The Canary List: A Novel

by Sigmund Brouwer

  He straightened his shoulders, then began reading through his new e-mails. There was one from Catfish titled Prelim on Genealogy Request—WITCHES!!! In another window he checked the Hotmail account he’d set up and saw an e-mail from Dr. McFarlane, with the subject heading Magnet and Gene Code Update.

  Good.

  He’d get to those as soon as he fired bits of data halfway across the world, asking for help.

  E-mail number one to Fish, cc: Sarah.

  Fish, got a challenge for you. Find a way to wire me some money. You’re going to have to scan my photo to go with it, because I don’t have any identification. Let’s go with 1000, USD. I’m in an Internet cafe in Marino, Italy, so you’ll need to figure out the nearest location for where I can pick it up. Walking distance. As soon as you’ve figured out the logistics, call the cafe and ask for me by name. I’ll explain what I can over the phone, and you can tell me how to get the money. Once I’m in a hotel, I’ll call you back, and we can plan what’s next.

  Crockett included the cafe’s phone number and sent the e-mail. After that, all he could do next was read his other e-mails and wait for a phone call.

  And eat.

  He had finished his soup and read and reread the e-mails from Catfish and the geneticist and was halfway through his sandwich when she walked in.

  Dr. Madelyne Mackenzie.

  Fifty-Eight

  ice place.” Crockett addressed a man with thick graying hair. “I really appreciate the invitation.”

  “Sarcasm,” the man answered. “A poor cousin to irony.”

  So the guy spoke English. And well.

  After Mackenzie arrived at the Internet cafe, she had given Crockett a simple choice. If he wanted to find out what was happening, he needed to come with her. She’d led him out to a small black Fiat, where they sat in the back as passengers. Both the driver and Mackenzie kept silent. A drive of less than ten minutes took them from the Internet cafe up into the hills, past vineyards and small homes that looked centuries old. They’d reached a walled estate, then driven through an electronic gate opened by a remote control in the car, down a tree-lined lane, to a large villa surrounded by gardens.

  Mackenzie had then escorted him into this shadowed courtyard, leaving him with this gray-haired man, who had been waiting with his hands behind his back. He was elegantly dressed, in tan trousers and a white shirt and had the calm, self-satisfied demeanor of one born into wealth. Uniformed men kept a discreet distance.

  Crockett knew he was powerless to fight any of this process. They’d taken him to Italy without his knowledge. They’d found him once, they would likely find him again.

  But he wasn’t going to show any of his fear, and he’d preferred focusing on his curiosity instead. In short, what was going on? Seven days ago, his life had been routine. Seven days ago, he’d only wanted to get as drunk as possible to ease his way through the anniversary night of his daughter’s death. How did a schoolteacher end up in a villa near the pope’s summer residence? More to the point, why?

  “Really, this is a nice place,” Crockett said, keeping up his unfazed act. “But sorry, I can’t think of anything ironic to say about being kidnapped.”

  “The irony,” his host said, “is your lack of gratitude, given that you were brought here as a means of protecting you.”

  “I’d suggest that a lack of consent on my part is a good explanation for my lack of gratitude.”

  “That lack of consent is also something that should earn your gratitude. Your consent would have had negative implications on your conditions of bail. As it is, you did not voluntarily leave the United States.”

  The man had a point. Crockett shut his mouth and looked around. In the center of the courtyard was a small table protected by an open umbrella. An envelope had been placed on the table. Beside the envelope was a pitcher of water with sliced lemon in it. Some empty glasses. Crockett was thirsty but didn’t want to show any sign of weakness by asking for water.

  “How about you tell me who you are and why I’m here?” Crockett said.

  “I’m Cardinal Ricci.” Slight bow.

  Cardinal. The Vatican. Again.

  “Accept this first, please.” The gray-haired man moved to the table and picked up the envelope. When he passed it over, Crockett caught the faint scent of cologne.

  Crockett opened the envelope. It held an American Airlines ticket. He scanned the details. First-class seat from Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Airport to Chicago’s O’Hare, then LAX.

