In God's Name

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

(Seattle, Saturday, September 20, 2013)

BABY KILLER, the email message said.

You killed your baby!

You preach for more deaths, more baby deaths.

Repent!

Confess your sins. Or face the VENGEANCE of God!

Janet Andrews stabbed the delete key and sat back in her chair. She closed her eyes, took a deep steadying breath, and let it out slowly.

The computer had become the enemy. Her phone, too. Messages came, two, three, four times a day. Invading her home, her office, her life.

“Janet, are you all right?”

Janet looked up, gathered a smile together. “Sure, Cari, was I spacing off? What do you need?”

“Got a story tip from City Hall today. Someone is challenging the art in the parks as not being politically correct.”

Janet raised an eyebrow. “Well, it’s not, I suppose. All those pioneer statues with square-jawed men, women, and children clinging to their legs. Not even historically correct.”

“Yeah, when you start looking at them,” Cari agreed. “No invaders stealing Indian land. And there aren’t many people of color honored anywhere, I guess. Do you think I should follow up on it?”

Janet nodded, scribbled on her notepad. “I’ll send out a photographer, just to go look,” she said. “You got some contact names?”

“Charlie Tu.”

Janet laughed. “Why am I not surprised? Go for it.”

The noise and chaos of the newsroom permeated the isolation created by the email message and chased away the shadows. Janet looked around, a half-smile on her face. Some 25 journalists reported to her on this shift—6 a.m. to 3 p.m.—with others working evenings and nights. Sports, lifestyle, and business had their own staffs segregated from the contaminating influence of the news junkies. Phones rang, computers hummed, people talked. No matter what the bosses did to tidy the place up, chaos won in the end as evidenced by countless stacks of paper and the debris of human endeavor. Janet loved every inch of it.

She always had, since the day she walked timidly into a college newspaper office to ask if she could write. She’d been sent out to interview a professor who was collecting dolls. Nervous and scared, she’d had to stop in a bathroom and throw up. But she came back with an interview and a story. The editors at the UW Daily ran it with a picture of the historian, who demonstrated how toys—dolls in particular—reflected the changes in culture and values.

And Janet was hooked. The loud, cynical, sarcastic people in the newsroom looked at the straight, plainly dressed girl, who didn’t drink, much less smoke weed, who didn’t say damn or even hell, and shook their heads. But she thrived in a newsroom. The intelligence that had never been allowed to ask all the questions it wanted to, had finally found a home.

Janet sighed at the thought of the girl of her past, and took the first stack of mail that had been dumped on her desk to open and sort. Or actually, she sorted and opened. She’d once calculated the hundreds of pieces of mail she opened each day. Depressing. She looked at return addresses, tossing some in a pile for the business department, others into the garbage. She sorted others into piles for various reporters, and finally tackled the pile that was left. Open, pull out, glance. Sort that one to a pile. Toss that one.

“Vengeance!” one screamed in big type at her. Her scanning got the rest of the message—devil worshiper, baby killer—before she crumpled the paper and tossed it into the garbage.

“I’m going to lunch,” she called over to the receptionist, as she stood up and grabbed her purse.

Out in the late summer sun, Janet took a deep breath and decided to walk for a while. The Examiner’s offices were in an old building on 4th Street, northeast of Pioneer Square. She could walk up Capitol Hill to Elliot Bay books, have a sandwich. Clear her head.

The harassment had started after the Examiner did an in-depth look at the anti-abortion movement. Not so much the issues of abortion as the movement itself: the people, the organization, the money. Lots of money. The newspaper’s special projects team had worked on the stories all summer.

One reporter, the only woman on the team, had been assigned to talk to the people who ran abortion clinics about the intimidation and harassment they lived with. About two thirds of the way through the story, the reporter fell apart. She couldn’t deal with the story, not the tension nor the fear. The special projects editor asked Janet if she’d finish it.

Janet had been reluctant. She was an editor now, and she wasn’t sure this was the story she wanted to return to a writing career. She couldn’t let the story go unfinished, however, so she’d agreed.

The package of stories had been really good. She was proud of it; glad she’d agreed to finish her piece. There was talk that it would win a Pulitzer.

Then the calls and the emails started. Personal, hateful. And worst of all, constant. She rarely answered her phone anymore. Let it go to voice mail, return the calls from friends and coworkers. She dreaded opening the mail, was paranoid about what would appear in her email.

Whoever coined the jingle, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” had his head up his ass, she thought grimly as she opened the door of Elliott Books.

Bookstores always rejuvenated her. She could feel the tension start to drain away as she browsed through the new books on display and then went to check out the discount tables. She bought a couple of books and a few magazines and went to the small cafe for a sandwich. Eating with one hand, she opened a book by Toni Morrison and started to read.

But she couldn’t focus, couldn’t immerse herself into the words. She set the book aside and finished her sandwich rapidly. Shoving the book back into the sack, she headed down the steep hill to the piers.

