John Gilstrap - Damage Control

“We’re following the money, remember? We’re trying to decide if there’s a payoff among all those contributions.”

“Okay,” she said. Good lord, she needed coffee.

Dom settled himself again. “I’m not being clear. I’m sorry. I got to wondering how many people in a church organization would have to know if the pastor sold out a missionary trip. I’ve no way of knowing that, of course, but I have trouble believing that Reverend Mitchell could truly act on her own in something like this. I’d think there’d have to be a presbytery or a board of governors or something. I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be somebody in a position of authority who would be involved, if only as a second opinion.”

Venice shrugged one shoulder and sort of nodded. Dom smiled as he handed over the next sheet of paper. “Here’s a list of the Board of Governors for the Crystal Palace Cathedral.” He waited for Venice to absorb it. Then he helped: “In alphabetical order, you’ve got Gordon Cantrell, Bobby’s father, and Eric Georgen, Bill’s father. As coincidences go, how do you like those?”

Venice’s eyes grew huge. “They were part of the plot,” Venice said.

Dom smiled. “I believe so.”

“But why?” Venice asked. “Why would anyone endanger children like this?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Dom said. “Maybe in their minds, they weren’t endangering the children.”

“With all respect, Father, they were kidnapped.”

Dom had obviously thought this out. “Maybe the kidnapping was just part of a show. Maybe they thought that no one would get hurt.”

She got it. “Except Jonathan,” Venice said.

“Right. Plays to the notion that he was really the target of this thing from the very beginning.”

Venice sat back in her chair and tried to take it all in. If Dom was correct-and his theory felt right-the board of directors for one of the most famous churches in the country was funding an effort to have Jonathan and Boxers killed. Digger had the personality and the work history that collected many enemies, but how was it possible for anyone to get this angry at him? And how was it possible that mere money would be enough incentive for Reverend Mitchell to so vastly betray her trust?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Dom said. “It’s not that big a jump from humiliating yourself with an underage boy to endangering people for money.”

Venice was stunned that he’d so closely read her mind. She pressed her hands flat against her temples. “Think about what you’re saying, Dom. Think about the depth of the conspiracy.”

“I have,” he said. “That’s why I haven’t slept. Beyond the depth of the conspiracy, I think about the breadth of influence. How many people in the world are powerful enough-or wealthy enough-to invest millions of dollars in a charity for the sole purpose of committing this kind of a crime?”

“We don’t know that that happened,” Venice corrected. “That’s the theory, but there’s real danger in ignoring other possibilities.”

Dom nodded unconvincingly. “Fine. I suppose. But I haven’t seen anything yet to convince me-or even make me think seriously-about an alternative scenario. And whoever is that powerful and that wealthy also, according to Wolverine, has the power to influence law enforcement agencies in two countries.”

It was almost too much. “You start saying this stuff too loud,” Venice said, “and you start sounding like those wackos who’ve been abducted by aliens.”

“We need to talk to the Georgens and the Cantrells,” Dom said.

“And ask them what?”

“Get them to tell what they know.”

Venice laughed. “Would you tell what you knew if you were them?”

Dom smirked. “Maybe I would if the motivation was strong enough.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I don’t know exactly,” he confessed. “But these are essentially religious people. They know right from wrong. I’m guessing that they got to this place in their lives via a route that they’d do anything to overturn. Between my psychologist’s hat and my priest hat, what do you bet that I can make that happen?”

“I don’t think Digger’s going to go along with it,” Venice said. “Let’s let Gail talk to them while she’s in Scottsdale.”

Dom shook his head. “She’s going to play cop with them. That will lock them down. Scare them.”

Venice tickled the keys and used Jonathan’s GPS signal to find him on the map, and then fiddled with the imagery from SkysEye to zoom in to see if she could get a peek at their vehicle. She was surprised at how short a distance they had traveled since the last time she checked up on them. It looked like only fifty or sixty miles.

“Father Dom, you know I love you, right? So I say this with all the respect I can muster. Your business isn’t about going face-to-face with killers.”

He stood. “I’ll call you from Scottsdale.”

Her eyes snapped up from the screen to see him striding toward the door. “Oh, come on, Dom. Let’s at least talk about this.”

He waved without looking as he walked through the door.

Venice slammed her desk with the heel of her hand. Digger bred this kind of impulsiveness in his friends and associates, and it drove her crazy.

When the satellite image refreshed, Digger’s truck and his team showed up as a hot spot among the blur of tree cover, absent any detail to even indicate that the heat was coming from a vehicle.

Now that she’d found them, she pulled the image back some to reveal more details of their surrounding location. Accessing publicly available geographic data, she was able to superimpose contour lines that revealed them to be on the edge of a steep slope that fell away to the west, their left. That probably explained the slow going.

When the image refreshed again, something had changed. Venice squinted at the screen for a better look, and then it was obvious.

“Oh, no,” she said aloud, reaching for the satellite phone. “Oh no, oh no, oh no…”

Gail Bonneville had taken the earliest flight out of Washington Dulles and was able to be at the front door of Reverend Jackie Mitchell’s Crystal Palace Cathedral when it opened at nine o’clock. Because it was the middle of the week, she didn’t have to deal with the flood of parishioners that she would have faced on a Saturday or Sunday, but tourists still flooded in by the busload to ooh and ah over the ultra-modern icon of Protestant devotion.

The place was huge-easily fifty thousand square feet-constructed of towering glass walls held in place by technology that she didn’t begin to understand. The sanctuary-the part you saw on television-was just the very tall first floor of a white skyscraper.

Unlike so many other places she’d seen in real life after coming to know them via television, the Crystal Palace Cathedral was actually larger than she’d expected it to be. Nowhere near the scale of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome-nor as robustly reverential-the Crystal Palace was closer to Gail’s vision of Hell than her vision of Heaven.

Entering the giant front doors along with the first wave of tourists, she paused in the massive lobby-really, that was the best name she could call it-and looked around for a place to start. The overall feel of the cavernous front area was more office building than place of worship. Accordingly, she made her way to the security desk, where two uniformed contractors seemed thoroughly engaged in a passionate discussion about the Houston Astros, who, according to the larger of the two, had no business calling themselves a professional baseball franchise.

Try being a Chicago fan, Gail thought. Even after so many consecutive years without any professional sports team that couldn’t be vanquished by a marginally talented college squad, the bitterness never faded.