Corruption of Faith

by Brenda English

  I had agreed, albeit reluctantly, to go to the hospital.

  “Before we go, if you feel up to it, the cops want a few minutes with you,” said the red-haired one.

  “I guess I’d better,” I told him, tugging my skirt down all around. As soon as the paramedics climbed out, I sat up on the stretcher in spite of their instructions. I had heard a voice outside that sounded ominously like Peterson’s. Facing him would be difficult enough without having to do it flat on my back.

  At the look in Peterson’s eyes when he had climbed into the ambulance ahead of Healy, I briefly considered having a serious relapse, but decided Peterson probably didn’t have the patience for it at the moment. And frankly, neither did I.

  So I had given Peterson my version of events, including Healy’s timely appearance from thin air. I assumed that Healy coincidentally had been in the parking lot on some errand of his own and had, luckily for me, witnessed my attempt to escape from Barlow. I thanked Healy for being so observant and for saving my life, and then listened in astonishment as he proceeded to tell me what really had happened—that he had been following me, at Peterson’s instructions, from the time I had left the paper in D.C.

  “You had me followed?” I asked Peterson, offended by his doubt that I could take care of myself—the recent proof of the validity of that doubt notwithstanding.

  “Lucky for you, yeah,” he replied tersely.

  Peterson told me that as soon he had hung up the phone from yelling at me, he had requested that an unmarked car be dispatched to follow me. He was, he said, concerned that Brant might attack me to prevent me from printing my story. I suspected it was as much out of wanting to see where I went next as to protect me, but I wisely kept that thought to myself.

  Healy picked up the story again and explained that he soon had figured out that a second car, which was between us, was following me as well, a car his computer showed was registered to the Bread of Life Church. Healy had driven into the shopping center right behind my Beetle and the car driven by Barlow. His seemingly miraculous appearance in the parking lot when Barlow tried to kill me had been anything but coincidence.

  It didn’t say much for my powers of observation, I mused to myself, that I had been followed by not one, but two cars all the way from D.C., and never noticed a thing.

  “But how did you know what I looked like and when I left the paper?” I asked Healy, trying to ignore Peterson’s satisfied expression at having been several steps ahead of me for a change.

  “I showed your lobby guard my badge and then slipped him ten bucks to point you out to me when you came downstairs,” Healy explained, looking as if he wanted to grin but not sure Peterson would appreciate it. “I was sitting in my car right outside the door, and he signaled to me as you went out. I watched you go into the parking garage down the street and just waited until you drove back out. I’d already checked the computer for your car make, so I knew to look for the white VW Beetle convertible and your license plate.”

  Clearly, I was going to have to have a little talk with George, the security guard, once I got back to the paper. He’d be lucky if I didn’t take the coat hangers to him.

  You idiot, just be glad you’re alive to be mad at him, my voice piped up. If Peterson had left it up to you, you’d be dead by now! I had to concede that it had a point and tried to get over my vexation.

  “What about the Brants?” I asked when I finally ratcheted my anger down a notch or two. “Where are they?”

  “Nobody knows,” Peterson said, giving me a rather baleful look. “As I predicted, they’ve disappeared.”

  I had to give Peterson still more credit. He must have been pretty pissed at me, too. Probably the only reason he hadn’t yet shot me himself, I thought, was that he figured I wasn’t worth wasting a bullet on.

  “Don’t they always say follow the money?” I asked, trying to be helpful and to take his mind off shooting me—or worse. “If I were wanted for murder and had several million dollars stashed away in the Caymans, I’d be headed that way as fast as I could go.”

  “We’re working on that now,” Peterson said. “Let’s just hope they don’t manage to get through a hole in the net we’re throwing out.”

  I summoned up my courage. “I apologize for making your job harder,” I told Peterson. “All I wanted to do was find out who killed my sister.”

  Peterson eyed me for a moment, probably trying to decide whether the pleasure of throttling me would be worth the prison term. Apparently the answer was no. He looked down to jot several lines in his notebook. I didn’t expect to get off this easily, however. I knew he eventually would have some more to say to me, but he evidently had decided this wasn’t the time or the place.

