I don’t doubt that. I hope indeed you find him very soon.
The preacher’s voice was touched with rhetoric even in conversation. The tape of the prayer meeting finished and the incident room became quiet.
‘That must have been a fun two hours for you, Boss,’ Trevor commented, as the assembled team began to shift and stretch in the relieved silence.
‘You are not joking. Don’t cry on my shoulder today, I’ll have rheumatism for the rest of my life after sitting through that,’ Harrigan replied.
‘We are in the darkness, you and I. Come with me and I’ll show you the way to the light,’ Grace said in her own clear voice. ‘He can really project, he goes out after you. He could probably sing pretty well if he wanted to. It’s such a pure voice.’
There was an edge to her words. Harrigan looked at her. Sometime during the morning while he had been out, she had disappeared back into her regulation dress and make-up. She was watching with the others as Ian pinned to the corkboard pictures of the photographer and the gadfly who had ambushed her outside the Whole Life Health Centre clinic a little over eight months ago. Both had been photographed as they left the prayer meeting that morning and now were being posted to the board for display, observation, dissection.
‘Can you tell that just by listening to him, Gracie?’ Ian asked.
‘It’s one of the things that makes him so easy on the ear. If you can forget the garbage he’s talking at you.’
‘I’m glad you said that, Gracie. The shit those people were talking would turn your stomach,’ Trevor said.
‘Okay, Ian. What can you tell us about these two acolytes?’
Harrigan asked, stymieing any possible discussion on the nature of opinions which, to his knowledge, were not so very far removed from those of some people in the room.
‘Enough to know they’ve missed their calling — they should be on this job,’ he replied. ‘They’re regular protesters outside the Whole Life Health Centre clinics, they travel from clinic to clinic. How do they track the clients down? They buy confidential information from government sources and we’re pretty sure we know who their contact is. They get an ID first and they chase it up. Sometimes they follow the women back to their cars and get their registration numbers, sometimes they do it some other way. There have been break-ins at the clinics and some medical records have been stolen. They work at it, it gives them something to do with their lives.’
‘That lump of lard isn’t the Firewall,’ Louise grumbled, staring at the picture of the woman Bronwyn. There’s no sign of a mind in that face.
It takes a mind to put the Firewall’s website together, twisted or not.’
‘Well, we know she’s not,’ Ian replied, ‘but she’d send the doc her hate mail and like doing it. These two, they do what they’re told. For them, it’s how high do I jump, where’s the cliff?’
‘What about the preacher?’ Harrigan said, moving things along.
‘What do we know?’
Trevor walked forward and laid down a folder of papers on the metal table, then smoothed down his short black hair with one hand, collecting his thoughts.
‘It wasn’t that easy to track him down. We started with the resume he gave Family Services and, give him his due, he’s what he says he is, a travelling preacher. He says he studied theology at the Freedom World Theological College, Illinois. That’s a joke, folks. Freedom World is a trailer park out of Chicago. Send money and the postbox will send you the piece of paper. They’ll even fax it to you if you’ve got a tight deadline the way we did and don’t mind paying for it. We got one for Ian for his birthday. Happy Birthday, mate, you’ve got a whole new life in front of you. Congratulations.’
There was laughter throughout the room as Trevor pinned an ornate degree awarded in Ian’s name onto the corkboard next to a photograph of the preacher. He stood with his hands on his hips.
‘Okay. You’re skint and you’re cooling your heels at Mascot for the first time in twenty-five years. Who are you going to call? Auntie Yvonne Lindley. She puts you up. Why not? She’s sitting at home all alone in that mausoleum of hers out at north St Ives. Glad to have the company. Want a recommendation to the Family Services Commissioner for your community care refuge? Auntie Yvonne will get you one written on the Minister’s letterhead. She even lets you have a couple of her buildings rent-free, courtesy of the Lindley Family Property Trust.’
‘She’s eighty plus, isn’t she?’ Ian said. ‘She must be past it by now.’
