Mystery in Harare

2 Stranger Things Have Happened

2

STRANGER THINGS HAVE HAPPENED

Germane sprang into action. He lunged at the mysterious man, kicking and beating his long legs, and screaming, “Who are you? Why are you doing this to my Aunt Priscilla?”

The mysterious man who had grabbed Priscilla and sedated her was accompanied by another man—dark-haired, well-groomed, and dressed in a black Armani suit. But before he and the other man could take Priscilla away from the church, they had to contend with her nephew.

The mysterious man stumbled, but he quickly regained his composure. “Germane—” He held up his hand in a nonthreatening way, palm facing outward.

“How,” the child asked, still holding onto the man’s legs, “do you know my name?”

“Young man, please, we’re the good guys,” the mysterious man said, as he gestured to the other man. Then, still holding Priscilla’s small limp body, he spoke more intensely, “No harm will come to your aunt. But we need to get her out of here for her own protection. Now, run down front and comfort your grandmother. Be strong for your aunt and your grandmother.”

There was something infinitely reassuring in the man’s tone of voice. But before Germane could yield and do what he had been told to do, he welled up: “Don’t you hurt her.” His voice broke. “And … and … You give me something to hold onto until you bring her back.”

The mysterious man gently removed Priscilla’s tiara and her veil. He handed them to Germane.

Germane could smell the chloroform, yet he kissed his aunt’s cheek, anyway. “See you soon, Aunt Priscilla.” Then, as if holding the mysterious man in check, he looked back up at him. “Soon,” he repeated, and wept.

The mysterious man picked Priscilla up in his arms. Then, the other man, who had kept still and quiet, looped the long train of her gown around her body and opened the huge wooden door leading to the outside. Then together, the two men raced out of the church, the one with Priscilla in his arms.

Germane watched as the two men carried his aunt away. He wiped away his tears and runny nose. Then he walked back inside the sanctuary.

Just inside the huge wooden double-doors, he stood staring at the pandemonium inside the immense Gothic space. The glory of the jewel-toned stained glass and polished mahogany pews and pulpits for once were overwhelmed by the panic of the terrified wedding guests, some of them stampeding toward the side doors, many others gravitating toward the center of the sanctuary where, under the massive dome, yet others—not just the women, but men, too—sat in their pews, screaming and hollering.

Germane lurched forward, down the inclined aisle, where—a mere three minutes ago—he had anticipated escorting his favorite aunt to her waiting bridegroom, with all eyes upon them.

He had been thrilled when Priscilla asked him to give her away, although his mother had cautioned him a few days later that some of his great uncles on Grandpa Nelson’s side of the family had been hurt, even angry, that none of them had been singled out as the rightful stand-in. But his Aunt Priscilla had stood firm. Germane had been her choice, and she had personally chosen the boy-sized black tuxedo that he wore with such pride.

He made slow progress down the long aisle. At times he had to cling to the pews so that he was not knocked down and trampled. He saw long-stem red and yellow roses everywhere, even on the shoulder of each pew, where they were entwined in yellow ribbons.

Germane staggered onward, the tiara and veil held in his hands. Dimly he noted that the chancel showcased white floral floor-model vases filled with bunches of red and yellow roses. The deaconesses had covered the altar and the other sacred objects in white-laced linens. Yet in the super-charged atmosphere of the sanctuary, the long-stem red and yellow roses seemed to droop, and the white altar clothes, now splattered with blood, seemed anything but holy.

At last he reached the crowd closest to the altar, where, in his peripheral vision, he sensed his grandmother was still sitting in the front row pew. He hesitated. He wanted the comfort—and safety, too—of either her arms or those of his mother. But he could not see his mother Helen anywhere.

Yet he could not resist the pull of whatever was the center of interest on the floor beside the altar rail.

Germane was small for his age, so it was easy to insinuate himself between the legs of the big people. So many of them seemed too frightened to move. Ahead he glimpsed something on the floor. He recoiled at the memory of the flash of the gunfire, and the two men falling.

Finally! Germane stopped dead at the sight of the two bodies on the floor. Blood and brain-matter splattered all about them. There was blood everywhere. He could not see the faces, but he was never to forget that blood and that gore.

A middle-aged woman kneeled next to the senator, sobbing. “Daniel! Oh, my Daniel!” Senator Callahan and his wife were in their late fifties, the same age as Liza. As Germane watched, he saw another woman put her arms around the first one, and together they sobbed.

One of the concelebrants finally regained his composure. He knelt down and felt on the senator’s throat for a pulse and then nodded. “Still breathing,” he whispered. But he shook his head as he stared at what was left of the bridegroom’s head. He prayed aloud for the living and the dead, and the people said, almost in a whisper, “Amen.”

