Blood of Angels (18 page)

I hold up my ID. “Assistant DA Thomas Dennehy,” I say. “This is Fiona Towns, pastor of the church.”

The officer walks to me cautiously, takes my ID, then holsters his gun. “What's an assistant DA doin' down here at this hour?”

“My job.”

He peers at Fiona. “She OK?”

I stand. “She's not hurt physically. I think she's in shock. Dispatch says the EMTs are on their way.”

He nods. “So what happened in here?”

“Something blew out one of the stained-glass windows. I was in the sanctuary with the pastor when it happened.”

“Just the two of you?”

“Yeah.”

He raises an eyebrow but nods. “Bomb squad got scrambled. The base is only ten blocks away, so they'll be here any second. Is there anybody else in the place?”

“I don't think so.”

“Let's get her out of here,” the cop says. “This whole place could go up in another blast.” We each take a side and get Fiona out the door and down the steps to the parking lot behind the church. The EMTs are already pulling in, another cop car behind them. We hand Fiona over to the EMTs, who sit her down in the back of their vehicle. She's conscious but not responsive. One of the technicians gets a pulse and looks up at me. “It's thirty-five, but steady.”

“It was slower before,” I say.

He nods. “Yeah, a pulse that slow sounds scary, but we see it all the time when there's been a traumatic experience. Just gonna take her a while to come back around.”

“I'm OK,” Fiona says, slurring her speech a little. “Where's Thomas?”

“Right here,” I say, taking her hand. “How are you?”

“I'm OK.” She starts to get up off the back of the truck, but the EMT gently restrains her.

“Hang on a little while,” he says. “You're not quite cleared for takeoff.” He takes her pulse again and looks up, smiling. “Yeah, she's gonna be fine. She's already at forty-two. Give her twenty minutes.”

The bomb squad truck arrives, shouldering its way past the cop cars, and parks, taking up a fourth of the small lot. Six officers spill out, three in dark blue search suits and helmets. Behind them come two yapping German shepherds. Fiona looks at the dogs and turns pale. “Look, let's put her inside the truck for a while, let her get her bearings,” the EMT says. He leans Fiona back into the vehicle and closes the doors, securing her from the growing crowd of officers.

One of the bomb squad officers, a burly-looking forty-year-old man with a flattop, introduces himself. “Victor Yenko,” he says. “What happened?”

I replay the incident, and Yenko nods. “Nothing since then?”

“No.”

“All right. There's probably nothing else to this, but we'll go through the building anyway, just to be safe.” Yenko tells his team to enter the building, leading with the dogs. The officers in search suits snap down their ballistic face shields and walk up the steps through the doors. The building is so large—especially the labyrinth of rooms and storage areas on the upper floors—I figure it'll take at least twenty minutes to search, even with three men. Once the dogs are gone, the EMT opens the back of his truck. Fiona is sitting up, drinking water from a bottle. “She's doing good,” the technician says. “Another few minutes, she'll be fine. Not to drive, though.”

“That's not a problem.”

We sit on the edge of the EMT truck for the next fifteen minutes while I give a statement to one of the officers. Eventually, Yenko comes out of the back door and walks across the parking lot toward us. He holds up a black piece of metal. “Rudimentary pipe bomb, very low tech,” he says. “Not much to it, really. Just some metal, black powder, and pressed paper. You can find directions on how to make it on the Internet in about five minutes.” He looks back at the building. “Figured out how they got it up there, too. There's a little doorway, leads right to a ledge that runs underneath the windows on the side. They probably used it when they were putting the glass in.” He looks at Fiona. “The lady OK?”

“She's fine.”

“Well, we're gonna be here half the night. Got to collect evidence, document everything. A bomb in a church automatically classifies as a hate crime.”

Fiona gingerly steps out of the ambulance and looks up at the building. “Someone wanted to blow us up,” she says quietly. “A house of God.”

