The Pawn

by Steven James

  I laid the shower curtain on the floor in front of Trembley and spread it smooth. His lips were quivering. The guy was about to cry. “Bethanie’s parents hired me,” he said.

  “Bethanie? Bethanie Dixon?”

  He nodded.

  I went for some towels. “Why?”

  “They think she was murdered. What’s that shower curtain for?”

  “She was murdered. It’s to protect the carpet.”

  “No, by the cult members from the group she was with out West.”

  I returned with the towels. “Cult? I thought she was studying in a private college in New Mexico.”

  “That’s the line they used to cover things up, to tell the family members.” He eyed the shower curtain spread out at his feet. “Please. You don’t have to do this.”

  “I’m not going to, Dante is. What else? You have ninety seconds.”

  Trembley’s rate of delivery began to improve dramatically. “Bethanie joined this group. I’m not sure who the leader is; everyone just calls him the Father. He claims he was there at Jonestown, you know Jonestown?”

  I got the iron out of the closet. “I’ve heard of it. Keep going.”

  “Claims he was there as a kid and survived. I don’t know if it’s true or not. You don’t need that iron, OK? I’m talking, all right?”

  I plugged it in.

  “Her parents wanted me to get her out of the group; they were gonna sue, I think.” He was talking so fast now I could barely keep up. “But then he let her go, and she turned up dead. They’re pretty sure his group did it, but the cops said it was a serial killer.”

  “What do you know about this guy they call the Father?” I glanced at my watch. “One minute.”

  “I don’t know, I swear! I’m not really that good. I didn’t find out very much, and then when she ended up dead and—”

  The door swung open.

  Trembley was shaking. “No, no, please.” He closed his eyes.

  Sheriff Dante Wallace walked in munching on a cheeseburger. “What’s going—what do we have here?” he said. “Reginald Trembley?”

  Trembley opened his eyes. “Sheriff Wallace? You’re Dante?” Trembley looked at me. “He’s Dante?”

  I watched in disbelief as Dante leaned over and cut the cuffs off Reginald’s wrists. “You two know each other?”

  “Get outta here, Reggie,” Sheriff Wallace said. “I don’t want you messin’ up this investigation. You got it?”

  “Yeah, I got it.” Reginald Trembley nodded, rose, and stumbled out the door. For his sake I hoped he had a change of clothes in his car.

  “What’s going on?” I said. “He broke into my room.”

  “He’s a snitch.” Dante looked at me. I was still holding the iron. “What’s all this here stuff on the floor?”

  “I thought I might spill something,” I said. “He’s a private investigator and a snitch?”

  “Look, Trembley knows everybody. He’s been on our bankroll for the last two years. This region is one of the main drug corridors to DC and New York City up I75 or I95 from Florida, across on highway 26 or 40. Meth dealers, marijuana, dirty cops, you name it. He knows ’em all. That old boy’s connected.”

  “So you just let him go?”

  “We bring him in for something like this, we lose out in the long run. He didn’t take nothin’, did he?”

  “No. I don’t think so,” I said with a sigh. I unplugged the iron. One step forward, two steps back. I reached into my wallet and dug out eighty dollars. “Hey, take this for your phone, Dante. I can give you more if you need it. I’m really sorry about that.”

  He took another bite of his burger, eyed the money for a moment, and then accepted it. “That should be good. I’ll swing by and get me one on the way home. Thanks.”

  “Yeah.”

  He was still looking at the towels and shower curtain. “Any new leads on the case?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’ll keep you posted.” Then I glanced down at the floor. “I guess I should put this stuff away. I’ll talk to you later.”

  He stared at the iron for another moment or two before he turned. “Yeah, OK. See that you do.” Then he left, taking another bite out of his supper.

  As I began cleaning up, I noticed something on the carpet glimmering in the light.

  I knelt beside it. A lapel pin of a Confederate flag.

  Just like the one the governor was wearing.

