Corruption of Faith

by Brenda English

  Give up?

  Of course I’m not giving up, I told my voice. Try not to be any more stupid than necessary.

  Maybe, I thought, it was time to call Detective Peterson anyway and tell him the specifics of what I had learned. I knew much of my theory still was just that—theory. But maybe it would be enough to get his attention at least, to get him to listen to me with an open mind. It was clear that Daniel Brant was not who or what he had been pretending to be. I had managed to find the records of Brant’s criminal career that had eluded Peterson. I could only hope that Brant’s change of identity and his prison record would be enough to convince Peterson to dig deeper at least. If they weren’t, I knew I still wouldn’t let it go, even though I might end up hanging out there on a limb all by myself. My sister had been murdered, and I was convinced that I knew who had killed her and why. But I had to find proof of that reason and put a name to her killer, and in such a way that Peterson would have no choice but to take action against the men responsible for Cara’s death.

  I opened a file in my computer and typed up brief summaries of Brant and Barlow’s criminal histories and the points where their paths had crossed. There was no need to expose David Edwards’s hand in what I had learned, after all. I sent a copy to the printer that I shared with several other reporters. I gathered up the pages of Daniel Brant’s story, walked to the printer for the summaries, and then crossed the newsroom to the photocopier, where I made copies of everything I had. I would, I decided, give it all to Peterson. I would find out just how determined a cop he really was.

  Twenty-two

  With my photocopies in hand, I had gone back to my desk and paged Detective Peterson. When he returned the call, I told him that I needed to see him, that I had more information, concrete information this time, that I was certain related to Cara’s murder. He told me he was up to his ears in paperwork but that if I could come out to Fairfax, he would make the necessary time to look at what I had. So here I was, pulling into the parking lot at the Massey Building where the Fairfax County Police Department’s Major Crimes Division was housed on the upper floors.

  The Massey Building, which is now occupied by much of the administrative hierarchies of the county’s fire and rescue and police departments, formerly was the main office for the Fairfax County government. It sits just south of the intersection of Chain Bridge Road and Main Street in the center of the city of Fairfax. In the boom years of the early 1980s, the Fairfax County supervisors determined that the answer to the county government’s rapid expansion, which had outstripped the available space, was to build an all-new governmental center at a site just west of the city, next to I-66 and the Fair Oaks Mall. In those days, real-estate values throughout the county were skyrocketing, and developers, both commercial and residential, couldn’t put up buildings fast enough to meet the demand. County tax coffers, filled by real estate and business taxes, overflowed. Very few quibbled when plans for the center were drawn up.

  By the end of the decade, however, fiscal reality had set in, as it had for local and state governments throughout the United States—just in time for the huge, posh complex to be completed and the bills to come due. Home owners and businesses who were at the limits of their ability to pay their county tax bills raised all manner of hell when the real costs of the new facility were unveiled, and there were even demands for recalls of supervisors and calls for the county government to sell the structure, cut a lot of bureaucratic fat, and stay where it was. All of which the county supervisors, already comparing their allocations of office space and outrageously expensive furnishings, ignored. They moved anyway, into what has come to be called a variety of less than fond but surprisingly accurate epithets, the most popular of which was the Taj Mahal.

  At Peterson’s serviceable but no-great-shakes Massey Building office, I stopped at the open door. He was sitting at his desk, his feet up on a corner and his back to me, engrossed in a thick file folder of information. From behind, I noticed that his black hair was thinning rapidly over his crown. His job would be enough to make my hair fall out, too, I thought as I rapped on the door frame to get his attention.

  Peterson’s feet came down, the folder went on his desktop, and he swiveled around to face me in one smooth motion.

  “Come on in,” he said, serious as always, at least around me. “Have a seat.” He motioned to the two industrial-gray, metal-armed chairs opposite his desk. I followed his direction and plopped myself down on the black vinyl, imitation-leather seat of the one nearest the door.

  “Thanks for taking a look at this stuff,” I told him, pulling a folder of pages out of the brown accordion portfolio I was carrying. I handed the folder to Peterson. He took it and pushed aside a couple of stacks of paper on his desk to clear a space on which to open it.

  “Okay,” he said, sliding out the folder’s contents, “let’s see what you’ve got.”

  As Peterson looked at each sheet on the stack, I took him through the scenario I had developed, piece by piece. I explained what I had learned about the real identity of David Daniel Brantley, aka Daniel Brant, and his assistant, Al Barlow. I showed him the newspaper clippings, their mug shots, and the summaries I had written of their criminal records, which got me a hard look beneath raised eyebrows. Peterson looked at the articles and obituaries on Marshall, Pursell, and Kelton, and I pointed out their connection through the Bread of Life Church. I explained the fax from the state corporations office, which showed the Caymans address and the officers of Brantlow, Inc.

  “Just looking at all this separately, there wouldn’t seem to be any connection among these things, much less any connection to what happened to Cara,” I told Peterson, who looked up at me again and continued to listen patiently and without comment to my recital. “But I found out that Cara herself actually told me how it all connects. Look at the next page.” He turned to the copy of the sheet from Cara’s safe-deposit box and looked it over carefully.

