by Paul Heald
The deacon thought for a moment. It never really said anywhere on the website how old the bikini girlfriends were. Most of them looked like college students, but he had met the occasional fifteen- or sixteen-year-old who looked much older. A wave of disgust flooded over him. What if he had been regularly fantasizing about sophomores in high school? “I don’t know,” he admitted as his face began to redden, “most of them look like they’re eighteen or twenty, something like that.”
Now he had the pastor’s full attention. “You mean that some of them could be younger?”
“I suppose so. It’s boyfriends sending in pictures of their girlfriends in swimsuits.” He shrugged his shoulders. “There’s no way to tell how old anyone is.” He watched warily as Armstrong opened up the Bible. “It’s not little kids, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“No, of course not,” nodded the minister, who thumbed through a book in the New Testament while he added, “but some of them could be thirteen or fourteen, I suspect. There are girls who ripen pretty early.”
James had no immediate response to this observation, and he doubted that the fruit analogy was even appropriate. Maybe the pastor was trying to evoke Garden of Eden imagery, but unless Eve’s body were the forbidden fruit, then his choice of words was just creepy. There was no way, however, to refute the charge. Some of the girls could be under eighteen. He had never thought about it. He sat still in the chair and watched the pastor search unsuccessfully for whatever snippet of scripture was eluding him.
“This is pretty serious,” Armstrong finally concluded as he shut the book. “I’ll have to talk to Brother Johnson, but I’m pretty sure that for liability reasons he’s going to want to keep you away from the kids’ Sunday school classes and the youth groups.” He nodded, becoming more and more sure of himself as he spoke. “You may have to step down as deacon, too. There’s something in the bylaws about deacons being able to ‘participate fully in the life of the church,’ and if we need to keep you away from the kids, then that’ll be a problem.” He frowned and suddenly stood up.
James joined him upright in panic. His confession was spinning out of control, and it was rapidly becoming too late to protest. “Isn’t that a bit excessive? I’m not a child molester, for heaven’s sake! I mean, shouldn’t I just be praying about this and offering my sin up to God?”
The pastor smiled indulgently. “Of course.” He reached out and grabbed the reporter’s hands. As he bowed his head, James could feel their sweaty palms slide away from each other slightly as the other man started to pray aloud. “Dear Lord, please hear us as we call upon you for your tender mercies. Feel the shame of this sinner as he seeks to find a way out of the darkness where sin has cast him. Guide him to a place where his compulsions do not control him, where your love can shield him from the wickedness of his desires. In your Son’s name, let your healing power come upon this sinner.” James felt a squeeze of his hands. “Amen.”
“Amen,” the reporter repeated, with doubt in his voice that he knew should not be there. He felt like he had just been run over by a truck. As he moved slowly toward the door, he turned around and saw that Armstrong stood rooted in the same spot where he had prayed, traces of ecstasy still lingering on his face. “There’s no need for anyone else to know about this, is there?”
The pastor looked at him as if he were having trouble processing the question, and James imagined a memo being passed around stating that he was not to be allowed around any innocent Baptist teenagers. How could they police him if no one but Armstrong and Johnson knew about his supposed pedophile tendencies? He saw only one way out, and he took it before the minister had a chance to reply.
“Neville, don’t worry about me.” He took a step forward and held up his hand, trying to salvage the situation by sheer force of will. He would give the big man no excuse to ruin him. “I’ll hand in my resignation as deacon tomorrow, and you won’t see me here again at First Baptist. I swear.” He fought the urge to run through the door, but he forced himself to stop and look the confused minister once more in the eyes. “You don’t even need to talk to Pastor Johnson. I’ll keep up my monthly pledge, but I’ll go worship someplace else. Okay?”
As soon as he saw Armstrong nod, he turned and bolted down the hall.
