by Kyle Mills
Michaels gave the thumbs up sign. “So we’ve found a great resource. All right.”
“Maybe,” Beamon said in a wavering tone.
“What? She doesn’t want to talk to us anymore?”
Beamon shook his head. “No, I reckon she’ll give us anything we need. I’m just a little concerned about her motivation.”
The young agent’s eyes widened. “You think she’s a church plant? Like they set her up to feed people misinformation? Wow …”
“Ho, Chet. Come on back to reality with me here. All I meant was that she’s still loyal to Kneiss—I think she believes he’s who he says he is. In her mind, it’s this Renslier woman who’s causing problems.”
Beamon leaned forward and began digging through the pile of documents Michaels had spread across his desk. “She also may think that I’ve been chosen by God to put the church back on track.”
Michaels made a sound like a strangling cat as he stifled a laugh.
“Go ahead,” Beamon said. “Laugh.”
“Sorry, Mark,” Michaels said through a loud guffaw. “It’s not that I don’t think you’d be a good choice, it’s just that I think if God needed someone to do his work on Earth, he wouldn’t pick a guy who refers to Christ and His disciples as ‘JC and the boys.’”
Beamon found what he was looking for and threw it at Michaels, who was wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. “That’s pretty much what I told her—though not in so many words.”
Michaels looked at the stock certificates that Beamon had thrown at him, still smiling. “What’s up with these?”
“I want you to look into those two companies.”
“These are just stock certificates from closely held corporations that Davis had bought Into. His Investment here is really pretty Insignificant. Certainly nothing to kill him over.”
Beamon began stuffing the rest of the safe’s contents back into the manila envelopes lying on his desk. “According to Ernie, one of the things the church has gotten into is buying up companies that might provide them with information or control over areas they think are important. Apparently they don’t do this directly, they do it through various members buying stock.”
Michaels’s eyebrows rose. “So then it looks like a bunch of unrelated people own the company, but it’s actually run by the church. Cool.”
Beamon pointed to the certificates. “I don’t think the Davises were killed or Jennifer was kidnapped over Eric’s ownership In those two companies, but let’s see If we can learn something about how the church operates. Might be useful,”
Michaels laid the certificates out flat on the desk. “Vericomm, I can already tell you. Is a longdistance provider and Internet service.”
“Maybe you can pull some information from the FCC? Do it quietly, though,”
“I can do better than that—and quieter, too. There are at least two annual reports on Vericomm In one of the filing cabinets In Mr, Davis’s home office. I’ll go grab ‘em and see what I can figure out,”
“What about TarroSoft?”
Michaels shrugged, “I don’t remember seeing anything on them in any of Mr. Davis’s stuff.”
“Ever hear of them?”
“Nope.”
Beamon stood and began walking toward the door to his office, “Okay, Chet. Run with that and get me what you can on a guy named Sines—he’s the head of the church’s security. I don’t have a first name on him, but I think he’s ex-military and he’s got a mustache and an obvious scar on his face.” He paused with his hand on the doorknob. “I don’t want it to get back to him that I’m looking. Not quite ready for that headache yet, okay?”
He didn’t wait for Michaels’s answer, but pulled the door open and began threading himself through the tightly packed desks and construction equipment that filled the office. The workmen seemed to be less obvious now that the heavy work was done. With a little luck they’d be history in a few weeks.
He made his way to a small cubicle along the far wall, pausing to chat briefly with the young agents who inhabited this part of the office and answer the myriad questions that always seemed to be on the tips of their tongues. He hadn’t been doing much of a job on the management end of things lately. Once he got on top of this Jennifer Davis thing, he promised himself, he’d turn over a new leaf.
Beamon poked his head into the cubicle next to him and looked at the back of Craig Skinner, the young man who managed the office’s Information systems.
“Craig! How’re you doing with those disks?”
The young man started and swiveled around in his chair to face Beamon.
He didn’t look like he belonged in an FBI office. His hair went well past his shoulders and his interpretation of the dress code was that anything was acceptable as long as you wore a tie with it. But the kid knew his way around a computer, and Beamon wasn’t about to lose him over the FBI’s obsession with throwing a three-piece suit on everything that came through the door.
“Jeez, Mark. What is this? A copy of the D.C. phone book?”
“Don’t worry about it. Are you done?”
“Yeah, I’ve loaded it into a database. What now?”
“How would I go about searching for a name?”
The young man did some magic with his mouse and a prompt appeared on the screen, “You’d just type it in here. Last name, comma, space, then the first name.”
“And what if I wanted to check another name when I was done with that one?”
Skinner pointed to the top of the screen. “Just click here and the prompt will come up again.”
Beamon motioned for him to stand. “Why don’t you go grab yourself a cup of coffee for a minute.”
“Uh, sure,” Skinner said, looking a little confused.
Once he was gone, Beamon sat down in his chair and typed in “Davis, Eric.”
The cursor turned to an hourglass for a moment and then the name appeared with Davis’s birthdate and “August 1968” in the field reserved for the date the person joined the church.