‘Sharp as the day she was born, Ian,’ Louise croaked, ‘and with about as much sense.’
‘Careful what you say,’ Trevor continued, ‘the family will have you round signing forms to have her carted away. Word is she wants to write her kiddies out of her will and write the preacher in. This is where you get told to stop pushing the envelope and fuck off, mate.
Geoff Lindley tells you to butt out or he will close you down. Result?
Mother bars son from house. Check. Elizabeth Lindley lets everyone know that poor dear old Mum’s lost it, it is just so sad, folks, maybe it’s time to call in the family doctor and get her declared mentally unfit.
Checkmate. End of the current state of play. Life is not as rosy as it was in the land of Lindley.’
‘Does he have any money of his own?’ Harrigan interrupted. ‘He must have some somewhere, surely.’
‘Nothing that we can find and, believe me, we’ve looked,’ Trevor said. ‘So if the supply gets cut here, what does he fall back on? We don’t know.’
‘It’d be good to cut the supply and find out. Make him sweat,’ Ian said.
‘If he can sweat. Maybe he can’t,’ Louise reflected.
‘Let’s go over to the States,’ Trevor said. ‘Why go there in the first place? There’s no answer to that one. Your parents are dead. You spend a little time here studying to be a minister but you don’t finish it. Nothing to keep you round here. But why the States? Because it meant not being here? Because there you can buy yourself a piece of paper and it makes you a preacher? He’s the only one who can tell us that. Meanwhile … ’
He pinned up onto the corkboard a photograph of a group of ordinary-looking people with humourless faces and dressed in shabby clothes.
‘Oh, God, look at them. Meet the Addams Family,’ Grace said.
There was some laughter at this, including from Harrigan.
‘No, Gracie, this is the Life Support Group.’ Trevor was grinning.
‘These are the people who stalked Agnes Liu when she was in California. They are way out on the far side of the pro-life movement.
Ask them about abortion and they will tell you it’s Satanic sacrifice.
Women get pregnant so they can go and have abortions and then become witches and work for Satan. That’s where these people connect to the world.’
‘Nothing like being in touch with reality,’ Louise muttered.
‘You said it, Lou. These people are classic urban terrorists. Clinic bombings, threats, harassment, it’s all in a day’s work for them. One of them is in gaol for arson as we speak. You can look her up on the Net. She’s got her own website, she’s a prisoner of God. Is there a connection between these people and the preacher? We could not get one scrap of information out of our American cousins on this bunch, they wouldn’t talk to us. So we did what everybody does when they’re stuck — we went and found our very own Deep Throat. And that’s the journalist who wrote that story.’
There were howls of derision as Trevor pointed to the print-out from the Internet news service that carried the headline: AVENGING
ANGELS’ DEADLY STRIKE. POLICE FAIL TO MAKE ARREST AFTER DOCTOR
SHOT BY EXTREME ANTI-ABORTION GROUP.
Trevor brushed the commotion away with an airy wave of his hand.
‘Laugh as much as you want. But when we got in contact with her, she gave us information. Pages of it. This for starters.’
He pinned up the photocopy of an article from a Californian weekend magazine which had the lead line: IN THE DARK MIND OF
EXTREMITY: THE BLOODY CONSEQUENCES OF MILLENARIAN BELIEF IN THE
ANTI-ABORTION MOVEMENT. STORY BY JANE MONAHAN.
‘What’s all that crap about?’ Jeffo asked.
‘All you need to know, mate, is that you’re looking at this woman, Jane Monahan’s, life. Writing exposes like this one. That’s all she does.
It seems she was a good friend of Laura Di-Cuollo. When that investigation went nowhere, she picked it up in the press. When we got in touch with her, she didn’t want to stop talking. She knows a lot about the Angels: according to her they’ve got more than one shooting behind them. Trouble for us is, how much of her info can we use?
Most of it would get thrown out by any half-decent lawyer. But it fits.
