by A. W. Hill
There were six men seated at the Formica-topped table, one chair at the far end conspicuously empty. Raszer was introduced around and invited to take the folding chair nearest the door, directly in the path of a chilly draft from the Hall.
“This is Jim Bidwell,” said Leach, placing his hands on the broad shoulders of the beefy man on Raszer’s left. “He’ll be taking over Silas’s duties as Ministerial Overseer.”
“Big shoes to fill,” said Jim Bidwell. “Big shoes.”
“From what little I saw, Mr. Bidwell,” said Raszer, “I’d say you’re right about that.” He scanned the table. “I’m very sorry for your loss, gentlemen. It must have come as a great shock.”
“No,” said Leach. “Not in truth. Silas wasn’t well. Hadn’t been since the, er, desecration two summers ago. I think he died to the world that day.” Leach dropped his chin solemnly and the others followed suit, leaving Raszer to ponder his daughter’s words. “There is no shame as deep as the shame of a disobedient child.”
“Amen to that,” said the man on Raszer’s right.
“And this,“ said Leach, following the voice, “is Sam Brown. He’s our Ministerial Servant. He runs the office, and he’ll be your main contact should we decide to proceed with this, uh, matter.”
Sam Brown was a black man in his sixties. He was the only person of color in the group, but it was a small group. As with many evangelical sects, the growth of the Witness flock in recent years was owed in large measure to the blurring of color lines. Raszer sometimes wondered if L.A.’s inevitable armageddon would come down less to a battle between rich and poor than to one between believers and nonbelievers. Amos Leach must have detected just the slightest movement of Raszer’s eyebrow, because he felt obliged to say, “We’re all servants here, Mr. Raszer. Unlike the world at large, we do not denigrate servitude. Our church is the faithful and discreet slave of the Lord.”
“Amen,” said Jim Bidwell, and the others nodded their agreement.
Leach took his chair at the end of the table opposite Raszer and laced his stubby fingers together. He cocked his head, thought for a moment, then said, “We thought we ought to ask you, Mr. Raszer . . . are you yourself a Christian?”
“You might do better to ask me,” said Raszer, “if I’m a man who can be counted on to keep his faith—and his own counsel.”
“And are you?” asked Leach.
“Yes, I am,” Raszer affirmed, although something about Amos Leach gave him pause, something off-kilter about the small body and big hair.
“That’s good,” said Leach. “If we should decide, as a body, to engage your services, we’ll need to have your complete discretion. We don’t want any headlines.”
“You won’t get any,” said Raszer, having anticipated the concern. “In seven years of work on six continents, with one exception, I haven’t generated a single line of copy. I’m not in the Yellow Pages, and whatever’s on the Internet is currently being swept clean. I prefer to work very, very quietly, and I don’t leave footprints.”
“And your fee for finding a missing person?” asked Leach.
“Ordinarily, six thousand a week, plus expenses.”
Raszer saw Sam Brown roll his eyes. Jim Bidwell shook his head gravely. Leach looked from man to man, clucked his tongue, and asked, “And how many weeks?”
“Very hard to say,” Raszer answered. “Six. Eight. Anyway, I don’t waste time.”
“I’m afraid Silas didn’t leave us that kind of money,” Jim Bidwell said.
“Maybe we ought to let the dead bury the dead,” said Amos Leach.
“We’re the trustees of Silas’s legacy,” Sam Brown countered. “And we made a—”
Painfully aware of his empty bank account, Raszer adjusted. “I’ll drop it to forty-five hundred with a five-week cap. My daughter . . . wants me to find your girl.”
“You understand, Mr. Raszer,” said Leach, “that we’d expect you to return Katy to her flock . . . spiritually unblemished.”
“I don’t do reconversions,” said Raszer. “Depending on what Katy’s been through—and assuming she’s alive—she may well want to come back to the fold on her own, and I’ll do my level best to correct the effects of any coercion, confinement, or manipulation so that she can make that choice. Despite what you may have read in the press, I’m not for hire as a deprogrammer. Not in the usual sense.”
Amos Leach leaned forward, his fingers still knitted. “In what sense, then?”
Raszer took note that the Overseer’s voice had broken into a higher register.
“Deprogramming, exit counseling—whatever you want to call it—is a little like shock therapy. Effective in the short term, but the problems remain because only the brain has been tinkered with. I try to approach my strays as embodied souls who may’ve wandered off to follow a star but wound up out in the cold. I offer them a coat, and the label on the coat says, ‘This is Who I Am, more or less as God made me. This is how I saw the world before anybody told me different.’ Most people are happy to put on the coat once they see how exposed they are. But I won’t have it tailor made to fit any particular doctrine or dogma. If I were in that business, Mr. Leach, somebody could just as easily hire me to deprogram your son or daughter.”
Sam Brown cleared his throat and broke the tense silence. Amos Leach affected indignation and hammered his entwined fists on the table. “Are you comparing this house of God to a cult, Mr. Raszer?” Midway, his voice broke again.