  “I recognize Marshall and Kelton’s names on this,” Peterson said. “So what is it?” I hoped that what I was seeing in his face was interest, genuine curiosity.

  “A couple of days ago I found out Cara had rented a safe-deposit box just before she was killed. This was the only thing in it, which makes me think she rented it solely for this sheet of paper.”

  “Okay.” Peterson nodded. “Why was it that important?”

  I told him about my conversations with Marlee, in which she described how Cara overheard the argument between Brant and Marshall and how upset Cara got when Marshall died. And about Cara’s run-in with John Brant over his computer. For all Marlee’s talkativeness, it was, I suspected, the first Peterson had heard of either incident.

  “I went out to talk to Marshall’s wife,” I went on. “She told me that she doesn’t believe her husband wrecked his car trying to keep from hitting a deer. She thinks he killed himself because he had gone through every dime they had and left her and their kids with almost nothing.”

  “Since when?” Peterson asked, frowning. “There was nothing like that in the investigation files.”

  “The only thing she has left is one insurance policy that he couldn’t sell,” I explained. “But it had an exclusion clause for suicide. The investigation already had been closed, and she was desperate to keep the money for her and her kids. So she kept her mouth shut. But neither she nor the family attorney has any idea what Marshall did with the money.”

  “Let me just take a wild guess here,” Peterson said drolly. “You do know what he did with it.”

  “I’m convinced,” I told him, “that Marshall was fighting with Brant, maybe threatened him, because Brant had been blackmailing Marshall and Marshall had no money left. Whatever Marshall said to Brant, it was enough for Cara to realize that Brant wasn’t on the up-and-up. When Marshall died, I think Cara had her suspicions about whether it really was an accident, and Brant probably already was worried about what she had overheard. That list,” I said, pointing to the paper in Peterson’s hand, “i
s what she saw on John Brant’s computer screen. She printed out a copy when she realized that one of the names on it was Nash Marshall’s and that all three men on it were dead.”

  “I suppose you can prove this blackmail you think was going on?”

  “Take a look at the last sheet.” I reached over and tapped the copy of the ledger sheet that Cooper had purloined for me. Peterson studied the page while I went on with my explanation.

  “These five men have given Brant millions of dollars in payoffs,” I said as he looked at the numbers. “The church deacons apparently kept careful records of donations to the church, and I think you’ll find that those records don’t match what’s on this ledger sheet in any way. No doubt this money is stashed away in some account in the Cayman Islands, to which I suspect John Brant travels on a regular basis under his guise of computer-system consultant. And when three of the men on that list ran out of money, they died.”

  “Where did you get this?” Peterson asked, now looking more intent as he glanced up at me from the ledger sheet.

  “It came from John Brant’s computer as well, although I don’t think Cara ever saw it. Never mind how I got it. But it’s for real.”

  Peterson put the page down on top of the others I had given him and swiveled around in his chair to look out the window. After a minute or so of watching him think, I couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “So what are you planning to do about all this?” I asked.

  He slowly turned back to face me.

  “I think you’re right that there’s something here,” he said directly. “Whether it led to your sister’s death is another question, but I don’t like what I’m seeing.”

  I sighed heavily in tremendous relief. With his next words, however, I saw that my relief was premature.

  “But I have to be frank with you,” Peterson was saying. “You haven’t brought me anything I can take to the commonwealth attorney’s office. It’s all completely circumstantial and supposition. I can’t make an arrest based on what’s here.”

  “But the pieces are all there,” I told him, my voice rising embarrassingly in my frustration. “You see it as well as I do.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but it’s not evidence, at least not the kind of hard evidence I’d have to have to make an arrest, either for blackmail or murder. You have to understand, Sutton, that what common sense and logic require for proof and what the law requires are very different things. I could sit here and agree with you all day that what you’ve brought me makes me think these guys are guilty of exactly what you say. But that’s not good enough for a court.”

  “Can’t you at least bring them all in for questioning?” I wanted to know, not believing that all my work was going to be for nothing.

  “I could, but I couldn’t hold them, and if you’re right, the minute they walked out the door, they probably would disappear off the face of the earth.”

  “Jesus!” I exploded, standing up suddenly. The portfolio fell out of my lap, and I let it lie on the floor where it landed. “How much more does it take before somebody does something about Cara’s murder? What else do I have to do?” In my impatience, I was pacing back and forth in front of Peterson’s desk. “Tell me,” I said, stopping to bend down and rap both fists sharply on the desktop. “What?”

  “Listen to me,” Peterson said sternly and leaning forward across the top of his desk. Clearly he wanted to calm me down.

  Fat chance of that, my own little voice said.

  “You’ve done well here,” Peterson went on. “I have to give you credit. You’ve put together enough evidence to at least give us a direction to look. But there’s a lot more to be done. I’ll need to go back to the investigation files on all three men’s deaths, and talk to the detectives who handled them. It’s still very possible that they all might have killed themselves. And we’ll have to check out the backgrounds of the Brants and Barlow ourselves. Daniel Brant and Barlow swore they were together at Brant’s house when your sister was killed, which means I have to have physical evidence or someone’s eyewitness testimony linking at least one of them to her death, and I don’t have either.”