* * *
Sondra Murphy, the ex-deacon’s wife, was a petite redhead who had succeeded in keeping a trim figure at thirty-nine despite the challenge of measuring barely five feet two inches tall. She had been one of the most eligible girls in Clarkeston until she met a handsome young journalism major at the college. She herself had stopped at a high school diploma, preferring to help her mother manage a small interior-design business, but she met James when he came over to do a story on a local charity that her mother was involved in. He was attractive and well spoken, more sophisticated than the local boys, and unlike the other college boys, who both despised and chased after the townie girls. They had two children and were married only three years before she realized how little ambition he had.
When they met, he talked about going to New York or Los Angeles and working for one of the big papers, but he fell in love with Clarkeston. He was blissfully content with life in the little college town. Even the smallest story captured his imagination, but the town was big enough that stories of murder and political corruption occasionally came his way. Sometimes his stories were picked up by the national wire services and a job offer would materialize. Just last year he turned down a job at the Chicago Tribune. Chicago! What a perfect chance to get out of this podunk burg! He turned it down without even consulting her.
The Chicago job would have been much better money too. When she went back to work after the kids were in preschool, her income quickly surpassed his, and she had been supporting the family for more than ten years now. If they had to survive on his salary alone, they’d be living in a trailer somewhere in a kudzu field on the edge of town.
As she stood at the kitchen sink washing some lettuce for a salad, she watched her husband park his car next to hers in the driveway and trudge up the sidewalk to the front door. He was a gardener, and this time of year the garage was filled with seedlings, tools, and other gardening junk, and she’d been caught in a downpour that afternoon because there was no room to park a car inside. A moment later, James came in and slumped down at the kitchen table without a word. Sometimes work put him in a dark mood when he realized (surprise! surprise!) that he could not solve all the problems that he wrote about in his articles. The back of her collar was still damp from the rain and she was in no mood to listen to his musings.
“Hey, hon,” he murmured as he got up and pulled a beer from the refrigerator, “what’s for dinner?”
She glared at the bottle in his hand. Every time her friends came over to play bridge someone remarked on the beer in the fridge or the bottles in the recycling bin. Baptist deacons were supposed to be role models, not beer-guzzling targets for the pastor’s sermons. “Nothing much,” she sniffed. “I made some chicken salad from last night’s leftovers.”
He did not reply. She looked at him carefully as he sucked on the Budweiser tit. Something was bothering him, but she decided to let it simmer. When he finished his drink and started worrying the label with his fingernails, he finally broke the silence.
“I stepped down as deacon today.”
“You did what?” She was momentarily caught off guard but managed to raise her voice to a shout by the third syllable she spit out.
“I told Pastor Armstrong that I was resigning.” He looked up at her briefly before he began tearing the label off the bottle with an obviously feigned nonchalance. “And I told him I was quitting the church altogether.”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She looked down for any sign that he was joking, but he ignored her and continued deliberately stripping off the red paper. She was about to really let him have it, to blast him away with the righteous venom of a teetotaling, industrious Christian woman who was sick to death of living with
a hedonistic, left-leaning, penniless journalist, but the vitriol caught in her throat. She had said it all before and no doubt he was waiting for the inevitable blowup, cooldown, and gradual return to normal, or at least as normal as things ever got around their house since the kids had left. He did not seem to realize that this was different. How the hell could she explain why her husband was staying at home on Sunday mornings?
“Can I ask why you’re considering doing this?” Her voice was pure steel, her politeness precarious.
“I’m not just considering it.” He pinched the label into a tight ball and pushed it into the bottle. “I already did it.”
“Are you crazy?!”
His voice was irritatingly calm. “I may give St. James Episcopal a try. The new preacher over there seems like a nice guy.”
That was it. He may as well have said he was signing on with Satan himself. She yanked the beer bottle from his hand and flung it across the room at the recycle bin. The neck hit the wall with such force that it popped into the sheet rock and stuck for a second before plopping down into the container.
