Free Prayer by Philip Kerr Page A

thousand hits a day.”
    “I didn’t even know he was dead,” said Anne.
    “Apart from politicians, Ekman regularly went after religion. The week before he died, he wrote a piece about the Baptists that drew sixty-five thousand complaints, which is a record for
The Daily Beast
. Ekman was the kind of guy who would say things no one else dared to say. And he got away with it because he was funny. Famously, he was on
The Volker Walker Show
on HBO with Pastor Ken Coffey, the evangelist, and Coffey got so angry with Ekman that he suffered a seizure and had to be taken to the hospital. That got Ekman in a lot of trouble with the religious right. I once saw him debating with the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Mocatta, at Georgetown University, and he was extremely funny and trenchant. But the biggest stink he attracted was with the Muslims when he blogged about Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, when she gave a press freedom award to Kurt Westergaard—the Danish guy who drew the caricatures of the prophet Mohammed.”
    “Always a mistake,” said Anne.
    “Actually, Ekman used his blog to compare the Danish cartoons with ones that used to appear in the newspapers in Nazi Germany, but even though he was defending them, he still managed to piss off the Muslims by reproducing the cartoons.”
    “Some people you can’t help,” said Anne.
    “All right,” said Gisela. “Ekman was funny. But he had a smoking-related illness. Emphysema, wasn’t it? And I remember that he had a heart attack. So why are we talking about him?”
    “After the Muslims threatened his life, he decided to take some precautions regarding his personal security; and he had a panic room built at his home. The room had its own generator and an alarm button connected to the local police. That should have saved his life. Instead, his wife came back from the city one day to find him dead in there. The police concluded that the room wasn’t properly ventilated and that this caused carbon monoxide poisoning. He was sixty-two.”
    “Why was he in the panic room in the first place? Do we know?” asked Gisela.
    “No. And he didn’t sound the alarm. Or if he did, it didn’t work and no one came. The front door was locked. So were all of the windows. No footprints in the garden. No broken tiles on the roof.”
    “Recent threats?”
    “Ekman’s wife told the police he received threats all the time, mostly on the website or in the mail, but that she wasn’t aware of anything out of the ordinary. Then again, she thought Ekman probably wouldn’t have told her if there had been. He tended to treat that kind of thing as an occupational hazard. Anyway, the Tarrytown PD handled the investigation with the assistance of the Bureau of Criminal Police from the New York staties.”
    “So, an accidental death,” said Gisela.
    “Ekman had a pet cat,” I said. “The cat was found dead, too.”
    “It figures,” said Gisela. “Carbon monoxide poisoning. That stuff is invisible and odorless.”
    “Except that the cat wasn’t found in the panic room but outside, in the gallery where the panic room was concealed.”
    “Maybe,” said Helen, “when the door of the panic room was opened, a pocket of gas came out. Not enough to trouble Mrs. Ekman, but just enough to affect the cat.”
    “There you are, Gil,” said Gisela. “I think Helen just solved your felinicide.”
    “Hey, I thought you were supposed to be on my side,” I told Helen.
    “I am,” she said. “But it just occurred to me. Maybe, unbeknownst to Mrs. Ekman, the cat followed her into the panic room, took a deep breath of the gas, came outside again, and died.”
    “All right,” said Gisela. “Let’s try to keep the speculation to a minimum, folks. Gil. You said there was a third case that caught Bishop Coogan’s eye. Why don’t you tell us about that?”
    “Willard Davidoff was a professor of human evolutionary biology at Yale University, the vice president of the American