by Ninie Hammon
After that, absolutely nothing the woman did made any sense at all. She suddenly pitched backward toward the back elevator wall, would have fallen if he hadn’t reached out to steady her. She grabbed his tie, pulled him toward her, then wrenched her head from side to side furiously and pushed him away. After that, she disengaged the emergency stop button and turned and huddled in the back corner of the elevator, facing away from him.
When the elevator doors opened on the fifth floor, the woman tripped—on what?—going out and sprawled on the floor. When he reached to help her up, she snatched his cell phone out of the breast pocket of his suit jacket and held it behind her while she scooted away from him toward the wall. Trying to get it back from her was like dealing with a five-year-old playing keep-away. He’d ask politely; she’d shake her head no and act scared. She suddenly jumped up and dodged past him into the hallway, where she held the phone out, then snatched it back again and again. When he cornered her at the end of the hall and threatened to summon security, she finally gave it to him, then snatched at it to get it back before bolting toward the elevator and vanishing.
Daniel stood alone in the hallway for a few moments after she was gone, totally confused.
What just happened here?
Then he shrugged—the woman was definitely off her meds—and returned to the elevator. He pushed the Up arrow, smoothed his hair, straightened the tie the crazy woman had pulled askew. Moments later he got in the elevator and rode to the top floor with an elderly couple in polite elevator silence.
When he stood before the crowd of about five hundred people, pastors and their wives and elder board members ten minutes later, he had collected his wits and was on his game. He began with a story.
“A man sits down on an airplane beside a stunningly beautiful young woman and knows instantly they were made for each other,” Daniel said. “So the man asks her, ‘What kind of men do you like?’”
The audience listened in rapt attention.
“The bombshell told the man, ‘Well, I’m very attracted to Native American men with those big eyes and high cheekbones.’ Then she stops and considers. ‘But I think Jewish men are sexy, too. They’re so intense and determined.’ She pauses again. ‘And Southern men—I love the sweet drawl when they talk.’"
“Then the woman flashes the man a breathtaking smile and asks coyly, ‘And what did you say your name was?’”
Daniel paused for a beat and delivered the last line with perfect timing.
“Geronimo Bernstein…but my friends call me Bubba.”
When the laughter died away, Daniel opened his mouth to begin the talk he’d prepared about how pastors and other church leaders were required to wear many hats, to be “Geronimo Bernstein” to the members of their congregations and their communities.
But he didn’t say any of that. He couldn’t. The problem was that Daniel wasn’t the same man who’d accepted this speaking engagement six months ago. After what he’d seen, after Emily’s murder, he couldn’t seem to put it on autopilot anymore, couldn’t manage to open his mouth and let the same old crap fall out.
The silence lengthened, became uncomfortable. The crowd moved restlessly in their chairs, looking around in consternation. Finally, Daniel made a decision and began speaking before he could change his mind.
“You don’t really believe what you say you believe,” he said, his voice calm and deliberate.
That got their attention. You could have heard a mouse tiptoe across a cotton ball. He leaned over the podium and spoke very softly, the microphone amplifying his quiet words.
“If you did, you’d know that the forces of evil are at work among us all the time, that as you coach your daughter’s soccer team or watch movies on your iPad, mow the grass or hit a hole in one—beings made of pure evil are watching, eager to cause you misery and heartache. And their greatest weapon is the one you have given to them.”
When he whispered the last line, every person in the audience was unconsciously leaning forward to hear it.
“You don’t even believe they exist.”
Daniel went on in that vein, giving himself over to his words in an intimate abandon, his voice louder and then softer in a kind of musical cadence that’d made him the “golden boy,” a rising star in the ministry.
But few people hung around to chat with the golden boy after he finished speaking. He wasn’t surprised. If he kept telling people what they did not want to hear, his days as a megachurch pastor were numbered. And he tried to make himself care about that, to make it matter, but he couldn’t seem to manage. Was it just grief? All the experts claimed you shouldn’t make any major decisions or changes in your life during the first six months after the death of a loved one because you weren’t in your right mind. But it seemed to Daniel that he’d never been more in his “right mind” than he’d been in the three months since Emily died. All the pretense, the phoniness was gone, been burned away in an instant by the sound of the gunshot that killed her.
Jack Carpenter had lost his wife, too, years ago. He understood. He’d been there for Daniel in the early days when the razor edge of pain sliced him open so viscerally he could hardly stand. Jack had told him then, “Every morning, you’ll open your eyes, and it’ll be the first thing you think about. And then one morning, it’ll be the second.”
For Daniel, it was still the first.
“Excuse me, are you Daniel Burke?”
The question came from behind him. When Daniel turned around, he found two uniformed police officers.
Daniel gestured down at his nametag.
“That’s what it says right—” His nametag was gone.
“We need you to come with us, sir,” said the one on the right and took him by the arm. The jerking movement sent a little bolt of pain down into his wrist, the one Victor Alexander had snapped like a twig that day in the belfry after he’d shot Emily. It was still casted from the final surgery and scars would forever encircle it in white bracelets.
