The Switch

by Sandra Brown

  Brother Gabriel gazed back at him, mildly inquisitive.

  "There's sort of a bond between officers of the law," Ritchey explained. "Like a brotherhood. If one asks a favor, you try to grant it."

  "Blessed are the peacemakers," Brother Gabriel quoted. "For they shall be called the children of God."

  Ritchey smiled. "Well, I've met more than a few who didn't act much like children of God."

  Brother Gabriel returned his smile, showing two rows of dazzling teeth. "I admire keepers of the law. How can I help?"

  "I got a call from Texas this morning. Dallas. A homicide detective named Lawson." He related the story as Lawson had told it to him.

  Brother Gabriel displayed no reaction until he had finished. Then he shuddered slightly. "Ghastly. I'll pray for the souls of both the victim and the disturbed individual who killed her. Mr. Hancock, please add them to today's prayer list."

  Ritchey turned his head, surprised to see Mr. Hancock seated on a divan on the far side of the room. He'd been so quiet, Ritchey hadn't realized he was still with them.

  "Of course, Brother Gabriel."

  The preacher looked back at Ritchey. "I'm still in the dark as to how this concerns me."

  "Well." He shifted uncomfortably because of the chair, as well as Brother Gabriel's penetrating green stare. "According to his telephone records, this Dale Gordon had placed several calls to the Temple. Ten, to be exact. Lawson wanted to know if you could shed any light on that."

  "But his case is solved, isn't it?"

  "He said he was just tying up loose ends."

  "Loose ends?"

  "That's what he said."

  "I myself detest loose ends."

  "I'm sure it's only a technicality."

  Brother Gabriel nodded in agreement. "Mr. Hancock, would you please check our telephone log?"

  "Certainly."

  Hancock moved to a wood cabinet that was as large as a mobile home standing on end. Behind the wide double doors were three computer monitors and an array of equipment. Hancock sat down at the built-in desktop and began typing on one of the keyboards.

  "Fortunately for you and your colleague in Dallas, we keep records of all incoming calls," Brother Gabriel explained.

  "I didn't figure this would be any big inconvenience to you."

  "None at all. You declined something to drink earlier. While we're waiting for Mr. Hancock to retrieve the records, perhaps I could talk you into changing your mind."

  More relaxed now that his official duty had been executed with no unpleasant repercussions, Ritchey said that something cold would be nice. "If it's no trouble."

  "No trouble." Brother Gabriel pressed a button on the telephone panel and a feminine voice answered. "Send in a cart of cold drinks, please."

  The cart must have been prepared ahead of time. Either that or one was perpetually ready, because barely had Brother Gabriel made the request than Ritchey heard the door behind him open.

  "Ah, Mary, bring it over."

  When Ritchey turned his head, he did a double-take. Mary was in her late teens. She had a small, petite face surrounded by an abundance of glossy dark curls. She was dressed in the royal blue uniform of the Temple school. The color flattered her fair complexion, rosy cheeks, and dark eyes. She glanced shyly at the sheriff but kept her focus on Brother Gabriel as she rolled the cart toward the massive desk.

  "What would you like, Sheriff?" Brother Gabriel asked. "Uh, anything's fine."

  The girl opened a can and poured the fizzy soft drink into a glass of ice. She passed it and a small linen napkin to the sheriff. He tried to keep from staring at her as he took them from her with a mumbled thanks.

  Brother Gabriel patted his side. Happily obedient, the girl moved around the desk to stand beside his massive chair. He slid one arm around her waist and pulled her closer. He spread his other hand over her stomach, which was distended by advanced pregnancy.

  "Mary is one of our special treasures, Sheriff Ritchey," the preacher boasted. "How long have you been with me, Mary?" "Since I was ten," she answered in a small voice.

  "I renamed her Mary because she reminds me of Renaissance paintings of the Madonna. Isn't she beautiful?" Ritchey nodded dumbly. His drink remained un-tasted in his hand.

  "She's done exceptionally well," Brother Gabriel said, his hand beginning to stroke her. "She's been an example to other children, a good student, a delight to her teachers. In fact, she's excelled at everything she's been taught. Everything." Playfully he tugged on one of her springy curls and she giggled. Then he leaned forward and laid a kiss on her protruding abdomen. Chuckling, he added, "As you can see, Sheriff, we're exceptionally fond of each other."