“That don't mean much to some people,” Yenko says. “Look, why don't you take the reverend here home, if she can travel. Like I say, we'll be here most of the night. But you're gonna want to get that window boarded up, soon as you can. If it rains on you, there's gonna be an even bigger mess.”

“I'm not leaving,” Fiona says. “I need to be here.” She starts toward the church, but a spate of dizziness leans her hard against me.

“Whoa, there,” the EMT says. “What you need is some rest. A good night's sleep ought to be about right. And don't let her drive, not until midmorning, anyhow.”

“We can't let you in the building until we're finished,” Yenko says. “So all you could do is sit outside and do nothing.”

“They're right,” I say quietly. “Get some rest, and you can do some good tomorrow.”

She looks up at me. “This is the Nation, isn't it? They hate me because of Moses.”

“What about it, officer?” I ask. “Think this is Nation?”

He holds up a piece of the bomb. “Low brains, low yield. Right up their alley. And those folks can hold a grudge.”

“Let's go,” I say, putting my arm around Fiona. “We'll get you home and get you something to eat.”

She relents, letting me guide her to the Ford. I fasten her seat belt, and she settles into the bucket seat. I come around and get in. “I'm sorry, Thomas,” she says.

“What for?”

“For what happened. You could have been hurt.”

I start the truck. “I will say this, Towns. You're a hell of a date.”

I back the pickup past the official vehicles and pull back out onto Church Street, heading toward Belle Meade, the old-money neighborhood where the church's parsonage is located. Fiona leans back in her seat, her eyes closed. I drive a few blocks toward the freeway and hear her breathing steady as she drifts off.
Good. Let it go for a while.
I drive south down I-65, turn off on Harding, and wander through the ever-increasing property values toward the parsonage. It's hard to miss the irony of Fiona living in the bastion of a South that really doesn't exist anymore, a place where wealthy housewives chair brunches for charity and throw money-raisers for the symphony. I turn left onto Glendale and pull to a stop. “Towns? You got to wake up.”

Her eyes flutter open, and she looks at me. “Where are we?”

“The parsonage, or nearly. I know it's on Glendale, but I can't recall the number.”

“It's 625.”

“Just a few blocks, then.” Fiona pulls herself up in the seat and presses her hair back behind her ears. “You OK?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

It's less than a minute before we pull into the parsonage's driveway. The house, an expansive, single-story, stone home on a large, level lot, is set back from the street by about forty yards. The driveway is circular, and I follow the curve halfway and stop by the front door. “Nice place for a radical like you,” I say, putting the truck in park.

“It came in handy, getting Moses out.”

“Yeah. Handy.”

We sit in the silence of the truck for several seconds. I can't help thinking that I'm days away from taking her apart on the stand, and if I do my job well, I will probably send her to prison. It seems intolerable, but there's no way out. Recusing myself from a murder case now would send a message to every defense attorney in town that the department has lost its nerve, and worse, lost its faith in the very death penalty it has asked juries to invoke more than a hundred times in the last thirty years. And even though the woman sitting on the other side of the truck has moved me, I'm still not convinced she wouldn't lie to save Bol's life. “Well,” I say, quietly. “Here we are.”

She looks over at me a moment, then leans over and kisses my cheek. I feel her lips on my face, warm and soft. She opens the passenger side door of the truck. “You don't really believe in the death penalty, Dennehy. You can't and be the man you are.”

I stare ahead without blinking. “If you take the stand for Bol, I'll do what I have to do.”

I feel her watching me for a long time. “I know that,” she says, at last. “And it breaks my heart.” She steps out of the truck. “I'll get my car back from your place on my own,” she says. “Don't worry about it.” She shuts the door and walks away.

