Storming Heaven (10 page)

The only other building visible was about twenty-five yards away and looked to be entirely constructed of old wooden signs. The low hum emanating from it and the cable snaking between it and the trailer suggested that it housed a generator. No way to get power run this far north of the middle of nowhere.

Beamon scanned the clearing as Michaels walked stiffly around the corner and started toward the trailer. Nothing. Just the wind blowing half-frozen dust and intermittent snowflakes through the air.

Michaels was almost to the door when Beamon saw one of the tires on top of the trailer move out of sync with the wind. He raised his gun too late and watched helplessly as a man in camouflage pants and a black sweatshirt jumped from the roof and landed on a very surprised Chet Michaels.

The force of the impact upended the makeshift staircase that Michaels had been standing on, and both men went down hard. Beamon jumped up
from his crouched position and was about to run to Michaels’s aid when the man he assumed was David Passal dragged the young agent to his feet and pushed a pistol into his neck.

Outstanding.

“What do you want?” Passal yelled, jerking back and forth on the back of Michael’s sweater for no apparent reason.

Beamon was still one of the best pistol shots in the FBI, but this one just wasn’t doable. It was a good twenty yards in a stiff wind. Couple that with the fact that Michaels was flopping around like a rag doll and it would have been fifty-fifty for Annie Oakley.

“I haven’t told nobody nothing! You said you’d leave me alone!” Passal pulled his pistol from Michaels’s neck and used the sight to scan the treeline.

With the gun no longer trained on Michaels, Beamon felt his heart rate notch higher. It was time to do something. Walking out of the trees probably wasn’t a great call. Passal looked pretty agitated and would almost certainly shoot him.

Beamon turned his gaze from Passal and focused on Michaels. The fear he expected to find on the young agent’s face hadn’t materialized. As near as Beamon could tell from this distance, his young associate’s current mood was hovering somewhere between irritated and mildly pissed off.

Passal’s eyes were darting back and forth wildly. “Come out. Do it! Come out where I can see you. I’ll kill him before you can do me!”

The situation wasn’t improving and it didn’t look like it was going to. Beamon aimed his gun a
couple of feet wide of Passal’s ear, took a deep breath. Hopefully this was where he was going to find out how a guy who looked like Howdy Doody became a champion collegiate wrestler.

He squeezed the trigger and the bullet smashed through the front window of the trailer, prompting Passal to duck away from the shower of glass.

And that was all the time Michaels needed. With one hand he grabbed the gun and with the other he lifted Passal’s right leg off the ground and tipped him over onto his back.

When Beamon finally ran up to them, Passal’s pistol was lying in the dirt and Michaels had the man’s limbs so twisted and tangled up that he looked like a contortionist. A contortionist in considerable pain.

Beamon picked up the gun, flipped the safety, and stuck it in his waistband. “You had me worried there for a second, Chet.”

Michaels gave one last subtle twist of his hips that made Passal cry out in pain and then pulled him to his feet. “Sorry. I wasn’t looking for him on the roof.”

“It was my fault. I had the wide view.”

Passal tried to back away, but Beamon grabbed him by the front of his shirt.

“What do you want?” the man said in a terrified voice. “I did what you asked! Leave me alone!”

Beamon moved his hand to Passal’s throat and slammed him against the trailer. “That’s not what we hear, David. We hear you’ve been talking to people you shouldn’t.”

Out of the comer of his eye, Beamon could see Michaels’s confused expression. Not exactly an FBI-approved
interrogation technique, but he had no idea who Passal thought they were and his curiosity was getting the better of him.

Beamon squeezed the man’s neck a little harder. Just enough to make his point, but not so hard that the man couldn’t answer him. Passal grabbed his wrist and Beamon tensed his arm to keep the man under control. Instead of trying to pull his hand away, though, Passal became momentarily confused, finally pushing the sleeve of Beamon’s parka up to the middle of his forearm.

“Who the fuck are you guys?” Passal said, the fear draining from his face in a matter of seconds.

Beamon released him and stepped back, wondering what the hell had just happened. He produced his credentials from the inside pocket of his coat.

“FBI!?” Passal said. “What the fuck do you want? Get off my property!”