  Hotly embarrassed, Sheriff Ritchey replied in a gruff voice, "Yes, I can see that."

  "I hope to keep Mary with me here at the Temple for a long, long time. Oh, Mr. Hancock, thank you."

  The assistant laid the computer printout on the desk. As Brother Gabriel scanned it, he continued to caress Mary's swollen belly, from beneath her voluptuous breasts to the lower point where it met her thighs, in a manner that suggested familiarity and intimacy. The girl gazed at the evangelist's bent head with absolute trust and adoration.

  Max Ritchey's pounding heart was in his throat. The drinking glass had begun to sweat in his tight grip. He was appalled but fixated, repelled but fascinated. He couldn't tear his eyes away.

  "Oh, yes. Mr. Gordon," Brother Gabriel murmured after a time. "Now my memory is refreshed. A very sad story indeed." He took the girl's hand and laid it on his chest, patting it affectionately. To his dazed guest, he said, "Sheriff Ritchey, when you tell Mr. Gordon's sad story to Lawson of the Dallas Police Department, I'm sure he'll be convinced, as I was, that Dale Gordon was a pathetic pervert and lunatic."

  CHAPTER 14

  Two days after Gillian Lloyd's murder and Dale Gordon's suicide, Lawson was closing the case file. His last official duty was to bring Melina Lloyd up to date. He opened a can of Dr Pepper, took a pull on it, and placed the call from his littered desk in the Capers Unit.

  After a subdued exchange of hellos, he said, "Lab tests confirmed what we assumed. Your sister's blood was on Gordon's knife. His fingerprints were the only ones on the hilt. They matched the ones we lifted from the windowsill and the glass in her kitchen. The semen on the pajama bottoms was his. None on her."

  The concentration of bath oil found on her skin indicated that she had bathed recently, probably just prior to going to bed. Even if Hart was lying and they'd had sexual relations, evidence of it had been washed off. In any case, there'd been no evidence-of sexual assault. Gordon hadn't raped her. Lawson considered that a small favor from the creep.

  Melina said, "I don't question the physical evidence, Detective Lawson. I'm convinced, as you are, that Dale Gordon was the culprit. What I question is his motive. Why did he kill her?"

  "I'm afraid the answer to that died with him. I've made an educated guess. Gordon was disturbed, one of those troubled individuals that unfortunately slipped through the system. He didn't have a police record. He'd never been in trouble. He'd had no disputes with neighbors or associates. He had a good job. In fact, when it came to science, he was brilliant. He'd earned a master's degree in biology at UT Arlington.

  "But he was a social outcast. According to people we questioned about his background—teachers and former neighbors—he had no male role model growing up. We don't know what happened to his father. His mother was a real trip. She was a domineering religious fanatic who abused him emotionally and I guess we can safely assume physically. Whatever she did, she created a sexually repressed misfit. Ever since she died several years ago, Gordon's lived alone in that derelict apartment.

  "For whatever reason, he obsessed over Gillian. Maybe she was once polite to him and he mistook it for a come-on. Who knows? The guy was delusional on many levels, or why would he strike that crucifixion pose before he died? Anyway, when he saw your sister that night with Hart, it triggered his switch. He short-ci
rcuited."

  "And stabbed her."

  "Twenty-two times. The autopsy report is more or less academic at this point, but I read the pertinent information. The wounds were consistent with the length and shape of the knife blade. The fatal wound was the one to her throat. It severed her carotid artery, which accounted for most of the blood. Another went straight into her heart. Eighteen of the wounds were delivered postmortem. She didn't suffer for long if at all."

  "It should have been me," she said quietly.

  "Can't have you thinking that way, Melina." He shifted the telephone from one ear to the other and took a swig of the Dr Pepper. She would probably carry this guilt around with her for the rest of her life. That wasn't right. Or fair. Then again, switching places was a damned silly thing for grown women to do.

  "How'd he get the pictures of her?" she asked.

