Act of God

by Susan R. Sloan

Genres: Religious & Inspirational

Synopsis

More than 200 people--including children--are killed when an extremist bombs a Seattle family clinic. A naval officer is arrested and attorney Dana McAuliffe is assigned to defend him. A conspiracy soon brews from the case--with Dana as an unwitting pawn.

Release date: April 10, 2002

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 608

Sample

He worked quickly but with extreme caution, knowing that one false move could prove fatal. Wearing several layers of latex
gloves and a surgical mask, he powdered the correct measure of aspirin tablets with a mortar and pestle, added the appropriate
amount of methyl alcohol, and then proceeded to whisk vigorously until the fine granules began to dissolve in the liquid.


He had chosen his product carefully. It had taken him two weeks to find a reasonably anonymous, out-of-the-way filling station
with a methyl pump, and to collect enough cheap, unbuffered aspirin, being sure to buy no more than one bottle at a time from
any supermarket or drugstore or quick-stop shop within a twenty-mile radius of Seattle. He then drove well out of the city
to acquire the quantity of fertilizer he needed. Lastly, he made the rounds of auto supply stores, traveling as far north
as Bellingham and as far south as Olympia to purchase the batteries, one battery per shop.


And all along the way, he was careful to pay for everything with cash, leaving no credit trail. After that, it was simply
a waiting
game—waiting for those blocks of time, like now, when he could steal into the garage and work undisturbed.


As soon as the aspirin was sufficiently whisked, he began to filter out whatever undissolved powder remained in the alcohol,
repeating the process again and again until the liquid was clear and he could pour it into a Pyrex dish and set it aside.


Next, he turned to the battery, draining the sulfuric acid from it into a glass beaker. Granted, this was an extra step, when
he could simply have bought the required amount of acid, but he decided it was far less conspicuous.


He took an old electric frying pan, retrieved from a thrift store for just this purpose, and filled it with cooking oil, which
he heated to exactly one hundred and fifty degrees. As soon as the alcohol in the Pyrex dish had evaporated, he added the
acetylsalicylic acid crystals that had formed in the dish to the sulfuric acid, and placed the beaker in the warm cooking
oil, letting it sit there until the crystals dissolved. Then he removed the beaker from the oil and very slowly began to add
the sodium nitrate, being careful not to let the foam overflow.


There was a real element of danger to what he was doing if he didn’t do it properly, but the procedure couldn’t have been
simpler. All he had to do was follow the recipe that was available to anyone with access to the Internet, skipping over the
disclaimers that popped up every second sentence about how illegal it was to do what the author of the recipe was describing
be done in step-by-step detail.


After cooling the mixture slightly, he dumped it into a measure of crushed ice and water and watched as brilliant yellow crystals
began to develop. He processed the crystals according to the instructions, then pulverized them into face powder consistency.
The final step was to mix the powder with the specified amounts of wax and Vaseline, and pack the plastique into a glass container.


He checked his watch. The entire process had taken a little
over three hours, just as it should have, just as it had taken to prepare each of the other containers that now lined the
shelves of a locked cabinet in the far corner of the garage.


He set about cleaning up after himself, placing the frying pan, the Pyrex dish, the beaker, the whisk, and the remaining materials
in a plastic garbage bag for discreet disposal into the depths of Puget Sound. Then he washed down the garage as though it
were a surgical suite.


This was the last batch he had to make. Now it was time to put it all together, to remove the plastique from the glass receptacles,
fill the duffel bags, attach the detonator he had fashioned from a light bulb, and affix the clever timing device he had found
on the front seat of his car two days ago.


There was an informal rule observed by the people with whom he had come in contact: admit to nothing and involve no one else
in what you’re doing. Still, the timer had been provided to him—perhaps, he decided, as a form of silent affirmation.


He loaded the finished product into his vehicle, covered it with a blanket, and went into the house, to sit down in front
of the television set as though he had been in his chair all evening. Then, as he habitually did on a night before work, he
watched the news and went to bed.


But he didn’t sleep. He waited until almost midnight, when the breathing beside him was deep and regular, and then he got
up, slipped silently into his clothes, and left the house.


The night was cold and damp, quite typical of February. He climbed into his car, shifted the gear into neutral, and let the
vehicle roll down the driveway and out into the street before starting up the engine. During the past weeks, he had made several
dry runs, testing different routes to and from his destination, timing himself, and checking traffic until he was satisfied.
Now he turned confidently onto the route he had chosen, circling around the back of Queen Anne to Denny Way, forking right
onto Boren Avenue, and driving up First Hill. Reaching Spring
Street, he made a little jog across Minor, then turned down Madison, and parked.


