When she'd finished her call, Frank had flown her to Barstow himself, where she could catch a Vegas-L.A. local with almost no wait. Frank, of course, didn't have a permit to fly in L.A. airspace—those are really hard to get, for obvious reasons—or he'd have flown her the rest of the way. All the way back she'd worried about what she could possibly do when she got here. The premonition was vague. I was in danger; that's all there was of it.
When she got with Carlos though, it seemed to her that the danger was or would be at the Campus. So they'd driven there, and she'd told Carlos, "Park here." "Here" being at the curb about forty or fifty meters from where I eventually came over the fence. That had been about midnight; they'd had more than a two-hour wait. She smiled at me, then reached and patted Carlos' cheek. "And you never complained a bit," she said to him. "I'm not sure you even doubted."
He laughed. "No comment," he said. Carlos Katagawa was seldom the inscrutable Oriental, regardless of his Japanese ancestry. "Actually I assumed it was genuine when you first talked to me on the phone. I've seen you operate before, remember. But I admit feeling spooky about sitting there at the curb with nothing happening. What good could it possibly do to wait there? Next to a nearly empty parking lot!" He sipped coffee and looked at me. "That's quite a lady you married. So. Now it's your turn to talk. How did you get into a situation like that?"
I put off answering till we got to the office, where I could talk to the computer terminal, to a confidential fail-safe file, telling him pretty much what I told you. Adding that I might have killed Miller; a kick like that to the sternum would shock the heart, might even stop it. Or Collins' shot may have hit him. Collins might also be dead, though I doubted it. I might have broken some of his ribs, though, so he could have a punctured lung.
"We've got grounds to call in the LAPD now," Carlos pointed out.
"No, I don't want to do that. I'd rather we each tape our statements of what we saw and heard, and duplicate the files into two or three legal repositories for use as depositions when the time comes. I'm not out to bust the church hierarchy, necessarily. I want to find out what happened to Christman."
Carlos raised an eyebrow. I suppose he figured I'd want to bust the hierarchy, after what had happened. "If we get a few people indicted," he said, "and some hotshot LAPD interrogators talk to them awhile, maybe they'll tell what happened to Christman."
"I don't think they would, Carl. I don't think even Thomas knows what happened to Christman."
He didn't say anything, just waited for me to explain. "It's the questions he asked me: Thomas seemed unwilling to accept that Christman was really dead. He argued that the Noeties and the COGs couldn't possibly have killed him. Which tended to load the case against him. Why would he do that? And who was he trying to convince? Me? He never intended for a minute to let me out of there alive.
"No, he was thinking out loud. My best judgement now is that he doesn't know what happened to Christman, and wishes he did."
"Okay, then why is he trying to kill the investigation? Or at least the investigator."
"If Christman's dead, he doesn't want us to find out. Plus I don't think he's all there mentally.
"Now here's a question for you: According to the Times article, Christman had things set up so the church paid him essentially all its income beyond strictly budgeted operating expenses. If it wanted money for any extraordinary project—something not budgeted as routine operating funds—they had to ask him for it. That seemed to be his major form of control after he turned the executive functions over to his bureaucracy. And considering how rich he apparently was, he really didn't spend a whole lot on his personal life.
"The same writers estimated that, by 2006, the church's long-term gross income had certainly surpassed 200 million. I called up the hypertext on that, and their estimate was based on a lot of hard information and some rough assumptions. So say its long-term gross income was half a billion by last fall, when Christman dropped out of sight. That's church income. Then add whatever earnings that money had accumulated!"
Carlos' pursed lips formed a thoughtful O, a silent whistle. Tuuli wasn't saying anything either.
"It'd be interesting to see Christman's will," I went on. "Who'd get his money if it was legally established that he was dead? That's a piece of information that might break this case. But it's my impression that as the law stands, it's information we can't get at, without compelling evidence that Christman is dead."
Carlos nodded. "So what do you want to do?"
* * *
What I did was call church security; it seemed like the only office they'd have open at that hour. A stoney-faced woman answered, and I told her I wanted to talk to Thomas. She told me he wasn't available.
"He is to me," I said. "Tell him Martti Seppanen wants to talk to him."
"Mr. Seppanen"—she got the name right, first shot—"it is three-forty in the morning. If you want to speak to Mr. Thomas, you'll have to leave your . . ."
I interrupted her. "You're damned well aware that someone escaped from the kitchen about two-fifteen this morning, and left two guys badly injured or dead. He got away through the tunnels, across the parking lot, and over the fence."
She actually changed expression slightly. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"The hell you don't! The whole thing is over an investigation of whether Ray Christman is dead or alive. Lon will want to talk to me. He wanted to so badly earlier, he had me kidnaped. Now get him on the goddamn screen or we'll go to the LAPD with everything we've learned. We've already got an investigation contract with them."
The stone face slipped a little more. "Just a moment," she said, and put me on hold. I glanced at Tuuli; she looked impressed and—proud.
I winked at her, and she grinned. "Thanks for saving my ass, babe," I told her. "It's all yours now." It was my version of Bogart as Sam Spade. Of course, in those ancient movies they'd never have said ass.
It took a few minutes before Thomas came on the screen. He looked like hell. I suppose I didn't look too good either. I spoke first. "Thomas," I said, "I want to do two things for you."
He stared.
"First I need to tell you that this conversation is being recorded. I want you to know that I and the two witnesses who picked me up have just recorded and safe-stored our separate statements of what each of us saw and experienced tonight. They've been covering me since I left my office—actually since the bombing. They witnessed the assault on me outside Canter's Restaurant, and followed my kidnapers.
"Your people didn't do that bad a job of searching me, incidentally. It's just that my shirt is an ultrawave transmitter. When your goons got me down in the meat-cutting room and Miller told me what they were going to do to me— Well, it's all in the net now, in triplicate safe-files, along with your interrogation."
Thomas' face had looked a little puffy when he'd come on. It had shrunk since then. "We don't particularly want to bust the church," I went on. "Like I said a couple weeks ago, I have an uncle who swears it turned his life around, even though he quit it years ago. Probably saved him from cirrhosis of the liver. All we want to do is find out what happened to Ray Christman. And we want your cooperation. If you did nothing criminal to him, you're clear.
"On the other hand, if you try to interfere, your ass is in the fire, along with the church. Our depositions are coded to several keeper keys in the law enforcement net. If anything happens, the LAPD, the county prosecutor, and the FBI will have them, and you know how they'd love that. Incidentally, those statements also cover what we know about the bombing of the Hollywood Boulevard apartment and the murder of the Boghosians."