  He hadn't shown them to her, but he'd told her about them. "Through a tiny peephole drilled into the wall between his lab and one of the examination rooms at the clinic. Staff there were mortified."

  "As they should be." "Yeah."

  A silence as long as a freight train stretched between them.

  He cleared his throat lightly. "Just thought you'd want to know all this before I close the file," he told her.

  "It doesn't seem..."

  A victim's family was always reluctant to close the file. Even in an open-and-shut case like this one, they didn't want to accept that their loved one had died for no other reason than someone wanting them dead. The life of their loved one had been squandered on a fit of jealousy, or greed, or the whim of a wacko. He didn't blame them for rejecting the devaluation of a life they had held dear. All the same, he dreaded hearing the familiar refrain today. He was bone‑tired, and there were already three other cases on his desk demanding attention.

  But he liked Melina Lloyd. He also respected her. She had shown a lot of guts, and he admired pluck like that. So he heard himself encouraging her to say what was on her mind. "Doesn't seem what?"

  "Doesn't seem characteristic of a socially withdrawn man to commit a crime this bold. It doesn't seem like Dale Gordon would have had the courage. The balls, if you'll pardon the expression. Was there anything in his history to suggest a latent violence?"

  "No, but I followed up on some phone calls he'd made to a TV preacher."

  "Which one?" "Brother Gabriel."

  "Blond hair, lots of teeth?"

  "That's the one. Gordon was a fan. Or a follower, as the case may be. Brother Gabriel's headquarters is in New Mexico. The Temple, it's called. Anyhow, Gordon had phoned there numerous times, but there was a concentration of calls over the past month. I had the sheriff out there check on it."

  "And?"

  "He talked to the preacher himself, who remembered Dale Gordon. Now, this is a man who has thousands of people calling him, but he knew exactly who the sheriff was talking about. Seems Gordon would call at all hours—daytime, middle of the night, early in the morning. His phone bills bear it out."

  "What was he calling for?"

  "Prayers. Mostly about his lust."

  "Sexual lust?"

  "I'll spare you the details as related to me by the sheriff, as told to him by Brother Gabriel. Pretty sick stuff. Anyway, Gordon had called in the wee hours of the morning of Gillian's murder. He told the preacher he was going to do a bad thing. Previously, the `bad thing' had referred to masturbation, followed by self-flagellation."

  "Good Lord."

  "As I said, the mother had done a real number on him. He equated sexual desire and fantasies about women, in this case Gillian, to sin. He probably resented your sister for arousing him. In his mind, she was his downfall. She was keeping him impure, which was in direct conflict with his religious fervor."

  "So he graduated from masturbation to murder."

  "It's twisted. Because while he probably resented her, he was obsessed. When he spotted her with Hart, he flipped out. Brother Gabriel regretted hearing about Gordon's suicide, but he admitted that he wasn't surprised. He had counseled Gordon that night but wasn't sure his message had sunk in. He said Gordon was farther 'round the bend that night than usual, so he assigned one of his hotline counselors to call him back a couple hours later. Gordon claimed that he was fine, that he felt much better than before, that his talk with Brother Gabriel had given him renewed hope."

  "But he killed himself shortly afterward."

  "Yeah."

  "I'm glad he did," she stated flatly. "If Dale Gordon hadn't killed himself, I would have killed him."

  Lawson didn't sanction anyone taking the law into their own hands or exacting their personal brand of justice, but he couldn't honestly say he blamed Melina for feeling as she did. He added the autopsy report to the file and mentally stamped it closed. "I think we've covered everything." "Thank you for filling me in."

  "I understand you had the body cremated."

  "Yesterday. As soon as the medical examiner released it. I'd done the necessary paperwork ahead of time. There's a memorial service tomorrow afternoon." She cited the place and time.

  He tried never to attend the funeral of a victim of a homicide he was investigating, unless the case was unsolved and he needed to see who among the mourners might be a viable suspect.

  "I'm terribly sorry about all this, Melina. You have my personal condolences and those of the department."

  "Thank you."

  They hung up, but it was almost with regret that he added the file to the stack of others waiting to be stored. Closing the case meant there was no need for further contact with Melina Lloyd. He would have enjoyed meeting her under different circumstances. In a social setting.

