“My name is Ray Harper, ma’am, and I’m an investigator with the Organized Crime Task Force in Seattle, Washington.”
“Yes?”
“Let me give you a phone number where you can call and verify my identity.” He was taking a breath to dictate the number at the office when the woman interrupted him.
“That won’t be necessary,” she said. “Do people tend to not believe you?”
“No, it’s just procedure. Who am I speaking with?”
“My name is Margaret Paulson. I run a women’s group here Saturday mornings and I happened to be walking past the office when the phone rang. How can I help you, Mr. Harper?” she asked again.
“I’m interested in knowing whether a man named Brandon Boanerges or Luke Fisher ever served as assistant pastor at Second Congregational.”
“No.”
She sounded so positive that Ray found himself letting out a breath, as though he’d been punctured. “Ah. You know the congregation pretty well? Enough to be positive of that?”
“I’ve been with this congregation for forty years, Mr. Harper. I know everyone in it.”
“And neither of those names is familiar.” He might have known Fisher’s whole history was a puff of smoke. There were still the other numbers to try, but he’d put money on them not panning—
“I didn’t say that. Boanerges, of course, is—”
“‘The sons of thunder,’” he finished. “Yes, I know.”
“Well, yes, but it’s also the name one of our volunteers took for an Internet ministry. You know, what they call a screen name. I’m not sure of the details, but it ended badly and he left the church after that.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Oh, three years at least.”
His boy Brandon had been playing mind games with defenseless women for two years before Ray had tripped over his trail. Could he have gotten started with an Internet ministry and met them there? Was that the connection that had tied these unrelated women together—the one piece of the puzzle that had eluded him all this time?
“What was this volunteer’s name, Mrs. Paulson? Do you remember?”
“Oh, yes. His mother, Mary Lou, is part of our congregation. Ricky Myers.”
“Ricky?” Disappointment spiraled into his gut. “Sounds like a teenager. The man I’m looking for is in his late thirties.”
“Oh, that would be about right. Everyone called him Ricky, though, like a nickname. He was such a charmer, you see. Even still, there are those among us who can’t quite believe such a nice, good-looking boy could have been so wicked.”
Chapter 6
“PREACHER CONVICTED of Rape,” the headline of the Inish County Courier said in heavy black type on Monday morning. Claire dropped a quarter in the newsstand and pulled a copy of the paper out. She could hardly blame the Courier for getting excited about the news; the most exciting things it usually had to report were escaped cattle and the occasional robbery or vandalism. A rape case—particularly when it involved a man like Phinehas, who was supposed to be celibate, holy, and good—was major news.
She tucked the paper under her arm and went into the station, waving at Luke, whose shift started at eight A.M., the same as hers. When she’d asked him why he liked eight to noon and eight to midnight, he’d said he liked to be on the air when people began their day and when they ended it. “I want to help them set a praiseful tone for their day, or a thankful tone for their evening,” he said with that endearing grin. “Hey, it’s not much, but it’s something good to think about.”
Those four-hour stretches were also the highest traffic times now as far as calls and listeners went, but who could blame him for wanting to catch the most people when he could? And Toby didn’t seem to mind being bumped out of the prime slots. He was just happy the station’s business was turning around.
A brightly colored box of software sat on her desk, still in its shrink-wrap. FileMaker Pro. “Thank you, Toby,” she said aloud. She stashed her purse and the paper in the bottom drawer of her desk and opened the box. This was better than a birthday.
With a computer as slow and obsolete as hers was, it took half an hour before the application was up and running. The rest of the morning was spent entering the numbers from Toby’s spreadsheet and the receivables she already had. The mail had brought another landslide of checks, cash, and money orders, not to mention a number of fan letters for Luke. She set those aside. If there was anything in there she needed to know about, he’d tell her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what else the owners of the feminine handwriting had to say.
By two in the afternoon, Luke had gone home and she had a semblance of an accounting system in place. Just for fun, she asked it to produce a profit-and-loss report. The computer crunched happily for a couple of seconds and the line items popped up on her screen, laid out just the way she liked them.
“Wow!” Claire goggled at the bottom line. Did that really say ten grand? Just to be sure, she ran the report again, and it produced exactly the same number. Eight thousand dollars in this morning’s mail alone? She sat back in her chair, feeling a little winded. It was a lucky thing Toby had bought the package when he had. Any longer and she wouldn’t have been able to stay on top of this burgeoning river of receivables.
At least they weren’t going to have any trouble meeting payroll for the three of them, or in giving to the ministries Luke had talked about.
Claire made a to-do list and pinned it to the bulletin board on the wall next to the desk. Then she gathered up all the deposits, slid them into an envelope, and generated an itemized deposit slip. Her first deposit for the station, she thought as she walked down to the next block, where the bank was. What would Margot say to this?
When she walked in, the first thing she saw was that they hadn’t filled her position yet. A forlorn little “closed” sign sat on her desk, and the tellers looked just as harassed as they had last week when she’d left. She’d just moved into line with her big, fat envelope when Margot looked up and waved at her through the glass that formed one wall of her office.
