Twisted Triangle Read online

  Gene turned him around, jabbed the gun into his back, and told him to lie on the floor. He put his knee in Edwin’s spine, cuffed his hands behind him, and shackled his ankles together.

  “Are you by yourself?” Gene asked.

  “Yes, I’m supposed to be meeting someone else, two other people.”

  Gene put a porous cloth bag with a drawstring over Edwin’s head and pulled it closed. The bag was somewhat transparent, so Edwin could see shapes moving against the light.

  “Well, there isn’t going to be anyone else coming. My boss made the call to you to set this up.”

  Gene sat Edwin in a chair in the hallway, then started asking him about the church bank accounts. When Edwin said there were some accounts he didn’t know anything about, Gene struck him in the back of the head.

  Gene said someone had been embezzling money from his boss and laundering it through Edwin’s church. He wanted to know if Edwin was part of the scam.

  “You’re going to help me,” Gene said. “Do you know why?”

  “No.”

  “Because I have someone watching your children,” he said, adding that he could’ve “taken” Edwin and his kids at the Giant or Dairy Queen earlier that day.

  “Do you know a Marguerite Bennett, a.k.a. Elizabeth Akers?” he asked.

  “Yes, I know a Margo Bennett.”

  “Did you know that she is an embezzler and a lesbian?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  By this point, Edwin realized that the masked man must be Gene Bennett, Margo’s crazy estranged husband who had kidnapped her in 1993 and then went to prison. He’d run into Gene briefly three times before, once in the early 1990s, then twice only two months earlier at the hospital when Lindsey was having heart surgery. After praying with Margo, her friends, and family in the waiting area, Edwin went to check on Gene, who was sitting by himself in another room. Gene seemed to appreciate the gesture and was very friendly. Edwin felt that Gene’s mood was kind of “blank,” though, so it was hard to tell if he was hiding his emotions or didn’t have any.

  Gene moved Edwin into an office, then back into the hallway, where he strapped a fanny pack around the minister’s waist. After establishing that Edwin had not been in the military and knew nothing about plastic explosives, Gene said he’d loaded up the pack with C-4.

  “I’m putting enough explosives around your waist to blow up this church and flatten all the trees around it,” he said.

  Edwin heard Gene talking to someone on a cell phone several times in an adjoining room, so he figured Gene had associates who were watching Edwin’s kids at the house. He was right. Sort of.

  One of those calls, around 10:15, was to answer a page from Mary Ann, who was still parked outside Edwin’s. She told Gene she was nervous because one of the elderly neighbors was looking suspiciously at her and her car. Gene told her to wait while he called the minister, then called back and instructed her to drive to the Catholic church across the street from Prince of Peace and to park next to the rental van.

  She stayed at the church lot for about an hour until Gene called again. This time, he told her to go to the Giant parking lot and look for a Jeep Cherokee, another car involved in the surveillance.

  Gene disappeared for a while, leaving Edwin to sit in fear, wondering about the pack strapped to his belly. He was sure Gene planned to kill him and Margo and harm his children.

  Next, Gene told Edwin to call Margo and lure her to the church with the ruse that he needed her help dealing with an abused wife. But he told Edwin to pick the name of someone who was no longer a church member, someone Margo didn’t know. Edwin wracked his brain to think of a family whose names Margo would recognize so that he could tip her off covertly.

  Gene had Edwin practice what he was going to say and struck him in the back of the head again when he fumbled. Finally, after Gene was satisfied, Edwin made the call to Margo around 11 PM.

  Margo had just drifted off to sleep when the phone rang. She reached over her seven-year-old daughter, Lindsey, to pick up the receiver, but heard only dead air.

  Lindsey had trouble falling asleep, so she would often curl up in bed with Margo at night, resting her head on her mother’s shoulder.

  The phone rang a second time. Margo still heard nothing on the other end.

  The third time, she heard her pastor’s voice.

  “Hi, Edwin,” she said. It was hard enough to get Lindsey to fall asleep without all this disruption.

  “I’ve gotten a call about domestic abuse—Tammy and Clarence Johnson, one of the families in our church,” Edwin said flatly. “Do you remember them?”

  Edwin sounded tired. His voice was not as animated as usual. But he always talked a little fast, so Margo had no way of knowing that something was wrong.

  “Yes, I know Tammy,” she said.

  Margo didn’t know the family well enough to understand that Edwin was trying to warn her by using a different last name for Tammy and Clarence Batchelett and by calling Clarence by his full name rather than C.E., his usual nickname.

  “They’ve been fighting,” Edwin said.

  “Fighting?” Margo asked, thinking that the police would be better equipped to handle a domestic violence case.

  “They’ve been yelling and arguing,” he said. “The children were scared, so they’ve gone to Tammy’s mother’s. I thought it would be a good idea to take a woman along. Can you help me?”

  Margo had been studying to be a peer counselor at the church, which was about fifteen minutes from her townhouse in Woodbridge. It was a little inconvenient to be running out in the middle of the night when she had to be at work early the next morning, but this was all part of the volunteer counseling job.

  “Of course I’ll help you,” she said. “Do you want me to meet you at their house?”