  Through the open doors of the ambulance, I saw a mobile satellite truck for one of the local television stations pull up. A slim blond woman clutching a notebook climbed out of the passenger’s side and headed toward a couple of the uniformed officers.

  “Here comes the press,” Healy said, watching her approach the other cops.

  “Oh shit,” I said suddenly, and reached for my purse, which Healy had rescued in the parking lot and which now was on the stretcher beside me.

  “What’s the matter?” both Peterson and Healy asked.

  I had fished out my cellular phone and was punching in numbers.

  “I’d better call Rob Perry and tell him I’ve got to completely rewrite tomorrow’s story!” I told them.

  Peterson slapped his notebook closed in a gesture of disgust and climbed out of the ambulance shaking his head. Healy followed him, nodding an acknowledgment as I silently mouthed a “thank you” at him while Rob’s extension rang in my ear. I heard Peterson tell the paramedics, “She’s all yours.” He said it with obvious relish.

  “Metro desk! Perry!” Rob barked abruptly in my ear as Blondie climbed into the back of the ambulance with me while Red went up front to drive. Rob’s surliness was an indicator of how quickly the evening’s first deadline was approaching.

  “Rob, it’s Sutton,” I told him. “We’ve got to make some changes to my story.”

  “We’re on deadline here, McPhee,” he pointed out. “This had better be worth the interruption.”

  “Oh, I think it’s worth bothering you with,” I answered coyly, smiling at Blondie. “Al Barlow just tried to kill me in a shopping-center parking lot, and the Brants have disappeared. I’m okay, but a cop shot Barlow and he’s been taken to the hospital.”

  “Fuuuck me!” Rob said, his Alabama accent adding several more syllables than that serviceable Anglo-Saxon obscenity had ever contained. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I assured him. “Just a bruised hip that they want to X-ray, and I’m still a little shaky.” He really didn’t need to know just how shaky I was beginning to feel now that the reality of what had happened, particularly that bullet hole in the car beside me, was sinking in.

  “Are you up to dictating a story?” Rob asked. “I’ll take it down myself.” I heard the rapid clicking of computer keys.

  “Yeah, if you’ll smooth out the edges.”

  “Okay, I’ve got a file open here and hard copy of your other piece. Give me a quick run-through of what happened and then I’ll help you put it together.”

  Blondie hung on to every word I said to Rob as I spent the ride to the hospital taking Rob through Barlow’s unsuccessful effort to kill me. We made the first deadline with five minutes to spare.

  Eight Days Later

  Twenty-six

  I was right. Peterson did have some more things to say, which he said at length to me and Rob and Mack Thompson, the managing editor, in a less-than-pleasant little get-together in Rob’s office. Basically, Peterson explained to us that my ego was surpassed only by my stupidity and recklessness. The list of my egregious transgressions was long, including interfering with a police investigation, reckless endangerment of innocent bystanders, and putting the life of a police officer at unnecessary risk in order for
him to save mine.

  “And those,” Peterson said angrily to Mack Thompson, “are just the things I personally witnessed. I don’t even want to think about what else she did, beginning with computer theft.”

  About the only reason he wasn’t going to recommend that I get the death penalty, apparently, was that my irresponsible behavior had not prevented the police from wrapping up the case against the Brants and Barlow.

  “The ingrate!” Cooper Diggs responded later that same day when he returned from the vacation he had begun the day before my little run-in with Al Barlow and I filled him in on what had happened in his absence. He had been enthralled by my account of my near-miss in the parking lot and the fact that I had almost made the trip to my eternal reward prematurely. Now, he was laughing his ass off at my rendition of the scene with Peterson in Rob’s office.

  “I don’t think Peterson saw it quite that way,” I told Cooper dryly.

  “So they caught the other two?” Cooper asked. It was fun to watch him hanging on my every word, as happy as a kid with a new toy.