Beamon didn’t feel the elation that normally overtook him when one of his off-the-wall theories started to come together. The prospect of going up against the Church of the Evolution and its eleven million followers wasn’t a pleasant one. He was getting too old and too wise for this kind of crap.
He cleared the screen the way Skinner had showed him and typed in the name “Davis, Patricia.” It, too, was positive, showing a membership date of January 1968.
The dates indicated that both had been children when they joined. Their parents must have been among Kneiss’s original followers. Great.
“Can I come in yet?” Skinner’s voice called from the other side of the cubicle wall.
“One second,” Beamon said, his fingers hovering nervously over the keyboard. He hated himself for being such a suspicious sonofabitch, but he couldn’t help it. Beautiful women with advanced degrees just didn’t normally knock down his door.
He typed in “Johnstone, Carrie” and held his breath as the computer searched.
NO MATCH FOUND.
PLEASE REVIEW
SEARCH PARAMETERS.
“Come on in, Craig,” he said, abandoning the chair and swiveling it toward Skinner, who took a seat.
“Thanks, Mark.”
“Okay, here’s the deal,” Beamon said. “I want you to run this list against the FBI’s personnel list. See if you get any matches. Is that possible?”
“Sure, but it might take some time.”
“Okay, but let’s keep it quiet. Don’t tell anyone anything about this.”
Skinner grinned. “I couldn’t if I wanted to. I don’t know anything.”
“You’ll be happier that way in the end, Craig. Believe me.”
“Come on, Mark, just give me a little hint. You looking for spies?”
32
“THAT CAN’T BE GOOD,” BEAMON SAID, stepping to his right and setting a large box of doughnuts on his secretary’s desk.
She covered the mouth
piece of the phone she was talking into and said, “Sorry, Mark. I wanted to warn you.”
Beamon leaned out so he could see through the window of his office. Jacob Layman had planted himself in his chair and was staring Intently into a folder that Beamon had left on his desk.
“What’s his mood look like, D.?” Beamon asked as she hung up the phone.
“I don’t think it’s good, Mark. He didn’t even look at me when he came in. Just walked over to your desk and sat down.”
Beamon sighed and began slowly walking toward his door. “You know, D., I was reading a play by Shakespeare yesterday …”
She shook her head sadly. “It’s not Desde- mona.”
“Okay, I’ll leave you in charge of the doughnuts,” he said, pointing at the grease-stained box he’d left on her desk. “If I’m not back in an hour, organize a rescue.”
“Jake, how’re you doing? What brings you to my neck of the woods?”
Layman closed the folder in front of him and laid it down on the desk. He spent a few seconds tapping at the edges so that none of the paper peeked out. “What are you doing, Mark?” he said without looking up.
Beamon rolled his eyes at Layman’s tone. That private school headmaster shit hadn’t worked on him when he was kid and it hadn’t become any more effective over the last thirty-five years. “I’m walking across the office to get a cup of coffee. You want one?”
Layman pushed a stack of computer disks across the desk. “What are these?”
Beamon looked back over his shoulder, recognizing the disks that contained the Kneissian membership list. Getting the morning off to a pleasant start.
He took a chair across from his desk and tried to make eye contact with his boss. Layman, who looked like he was struggling to maintain control, continued to stare at the folder in front of him.
“Look, Jake, we’re both busy men,” Beamon said. “You know what’s on those disks or you wouldn’t have hauled your ass up here from Phoenix. What do you want?”
Beamon regretted his word choice the second they were out of his mouth. Layman looked like he was about to explode all over his new carpet.
“Last time we talked, what did we talk about?”
Beamon took a sip of his coffee. “We talked about the Davis case. That you didn’t think the church lead was worth pursuing.”
“I don’t think that’s quite what I said. I told you to stay away from the Kneissians on this. That the FBI’s taken enough flak already over Waco. And you agreed.”
“I agreed that the FBI had already taken enough flak over Waco. Not that the church angle wasn’t relevant in this situation.”
That did it. Layman jumped up from the desk. “I don’t give a shit what you did or didn’t agree to. I gave you a direct order and I expect you to carry it out!”
Beamon looked at him calmly in the silence following his outburst. “Look, Jake. I’ve got a missing fifteen-year-old girl and two adults with their brains painting the walls of their house. I’ve got the press up my ass twenty-four hours a day wondering why I haven’t lived up to my reputation and figured this thing out yet. It’s easy for you to shut down lines of inquiry, ‘cause the buck stops in my office. If I miss something, it’s my ass, not yours.”
“Who the hell do you think you are, Beamon?” Layman leaned farther over the desk, making sure his voice was loud enough to cany through the open door of the office to the young agents outside. “You know why you’re in Flagstaff? The director had to promote you and give you an office so he’d look good in the papers. There were only three open offices small enough that you couldn’t do any real damage. Do you know why you ended up in this one?”
Beamon took another sip from his coffee. The cream tasted like it might be going off. “I guess you’re going to tell me.”
“Shut up!”
Layman’s train of thought got lost in his anger for a moment. Unfortunately, it only took him a moment to find it again. “You’re here because I was on vacation. That’s it—I was on vacation. The other two SACs were around to threaten to quit if they got you. I wasn’t.”