  Must have pulled off Trembley’s shirt when I made him lie on the floor.

  I decided it was time to listen to those phone transcripts and see what Bethanie had to say about Governor Sebastian Taylor.

  51

  Once inside the federal building I didn’t waste any time locating the transcripts of Bethanie’s calls to Governor Taylor’s office. As I read through them I realized she was clearly terrified but also afraid to give specifics. Maybe she was worried someone was listening in.

  “Tell him the boy remembers. Tell him the boy is coming,” she said over and over. “You have to tell him!”

  “The boy remembers,” I whispered.

  Trembley had said the cult leader in New Mexico claimed to be a Jonestown survivor. Was he “the boy”? Terry had said Governor Taylor was a CIA agent stationed in Guyana at the time of the tragedy. Was this cult guy after the governor?

  I flipped open my computer to try and figure out what “college” Bethanie and Alexis had attended in New Mexico.

  An hour later it was pitch black outside, and I was still searching, still coming up with nothing. I heard some footsteps and looked up. Ralph and Lien-hua walked in toting takeout boxes of Chinese food. “It’s the best Chinese food in Asheville,” Lien-hua was telling him. “Which isn’t saying much.”

  Ralph stopped abruptly when he saw me. “What are you doing here, Pat? Aren’t you supposed to be picking up your daughter from the airport?”

  “Her flight was delayed,” I said. “Comes in tomorrow morning. Remember when I was followed earlier today?”

  Ralph set down his food. “Yeah. So you know who it was?”

  “Yeah. Mind if I join you? I’m starved.”

  In between bites of General Tso’s chicken and beef chow fun, I filled them in on what Trembley had told me at the hotel and what Terry had told me on the phone.

  “Jonestown, the governor, the murders, they’re all connected . . . ?” said Ralph.

  “Looks like it,” I said. “I read through the transcripts of Bethanie’s phone calls. She was afraid for her life. And according to the case files, one of the women in Alexis’s apartment complex thought she was acting nervous in the days preceding her death.”

  Lien-hua used chopsticks like an artist uses a brush. “So you’re thinking maybe this cult leader in New Mexico is planning something against the governor, and when Bethanie and Alexis caught wind of it and tried to leave and warn Governor Taylor, this man, the Father, had them killed?”

  I nodded. The theory explained a lot about the location and timing of the murders but still left some major questions unanswered. “I’ll admit it’s a work in progress.”

  “How did the Father find out the details from the case files?” asked Ralph. “Location of the stab wounds, type of rope, stuff like that?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. Some of it was made public, but not all of it.”

  “But why go through all the trouble of staging a crime to make it look like a serial killer did it?” asked Ralph. “Why not just kill them and then dispose of the bodies?”

  “Bethanie’s family was already suspicious,” I said. “That’s why they’d hired Trembley in the first place. If she suddenly disappeared, it would have brought even more suspicion on the group, maybe even put an end to their plans.”

  “So what do we know about this cult leader?” asked Lien-hua.

  “Almost nothing so far. I’ve been trying to find stuff on the Internet, but I’ve come up dry. It’s like he’s a ghost.” I sighed. “I even tried contacting Bethanie’s fa
mily, but they’re not returning any of my calls. They might be in hiding. I guess if we had a little more info on Jonestown it might help us see where all these stories intersect.”

  Lien-hua’s eyes lit up. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I researched group dynamics and cult behavior for my master’s degree, spent a couple months studying Peoples Temple.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope. I even had to write up a profile on the Reverend Jim Jones.”

  “I can give you his profile in one word,” said Ralph. “Wacko.” He took a bite of chicken.

  “If we do not learn from the past—” she started to say.

  “I know, I know,” he said. “We’re destined to drink cyanide all over again.”

  Lien-hua set down her chopsticks. “You know, there’s a lot about that whole incident most people don’t know.”