  “Yeah,” I said, “a week after Barlow grabbed me in the parking lot. They found the Brants at a small airfield outside Tampa, where they were trying to charter a private plane to the Caymans. The two of them never had a chance. I mean, it’s not like any idiot couldn’t figure out where they would try to go. The FBI not only put out an alert to police agencies, airlines, airfields, and marinas up and down the eastern seaboard and around the Gulf, but there was even an alert on America’s Most Wanted.“

  “Hey,” Cooper said, “John Walsh always gets his man!”

  “He did this time,” I agreed. “It turned out that the pilot the Brants approached used to be a cop himself once, and he had no hesitation about turning them in when he recognized them. He sneaked a call to the local police and then stalled the Brants by going through some elaborate preflight check of the airplane that went on long enough for the police to arrive.”

  “So where are they all now?” Cooper asked, relishing the idea of just desserts.

  “Well, at the moment, the Brants are in jail in Hillsborough County, fighting extradition to Virginia, which should be forthcoming shortly anyway.”

  “And Barlow?”

  It was my turn to smile.

  “He’s going to live, according to his doctors, although he probably will want to bundle up in his prison cell in the winter to avoid catching cold in the lung that Officer Healy’s bullet shredded. The trauma surgeons at Fairfax Hospital saved his life. I guess they don’t get a choice of asking whether it was worth saving.”

  “It’s a tough job, et cetera, et cetera,” Cooper commented.

  “They couldn’t save the sight in his right eye, though,” I continued. “Apparently I did quite a number on it and the rest of his face with those coat hangers. According to the cops, that’s probably why he missed me when he shot at me. With only one eye working, he lost his depth perception.”

  In fact, what Rich Healy, who had been ordered by Peterson to keep me informed so Peterson didn’t have to talk to me himself, had said was that Barlow’s face looked like a wildcat had been at him. Then Healy had started laughing. “Actually,” he had told me, “I guess one had.” I took it as a compliment.

  “Are any of them talking?” Cooper wanted to know.

  “Barlow is spilling his guts, metaphorically speaking,” I explained. “The cops made sure he understood that as soon as the Brants got together after I confronted Daniel Brant, they immediately lit out for Florida. They had told Barlow that they would wait for him at their house while he went to dispose of me. He was pretty mad when he figured out that his partners tried to screw him, too.”

  “What is honor among thieves coming to?” Cooper asked, shaking his head.

  “Well, Barlow was even madder when he heard that the Brants are denying any knowledge of anything and that they told Peterson, when he flew down to Tampa to question them, that they had been going to the Caymans on vacation and that if Barlow killed Cara, he had acted on his own.”

  “That’s a dirty trick,” Cooper observed.

  “Barlow thought so, too. At first he offered to tell the police and commonwealth attorneys what he knew and to testify against the Brants if he could be sure he wouldn’t get the death penalty. Everybody involved said no deal because the cops have reopened the investigations into the deaths of Marshall, Kelton, and Pursell, which means Barlow might be looking at four murder charges.”

  Cooper turned serious for a minute. “Have they found anything good enough to pin your sister’s murder on him?” he asked.

  “No question,” I told him. “They searched Barlow’s apartment in Annandale and found my mother’s jewelry. He wasn’t even going to try to sell it until he was out of the country. He had stolen the jewelry to keep up the pretense that Cara’s death was all about a robbery. Of course, his real reason for going through the apartment was to make sure Cara hadn’t left anything incriminating there, if she had put things together. The police also matched the bullet that killed Cara to the gun Barlow used to shoot at me. And they think they’ll be able to match some hair and fiber samples they took from Cara’s car to Barlow. The evidence against him is a lot more than circumstantial now.”

  “So at the very least, they’re all going away for pretty much the rest of their lives,” Cooper said.

  “And there’s always the possibility that Barlow, and even Daniel Brant, might get the death penalty,” I added. “When Barlow heard the Brants were trying to pin everything on him, he told the cops that if he was going to be put to death, he fully intended to take Brant to hell with him. I guess some of those sermons must have sunk in after all. He has agreed to testify in both the Brants’ trials, with no immunity and no deals.”