BY MORNING THE RAIN
clears out, leaving behind a stifling, humid mist. One day's relief, and it's back to the sweatbox. I make a light breakfast and wash down the day's Zoloft with coffee. It's a weekend, so I would normally have Jazz with me. It turned out to be a blessing she went to Orlando with Dr. Knife; at least she wasn't here while her daddy was almost getting blown up. I check my watch; pretty soon she and her mother will be starting their second day of theme park attractions while the good doctor gets his lunch bought by the New and Improved Liposuction Company. I shake my head. Bec will be back tomorrow night, and she'll find out what's happened soon enough. I can picture her response:
See, Thomas? That's why I left you. Dr. Knife hardly ever gets blown up.

Fiona's Volvo is no longer in my driveway; somehow, she's already retrieved it. At ten I call Rayburn and tell him what happened last night. He freaks, predictably, but I get him talked down. “It's just some Nationites pissed off about Bol,” I tell him. “They want to make a statement.”

“But I don't get why you agreed to go down there in the first place,” he says.

“She asked me. I said yes.”

“Why, for God's sake?”

“Because Buchanan's not smart enough to pull off the Hale thing on his own. He looks good, but he's kind of a lightweight.”

“Yeah, I had the same impression.”

“On the other hand, Towns has guts, brains, and principles. So I played along to get some answers about what's really going on.”

“And?”

And I almost kissed her,
I think. “All she wanted to do was beg me to drop the death penalty on Bol.”

“I assume you made it clear that ship has sailed.”

“Yeah. I made it clear.”

Rayburn pauses. “All right, dammit. I'm not going to start second-guessing you now. But for God's sake, Thomas, watch your ass, ok? We don't want any more confusion than we already got.”

I click off the phone and walk to the glass doors looking out on the backyard. I stare into the trees behind the house, thinking about what I would do if I quit the DA's office. I have thirty-eight thousand dollars in the bank. It would tide me over until I sorted things out. I run through the usual midlife crisis suspects: bonefishing captain in the Keys, inner-city school teacher, back to college to study something else. None of them feel right, since I'm a prosecutor, expert at what I do, trained to point the state's finger in a court of law. “So,” I say to the living room. “It's as clear as mud.”

I get dressed, head to Dad's truck, and let its sweet V-8—a well-tuned engine being the answer to most male conundrums—solve my problems, at least for a while. I hop in the truck, fire it up, and gently give it some throttle, just to listen to the engine respond.
Hell, yeah. Let's go, Pops. You and me. Lemme tell you how I ported the cylinder heads on this baby. And you can tell me what to do with the rest of my life. Deal?

I back out of the garage and drive across suburban Williamson County, passing more or less identical subdivisions. Stones River. River Glen. River Farms. Each with a house stamped on its own quarter acre of land, a two-story box of furniture surrounded by a patch of grass. One thing I do know: a bigger box and more grass isn't the answer. Hell, my father had less box and grass than I do, and he was the happiest, most contented guy I ever knew. Dr. Knife seems happy, but he's Greek and rich and married to my beautiful ex-wife, so what the fuck else would he be? Maybe the guy actually enjoys carving excess skin off people's jowls. I turn the truck down the packed four-lane road that rolls through Franklin's busy shopping district. Williamson County's growing explosively, and it seems like every month the traffic doubles.
Bone fishing. I could live on the boat. No wasted space. Efficient.

I decide to drive down to the DPC to see the hole that pipe bomb put in the building. It would be a hell of a mess, and with the rain continuing sporadically through the night, the interior would be pretty much a catastrophe.
Thirty bucks' worth of mischief, thirty thousand dollars' worth of repair. It's a hell of a lot more expensive to be on the right side of things, sometimes.
I pull out onto I-65 and head north, into town. There's no rush hour, so the Ford cruises at seventy-five miles per hour on a stretch of highway I normally pick my way through at one-fourth the speed. I take the Church Street exit into downtown, drive nine blocks, and turn right onto Fifth. I slow and see a medium-size ladder truck parked beside the church. A small group of people are gathered around, rubbernecking. Fiona is there, too; whatever the residual effects of last night might be, they're not slowing her down. She's arguing—it seems like every time I see her she's arguing about something—with a stocky man in dark blue coveralls. A group of workmen are hanging around near the truck, like they're waiting for orders. From their bored expressions, they've been there a while. I pull the truck behind the church and park in the small lot. Fiona's Volvo is there, but there aren't any other cars.