Germane reached over and, in a tender gesture for one so young, covered Jonathan’s head with the veil of the bride. But he held onto the tiara. For a moment he stood there, wondering if he should be doing something else. Finally he tore his eyes away from the blood and the gore.

Quickly then, he stepped back and ran over to his grandmother’s waiting arms, where he nestled in her bosom and wept like the child that he was. When he told her what had happened to Priscilla, his grandmother recoiled in horror. Then, true to her lifetime as a preacher’s wife, she, too, prayed aloud.

Gradually now, Germane could sort out words from the screaming crowd.

“Someone, call an ambulance!”

“Call the police!”

While Germane was telling Liza what had happened to Priscilla, his eldest Aunt Ellen leaned over from her pew behind them and asked, “Where’s Priscilla, Germane?”

But it was Liza who turned and responded over her shoulder: “Ellen, Priscilla’s gone. Germane said ‘a mysterious man took her away from all this.’”

“No!” Ellen covered her mouth with her hands, and then she cried, “Oh, no!”

Just then another voice drowned out the others. “Clear the way! Security!”

Two burley, middle-aged men shouldered toward the crowd closest to the altar rail.

“Who’s in charge here? We’re the security.” Doug, one of the security guards said. “What’s happened in here?”

Julia, Priscilla’s best friend and maid of honor, detached from the crowd. Her once-lovely melon tea-length silk dress was splattered all over with blood. During the pandemonium she had been kneeling beside the two bodies, for the entire bottom of her skirt now drenched in blood.

“I’m here, Doug,” she said. “And you, Mitch, come here.” Always master of every detail, Julia remembered the names of the security detail; and, as usual, she took charge and deftly guided the two men away from the throng. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but someone shot Senator Callahan and the groom, Reverend Morgan.” The guards both stood in disbelief as Julia described the gruesome chain of events that had occurred inside the church while they had been stationed outside.

“Holy cow,” Doug breathed. He and his partner had thought they were providing minimal security, as it were, for this church wedding. Charged with patrolling the exterior of the site, mostly they had lounged around and loaded the numerous wedding gifts onto vans for transport to the parsonage. “Has anyone called for an ambulance?”

“I did.” Julia nodded. “They’re on their way. The police as well. There’s a phone in the sacristy. I asked for two ambulances. I’m afraid it’s too late for the groom. But the senator is still breathing. I think—”

Doug broke in. “But the bride! I think there’s been a kidnapping, too!”

Julia staggered, but Doug caught her before she could fall. “Priscilla?” She sank down in a nearby pew. Priscilla and she were more than best friends. Since they had teamed up a few years ago—when Priscilla was a legislative aide in the Ohio Senate—Julia’s attachment to her friend had grown and grown. Whenever Priscilla was rash or demanding, Julia was the one who smoothed things over in the end. She looked over at the two bodies on the floor. What would she do if Priscilla were facing a similar fate? Julia could hear herself breathing hard, almost panting. With an effort, she mastered her rising panic. “What happened? Tell me everything! Every detail…”

Tersely the guard reported that, moments ago, he had seen a man dressed in a black suit, carrying the bride in his arms, out of a side door of the church. “She looked unconscious to me. There was a white cloth covering her face. That guy and another one with him put her into a silver Land Rover that seemed to be waiting at the curb with the motor running. And then it sped away! That’s why we came running in here!”

Julia pulled herself together. She stood up in her blood-drenched dress. Priscilla needed her. She would be here for her now, as she always was. Already she had done what had to be done to get the emergency crew and police here to cope with what had happened to the groom and the senator. But now she would have to do whatever she could to help her Priscilla. She narrowed her eyes as she looked toward the rear of the inclined sanctuary. Why would anyone kill the groom and kidnap the bride? Then she looked back at the floor near the altar rail. And Senator Callahan? What was his role in all of this? Who had been the actual target, the politician or the preacher? What lethal enemies would a pastor have? The senator, she thought. It had to have been aimed at the politician. Her mind raced. Of course Callahan had enemies. Every politician does. But Ohio was not Beirut. And his foes might have the tongues of a serpent, but surely they weren’t assassins. Was this a professional hit? If so, what could he possibly have done to trigger such retaliation?

Mitch, the other security guard, pulled his radio from its holster and called the police. There was static, some quick responses. The others heard him say “Yes, two down. Yes, gunshots. One may still make it. The other may be DOA.” He paused and listened. Then he nodded. “OK. Got it. ‘Nobody leaves.’” Grimly he signed off and replaced his radio in its holster before turning back to face Julia. “You’re right, lady. They already knew. Ambulances should be here any minute. But it’s anybody’s guess who will get here first, the cops or the EMS.”