She was a tall woman, broad-shouldered, long-legged, no longer thin at 38, but strong and athletic. She put some effort into lengthening her stride, her shoulders thrown back. A movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. She turned to look, but there was nothing unusual in the mix of tourists, businessmen, and shoppers. She shook her head, walked down to the piers, up Alaskan Way past Ivar’s, dodged across the street to a Starbucks coffee shop. The flicker was there again. She looked. Again, saw nothing.

She got the coffee, came out, sat at the table on the sidewalk, watching. Nothing unusual. She wasn’t even sure what it was that had caught her eye. A ghost. Something familiar. She sighed.

When she went to college, she’d shut the door on her prior life and got on with building a life she wanted. Over time, the memories had faded, fragmented. She found she had trouble recalling faces from her youth; the details of events—even well-known ones like the shuttle Challenger blowing up—were vague and hard to grasp. Sometimes they cropped up in her dreams. And when they did, a scene, a person would have the vividness of reality rather than the soft edges of dreams.

Lately, she felt like she’d built her life on a paved-over volcano. She’d shoved all those bad memories down, slammed the lid shut. Now they threatened to blow up, taking everything with it.

Restless still, she carried her half-finished coffee up the hill and back to the office.

At 3 p.m. Janet leaned against her car and let out a deep sigh of relief. Thank God the day was over, she thought. Now it’s time to go to the gym, walk the dog and call a friend for dinner.

What she really wanted to do was go home, pull the covers over her head, and hide. Let loose the tears that had been threatening to spill out all day.

She had her gym gear in the car. She would go to the gym, she vowed. The gym overlooked Puget Sound; she could run on the treadmill and watch the water. A gym membership was pricy, but the serenity she found watching the boats while working out was worth it.

The place was nearly empty, one of the advantages of working 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. She changed machines and started on the treadmill, working up to a jog, seeking oblivion in her workout.

An attendant tapped her on the shoulder, startling her. “Are you OK?” he asked. “It’s been an hour. You don’t usually go that long.”

“Lost track of time,” she mumbled, getting off. She smiled at him. Not convincingly, from his expression. She gathered up her stuff; no point in changing before she walked her dog Pulitzer. She called a friend about dinner.

Janet drove across the bridge to Ballard. She had a ritual of mentally casting the day’s problems off the bridge as she went over. They could catch a ride to the office from there in the morning, she said with a laugh. These current problems, however, seemed to follow her home, invading private space as well as her work.

She parked the car, locked it, not something she always remembered to do. Back in the days when she felt safe, she rarely locked the car. She let herself in the back door.

Pulitzer was waiting for her, eager to see her, wanting his walk. She stroked his head, bent down and hugged him. He licked her face. For the first time that day she laughed. To his great excitement she found his leash, and they trotted out to the driveway and down the block.

The tension in her arms and shoulders didn’t dissipate as it usually did. Pulitzer’s enthusiasm, the nice day, a walk through the neighborhood admiring everyone’s gardens—nothing relaxed her. Her muscles were tense, her nerves stretched too tight, too thin.

She took Pulitzer home, fed him. Showered and changed. Headed back out the door to dinner.

Her friend had called a couple of other women, which was fine with her. She wanted lights and company, not necessarily someone to confide in. They had a table staked out at Pasta Freska in Westlake when she got there. The humor and wit of her friends eased the tension in her throat. She could eat, swallow the food, and even laugh as if things were normal.

One friend, an attorney, was talking about a judge who had made some outrageous remarks about female attorneys in court last week. They giggled about the absurd responses she could have made. Someone else had seen a new play and pronounced it worth seeing.

A second bottle of wine appeared, disappeared. Mellower, Janet left the restaurant feeling almost normal. She took a deep breath and let it out, relieved to find the pain riding in her shoulders and arms had receded a bit. She could breathe. It felt like she’d been holding her breath all day. She felt tears crowd the corners of her eyes and swallowed hard.

One of her friends stopped beside her. “Are you going to make it?” she asked with concern.

Janet laughed. She could hear the tears and near hysteria in her response. “And my choices are?” she asked. “Of course, I’m going to make it. What else? Sit here on the curb, and say I can’t take this anymore?”

Her friend laughed and hugged her. “Well, if you do, be sure to call. I reserve a spot on the curb next to you.”

Janet smiled, hugged her back. She got in her car, carefully locked the doors, turned on the lights and headed out again, back along the edge of Lake Union to her bridge, to her home.

She wasn’t sure when she realized the car behind was following her. Stop it, she told herself. How could you tell? The traffic had few places to go here but along the shore.

She slowed. The car didn’t go around her. She slowed further. Finally, the car signaled, went around her. The windows were darkened; she couldn’t see anyone inside.

See? She told herself. Your imagination.

She parked in her driveway. A car went by on the street slowly. The same car? she wondered.

She went inside to the phone. With trembling fingers, she dialed a number, got an answering machine. Of course, she thought, it’s a Saturday night—he won’t be home. She hesitated, decided to leave a message anyway.

“Mac,” she said barely above a whisper. “I think I’m being watched.”