Harrigan and Grace - 01 - Blood Redemption (41 page)

Lucy started her car and moved it so that it straddled the pit. She needed to have a barrier between her and whatever might be in there.

She went into the office and taking her phone out of her pack rang Graeme. The battery would need to be recharged soon but there was nothing she could do about it. He answered at once.

‘New Life Ministries. Preacher Graeme Fredericksen speaking.’

‘It’s only me, Graeme. You don’t have to go on with that sort of shit,’ Lucy said.

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t quite understand you. I don’t think I know who you are. Is there someone in particular you wanted to talk to?’

‘Someone gave me your name. And your number. I thought you’d know me,’ Lucy said, assuming from this reply that Graeme was expecting someone else to be listening in on their conversation. ‘You see, I’m looking for someone. Someone who matters to me a lot. And they said you might be able to help. So don’t hang up.’

‘Tell me what you want,’ came the reply. ‘I’m always here to help those who need it.’

‘Yes or no is all I want. Will I find who I’m looking for …’ She paused, thinking. ‘You know, there are places where I was afraid to go.

Because I thought if I did I’d meet all my old ghosts back there and I’d be frightened of them. But I had to go back there because I had nowhere else to go, and I can tell you now, I’m not afraid of anything any more. Am I going to find who I’m looking for here? I look around this place and I can see that something’s changed, it’s all boarded up.

You know what’s different, don’t you? Now you had better be honest with me. You really had.’

‘Yes, I think you’re right. You probably need to know that. You probably also need to know that the person you seek is there because they chose to be. They sleep where they sleep now through their own actions. If they sleep in the cradle of death’s river, it’s because they chose to be there.’

‘Do you know the thing that hurts me most, Graeme? It’s when people let me down. I really hope that’s not going to happen any more.

I’ll be waiting to find out. I’ll be where I said I would be and I hope everyone else will be there too.’

‘Though you may have to wait longer than you expect, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.’

Lucy cut the connection. Time was no longer on her hands, she had things to do. Things to work on, things to build.

She cleaned her gun, reloaded it and left it sitting on the table, ready to use. In the cupboard she found switches and devices, explosive materials that Graeme had stored there. He had taught her about these things as well but she had not been quite so interested in them at the time. Now they could be useful. She fossicked around until she found in a drawer a stapled document titled,
Ka-boom: Ways to stop
abortion that work.

I’m going to give you a memorial, Greggie, the only type that anyone will ever take any fucking notice of where you’re concerned. I’m going to take something out for you in return for what they did to you. You’ll see.

She went to work, believing herself to be simply working and not sitting with every muscle tensed, concentrating ferociously on each connection built, obsessed by what she was doing. When she had finished, she was exhausted and terribly hungry. She tossed her sleeping bag on the pallet and lay down on it, holding her gun, aiming it at the ceiling, making pretend shots at the shadows. You be there tonight, Graeme. Then you can explain to me a few of the things you’ve done lately, can’t you? I’ll be waiting for you. Despite her hunger, after some little time she slept, as deeply as she would have done if she had been drugged.

30

Harrigan wanted to make Lucy Hurst dance for him but the truth was that he could not move. Once the options were laid on the table they came down to a single possibility: watch and wait. Exert pressure, push people a little and see what will break, then pick up the pieces.

He had put in place all the resources he had: surveillance teams, street patrols, saturation coverage in the media, his own people monitoring every scrap of information that was fed to them, waiting for the break. Other than that, he was fixed in the small square of space that made up his office.

Outside his window, the weather seemed to be engaged in the same kind of phoney war. The wind was chasing rubbish through the air, using it as a punching bag for unseen fists. The ground was dry, there was as yet no rain, only an anticipation. He was detached and sealed away in this building, watching for an outcome through his wide glass window, an unwilling spectator at some organised gladiatorial event where the pleasure for most of the other spectators is that the outcomes are real.

His people had brought the preacher in and Harrigan had decided to keep him waiting, although he doubted that this tactic would have much effect on the man. He laid his photographs out on the table one by one and asked himself what he could achieve by placing these images in front of someone he had already decided was unreachable.

The preacher was still human. Most people are accessible through fear and others can’t resist a game. He gathered the photographs into a folder and walked out of his office.

In the interview room, the preacher sat waiting with Trevor and Ian. Harrigan greeted him with his professional smile. Ian moved his chair back to sit against the wall, Trevor to the side out of the way.

Harrigan had asked for space while he talked with the preacher.

‘Thanks for coming in, Graeme. We appreciate it,’ he said, taking his seat.

‘Paul, I am happy to assist you in any way I can. I hope I will have something of value to tell you.’

‘Good.’ Harrigan’s tone was perfunctory. ‘Just a point to get clear to begin with. You know Lucy Hurst?’

‘I do indeed. She is a member of my congregation, a very troubled young woman. She was, or is, in desperate need of help. However,’ the preacher forestalled him, ‘I am afraid I am unable to repeat any of the conversations we may have had together. They are strictly confidential. I’m afraid that confidence is inviolable.’

‘That wasn’t my question, Graeme. Let me tell you what I do want to know. You’re a man of God. That’s what you say you are.’

‘That is what I am.’

‘What makes you that?’

The preacher sat upright, his hands clasped in front of him, resting on the table.

‘You don’t need to ask me that question. You know the answer.

You’ve heard me preach. You know I reach into the heart. It is not my voice that speaks through me but the voice of eternal love, no, of primal love, the first of all loves that speaks through me. I speak an eternal truth to those who will hear it.’

‘Then why do you need this? Your resumé with the Family Services Commission says you have a Master of Theology from Freedom World University. Our information says that’s a postbox in a trailer park in South Chicago. Why bother? If you have all those skills without this piece of paper?’

The preacher glanced at the ornately decorated degree that Harrigan had slid across the table towards him.

‘Ian Enright,’ he said, reading the name of the recipient. He looked at Ian. ‘That’s you. Again you have the answer to your question, Paul.

You have already identified the true worth of these pieces of paper.’

‘My question was, why did you bother?’

‘People need the reassurance these things offer.’

‘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.’