“No,” said Raszer. “I don’t use that word much. Belief in a higher purpose gets channeled into all sorts of streams—big and small, clean and polluted. They all go to the sea. The sea is what I try to show them.” Raszer sat back, and the cold draft hit him.
“What is it, Mr. Leach, that leads you to think Katy Endicott—wherever she may be—might need deprogramming?
“She left the flock,” said Leach. “That speaks for itself, as far as we’re concerned.”
“You’ve got an eyewitness who says she was forcibly abducted,” said Raszer.
Leach pressed on, as if oblivious to the point. “And those goats up in the canyon she fell in with,” Leach replied, “those boys.”
“Goats?” Raszer queried.
Jim Bidwell chimed in. “Those who speak against the Witnesses,” he said.
“I’m not clear on this,” said Raszer. “Those were the same boys who—”
Leach continued his thread: “They were dancing to the Devil’s music—”
“Raped her,” Raszer finished. “Again, according to your sole eyewitness.”
“And there’s no doubt in my mind,” Leach went on, “that they pawned her off to pay their debt.”
Sam Brown spoke up. “I should explain, Mr. Raszer, that we have pondered this matter deeply and come to the conclusion that the, uh, assault on Katy Endicott that night was, if I can put it this way, a kind of send-off. That the boys had already sold her into some sort of white slave ring. Well, that’s our theory, anyhow.”
“It’s not a bad one, Mr. Brown,” said Raszer, “as theories go. I want to ask you gentlemen about those boys. Whatever this was, they were also ultimately victims of it. Are their families still members of your congregation?”
Jim Bidwell cleared his throat. “The families—well, they’re a bit of a problem right now. Most of them have left us. They stayed on even after two of the boys—the ringleaders—were disfellowshipped a couple years back, but after the killings, they turned around and blamed it on the church.”
“So there’s a real history here,” said Raszer. “Why were they disfellowshipped?”
Amos Leach answered. “Against the command of the elders,” he said, “they enlisted in the Army and went off to fight in Iraq.”
Raszer blinked. “And that was enough to get them booted out?”
“We’re good citizens,” said Leach, “but we believe that there’s only one nation worth fighting and dying for, and that is the Theocratic Nation of Christ, which was established in 1914 t
o prepare our flock for the End Times.”
“The world belongs to Satan, Mr. Raszer,” said Bidwell. “Just look around. Look at any meeting of the UN General Assembly.”
Raszer ignored the political contradictions. He had to stay on point or risk losing them, and he was now far too intrigued to chance that. “And when the boys came back from the war?”
“They were worse than before,” said Leach. “That’s when the real trouble began. That’s when they took that trailer up into the canyon and started luring the other kids there. You see, we’ve got some protection from Satan’s power in our communities. We learned a long time ago how to circle the wagons. But once you venture out into the world, you’re at his disposal, and once you’ve been to Babylon, you carry his disease.”
“It wasn’t too long after they got back,” said Sam Brown, “that Ruthie—she’s Katy’s older sister by a year--showed up. Her and the oldest boy, Johnny Horn, they’d been sweethearts before Silas and Connie—that’s Silas’s wife—split up.”
“Okay,” said Raszer, “I get it. I’m going to need the names and addresses of all four boys’ families—the three who were killed and the witness—and the same for Katy and Ruthie’s mother. I’m assuming you’ve got them.”
“We can give you the Strunk family,” said Amos Leach. “And we’ll give you the last known address for Silas’s wife. But the other families, no.”
“Then I’ll have to get them from the police,” said Raszer. “That is, if you want me to take this case.”
Leach smiled, and Raszer felt sure he saw Leach’s eyes flash briefly. “I’m sure you’ll manage to get what you need, Mr. Raszer. And Sam here will assist you in every way.”
“Then we have an agreement?” Raszer asked.
“We’ll take it under consideration,” said Leach. “If you want my opinion, this is good money after bad. Silas’s legacy could’ve been a new Hall. But let’s say we have an
agreement on principal. We’d sure like to see Katy redeemed.”
“I will find her,” said Raszer, “if you want me to.” Now it was his turn to lace his fingers in symmetry with Amos Leach’s. “But at the risk of laming my own horse, let me address Mr. Leach’s opinion. Katy Endicott is now of legal age. I can’t force her back. She could be anywhere in the world. That means time, and my time isn’t cheap, even at a discount. Do you have the resources to see this through?”
“Silas’s estate passed to the church on his death,” Sam Brown replied, “and there is a codicil to his will requiring that we use as much of it as necessary to find and restore his daughter to the fold. Katy is one of our own. At the time of her disappearance, she had more good years behind her than bad ones. She’s still a member of the Little Flock. She belongs with us,” he said. “In the nation of Jehovah.”
Amos Leach looked on, unblinking. “We’ll call you,” he said.
Raszer’s tires were hubcap-deep in runoff by the time he left the Kingdom Hall. There had been another downpour, only now abating. Even the hard rain, however, felt gentler than the steeliness inside the church. Of all six men, only Sam Brown had given off a scent he recognized as anything like his own.