Then the officers hauled Daniel out of the building.
*****
2011
Harrelton, Ohio Police Department Sergeant Jack Carpenter had seen worse gore in ten years as a police officer and six in Special Forces—but not on someone he loved.
Theresa Washington sat on a table in an exam cubicle in Good Samaritan Hospital emergency room covered in dried blood. It was smeared all over her—hands, arms, legs, face, hair, and had turned her white hospital auxiliary uniform pink. When she saw him, she burst into tears, and he put his arms around her and pulled her tight to his chest while she cried. He was a big man, six feet four inches, with skin a couple of shades lighter than Theresa’s. Though not handsome, his face was distinctive—rugged—with penetrating eyes and a determined set to his square chin.
“Oh, Jack, they’s gone. Miss Minnie and Mr. Gerald is dead,” she said.
Jack knew that already. An anonymous 911 call had reported screams coming from a house on Elmcrest Circle, and the responding officer had found two dead bodies and an unconscious Theresa at the scene.
He rocked her gently back and forth as sobs racked her body. Up close, he could see that there was one clean spot on her. A white bandage covered some sort of wound on her forehead.
“Are you all right?”
“No, I ain’t all right.” She pulled back out of his arms and looked up at him. Her tears had cleaned the blood off her cheeks in twin streaks. “It was him. He done it.”
“Who?”
“Chapman Whitworth! He was there.”
“At the Cohens’ house?” Jack was flabbergasted.
“Won’t nobody but me ever know it, though. Won’t be no trace he ever set foot in the place, like he was a ghost.”
Jack listened in growing wonder as Theresa told him what had happened. Light dripping down the walls? And Whitworth?
“They can do that?” he asked. “Demon-possessed people can float in the air?”
“S’pose they can,” she snapped. “He did!” Then
she sagged and put her face in her hands, didn’t cry, just shook her head slowly back and forth. “If Bishop was here…he tole me once that powerful demons, what Scripture calls authorities, can tele—tell—what’s it called?”
“Telekinesis. Moving things by thinking about it, by mental power.”
“Bishop said that was a power come from the demon hisself—not like when a demon dumps a person’s own adrenaline in they veins to make ’em impossible strong.”
Jack, Daniel and Theresa had fought for their lives three months ago against demon-possessed men like that.
“What other kind of things them creatures might be able to do, I got no idea. Bishop did say that regular old demons is bound by natural laws but an efreet ain’t. It can be in two places at the same time—possessing somebody and yet still at the place where it was summoned into the world.” She paused. “They can control animals, too. You seen that part when you’s a kid.”
What comes behind. The hiss of snakes and the whisper of spiders crawling all over them. Yeah, Jack had seen that part. He remembered almost nothing from the summer when he was twelve years old and wished that memory was not one of the few he’d reclaimed.
“Bigger ones than bugs, I think. Dogs and cats. They can lift up things, too, not just theirselves. Like he done that ax. Pulled it right up out of Mr. Gerald’s chest. It was…stuck”—tears threatened to claim her again—"and he had to wiggle it.”
They were both silent for a beat. Then Jack spoke carefully.
“You do know why he gave you that ax, don’t you?”
“Duh! Course I know. He wanted my fingerprints on it. His sure wasn’t! I bet he never touched it at all. Just used it to…probably floating up in the air when he done it so’s he wouldn’t get no blood on his good suit.”
She reached out and grabbed Jack’s hand with both of hers. They were trembling. “They ain’t gonna find no trace of him anywhere in that house. You know they ain’t. Just me. All over the place. And that man in the black hoodie—I bet they ain’t gonna find no trace of him, neither.”
“Man in a black hoodie?”
“I told that other officer about him, but I don’t think he b’lieved a word I’s sayin’.” She described the man to Jack. “They gone say I killed them old people. That I took that ax…and then the electricity went out, and I slipped in the dark and hit my head.”
“What possible motive could you—?”
“He’s got that part figured out, too. You’ll see.”
“Why go to all this trouble? Why not just kill you?”
“’Parently things has changed somehow since he sent Cole Stuart and them others after us. He’s changed his mind, don’t want us dead no more. He wants us alive…so’s he can make us suffer.”
She was silent again, and then the suggestion of a smile tugged at her lips. “I said the day we put my Bishop in the ground that Miss Minnie and Mr. Gerald would go out of this world together. That when one of they hearts stopped beatin’, the other’s would, too.” Tears filled her eyes and slid slowly down her cheeks. “They’d a’liked that part.”
CHAPTER 6
2011
Daniel felt a sense of foreboding as he sat in the back of the police cruiser, what Bishop Washington would have called “the presence of evil” when he was a kid.
As the policemen had ushered him toward the doors of the Emerald Ballroom, he’d finally found his voice and bleated, “What’s all this about?”
One of the officers had said they needed to talk to him in connection with—and then rattled off a string of charges. Daniel had heard only one word: rape. After that, he’d been so stunned that nothing else registered.
But now, sitting in the back of the cruiser, he focused, tried to get it straight in his head.
