Bruce DeSilva - Cliff Walk

“Brothers and sisters,” Reverend Crenson began, “have you heard the troubling news? The loathsome pornographer still walks among us. The avenging angel sent by Almighty God destroyed one of this demon’s disciples, but his work is not yet complete. Bow your heads and pray with me for the death of Salvatore Maniella.”

He paused, surveyed his flock, rested his elbows on the lectern, and clasped his hands in prayer.

“Lord, if it be your will, choke the breath from this vile beast and condemn him to the fiery pit of hell. And while you’re at it, Lord, if it’s not too much trouble, please snuff out the life of our mongrel president, too. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”

I’d read about right-wing preachers praying for the death of Barack Obama, but reading about it was one thing. Seeing it in person was quite another. My face was a mask, concealing revulsion.

Reverend Crenson opened his sermon with a declaration that the United States Constitution had been divinely inspired-“as holy a document as any book of the BY -a-bil.” That got me wondering why a divinely inspired document had needed to be amended twenty-seven times, but the preacher soon set me straight. The amendments, too, were written “under the guiding hand of GOD -duh.” That the Eighteenth Amendment, which established prohibition, and the Twenty-first, which repealed it, were both divinely inspired seemed unlikely to me, but this wasn’t the time and place to make an issue out if it.

The rest of the sermon consisted of a warning that the Second Amendment, which seemed to be the reverend’s favorite, was under attack by liberals, socialists, communists, homosexuals, and “a socialist president who seeks to take our guns away so that he can enslave us.”

Then came the part that I’d come to hear:

“Dear Lord, we have faith that you did not place your children on this earth to be easy prey for the sons of Satan. We thank you for giving us the courage to defend ourselves and our families and to fight for what is right. Joyfully, we thank you for providing us with the tools to do so. Bless our guns, O Lord, and steady our hands so that our aim may be true. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

Afterward, the congregants arranged the chairs in a circle for an hour-long Bible study. Reverend Crenson surprised me with his tolerance for dissent on the topic of the day: whether Barack Obama was the Antichrist, as the preacher believed, or merely one of his minions.

As the members of the Sword of God gathered their guns and headed out, Reverend Crenson stood in the doorway and wrapped each of them in an embrace. When it was my turn, he grasped my right hand in both of his, curled his lips into a smile, thanked me for coming, and urged me to come again.

A couple of days later, Fiona joined me for breakfast at the diner.

“We got the names of the pedophiles from the Internet providers,” she said, “and one of them fits the profile.”

“The profile?”

“Yeah. He’s a fucking priest.”

“Oh boy.”

“Father Rajane Valois of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.”

“Who are the others?” I pulled a notepad from my hip pocket and took notes as she rattled off the names, ages, and hometowns of five middle-aged men from Fort Worth, Texas; Naples, Florida; Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Andover, Massachusetts; and Edison, New Jersey.

“They in custody yet?”

“They’re all out of state,” she said, “so we have to turn this over to the FBI. Probably be a couple of weeks before they move on it.”

“The names are off the record till they do?”

“Yeah. Don’t want to tip the bastards off. After that, do me a favor and make them famous.”

“I will,” I said. “It’s a big story. The AP will pick it up and move it on the national wire. The perverts will get to read about themselves on the front pages of their hometown newspapers.”

“Good,” she said.

“Think there’s a connection between the Chad Brown murders and the Providence PD’s child porn raid on Colfax Street a couple of months back?”

“There must be,” she said. “I mean, what are the odds that there were two child porn factories in our little state? The way I figure it, the Winklers were running their operation out of Colfax Street, somehow got away when the bust went down, and moved their operation to Chad Brown.”

“That’s how I figure it, too.”

“Of course, we don’t know for sure,” she said. “The Providence cops are pissed at the way Parisi’s been bigfooting them, so they’re stonewalling us.”

“I don’t suppose Dr. Charles Wayne’s name has come up in any of this.”

That startled her. “Some reason it should?”

So I told her what I’d heard, leaving McCracken and Peggi out of it. “Be nice if we could get a look at his home computer,” I said.

“It would, but we can’t. There’s no probable cause for a warrant.”

We lapsed into silence as Charlie shuffled over to top off our coffees. The silence dragged when he moseyed back to the grill. We were probably both thinking the same thing: We didn’t have a clue who was behind the Chad Brown murders. The body parts at the pig farm were still a dead end. And we had no idea why Sal’s double had been whacked. We were just blundering around in the dark.

We broke the silence at the same time.

“Could it all be connected somehow?” I asked, just as Fiona said:

“What if it’s all connected?”

“Parisi won’t speculate,” I said.

“But we will,” she said.

So we started brainstorming, throwing out ideas that had been bouncing around in our skulls for weeks.

“A war between rival pornographers?” I suggested.

“Maybe. The Chad Brown creeps try to whack Sal so he whacks them.”

“Of course, the creeps could have been working for Sal.”

“In that case,” Fiona said, “maybe Arena and Grasso whacked them all to settle their old strip club beef.”

“Then again, what if this is all the handiwork of the Sword of God?” I said, and started to give her a rundown on Sunday’s service.

“I heard all about that,” she interrupted. “Parisi planted an undercover in the congregation to keep an eye on them.”

“Jimmy Ludovich,” I said.

“How’d you know that?”

“I saw him there Sunday.”

I sipped coffee that was turning as cold as my investigation.

“Got anything solid yet on the Maniellas’ illegal campaign contributions?” Fiona asked.

“Not yet.”

“That’s what you should be concentrating on. You’re a reporter, not a cop. Murder investigations are way out of your league.”

“You’re probably right.”

She picked up her cup of coffee, discovered it was cold, clunked it back on the table, and sighed.

“So we’re still nowhere with all of this,” she said.

“Only thing we can be pretty sure of,” I said, “is that the body parts at Scalici’s farm came from the Chad Brown snuff film factory.”

“No, we can’t,” she said. “We can’t be sure of anything.”

Christmas Day I didn’t have anything better to do, so I volunteered for a double shift on the city desk again. I edited the annual holiday traffic fatal-a family of five erased in a collision with a snowplow-and was scrolling the AP national wire when a story out of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, caught my eye.

The parish priest at St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church had presided over midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, but he failed to show up for Mass on Christmas morning. Alarmed, the vicar went looking for him, found the back door of the rectory kicked in, and called the police. Two patrolmen arrived promptly and discovered that the place had been ransacked. They found the priest dead in his bed. Father Rajane Valois had been executed with a single gunshot to the back of his head.