Storming Heaven

by Kyle Mills

A knock at the door startled Beamon, breaking his concentration. “Trace, could you hold that thought for a minute? Someone’s here.”

  Beamon walked through the snow melting on his carpet in his stocking feet and pulled the door open. Carrie Johnstone stood on the other side, haphazardly dressed in a down jacket, boots, and light cotton pants. Emory stood next to her, similarly dressed, except pajama bottoms substituted for the cotton pants.

  Carrie looked at the phone in Beamon’s hand and then at the cord stretched out across the room. “I’m sorry, Mark,” she whispered. “I didn’t know you were on the phone.”

  “No problem. I won’t be much longer. Come on in.”

  A strained look crossed her normally cheerful face. “Actually, I came to ask a favor. One of my patients called and is having … some problems. There’s no one to stay with Emory and I was wondering … well, could you watch her for a while?”

  Beamon looked down at the little girl, whose face was turned up toward him. She smiled and waved at him.

  He pulled the phone off his chest and up to his mouth. “One more second, Trace. I’ll be right with you.”

  He took it as a positive sign that Carrie was willing to trust him with her daughter, but what the hell did he know about children? “Uh, Carrie, I’d be happy to in theory, but I really don’t know much about taking care of a four-year-old girl.”

  “I’m almost five,” Emory reminded him.

  He looked down at her and laughed. Hell, how hard could it be? You feed them, let them watch a little TV, then put them to bed. Right?

  “Almost five?” he said, stepping out of the way and providing her a clear path into the condo. “In that case, come on in.” Emory ran past him and dove onto his couch.

  “It’s an hour ‘til her bedtime, Mark,” Carrie said, looking relieved. “She’s already eaten and brushed her teeth—won’t be any trouble at all.” She gave her daughter a stern, motherly look. “Will you, honey?”

  “Uh-uh,” Emory replied convincingly, punching buttons at random on the TV remote control.

  “Thanks, Mark. I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Carrie said, already heading for the snow-covered steps.

  He leaned out the door. “Take your time. No problem.”

  By the time Beamon had closed the door and walked back to the kitchen, Emory had found the ON button and was surfing through the channels at breakneck speed.

  “Sorry, Trace. Minor emergency. Where were we?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right.”

  “Anyway,” Fontain continued, “I examined Passal’s body to see if there were any scratches or injuries that might suggest he participated in a rape. Nothing.”

  “He could have tied her up before he r—” Beamon looked over at Emory, who was bouncing up and down on her rear in the soft cushions of the sofa. “Before he, you know …”

  There was a confused silence over the phone for a moment. “Before he raped her, Mark?”

  “Yeah. Before that.”

  “The only comfortable place to do that looks like the bed in the trailer. No marks on the bedposts or fibers that might have been left by a rope. We did find a rope in the generator shed that had a lot of blood on it, but my guess is that we’re going to find out it was deer or elk or something. The good news is, it doesn’t look like this guy’s taken a shower in weeks, so if he has come into contact with Jennifer, we’ll be able to tell you.”

  “But you’re not hopeful.”

  “I just don’t think she was here, Mark.”

  “Yeah. Shit. Listen, Trace. I want you to get the locals to widen the search of the area. And bring in that heat photography plane to go over the area again. Passal’s been running around the backcountry there for years. He could have her stashed a ways out from his property. I think you’re right, but let’s be sure, okay?”

  “Then can I go home?”

  “Then you can come home.”

  Beamon hung up the phone and leaned over the counter. “Hey, Emory. Give you a cookie if you flip it to channel seven for a while.”

  She craned her neck around and pushed herself up high enough to see over the back of the sofa. “What’s seven?”

  “The news.”

  “Yechy,” she said, crinkling up her nose.

  Damn. He figured the cookie ploy would be foolproof. What was he going to do now?

  “The Tick’s on,” she said hopefully.

  “I’d, uh, kind of rather watch the news for a few minutes.”

  She shrugged and flipped the channel to seven without another word.

  Beamon smiled. That wasn’t so hard. This could be fun. One cookie for the news, one for going to bed, and he’d still have enough to put him in a sugar coma while he awaited Carrie’s speedy return.

