We exchanged brief greetings, and I went over to my desk to get the folder. Lying on top of it was a manila envelope with my name printed in block letters. I tore open the sealed top and pulled out a pale green folder with several sheets of paper inside. There was a small yellow Post-it note stuck on top.
Hope these are helpful, it said in an angular, sprawling handwriting. Although I can’t say much for the company you’re keeping these days. Let me know if you need anything else. There was no signature. It wasn’t necessary. I knew it must be the background checks for which I had asked David Edwards.
I put the folder back in the envelope without going through it. I really wanted to go home, where I didn’t have to see or talk to anyone else for a while. I got the copies of my interview notes as well and called a “see you” to Dalton on my way out of the newsroom.
If I had had any notion of being able to shut my brain down once I got home, the information in the envelope from David Edwards quickly disabused me of that idea. I got a glass of iced tea from my kitchen and sat down at the dining-room table with the envelope. It was an education.
On top was a sheet for David Daniel Brantley. His adult criminal career stretched all the way back to 1969, to an arrest for receiving stolen property that I guessed was the incident that had short-circuited his attempt at being a divinity student. He had received a sentence of three years in prison, which was reduced to one year plus parole. With credit for time already served while awaiting trial, he actually spent only another nine months in the Washtenaw County jail. In 1976, he was arrested again and served three years in the Michigan State Prison in Jackson for fraud and extortion. There were no further entries for Brantley, and the second sheet showed the search under the Daniel Brant name had turned up no arrests. In part, I suspected, because Daniel Brant had come into existence only shortly before or after his appearance in Virginia, sometime in the last few years, as a man of God.
Sort of an immaculate deception? my voice asked.
I sent it to stand in a corner of my brain. I didn’t need the distraction right now.
Next was the sheet for Alfred Reuss Barlow. He had a string of arrests and convictions going back at least as far as age eighteen. Assault. Petty theft. Burglary. Receiving stolen property.
Interesting, I thought, as I read further and compared the sheets on Brantley and Barlow. In 1975, the year before Brantley had been sent to Jackson, Barlow arrived there on an armed-robbery charge. The two men were released within three months of each other in 1979. Eight months later Barlow was back in prison for the Ypsilanti bank robbery, in which he had worked with a never-identified accomplice, and this time he stayed until 1986. His record appeared clean after that.
The next two pages showed nothing more sinister than a string of speeding tickets for John Brant, and nothing at all for Nash Marshall. Fortunately, David Edwards hadn’t stopped there. He apparently had contacted the police in Michigan and had had them fax down copies of the mug shots for both Brantley and Barlow. I already knew, from the photo in the Ann Arbor News, taken during his trial, that Alfred Reuss Barlow, the Michigan criminal, was now Al Barlow, assistant and business partner to the Reverend Daniel Brant. Now David Daniel Brantley’s mug shot left no question that, with the exception of some additional facial creases and graying hair brought on by middle age, he and Daniel Brant were also one and the same.
I pondered the information in front of me, while a puddle of cold water formed under my glass of iced tea from the condensation drops that collected on the glass. I got up and went to the kitchen for a paper towel and a coaster. I didn’t know how or when they had met, but it was clear to me that Brant and Barlow had known each other in Jackson, I thought as I sat back down and wiped up the growing pool of water. They also had been released at about the same time. Within months Barlow was right back inside for the bank robbery. Could his partner in that robbery, who was never caught, have been Brant? I wondered. If it had been Brant, no wonder he had given Barlow a job when Barlow finished his sentence.
And what about Brant? What were the chances that his getting religion was real? True, he had gone briefly to a Bible college, ostensibly with the goal of training as a minister. But he had blown that in the very first year with his arrest. And then he’d been caught again and done time in Jackson. I’m certain there are people who experience genuine religious epiphanies while gazing out from behind prison bars. But the more I thought about it, the more the cynic in me believed that the much more likely scenario involved either Brant being forced into the divinity college by a family hoping to straighten him out or his having gone on his own, already planning to use the trappings of religion as a disguise for what he was. Either way, years after his expulsion, he had taken the Bible lessons he had learned in his brief time at the school and had parlayed them into a successful alias as a minister.
All of which was pretty interesting and certainly set the reporter wheels turning in my brain. But the real question was how did any of it connect to Cara—and to the three dead executives who belonged to the Bread of Life Church? If it connected. Right now the picture in front of me was still chaotic, disjointed, bits and pieces of information that made no sense. I thought of a book I recently had read, on all the research under way into theories about chaos and complexity and about the hidden order that often lurks within apparent chaos. This hidden order appears, according to the experts, only after something they call a phase transition, in which increasing chaos suddenly condenses into a new level of order. I hoped that, if there was something that could bring about such a phase transition in my thinking, it showed up soon. Right now all I could see was the disorder. Of course, I didn’t expect a catalyst to present itself out of the blue. I would have to keep looking for it.
I went to the phone in the kitchen and called David Edwards’s office. I knew he wouldn’t be in, but I left a voice-mail message thanking him for the “favor” and telling him it had been helpful.
