Until Proven Guilty - J. A. Jance [52]
Peters looked at me for a reaction. “He asked my opinion, Beau.” It was part apology and part justification.
“That’s why they have two detectives on this case, remember?” We went inside.
The bodies were gone and the crime lab folks were pretty much finished. One of them tossed Peters a bulging manila envelope. “You can cross robbery off the list of motives,” he said. “There’s seventeen thousand dollars in cash in that baby. It was in a bottom drawer in the study. We’re taking it down to the department for safekeeping.”
I went into the study. A well-thumbed and much-marked Bible lay open on the desk. I turned some of the pages. The marked passages were all of a vein similar to what we had heard on the tape. Nothing in Brodie’s selections spoke of forgiveness or loving one’s neighbor, to say nothing of one’s enemies. Faith Tabernacle’s leader had demanded retribution from his followers, had turned a blind eye on adultery. Someone had learned the lessons well and had given Brodie a taste of his own medicine. “Vengeance is mine” was the message. The Lord was excluded from the equation.
A halfhearted prayer service was continuing in the fellowship hall. The few True Believers who held jobs had not gone to work. Like bewildered sheep they huddled together for warmth, locked in a cell of interminable prayer, waiting for direction. Brodie had told them what to do and when to do it for a long time. Without him they had no idea how to function. I felt sorry for them. At the same time I felt repulsed. They had turned their lives and minds over to a monster masquerading as a messiah.
I saw Jeremiah. I tried to catch his eye in hopes I could get him to come talk to me. I think he saw me, but he studiously ignored me. Already someone had taken up Brodie’s mantle and was pulling the strings.
Peters and I hit the street. We went back to Gay Avenue. Like the evidence techs before us, we found nothing. It looked as though no one had been in the house since we had come with Carstogi the day before. As we stepped off the porch to leave, Sophie Czirski hailed us from the concealed gate in her fence.
“Is it true?” she demanded as we approached. “They’re both dead?”
“Yes,” Peters responded.
“Serves ‘em right,” she muttered, “both of ’em.” Her loose dentures clicked in satisfaction.
“You didn’t do it, did you, Sophie?” Peters’ question was a joke more than anything, but Sophie’s face brightened.
“I didn’t,” she said. “Wish I had, though. I was right there in the house from ”Little House on the Prairie‘ to the eleven o’clock news. Then I went to bed. No way to prove it, though. Nobody saw me. You want to take me in?“
Peters grinned. “That won’t be necessary, but you call us if you see anything strange around here, will you?”
Her red hair bobbed up and down. “I will,” she assured us, and we both knew it was true.
We questioned some of the other neighbors and then returned to Faith Tabernacle to canvass that area, looking for leads the whole time. We kept after it all day. For a while it looked as though we were going to come up empty-handed. We were still at it when yellow school buses started discharging passengers in late afternoon. Shortly after that a kid on a bike, probably junior high or so, rode up to where Peters and I were standing.
“You guys detectives?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
“I saw someone on a bike this morning when I was on my paper route. I usually cut through the church parking lot to get to the house across the street. It’s the last one on my route. Someone was just leaving the front of the church. He was in a hurry.”
“Did you get a good look at him?”
He shook his head. “It was too dark. I only saw the reflectors on the bike’s wheels.”
“What time was it?”
Again he shook his head. “I don’t know. My dad gets home from work about two—he’s a janitor—and he wakes me up. I deliver my papers and go back to bed. That way I can have breakfast with everybody else in the morning. I usually get home around three. This is my last house.”
He couldn’t give us much