The Perfect Soldier

by B D Grant

  “If they’re able to turn Kelly into a perfect soldier, you know what that means? They could do it to anyone.” Mom says nothing. “You thinking they might have made him bulletproof?” Bryant asks. “That would be cool.”

  I could tell them what I saw when I read Kelly’s lie. Bulletproof isn’t too far off from the truth.

  “He can’t feel pain.” The ghosts of the words escape my lips, mostly air. It hurts to think about. It must have been a side effect from blocking his own soul.

  Mom glances in the back seat floorboard. “What was that, sweetie?”

  Bryant turns around. “That wasn’t a very long nap.”

  Outside of the backseat window, the tops of tall buildings have been replaced with lightly-clouded sky. I move into the right seat, rolling my shoulders back. I keep the blanket on my lap. I’m expecting to hear something from Mom about me getting up, but she silently watches me from the rear view mirror.

  I take in the view, twisting around to stretch my back. “Where are we meeting the others?”

  Mom is quick to answer. “We aren’t.”

  Mom moves into the other lane to pass a little blue Audi. The young woman in the other car glares over at Bryant as we pass. Bryant smiles back, giving her a wave. When she doesn’t smile or return his wave, he smashes his face against the passenger side window. That does the trick; she laughs, and we’re forgiven.

  Bryant sits back, his face leaving a sheen on the glass. “Mr. McBride said to bring you straight to him. John and Ben weren’t really expecting us to meet them. And they’ll be tied up with the police anyways.”

  That’s fair. Uncle Will must have sent John in his place to find me. “Why didn’t Uncle Will come too?” Bryant glances at Mom. It doesn’t seem that the question’s occurred to her.

  Bryant’s hesitation starts to make me nervous. “More hospital attacks?”

  Mom tightens her grip on the stirring wheel, letting off of the gas a little. “Is he okay,” she asks.

  “As far as I know,” he says, not sounding too sure.

  “What is it?” Mom asks, getting to the point.

  I slide to the edge of the seat. “Is it Jake?”

  “Is it Darrell?” Mom asks.

  Bryant shakes his head at both of us. “Nah, it’s nothing like that. They’re fine.” He looks at Mom. “Mr. McBride couldn’t make it because the council showed up before we got…the call… to help Taylor.”

  Mom is as confused as I am by what he’s saying. I’ve heard that Aurora used to have a council, but I’m pretty sure it dissolved before I was born.

  “I’m not talking about Aurora’s council.”

  Mom’s face drops. “Oh no.”

  I look at Mom. “What? What do you mean, ‘oh no?’”

  “They showed up for your uncle. It’s kind of what they do if a community council has a major problem, and they can’t handle it by themselves. Well, supposedly they do.”

  Mom reads my expression in the rear-view mirror. “The Supreme Council,” she explains.

  Bryant nods adding, “And they showed up the day before Taylor was taken.”

  I’m trying to understand. “So there’s more than one Seraphim council?”

  Mom chimes in. “It is very rare for a town’s council to ask them for help. They’re more overseers. It’s not a good thing. William must have collected substantial proof against the Rogue organization for the council to actually show up.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” Bryant says, looking grim. “They showed up FOR him.”

  Mom stares straight ahead. I lean closer to the front seat. “Like, he’s in trouble?”

  Bryant rests his head against the headrest. “Yeah. Yeah, big trouble.”

  Mom whips the car into a gas station parking lot. I plop back in my seat. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she announces. “Either of you want anything?” She pauses just a moment before slamming the door shut.

  Bryant turns around in his seat as my mom stomps off. “You want to sit up here for the next stretch?”

  I smile despite myself. “You’re the one telling her stuff that you know is going to make her mad. You go ahead and enjoy it.”

  He turns back to face the front. “Hey, just thought I’d offer. At least she says what she’s thinking. My mom never shows it when she’s angry.” That’s one problem I’ve never had. It might bother me more some other time, but I’m still just glad to have her back.

  Through the gas station windows I watch as she picks out a bottle of water before going to pay for it at the count.