I hung up, and after a minute or so of pawing through my purse, which I had tossed on the kitchen counter, I came up with the piece of paper containing John Brant’s computer modem number. With it in front of me, I dialed Cooper Diggs’s home phone number.
“Hello?” he said breathlessly, when he picked the phone up halfway through the fourth ring.
“Cooper, it’s Sutton.”
“Hey, Sutton. Sorry about the heavy breathing. I was on the stair machine.”
“Oh, gee, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Forget it. I’m done anyway. What can I do for you?”
“Can you write down a phone number?”
“Yeah, I can just about manage that. Just a sec,” he said, and I heard noises as he scrambled around for pen and paper. “Okay, go ahead.”
I read out the number Marlee had given me.
“This is the modem number to the computer that I’m certain contains the list of names I found in Cara’s safe-deposit box,” I told him by way of explanation. “It belongs to John Brant, Daniel Brant’s son. Do you think you could get into his computer and see what else might be in there about the names on that list?”
“Unless this guy is a whole lot smarter than I am, I can get into it,” Cooper assured me. “Any idea what I’m looking for?”
“Anything you can find. I’m still feeling around in the dark at this point. John Brant’s paranoia about his computer and my gut keep telling me there’s more there, but I have no idea what it might look like.”
“Okay,” Cooper said, “I’ll work on it this weekend. If there’s anything to be found, you’ll have it by Monday.”
And if there wasn’t, I wondered, then what do I do? Should I just go to the police with what I did have? Which was what? That Brant was a liar and Barlow a crook? Peterson would show me the door, but not before chewing me out for trying to do the cops’ job. Or should I just go on, day after day, grieving over my sister’s death and furious at my inability to find out who killed her? How long could I do that before it ch
ewed me up?
I was waiting at a table at Copeland’s, a bustling, New Orleans-style restaurant on King Street at the northern edge of Alexandria, when Chris arrived. He slipped into the chair across the table and, smiling at me, said hello.
“Hi yourself,” I answered, smiling back and taking in the way his decently muscled arms and shoulders were flattered by the navy knit polo shirt he wore over khaki pants. “This was a good idea.”
“It seemed like it at the time,” he agreed.
Our waiter appeared to take Chris’s drink order. We studied the familiar menu in companionable silence for a few minutes before each of us decided what to have, closed the menus, and put them down on the table. At the waiter’s return with Chris’s beer, I asked for a house salad and shrimp creole. Chris ordered a crab-stuffed flounder and a bowl of gumbo. The waiter left us alone again and we looked at each other.
“You look good,” Chris said finally.
“Thanks,” I told him. “So do you. I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages, even though it’s only been a couple of weeks.”
“Well, we’ve both had a lot going on,” he said.
“True,” I agreed as the waiter came back with our salad and gumbo. “A lot I would rather not have had to deal with. It has been a very hard two weeks, too.”
“But you’re okay now?” he asked, putting a spoon into his gumbo.
I teased the pieces of lettuce in my salad with my fork. “Sometimes I am,” I said, looking back up at him. “Other times I’m not so sure. I find myself going along, doing what I have to do and thinking about things like work, and then all of a sudden it all comes back and just kicks me in the stomach all over again.”
Chris nodded and put another spoonful of gumbo into his mouth. “Mmmm,” he said as he chewed. “This is delicious.”
And that was pretty much the way the evening went. Throughout dinner, we talked about a lot of things: our jobs, one acquaintance who was getting a divorce, another who had just found out she was having triplets, a third who was taking a vacation in Thailand. We topped off dinner with a round of coffee and then Chris took me up on my invitation to come back to my apartment. At no time had I been able to get any closer to the subject of Cara’s murder and how I was struggling with it.
When we got upstairs, I went to the kitchen and put on water for more coffee. Chris suggested watching Last of the Mohicans, a film we both liked and that I had purchased on video just before Cara had been killed and had not had a chance to watch. We spent a couple of hours propped against each other and making occasional comments as Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe struggled to survive French and Indian treachery in Colonial America. When the movie was done, Chris changed positions on the sofa and proceeded to convince me that we should conquer some new territory of our own.
Predictably, we ended up in the bedroom, where we didn’t spend our time talking. And what we did spend our time doing left both of us relaxed and quickly drifting into sleep. Mine was deep and dreamless for a change, a release from the nightmares about Cara that had been regular visitors since her death—and from the nagging question of what was bothering Chris.
The evening had done nothing to answer that question. On the surface, he had seemed his old self, happy to see me, pleasant to be with, imaginative in bed. But at 4:30 in the morning, I awoke and saw that he uncharacteristically had dressed and left sometime during the night. The note on his pillow said he had to go into the office later to get some extra work done. But I knew it was more than that, that whatever had been wrong before was still there between us. As I lay awake in the predawn gray of my bedroom, I mentally reviewed our conversations from the previous evening, remembering how, each time I had mentioned Cara’s murder or the pain it was causing me, Chris had found something else to discuss.
