The intruder read his face and nodded as though Frank had said something. “I’m Aaron Biehn’s father.”
And there it was, like a shirt ripped off his body, revealing the ugly, naked body beneath; like a story told so often it seems true suddenly revealed to be a lie by the simplest honest statement. Like an object of beauty suddenly, obviously discovered to be a cheap and ugly bauble.
The truth of himself flowed into Frank’s veins like a poison finding its home.
Then the man, the father of Aaron Biehn, was standing on his ankle. The pain turned him back to the world outside.
“Aaron tried to kill himself tonight,” the father said. Frank started to speak, but remembered his vow.
“Do it quietly,” the father said. He could read
Frank’s thoughts through his body language.
Frank spoke. “Tried to kill himself?”
“Don’t you dare ask why,” Don Biehn hissed.
“You know why. Because of what you did to him. Because you… violated him.” He slapped Frank. Hard. For no purpose other than because the rage in him needed some expression more than words.
Don watched the priest’s eyes roll back in his head. If he were an iota less enraged, he’d have enjoyed it. But he was too far gone, too bound inside his anger, to feel anything. However, he waited until the rapist’s head cleared.
“He tried to tell me about it. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He gave up.” Don spoke in simple declarative sentences. He did not feel able to do more. He felt focused. Lucid. His thoughts demanded declaratives the way a knife required a sharp edge.
“I read his journal afterward. It told me everything.” He pressed his foot down on Frank’s ankle again. The priest sobbed.
“Father Frank,” Don said in a voice dripping with irony. “I am the father here, Frank.” He crouched down and grabbed Frank’s hair, forcing him to look directly into Don’s eyes. They burned too brightly for Frank to bear them.
“You can’t have any idea what that word really means,” Don said, his voice half a whisper, half a sob. “Father. Father is a job, Frank. Father is a duty. Do you know what that duty is?”
“Please,” Frank pleaded quietly.
“It was my job to protect that boy, Frank. To. Keep. Him. From. Harm.” He jerked Frank’s head up and down with each syllable. “But I didn’t do that, did I? I guess I drove him right up to harm’s front door. And you. You fucking raped him.”
Frank felt hands clasp his throat. All his air went away as his windpipe closed. He struggled, but the man was straddling him, pinning him. Terrifying urgency built up in his chest; he needed to breathe, breathe, but he couldn’t. He thrashed, but didn’t really thrash because he couldn’t. He was going to die.
Then the man let go of his throat and he could breathe again. He gasped, coughed, and sucked in oxygen. Again, Don waited until the priest could focus.
“That’s what he said it was like,” he explained.
“He said it was like suffocating. Like being choked. Strangled. Every time you—” He couldn’t say it this time.
Frank was crying now. “I’m sor—”
Biehn slapped him again, hard enough to draw blood from his lip. “Don’t apologize. There’s no meaning in it. There’s no value in it. There are two things you’re going to do that have value, though.”
Biehn reached into his pocket and pulled out a notepad and a pen. “You’re going to give me the names of other children you’ve destroyed. And you’re going to tell me what other monsters there are in this place so I can kill them, too.”
Kill them, too. Frank noticed it. He didn’t want to die. “I’ll tell you. But you have to promise to let me go—”
Pain. Pain in his testicles. He tried to scream but Biehn was covering his mouth, muffling the sound of agony. Don had stabbed the pen into his groin as hard as he could.
“We aren’t negotiating,” Biehn said firmly. He pulled the pen out of the priest’s groin and wiped it on the man’s pant leg. He kept his hand firmly over the rapist’s mouth until his sobs subsided. “So listen to me, you sick little piece of shit. You tell me who else did this to little children. That geek down the hall?”
Frank whimpered but shook his head.
“Then who?”
“I don’t know!” Frank sobbed again. “It wasn’t a club!”
Don raised the pen again.
Frank pressed himself back against the bed. “Col
lins!” he squealed. “Father Collins! I heard him…”
He hesitated, terrified of angering Biehn further. “He said something once to me. About Aaron. Kind of… of a joke.”
Biehn’s face softened into agony. “A joke. Is he here?”
“He doesn’t live here, I swear.” Frank gave him a mid-Wilshire address for Father Collins.
“Who else?”
“Dortmund. That’s it. That’s all I know about. And Mulrooney. I know he had heard about them from other parishes. That’s all I know. You have to believe me.”
Biehn heard the terrified sincerity in his voice. “I do,” he said. He reached past Frank and grabbed the pillow off the bed. He stuffed the pillow over the priest’s face, jammed the weapon into the pillow, and fired.
Nina Myers shook hands with Millad Yasdani at his front door and said, “Thanks for your time, Mr. Yasdani. I’m sorry to bother you so late.”
“I suppose,” the man said wearily, “you have to do your job. I’m sure you can understand that it’s hard not to take it personally.”
Nina adopted a remorseful, world-weary pose that usually appeased the offended in these cases. “I guess so. But I hope you know that we don’t mean anything personal by it.”
“We’re not all terrorists,” Yasdani stated. He pointed back over his own shoulder at his comfortable, middle-class house in El Segundo, south of Los Angeles. His wife was still in the living room, thoughtfully sipping some of the tea she’d made for Nina. “Do we look like terrorists?”
What do terrorists look like? Nina wanted to snap back. But that was poor public relations.
Yasdani moved his head so that he caught her eye again. “You know that ninety-nine percent of the Muslim world is peaceful, don’t you?”
“Mr. Yasdani, I am not out to stop Muslims. My job is to stop bad guys. The bad guys I’m trying to stop happen to be Muslim. That’s the end of the story.”
“But you come to my house at night,” he pointed out, his voice straining just a little. “To interview me. Because I’m a Muslim.”
“Because you attend the same mosque as some of the people we’re looking for. You’re not a suspect, I told you that already. You and…” She checked her notes again. “You and Abdul Ali. You’re sure you don’t know him?”
Yasdani shook his head. “It’s a big mosque. And he sounds Arabic, maybe Iraqi. Most of my friends are Persian.”
“Is it common for Persians and Arabs to attend the same mosque?” Nina asked. She had a degree in Middle East studies, so she already had a fairly clear idea of the answer, but Yasdani seemed to be a thoughtful man, and she was curious about his perspective.
Yasdani’s nose twitched, a sign Nina had recognized during the interview as an indication of annoyance. “If his name is Ali, he is probably Shi’a, like me. So yes, we would go to the same mosque. But that doesn’t mean we are best friends. You do under stand that we are not all alike, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Nina said amiably. “Thank you again.”
Nina turned and walked back to her car, disappointed and frustrated. She’d known this would be a dead end. Millad Yasdani was exactly what he appeared to be: chief information officer for a small insurance company, who lived in El Segundo with his wife and three children, and happened to be a Muslim. The only reason he’d shown up on her radar at all was that he drove a long way to go to a mosque in Los Angeles. It was a pathetic lead, but with the Three Stooges in jail not talking, she was reduced to chasing pathetic leads until they’d stewed for a while.