Corruption of Faith

by Brenda English

  “Goddammit!” Peterson yelled. “You’re going to bust this thing wide open. How the hell will we ever make a case against him if you do this?”

  “Maybe he’ll panic, do something stupid,” I said, hoping to show him a possible bright side to the situation.

  He wasn’t buying it.

  “Oh, he’ll panic all right,” he answered acidly. “And probably skip town, if he hasn’t already. He’ll disappear without a trace, and then your sister’s murder will never be solved. And he’ll be free to surface someplace else under another name and do it all again!”

  He had a point, I supposed. Maybe I had acted a little precipitously, but it was too late for apologies now.

  “I’m going ahead with the story,” I told him. “I have to.”

  “I tell you what, Ms. McPhee,” Peterson said (no more Sutton, I noticed), “you had better hope for your sake that you haven’t blown the case we might have been able to make against these guys, because if you have, before I’m done I’m gonna have your job and maybe Perry’s, too!”

  Peterson slammed down the phone. I heard an explosive “Jesus!” just before the receiver clanked and the line went dead.

  I took a few deep breaths, letting them out long and slowly to drain off the adrenaline and tension that had built up during the abortive conversation with Peterson. Then I dialed the Bread of Life Church. I needed to get the deacons’ names and phone numbers, and Marlee was the only source I had for them.

  “What on earth did you do to Reverend Brant?” Marlee asked in a dismayed voice when I told her it was me. She sounded as if her jaw was still hanging.

  “What happened after I left?” I asked, my imagination relishing the picture of Brant in an apoplectic fury.

  “Well, Sutton, he came back out of his office looking just awful, and when I asked if I could help, he just about took my head off.” Marlee sounded as if she was going to cry just remembering it. “And then he told me to get John and Mr. Barlow on the phone, and he went back into his office and slammed the door again.”

  “Did you reach them?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what happened after he talked to them?”

  “He went into John’s office and came back out with the hard drive to John’s computer. And he left without saying another word! I haven’t seen or heard from him since. Sutton, what is going on?”

  I took pity on Marlee and briefly told her the gist of tomorrow’s story.

  “Oh no! Oh no!” she kept saying in a shocked and mournful voice. By the end, she was weeping in earnest. I felt badly for her, just as I would have for anyone whose idol had turned out to have feet of sewage. And then I realized that that was what Cara had gone through, too. Her letter to Amy Reed, perhaps even her poem, had been talking about the Reverend Daniel Brant, the man she had admired and respected, and who preyed on the people who trusted him most. When she wrote Amy, she had been dealing with the twin burdens of her disillusionment and the fear invoked by the awful secret she had learned.

  “Marlee, listen,” I said firmly, needing her to collect herself enough to understand what I wanted from her. “I need to get hold of at least a couple of the church’s deacons for comments before I can write this thing. I want to be fair to the other people at the church, because I think Brant had everyone fooled. I need you to give me their names and telephone numbers. Can you do that?”

  “Oh. Yes. Just a second,” she said, sniffling. “Let me get my list.”

  She read me off the names of the seven deacons and their home and office telephone numbers, stopping once to blow her nose.

  “Thanks for your help, Marlee,” I said when she was done. “I’m really sorry you had to find out about him like this, but take my word for it. Daniel Brant is a very bad man, even more than I can tell you right now. And if I were you, I think I’d call it a day and go home and unplug your phone.”

  “Oh, dear Lord,” she said, and started crying again. She hung up, and I figured it was just as well. I had more calls to make and a story to write. I just didn’t have time right then to provide Marlee with a more sympathetic shoulder. I had too many other things to worry about. Like getting quotes from the church deacons. And those conversations didn’t promise to be any more pleasant than the one I had just had with Marlee.

  I was right. I managed to reach four of the seven deacons, each of whom was disbelieving of the devastating news that I delivered. All four declined to comment until they saw the proof for themselves. Two had angry kill-the-messenger reactions, one of them chewing me out for trying to drag a “man of God like Daniel Brant” through the “liberal, left-wing media’s mud.” It would make great copy, I thought as I opened a file in my computer to start writing.