At this time of night, the street was deserted, the shops and restaurants closed. The area, appropriately nicknamed “Pill
Hill” some years ago, was dominated by Seattle’s major hospitals, and the swing shift had given way to the graveyard shift
over an hour ago. He had planned for that, of course.


A splendid Victorian mansion, set off by carefully manicured lawns, occupied the northeast corner of Madison and Boren. He
was relieved to see that the building was dark and silent. The security guards who protected the grounds during business hours
were gone, and no night watchman was on duty. It meant there were no late evening activities in progress, a glitch that would
have significantly altered his schedule.


Neither of the two gates in the high iron fence that surrounded the house was locked at this hour, a foolhardy practice he
had determined in advance. Not that a locked entry would have stopped him, of course, it would just have slowed him down,
and perhaps made him a bit more vulnerable.


He climbed out of his car, looking in all directions to make sure there was no one in sight. Then he hefted his plastique-filled
duffel bags and carried them through the Madison Street gate. Just inside the fence, a high hedge of laurel bordered the property,
making him all but invisible from the street. Nonetheless, he wasted no time. He went quickly along the path at the side of
the building to the basement access he had spotted during one of his exploratory visits, pulled open the trapdoor, descended
the concrete steps, and set about positioning the duffel bags in exactly the right place for maximum effectiveness. Then he
checked one more time that the detonator was properly connected.


The very last thing he did before leaving the scene was to check the timer, just to reassure himself that it was set for two
o’clock, and that the little green indicator beside the AM designation was lit. Then he got back into his car and drove away.





Dana McAuliffe looked far more like a high school cheerleader than an accomplished litigator approaching forty. She had thick,
honey-colored hair, neither curly nor straight, that was gradually feathered in front and then fell softly around her shoulders.
Her warm brown eyes required just a hint of mascara for accent, her cheeks were naturally rosy, and her unpowdered nose was
highlighted by a generous splash of freckles. Were it not for the tailored gray suit and leather pumps she wore, one might
almost have expected her to break into a high leg kick and a hearty “rah-team-rah.”


Instead, she leaned back in her chair and smiled calmly at the nervous gynecologist seated across the desk from her.

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “As I said over the telephone, this kind of case rarely goes to trial. And now that I’ve looked
over the papers, I can assure you that even if it does, we’d be in a very strong position.”


It was the first Tuesday in February, and although the office building’s heating system rarely pushed the temperature
above sixty-eight degrees, Dr. Joseph Heradia was perspiring freely.


“You see, I’ve never been sued before,” he said in distress. “Twenty years of practice, and I’ve never been sued. Some people
would probably say I’ve just been lucky all these years, and never got caught. But I’ve looked into my heart, and I know I
did the best I could for those poor people.”


“I know that,” Dana assured him. “And I can understand their reaction. But I’m sure, once they’ve had time to calm down, they’ll
realize you weren’t to blame.”


“In vitro fertilization doesn’t come with any guarantees, I told them,” he persisted. “I tell everyone that going in. Sometimes
you can fool Mother Nature, sometimes you can’t.”


Dana sighed. “I think the Jensens probably wanted a baby more than anything, and you were their last hope,” she said. “Hope
can be a hard thing to let go of.”


The gynecologist nodded. “I told them they should think about adopting.”

What a world, Dana mused. People wanting babies who couldn’t have them, and people having babies who didn’t want them. She
had told Heradia the truth, as she did with all her clients. It was a bogus case—it had no legs.


“Maybe they’ll think about that now,” she suggested.

The short, pudgy son of Guatemalan immigrants slumped in his seat. “It’s just that I feel so bad for them,” he said.

He was a good man, Dana reflected, not for the first time. “Let me talk to their attorney,” she said, without bothering to
mention that she knew him to be the type who would take on any case for an adequate retainer. “If I can get them to understand
that there is no blame here—not on you for not being able to work a miracle, and not on them for not being able to conceive
a child—I think we can make this all go away.”


“I sure would appreciate it,” he said, confident that he was putting his problem in the right hands. “And thanks for
seeing me on such short notice. I guess we’ve kind of flipped the professional coin here, haven’t we?”


Dana smiled. “That’s what coins are for.”

Heradia rose to leave. “Look, I’d really like to buy you lunch or something,” he said, “but I have to get back to the clinic.
Will you take a rain check?”


“Sure.”

Dana walked him down the hall and through the reception area to the front entrance, giving him one last reassuring nod as
he departed.


As soon as the solid oak door had closed behind him, Angeline Wilder leaned over the edge of her desk. “Isn’t he one of those
abortion doctors from Hill House?” the receptionist for the law firm of Cotter Boland and Grace whispered.