  “Let’s see,” grunted Ralph, “vats of Kool-Aid laced with a mixture of potassium cyanide and tranquilizers. I think there were about nine-hundred people there. They’d practiced the whole group suicide thing before. Lined up, drank it, died in the jungle. That about sums it up.” He went back to his food.

  “Nope, nope, and nope.”

  “What?” His mouth was full. “What do you mean?”

  “The first one’s just a technicality—it was Flavor-Aid, not Kool-Aid. Secondly, there were no drills, at least not according to the survivors. And third, while it’s true that some of the people did drink the poison, many, if not most, of them were murdered—”

  “What!” I said.

  She nodded. “Some were injected with cyanide, some were strangled, some died from gunshot wounds, others from crossbow bolts.”

  Ralph and I exchanged glances. “I thought they all drank it,” I said. “Mass suicide.”

  “Babies don’t commit suicide, Pat. Of the 909 who died, nearly 300 were children, another 200 were elderly. Some people were asleep when they were injected. That’s not suicide. The babies had cyanide squirted down their throats by their parents.”

  Just the thought made me physically ill. “I had no idea.”

  “That’s what I mean; most people don’t know the whole story.” I pushed my plate away. I’d lost my appetite.

  Ralph took a bite of beef chow fun. Nothing seemed to faze him. “All right,” he said. “So fill us in.”

  “Well . . . the Reverend Jim Jones founded Peoples Temple as a mainline Protestant church in the 1950s. They did a lot of social work, crossed over racial lines, attracted lots of minorities, which of course made him popular with the city council of San Francisco. Eventually, though, he stopped teaching about God and drifted into teaching a mixture of pseudo-communism and socialism—of course, he only preached those sermons when the city officials weren’t present.”

  “Of course,” Ralph said.

  “I knew he was a pastor,” I said, “but I didn’t know he was a communist.”

  “Well, he talked like he was, but for him nearly everything he said was to manipulate others. It’s hard to say what he really believed. After a while the political tide began to change—lawsuits, allegations of human rights abuse. Jones was even arrested for lewd behavior with another man.”

  She nibbled at her chicken and then took a sip of bottled water. “Anyway,” she continued, “he was paranoid and convinced nuclear war was imminent—also wanted to avoid the lawsuits. He’d researched the best places to live in case of nuclear war and decided on Guyana, South America. Eventually, he and his group moved down there to set up an agricultural project.”

  “A what?” asked Ralph.

  “Basically a commune. They farmed, grew their own food, stuff like that.”

  “So. A cult,” he said.

  “Semantics. Call it what you want, but the truth is when you look at what they were able to accomplish in just fifteen months, it’s nothing short of astonishing.”

  I couldn’t believe she was saying anything good about Jonestown. “What’s so astonishing about a killer cult?”

  “Clearing the land, planting, building, even moving toward universal health care. Originally they were planning on having 500 people living there within 6 to 10 years, but in just over a year nearly a thousand had moved down—and that didn’t even include the Temple members who were still in California waiting to come down.”

  “OK, but despite all that, Jones was clearly insane,” I said. “Right?”

  “Of course. But he was also a genius. And he was able to inspire people to work together toward a common goal, to sacrifice for the good of others, to put aside hatred and prejudice. Most of the people in Jonestown were disenfranchised minorities. He gave them hope, a place to belong. And he had an amazing ability to persuade people. Incredibly charismatic. People even said he could perform miracles—healing cancer, reading people’s minds, even raising the dead. Sure, some of the gags were shams and con games, but some of his miracles have yet to be explained.”

  I ventured another bite of supper. Jim Jones a miracle worker? You have to be kidding me.

  “Jones wouldn’t let anyone leave the town. Soon there were allegations of abuse, torture, kidnapping. Eventually, Leo Ryan, a congressman from Northern California, was told they were keeping people against their will, and he decided to investigate. There was a boy involved, some kind of custody battle with a woman who bore Jones a son and then left Peoples Temple. It gets complicated.”