  “You are not a prisoner,” the man said. “You can walk away. The men behind you will escort you to the airport. I can arrange for someone from the American Embassy to meet you there. You don’t have your passport, but as a returning fugitive, you’ll be allowed on the airplane, and authorities will be waiting for you in Chicago when you clear immigration. There, as we both know, you’ll be met with a warrant for your arrest.”

  “And if I stay,” Crockett said, “I’ll be guarded by a priest with a stun gun?”

  “We were hoping to keep you in the hotel long enough to explain the situation,” the cardinal said. “It would have been safer and more discreet. As it is now, the chances are much greater that our plans will be discovered.”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “You only get the answers if you stay,” the gray-haired man said. “If you decide to stay, I’ll need that ticket back. At least for a few days, until the situation is resolved.”

  Crockett considered his options. He could come up with three. Stay, get on the airplane, or try to escape again.

  Getting on the airplane meant certain arrest, with nothing learned about any of this that might help him avoid going to prison.

  A successful escape wouldn’t help him much, as he still had no money and no identification, no place to go, and they’d probably find him as easily as they did after his first escape.

  And staying meant he might learn what was going on. More importantly, if he learned what was going on, he’d have a chance at recovering his former life. Quiet daily routines, with weekends of hope and joy with Mickey.

  He handed the ticket back to the cardinal.

  “Thank you,” Ricci said. He made a fluttering waving motion with his fingers, and the uniformed men retreated from the courtyard.

  The cardinal motioned toward the table and they sat.

  “Please,” he said. “Help yourself. I’m guessing the effects of the drugs it took to put you on our jet have left you thirsty.”

  The man was charming, but Crockett wasn’t in the mood to be charmed.

  He refused the offer of water.

  “Who is ‘we’?” Crockett asked. “And what is the situation that needs to be resolved?”

  “Have some water. Make yourself comfortable. My villa is yours for the stay. We’ve moved all your personal possessions into a guest room. Think of it as a complimentary vacation. You’ll find plenty of books, but no Internet. Among the conditions is that your presence here remains unknown. When the situation is over, we will fly you back to California. All the charges against you will have been dropped. Your life will be what it was before Jaimie showed up at your house.”

  Crockett thought of the note on his mirror, promising the same thing. Pretty strong odds that this was connected.

  Cardinal. Vatican.

  “I’m supposed to believe that?”

  “Your alternative is to get on a commercial flight and take your chances when you land.”

  “No,” Crockett said. “The alternative is that you tell me what’s going on, as you promised.”

  “You are not in a position to make requests.”

  “I know that Dr. Mackenzie sent out a sample of Jaimie’s blood for DNA analysis. And that she also ordered a genealogy report.”

  “You’ve already informed her of that. Rather melodramatically, from what I understand.”

  Now Crockett knew that this man who exuded such European arrogance was working with Madelyne Mackenzie.

  “Not cu
rious to know how I found out?” Crockett asked.

  The man sighed, in a manner that implied Americans were such simple children. “Spyware. It was not so very difficult to guess that you had hacked into her computer. Hacking into someone’s computer is a crime, but we made a decision not to begin any prosecution for it. It’s your good fortune that it’s more important to keep you comfortably in hibernation for a short while than it is to address that blatant invasion of privacy.”

  This was beginning to feel like a poker game to Crockett, and it seemed smart to hold on to what he knew. Like that he wasn’t the only one who had been prowling Mackenzie’s cyberspace.

  “What if you and Dr. Mackenzie have been looking in the wrong family tree?” Crockett said. “What if it turns out Jaimie’s great-great-great grandmother was burned to death for the crime of witchcraft?”

  The arrogance was replaced by a stillness. A predatory stillness.

  Crockett had him, and knew it.

  “I’ll be glad to tell you about Jaimie’s real mother,” Crockett said. “But first I want to know what’s happening here, why you’re so interested in Jaimie, and how you are going to get us both home and back to normal lives.”