  Twenty-five

  The tack I took with the Brant story was that the leader of a very successful local church, which had raised megabucks from its members for programs such as its elaborate sanctuary, was really an ex-con who was using a phony name, who had been tossed out of his divinity college because of his criminal habits, and who was a partner with his prison buddy in a Cayman Islands company that was reported to have several million dollars in assets, based on confidential documents the News had obtained. It was a start anyway.

  I stood over Rob’s city-desk chair while he read the draft. He asked me a couple of questions, fiddled with several sentences, and then gave me a thumbs-up.

  “I’ll fax it over to one of the attorneys right now,” he said, “but I don’t anticipate any problems with it. It looks solid to me.”

  “If there is a problem, just page me,” I told him. “I’m gonna go home.” I was suddenly very tired. Part of my fatigue, I knew, was because the adrenaline of the day finally was wearing off. But I also thought part of it might simply be that taking the first real step toward doing something about Cara’s murder had drained away some of the tension my body had carried since her death. I might, I thought, actually get a good night’s sleep. And once my story hit tomorrow’s papers, I suspected it might be the last good night’s sleep I got for several days.

  “Will do,” Rob said. “Go home. You did a good job, Sutton. Get some rest.”

  I went to my desk for my purse and then headed out of the building and down the block to the parking garage. As I walked I reviewed the mental checklist I kept in my head of things I needed to do and decided I should stop at the dry cleaners on the way home. A few minutes later I backed the Beetle out of its space and headed south out of the District and toward I-395.

  Traffic was moving moderately well for four o’clock on a weekday afternoon. In the Washington area, four o’clock means the “evening” rush hour already has been under way for half an hour or more. I-395 South is the major commuter route that leads from all the government buildings that line the Mall, then crosses the Potomac next to the Pentagon, and finally feeds directly into I-95 for all points south. As such, it often is a parking lot by four P.M. But today, either I had managed to catch it before the heaviest traffic or the first of several daily accidents that usually created instant gridlock hadn’t happened yet.

  At Duke Street, I exited onto the westbound ramp and stayed there as it became a right-turn lane from which I could pull into the Plaza at Landmark, the shopping center where I frequented Kim’s Beltway Drycleaners. As much of the through traffic from Little River Turnpike merged into my lane to turn right onto Beauregard Street, I barely managed to brake in time to avoid rear-ending a young gentleman with D.C. license plates and subwoofers that could set off earthquakes, and who apparently thought turn signals were meant for everyone but him. I didn’t even bother to blow my horn at him. Horn blowing in traffic has become a killing offense in D.C. and its suburbs these days.

  I pulled safely into the shopping-center parking lot, however, and managed to find a space halfway down the row that was directly in front of the dry cleaners. Double-checking that my car doors were locked, I went in to get the two dresses that Kim—I wasn’t sure whether that was the Korean owner�
��s first name or last—was holding for me.

  I stood in the late-afternoon heat and steam of the dry cleaners while Kim found my two dresses in the rows of cleaned and pressed garments that ran along the huge conveyor gizmo. He rang up my bill, and we chatted briefly, as well as we could anyway, since his English was broken and my Korean was nonexistent. I paid for the dresses, which were arranged on white metal hangers and covered by a full-length plastic bag. Kim and I smiled and nodded our good-byes, and I walked back out the door, grateful to leave the steam bath inside and trying to decide whether or not to drop the dresses off at my car and run into the discount store for the new toaster I had needed for weeks.

  The decision was made for me, however, by the advent of Al Barlow, who suddenly appeared next to me and rudely poked a gun into my ribs.

  “Don’t say a word,” he told me, jabbing the gun even harder into my side with his right hand and grabbing my upper arm with his left hand in a hold that I knew would leave bruises. “You just do what I tell you if you don’t want to end up like your sister.”