She looked around for something else to throw, but paused when her hand touched a glass vase of fresh-picked flowers. Her husband was looking at her with curiosity, not fear or respect. A sudden wave of coldness stayed her hand and she pushed the vase aside. She marched through the kitchen door and into the bedroom to pack. “I’ll be staying with my sister.”
VI.
CLUES
Melanie stared at the phone in her hand before slamming it back into the cradle. Leave it to the FBI, where arrogance was a job requirement and acting like a dick was essential for promotion, to find the rudest person in Arkansas to answer its phone. When she had decided to pursue James Murphy’s inquiry, she had briefly debated whether or not to call the number she had found in the FBI database next to the name of Jacob Granville. It was an odd notation. There was no case file associated with him, nor had any official investigation been undertaken, but there sat the name, listed with no data other than a contact number with an Arkansas area code in case anyone made an inquiry about him. She had no obligation to call the number before she followed up on Murphy’s story, but a professional survival instinct told her to call and cover her ass.
She dialed the number, assuming that it belonged to a bureau agent stationed in Arkansas, but the responding voice on the other end of the line did not state her name or her department; she just repeated the phone number back to Melanie by way of greeting. Melanie identified herself vaguely as an assistant US attorney and asked to whom she was speaking, but she was ignored and in turn was asked abruptly why she was calling. She bit back a remark about people from Arkansas usually being more polite and then reluctantly explained the notation that had popped up when Granville’s name was entered into the FBI database.
“And who initiated the query that you’re reporting?”
Melanie hesitated for a moment. The woman’s voice was nasal, not southern at all, and it set her teeth on edge. Ten years earlier, she might have hung up, but with advances in phone technology, the person on the other end of the line was undoubtedly staring at Melanie’s office number on some display. If she hung up now, she’d likely get a visit from a local bureau agent repeating the question in person. Bloody-minded bastards. The number made her easy to track down. She decided to tell the truth and then ask some hard questions about what the FBI knew about the Cavendish-Granville case.
“A newspaper reporter from Clarkeston, Georgia, by the name of Murphy,” she answered grudgingly. “And now maybe you can tell me who you are?”
In response, she heard only the rapid tapping on a keyboard. “James Murphy? The Clarkeston Chronicle? You need to tell me why he came to you.” No please, just a command with more than a whiff of urgency to it.
“Look, Miss Whatever-The-Hell-Your-Name-Is, I’m not answering any more questions until you answer some of mine—”
The phone line went dead, and Melanie strangled the handset as if she could reach through the fiber-optic cables all the way to the throat of the rude bitch three states away. She stared out the window and emitted a barely perceptible growl. She’d ratted out Murphy and gotten nothing in return to help him. And, for the first time, she wondered whether she’d been talking to the FBI at all. She would track down the Arkansas number later, and in the meantime she felt a renewed commitment to follow up on Murphy’s tip.
The best place to begin was the courthouse’s IT department. In theory, the cybercrime techies would be best at tracking down the source of something posted on the web, like Murphy’s bikini photos, but they were so busy laying traps for pedophiles and tracing laundered drug money that she knew from experience they would have little time to answer her questions. Instead, she walked down to see Hans Peterson, the IT guru who fixed her computer whenever it wouldn’t print and who removed the annoying viruses that splattered pop-up ads selling anti-pop-up software on her computer screen. Hans and his bespectacled minions were not investigators—their only official job was to keep the computer network running—but they loved getting questions related to real cases and, unlike the snooty cybercrime crowd, they didn’t take three weeks to return phone calls.
She took the elevator down to the basement and asked if Hans was around. The bottom floor was the coolest part of the building on a hot day, but even an East German architect would have found its aesthetics challenging. Yellow cinderblock walls and brown-flecked linoleum gave it the air of a church basement circa 1950 or so. The oldest furniture in the building found its way down whenever replacements arrived on the upper floors, and the hallway lobby in front of the elevator was crammed with gutted CPUs sitting on chipped wooden desks. Melanie leaned around a filing cabinet and spotted a woman behind a huge monitor, who said that the IT head was in his office. She picked her way past the techno junkyard and into the sanctum of its cannibalizer-in-chief.