  “What about the gun she was killed with?” I asked. “Couldn’t you test the bullet for—”

  “Show me the gun,” Peterson interrupted. “I don’t have a gun to match the bullet to. Even if we could come up with grounds for search warrants to try to find the gun, that’s still more delays.

  “And,” he went on, “I’ll need to talk to this Ulm and Rivers, although I can just about guarantee you they’ll clam up to the nth degree. And we can’t touch the company in the Caymans or get any sort of access to records or bank accounts, at least not based on what’s here.”

  “So what can you do?” I asked, my heart sinking at my failure to move his investigation off what looked to me like dead center.

  “I promise you that we’ll take it just as far as we can. We’ll go through everything you’ve brought me with a fine-tooth comb. If there’s anything there to prove what happened, we’ll find it. If there’s anything that connects these guys to your sister’s murder, eventually we’ll nail them for it. Maybe not tomorrow. But sooner or later.”

  “Well, I’m grateful for that anyway,” I said. I sat back down in the chair, but my fists were still clenched to keep from doing worse than pounding the desk.

  Peterson wasn’t finished, however. “But there’s something I want you to do, too,” he went on.

  “What’s that?”

  He gave me the stern look again. Jeez, I thought, he’s as bad as Rob Perry.

  “I want you to stop trying to conduct your own investigation. You’ve done okay so far, but if there’s a case to be made here, I can’t run the risk of you screwing up evidence inadvertently or having you tip my hand to the Brants or to these other two guys you think they’re blackmailing.”

  My fingernails dug into my palms.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but I can’t promise that. It’s already too late where Rivers is concerned. I tried to talk to him earlier today. And if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even have this much. There’s no way I’m going to just sit back and let the people who killed Cara get away with it because someone hasn’t dotted every i and crossed every t.”

  “I mean what I say, Sutton,” Peterson reiterated, sounding as if his patience with me was growing pretty thin. “You could screw up the whole investigation because you don’t know what you’re doing. And besides that, if what you suspect is true, if Brant and Barlow really did kill your sister or any of these guys, they don’t hesitate to play hardball with anyone they see as a threat. You could end up like your sister.”

  He really did sound disturbingly like Rob, and I felt fear nudging at my mind again. I suppose that in my thinking (all right, fantasizing), I had seen myself as putting the information together that would identify Cara’s killer and then handing it to the police to make an arrest. Things weren’t working out so neatly, however. Was I willing to risk my own safety, possibly my life, to try to expose the murderer? But there was only one possible answer. I knew I couldn’t rest until Cara’s murder was solved. I wanted some peace, a good night’s sleep again. And I wanted Cara to know that, though she hadn’t confided in me for whatever reason, in the end she could rely on me to do what needed doing.

  I bent down to pick up the pages that had slid out of the portfolio, straightened them, put them back inside, and then stood up to face Peterson’s wrath—which I was about to provoke.

  “No,” I told him. “I can’t stop. I appreciate your concern for my safety, and I know you’ll follow up on what I’ve given you. But if that evidence isn’t enough to convince you, if it isn’t enough to put a stop to what these people are doing, then I’ll have to find something else.” I turned and walked out before he had time to say more. By the stormy look on his face, I knew he had plenty more to say.

  So what now, Sherlock? my voice asked as I walked through the Massey Building lobby and back out to my car.r />
  Time for desperate measures, I suppose, I answered in my mind. I’ve run the paper trail about as far as I can. Ulm is out of the country, and Rivers is scared shitless to talk.

  Daniel Brant had woven an intricate web for himself, one that had hidden from his followers what he truly was until, one at a time, several inadvertently had put themselves at his mercy—a quality he apparently lacked completely. It was a clever web, one that hamstrung the police because the witnesses, who were also the victims, either were dead or too frightened to talk, and the money was hidden in an offshore account. Perhaps, I thought, my only option now was to shake the web itself to see if I couldn’t bring the head spider out into the open.

  There also was one thing I hadn’t pointed out to Detective Peterson. While my evidence might not yet be good enough for the police to make an arrest, it was good enough for a news story about the two things I could prove: that Daniel Brant, respected minister of the Bread of Life Church, was not a minister at all, but a reject from his divinity school and an ex-con named David Daniel Brantley, and that he was a principal in a mysterious Cayman Islands company that had a lot more assets than a minister had any right to accumulate. I wondered what his apparently unsuspecting congregation would make of those pieces of information. It just might, I thought, be enough of a tug on the web to send some shock waves right to Brant’s doorstep.

  Satisfied that at least it gave me one more thing to try, I drove home to a frozen dinner, an empty bed, and my hopes for a less restless night.

  Thursday

  Twenty-three

  At 8:30 the next morning, I called the office at the Bread of Life Church and told Marlee I’d like some time with the Reverend Brant as soon as possible.