  It’s true what they say about time slowing down in a crisis. In real time, it must have taken all of two or three seconds, but in my mind, my thoughts seemed to go on for at least a minute. I remember thinking that it must have been Barlow who had killed Cara, dispatched by Brant after Cara went into his son’s computer, to keep her from telling anyone what she knew. I could even see how it might have happened: Barlow abducting Cara outside the church that night after she had worked late, forcing her to drive to an out-of-the-way bank and withdraw money as a cover for the real reason for her death. A Cara too paralyzed with terror to do anything other than exactly what he had told her to do, sitting in the car as Barlow raised the gun and shot her in the head.

  The rapid movie in my own head ended as Barlow pushed me forward to get me moving toward wherever his car was parked. I looked around the parking lot, where any number of people were coming and going on foot or in cars, but none of them paid us any attention, all of them intent on their own errands.

  Do I go as easily as Cara did? I asked myself. Do I let them win without any resistance from me? I knew that if I went with Barlow, there was no question he would kill me. I realized I had left him and Brant no choice, at least by their calculation. They had too much at stake to let me go so I could tell what I knew. I was terrified, as I knew Cara had been. But beyond that, I was angry, overcome by one of those black furies that my mother used to refer to in almost reverential tones, anger that she said sometimes turned me into someone she didn’t know.

  So what do you have to lose? my voice asked.

  Nothing, I told it. Absolutely nothing.

  I guessed that the dresses I was carrying draped across my body, the neck of the hangers in my right hand and the skirts hanging over my left arm to keep them from brushing the ground, helped hide from the people around us the fact that Barlow had a gun jammed in my side. I tightened my grip on the hangers, and as Barlow pushed me again I took a step forward onto my right foot. He thought I was following his orders to keep walking. Instead, I used the momentum to turn to my right just enough to reach up and back with the hangers and rake the sharp ends of the curved wires down across his face, managing to strike one of his eyes in the process.

  Barlow, I suppose, had made the mistake of assuming that I would be as biddable and as intimidated by him and his gun as Cara had been. Clearly he had not expected me to resist, much less try to attack him. He shouted in surprise and pain and let go my arm to grab his face with his left hand, while still trying to keep the gun in my side with his right. But his instinctive flinching away from the hangers had pulled the gun away momentarily. In the second that I felt the pressure from the gun ease, I turned even more in Barlow’s direction and pushed at him with all my strength.

  He was fast; I’ll give him that. He saw my movement coming, and even as I pushed him away he already was reaching to grab me again. I turned back away from him to run, only to have him lunge into me and send me flying into the side of a parked car and then sprawling on the ground, where I got entangled in the dresses and the dry-cleaning bags.

  Barlow was pretty mad. I’d done quite a job on him with the coat hangers, and a small river of blood was running down all along the twin furrows the metal had made across his face. It must have hurt like hell. If killing me had been an impersonal act of self-preservation before I wrecked his face, it was clear that it suddenly had become extremely personal. Now he wanted to kill me for the pleasure of killing me.

  I had done something to my left hip and leg in the fall, and they didn’t seem to be working or to have any feeling in them at the moment. I couldn’t stand up. All I could do was cower there beside the car, desperately trying to get the plastic bags and dresses off me, and watch as Barlow bellowed at me in fury and raised his gun to kill me. This is the last thing Cara saw, I thought as I looked at the rising gun barrel. I heard a shout from somewhere behind me. My brain, still in slow-time mode, had sufficient time to think that it was nice that someone had figured out what was going on but also to observe that it was a little late.

  What surprised me most was that I was able to hear the shots when Barlow killed me. I had thought I’d already be dead by the time the sound could reach me. And then I realized that it was Barlow who suddenly was bleeding from his chest and falling to the ground near my feet, his gun cartwheeling away from his hand and skittering across the asphalt to end up under the car against which I had fallen and into the side of which I was vainly trying to disappear.