Clearly, the whole topic of Cara’s death and my reactions to it made him very uncomfortable. I didn’t know why, but I did know that I was equally uncomfortable with his reluctance to discuss it. I hoped that, with the passing of some time, he would open up to letting me talk about it. Cara’s murder had turned my world upside down, and I needed someone to help me deal with that, to help me endure the emotional upheaval that her death had triggered.
How could Chris and I spend time together if I couldn’t broach a subject that was so close to my heart? I wondered, watching the first touches of pink warm the lightening morning sky. And now, with Cara dead, if Chris wasn’t there, then who would I have?
Only me.
Well, that really makes me feel better, I thought caustically.
But the truth of my voice’s response forced me to admit to myself the true contours of my life, the actual dimensions of its emptiness, which the demands of my job and time with Cara and Chris had conspired to let me hide from myself. I spent long hours at my job, sometimes more than necessary, I knew. Outside of an occasional after-work bar session with other reporters, Cara and Chris had been my social life. And my confidants. It appalled me to understand how far I had drifted, since my parents’ death and my brief and unsuccessful attempt at marriage, from having much in the way of real contact with the other people around me. Even Chris. I knew that I couldn’t put all the fault for my current irritation with Chris on his head. In fact, I had always been as wary of closeness as he had, perhaps had found him appealing partly because of the emotional demands I knew I wouldn’t have to meet. And although I considered people like Rob Perry and Ken Hale as friends, I still kept them—and most everyone else around me—at arm’s length, where, if their feelings for me changed or if they went away, they couldn’t cause me pain because I hadn’t really let them in.
Only I was in pain, anyway, in spite of all my caution. Cara’s death had taken away the person I loved most in the world. And apparently had sent the other person I cared for into a full emotional retreat. As the nighttime gloom drained out of my bedroom, I saw around me the flat topography of my present and the distant horizons of my future, an empty plain on which I stood alone.
Sunday
Sixteen
I spent most of the day Sunday brooding over my predawn insights into my psyche and worrying the bits and pieces I had learned about the Brants and Barlow into various configurations, trying to fit them together into some semblance of a coherent picture. But no matter how I jiggled things around in my brain, I still was left with a large puzzle piece missing, the piece that would show me whether or not it all connected to Cara’s murder.
And my questions about what was wrong with Chris were never far from my mind either, especially as the day went by and Chris didn’t call. Late in the afternoon, I concluded that, whatever it was, we were going to have to talk about it pretty soon, if I could get him to talk about it at all. I wasn’t looking forward to the conversation. But I knew something had changed. He had withdrawn from me in some important way. I don’t work well in a vacuum. I had to know what the problem was.
It wasn’t until I was getting ready for bed on Sunday night that I remembered Cara’s poem that Marlee had given me and that I had forgotten to read. I got my purse off the dresser and sat down on the end of my bed, took out the sheet of paper, and unfolded it. It said:
The Dark
When the world becomes too real,
When trust is shattered, truth deceived,
When doubt and fear replace them,
And we question what we believed,
Then is the time for greatest trust,
Not in the words of man,
But trust in the Lord who put us here,
And confidence in his plan.
We cannot see the road ahead,
Blind to our future, we plod.
There is then but one path to take;
We must take our fears to God.
Cara McPhee
And did He take your fear away? I asked Cara silently, remembering her face on the ATM security camera’s tape. Was He there when you were killed, to take you to someplace better as you always believed?
A
nd how ironic, I thought, that her poem should be so appropriate. I had learned that Daniel Brant, whom she had trusted and believed, had deceived her and everyone else at the church about who and what he was. What kind of answer would her God have for that? I wondered. Had Brant’s deceit made a mockery of Cara’s belief? Had she been forced to ask herself these same questions, to wonder if she had been a fool?
I cried myself to sleep, imagining the terror my sister must have faced at the moment when her faith was put to the ultimate test, at the very time when she might have had the greatest doubts about that faith. All night I went from one bad dream to the next, dreams of Cara dying, of Cara dead, and each ended the same way—with Cara trying to tell me something from wherever she was and then leaving me again, alone here with my grief and my frustration at not being able to understand whatever it was she wanted me to know.
Monday
Seventeen
My first stop at the office on Monday morning was Cooper’s cubicle. He wasn’t there, but his computer was on, so I decided to wait for a few minutes in case he was around somewhere. I’d been contemplating my fingernails for five or six minutes when he walked in, a cup of coffee in his hand.
“I’m glad you stopped by,” Cooper said as he shoved aside a stack of papers to put the coffee cup down on his desk. “I was just about to call upstairs to see if you were in.” He handed me a sheet of paper. “This is what I was able to download before your friend’s computer decided I was trespassing and kicked me out. It was another file in the same directory as the list your sister found.” He sat down in his desk chair to watch my reaction.
On the page were five names, three of which I recognized from the list I had found in Cara’s safe-deposit box. They were familiar names by now: Nash Marshall, Neal Pursell, and James Kelton. The other two—Stephen Ulm and Carl Rivers—rang some sort of vague bell, but at the moment I couldn’t place them.
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