Free Prayer by Philip Kerr

my marriage choked the words in my throat. I thought of Danny, and I swallowed hard and felt my eyes begin to blink as if I didn’t quite trust them to stay open without displaying more emotion than was appropriate for a case meeting with my ASAC. There followed a longish silence that grew more revealing and eloquent by the second as I tried to get a grip.
    Gisela’s quick, poker-player instincts read the tell that was in my eyes and guessed the whole story, or at least half of it.
    “Oh, my God,” she gasped. “Gil. Has Ruth left you?”
    I shook my head but my face and fluctuating Adam’s apple said different. “I’d really rather not talk about it right now. One way or another, it’s been a difficult week.”
    “Look, do you need a minute?”
    I took a deep breath.
    “No, I’m fine,” I said, and suddenly, for the moment, I was.
    “Cliff Richardson lived in the Watergate complex,” I said. “His apartment had a balcony with a view of the Potomac. On Friday, February 21, of this year, Richardson was late finishing work at the clinic. His receptionist described him as unusually preoccupied. After filling the tank of his car at a gas station, he arrived home at about nine o’clock, parked in the underground parking lot, and took the elevator upstairs. Despite what you may have read, security is good at the Watergate. His neighbors reported seeing or hearing nothing unusual. It was a cold night and there was snow on the ground, but not enough to break a man’s fall from the eleventh floor. The following morning one of the gardeners found Richardson’s body in some bushes beneath his balcony. He had a ticket for a concert the following evening and a full refrigerator. The same day he apparently jumped off his balcony he also ordered some books from Amazon that arrived on the same morning his body was discovered.”
    “What you’re saying,” said Gisela, “is that none of this behavior was consistent with a man who was going to kill himself.”
    “Correct,” I said. “The Metro Police Department attended the scene and—with some difficulty, I might add, for there were several locks on the door—they entered Richardson’s apartment, where they found no suicide note and no signs of a struggle. The TV was still on, and there was a meal cooked in the microwave oven. Because of these contraindications to suicide and Richardson’s previous history, MPD decided to treat the death as suspicious. Inquiries were made in Utah. And people who had been picketing the clinic were interviewed. There’s also a CCTV in the apartment block and everyone who went in and out of the building that day was accounted for and cleared. None of them had any connection with the pro-lifers outside the clinic. Having failed to turn up any leads, the MPD concluded that Richardson had committed suicide and closed the case. But there was one unusual thing the police noticed in Richardson’s apartment. A Torah scroll open on the sideboard in a kind of pride of place. You know? The sort they use in a synagogue, written on parchment paper in ancient Hebrew, with wooden rollers ’n’ all.”
    “So?” said Gisela.
    “Richardson wasn’t Jewish,” I said. “According to his daughter, he wasn’t even religious. She couldn’t explain why he owned such a thing.”
    “It was a Sefer Torah scroll,” said Anne. “They’re expensive. Richardson bought it on eBay about two weeks before he died. And he paid seven thousand dollars for it.”
    “Which is strange,” I added, “when you consider that he read not one word of Hebrew.”
    “Strange, yes,” admitted Gisela. “But not evidence of murder.”
    “Next we have Peter Ekman, a prominent British journalist who became an American citizen after 9/11. He was a former editor of
The New Republic
, the author of many books and an irreverent daily news blog called
Ekman: Hack
that appeared on
The Daily Beast
. Until his death in April this year, his blog was receiving five hundred