Until Proven Guilty (5 page)

“Must have been a really accident-prone kid,” I said sarcastically.

“Right,” Peters replied. He was looking at Suzanne Barstogi’s house. Like me, he was probably thinking about the living room full of kneeling supplicants. “I’ll just bet that asshole’s our man.”

“Could be,” I said. “Sounds more plausible all the time.’

“And Suzanne Barstogi’s an accessory!” Peters ran his hand over his forehead and hair in a gesture of hopelessness. For a time he was quiet, waging an internal war.

“You ever hear of Broken Springs. Oregon?” he asked at last. It was an off-the-wall question. I thought for a minute, then shook my head without making any connection. He continued. “It’le place in central Oregon south of The Dalles that’s been taken over by a cult. The peons eat long-grain rice and go without, while the swami or whatever the hell he is rides around in one of his thirty or so Cadillacs. My ex-wife and kids are there.”

He stopped. For a space there was no sound in the car but the rain slapping the windshield and the roof. I had worked with Peters for the better part of two months without a hint that something like that was in his background. Now he had dropped the whole load at once.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Me too,” he responded bleakly. “I can’t understand how it happens, how people put themselves totally under someone else’s control. That’s the way it is with Suzanne Barstogi. She probably stood right there and watched, maybe even helped.” It was a chilling, sobering possibility.

Once more the sound of the rain filled the car. Peters sat hunched over the steering wheel saying nothing, gripping it with such force that his knuckles turned white. The hurt and pain were so thick in the front seat you could almost touch them. “I’ll ask Powell to pull you off the case. I think your objectivity is shot to shit.”

That jarred him out of his introspection. He sat up and glared at me. “If you so much as try to get me pulled, I’ll kick your ass till Sunday, J. P. Beaumont.”

“That’s fair enough.” I could handle him pissed a whole lot better than I could handle him grieving. “Now let’s get the hell out of here. I want to go take a look at Faith Tabernacle.”

Peters straightened his shoulders and started the car. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s not about the time we started being real partners. At least we had taken the gloves off. It was about time.

I
t was still raining Saturday morning, so I grabbed a bus to the Public Safety Building. The lady Metro driver winked at me. I don’t think getting hit on by a lady bus driver is exactly dignified. Besides, I spent too many years with a ring around my finger to know how to handle a pass when I meet one. I consider myself a relatively cool customer. That’s why I got off the bus by the back door.

There was a whole stack of messages on my desk. I returned what calls I could. One was from a Tom Stahl. When I tried his number, I discovered it was the telephone company business office. It was closed until Monday. I’ve had calls from Ma Bell before. It usually means I’ve neglected to pay my phone bill. I looked in my checkbook. Sure enough, no check showed in April for the March bill. It was nice of Mr. Stahl to remind me! Karen used to handle that. I wadded up the message and pitched it, making a mental note to pay all my bills.

I went over the Sophie material. Who was Uncle Charlie? I pored over the list of Faith Tabernacle members. No Charles or Charlie there, only those quaint biblical names that sounded like they’d just stepped out of the Old Testament. I fed the names into the computer, looking for driver’s licenses, vehicle registrations, unpaid traffic fines. There was nothing on any of the names in the state of Washington, except for Brodie. He was the registered owner of a total of five vehicles. Not finding any information is enough to arouse any good detective’s suspicions. Who the hell were these people? I fired off another inquiry, this one to Illinois.

Afterward I waited, drumming my fingers on the desk, wondering about Uncle Charlie. No one in Faith Tabernacle had mentioned him. Whoever he was, in or out of the group, he had been important to Angela Barstogi. She had mentioned him to Sophie Czirski when she hadn’t mentioned her own father.

I looked up to find Captain Powell perched on the corner of my desk. “How’s it going?” he asked.

I guess Powell’s all right. He’s probably thirty-seven or thirty-eight. He’s what I call a young Turk, one of those guys who’s on a fast track and plans to make it all the way to the top in a hurry. The best way to handle people like that is to stay out of their way. Their ambition has a way of clobbering anyone who isn’t pushing and shoving in the same direction.

“We’re plugging,” I replied noncommittally.

“What are you finding?”

“We spent a good part of yesterday afternoon around Faith Tabernacle over in Ballard. We didn’t get inside. No one was there. The doors were locked, but we spent lots of time with the neighbors.”