He sat stiffly back down in Beamon’s chair. “And as for your reputation? It’s for being a pain-in- the-ass drunk who stumbled over the solutions to a few high-profile cases. I wouldn’t worry too much about protecting that image.” Layman paused for a moment, but Beamon kept his mouth shut.
“Your career is pretty much finished, Mark. You know that as well as I do—it has been for years,” Layman said, the volume of his voice dropping off. “Mine’s not. I still have places to go in this organization and I’m not going to let a glorified supervisor dead-ended in Flagstaff fuck that up for me. Do you understand?”
“Okay, I think I’m ready to talk now,” Beamon said, slamming his cup down on the edge of his desk hard enough that coffee sloshed over onto the papers strewn across it. “Am I finished at the FBI? Sure, probably. I’ve been the Bureau’s dirty little secret for years. But you can’t always get the job done by kissing the right asses and spouting off a bunch of politically correct bullshit. Sometimes you just got to go out there and get the sonofabitch you’re after. And I’m sorry if things get a little politically inconvenient for you, but this seems to be one of those times. So why don’t you let me do my job, and maybe, with a little luck, I’ll stumble over little Jennifer Davis and we’ll both be heroes.”
Layman stood and grabbed the disks off the desk. “This is your last chance, Mark. If it wouldn’t cause too much speculation in the press, you’d be off this case. I suggest you take the rest of the day off and give some serious thought to your future here.”
Beamon leaned back in his chair as Layman stormed out, already starting to replay the conversation in his head. He probably could have handled that better. After a few more moments of contemplation, he decided that he couldn’t have handled it much worse. So much for the new, improved Mark Beamon.
He sighed loudly, walked across the office, and leaned out the door. Layman was gone, but his presence was still palpable in the hush that had fallen over the office. Beamon waved at Chet Michaels and then turned to his secretary. “D., I’ve got a job for you, but you’re going to hate me for it.” He thumbed behind him to the wall of boxes containing the data on the Davis case. “See those boxes?”
She nodded hesitantly.
“I need one copy of everything in there.”
“When do you need them by?” she said, wincing slightly.
“Top priority. I want you to lock yourself in the copy room and try to get it done by midday tomorrow. If anyone else needs the copier, tell ‘em to go to Kinko’s and save the receipts. Okay?”
She nodded. “I’ll get started right after lunch.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.” He stepped aside and let a nervous-looking Chet Michaels walk by him and into his office. “Get some of the guys to carry the boxes to the copier for you. They’re pretty heavy.”.
Beamon walked back to his desk and settled into his chair. It was still a bit damp from Layman’s back. “How’re you coming on Vericomm and TarroSoft, Chet?”
“So-so, Mark.”
“So-so?”
“I’ve got some stuff on Vericomm, but I haven’t been able to find anything on Tarro.”
“Okay, then Vericomm.”
“Like I told you, they’re a holding company for long-distance carriers and a few Internet access providers. Their business is concentrated in small long-distance carriers in about twenty states. They’re those ones that you call an 800 number and then punch in your personal ID number before you dial and you get a good rate. Kind of like having a really cheap calling card that you use at home, too.”
Michaels pulled an envelope and some glossy papers from his coat pocket and laid them on the desk. “This is the Arizona-based Vericomm subsidiary. I got one of their solicitations about a week ago. Fortunately for us, I’m a procrastinator and haven’t sent it in yet.”
Beamon reached over and picked it up. The cover letter had NICK
ELINEAZ in glossy red letters across the top.
“It’s a really good deal, actually,” Michaels continued. “Five cents a minute, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I have no idea how they stay in business, though. I looked at their financial statements. They’re kind of strange.”
“Strange?” Beamon said, finishing the solicitation letter and flipping through a stack of NICKELINE stickers and application material.
“Well, they’re not a very large company—under thirty million in annual sales.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Well, considering they cover, like, twenty states. That’s not very many customers per state.”
Beamon pursed his lips and shrugged. He was the first to admit that this financial stuff just wasn’t his bag. Thank God the Bureau was infested with CPAs.
“It gets more interesting,” Michaels promised. “They lose a lot of money—every year I looked at, so the last three. There isn’t a lot of financial data on this type of long distance company, but when you compare them to RMA and some other data I was able to dig up, they’re really out of whack.”
“Huh?”
“RMA gets financial statements from all kinds of companies and creates a database for financial statistics on different types of businesses. So you can take the statements of any given company and compare them to an average for that industry.”
“And they don’t line up?”
Michaels shook his head. “For one thing, Vericomm has absolutely no debt. They fund everything—including their losses—through the sale of stock.”
“I don’t know much about this stuff, but it seems like if you lost money every year, people would stop investing.”
“Normally they would. The other thing that’s funky is that they have too many fixed assets.”
“Come again?”
“They have too much, uh, stuff. All companies have a different makeup of assets and liabilities. Take, say, a consulting firm. You wouldn’t expect them to have, oh, I don’t know, inventory, say, as high as a grocery store’s. A grocery store has tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of food and a consultant has, like, a computer and some reference materials.”