  Fifty-Nine

  n the dim late-afternoon light, in a king-sized bed, in a room darkened by blinds, a slight creak of the door woke Crockett from his nap.

  Earlier, the cardinal had refused to discuss Jaimie with him, saying there would be time for that later. He’d left Crockett alone, advising him to rest. Easy advice to take, given the debilitating combination of massive jet lag and a hangover from whatever drug had been used on him.

  He was on his side, facing the door. He opened his eyes slightly. He didn’t feel a sense of danger. There seemed to be no violent intentions against him. They just wanted him contained.

  Mackenzie had entered the room and was walking softly toward him. He kept his eyes nearly shut.

  When she reached him and was about to touch his shoulder, he opened his eyes more fully. She wore a loose blue dress, and her hair was pinned up in a tight bun. Once again, she looked ready for a senior’s discount at Goodwill.

  “Hello,” Crockett said.

  It startled her, which, of course, was what he wanted. She withdrew her hand as if a wasp had stung it.

  “Get ready,” she said, stepping back. “You need to get dressed and ready to go. Cardinal Ricci has sent a car to take us to Rome. He’ll give you some answers when we get there.”

  Crockett reached for the horn-rimmed glasses on his nightstand, then slipped them on. Marvels of engineering. Waterproof enough in his pocket to have survived his plunge into the pool. He’d tested them before falling to sleep. “Fine. More mystery and deception. Maybe this time I’ll wake up in Brazil,” Crockett said. “But maybe you could at least clear up one thing. Can you tell me why you belong to a coven of witches?”

  In the courtyard, Mackenzie stood in front of Crocket, staring at a far wall. She spoke softly, “Hail Satan. Hail Satan. Hail Satan.”

  Crockett watched her carefully, wondering where this was going. He found it curious that she hadn’t even asked him how he knew about the coven before leading him out to the courtyard.

  She finally focused on him. “One of my patients is a woman from a foster-home background who was abused as part of a Satanic ritual when she was only five years old. She told me that both she and a boy living in the house, a boy who was four at the time, believed they were hearing the ‘men in black robes’ say the phrase, ‘Hales Ate In.’ Then, long after she too had been abused, she finally realized she and the boy had misunderstood. It was not ‘hales ate in.’ Instead, the robed individuals were saying, ‘Hail Satan.’ ”

  “Hail Satan?”

  “Black Mass. Satanism rituals.”

  “Thought that kind of Satanism stuff was urban myth.”

  “Tell that to the woman who was abused as a foster child,” she answered.

  “Or maybe she just believed she was abused as a child.”

  “It happens that way too,” Mackenzie admitted. A cloud passed in front of the sun and seemed to cool the temperature by a few degrees. “But in this case, one of the Satanists was a Catholic priest, the one in charge of both the rituals and the abuse. I’m talking about witchcraft, in its truest evil sense. Not the feel-good Wicca New-Age stuff. Actual worship of the devil. The devil. I’ll spare you the graphic details, but imagine the girl’s helplessness. In the dark except for a circle of candles around her, listening to incantations, shadowy figures like gargoyles. She was only five years old. Once, they killed a pregnant rabbit in front of her, opened it up, made her eat one of the babies.”

  Crockett hated stories like this one. He loathed them. All of it was abstract, unless you were a parent, then every story you heard brought it home. Every story made you think, what if it happened to your little girl?

  “People do evil things,” he said.

  “See, there’s our divide. You are defining evil as the bad things that people do. I’m defining it as a force. A real thing, apart from people. I’ve come to the point where I believe some of the horrors that people do are a result of this evil. An evil that more often than not nudges people instead of threatens. Caresses instead of commands. Always probing, always looking for cracks in psyche, like tendrils of a vine, hoping to find a place to reside. Yes, the devil. And demons that obey him, preying upon humans.”

  “You’re saying humans don’t have a choice. The devil just chooses victims?”