“And?”

“Pastor Michael Brodie is not well thought of in that neck of the woods. People say odd things go on in Faith Tabernacle, that they sometimes hear children crying.”

“Have there been complaints?”

“Peters is checking that out right now. No one has ever been able to get close enough to the kids to talk to them.”

Powell rubbed his chin. I’m always about half-suspicious of chin rubbers. It’s the same way with deliberate tappers and cleaners of expensive, hand-carved pipes. The gestures are calculated distractions, serving to divert attention from the current topic of discussion.

“Speaking of Peters, how’s he working out?”

“He’s okay.”

“You knew there was some difficulty downstairs. We had to shift him out of property. It was either send him to homicide or bounce him back to walking a beat.”

“No, I didn’t know that.” I might have added that I was outside the departmental gossip mills, but I let it go.

“Captain Howard down there specifically asked for you to be his partner.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And you think he can handle this case without a problem?”

“Absolutely,” I replied. I wasn’t about to let on that Peters had told me anything about Broken Springs, Oregon, and losing his family to a cult. I didn’t want to risk giving Powell any ammunition about Peters’ impartiality. Powell is the kind who might use it. He ambled away from my desk then, no wiser, I hoped, than when he had arrived. I was a little wiser, though. Peters was on our squad without Powell’s wanting him there. If the captain was looking for an excuse to bump the newcomer, he wouldn’t get any help from me.

Peters showed up a few minutes later. He had checked through 911 records for any complaints from the Ballard area around Faith Tabernacle and come up empty-handed. He looked a little worse for wear, as though he hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours.

“You tie one on last night?” I asked.

“No.”

“Maybe you should have,” I told him.

He didn’t take kindly to my remark. “What’s the program today?” he asked.

“Let’s go downstairs and talk to the crime lab folks. They might have something for us.”

The Washington State crime lab is on the second floor of the Public Safety Building. They work for all the law enforcement agencies in Washington, with a number of labs scattered throughout the state. There’s a backlog of work, but murder gets priority treatment. Angela Barstogi deserved at least that much. Janice Morraine offered us some acrid coffee that Peters had the good sense to refuse. I didn’t. I’m a dog for punishment.

Janice lit a cigarette, and Peters grimaced. I was surprised he didn’t launch into an antismoking lecture on the spot. Jan took a long drag on her cigarette, ignoring Peters’ pointed disapproval. “What can I do for you?” she asked.

“Have you come up with anything on Angela Barstogi?”

“She had a Big Mac for breakfast, if that’s any help.”

“As in McDonald’s?” Peters asked.

Janice nodded. “She had mustard with whatever she ate. There were traces of mustard under her thumbnails like you’d get from opening one of those little individual packages. You can collect samples, but it’ll probably only separate Burger King from McDonald’s.”

She flicked an ash into an ashtray. Her tone was matter-of-fact. Evidence is evidence. People in this business can’t afford to look beyond the evidence to the human suffering involved. If they do, they crack up.

“Did you find anything in her room or in the house?”

“Nothing that appears to be important at the moment. Fingerprints from the room are mostly the girl’s and the mother’s. There are a few that belong to other children, but no adult prints.”

“What makes you say McDonald’s?” Peters asked.

“It may not be McDonald’s, but it was one of those fast-food joints. Hamburger aside, Baker’s office says she was generally malnourished, had been for some time.”

Janice reached across me to the end of the table and picked up a folded newspaper. She opened it to the editorial section. “I read this coming in on the bus this morning.” She handed me the paper, open to Maxwell Cole’s “City Beat” column.

I skimmed through an emotional portrayal of Suzanne Barstogi as a woman of unshakable faith and courage, one who was walking through a time of personal trial supported by her beliefs and the willing help of fellow church members. It spoke eloquently of the group’s communal sharing of food and heartbreak. It told in heartrending prose how the congregation as a whole had spent the previous afternoon on its knees praying for the murderer’s immortal soul.

Murderers are always the first victims in Maxwell Cole’s book, unless the person pulling the trigger happens to be a cop.

I finished reading the column and handed the paper to Peters.