  “No, I’m at the church. I’ll wait for you here.”

  Margo moved carefully away from Lindsey and out of her bed, then went to tell her sister Letta, who was staying in the basement apartment, where she was going. The kids were asleep, Margo said, and she’d call in a little while to tell her how long she’d be.

  “Okay, be careful,” Letta replied.

  Margo got her purse and packed her .38 revolver, fully loaded with six bullets. Only now that she was in a hurry, she couldn’t seem to find her can of pepper spray on the bookshelf in the living room where she usually left it, out of the girls’ reach. At first, she decided to go without it. But by the time she got out to the car, an inner voice told her to go back and search again. This time she found it, right where she’d tried looking the first time.

  That’s when she saw Allison standing on the stairs, holding her favorite green blanket. She couldn’t sleep either.

  Margo hugged Allison, kissed her goodnight, and told her to go back to bed.

  “I love you,” she said. “I’m going to the church. I’ll be back in a little bit.”

  Allison was afraid. She felt something was wrong.

  Margo had quit smoking in college, but she’d secretly picked up the habit again after Gene’s release from prison a little more than a year ago, when she’d seen him following her—stalking her, really—making sure she saw him watching her.

  Margo grabbed a pack of Winston 100s from her purse and lit one, stopping at a red light near a 7-11 to throw out the butt. It was a comfortable night, warm enough to wear a short-sleeved T-shirt and jeans.

  As she sped through the night, Margo went over in her head what she was going to say to the couple. This peer counseling program was one of the few activities that provided her with some relief from her nagging paranoia and fear of Gene. It also felt good to practice some of the hostage negotiation and counseling skills she’d learned over the years.

  When she pulled up to the church around 11:25 PM, she recognized Edwin’s Isuzu SUV parked near the entrance, but the building was dark. She pulled around the truck and parked in front, noticing that the door was propped open with a half-dead potted fern.<
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  As she stepped through the first set of double doors into the foyer, where parishioners would leave their wet umbrellas, she started feeling a heaviness, a sense that something wasn’t right. She gripped her pepper spray tightly in her left hand, her thumb on the button as she’d just been trained, apprehensive about what might be waiting for her inside.

  “Margo,” Edwin called out.

  “Edwin, are you there?”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice muffled through a wall to her left.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in the secretary’s office,” he said, referring to the room connected to his office, which was off the lobby ahead. His voice sounded off. Unusually serious.

  “Are you all right?”

  “No, not really.”

  She opened the second set of double doors into the dark lobby area, which was steeped in the faint pink glow of the Exit sign at the far end of the room. A low light was coming through an open door a few feet ahead and to the left, which led to Edwin’s office and then dog-legged into his secretary’s office.

  Suddenly, a door to the sanctuary burst open about ten feet ahead and to the right of her. A man in a ski mask jumped out with a gun and started coming toward her.

  “Margo, don’t fight me on this,” he ordered.

  Margo knew that voice almost as well as her own, and she recognized the bulky frame. It was Gene.

  Margo immediately raised her hand and pushed the button on the pepper spray, aiming for his face. It was too dark to see much, but she saw him take a few steps quickly back, trying to get out of her range. Her survival instinct kicked in and she was airborne, plunging into Edwin’s office, where she dove for cover behind the desk in the corner.

  “Gene, no!” she yelled. “You’re not going to do this!”

  Margo dug around in her purse for her gun with her right hand, spraying Gene with her other hand every time he poked his head around the doorjamb.

  “Margo, do you want to die?”

  “You’re not going to kill me, Gene. I am not going to let this happen. I am not going to let you do this.”

  “I don’t want to kill you,” Gene said. “I just want to talk to you. If I’d wanted to kill you, I could have had you any time.”

  “If you wanted to talk to me, you could’ve called me on the phone,” Margo said. “I’m not coming out. You are not going to do this.”

  By her fifth spray, her can was out of power and barely spurted a few inches out. But by that point, she’d found her gun and had her trigger finger right where it needed to be. Margo knocked a stack of letter trays off the desk so that she had an unobstructed view of the doorway she’d just dived through. She balanced the gun on the corner of the desk, where Gene could plainly see it, aimed at his head.

  “What do you want to do, get into a shootout right now, right here?” he taunted. “Let’s just end it all right now. We can get in a shootout and see who’s the best shot.”

  “I don’t care, Gene; I am not coming out there.”

  “Edwin has got explosives around his waist. I’ll kill us all. Come on, let’s talk, or we’ll all die. Do you want to die?”

  “I don’t care. You want to blow us up, blow us up, but I’m not coming out there.”

  Although it hadn’t during the kidnapping, Margo’s training had kicked in by now, and Gene could do nothing to override it. This time, she intuitively reacted with a game right out of Gene’s own playbook, knowing that as long as she could keep the chaos going, he would not have the chance to come up with Plan B. Or so she thought.

  Margo could see Edwin in the darkened secretary’s office, with a bag over his head and hands cuffed behind him, up against the copy machine.

  “Edwin, are you all right?” she asked.

  “I think so,” he said.

  “Do you have explosives around you?”