And Amos Leach—something wrong with that picture.
The call did come, late that afternoon. Despite Sam Brown’s help with names, addresses, and some background, Raszer was a long way from having what he needed to begin a proper investigation. He needed the families’ help, and he would not live fully in the world of the case until he’d seen through the eyes of the eyewitness, whose name was Emmett Parrish. Still more essential was the perspective of perhaps the most important participant: Ruthie Endicott. Finding her would take some legwork.
Each case had its own landscape of mayhem, and that was where he needed to locate himself, because until Raszer had fashioned a living narrative of the events leading up to the night of the rave, his intuition would not boot up. At his best, he was capable of thought pictures that neared the clarity of lucid dreaming, or even so-called remote viewing. It wasn’t like the psychic radar of those who could lay a missing girl’s angora sweater against their cheek and conjure a sense of her whereabouts. It was both eerier and more methodical than that. All stories had a fractal nature. They were made of the same tiles, only the design of the mosaic had been changed. Every possible outcome was like a different world; Raszer’s trick was to figure out which world this case occupied.
He wanted to get up into the mountains, to the site of Katy’s abduction, before the rains closed San Gabriel Canyon Road. He couldn’t even begin serious work until he’d stood at the crime scene, but before that, he needed to make a visit to the Azusa Police Department and the detective who had handled the case. Among other things, there was a set of snapshots he very much needed to see: those taken on the morning after Katy Endicott’s crew had despoiled the Kingdom Hall.
FIVE
“JOHNNY HORN,” said detective Jaime Aquino, laying open a third file folder on his formerly pristine desk. “Also known as Johnny Jihad . . . after he came back from the war, that is.” He looked up at Raszer, more as a young father than as a cop, and stubbed his index finger into the morgue photo of a young man of twenty-two: close-cropped blond hair, wide, sensuous mouth, neck broken at the brainstem. “Some boys go to war and never get to know the enemy. Never get close enough to smell him. They go back to their families, their little towns, the farm or the coalmine—maybe have a few bad dreams, but they shake it off. Johnny Horn came back as the enemy. From what we know, he came back sure that everything he’d ever been taught was wrong.”
Raszer lifted his eyes from the photo. “He had a bad ride over there?”
“I don’t know about that,” said Aquino. “His unit was in Karbala, not Baghdad. He wasn’t wounded. His military records don’t say much.”
“So, how do you account for his change?”
“I think it started before he left,” said Aquino. “Trouble in the family, some minor run-ins. Then him and his buddy—this guy . . . ” The detective dropped his finger onto a second morgue shot, one of a mannish boy with a yellow crest of spiked hair, a lip ring, and a dagger tattooed on his left breast, with the inscription “She Made Me Do It.” “Henry Lee is—was—his name. The two of them enlisted, and the shit came down on them. Johnny was tossed out of his church, tossed out by his family, and then he’s in fucking Iraq for two years. He had nothing to come home to, but he came home anyway. Him and Henry. They shipped out together, they came home together.”
“And moved into the trailer,” Raszer said.
“Right. Up above the Burro Canyon Shooting Park, on the east fork, not far from the state corrections fire camp. It was an abandoned heap from the ’60s, wedged up in a gulley. How it got up there, I couldn’t tell you. But Johnny took it over and set himself up like some mystic commando. Stenciled a big peacock on the side of it.”
“A peacock?” Raszer asked.
“Right. He had guns, he had pills, he had a pirate radio transmitter and a rebuilt generator to power his music, and after a while, he had girls. The boys from town, the slackers and gamers, some from other families the JWs had—what do they call it?—shunned, they loved Johnny. Made him a hero. They’d truck up there Saturday afternoon, do some shooting at the range, and then play that hardcore techno shit all night, till it shook the canyons. Drove the Forest Service and the other trailer folks loco. They finally confiscated his generator. I guess that’s when the kids started looking for other places to dance, if you can call it dancing.”
Aquino did a wild-eyed impression of a raver’s pogo, as good as a man of thirty-two could muster while seated, wearing a shirt and tie, and with pictures of his young children on the wall. Raszer sensed that the detective, though square, was probably not a bad dancer himself, given the right music.
“Why didn’t they move him off the land?” Raszer asked. “I don’t get it—firearms, drugs, a state prison facility nearby . . . ”
“Well, unfortunately,” Aquino re
plied, “we didn’t know the whole story until after the fact. Johnny and his friends fell through a crack. That’s federal land up there, but it might as well be no-man’s-land. Technically, the Forest Service could have instituted procedures, but it all happened pretty fast, and—believe it or not—Johnny had the folks up there both spooked and sweet-talked. He was smooth. And he had all the weapons cached. He learned that in Babylon. He learned that from the enemy.”
“You say he was a good talker, and you called him a ‘mystic commando.’ What was his rap? What brought the boys up there, aside from pills and girls?”