Fiona sees me come around the building and stops what she's saying, midsentence. She smiles, which turns on some pheromone-chemistry thing that I want to shut off, but can't, because there's no switch. You can intellectualize the shit out of the moment a woman's smile starts to matter to you, but it doesn't help much.

I walk up to her. “So you're OK.” Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and she's wearing black jeans and a light T-shirt that says
Sprawl Mart.
Other than a small bandage on her bare arm, she's unscathed.

“You, too,” she says.

“You came out and got your car pretty early.”

“I got a little sleep and was fine. I took a taxi out and drove here.” She looks up at the hole where the stained-glass window was before the explosion. “This can't wait.”

The workman—his name is Ross, according to the tag stitched into his shirt—interrupts. “Look, while you two are having your little moment, I still got a crew of four sitting on their butts. So are we gonna work this out or not?”

“What's the problem?” I ask.

“The problem is the lack of forty-five hundred bucks, pal. That's the charge for putting three people up on that roof, clearing the remaining glass, covering it with a temporary waterproof tarp, removing the other cracked windows, and coming back Wednesday with clear replacements.”

“Other windows?”

Ross points up to the windows. “There's hairline fractures in the two adjacent to the one that fell in. They could go at any time. They got to come out, or you're gonna have lawsuits out the yingyang.”

“I don't have forty-five hundred dollars,” Fiona says. “Or anything like it.”

“Then we load up and go home, lady.”

Fiona's face flushes. “This is a church, Mr.…what was your name again?”

“Moore. Ross Moore.”

“This is a church, Mr. Moore. The interior of this building is of immense historical value. Surely we can work something out here.”

“We sure can, for forty-five hundred bucks.” Moore shakes his head. “Look, you're a nice lady. But I put somebody up on that roof, insurance, workman's comp got to be paid. I can't budge on this thing.” He turns to his crew. “Load it up, fellas. We're heading out.”

“I can't believe this,” Fiona says quietly. “I absolutely cannot believe this is happening.”

It's the middle of summer in Nashville, there's a gaping hole in the roof of the church, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that air that humid will generate mold inside the sanctuary within days, even if Fiona manages to get everything covered inside. It's a disaster waiting to happen. I walk up behind Moore and put my arm around him as he walks. This is not a rational choice, but the smile matters now, so fuck it. “Forty-five hundred bucks is pretty steep,” I say.

“So is the pitch of that roof, hombre. That's the price.”

“I'd hate to think you were gouging this woman because of her desperate situation. Me being an assistant district attorney and all.”

Moore's footsteps grind to a halt. He looks up at me warily. “You with the DA?”

I squint up at the roof, gripping his shoulder firmly. “Workmen's comp regulations are a pain in the ass, aren't they, Ross?”

“Yes, sir, that's a fact.”

“And when I think about all the licenses and fees, and how easy it is to get hung up on a codes violation…I mean, a job can get shut down for days at a time.” I shake my head, eyes on the roof. “You know, there's a door up there that opens up to the ledge. You really don't need the ladder truck.”

Moore squints, too, making a pretty good show of it. “Yeah, I guess I see that. Still have to put tackle on the workmen, secure them to the building.”

“Sure, no question. But I imagine the charge for the truck would be—what, about a grand?”

“A grand? Nope, not hardly, not for the truck.”

I squeeze his shoulder, eyes still on the roof. “Yeah, I'd say it's about a grand.”

“You would?”

“Yeah, I would.”

Moore glances over at Fiona. “You reckon she's got the thirty-five hundred?”

I pull out my billfold and slip him my Visa card.

He looks at the card. “Yeah, that'll do.”