“They sound like wonderful people, don’t they?” Janice said with just a hint of sarcasm tinging her voice. “Just the kind of people you’d expect to systematically abuse a child for years. The broken bones she had would be consistent with a highly abusive environment. Kids that age don’t break bones. They have too much cartilage. Are there other kids stuck in that mess?”

I thought about Jeremiah and how afraid he had been. His fear was not unfounded. I was convinced the bruise on his forearm was not an unusual occurrence. Janice finished her cigarette and rose, dismissing us. “I don’t have anything else right now, but I’ll call if anything turns up.”

“So what now, coach?” Peters asked as we waited in the elevator lobby.

“I vote we go back to Ballard. This time we’ll get inside Faith Tabernacle if we have to have a search warrant to do it.”

Ballard is a predominantly Scandinavian enclave about five miles from downtown Seattle. It sits across Salmon Bay from Magnolia. You get there by crossing the Ballard Bridge, a drawbridge used to let through sleek sailing vessels as well as stodgy, loaded barges on their way to Alaska. If Magnolia is highbrow, Ballard is lowbrow. If Magnolia is known for its upwardly mobile professionals, Ballard is known for its sturdy blue-collar folks who march along, never quite getting ahead but never falling very far behind either. Ballard is pretty much middle America at its best or worst, depending on your point of view.

Faith Tabernacle was a respectable-enough-looking place situated on the corner of Twenty-fourth and Eightieth N.W. in the Loyal Heights area. It was an older church that gave evidence of some recent renovations, the most jarring of which was a neon sign. New gray shingles sparkled, and surrounding trees had been pruned back with a vengeance. Double doors, new but cheap, stood wide open.

The day before, neighbors had told us that it had originally been a Lutheran church. A steady decline in enrollment and a consolidation of congregations had left it vacant for a number of years until purchase by Michael Brodie’s group some six or seven months earlier. Two similarly shaped, parallel buildings had been connected at either end. Half the building was used as a church and half as a parsonage.

The interior of the sanctuary reminded me of a barren medieval church. I’m not a regular visitor of churches, but the ones I have encountered usually have some of the amenities like heat, carpeting, reasonably comfortable pews, that sort of thing. Walking into Faith Tabernacle, the first sensation was one of bone-numbing chill. There was no heat, and the barren concrete floor retained the damp cold from the previous late-spring night. Two banks of rickety benches formed the seating arrangements, with a center aisle between them leading to a raised altar. The benches had no backs on them. If Angel Barstogi had fallen asleep during church, where had Suzanne put her, on a bench or on the cold, bare floor?

At first we thought we were alone, but then a woman emerged from behind a makeshift pulpit. Armed with a scrub brush and a bucket of soapy water, she crawled across the cold surface on hands and knees, diligently scrubbing every inch of the altar, like a buck private preparing for a major inspection.

Peters approached the woman and asked her where we might find Brodie. She motioned with her hand, indicating that she was unable to talk but that we should go through the door on the right of the altar. It led us through a darkened, closetlike room. In the dim light from the doorway behind us we could see a wooden kneeling frame with an open Bible on a stand before it. Other than those two items, the room was empty.

Another door barred the way. I knocked. Beneath my knuckles I found the deep sound of a solid wooden door, not the hollow laminate of the church’s front doors. Pastor Michael himself answered my knock. If he was startled to see us, he certainly covered it well. “Come in,” he said, stepping back and holding the door. “I was just preparing for this afternoon’s service,” he said.

I doubt Peters was surprised by what we found there. I wasn’t. The room could hardly have been called sumptuous, but it was a long way from the grim, unadorned rooms through which we had entered. The contrast was striking. The place was immaculate. There was none of the dirty clutter of Suzanne Barstogi’s house. A well-padded deep brown carpet covered the floor. The two walls that weren’t covered with bookshelves were papered in a tasteful grass cloth. A stately mahogany desk with a brass study lamp dominated the room. An open Bible lay in a halo of light the lamp cast on gleaming wood. Pastor Michael snapped the Bible shut as I approached the desk.

“Won’t you sit down?” he offered.

We sat. I looked at Peters, grim faced and tense. I wondered how this office compared with the Cadillac-driving swami of Broken Springs, Oregon. Peters was holding himself in check, but just barely. “We wanted to see your church,” I said before Peters had a chance to open his mouth. “We thought seeing it might give us some ideas about Angel’s death.”