“Is he?” Dana replied with a blank expression. “I thought he was a gynecologist.”

“Well, I suppose he could be both,” Angeline conceded. “But I’m sure he’s one of them.”

“How do you know?” Dana inquired. “Do they wear some sort of a badge, or do you just know them all by sight?”

“No, silly,” Angeline said. “There was a story on the news about them the other night, you know, about how many abortions
they perform up there every year, and he was one of the ones they identified.”


“I see.”

“He isn’t a client, is he?”

“He may be,” Dana told her. “So, given what you’ve heard about him, if he should come in again, be very polite. After all,
you never know when he might whip out a curette.”


“What’s that?” the twenty-one-year-old asked.

“Nothing you’d need to know about, unless you happened to be pregnant,” Dana replied.

The receptionist blushed to the roots of her already red hair. “Well, I most certainly am not. I’m not even married.”


“In that case, don’t give it a second thought.”


The attorney walked back to her office, shaking her head. Joseph Heradia had been her gynecologist for the past twelve years,
and to her knowledge, a kinder, gentler, better man did not exist.


She thought about the couple who wanted a baby. The Jensens were probably good people, too, she decided, just desperate. And
desperate people sometimes got caught up in doing irrational things. She flipped through her Rolodex file for their attorne’s
telephone number, and was reaching for the receiver when her intercom buzzed.


“Yes, Angeline?”

“Ms. Purcell’s here,” the receptionist announced. “She said to tell you it’s one-thirty, and she’s sorry she’s late.”

Dana glanced at her wristwatch in surprise. Heradia had stayed much longer than she realized. Her chat with the Jensens’ attorney
would have to wait until after lunch.


“Tell her I’ll be right out.”

Lunch with Judith Purcell had begun as a daily event when the two were assigned adjoining desks on the first day of second
grade, and continued, if not quite as regularly, right up to this moment. Now that they were both working in Seattle, it had
settled into a more or less weekly routine. They had been best friends for so long, and knew each other so well, that there
were few surprises left between them.


“You didn’t get the commission, did you?” Dana asked as soon as they had been escorted to their customary window table at
Al Boccolino, their lunchtime restaurant of choice.


“No,” Judith confirmed. “They loved my concept, but alas, not my bid. I think they would have gone with me if I’d been willing
to drop my price, but I’d already cut it to the bone.”


Judith was an accomplished, if not yet renowned, sculptor.
The commission in question was for the lobby of the city’s newest waterfront office building, and Judith’ s proposal had been
for a fanciful pod of gray whales done in glass, steel, and ceramic. As bid, the eighteen-month project would have enabled
the artist to cover her costs, with barely any to spare.


When she was married, Judith’s moneymaking ability had not been as important as indulging her creative spirit. But her first
husband had died suddenly of a heart attack, she and her second husband had married and divorced in a very short period of
time, and now she needed to support herself and her twelve-year-old son, Alex. A life in the arts was beginning to seem frivolous.


“I’m sorry,” Dana said. “I really thought you had that one in the bag.”

“Me, too,” Judith admitted with a resolute shrug. “But the truth is, I have only myself to blame. Instead of preparing for
a real career, like you did, I thought I would be able to count on having a man around to support me.”


Aside from their physical dissimilarities, Judith being small and dark to Dana’s above-average height and fair complexion,
the attorney knew there was one basic difference between them. Judith had been raised to define herself by the man at her
side, while Dana had been raised to define herself without anyone at her side.


“I still like the idea of you having your own gallery,” Dana said. She had been trying for almost two years now to move her
friend onto more stable financial ground. Small loans from Judith’s mother kept food on the table, and the half dozen Purcells
that had made their way into Dana’s home paid the artist’s mortgage, but neither was going to be a long-term solution.


Of late, an idea had begun to form in the back of Dana’s mind, of a joint venture, perhaps, where she might front the money
for a gallery, but not be involved with the actual operation, since she admittedly knew next to nothing about art.



“I’d die to have my own gallery,” Judith agreed. “But I just don’t have the capital. And I doubt there’s anyone out there
who would be willing to gamble on me.”


“Well, who knows,” Dana said as their bowls of pasta arrived. “Maybe Providence is getting ready to smile on you.”

“It would be nice,” Judith said with a sigh.




Summer was definitely Joshua Clune’s favorite time of year. It was then, when the cold went away and the nights were mild,
that there were plenty of places to sleep. And, too, when the tourists came, there was always more money. It was getting from
October to April that was the problem, when the spaces under the overpasses and in the bus tunnel were taken, and the missions
were full.


