J. Jance - Until Proven Guilty

“Nothing that appears to be important at the moment. Fingerprints from the room are mostly the girl’s and the mother’s. There are a few that belong to other children, but no adult prints.”

“What makes you say McDonald’s?” Peters asked.

“It may not be McDonald’s, but it was one of those fast-food joints. Hamburger aside, Baker’s office says she was generally malnourished, had been for some time.”

Janice reached across me to the end of the table and picked up a folded newspaper. She opened it to the editorial section. “I read this coming in on the bus this morning.” She handed me the paper, open to Maxwell Cole’s “City Beat” column.

I skimmed through an emotional portrayal of Suzanne Barstogi as a woman of unshakable faith and courage, one who was walking through a time of personal trial supported by her beliefs and the willing help of fellow church members. It spoke eloquently of the group’s communal sharing of food and heartbreak. It told in heartrending prose how the congregation as a whole had spent the previous afternoon on its knees praying for the murderer’s immortal soul.

Murderers are always the first victims in Maxwell Cole’s book, unless the person pulling the trigger happens to be a cop.

I finished reading the column and handed the paper to Peters.

“They sound like wonderful people, don’t they?” Janice said with just a hint of sarcasm tinging her voice. “Just the kind of people you’d expect to systematically abuse a child for years. The broken bones she had would be consistent with a highly abusive environment. Kids that age don’t break bones. They have too much cartilage. Are there other kids stuck in that mess?”

I thought about Jeremiah and how afraid he had been. His fear was not unfounded. I was convinced the bruise on his forearm was not an unusual occurrence. Janice finished her cigarette and rose, dismissing us. “I don’t have anything else right now, but I’ll call if anything turns up.”

“So what now, coach?” Peters asked as we waited in the elevator lobby.

“I vote we go back to Ballard. This time we’ll get inside Faith Tabernacle if we have to have a search warrant to do it.”

Ballard is a predominantly Scandinavian enclave about five miles from downtown Seattle. It sits across Salmon Bay from Magnolia. You get there by crossing the Ballard Bridge, a drawbridge used to let through sleek sailing vessels as well as stodgy, loaded barges on their way to Alaska. If Magnolia is highbrow, Ballard is lowbrow. If Magnolia is known for its upwardly mobile professionals, Ballard is known for its sturdy blue-collar folks who march along, never quite getting ahead but never falling very far behind either. Ballard is pretty much middle America at its best or worst, depending on your point of view.

Faith Tabernacle was a respectable-enough-looking place situated on the corner of Twenty-fourth and Eightieth N.W. in the Loyal Heights area. It was an older church that gave evidence of some recent renovations, the most jarring of which was a neon sign. New gray shingles sparkled, and surrounding trees had been pruned back with a vengeance. Double doors, new but cheap, stood wide open.

The day before, neighbors had told us that it had originally been a Lutheran church. A steady decline in enrollment and a consolidation of congregations had left it vacant for a number of years until purchase by Michael Brodie’s group some six or seven months earlier. Two similarly shaped, parallel buildings had been connected at either end. Half the building was used as a church and half as a parsonage.

The interior of the sanctuary reminded me of a barren medieval church. I’m not a regular visitor of churches, but the ones I have encountered usually have some of the amenities like heat, carpeting, reasonably comfortable pews, that sort of thing. Walking into Faith Tabernacle, the first sensation was one of bone-numbing chill. There was no heat, and the barren concrete floor retained the damp cold from the previous late-spring night. Two banks of rickety benches formed the seating arrangements, with a center aisle between them leading to a raised altar. The benches had no backs on them. If Angel Barstogi had fallen asleep during church, where had Suzanne put her, on a bench or on the cold, bare floor?

At first we thought we were alone, but then a woman emerged from behind a makeshift pulpit. Armed with a scrub brush and a bucket of soapy water, she crawled across the cold surface on hands and knees, diligently scrubbing every inch of the altar, like a buck private preparing for a major inspection.

Peters approached the woman and asked her where we might find Brodie. She motioned with her hand, indicating that she was unable to talk but that we should go through the door on the right of the altar. It led us through a darkened, closetlike room. In the dim light from the doorway behind us we could see a wooden kneeling frame with an open Bible on a stand before it. Other than those two items, the room was empty.

Another door barred the way. I knocked. Beneath my knuckles I found the deep sound of a solid wooden door, not the hollow laminate of the church’s front doors. Pastor Michael himself answered my knock. If he was startled to see us, he certainly covered it well. “Come in,” he said, stepping back and holding the door. “I was just preparing for this afternoon’s service,” he said.

I doubt Peters was surprised by what we found there. I wasn’t. The room could hardly have been called sumptuous, but it was a long way from the grim, unadorned rooms through which we had entered. The contrast was striking. The place was immaculate. There was none of the dirty clutter of Suzanne Barstogi’s house. A well-padded deep brown carpet covered the floor. The two walls that weren’t covered with bookshelves were papered in a tasteful grass cloth. A stately mahogany desk with a brass study lamp dominated the room. An open Bible lay in a halo of light the lamp cast on gleaming wood. Pastor Michael snapped the Bible shut as I approached the desk.

“Won’t you sit down?” he offered.

We sat. I looked at Peters, grim faced and tense. I wondered how this office compared with the Cadillac-driving swami of Broken Springs, Oregon. Peters was holding himself in check, but just barely. “We wanted to see your church,” I said before Peters had a chance to open his mouth. “We thought seeing it might give us some ideas about Angel’s death.”

Brodie’s defenses came up instantly. “Surely you don’t think someone in the church had anything to do with it.”

“We haven’t ruled out anyone so far,” Peters commented stiffly, glancing at Brodie’s hand. Brodie covered the scratched hand with the other one in a pious and, I thought, highly suspicious, manner. Peters noticed it too.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

There was the pause — slight, but enough to be noticeable. “Oh, a little over six months, I guess. Before that we met in private homes.”

“I see,” I said.

“Would you like to see the rest of it?” he asked, rising suddenly. “We have a fellowship hall and a kitchen in addition to my little apartment.”

“What’s the room we just came through,” Peters put in, “the one with the Bible stand in it?”

There was another pause, as if Brodie wanted to consider his words carefully before answering. “That’s our Penitent’s Room. It’s where people can spend time in prayer when they have strayed.”

He hustled us out of the study through his apartment, as if anxious to leave the area and the subject matter behind. The apartment was something less than luxurious, but obviously Brodie didn’t believe in living in the same kind of squalor deemed appropriate for his flock.

We followed him through the rest of the building. What little of the upstairs that wasn’t devoted to parsonage contained several small Sunday School rooms. Downstairs we found a commercial-style kitchen off the fellowship hall. The equipment was polished to a high gloss. The Faith Tabernacle women evidently spent far more time maintaining church facilities than they did their own homes. The fellowship hall was outfitted in the same barren style as the sanctuary. Its only furnishings consisted of two sets of splintery redwood picnic tables pushed together to form two long banks of tables.