  As I watch her talk to the cashier, it hits me how much I’ve missed her. The smile she gives the cashier quickly fades when she turns for the door. She walks out with a heavy frown.

  “She’s still mad,” I tell Bryant. “Smash your nose on the window again and see if it has the same effect on her as it did with that other lady.”

  “Pass,” he says, buckling his seatbelt.

  “Benny Bumperson and friends,” Bryant says into the gas station phone we stop at in the next town over. We paid the gas station attendee ten bucks to use the cordless phone. She snatched the ten and slid the phone across the counter and went back to stocking the cigarettes behind the register. “It’s our code,” Bryant says to us, covering the receiver.

  “Obviously,” Mom tells him. Still cross.

  Bryant talks quickly into the phone. “No injuries,” he says quietly, glancing at the woman who’s busy pulling a stepping stool over to reach the top row of cigarettes. I glance at Mom. Her eyes are downcast watching her foot rub a smear of rubber off of the floor. I know Bryant’s probably talking about the three of us being okay, but the mention of injuries has my mind thinking of Sidney. Her limp her body was such a sad sight being carried in John’s big arms. Sidney never talked about how old she was; she never really liked talked about herself at all. I guess I had always assumed she was somewhere between late fifties and early sixties, but seeing her in person she looked like she could be in her eighties. I’m sure Mom’s thinking about her as well. She had called her, “Sid” like it was a nickname she’d called her for years. I could ask, but then if she weren’t worrying about Sidney she would once I brought her up. There were plenty of emergency vehicles waiting outside for John to take her to. They would have loaded her into an ambulance and rushed her off to the closest hospital. She’s been through too much to not pull through. When Bryant finishes the phone call he hangs up and thanks the woman behind the counter setting the phone down next to the register.

  “Darrell and Jake are fine,” he tells us as we step outside. “They were giving their statements. They’re using an old insurance building that Detective Doherty’s people have been using for their investigation.”

  “Who’s Detective Doherty?” Mom asks.

  “He’s the guy that was brought in to investigate the raid and now the hospital attacks. He has a whole team of people working for him. That Detective Ash and the shorter guy that got shot up in that building were two of his people.”

  “Oh,” Mom says, taking the car keys out and unlocking the car as we walk up.

  “Yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see if Rogues get away with that,” Bryant says, opening the door to the backseat for me before getting into the passenger seat.

  “They’ve always come up with something in the past,” Mom says as she gets into the driver's seat.

  “How’s my uncle doing?” I ask, sliding into the middle seat. “Is that who you were talking to?”

  “Yeah, it was, but he was too busy worrying about you guys to tell me anything about what’s going on with him. He sounded rushed though. He did tell me that the council has even reserved a hotel nearby to house people while they’re figuring out who did what and who’s to blame. But anyway, he wanted you two to know that Darrell and Jake are okay. They left the council building after giving their statements. I don’t know where they went,” he says quickly, “but they are expected back.”

  I’m happy th
at Jake and my dad gave their statements about what happened to them. The council is going to have a hard time if they plan on prosecuting Uncle Will when they learn how many people were being harmed at the school we raided. I’m sure Mom had planned on taking me to Clairabelle’s even after Bryant told her about the Supreme Council and Uncle Will, but now that we know Dad and Jake are somewhere around there too there’s no way she’d take me anywhere else. Though, by the way she’s chewing on her bottom lip as she stares down at the steering wheel, I can tell that she’s worried. If my life with her has taught me anything, it’s that she’s a private person. She’s not going to like having to answer for where she’s been or why she left the morning of the raid. Going to Uncle Will’s aide only may not have been enough for her to She loves her family too much though, and even though Jake isn’t blood, I know she wants to see him and my dad as much as I am.

  “What do you know about the council?” Mom asks Bryant. I smile at myself for having guessed so accurately at what was on her mind.

  “Not much,” he admits. “There were four council members there when I left, but John told me and Ben that there were four more on the way.”

  “And the ninth?”