  “There’s something around my waist.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Edwin that you’re a lesbian?” Gene interrupted. “Did you tell him about the money you stole?”

  “I’m not going to let you do this,” Margo said. “Just leave. Get out.”

  At this point, Edwin felt he should try to help.

  “Gene, you don’t have to do this,” he said.

  But Margo didn’t want Edwin diverting Gene’s attention and giving him an opportunity to calm down. She needed to keep the chaos going, but she was also angry, and her adrenaline was running high.

  “Edwin, just shut up,” she yelled. “This is all your fault. How could you do this to me? How could you call me and bring me into this?”

  “Margo, I didn’t know what to do. He told me somebody was with my kids. I’m sorry.”

  “God dammit, Edwin, if Gene doesn’t kill you, I will.”

  “Don’t you know I’m going to take the children and leave the country tonight?” Gene said.

  “Gene, just do what you have to do. Get out of here. Just leave.”

  “You know I’m going to leave here and go and get the kids. You know I’m going to have to go through Letta. Is that what you want?”

  Margo figured he meant that he would kill Letta if necessary to take the kids, but Margo was willing to call his bluff. “Gene, just do what you have to do. Get out of here. Just leave. I’m not coming out.”

  Margo didn’t understand why he wasn’t trying to shoot at her. All she could think was that he wanted to take her somewhere, to torture her, to make her suffer more than just a quick shot to the head.

  She’d backed herself into a corner, literally, with no way out of the room except to get past Gene and the doorway he was guarding, and she knew that was highly unlikely, if not impossible.

  “Edwin, are you ready to die? ’Cause I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this.”

  Edwin sighed and said, “I was afraid of that.”

  “Are you praying?”

  “I’ve been praying.”

  “Pray for me too,” she said. “I’m a little busy right now.”

  She made the decision then and there that she would have to shoot Gene and, with any luck, take him down.

  She took careful aim at the spot where his head had appeared, but as she began easing back on the trigger, she could feel it slip. The trigger didn’t catch. She also heard a click, which meant that the cylinder hadn’t rotated inside the gun, so it wouldn’t fire. She started to panic.

  Please don’t tell me my gun is malfunctioning, she thought.

  She decided she would have to “single fire” the gun, so she pulled the hammer back with her thumb, cocking it, and took aim again at the doorway.

  The next time Gene poked his head around, she fired. The bullet slammed into the doorjamb and the plaster next to it. Just a quarter-inch more to the right and she would have caught him in chest.

  Dammit! she thought before snapping back into police action mode. Don’t panic. Get ready. Take the next shot.

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” Gene said.

  Margo crawled around the edge of the desk and tried to reach up and grab the telephone. She had five bullets left, and she was going to use them wisely.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Gene said, tauntingly.

  Margo withdrew back behind the desk.

  Gene started throwing books and handfuls of papers into the office, apparently to draw her fire until she ran out of bullets, but he was careful not to put his head or body into her firing range again.

  “Does he have a vest on, or doesn’t he?” Gene asked in the same taunting voice.

  Margo knew that Gene had been issued a bullet-proof vest by the FBI and that he could very well be wearing it. That meant she’d have to aim for his head, a much smaller target than his chest. But she also knew that Gene might be toying with her.

  “Gene, just leave. Get out of here.”

  “I’m not going to leave,” he said. “If I leave, you’ll shoot me in the back.”

  “I’m not going to shoot you in the back
. Just leave.”

  “You’re going to follow me and shoot me. Give me your car keys.”

  “No, I’m not giving you anything. Just get out of here.”

  “What’s it going to take to get you out of there, Margo, a gas canister?”

  Margo hoped that this, too, was a ruse and kept yelling at him until he stopped responding.

  It got very quiet in the church, but Margo couldn’t be sure.

  “Gene, just go. Just leave,” she said.

  When there was still no response, Margo reached up and pulled the phone by its cord off the desk and onto the floor. She didn’t know if Gene was still lurking around, but if he was going to run into the room, she didn’t want to be up and walking around. What she wanted was to call 911.

  But as she started pressing buttons on the phone, she realized that Gene had disabled the lines: there was dead air on one of them, music on the other, and she couldn’t get a dial tone. She figured Gene had used one line to call the other and then put it on hold.

  “Edwin, the phones are dead. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

  Finally, after pressing one button and then the other five or six times, she was able to free up one of the lines and call 911. It was 11:38 PM.

  She laid the receiver down and shouted so that she could keep her hands free and her finger on the trigger, aiming at the doorway, in case Gene appeared again.

  Margo continued to yell at Gene. She was afraid that he might come charging back in if he heard her talking to the 911 operator; she also wanted the dispatcher to know what was going on at the church.

  “Gene, just take your gun and get out. Edwin, do you have explosives around your waist?”

  Once she figured Gene was probably gone, she picked up the receiver and talked directly to the dispatcher.

  “This is Margo Bennett; I’m at the Prince of Peace United Methodist Church. My husband has been here with a gun and tried to kill me. I think he’s on the way to getting my children; I need someone to check on my kids. I need police out here.”

  “Officers are already on the way,” the dispatcher said. “I need you to calm down.”

  “I am calm.”