Until Proven Guilty - J. A. Jance [19]
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