“We just want to talk to you for a few minutes. We’d already be gone if you hadn’t decided to do your Superman impression from the roof.”

Passal grunted and looked over at Michaels.

“Who did you think we were?” Beamon asked.

“I don’t have to say anything to you, man,” Passal said, starting to shiver. The wind was obviously cutting through his sweatshirt as if it weren’t there.

Beamon kicked the stairs back upright and took a step toward Passal’s trailer. “It’s been a good five minutes since I felt my toes, Dave. Why don’t you invite us in?” He balanced his way up the rickety steps and through the front door of the trailer. It
wasn’t much warmer inside than it was out. The cold wind streaming through the window Beamon’s bullet had shattered was starting to overpower the old iron wood-burning stove in the corner.

Beamon walked the length of the small trailer examining the makeshift shelves lining the walls and the large cans of fruits and vegetables stacked on them. Other than that, there were some skins drying on 2x4s and a bed in the corner. The only weapon he found was an unloaded shotgun, unless he counted the hatchet lying on an empty paint can.

“Come on up, Dave. It’s cold out there,” Beamon said, sliding both the shotgun and the hatchet under the bed and out of reach

Passal walked up to the door and paused as though he was entering a house he’d never seen before. Beamon motioned to one of two chairs around a formica-covered card table and stuffed a couple of split logs into the stove. When the flames reached a more satisfying height and intensity, he turned back to Michaels, who was standing in the doorway. “Why don’t you go have a look around while we talk. Stay out of the woods, though—booby traps. Just around the trailer and generator house. Carefully.”

“Hey, he can’t do that!” Passal said as Michaels disappeared through the door.

Beamon sat down across the table from him. “He just did.”

While the trailer was just about what Beamon had imagined. Passal himself wasn’t. Despite his threadbare clothes and less than cosmopolitan surroundings, he was alert, and his hair was reasonably
well kept—not the long scraggly locks or military cut that people who chose this type of life normally favored. The eyes that had a few minutes ago flashed with paranoia and fear had settled into the calm apprehension of a thinking man.

Beamon considered his plan of attack carefully. “I’d like to talk to you about your niece.”

“My what?”

“Your niece. Jennifer?”

Passal’s expression softened for a moment. “Haven’t thought about her in a long time. She was two last time I saw her. Couldn’t be much more than fourteen now.”

“Almost sixteen, actually.”

Passal nodded thoughtfully. “What’s the FBI want with a fifteen-year-old girl?”

“To find her. She was kidnapped a few days back. The couple who adopted her were both shot in the head. Hell of a mess.”

The muscles in the man’s jaw rippled subtly as his teeth clenched. “So you thought maybe the child molester did it. Fuck you.”

“Don’t know who did it, Dave. Thought you might be able to help me. Maybe your brother or your sister-in-law might have had some enemies. Any ideas?”

“They’re both dead,” Passal said. “Any enemies they had ought to be satisfied with that, don’t you think?”

“You tell me.”

Passal’s quiet apprehension seemed to be slowly evolving into full-fledged nervousness. “No. No enemies.”

“You’re sure.”

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

“What can you tell me about your sister-in-law?”

“What do you mean?”

“It sounds kind of strange, but we’re having a hard time figuring out who she was. Looks like she might have changed her name a few times, moved around a bit. Would you know anything about that?”

“No.”

Beamon pulled a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and began slowly rolling a cigarette. “Maybe you remember where she was from? Did she ever mention any family?”

“No.”

Passal knew something, but his fixed stare and the set of his jaw told Beamon that he wasn’t going to succumb to any classroom interrogation techniques. Beamon considered taking him in, but decided that it would be pointless and possibly dangerous. If the man did have Jennifer stashed around here somewhere, she’d likely die without him tending her. Goddamn cold in Utah at night.

Beamon lit the cigarette and mulled over his options. They were all bad. All he could do was move as quickly as possible and hope that luck was with him. He stood abruptly, prompting Passal to scoot back in his chair.

“Okay, then, sorry to have bothered you. Is there any way we can reach you if we come up with something that might jog your memory?”

Passal looked down at the table. “You won’t.”