  Bryant shrugs. “I didn’t even get to see the four who were there when I left. John was with Mr. McBride though, so he’d know.” He looks over at my mom. She hasn’t started the car yet. She breathes deeply, massaging the back of her neck with both hands. “Maybe I should drive,” Bryant offers. “This is better for me,” she says, putting the key in the ignition. “What’s the address?”

  Chapter 17

  Detective Susan watches Bill walk into Doherty’s office. Bill really had turned out to be a good choice for her makeshift team of detectives. Sure, it had been a pretty messy case, but he had pulled his weight. Especially once she had sent Detective Lane to shadow Catherine McBride. She wouldn’t have even called it a skeleton crew after that. Still, she’d managed to accomplish a lot with only Bill there with her.

  Susan had gotten in contact with the Swartzes, who had come back from the mission trip before the hospital bombings. Just like Pastor O’Leary had told her, the couple had moved out of town shortly after returning early from the mission trip. The Swartzes were living in South Carolina with Mr. Swartz’s mother, which is how Susan and Bill had been able to track them down since his mother had been listed as his emergency contact on the mission trip form Pastor O’Leary had found and forwarded to her after her team and her had left the church.

  Susan had been able to get the couple on the phone after getting the home phone number for Mr. Swartz’s parents. She was happy Bill and her didn’t have to make the trek to South Carolina.

  During their talk, it was Mrs. Swartz who had given Susan the most information. Mrs. Swartz had been the one to back out of the fake mission trip when Pastor Dave started telling them about the existence of Seraphim, and her husband had been smart enough to leave with her. She’d thought the pastor had lost his mind.

  “It was so familiar, how he was acting,” Mrs. Swartz had told Susan. “My brother is schizophrenic and it took years of my parents witnessing his episodes before they’d finally admit that it wasn’t normal. I was just a kid and I could’ve told you he wasn’t right. The stuff I’d hear him telling my parents was so off the wall. He swore he was chased by masked men when he went to the grocery store and came back with no groceries. My mother picked me up from school one day, and when we got home my brother was in the kitchen balling like a baby in my father’s arms. He’d told him that he’d killed someone. It wasn’t true, thank God, but it was finally enough that my parents took him to see a psychologist.”

  “I’m happy he finally got help,” Susan told her.

  “It wasn’t a cure or anything, he’ll be on meds the rest of his life, but at least we knew what was going on with him. Dave sounded just as anxious and scared and…” Mrs. Swartz’s voice faded to silence.

  “He sounded like your brother,” Susan coaxed.

  “Exactly like my brother when he’d been at the height of one of his breaks from reality. It was so hard to witness.”

  The fact that the Swartzes had moved shortly after returning to town had been coincidence. Mr. Swartz’s father had passed away and they’d decided to move to South Carolina to help his elderly mother.

  “And even after we’d made it clear that we were through with the mission trip, and left, that man had the audacity to try to call my husband a week later. Thankfully I answered the phone.”

  Susan’s interest had been peaked. “What did he want?”

  “He was checking up on us. He wanted to know if we’d told anyone about those made up Sera-whatever people he was telling us about,” Mrs. Swartz had told her. “I knew we’d made the right decision to leave after that phone call. If you ask me he was suffering some intense paranoia believing whole-heartedly that these made-up people had to be stopped and us leaving after finding out that he wanted to stop them somehow fueled the delusion. He even said something along the line of us being liabilities.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have that number he called you from, would you?”

  “I’m sure,” she could hear her walking through her mother-in-law’s house. “Yeah, it’s still in his call log. You want it?”

  Susan fought back the urge to shout, “Yes!” into the phone, and instead gave a cool, “that would be great.” The phone number had ultimately served as the key to breaking the case open.

  Susan pulls out the only pencil sitting in the penholder on her desk, replaying her conversation Mrs. Swartz in her head for the tenth time that morning. Two days after that phone call, Bill had gotten a call from their lawyer; unless they were being charged, the Swartzes were done talking.

  She keeps an eye on Doherty’s door and doodles a cartoonish version of the front of Good Faith Fellowship church.

