Storming Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

you live here at the house?”
    “No. In town with my husband and five sons. I come every day, though.”
    Beamon slipped his hands under his armpits. “Five sons? That must be a handful.”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Have you had a chance to walk through the house, Carlotta? Does it look like anything’s missing?”
    “Nothing that I could see.” She paused. “Only Jennifer.”
    Beamon looked up at the stars. “Tell me about her.”
    “She’s a wonderful girl. Bright, kind, thoughtful.” Her voice trailed away. “How could someone do this?”
    He ignored the question, having asked himself that same thing at crime scenes all over the country and never coming up with a good answer. “Does she have a boyfriend?”
    “Jamie Dolan. He’s a senior at Jennifer’s high school.”
    “Anything unusual going on lately, Carlotta? Strange phone calls? People you didn’t know coming over?”
    She shook her head.
    “How about between Jennifer and her parents? Were they angry at her for something? Maybe they didn’t like her boyfriend?”
    “Mrs. Davis always wanted Jennifer to see their neighbor’s son Bill. But I don’t think she disliked
    Beamon peeled his back from the frozen side of the house. “I appreciate your help, Carlotta. Oh, and I apologize in advance for the people who are going to ask you all the same questions.” He turned and began tugging at the door to the kitchen. “Don’t freeze out here, okay?”
    A couple of brief, but harrowing, expeditions into his sister’s room decades ago had given Beamon his only image of a teenage girl’s natural habitat. Apparently it was hopelessly outdated.
    The wall of dolls and full-sized poster of Shaun Cassidy that he halfway expected to find had been replaced by bicycle parts hanging from the ceiling and posters of what looked like young homeless men. A closer inspection of the posters revealed thatthey were music groups with names like Gas Huffer and Mudhoney.
    Beamon wandered across the room, stepping over the clothes and towels strewn across the floor, occasionally pausing to look into a drawer or box. Nothing leapt out at him as particularly significant so he ducked into the attached bathroom. The counter was covered with various tubes and vials that, as a lifelong bachelor, he found completely baffling. He stepped over the cord of a blow dryer and pulled a few blonde hairs out of the sink. Wrapping them up in a length of toilet paper, he headed back downstairs.
    “I’m out of here, Chet!” Beamon yelled from the front door.
    Michaels jogged out of the living room and caught Beamon shuffling around the roped-off area on the front porch.
    “You’re not staying?” He sounded shocked that anyone would choose to spend an evening at home when presented with the opportunity to hang around a house full of blood and death.
    Beamon waved his hand dismissively as he cleared the cordoned-off area and made a beeline for his car. “You seem to have it under control, Chet. Call me at home if you run into any really earth-shattering problems. I’m not available for little glitches and snafus ‘til tomorrow morning, though. Right?”

4
    B EAMON MADE IT THROUGH THE DOOR OF THE FBI’s Flagstaff office just as the wall fell.
    He saw the expressions of the young agents crammed into the small room converge on resigned annoyance as they covered their coffee cups and computer keyboards. A white cloud of plaster dust enveloped two men in coveralls and billowed slowly across the room.
    Beamon stepped over a pile of acoustic tiles and headed for his office, shaking his head. Director Calahan didn’t take defeat lightly. When he had finally been shamed into giving Beamon a management position, he’d been overcome with another one of the flashes of complete idiocy that had become the hallmark of his tenure at the Bureau.
    He’d decided to take a small resident agency, expand it enough to make it look good to the press, and put Beamon in charge. In the director’s mind,