Hans was a lean bike racer who kept his graying hair out of his face with a neat ponytail. Melanie had been in Atlanta for only six months, but it had not taken her long to figure out that Hans was a key person to have on her side. In the old days, the conventional wisdom said not to piss off the person looking after your horse; nowadays the same held true for the person taking care of your computer.
“Everything all right, Ms. Melanie?” Being back in the South was a mixed blessing, but it was kind of nice to be Ms. Melanie again. His eyes tracked back to the screen in front of him and he quickly typed in a command before looking back up at her.
“Everything’s great, Hans,” she replied brightly, “I can’t thank you enough for working out the IP address issue with the Wi-Fi at my apartment.” He nodded, glanced briefly back down at his keyboard, and shot off a couple of rapid key strokes before pushing back from his desk.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve got a question about a case I’m working on.” She was gratified to see his left eyebrow rise slightly. “Basically, I need to track down some photos that are posted on the web.” She handed him a piece of paper with the link to the pictures of Diana Cavendish, and he leaned forward to enter the URL into his browser.
“Nice!” he exclaimed when he got to the website.
“Calm down, Hans. She disappeared five years ago, probably dead.”
“Sorry,” he looked up and shook his head. “That’s a shame.”
“What can you tell me about the photos?” She walked around his desk so that she could look over his shoulder. “Is there any way to track down the source?”
“Well,” he said as he downloaded one of the images and clicked on Properties, “it’s a standard JPEG file. Sometimes there’s a date stamp or some comments entered by the person who uploaded it, but the only date you can see is from last week, which is probably the date it was posted and not when the picture was taken.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “You said she’s been dead five years, right?”
“Yeah.” She put her hand on the top of his chair and leaned down to take a closer
look.
“You can see where one could add information to the file, but it’s all blank.”
“What about the website? Can you find out anything about who runs it?”
“That’s easy,” he replied, shooing her back a bit with a flick of his right hand. “In order to get an Internet domain address, you have to register as owner of the address and provide contact information.” He opened up another window on his browser and showed her a database called Whois. “It’s basically a directory of who owns what domain names on the web. So, we just type mygirlfriendsbikini into the box, hit Enter, and voilà!” He copied the information that appeared, pasted it into an email to Melanie, and fired it off. “Now you know who claims to be the registrant and owner of your little website.”
“Thanks, Hans!” She rapped a knuckle on his desk and turned to leave the room. When she reached the door, the funny tone she had heard in his voice registered with her. “Claims?”
“Sorry, Ms. Melanie,” he replied as he settled back in his work station, “but no one polices the truthfulness of any of the data in Whois. With reputable firms, the information is pretty reliable, but people who run sketchy websites frequently try to hide who they really are. Don’t be too disappointed if the names and number I sent you are bogus.”
She nodded and headed back down the hall to the elevator, anxious to see whether she could track down the owner of the website and ask about the source of the pictures of Diana Cavendish. Unfortunately, Hans’s instincts turned out to be correct. When she opened her email and called the phone number provided by James C. Smith, the agent for the registrant, Sweaty Palm Productions, she got the reservations number for a Marriott Hotel in Los Angeles. When she googled the street address provided for Sweaty Palm, it turned out to be for the same hotel. “Shit,” she said under her breath.
She googled Sweaty Palm Productions. The first item listed in the search result indicated that the company existed; at least it had a rudimentary website, which touted its provision of “top flight soft-core content.” The one-page site provided no physical address or phone number for the firm. It included an email address, [email protected], for sales queries, but listed no names of anyone associated with the business. She sent a brief message to the address from her personal email account, politely requesting a content list and pricing information. Then she sent the email address to Hans and asked him how easily it could be traced.