It was also in the summer that the scar that ran from his temple to his chin didn’t hurt so much. Joshua hid the scar as best
he could beneath long brown hair and a reddish stubble, but he knew it was there—a painful reminder of the car that had skidded
out of the night years ago, and plowed into the doorway where he slept.


In the winter, Joshua suffered.

He had come from Wisconsin, slowly making his way west, walking, hitching rides when he could, until he reached Seattle and
the end of the continent, and then he stopped. Someone told him he should go south to California, where the weather was even
warmer and the people were rich, and he
could get a suntan and put some meat on his bones. But he was tired of traveling, and besides, Seattle suited him.


He met people like Big Dug, a giant of a man with a full black beard, who showed him the ropes, and helped him settle in.
Big Dug didn’t trust the city shelters. He said there were too many stories about what happened at places like that, where
there was little if any supervision. So, under the older man’s tutelage, Joshua acquired a big cardboard box that had been
used to deliver a desk to somebody’s office, and he rummaged around in Dumpsters until he found a plastic tarpaulin. He cut
the tarp in two, folding one half underneath his box to keep the cardboard dry, and draping the other half over the top to
shut out the wind and rain and cold. Then, for a couple of dollars, a thrift shop provided him with a blanket.


“All the comforts of home,” he told people with a big happy smile.

Big Dug showed him where to go to relieve himself and where he could bathe, when he felt it necessary, and then he introduced
him to Hill House, taking him up Madison to Boren, and pointing out an enormous gray mansion on the corner.


“It’s like a clinic, but it’s a whole lot more than that,” Big Dug told him. “They bring a soup kitchen to the waterfront,
and give you a hot dinner every night, and it’s good food, not slop. If you do drugs, they can help you get clean. If you
want to work, they can help you find a job. And if you’re sick, they take care of you. And it doesn’t cost anything, if you
can’t afford to pay. Only thing is, they don’t want any of us sleeping up there. That’s the rule, and we all know it, and
we don’t break it.”


“Why is that the rule?”

“I think it’s probably got something to do with insurance,” Big Dug said. “You know, in case there was a fire, or something,
and somebody got hurt.”



“Is that why I can’t go there?” Joshua asked, his hazel eyes taking in two well-dressed people as they walked through the
gate. “Because I might cause a fire?”


“Sure you can go there. You can go there first thing in the morning, if you need to, or any time of the day you want to, but
you just can’t sleep there, that’s all, ’cause if they found out, they might get mad, and then it could ruin things for all
of us. Do you understand?”


Joshua kicked at a crack in the cement pavement. “Uhhuh,” he said.

“Okay, then,” Big Dug said.

Doctors in Wisconsin had classified Joshua as retarded when he was six years old, at which point his mother, who had four
other children from three different men to raise, handed him over to the state.


“Life’s tough enough,” she explained. “I don’t have time to do for no dummies.”

The state educated Joshua as best they could, encouraged him to be an upstanding citizen and to embrace true Christian values,
taught him to be as self-sufficient as possible, and turned him loose, according to law, at the age of twenty-one. He was
functional and he could follow simple instructions.


He got jobs washing dishes in restaurants, or mopping floors and cleaning toilets in office buildings. But with no one to
remind him, he sometimes forgot to go to work, and then his employer would get mad and fire him, and Joshua would have to
look for other restaurants and office buildings. When he didn’t have enough money to pay for a place to sleep, he slept on
the streets.


He left Wisconsin one day without even noticing. He just got in a car with a fellow who offered him a lift, and ended up in
Minnesota. He never knew the difference. After all, there were restaurants and office buildings in Minnesota, too.


By the time he reached Seattle, Joshua was thirty-two
years old. In all that time, he had never known a real home-cooked meal, or a night’s sleep in a soft bed, or the warmth of
another human being. But he knew right from wrong, and he knew he was not supposed to sleep at Hill House.





The official name of the building, imprinted on a small brass plaque affixed to the front door, was the Seattle Family Services
Center. But for almost fifty years, it had been known throughout the city simply as Hill House. A spacious three-story Victorian
that dated back before the turn of the twentieth century, it was one on a very short list of elegant dwellings gracing First
Hill to have survived the onslaught of progress. The rest had been systematically gobbled up by the insatiable need of a municipal
medical community for more modern complexes of steel and concrete.


By the early 1950s, the mansion had fallen into serious disrepair. An anonymous benefactor then quietly purchased it, restoring
the gingerbread facade to its former glory with a fresh coat of paint and installing a new roof. The lawn was tilled and seeded,
the front was decorated with little stone benches, the back was fenced around a children’s playground, and the interior was
remodeled into an efficient multipurpose clinic.