  “And so what did Brant have on these guys he was blackmailing?” Cooper asked. “You were right about the blackmail, weren’t you?”

  “That’s another interesting story,” I said, and explained that my guess about the source of Brant’s blackmail material had, in fact, been correct. Each of the five victims unwittingly had confided a secret to Brant, in an effort to ease a nagging conscience.

  For Nash Marshall, it was his approval to use a substandard component in a surgical machine that his company produced, a component that made an extra half million bucks for the company. The machine was in use in more than thirty hospitals around the country, and failure of the part already had killed a patient, at which point Marshall’s conscience apparently had woken up.

  Caught between admitting what his company had done, with the attendant lawsuits and possible criminal charges, and waiting for the next patient to die if he kept quiet, Marshall had confided in his minister, Daniel Brant, in hopes of receiving guidance about what to do. Instead, he had found himself with a whole new set of problems. When Marshall finally was bled dry, he had gone to the church and shouted dire threats at Brant. A week later he was killed when, Al Barlow told police, he forced Marshall’s car off the parkway and down a steep embankment, where it had caught on fire with Marshall trapped inside.

  In the case of Kelton, the blackmail was over his predilection for young boys, with whom he had sex on twice-yearly vacations to Thailand. He apparently confined his abuse to children overseas, but he had become afraid someone would find out about him and that it would destroy his business, which was built on caring for other people’s children. When Kelton’s money was all gone, Barlow said, he went to Kelton’s house one night and forced him, at gunpoint, to asphyxiate himself in his car while Barlow watched through a garage window to make certain Kelton went through with it.

  Pursell had killed a woman, five years before, in a hit-and-run accident for which he had never been caught. His conscience bothered him more and more as time passed, but he feared being sent to prison even more than he feared his conscience. He had gone to Brant for advice and absolution. Once Brant and his partners had bankrupted Pursell, Barlow had done a clever tampering job on the engine of Pursell’s
plane, which Pursell frequently flew on business trips.

  The police were still being closemouthed about whatever secrets Brant had on Ulm and Rivers, who presented possible slander and libel liabilities that the dead men did not, but I fully expected their stories to come out during the trials. No doubt they were as ugly and pathetic as those of the other three.

  Barlow also gave a full accounting to police of how Brant’s blackmail scheme had worked. Once Brant had something to hold over a victim’s head, he required them to buy his silence in large and regular cash payments. That way, he didn’t have to fool with converting assets such as property into cash, thus avoiding any paper trail to link him to the disappearance of the men’s wealth. John Brant was the courier, using his phony job with their phony company to provide him with a reason for frequent flights to the Caymans, where he deposited the cash into numbered accounts. As the group’s computer guru, the younger Brant also kept track of the money, letting the church pay for the computer he used and to which, ordinarily, no one had access but himself.

  Except that he got careless one day, and in a hurry, he had left up on the screen the file that Cara saw and printed. Clearly, she already had been suspicious of Daniel Brant after hearing the argument with Marshall, and Marshall’s death probably had made her even more suspicious. So when she saw Marshall’s name on the list in the computer, along with the names of other well-to-do church members who recently had died, it got her attention in a way it might not have at an earlier time.

  Daniel Brant already had been worried about Cara, Barlow said. During Brant’s argument with Marshall, Marshall had been pretty explicit about the fact that Brant was blackmailing him and that he had no money left to give. When John later went to his father with his suspicion that Cara had tampered with the incriminating file in the computer, Brant decided she had to be eliminated and ordered Barlow to do just that. And so Cara had died in a phony ATM robbery, and the three men smugly went on with their blackmail. When Barlow found nothing at Cara’s apartment, he came away confident that they were out of the woods. Except that Cara had left a trail after all, a single sheet of paper that Barlow and the Brants had not known about, that she had put into a bank vault and that had led me back to the Bread of Life Church.