  Of course, she would never have looked twice at a short, stocky burnout like him. She outclassed him several notches. She'd go more for the Christopher Hart type. Apparently Gillian had.

  Hart could fly rockets, but he couldn't lie for shit. The fiancé might have been duped, but Lawson didn't believe for one second that Gillian had left the astronaut's hotel suite without trying out the bed first. A guy like Hart didn't "talk" to a woman until two, three o'clock in the morning. Not a woman who looked like Gillian Lloyd. And Melina.

  Reaching for the next unsolved case file, Lawson muttered, "Lucky son of a bitch."

  Brother Gabriel was in repose in his palatial bed. His hands were folded over his chest. His eyes were closed.

  Had they been opened, he would have been looking at the frescoed ceiling above his bed, which was similar to the one in the outer room. Both depicted his vision of the afterlife. His idea of heaven was more prurient than conventional religion conceived it. With the exception of the rays of sun piercing a bank of clouds, the painting above his bed could have been an oil rendition of a Roman orgy.

  The women, captured in blatantly erotic poses, were all beautiful in face and form. Their apparel was diaphanous if there at all. By contrast there were few men, and all were physically inferior, looking more like eunuchs than gladiators.

  The Christ figure at the heart of the painting bore a striking resemblance to Brother Gabriel, a.k.a. Alvin Medford Conway.

  He'd been born in Arkansas forty-six years earlier, the youngest child of a junkyard owner and his wife who already had seven other children to house, clothe, and feed. Little Alvin didn't get much attention and was more or less free to wander the streets of the small town, looking for mischief or other ways in which to amuse himself.

  It was on one such aimless expedition that he found the church.

  The quaint little protestant church was located on the edge of town where Main Street merged with the state highway. The white clapboard chapel was set apart from the neat graveyard by a low picket fence. The slender black steeple had a tiny cross on top. Its proudest feature were the six tall, narrow stained-glass windows, three on each side of the sanctuary. Twelve rows of hard wooden pews were divided by a center aisle covered with a runner of ratty red carpet that led to the altar.

  Behind the communion rail rose the pu
lpit, and it was behind this pulpit every Sunday morning that the robed minister stood above the congregation. As they desultorily waved their paper fans provided as a courtesy by the funeral home, the preacher handed down instructions to his flock on how to live. He told them how to tithe their paychecks. How to rear the children by not sparing the rod. How to be charitable to those less fortunate than themselves. How to stop cussing, drinking, gambling, and dancing. How to start witnessing. How not to covet your neighbor's ass, or his ox, or his wife.

  If there was an ox in their town, young Alvin Conway didn't know about it. He wasn't even sure what an ox was, but that point of the message was inconsequential. However, the remainder of that sermon on coveting was monumentally significant. It changed the course of young Alvin Conway's life.

  But it was the stained-glass windows that had first attracted the eleven-year-old to the church. That July day, when it was so hot outside the sky was white, and Alvin was looking for something to do to pass the hours till suppertime, he'd happened upon the church. He'd seen it before but had never paid much attention to it. On that airless day, boredom motivated him to stop and take a closer look.

  With his dirty feet planted in a patch of dusty weeds, as he idly scratched at the bull-nettle welt he'd gotten the day before, he'd stood across the road from the church and speculated on what would happen if he threw a rock through one of those pretty, sparkly windows.

  What a hue and cry that would raise! He'd catch hell and probably the strop from his old man. His mama would bawl and carry on and say he was no 'count and would probably wind up in the pen before he turned twenty-one, like his oldest brother. But it would be worth any hell he might catch. At least it would distract his folks from their ongoing argument over the shortage of money and over what to do about Sister, whose boyfriend had knocked her up and now was nowhere to be found. If the law dragged Alvin home, his folks would be forced to take some notice of him for a change.

  He was still weighing the pros and cons of the vandalism when he heard the strains of organ music coming from inside the church. Bravely, he crossed the road, hardly aware of the hot bubbles of tar that burst against the soles of his feet. He crept up the steps of the church and opened the door, just a crack, causing cooler air to blow against his hot, flushed face.