  “Simplify it,” said Ralph. His mouth was full of rice.

  “Ryan was assassinated.”

  “What?” I said. “Down in South America?”

  Lien-hua nodded. “He took a news crew down, met up with Jones, and as he and his team were getting ready to board the plane to return to the states at a nearby airstrip, some men stepped out of hiding and assassinated him and four of the newsmen. It happened at a place called Port Kaituma. A number of others were wounded.”

  “I don’t remember hearing any of this stuff before,” I said.

  “I remember hearing about it now,” said Ralph. “That name, Leo Ryan, but not the details.”

  Lien-hua continued. “Well, in the aftermath of the tragedy, the media had photos of rows and rows of dead bodies to show the world, and when they latched onto the killer cult angle, most of the events leading up to the White Night were lost in the shuffle.”

  I sat up straight. “What did you just say? The White Night?”

  She looked baffled by my reaction. “Yeah, White Night. The night they all died is called the White Night.” As she said the last two words, her eyes lit up. “White night!” she exclaimed. “That’s what Bethanie wrote, isn’t it?”

  I grabbed my computer and pulled up Bethanie’s crime scene photos while Lien-hua hurried into an explanation. “Jones didn’t like the idea of darkness being associated with something bad or evil because of the large number of African-Americans in his group. So, whenever there was a crisis or tragedy at Jonestown, he called it a ‘white night.’ Sometimes he’d create his own crisis—even having his guards fire gunshots over the compound—to keep the people following him, believing in him as their savior.”

  We gathered around and looked at the computer screen. Sure enough, the K wasn’t a letter at all, just a smear of blood from Bethanie’s finger. But because of the chess connection, everyone, including me, had assumed it was “knight.” Never assume. Never ever assume. I could have kicked myself.

  “So that’s it,” I whispered. “White Night. There’s going to be another one. The kid remembers.”

  Aaron Jeffrey Kincaid stared out the window at the starry New Mexico sky. Each point of light pierced through the fabric of the night like the tip of a dagger driven through black velvet. So many stars. So many distant worlds. So many daggers piercing the darkness.

  He struck a match and lit the scented candles beside him. As he did, the window turned into a mirror, reflecting flickers of dancing candlelight as well as the interior of the room.<
br />
  He gazed at the reflection. The room still bore the marks of its predecessors, with all their rare artwork and imported Italian furniture. High above him the original aspen beams held up the vaulted ceiling of the main room. Even after eighty years they looked as solid and imposing as ever.

  Too bad this place would be a pile of ashes by tomorrow night.

  In the dark mirror, he saw the door on the other end of the room swing open. A huge barrel-chested man with a shaved head stalked into the room and stood motionless, at attention, not wanting to disturb the Father. David was twenty-nine years old, had played six years as a tackle for the Bengals, and then started teaching martial arts. His specialty was breaking people’s bones with his bare hands.

  Kincaid ran his finger along the scar on his wrist and stared at the stoic man’s reflection in the dark window. He knew he could have made David wait for an hour, a day, forever. David would do anything for him. Just like the others.

  Kincaid approached David. “My son,” he said. The words rang with the true affection of a father, even though the two men weren’t related.

  The leviathan of a man lowered his gaze in deference to his master. “Yes, Father?”

  Kincaid laid his left hand on the back of David’s neck and gently stroked the corded muscles like a father might caress the neck of his child. “Do you understand what we’re doing here? Do you really understand?”

  David lifted his eyes to stare at the far wall. “We’re creating a better world, Father. We’re stepping together into the light. We’re completing the revolution, we’re—”

  Aaron Jeffery Kincaid interrupted his pupil. “From your heart, my son. I know the teachings and the texts. I wrote them.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “No need. You were about to say, ‘a world where peace can reign and those who have chosen the way of unity can find freedom on the highest plane.’”

  “Yes, Father.”