“I had a feeling.”

Moore heads off to his crew, and I walk back over to Fiona. “Turns out Mr. Moore is a fan of architecture,” I say. “Once he understood this place was on the National Registry of Historic Places, I couldn't talk him out of doing the job.”

She looks at me skeptically. “What did you do, Dennehy? You realize I don't have the money.”

“I told you. He considers it a contribution to the cityscape.”

“
Cityscape.
He used that word.”

“Yeah.”

“My God, Dennehy, you're a bad liar.”

She starts off toward Moore, and I grab her arm. “Everything doesn't have to be a battle, does it?” She stops and watches the workmen beginning to unload their ropes. A couple strap on safety belts and start toward the structure. “Just say thank you, Towns.”

She looks at me. “Thank you. Now tell me why.”

I smile. “Something somebody taught me. You go to battle, and you buy your adversary a drink when it's over. It's not personal.”

“This was an expensive drink.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“So I owe you one. A drink, I mean.” She pauses. “I suppose I should be glad it's not…personal.”

There it is again; the surpassing desire, some kind of voodoo chemistry drawing me to her.
Last time I felt like this, a bomb exploded. Time to go now.
“I'll see you, Towns. I'm glad you're OK.”

“You, too. You look…well.”

I smile. “I look well.”

“I mean you're OK.”

“Yeah. I'm OK.” I walk off, passing by Moore as I go.

“All set, Mr. Dennehy. We'll take care of it.”

I take my Visa card from him and push it back in my billfold. “You need anything downtown, Ross, you just give me a call.”

On the other side of the building, I stop and catch my breath.
I look
well.
What the hell is that?
She looked well, too. Way better than reverends have any right to look. I walk to the edge of the far side of the church and turn right again to complete the square. My car's up ahead, and there's somebody standing near it. I stop and watch; the guy is looking inside the driver's-side window, his face pressed against the glass. He steps back and gives the truck a once-over, like he's an aficionado. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and starts walking back toward the church. It's Robert, the so-called ex-addict who helps Fiona around the church.

“Robert!” I call his name, and he looks around, his dark, unblinking eyes staring out from the facial hair. He doesn't move as I approach. I smell him at ten yards; at five, it's a serious wall of scent, and I stop.

“Well,” he says. “It's you, Skippy.”

“That's right.” Unlike the time before, he's definitely glazed. His pupils are a mile wide, and his eyes are glassy. “You like the truck, Robert?”

“It's nice. It's bitchin'. It's a completely bitchin' ride.”

“I saw you checking it out.”

He smiles, exposing a row of horrifying teeth, a telltale sign of time spent on the pipe. “And I saw you looking at Fiona.”

I watch him, trying to read his face. “You ought to get a shave, Robert. It's too damn hot for a beard like that.”

“Yeah. Maybe I'll do that.”

“I understand from Fiona you've had a little drug problem in the past.”

His eyes darken. “Telling tales on me, the reverend. No matter, Skippy. All behind me now. I'm straight as a whistle. Clean as an arrow. And all because of her.”

“Reverend Towns?”

He smiles and opens his arms wide. “Don't you know, Skippy? She's the patron saint of lost souls. She's my reason for being.”

 

SOMETIMES
,
I HAVE TO ADMIT
, I get the whole totalitarian thing. It's so damn efficient. Somebody pisses you off, you haul them in, question them awhile—no witnesses, naturally—and you find out what the hell's going on in their weird little mind. I pull back out onto Fifth, turning away from the church toward the river. Totalitarianism may be an occasionally tempting prospect for a prosecutor, but here, in Nashville, Tennessee, people like Robert the ex-addict are free to annoy the hell out of whomever they please, as long as they don't break any laws when they do it. The little fucker's got things figured out pretty well, actually. He's a guest of Fiona, so he can't be arrested for vagrancy while he's near the church. It's sanctuary, in the old sense of the word.