The move to Jacksonville, Nautilus figured. “Listen, Rebecca, Greta called. She’s scared and doesn’t trust me, but she trusts you. She’s afraid I’m setting some kind of trap, or a test. She’s going to call in about ninety minutes. I’d like to stop back then and have you answer the phone and convince her to trust me and meet with me.”

Rebecca crossed the floor in thought, spun back to Nautilus. “I don’t think Greta’s going to trust me over a phone, Harry. She’ll need to see me, right? To be …” the kid puzzled for the word, said, “assured that everything’s all right.”

“Not in the cards, Rebecca. You can’t leave the motel.”

The kid held up the bottle of soda. “I’m not allowed soft drinks. You know that convenience store down the street? I just got back from there. I put on sunglasses, tucked my hair up under a scarf, and went down the back stairway. I made myself walk like I’m older …” the kid straightened and crossed the room with choppy steps – the gait obviously stolen from her mother – and turned back to Nautilus. “See?”

It was a masterful ploy, Nautilus had to admit. Seen from the lobby as she crossed the lot toward the c-store, none of the busy staffers would make Rebecca as the sixteen-year-old sequestered upstairs.

He shook his head. “You have to stay here. I’m not going against your parents’ wishes. That’s final, girl.”

A pout started to cross Rebecca’s face, a look Nautilus hadn’t seen since they’d made the trip to the park. But like a thin cloud passing a bright sun, it dissolved into radiance.

“OK, Harry. We’ll do it your way. When you coming back?”

Back on the balcony of the motel, Harry Nautilus looked at his watch, ninety minutes had passed since he’d spoken to Greta, meaning it was time to return to Rebecca. He patted his pocket for the Joshua pass and headed to the second-floor walkway, stepping down to the lot when a voice came from behind him.

“Hi, Harry. Jeezle, it’s hot out here.”

He spun to see Rebecca Owsley leaning against the doorframe of the room where the soft-drink, snack and ice machines were located, dramatically fanning herself with one pink hand, the other clutching a can of Dr Pepper.

“What are you doing, girl?”

“I wanted another Dr Pepper, but somehow just kept walking.” Her amused eyes scanned the parking lot, weeds growing from the asphalt. “This place is kind of a dump, isn’t it?”

“You can’t be here with me, Rebecca. It’s a motel. You’re sixteen. It doesn’t look right.”

She grinned. “We’ll tell people you’re my father. They’ll believe that, y’think?”

Nautilus sighed. “Get in the car. I’ll drive you close to your digs and you can sneak—” His phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket. The screen said REBECCA.

“Hi, Greta,” he said, his voice as creamy as a chocolate. “I’m happy you called back.”

“I … I’m on break, they told me to go early so I can work later. I’ve only got a minute.”

“Like I said, Greta, we need to meet, to speak.”

“Is she there? Rebecca?”

“She can’t be with us, Greta …” Nautilus started to explain. “It’s gonna be impos—”

The phone disappeared from Nautilus’s hand, snatched by Rebecca Owsley.

“Give me the phone,” Nautilus said, fingers making the gimme motion. But Rebecca Owsley danced away, talking as she moved across the parking lot. Nautilus started after the kid, but glanced toward the small swimming pool to the side, two scruffy palms shadowing a pair of hefty ladies in one-piece swimsuits, stern and suspicious eyes turned on the big fiftyish black man and the petite teenager, the women probably about to dial 911.

Nautilus put his hands in his pockets and approached the pool, putting on his warmest voice and most benign visage. Carson had once said that – when he wanted to – Harry Nautilus could charm the milk from a coconut without leaving a hole in the shell.

“Howdy, ladies,” he said, putting his elbow atop the fence surrounding the pool. “This looks like the place to be today.”

A look between the women, wondering whether to respond. “Yes,” the one on the right finally said. “It’s hot today.”

“Down to visit folks, or just enjoying our fine Florida weather?”

Another pause; wondering what his angle was. The one on the left said, “We come down every year and visit Hallelujah Jubilee.”

“Don’t you love the Ark?” Harry said. “It’s so real. I think it’s like being there at that blessed time.”

A pause. A large black man was speaking their language! The smiles widened and became real. “I love the rides, too,” said the lady on the left, nodding to her sister. “But they make Thelma dizzy.”

“I’ve got the vertigo,” Thelma said. “It’s in my ear.”

“There’s still so much to see,” Nautilus said. “Bethlehem, Jerusalem, the Passion play.”

“We see the Passion every time we’re here. We cry and cry.”

“Where are you girls from? Up north?”

A tinkle of laughter. Girls. The women were in their mid sixties, but probably saw girls in their mirrors, bless mirrors everywhere.

“Pittsburgh. We’re sisters.”

Nautilus turned and saw the kid approaching, phone away from her cheek, a happy smile on her face, a portrait in innocence. “Well, ladies, it looks like my stepdaughter is finished with her call or text or whatever. I can’t understand how those fancy phones do so much.”

“They confuse me no end,” Thelma’s sister said. “I wish I had my old Princess phone back.”

Harry did a courtly semi-bow. “Nice meeting you fine folks. Enjoy the park.”

Twin smiles on the chubby faces. “And wonderful meeting you, sir. Have a blessed day.”

Rebecca stood before Nautilus and handed back the phone.

“Don’t ever grab my phone away ag—”

“We’re meeting with Greta, Harry. You and me. She says there’s a motel on Conway Street with a small woods behind it, a path that goes inside. We’re supposed to wait in the woods and she’ll meet us.”

52

When I returned to the department, I found Belafonte huddled in conversation with Clinton Monroe, a former IRS agent and a crack forensic accountant whose primary duties were tracing drug money through its laundering and making cases against launderer and launderee alike. I was happy to see the brilliant Monroe, sixty-two, pudgy and balding and looking like a guy whose twin hobbies were bridge and bird-watching, which they were.

“We’ve been checking out Hayes Johnson, as you requested,” Belafonte said. “Which brings in the whole Crown of Glory network, including the Reverend Amos Schrum.”

I sat and asked a question I always wanted to ask about famous televangelists. “What’s Schrum make? My guess is a million at least.”

“Fifty grand,” Monroe said.

“What?”

Monroe chuckled. “The COG Foundation owns Schrum’s fancy house and furniture and leases it to him for a dollar a year. The Foundation provides a car and driver. There’s a plane at his beck and call. All his meals and living expenses are picked up by the Foundation. I imagine there are other perks, like Foundation-supplied insurance and medical plans. Basically his life is funded by the Foundation, and I expect it’s a nice one.”

“It’s splendid PR,” Belafonte said. “The relative pauper’s salary looks like Reverend Amos Schrum has been called to service by God, not Mammon. And I expect it curtails potential problems from a staff that’s four-hundred strong.”

“Problems like what?”

“The network pays crap,” Monroe said. “A lot of the work is done by unpaid volunteers, the low-level stuff at least – handling the mail, deliveries, working the phone lines for donation. They offer a full page of internships, unpaid or with a minimal stipend. The median salary for a television studio cameraperson in the US is about seventy grand a year. The COG network pays its camera operators an average of forty-one grand.”