Alex Palmer - Blood Redemption

‘Why not get a real one?’

‘I have no need of it.’

‘You don’t need a real degree but you do need a fake one?’

‘It’s a crutch for others, Paul. I don’t have the time to devote myself to that sort of study. I have the world out there to concern myself with.

No one asked Christ if he had a degree.’

‘You don’t have a problem presenting yourself fraudulently to others?’

‘I am not presenting myself fraudulently. I am exactly what I say I am. That piece of paper allows others who may doubt me to cast aside their doubts and see me for what I truly am.’

Harrigan looked at the preacher for a few seconds. Then he gave a short, offensive laugh.

‘I couldn’t agree with you more, mate,’ he said. ‘I think it says exactly what you are.’

The lines of the preacher’s face hardened into expressionless anger.

The atmosphere tightened, the ante was upped slightly. Harrigan retrieved the imitation degree and returned it to his folder.

‘I have a list here I want you to read aloud, please, Graeme.’ His tone was brusque. ‘You were associated with the New Life Ministries in Berkeley, California. These are the members of the Life Support Group who were also associated with that church. Tell me the ones you know.’

The preacher smiled and rested his fingers on the list without looking at it.

‘I meet so many people in my work, Paul.’

‘But you never forget anyone. You told me that yourself. When I was at your prayer meeting you even knew who the children were. You have to be able to glad-hand people in your line of work, don’t you?

You want to control them so they jump when you say jump? Then you have to know who they are, don’t you? Read those names and tell me the ones you know.’

‘I am not obliged to do that.’

Fredericksen pushed the paper back across the table.

‘Trev?’ Harrigan asked. They listened as Trevor read each name aloud.

‘Recognise any of those names, Graeme?’

‘They’re just names to me, Paul.’

‘Are you a member of a group called the Avenging Angels?’

‘What are they?’

‘You know what they are. You tell me.’

Fredericksen replied with unshakable self-possession.

‘I am my own man, Paul. I do only what I am called to do. Where people are concerned, I am just myself, nothing else.’

‘Do you know this woman?’

He placed on the table the picture of the woman shot dead on her front doorstep with the words ‘You can run but you can’t hide’ written across the image.

‘Again you ask me to identify someone from the back of the head.’

‘This woman’s face was shot away so it wouldn’t help you much.

Let me introduce you anyway: Dr Laura Di-Cuollo, obstetrician, Long Beach, California. She used to carry out abortions at a local women’s health clinic.’

Fredericksen glanced briefly at the photograph. He drew his head up in what appeared a gesture of fastidious distaste. Then the swiftest of expressions, joy, crossed his face.

‘Does this picture appeal to you? Does it please you?’

The preacher did not speak. Harrigan continued.

‘It’s a cruel picture, Graeme. Don’t you feel grief, sorrow, anything, when you look at it?’

‘This woman dealt in death. Why should anyone, herself, her fellow travellers, be surprised if one day death catches up with her?’

‘You’re saying she deserved to die?’

‘No, not at all. Only that those who deal in death should not be surprised if one day their partner in life comes to claim them.’

In the room, briefly, there was a sense of extraordinary cold.

‘I see,’ Harrigan said eventually. ‘What about this?’

He placed in front of the preacher the picture of Professor Henry Liu lying dead in a Chippendale street.

‘None of this has anything to do with me. Why are you showing me these things?’

‘What about this one?’

A picture of the professor in the same street with the blue handkerchief Harrigan himself had dropped across his face. He set the two photographs side by side.

‘You show me pictures, Paul, but you don’t tell me why.’

‘The morning this shooting happened, and we got the call to go down there, we found one dead body and one living one. And one teenager with his life shot to pieces. I dropped that handkerchief over the dead man’s face because of the way he looked.’ There was a pause.

‘Don’t you find that sickening to look at?’

Harrigan’s voice was quiet. He watched the preacher look from one picture to the next without blinking or registering any change to his expression.

‘Do you know what this man did for a living? He taught music. I’m asking you, Graeme: should he have expected to be shot dead like that?’

As he spoke, Harrigan very briefly felt the memory of his conversation with Grace that morning, an impression gone in a second.

There was silence. The preacher stared at Harrigan, his hands resting on the photographs.

‘I have no idea,’ he replied calmly.

‘Do you feel any grief for him? His son? His wife? You know who she is, Graeme. Your mates from your congregation spend half their lives outside her clinics buzzing around her clients.’

‘She dealt in death. Her son should be accusing her. So should the ghost of her husband. Perhaps in the afterlife he will, when the scales have fallen from his eyes. Perhaps he will accuse her while he watches her fall into her place in Hell.’

Again there was a sense of profound cold in the room. Harrigan saw how the attention of everyone, himself, his two officers, was fixed on this man who drank it in, unafraid.

‘There’s only God’s law for you, Graeme.’

‘There is only God’s law for every one of us, Paul.’

‘Does this represent God’s law to you?’

He tapped the pictures, avoiding any physical contact with the preacher. Fredericksen smiled at him with a slightly taunting expression.

‘You are the law enforcer here, Paul. Tell me how you see it.’

‘I see it as cold-blooded murder.’

Silence. Fredericksen continued to smile.

‘Then we wait for the answer to your question. We wait until the day that we are called to account before God. On that day, the true representatives of the law will be revealed to us. We will see whose blood is innocent and whose is not.’

‘You want to talk about blood guilt?’ Harrigan said. ‘The Lius were shot by the same type of gun that shot Laura Di-Cuollo. They’re not all that common in this country in the hands of nineteen-year-old street kids. Did you give Lucy Hurst that gun?’

‘How can I have given her a gun? I have no gun. I can’t answer that question.’

‘You can’t answer my question?’

‘No.’

‘Because to answer the question would be to lie to me directly.’

‘I don’t lie, Paul. I tell people the truth in their hearts.’

‘Did you give Lucy Hurst a gun and tell her to go out and do this?’

There was a fraction of a hesitation.

‘No, I did not say that to her,’ he replied.

‘She killed the wrong person. She didn’t even know how to control the gun. Why pick someone so young? No one else have the nerve?

Including you? Enforcing God’s law is fine provided you don’t have to do the dirty work.’

Harrigan laughed in the preacher’s face.

‘Her actions have nothing to do with me,’ the man replied.

‘You mean the fact that she made such a dog’s breakfast of it?’

‘None of this has anything to do with me.’

‘You don’t kill people. You get other people to do it for you.’

‘That is untrue.’

‘You mean you kill people as well?’

The preacher’s face was not so much white as colourless. He sat completely still.