Doug broke in. “You forgot to tell ’em about the kidnapping.”

“First things first. The two that took the bullets take priority.” Mitch bellowed to the congregation at large. “Has anybody else been hurt or shot?” There was no response. He raised his voice even louder. “I’m sorry, folks, for the apparent tragedy, but I just talked to the police. They are asking—no, ordering—no one leaves the premises until the authorities arrive. It could be a long day, or they might just get your contact information. But for now, everybody remain, just as you are. Please cooperate, folks…”

There was a collective intake of breath, and then the wedding guests withdrew from the section nearest the altar rail. Many sat back down in the pews, and they remained there, as though too afraid to move too far away. Besides, no one knew whether the shooter or his possible accomplices were still on the premises.

As the guests were settling back down in their seats, a dark-complexioned, portly figure approached Julia and the security detail. “I saw something before the shooting started,” he began. “Or rather someone…”

Julia wheeled. “‘Someone?’”

“I was over by the side door,” the man continued. “The bridesmaids were coming down the aisle, when I noticed a tall white man with a strange accent elbowing his way toward the door. ‘Excuse,’ he kept saying. ‘Excuse!’ He had this funny foreign kind of accent. I heard him say that he left his wedding gift in his car. So out the door he went, and it wasn’t long—all those pretty bridesmaids were still in the aisle—when he returned carrying an elongated black leather satchel. For all I knew it was just an unusual wedding gift.”

“And then?” Julia asked. “Did he return to his seat?”

The informant shook his head. “No. He never did. But I kept looking for him, and I think I saw him going upstairs into the balcony.”

Mitch whistled. “Where he’d have a perfect line of fire to the altar.”

Julia and the security guards were still staring up at the balcony when there was a commotion at the church’s main entrance. A trim white man in a dark suit, flanked by two policemen—one black, one white—strode down the aisle. Another, carrying a camera, hurried behind.

At the altar rail, the police detective lost no time directing the photographer to record the presumed murder scene.

“They’re trying to get the pictures before the ambulances arrive,” murmured Mitch.

“Where are those ambulances?” Julia shook her head. “Every minute makes it less likely the senator is going to make it.”

As she spoke, they all heard the sirens, and in a moment the emergency crew was wheeling a gurney down the aisle. One of them shouted, “Make way! C’mon, people, let us through!”

It seemed only seconds later that Senator Callahan—evidently still alive but unconscious—was loaded on to the gurney and wheeled back up the inclined aisle, his wife clinging to the arm of one of the emergency crew. The first responders loaded the senator in the ambulance and helped his wife inside as well, then they slammed the doors and sped away with their sirens blaring. The siren’s wail receded as the senator was rushed to the hospital.

A second crew took its time with the remains of the groom. As the bridegroom’s twin brother conferred with the police and the EMS crew, the police photographer took more photographs. Then the remains of the bridegroom were lifted onto the gurney and wheeled back along the inclined aisle to the waiting ambulance. The bridegroom’s brother rode in the back of the ambulance. When he was out of earshot, a first responder said that he expected the bridegroom would be declared dead by the doctor at the emergency room.

The Columbus Police detective, a sandy-haired fellow in early middle age, had meanwhile been talking to the guests. Before long he approached Julia and the security guards. “You’re Julia, Ma’am? The maid of honor?” When she nodded, he flashed his police badge and stuck out his hand. “Detective David Stoudemeir.” He gestured to the floor in front of the altar rail where the slain bridegroom had fallen. “Sorry for your loss, Miss.”

Julia and the security guards told him what they knew, including the portly eyewitness reporting his suspicions about a guest having re-entered the church with a rifle-sized package. But then the detective’s thick eyebrows rose at the mention of the bride’s abduction.

“Details?” he asked. “This man in black who you think abducted the bride. What did he look like?”

As Mitch gave him a vague description, the police detective shook his head. “Surely someone else saw the guy?”

To everyone’s astonishment, Liza stood up from her front row pew. Shoulders squared, head held high—still in mother-of-the-bride mode. She would not lose her composure, not in public. There would be time enough to break down and cry, but not here, not now. She stood proudly amid the groundcover of her four other daughters and Nelson, Jr., snuggly buffering her and Germane. Onlookers could not help noticing the distinct cheekbones framing each of their faces, their overarching eyebrows, their alluring, though reddened, weeping eyes and, the natural radiance of their skin tones ranging from Harriet’s Nubian to Helen’s ostensibly pale complexion. At once the siblings’ spirits lifted as all eyes fell upon their matriarch. For surely someone would tell her why the two men had been shot and where and why her beloved Priscilla had been abducted. For the Austin tribe had come to Columbus not only for a wedding but for an equally auspicious occasion, a family reunion, but not for this, whatever this was.