Hill House sat quietly on the corner of Boren Avenue and Madison Street, behind a high sculptured iron fence and a
dense border of laurel bushes that had grown up over the past half century to provide an ample measure of privacy. Neither
the people who worked at the center nor those who frequented it had any wish, nor made any attempt, to conceal their presence
there. Nevertheless, they came to appreciate the buffer that the hedge provided from the little knot of protesters who verbally
assaulted them from the sidewalk on a regular basis.


The group had appeared one day, some dozen and a half years ago, pushing and shoving, shouting, intimidating, and even threatening.
Over time, the number of protesters dwindled, and several of their more extreme actions, such as vandalism and stalking, had
been curtailed by the passage of new legislation, but their purpose remained the same.


Many things happened at Hill House, including multilevel counseling, a full range of obstetric and gynecological services,
and comprehensive day care. But the only activity that concerned the sidewalk people, as the center’s employees came to call
them, was what they devoutly believed to be the immoral procedure of terminating pregnancies. Every single day, for almost
two decades, the staff and patrons of Hill House had alternately been damned and prayed over, entreated and spat upon.


“Personally, I would never have an abortion, and I don’t assist at them,” Shelly Weld, one of the clinic’s obstetrical nurses,
informed a member of the group one day. “But I would never presume to tell anyone else what to do.”


“If you continue to dwell in the house of the devil,” came the dour reply, “your soul will burn in hell for all eternity.”

Altogether, some ninety people worked in the nine-thousand-square-foot building. Among them were four physicians who specialized
in obstetrics and gynecology, three family practitioners, two radiologists, two anesthesiologists, one pharmacist and an assistant,
nine registered nurses, eleven nurse’s aides, and seven laboratory technicians. In addition, there were
two social workers, three psychiatrists, eight psychologists, sixteen licensed day care providers, three receptionists, one
administrator and his two assistants, two secretaries, one accountant, two bookkeepers, two clerks, two security guards, and
six maintenance people.


Moreover, at least three hundred others passed through the iron gates every day, seeking one kind of service or another.

The center’s administrative and business departments were located on the first floor, just off the front entrance, and the
laboratories, the pharmacy, and the consultation rooms shared the back of the building with the counseling unit. A surprisingly
well-equipped mini-hospital occupied the entire second floor.


And each morning, some seventy children between the ages of two months and five years found their way to the third-floor day
care center. The vast majority of these children were the offspring of personnel from the surrounding medical community, including
the center itself; parents who prided themselves on having their sons and daughters in the most highly regarded facility in
the city, and who knew how lucky they were. At any given time, as many as fifty other youngsters languished on a waiting list.


At two o’clock in the afternoon on the first Tuesday in February, the sky was overcast, the temperature hovered around fifty,
scavenging crows squawked at one another from their perches in the laurel bushes, and the scent of cinnamon from a nearby
bakery hung in the air.


In addition to the staff and the children, there were six couples and five women in counseling. Seven women were undergoing
a variety of laboratory tests. Three mothers and their newborn babies were rejoicing with family and friends in second-floor
rooms. One woman was preparing for a termination, two women were in labor, an expectant father and grandmother paced the maternity
lounge, and nineteen people were waiting
in the lobby for one type of service or another. At that moment, the building held close to two hundred and fifty people.


On the first floor, psychologist Frances Stocker, a robust sixty-year-old woman, had spent her morning counseling parents
of an autistic son, a woman contemplating divorce, and a pregnant fifteen-year-old. She was just settling into a session with
her next client, Grace Pauley, a frail, nervous woman, who was finally seeking help after years of spousal abuse. If Frances
ever questioned her choice of profession, she needed only a day like this to remind herself of how much what she did mattered,
and how meaningless her life would otherwise be.


In a consultation room just down the hall, radiologist Caitlin Callahan was reviewing the ultrasound recording of a suspected
ectopic pregnancy. The single mother had just come down from the day care center, where it was her habit to lunch with her
three-year-old daughter, Chelsea.


On the second floor, obstetrician Jeffrey Korba, tall and balding at forty-two, was holed up in his office, washing down a
chicken salad sandwich with a soda before his second delivery of the day, and wondering if he would have time to call his
wife. They had parted this morning on an argument about a washing machine, of all things, and he was sorely regretting it.


In one of the mini-hospital’s four holding rooms, Shelly Weld was monitoring Denise Romanadis’s contractions, and estimating
that she could probably give Korba another five minutes to finish his lunch before Hill House’s seventeenth set of triplets
would require his attention. In another room, Betsy Toth had just finished preparing Joyce O’Mara for an abortion, and was
awaiting Joseph Heradia’s return from a