  “I’m saying the devil is constantly looking for people who are open to his seduction, often those who have been abused and whose despair makes them more vulnerable. But humans have the choice to resist, and then the devil will go seek his prey elsewhere. This woman made a choice to refuse to let what happened to her open the door to a demon. Instead she’s spent her life fighting the attempts of demons to get through the cracks that were caused by the abuse. The fact that she believed demons were real is what ensured she never stopped fighting their attempts to seduce and possess her.”

  “I’ve been told by another psychiatrist that exorcism is a placebo,” he said. “Self-fulfilling prophecy. That so-called demon possessions are just manifestations of other mental illnesses. Maybe a woman like that believed in demons, so she believed in exorcism and allowed herself to be cured.”

  “Or the alternative,” she countered. “Demons are real. Born into a family of love, our psyches are intact, no cracks for evil to enter. But the abused are susceptible, and in turn, demonically influenced, they abuse a new generation. A vicious circle of evil spawning new victims, open to infiltration of more evil. Abused boys grow into adults who abuse boys—and they join and hide within this institution, knowing it will be safe to abuse the next generation.”

  She shifted her eyes away, then back to Crockett. “An institution, like, say, the Catholic Church. And here’s what’s frustrating, not only to me but to millions in the church. It’s an institution that does so much good all across the world. It’s like a beautiful mansion, with one horrible, dark closet. But the closet draws all the attention, and the fact that the mansion is beautiful too often gets lost because of it.”

  The cloud passed, and it was bright again.

  Crockett shook his head. “Let me get this straight. There’s a dark closet of witchcraft in the Catholic Church. Witchcraft that explains the pedophilia and all the cover-ups. Generations of witches inside the church.”

  “You’ve got the vicious circle right, but source of the circle wrong. Witchcraft is a symptom. The cause is simple. Demons.”

  “I’ll give you this,” he said. “This worldview that you present is well constructed. I mean, once you accept a certain premise—that demons exist—everything falls into place. Demons reside in humans who abuse other humans, which opens cracks in the psyche of those abused humans so that they’re susceptible to demon possession, and once they are possessed they in turn abuse other humans. And these demons have found a safe haven in the hi
erarchy of the Catholic Church. But that doesn’t explain why you are a witch.”

  “I joined a coven and began attending Black Masses to hunt the priest who had abused this child.”

  “This is crazy. You were willing to engage in that kind of abusive circle until you catch the priest in the same abusive act?”

  “Not for a moment would I engage in abuse,” Mackenzie said. “Most of this stuff is only damaging in a spiritual sense. Very few Black Masses involve real abuse or human sacrifice. You don’t just waltz in and get accepted in a secret circle of hard-core Satanists. I’ve been on the fringes, with the dabblers, trying to get close enough to the core to catch this priest at a ceremony. I’ve always had my cell phone with me, ready to make a call that would bring in cops to arrest them at the first signs of real abuse, even if the priest wasn’t there.”

  “Why not just confront the priest? Expose his Satanism to his congregation?”

  “Without proof? No.”

  Crockett wanted, no needed, to be able to trust Mackenzie. If he couldn’t now, then he couldn’t trust whatever happened next or wherever she might lead him. “I’m still trying to accept your motivation. Getting this involved—isn’t that blurring the lines between psychiatrist and patient? Why not have your patient make the allegations? Priests all over the world have been brought to justice decades after molesting children.”

  “With the charges ignored or dismissed as fabrications until more than one accuser comes forward. My patient was the only one who saw this man’s mask slip. I mean a literal mask, not metaphorical. And the sad reality is that the church has a history of trying to cover up the abuse. If ever a situation demanded proof, this was it.”

  “That was your motivation,” Crockett said. “Finding proof to help a patient? I’m not trying to be a jerk, but sounds thin.”

  “Definitely sounds thin,” Mackenzie said, her smile grim. “There’s a little more to it than that. It’s been months since I first made contact with Father O’Hare, and he’s the one who suggested we try to trap that priest at a Black Mass.”