  “You want milk, too?” he asked.

  Emory flipped over on the sofa so all he could see was her feet sticking up over the back. “Mom says I can’t eat cookies.”

  “Can’t eat cookies?” He lowered his voice. “A food Nazi, huh? I should have guessed.” Beamon grabbed his beer and took a seat in the chair next to the sofa. The newscast was just starting.

  “What’s a Nazi?”

  He stopped the beer a few inches from his mouth. It probably wouldn’t take Carrie long to figure out who had been working on her daughter’s vocabulary. “Nazi? I didn’t say Nazi.”

  Emory was about to continue her line of questioning when the local news anchor saved him.

  “Mark Beamon refused to comment on the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the kidnapping of Jennifer Davis …”

  Emory, her attention momentarily diverted, flipped over and scooted forward so that she was half on the box containing his coffee table and half on the sofa. She squealed excitedly when the screen went from the newsroom to a group of reporters mobbing Beamon as he fought to get through the front door of his office building.

  “That’s you! You’re on TV!”

  “That’s me.”

  “Mommy was on TV once, too, but it was really boring,” she said excitedly.

  The screen cut back to the anchor, framed by a large photograph of the building housing the FBI’s Flagstaff office. Beamon’s head sank into his hands as the man began quoting an unnamed source regarding the possibility of a white slavery ring operating in the Flagstaff area. The office building background faded artistically into a picture of Jennifer Davis’s young body stuffed into a black halter top and skin-tight biking shorts as the newscaster related a sordid tale of wealthy Arabs and their penchant for spunky young blondes.

  Beamon groaned quietly. It wasn’t enough for them that a fifteen-year-old girl was missing and possibly dead. No, there had to be some sex in there somewhere to loosen up the advertisers’ check-writing hands.

  He looked over at Emory and pointed to the TV. “You don’t believe anything you see on this thing, do you?”

  She looked at him like he was crazy. “Sure.”

  16

  “HEY, D. HOW ARE YOU THIS UNGODLY morning?” Beamon said, knocking his umbrella on the floor and leaving a ring of slush in front of his secretary’s desk.

  “I’m fine. How was Utah?” Her voice sounded tentative.

  “Weird. Something wrong?”

  “Well, I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.”

  Beamon grimaced. D. hated to deliver bad news, so she always dreamed up something inconsequentially positive to try to cheer him up. “Bad news first, please.”

  “I couldn’t hold her off anymore.”

  Beamon leaned over and peeked through the open door of his office. There was a tall blonde hairdo growing from the back of one of the chairs in front of his desk.

  “I assume that the hair belongs to Nell Taylor.”

  She nodded. “Sorry.”

  Nell and her husband Tom owned the house two doors down from the now defunct Davis family. She had taken it upon herself to use her considerable financial resources to lead a civilian search for the missing girl and her
kidnappers.

  She seemed to have made it her life’s pursuit to see that Jennifer’s face was plastered across nearly every city, town, and crossroad in the U.S. She’d hired a virtual army of private investigators that were at this minute running around Flagstaff like the Keystone Kops. And man, did she like to talk to the press.

  “I gotta know, D.,” Beamon said. “What’s the good news?”

  His secretary flipped his calendar around on her desk and jabbed at it. “You had two hours open this morning. I told her you had fifteen minutes.”

  Beamon entered his office with a wide smile. “Mrs. Taylor! I’m so glad we’re finally able to get our schedules to dovetail.”

  The hair turned and rose from behind the high-backed chair. When the pudgy face supporting it appeared, Beamon held out his hand.

  “I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me, Mr. Beamon.” Her tone was cold.

  Beamon dropped his coat and umbrella next to his desk and walked to the percolating coffee pot at the other end of the office. “Can I tempt you with a cup, Mrs. Taylor?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I was in a small town in Utah a couple of days ago and there was a poster with Jennifer’s picture on it in the window of the sheriff’s office,” Beamon said, sitting down in the chair next to her. He took a tentative sip from the steaming cup in his hand. “I assume it was one of yours. Quite an accomplishment to get that kind of coverage so quickly.”