Beamon paused for a moment just outside the door. “Must get kind of lonely up here sometimes. Don’t know if I could do it.”

Passal turned a tired face toward him. “Maybe you’ll get a chance to find out. There’s an empty lot about a mile down the creek. I’ll save it for you.”

Beamon cocked his head and opened his mouth to speak, but then thought better of it. He’d get what Passal knew. He just needed a little leverage.

“Okay, Chet, we’re out of here,” Beamon called.

Michaels was walking with comic slowness through the sagebrush west of Passal’s trailer, his eyes locked on the ground.

“Anything?” Beamon asked as Michaels retraced his steps and came alongside him on the road.

“That shack over there is the only other building. There’s a snowmobile and a generator in it and that’s about it. I looked under the trailer—it’s up on a bunch of cinderblocks cemented together. Nothing but some old lumber. How ‘bout you?”

“He knows something, but he sure doesn’t want to tell me what it is.”

“So you think he’s involved?”

“Either that or he has an idea who is. I don’t know. This one’s throwing me.”

Beamon looked up at the stars coming to life in the darkening sky and pulled his parka close around his neck. “You hear the weather forecast for tonight?”

“Yeah. The wind’s supposed to die down. Other than that, clear and cold.”

“Good flying weather.”

“You’re going to fly back to Flagstaff?”

The sound of pounding drifted up behind them on the wind. Michaels jerked around, but Beamon just kept walking. Passal patching his broken window. “No, we’re going to stick around.”

“And watch Passal?”

“And improve our relationship with the sheriff.”

“But what if he’s got her? He might be planning on getting rid of her right now!”

“It’s possible,” Beamon said hesitantly, trying to fight back the memories of his most spectacular failure. “But if we bring in a bunch of people to watch him, he’d know it. Hell, we couldn’t even sneak up on him today.”

It had been years ago in the heat of a southern Texas summer. He had brought in no less than ten agents to watch and occasionally harass Bill Meyers, his primary suspect in the kidnapping of a ten-year-old girl from El Paso.

A few weeks later he’d found the girl tied up in a pit about a mile from Meyers’s house. The memory of how she looked, staring up at him, her skin turning black and her swollen tongue prying her mouth open, was still painfully vivid.

It seemed that Meyers had stopped bringing the girl food and water when Beamon’s men started watching him. According to the local coroner, the little girl’s death had been extremely unpleasant.

“O
KAY, SO I’M STILL BEHIND THE TREE.
I thought I caught the guy solid through his car window, but I’m not sure, right? And I’m not too happy about having to stick my head out ‘cause the tree next to me doesn’t have any bark left from this asshole’s machine gun.”

Beamon kicked an empty chair across the floor to demonstrate the tree’s relative position. “I had to do something, though, you know?”

The man was an artist, there was just no denying it. Sheriff John Parkinson and three of his deputies sat literally on the edges of the seats surrounding the torn-up old wood table, transfixed by Mark Beamon’s manic way of telling a story.

Chet Michaels leaned back, took another sip from the Budweiser he’d been nursing for the last hour, and watched his boss’s face intently. There was nothing in his expression or tone that would indicate that he was anything more than some good-old-boy cop from Texas. No trace of the reportedly off-the-scale
IQ,
the pressure of the press’s impossible expectations and constant scrutiny, the endless distractions that came hand-in-hand with running an office. The little girl who was most likely dead or dying somewhere.

But those things were there—he’d seen them. Sometimes when Beamon didn’t think anyone was
looking, he’d suck the right side of his lower lip between his teeth and fix his eyes on the nearest wall. In those brief moments, he seemed like a completely different person.

Michaels took another tiny sip of his beer and continued to study Beamon’s performance. In the two days that they’d been in Kanab, local law enforcement’s attitude toward them had gone from mild suspicion to near-worship. He would never be able to pull that off. You just had to be born with that kind of charisma.

“I must have waited there for five minutes,” Beamon continued, barely pausing to breathe. “Listening for the guy to get out of the car. Nothing. Finally I take a quick look. Shit, you can’t even see into the goddamn car anymore ‘cause of the blood all over the windows. Looks like he exploded in there, you know?”