  My brain clicked once more into real time as another man, who was holding a gun of his own in a double-handed grip, stepped around the back of the car. He put the gun to Barlow’s head as my would-be murderer lay on the pavement. When the man was satisfied that Barlow was unconscious and would offer no resistance, he brought out a pair of handcuffs from somewhere in his clothing, and in one smooth motion, pulled Barlow’s arms behind him and put the cuffs around his wrists, where the cuffs locked with reassuring clicks. As the man reached forward to check Barlow’s neck for a pulse, he raised his head in my direction and said, “I’m a police officer. Are you hurt?”

  “No,” I said. “I just banged my leg when I fell. I guess he didn’t have time to shoot me before you got him.”

  “Then what’s that?” he asked, pointing just to my left. I turned my head to look at the side of the car against which I was sitting and saw the nice round hole that had been punctured in the rear quarter panel, about six inches from my head.

  “Oh,” I said, feeling faint.

  “Yeah,” he agreed.

  He straightened up and took out a small radio, on which I heard him call for two ambulances. In the distance, I could hear sirens; he must have called for police backup already, as soon as he had seen I was in trouble. Somewhere in his radio conversation, I heard him say “Peterson,” and I groaned at the thought that I might have to confront the detective yet again, especially now that his direst predictions seemed to be coming true.

  If you ask him nicely, maybe this cop will do you a favor and shoot you.

  It was worth considering.

  Peterson surprised me completely. He was sitting across from me in the back of one of the two Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department ambulances that had responded, where he was listening carefully to my account of what had happened. I had not yet heard a single “I told you so” from him. Mentally, I gave him credit for being much more professional than I wanted to admit, especially since I knew how much he would have preferred to have locked me up along with Barlow.

  Barlow had been transported in the other ambulance—along with two uniformed officers as guards—to Fairfax Hospital, which housed northern Virginia’s trauma center. Although he had been alive when the ambulance left the scene, his chest wound looked pretty vile, and he had been losing significant amounts of blood, some of which still was congealing on the surface of the parking lot. If he survived the gunshot, I fervently hoped that the wounds
I had managed to inflict on his face with the coat hangers would leave some permanent and nasty-looking scars of their own.

  Gawkers in the parking lot were in their element. As soon as the people around us had realized the sounds they heard were gunshots, the smart ones had fled screaming; the others had come running to see what all the excitement was about—and probably hoping for some dead bodies. My plainclothes savior, whose name I eventually learned was Officer Rich Healy, had his hands full, retrieving Barlow’s gun and keeping people back until the first of four marked police cars arrived on the scene to help.

  I had continued to sit where I was on the pavement. I tried to get up, of course, but my leg still wouldn’t cooperate, and Healy, after satisfying himself that I really hadn’t been shot or seriously injured, had told me in the firmest of voices to stay still until the ambulances arrived. Within another minute or so, both ambulances had wheeled in together, right on the rear bumper of the third police car, and all of them had lights flashing and sirens tearing the air to bits. Not being particularly prone to obedience, I had been rubbing my leg and hip, trying to work the feeling back into them, with some limited but painful success, when my very own EMS crew—a blond and a redhead (males)—came my way with a stretcher. I had put up a fuss about wanting to walk to the ambulance under my own steam, which they immediately refused to allow. So I had ridden the thirty feet to the ambulance’s rear door in style and had been hoisted inside, stretcher and all, and told to stay on the stretcher. The paramedics’ examination revealed that my left hip and the whole outside of my thigh were pretty scraped up from my fall and already were discoloring.

  “I don’t think there’s anything serious going on here,” the blond-haired one had said as he pulled my skirt back down.

  I hope it was good for you, my voice said. That’s the closest thing you may have to a date for the foreseeable future.

  “But,” Blondie had continued, “we’re going to transport you anyway so the ER can X-ray things and make sure you didn’t sustain any hairline fractures. At the very least, you’re gonna be sore as hell tomorrow, and they can give you something for the pain.”