fight between the Fairfax County Parent-Teacher-Student Association and the school board over the school system’s sex-ed curriculum.

  At one P.M., Rob Perry came in, saw me at my desk, and pulled me into his office for an update on everything—Cara’s case, my beat, my emotional state. I told him there was nothing new on the investigation, that I had talked to Mary Blaine and would have a story on the parent/school-board fight for tomorrow’s paper, and that my emotional state was pretty frustrated at the cops’ lack of suspects, at the idea that Cara’s killer might get away.

  Rob looked at me sagely. “And you feel some responsibility for finding the person who did it?”

  “Well, yes,” I answered. “She was my sister. The last real family I had. I loved her. How does she have peace, how do I have any peace if no one finds out why?”

  “I know you, McPhee,” Rob went on. “No matter what I say, you’re not going to rest until either the police find the answer to that question or you do. I know you’re probably out there right now, trying to conduct your own investigation. Just remember two things, okay?”

  “And those are?”

  “One, don’t let whatever you’re doing interfere with your job, which I know you won’t.”

  “And two?”

  “Not every murder is solved. You have to be prepared for the possibility that in spite of the best efforts of the police and yourself, you may not ever know why or who.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head and standing up. “I’m not ready to accept that. If I can’t find out who killed her, if I can’t make sure that person pays for it, how good a reporter can I be?”

  “I’ll admit that’s about the answer I expected,” Rob said, shaking his head back at me, but a smile played around the edges of his mouth. “Go back to work.”

  At four P.M., Cooper called to say he had some articles for me to pick up. I told him I’d be right down.

  “Well,” Cooper asked, “do you want the bad news or the good news first?”

  “Okay, I can talk in clichés just like the next person,” I responded. “Give me the bad news first.”

  “Actually, it’s not so much bad news as it is non-news,” Cooper explained, handing me photocopies of several articles.

  I scanned through them quickly. They were from a variety of area papers, including ours. Most were about Nash Marshall. He had had a fairly high profile in the business community over the last six or seven years, including appointed stints on a couple of regional boards, some chamber-of-commerce activities, and participation in a special advisory group on technology that the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors had set up at one point. All pretty much what one would expect from the guiding light of a large and successful local company. In fact, about the only thing that seemed at all odd about what I saw was that there was nothing very recent. The last article that mentioned him was from some eighteen months ago—until, of course, the stories about his accident and death in April. It was as if sometime in the last two years he suddenly had burned out on civic responsibility.

  That final article from the time before he disappeared from the news was one about a ribbon cutting for the new building at the Bread of Life Church, the first in a series of expansion projects the church had been planning. Along with the article was a boring group shot of a whole host of folks holding scissors and standing behind a big ribbon draped across the doorway of the church. Cooper had highlighted two names, which appeared in both the article and the caption with the photo. The first name was that of Daniel Brant, who was to be expected, considering the article was about his church. The second was Nash Marshall, who, according to the article, had helped in a major way with the fund-raising for the building. So, I mused silently, in spite of both the argument that Cara had overheard and Marshall’s loss of interest in the church recently, at one time he had been a strong supporter of Brant’s. I filed that thought away in my mental folder and looked back up at Cooper.

  “And the good news is?”

  He gave me a big grin and picked up another set of articles from his desk, but held them tantalizingly out of my reach while he set the stage.

  “That piece about the ground breaking was all I could find locally about Brant,” he explained, enjoying the moment. “But it mentioned that Brant had his divinity degree from the”—Cooper reached over with his free hand and turned my arm so he could see the article about the church—“Holy Word Divinity College in Ypsilanti, Michigan. So, just on a whim, I called up the librarian at the Ann Arbor News, which is the closest daily paper for Ypsilanti. I decided to just give her your whole list, since it was short, and asked her to fax me copies of anything she found. Here’s what came through just a little while ago.” He ceremoniously handed me the articles, obviously quite proud of himself.

  There were four of them, beginning with an article about the holdup, by two men in ski masks, of an Ypsilanti bank in 1980 and the subsequent arrest, trial, and conviction of one Alfred Reuss Barlow for the robbery. The article on Barlow detailed the fact that, at the time of his arrest for the bank robbery, he already had a record for burglary, assault, and receiving stolen property. He received a sentence of another five to ten years and was sent off to the state prison in Jackson to serve it. His partner in the robbery was never found, and Barlow adamantly denied his guilt or any knowledge of an accomplice.

  With the article about Barlow’s trial was a photo of the defendant being escorted into the Washtenaw County Courthouse by police. Even in the grainy reproduction from the fax machine, it was clear that it was a slightly younger-looking version of the Reverend Daniel Brant’s current “assistant.” Once more I looked up at Cooper, this time the surprise clearly written on my face. His grin was even bigger.

  “You were right about his record,” Cooper said. “But I’ll bet you didn’t know that he and Brant apparently are from the same area. And isn’t he kind of an odd bird to be in business with a man of God?”

  “I thought so when I met him,” I said, looking at the articles again. “Now I know it wasn’t my imagination.”

  “More like ESP,” Cooper agreed.

  “Thanks, Cooper. This is good stuff. I don’t know what it means yet, but at least it gives me someplace to really start digging.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes if you’re looking into them, Sutton,” he said, “but it sure is fun watching from the sidelines. If you need me to find anything else for you, just let me know.”

  “Oh, you can count on it,” I said, feeling a little less helpless for the first time in days. I thanked Cooper and left, taking the articles with me to read in detail when I got home.

  As I read and reread the articles Cooper had unearthed, at my dining-room table that night, it became obvious that while Detective Peterson had forewarned me about Barlow’s record, he had not hinted at how extensive that record really was. Still, I felt that the real cipher in the picture was not Barlow but the Reverend Daniel Brant, and I had found nothing that would help me unlock the code to him. Doing a good turn for another was one thing, but to take on a man as unsavory as Al Barlow as a personal assistant and to go into business with him? That seemed to me to be taking Christian charity to the extreme, not to mention possibly tarnishing the reputations of both Brant and his church.

  So the next l
ogical question to answer seemed to be the question of who was Daniel Brant. I knew next to nothing about him. Based on the church groundbreaking article, I knew he was the head of a clearly wealthy and prosperous organization, one that had managed to attract at least one parishioner of the caliber of Nash Marshall and probably others. I knew the name of the divinity college where he had trained to be a minister. And that was about the extent of it.

  The most important question, of course, was what any of this, as fascinating as it might be, had to do with Cara’s murder. Probably nothing, I knew, but I didn’t have anyplace else to look at this point. I figured I might as well keep tugging on the string in my hand.

  Thursday

  Ten

  One of the first lessons a reporter learns, usually the hard way, is to question everything, to assume nothing, to take nothing for granted. I know of more than one reporter who suddenly acquired a new anal orifice, courtesy of some angry editor, for screwing up a story by making an unjustified assumption. And I also know of more than one major story that has been broken open by a reporter who went back to square one and started checking into the basics such as the credentials on a résumé, thereby unraveling a tissue of half-truths and outright lies invented by a public figure with things to hide. So that was where I decided to start when I got to work the next morning, in an effort to answer my questions about Daniel Brant and his relationship with the questionable Al Barlow.

  A few seconds’ effort on the telephone got me the phone number of the Holy Word Divinity College in Ypsilanti, Michigan. In another minute I was talking with a pleasant female voice that answered, “Admissions and records. This is Lacy Settle.”

  “Good morning,” I told her. “This is Sutton McPhee. I’m a newspaper reporter in Washington, D.C., and I’m doing a profile of one of your graduates. I was hoping you could help me double-check the year he got his degree.”