  The Swartzes had been lucky. She shouldn’t have told Mrs. Swartz that there had been deaths linked to trip, but she’d wanted them to know how close they’d come to disaster. No doubt that was why they’d gotten legal representation. It was a shame; Bill had come up with a few more questions for them.

  The calls to church members from the Wyoming number Mrs. Swartz gave her dried up just a day before her conversation with the couple. Bill’s thought was that the Swartzes had warned the pastor but there was no evidence besides the timing to support this theory. Susan figured it had something to do with her team showing up at the church and asking about that mission trip. Pastor Dave may have stopped making calls, but the phone hadn’t been turned off. They’d been able to ping its location, so there was still a sliver of hope that he’d kept it. Either way, Wyoming was the next step.

  Susan pauses midway through drawing a steeple on top of her crummy drawing of the church absentmindedly making soft strokes with her pen. She lets the desk chair swivel under her, thinking she’d heard a noise from Doherty’s office.

  She hadn’t even gotten to see Doherty yet. She’d called him to tell him when they’d gotten into town but he didn’t answer. He hadn’t called her back either, which was unusual for him. Lane and Ash also hadn’t been returning any of her calls and she had been trying to call them since before Bill and her got on the plane to head back. She’d wanted to know what was going on with Catherine McBride.

  A woman she’d never seen before greeted them outside of Doherty’s office when they’d made it upstairs and requested that only one of the detectives come in at a time to discuss their findings. Bill volunteered to go first, before Susan could tell the woman that their findings had already been emailed to Doherty before they’d left Wyoming. He’d handed her the plastic bin he was carrying that was full of their work before following the woman inside Doherty’s office.

  She glances over her shoulder at Bill’s desk where she’d placed the plastic bin. No, she thinks to herself, by the time I get everything out and get situated it will be my turn to debrief with Doherty, and whoever that woman is. Susan looks back down to
her drawing.

  She had mentally marked Wyoming off of any future plans of possible vacation destinations shortly after arriving. It was a pretty enough state with picturesque blue skies and friendly residents, but she wasn’t able to stop shivering even on the warmest day where the thermostat had read a whopping thirty-two degrees. It also didn’t help that the team had crap cell reception for over half of the trip. They had tried to keep a low profile, more than once they’d had to go into local businesses, little run-down shops and a few chains, to use the landlines. As soon as either of them asked to use the phone the person they were talking to would pick up their southern accents and it opened them up to being asked where they were from and what had brought them up to Wyoming. No story they told was the same, work trip, traveling cross country, looking at real estate; just about anything other than we’re detectives working a case.

  Their trip had ended in Laramie, where the cell phone they were tracking had placed him. Doherty had established contacts with Laramie’s Chief of Police before the team had arrived. One of the bonuses to having a great boss with connections was that when they arrived, there was a signed search warrant waiting for them for Pastor Dave’s last known residence in Wyoming, a garage apartment. The landlord had run a background check that the pastor had been dumb enough to use his real name and social security number.

  Two police cars had escorted them to the residence in west Laramie. The Laramie Police Department had nothing to report from the short surveillance Doherty requested on the garage apartment. It was, Susan had admitted to herself, a move she wouldn’t have made in fear that a car sitting on the garage apartment would tip the suspect off, but her boss knew what he was doing. The unmarked police car that had been sitting on the place pulled up to them as they parked. The landlord living in the main house in front of the two-story apartment was the only one seen coming and going from the property. By that point, Susan was pretty sure that Pastor Dave was long gone.

  The search warrant was given to the officer who’d been casing the residence so he could give it to the old man in the main house while the rest of them headed to the garage in the back. Susan, Bill, and one of the senior officers had taken the front entrance of the garage apartment while the others secured the back. The apartment was old. If the bottom section of the garage apartment ever had a garage door it was long gone by the time they showed. The garage was empty except for misshapen pieces of plié wood leaning against the wall on the inside wall. The numerous spider webs filling the corners of the garage were visible as she walked past the garage toward the stairs located on the side of the apartment from the heavy amount of dust caking them.