“Come in,” she mouthed, motioning toward the door.
As the branch manager, Margot could take a deposit as well as anyone else, or approve a loan, or any of a dozen jobs. Claire tried not to feel triumphant, because vengeance belonged to the Lord, but her back was a lot straighter going in this morning than it had been coming out last week.
“Claire, it’s good to see you,” Margot said. “Have a seat. What brings you here today?”
“Business deposit.” She indicated her envelope. “I’m at KGHM now. Accounting manager.”
Margot looked impressed. “That was quick.”
“It was . . . meant to be, I think.” She still wasn’t convinced that God had a hand in getting people jobs, but it certainly had been a nice set of coincidences, hadn’t it?
“I’m glad for you, but on the other hand, I’m disappointed.” Margot paused and took a deep breath. “I’m afraid good front-office people are hard to find at the moment. When I saw you I thought you might . . . well, that’s beside the point. Never mind.”
“Might what?” Claire asked.
“Be coming back.”
Why would I beg for a job when you fired me because of how I look? “No,” she said. “I’m here strictly for business. Can you take my deposit?”
“Sure.” Margot reached for the envelope. “What’s the account number?”
By the time they’d reached the end of the lengthy transaction, Luke’s prophecy was on a fair course to coming true. Margot was all smiles and sunshine, seeing Claire to the door as if she were some corporate bigwig, and there was no more mention of anybody coming back begging for a job.
How about that.
She wondered how many other things Luke was right about. And what effect that was going to have on the Elect’s way of life. Or, for that matter, on hers.
* * *
RAY HELPED HIMSELF to an unused workstation at the Hami
lton Falls P.D., grateful for the joint-forces agreements that the OCTF had in place with every law enforcement agency in the state of Washington. With a few keystrokes, he could tap into the most comprehensive criminal databases in the world—and he had every intention of doing just that. He’d run a warrants check on Brandon Boanerges months ago, but now—if Mrs. Margaret Paulson was correct—he had the guy’s real name.
Richard Brandon Myers. Oh, you are so nailed, my friend.
NCIS, AFIS, and California’s CJIC system provided him with a string of charges for Richard Brandon Myers, date of birth April 13, 1974, from West Hollywood, California. A number of misdemeanors, including vandalism, some traffic stuff, all taken care of—presumably by his mother—by paying a fine. Petty theft. Fraud. Fencing stolen property. All drummed down to the lowest penalty or dropped altogether.
Bottom line, either Myers/Boanerges/Fisher had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and proven innocent, or he was a master at flashing that smile at a judge and earnestly promising that he’d learned his lesson and would never do it again.
Under that name, at least.
Luke Fisher, date of birth July 20, 1973, was as clean as a whistle. He owned a car—the almost new Camry parked behind the station eight hours out of twenty-four—but other than that, he’d never even had a parking ticket.
And at the moment, there was nothing but Ray’s gut feeling and his knack for remembering voices to connect petty criminal Richard Myers with either Brandon Boanerges or Luke Fisher. But what he had was enough to make him stick around Hamilton Falls for another couple of days.
That and the look in Claire Montoya’s eyes when Luke smiled at her.
Ray was no knight in shining armor, and he didn’t make a career of saving women from themselves—especially if they weren’t willing to press charges. But nobody deserved to be taken in by Luke Fisher, including his best friend’s wife’s best friend. If Ray had a sister, he’d look out for her. He and Claire were practically family. Not that he thought of her as a sister or anything. Not with the way her voice played in his head just before he went to sleep, or the way he found himself watching her mouth when she spoke. But he did feel a little protective toward her, for Julia’s sake. There was nothing wrong with that, was there?
Enough. He was supposed to be thinking about Luke Fisher and how he was going to keep him away from Claire.
No, no. He was supposed to be thinking about Luke Fisher and how he was going to tie all his identities together. Not that he could do anything once he got that confirmation. Unless Fisher committed a crime by Saturday, Ray was just sitting here using up the taxpayers’ money on motel bills and a per diem.
He could tie Fisher to Boanerges with the voice. But how to tie Myers to Boanerges with something more than the fact that they had the name Brandon in common?
For what seemed like the hundredth time, Ray pulled the battered case file out of his backpack and opened it. Once again he went over the reports and interview transcripts it contained. By now he could practically recite them verbatim.
Hmm.
Like a gopher poking its head out of its hole, he half stood and scanned the workstations around him in the bull pen. It was a quiet afternoon. Everyone was out on patrol, leaving only the administrative assistant, who was busy at her computer.
“Excuse me,” he said, and the woman looked up.
“Need something, Investigator?”
“Do you have a couple of minutes to do me a favor?”
She shrugged. “As long as I get this report done by the time Lieutenant Bellville gets back from his accident scene, sure.”
“It won’t take long. It’s going to sound weird, but can you read these reports to me?”
She looked through her bangs at him. “Read them to you? What’s the matter, need glasses?”
He shook his head. “I’m one of those people who retain what they hear, not what they see. This case is driving me nuts. I figure if I do something different, like listen to these reports instead of staring at them, I might catch something I missed before.”