She knows Fredericksen, he’s mentioned in her latest article but just in passing. He was living in the vicinity of Berkeley at the same time the doc was there and had a set-up very similar to the one he’s got here now: rich benefactor, political connections, a private church. Except he wasn’t the main man, he was more of a sidekick. People active within the Life Support Group were connected to his church. This woman’s talked to people who’ve moved away from that group and some of them knew our man. The “nice talker” one of them called him, the man who sets things up. And she knows about the gun that shot her friend. She says she got the ballistics information out of the police forensic lab by paying for it — would you believe, she actually told me that — and if it’s true, I can tell you that the same type of gun
— not the same gun, but the same type — that shot Di-Cuollo also shot our doc. It’s a modified pistol and Monahan tells me it’s a calling card for the Angels. The preacher left the States not long after that shooting. Everything was a bit too warm for him. He’s connected, but we’ve got nothing except our journalist friend to help us prove it.’
‘But is the Firewall one of them?’ Grace asked.
‘That doesn’t matter just at the moment,’ Harrigan said, speaking to her again for the first time since that morning. ‘We know he’s connected. What she is is something we ask her when we find her.’
A short silence followed.
‘It’s a game then,’ Grace said eventually. ‘He likes playing with other people’s lives. It’s a blood sport for him, it gives him a high. It’s not money. It’s the rush.’
‘Yeah, whatever, Gracie,’ Trevor said.
Harrigan found himself looking at her again.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘that’s good, that’s all good. That’s taken us a lot further along the road. Keep digging. And while we do that, we watch the preacher’s every move and we see what happens. We’ve got to turn up something soon.’
‘Like a body maybe?’ Trevor asked him as they all left the room.
‘Say, like poor old Greggie’s?’
‘If I’m going to be honest about it, Trev, I think hell will freeze over before we find that kid,’ Harrigan said.
Grace, moving past him, glanced at him as he said this. Before he could speak to her she was gone into the crowd.
Cafeteria coffee was not Harrigan’s favourite beverage but as he needed both caffeine and a break from the team it was his best choice.
He had sat down to drink it when he saw Grace out on the terrace, leaning against the railing and looking out at the cityscape as she smoked a cigarette. After some moments’ thought, he went out to join her. She looked up in surprise as he appeared. She greeted him and then again looked out at the jumble of roofs and high-rise.
‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘Fine.’
Yes, he could see that.
‘I’m sorry I ripped into you this morning,’ he said. ‘It was out of order for me to say that to you in front of everyone. You’re doing a good job, Grace. I’m not trying to make your life more difficult.’
She stood upright and shrugged, ever so slightly.
‘Thanks. But I wish I had left my phone on. I wish I had taken that call,’ she said.
‘What could you have done? We would have known a bit sooner and that’s about all. Don’t take it on.’
‘It’s more that it’s all of a piece. That kid sends his last message out to the world and I wasn’t even there to hear it.’
‘Where were you?’ he asked, a question he knew he had no business asking.
‘Sleeping on an old friend’s couch,’ she answered lightly, with a slight touch of steel and a sharp glance at him. ‘Somewhere I go when I’m feeling stretched.’
They stood in awkward silence while Harrigan tried to think of something intelligent to say in reply.
‘I wasn’t trying to be abrupt when I left last night,’ she said before he had the chance. ‘I’m sorry if it came over like that. I think I was feeling a bit worn.’
You take so much on, Grace. Why do you think any of these people are worth it from you?
‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t matter. We all get worn.
We’ve all got too much work to do.’
‘Yeah. I’ll just finish my cigarette.’
‘No, it’s okay, Grace. I’m not rushing you. Take your time. I’ll see you later.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ she said, embarrassed by her hypersensitivity.
He walked back to his office, a little lighter in spirit than he had felt all day. The watchers inside the cafeteria had no idea that they had just witnessed the unprecedented event of Harrigan apologising to a member of his team.