  The compliment seemed to go unnoticed. Or at least unacknowledged.

  “What is it that I can do for you, ma’am?”

  She smoothed an imaginary wrinkle from her gray business suit and then folded her hands neatly on the manila envelope in her lap. “I wanted to discuss the direction you’re taking in this investigation, Mr. Beamon.”

  “Mark, please.”

  She ignored him. “We have some concerns.” “We?”

  “The Jennifer Davis Recovery Foundation.”

  “The Jennifer Davis Recovery Foundation,” Beamon repeated. “Of course you do. And what exactly are they?”

  She cleared her throat. “Did you see the local news broadcast last night? Channel seven?”

  Beamon thought for a moment. “I did, actually, yes.”

  “What are we going to do about it?”

  Beamon tried his most winning smile. “Well, Mrs. Taylor, as much as I’d like to, I can’t just go around shooting reporters.”

  The look of impatience etched across her face deepened. “Mr. Beamon, you may think this is all very funny, but I know Jennifer Davis. She’s a wonderful girl …” She paused for a moment and seemed to be switching back to her mental script. “We are very disturbed that Jennifer, right now, may be suffering the worst kind of … abuse at the hands of Arab terrorists while the FBI is harassing and threatening an innocent seventeen-year-old boy.”

  Could this case get any worse? Beamon wondered. It wasn’t bad enough that he didn’t have a single reasonable suspect and hadn’t been able to dream up even a farfetched motive that fit the facts, but now a woman with a beehive was telling him how to conduct an investigation. There used to be some goddamn dignity in being an FBI agent.

  “I assume you’re speaking of Jamie Dolan,” he said.

  She nodded in a single jerky motion. Her hairdo flexed perilously.

  “You have to understand, Mrs. Taylor, that the FBI doesn’t just follow one line of investigation. Just because we talked with Jamie doesn’t mean that we aren’t pursuing many other leads. We have to cover all the bases.”

  She looked like she had something to say, but Beamon continued before she could get anything out.

  “I have to tell you, though, for the record, that I’ve seen nothing to suggest that there is anything even remotely resembling a white slavery ring operating in the Flagstaff area. In fact, if you look at the data, there have been relatively few unsolved abductions of girls and women who would be …” He was going to say “salable,” but thought better of it. “That would fit the profile. Frankly, I don’t know where they got that story. I’m guessing that it’s a complete fabrication.”

  She picked up the envelope from her lap and handed it to Beamon. “I hired a psychic to look into this matter, Mr. Beamon. She’s one of the best in the field. It was she who uncovered the Arab connection.”

  The Arab connection. It sounded so terribly official. Beamon shook off the image of a woman with a handkerchief on her head looking into a crystal ball. “I appreciate the information, Mrs. Taylor. I’ll have my people review it right away.”

  Beamon waved to Michaels, who had been hovering outside his window for the last five minutes. “Before you leave, Mrs. Taylor, there is someone I’d like you to meet. This is Chet Michaels. He’s working with me on this investigation.”

  She stood and took his hand.

  “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Taylor,” Michaels said with a hint of recognition in his voice.

  “My pleasure.”

  “Mrs. Taylor is the head of the Jennifer Davis Recovery Fund.”

  “Foundation,” she corrected.

  “I’m sorry, foundation. Chet here’s up on all the details of the case, Mrs. Taylor. And he’s probably much easier to get in touch with than I am. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to give him a call.”

  She granted them one more of her jerky little nods and the two FBI agents watched her walk proudly from the room.

  “Thanks a lot, Mark. I have a feeling I’m going to be spending a lot of time on the phone with that woman.”

  Beamon handed Michaels the envelope she’d given him and settled into the chair behind his desk. “Better you than me, son. When you get a few minutes, look over the stuff in that envelope. My guess is she’s going to quiz you on it when she calls this afternoon. Now, what have you got for me on Passal?”

  “I haven’t talked with the guys in Utah yet.” Michaels said.

  “I have. Inconclusive on all counts. No evidence that Jennifer was there and nothing pointing in any particular direction on his death.”