“Okay.” She left her desk and rolled a chair over to where he was sitting. “Where do I start?”
“They’re chronological. Start at the beginning.”
“Should I look for something, too?”
“If you can do two things at once, why not? I need a connection between a guy who ran an Internet ministry in Hollywood named Richard Brandon Myers, a guy named Brandon Boanerges who romanced women until they signed their money over to him, and Luke Fisher, who—”
“Luke Fisher!”
Ray sighed. Great. Of course the woman would be a fan. “You’re bound by your confidentiality agreement.”
“What, you think I’d blab the stuff I learn around here? I learned from my predecessor’s mistakes.” Her chin tilted. She didn’t look much more than twenty, but she must have passed all the security checks and then the traditional police hazing that not all support staff survived. “Let’s get on with it.”
“First I need to know why you reacted.”
“He’s just the closest I’ve ever been to a celebrity, that’s all. Plus he’s this great Christian guy. One of the pastors at my church works with him. It surprised me that his name would come up in a file.”
“In this business, nothing surprises me. Come on. Start there.” He indicated the document at the bottom of the folder.
An hour later, the woman’s voice was getting a little hoarse, but she gamely kept reading page after page. She did a good job, too. Maybe she’d had a couple of acting or elocution classes. She put expression into the dry lines, particularly when they got to the transcripts of the women Boanerges had defrauded.
SHONBERG: The last night I saw him, Brandon said he had something special for me, and I was to meet him at La Colombe, a French place that we’d gone to on our first date. I was convinced he was going to give me a ring.
HARPER: And did he?
SHONBERG: He spent nearly an hour going through the ex files.
HARPER: The what?
SHONBERG: You know, all his ex-girlfriends. It’s part of the mating ritual.
HARPER: It is? Never mind. What did he say about them?
SHONBERG: Oh, that they each meant a phase in his life. You know, Michelle Groning was his first love, Teresa White was the first one he slept with, blah blah blah. But those phases were over, and he was now with me. The operative word being now.
HARPER: To your knowledge, did he treat these women the way he treated you? Trying to defraud them?
SHONBERG: I have no idea—
“Wait a second.” Ray held up a hand to stop the woman’s voice.
She looked up from the transcript on the desk. “What?”
“I never followed up on those two.”
“Two what?”
“The girlfriends.”
“You think he’d give real names?” She sounded a little cynical. Maybe there was a recent breakup in the picture.
“Rule number one when coming up with a story is stick to the truth as much as you can. That way you don’t trip yourself up on the details.” He smacked himself on the forehead. “Bad investigator.” He took the file from her and tapped everything into order. “Thanks for helping me with this. I owe you.”
“Everybody in here does,” she said.
* * *
LUKE’S FACE LIT UP with joy and awe when Claire told him about the money that had come in practically overnight thanks to the prayer program. Her heart gave a great big thump and she made an effort to keep her face friendly, calm, and professional.
“This is great!” He grabbed her in a jubilant hug and swung her around her office.
Friendly and calm and professional, oh my! She laughed and tried to get her feet back under her, but her blood was flying around in her veins and she was sure the goofy grin on her face was going to stay pasted there all day.
“God is great!” Luke put her down at last and she got her breath back, self-conscious
ly patting her chignon into place.
“Maybe so,” she said, “but we should make some decisions about what to do with it. Charities, what do you call them—ministries. Something. We can’t just sit on it.”
“Of course not.” Luke parked one hip on the corner of her desk and grinned at her. It was just after noon and he should have been on his way out, but the good news had stopped him in his tracks. “This money is earmarked for God’s good work. I have a couple of ideas, but first off is a fully equipped van so we can take the show on the road and reach more people.”
“The down payment is certainly taken care of,” Claire allowed. “What else?”
“There are a couple of worthy ministries I’ve been supporting for years. A check for a few grand could support a homeless outreach in Idaho run by a friend of mine for months.”
He practically glowed, and Claire gave herself a mental slap. He was her boss. She had to remember that. Okay, so most bosses didn’t pick you up and waltz you around the office, but then, Luke wasn’t like any man she’d ever met, boss or not.
Unlike most of the Elect men, who kept a woman guessing about their feelings in case something better came along, Luke put his right out there. If he was happy, everyone around him knew it. If he was passionate about something, it was so infectious you found yourself caring about what happened to—to homeless people in Idaho. Something, she had to admit, she’d never even thought about before. The Elect usually did their outreach right here at home, by inviting people to Gathering.
“Okay, so earmark money for a van and the homeless outreach.” She bent over her desk and made notes on her to-do list. “If you give me the address, I’ll send a check. Oh, and Luke, we should meet with a lawyer to make sure our gifts are covered regulation-wise. Toby tells me we’re a nonprofit, so we need to make sure the money’s distributed correctly.”
Luke waved a hand at her. “I’m just the front man,” he said. “You’re the accounting manager. Do what you think is best. I trust your judgment.”
“Careful. I might go on a power trip and give myself a raise.”
A Sounding Brass Page 9