“My grandson Germane,” Liza said with a stoic air, “he was with Priscilla when the men took her away.” She beckoned her grandson to stand. Then she dabbed her uncontrollable flow of mucous with a Kleenex tissue. “Go ahead, Germane,” she prodded him. “Tell the officer what that man said to you.”

Perhaps Liza’s comportment caught Detective Stoudemeir off his guard. Or perhaps he was more than a little surprised that he was about to get an eyewitness account of one of the alleged crimes, from a youngster! His eyes shifted from Liza to the young man’s shimmering dark, almost ebony, freckled skin and alluring dark eyes and, even when he was trying to stand still, a kinetic kind of energy. A handsome little fellow, he thought, but probably not much use in a murder investigation. “So you saw the bad guy, did you?”

Liza was not pleased with the detective’s seeming condescension to whatever it was that her grandson was about to say. “Ahem—” But Germane had already begun talking.

“First, he called me by my name,” Germane said. Then, word for word, he repeated what else the man had said, adding: “Then I did what he said. I came down here to be with Grandma. I’ve been living with her in Sills Creek, Illinois.”

“Such a brave young man,” Detective Stoudemeir said. “Now, Son, did you have any reason to be afraid of that man? Did it appear as if he carried a weapon?”

“No, Officer, I can honestly say I wasn’t afraid of him. And no, Officer, he didn’t seem to be carrying a gun.”

The detective nodded at the boy and then looked around the church and frowned.

Germane sat back down.

Then Detective Stoudemeir said, “We’ve got a situation here, folks. Either the shooter and the kidnappers were a team, or the gunman acted alone—and the other men really did rescue Ms. Austin from the scene.”

Whichever seemed more likely to him, Detective Stoudemeir did not share any more speculation, at least not about the abduction. Instead, he turned to the question of why something that seemed like a professional hit would have happened in the middle of a church wedding—at a black church in the vicinity of the Ohio Capitol, at that.

His look now encompassed Julia, the grandmother, the boy and the security guards. “I’m wondering about motive,” he began. “Any of you have any thoughts about why something like this happened here?”

Julia bit her lip, and then spoke her mind. “I don’t want to sound crazy,” she began. “But I’ve been thinking and thinking about that very question. There could be a link with something that’s been happening in the Ohio Senate.” As the detective looked incredulously at her, she elaborated. “I mean, there’s been a lot of headlines about Senator Callahan—he’s the one who was just taken to the hospital with the head wound—speaking out about South Africa.”

“‘South Africa?’” The detective repeated the unlikely locale.

“It’s a big controversy,” Julia continued. “Very political. The South African Divestiture Bill is all about racism, a*******d and, at its heart, all about money. Diamonds! Gold! Platinum! You name it! And it’s one that Senator Callahan has been in the thick of. It’s been all over the news. Not just local but national. International, in fact.”

“You’re serious?” The detective stared closely at Julia—a tall, commanding woman with a radiant Nubian complexion, short hair, and take-charge demeanor. A woman to be taken seriously. He thought fast. He had indeed seen reports in the newspapers and on television about Ohio politicians sounding off about South Africa. He had shrugged that off as just more publicity-seeking politicians whom he thought should be spending their time on bread-and-butter Ohio issues, anyway. Africa. But maybe, just maybe, this woman in the blood-drenched maid-of-honor dress was on to something. His first insight at the scene of the shooting had been that the range of the shooting and the damage to the two men had seemed consistent with a professional hit job. One of the men was the intended target, but which one and why had puzzled him. Had the senator been the target, and the bridegroom only collateral damage?

Julia seemed to be able to read his thoughts. “Stranger things have happened,” she said.

The detective squinted even more closely at her. OK, so she has credibility. But surely this isn’t a case of international terrorism? In Columbus? At a wedding in a black church? He sighed. These days, one couldn’t be too careful. There would be hell to pay if this woman in the bloody dress turned out to be right. I’d better cover myself and call in the big guns. Besides, just in case she is right, it’ll be a feather in my cap to make this call right away, on the scene. Maybe even a promotion if I played this right. “Nobody moves,” the Columbus Police detective said.

Columbus Police Detective David Stoudemeir excused himself and walked outside to his vehicle. From there, he made a series of calls at various lengths to his captain at the station, and then, at his superior’s direction, to the local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Once on the line with the FBI, the detective was shuttled from agent to agent, and there were delays and hemming and hawing. But at last he shambled back into the church.

“What’s happening?” Julia asked Detective Stoudemeir.

“We wait,” said the Columbus Police detective. “The FBI is on the way.”

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