  “We had a mechanic go over Passal’s truck,” Michaels said. “The thing looks like it has a top speed of thirty miles an hour and it gushes black smoke.”

  “Any record of him renting a car?”

  “None. We circulated his name and description to all the agencies in the area. Nothing. Preliminarily, a check of signatures on rental contracts for the time period we’re looking at doesn’t match his handwriting. The guy didn’t even have a credit card.”

  “Figure out what roads he could have taken to Flagstaff and call the state cops. See if anyone remembers seeing a pickup like his crawling along the highway billowing smoke,” Beamon said, then leaned back in his chair and began tapping out a rhythm on the desk with his pen.

  “What’re you thinking, Mark?”

  “Wondering. Based on my conversation with Passal, I’d be willing to bet that he knew more than he was telling us. But what did he know? Who did he think we were when we got there and how did he suddenly figure out that we weren’t them? And last, why the hell did he pick this week to go to that big trailer park in the sky?”

  “You think maybe he wasn’t involved directly, but knew something and was killed for it?”

  Beamon shrugged. “I think it’s possible. I mean, we go and talk to him and suddenly he falls off a ladder he’s been down a thousand times before? You see, Chet, there are only a few reasons people die—”

  “Wait a minute. Let me write this down. I can’t keep up with all your lists.”

  “What lists?”

  “Why you kidnap, why you die …”

  Beamon chuckled. “I didn’t realize I had so many. Tell you what, though. This one’s easy. You give it to me. There are four.”

  Michaels chewed on his eraser. “Okay. Murder, accident, natural causes.” Pause. “And, uh, um.”

  “Suicide.”

  “Right. Suicide.”

  “For the sake of argument, let’s rule out na
tural causes. It’s possible, of course, but kind of boring.”

  “Uh, he had a nail in the back of his head, Mark. Doesn’t that kind of automatically rule out natural causes?”

  “No. What if the autopsy finds that he had a heart attack on the way down that ladder? Dead before he hit the ground?”

  Michaels looked at his shoes. “You’re right.”

  “Where was I? … Oh, yeah. Suicide. I like suicide from a motivational standpoint—FBI’s on to him, so he kills himself. But the logistics of throwing yourself backward off a ladder onto a nail are pretty complex. You’d probably die of tetanus before you hit the thing right. So that leaves accident and murder. And accident seems like just too much of a goddamn coincidence to me.”

  Beamon stopped tapping his pencil and pointed to the blue folder that Michaels had put on the desk when he’d come in. “Okay, enough mental masturbation. What’s in the folder?”

  Michaels grinned and picked it up. “This is really going to destroy your day, Mark. We finally tracked down Jennifer’s mother’s real identity. She’d changed her name illegally four times before she was married—each time relocating geographically.”

  “Did you check to see if she was wanted?”

  “Yup. But she wasn’t.”

  “So who was she?”

  Michaels paused dramatically. “Her name was Carol Kneiss.”

  Beamon raised his eyebrows. “As in nice day or as in our local messiah?”

  “As in our local messiah. You’re going to love this—Carol was his daughter. Jennifer’s his granddaughter.”

  Beamon stared over the young agent’s shoulder and watched through his window as two workmen sorted through a thick stalk of brightly colored wires dangling from the ceiling.

  “So, what do you think, Mark? Is there a connection?”

  Beamon let out a deep breath and turned his palms up. “Shit, I have no idea. Don’t know that much about the Kneissians. They serve good food at weddings.” Beamon pointed across the desk at Michaels. “You’re from Tucson. You must know something.”

  Michaels pursed his lips thoughtfully. “I remember all the publicity when they chose Flagstaff as a base—I was in junior high or something. There was a real uproar from the born-agains. Blasphemous cult. Satanists—you know, same thing they say about everyone. But it seems like as soon as the Christians got on a roll, they suddenly shut up. Decided that keeping Kneiss out of Arizona would be un-Christian, I guess. Since then, the Kneissians have bought up half of Arizona and three-quarters of Flagstaff. And then, I suppose you know about Kneiss’s ascension.”