Rape. And aggravated assault. Why on earth would they suspect him of—then it came to him, fell into place like the last tumbler of a lock that springs it open. The little blonde woman in the elevator! She’d been so crazy, there was no telling what she might have said.
Surely, the police wouldn’t believe the story of a whack-job like that, take her word over his. But he couldn’t shake the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.
At the police station, Daniel was relieved of the contents of his pockets. He handed over his car keys, a handful of change and his wallet out of his pants pockets.
"Everything," said the officer, nodding toward his suit jacket.
Daniel took his cell phone out of the top pocket, then stuck his hands down into the bottom pockets as he said, "I don't carry anything in--"
There was something in the left pocket, something cloth. He pulled it out and gaped at it in stunned disbelief. It was a pair of lacy bikini panties! Pink ones, torn. The officer snatched it out of his palm and held it up like a mouse by the tail.
Daniel was almost too flabbergasted to form words. "I don't...I have no idea how that got there. I didn't--"
"Save it," the officer said, then ushered Daniel unceremoniously into a police lineup. He was number four of five men standing in front of a height chart facing a mirror.
He didn’t have to wait long for the verdict. As soon as he stepped out into the hallway, a plainclothes officer he’d not seen before told him, “Daniel Burke, we need to ask you some questions. The victim has picked you out of the lineup as the man who raped and assaulted her earlier this evening.”
“Someone says I…raped…?” Daniel’s breath caught in his throat, and he couldn’t continue.
“Do you wish to have an attorney present before questioning?”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Are you saying that you give up your right to an attorney during questioning?”
“What do I need an attorney for? This is a mistake. I didn’t hurt anybody.”
Without so much as a “come with me,” the officer took him by the arm and ushered him down the hallway to a door at the end. The room behind the door looked like every interrogation room in every cop show or movie Daniel had ever seen.
A wooden table, bare. Three chairs around it. There was no two-way mirror on the wall, though, and Daniel was disappointed about that. Wasn’t there supposed to be a mirror? He should demand a mirror. No mirror, no questioning. Game over.
Daniel grabbed his thoughts, sensing a freight-train rush toward hysteria and tried to think rationally. What evidence could they possibly have against him? He hadn’t done anything. What kind of idiot cop would take the word of a crazy woman over the minister of one of the biggest churches in America?
Daniel was told to have a seat, that somebody would be with him shortly.
“Shortly” turned out to be more than two hours, during which Daniel cycled through every conceivable emotion, broke into a cold sweat, almost hyperventilated—all for the edification and amusement of the video camera that was obviously this room’s equivalent of a two-way mirror. It had been strategically placed too high for him to rip it off the wall had he been the kind of man disposed to ripping things off walls. During the last fifteen minutes of his stay in the room, however, he was considering whether or not he could reach it if he climbed up on one of the chairs.
Two men in sport coats came into the room. One was about fifty, balding, with sharp, angular features, and the other was short, with a face like a ferret. Daniel decided on the spot that he suffered from a raging case of little-man syndrome.
“I’m Detective Donald Bizanski,” said Angular Face. “And this is Detective Herb Fowler.”
Fowler didn’t even nod, just placed a folder and a laptop on the table, pulled out a chair directly across from Daniel and sat down.
“Would you like something to drink—coffee, water, a soft drink?” Bizanski asked.
Good cop. Which meant the little ferret was Bad Cop.
“No, I’m not thirsty. I want to get this all straightened out so I can go home. My little girl’s with a housekeeper, and she'll be waiting up. I always tuck her in bed at night and say her prayers with her.”
Daniel couldn’t help that last bit. If ever in his life he’d felt the need to sound “religious” and “holy” it was right now.
“We’ll give you time to make arrangements for your little girl,” said Fowler. “You’re going to be staying with us for a while.”
Daniel felt that pounding again, the hammer blows of heartbeats he was sure moved his shirt with every stroke. He didn’t mean to sound frightened when he spoke, but he knew he did, and he hated it.
“Why? I haven’t done anything.”
“You’ll have a chance to tell your side of the story,” said Bizanski.
“What story? I don’t have any idea what you guys are talking about.”
Bad cop opened the folder on the table in front of him and removed a nametag and pitched it across the table toward Daniel.
“Recognize this?”
“Of course I recognize it. It’s my nametag. I lost it when—” When had he lost it? He couldn’t recall.
“When what?” Fowler pressed.
“I don’t know for sure. But I think it was…Why does it matter where I lost my nametag?”
The detective reached into the folder again and pulled out the pair of torn pink panties Daniel had found in his coat pocket.
"I don't know how those panties got in my pocket," Daniel said, hearing how phony that sounded even in his own ears, like a line of bad dialogue from a black-and-white movie. "I know how that sounds, but it's the truth. I never saw those--"
"The victim has identified them. She said the guy who raped her ripped them off her and kept them--as a souvenir."
"Victim?" Daniel's mind was spinning so fast the friction might set his head on fire.
The officer reached into the folder a third time and brought out four eight-by-ten photographs and placed them on the table in front of Daniel, one at a time, like a Las Vegas blackjack dealer.