Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  “Then untie me and let me get dressed,” said Raszer. “If I’m going to be bartered with, I’d like to have my pants on.”

  Harry raised an eyebrow toward Layla and then nodded. “All right, then,” he said. “It’s not as if we haven’t frisked you.”

  Raszer’s captors each took a side of the bed and untied the knots, and as Raszer stepped into his trousers, he asked, “If you went to so much trouble to keep all this from the police and the FBI, why are you telling me? You could have sent me walking without either the workout—nice as it was—or the information.”

  “I Googled you after you called,” said Harry. “You’re quite a character.”

  “Christ,” said Raszer. “This is getting really irritating.”

  “Cops have a way of creating blowback,” Harry continued. “The FBI is worse. You can’t afford blowback, because it’ll blow your cover. And unlike cops, PIs only whore themselves for information.”

  “I suppose I should take that as a compliment,” said Raszer.

  “Indeed you should, mate. As for why I served you up to Layla . . . well, what can I say?” Harry Wolfe chuckled. “She was hungry.” He gave Layla a wink, and she ran her nails over his shoulder, the first sign of affection Raszer had seen between them.

  “Okay,” said Raszer, pulling on his sweater. “What is it you need?”

  “My dad has a little fishing cottage in the Lake district of England,” said Harry. “Far from the madding crowd. We can be safe there. Layla can be safe . . . if we can get there. But Layla’s here illegally and, due to her past associations, is probably on a dozen watch lists. I’ve overstayed my visa, and my British passport’s been revoked because I once brought a suitcase full of Ecstasy through Heathrow. We’re stuck, you see.”

  “In a stateless limbo,” said Raszer. “We’ll all live there one day.”

  “A no-go zone,” said Harry. “That’s what my namesake, Hakim Bey, calls it. We’re invisible . . . until we show up at the airport. But if we can get down to Costa Rica, I have friends from the old days who’ll arrange transport to the U.K. We can get in by way of the Hebrides. Once I’m home, I’m home.”

  Raszer lit another cigarette and looked the pair over. “I have a hard time,” he said, “picturing the two of you in a fishing cottage.”

  “Look closer,” said Harry, “and you’ll see the sword over our heads. Layla and I have made mistakes, and sooner or later they’ll catch up. But we’re not such bad people, not so undeserving of a little happiness. A fishing cottage will suit us fine.” He rested his big left hand on the small of Layla’s back. “Isn’t that right, my little cat?”

  “I will go,” she said quietly, “where Harry goes.”

  “Besides,” said Harry, “I miss my da.”

  “So you want me to arrange a flight to Costa Rica?” Raszer asked.

  “Plane, boat . . . ” said Harry. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “And what in return, aside from eternal gratitude and good karma?”

  “The best for last,” said Harry. “Once arrangements are confirmed.”

  “We can tell you where they have probably taken the girl,” said Layla.

  “Well, that seems fair,” said Raszer, stepping into his shoes.

  He picked up his cigarettes and offered his hand in farewell, but Harry Wolfe had something else to say, and just when Raszer had begun to acclimate himself to one skewed reality, they hit him with another.

  “Listen, er . . . ” said Harry. “I’ve got to pack up and get across town to feed my dogs. Would you mind, Stephan, staying with Layla tonight? It would be—”

  Raszer squinted.

  Layla simply lowered her black lashes and smiled.

  “I can pay you,” said Harry. “For your trouble.”

  Raszer shook his head. “It won’t be any trouble.” He sat back down on the bed and flopped against the pillow. “Not any more than it already has been.”

  “Good, then,” said Harry, and gave Layla’s hair a playful yank.

  And with that, the DJ was gone, and Raszer found himself alone again with a beautiful woman who might, depending on her inclination, be either lamb or wolf.

  She stepped out of her shoes and climbed into bed.

  Raszer awoke before dawn with a buzzing in his head. A pinprick of indigo light moved on the celing when he shifted his head. It took him a moment to realize that its source was his eye. With the light came a sharpening of sense. The breath of the sleeping woman beside him carried a scent he now distinctly recognized as wintergreen.

  TEN

  “Argonauts.com,” said Monica, swiveling to face Raszer as he came in.

  “What?”

  “You left your little notepad in the bathroom,” she said. “With the fill-in-the-blanks quiz.” She blew the bangs out of her eyes and leaned back. “It’s that website for alternate reality gamers, remember? We found it when we were on the Scotty Darrell case. Who’s Hazid?”

  “I dunno,” he mumbled, and closed the door behind him. “It was inscribed on the toilet seat in Johnny Horn’s trailer. Along with the other letters. Nice work. You are a woman who takes initiative.” He leaned against the wall of her cubicle and rubbed his eyes. “Jesus. Could Johnny and Henry have been into this stuff, too?”

  “You mean The Gauntlet, or just the role-playing thing?” she asked.

  “I dunno what I mean,” he said. “I think I need a shower and a nap.”

  She looked him over and wrinkled her brow.

  “Where have you been?” she said. “You look like you spent the night in a cathouse. And your eyes are totally bloodshot.”

  “You’re the one who told me I should get laid.”

  “Judging by the way you look, you got more than that. Who was she?” Monica chewed on her pencil and waited for the answer.

  “How badly do you want to know?”

  “Badly,” she said. “Another dancer?”

  Raszer plucked a daisy from her desktop vase and leaned over to park it behind her ear. She looked as fresh and squeaky-clean as he did grotty and disreputable. “In this case, your curiosity is justified. She was the former consort of Johnny Horn, allegedly provided to him courtesy of the men who killed him and kidnapped Katy Endicott, and now being sheltered by the DJ who did the rave at the Coronado.”

  Her jaw dropped. “Holy shit, Raszer,” she said. “You got a triple play!”

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I have a weird feeling about this girl. She has a little too much to hide.”

  “Well, I need to hear all of it . . . ” She wrinkled her nose. “After your shower.”

  He stumbled a little on his way through the office, and she giggled.

  “She really worked you over good,” Monica said.

  “Yeah,” Raszer said. “Just like a Waring blender.” Monica blinked. “Warrren Zevon,” he explained, then peeled off his sweater and held it to his nose, remembering. “About that website. Were there any secret drawers? Members-only stuff?”

  “It’s all password protected. I searched for Hazid, but nothing came back.”

  “Just for kicks, try using all the variations on Scotty Darrell’s name as a log-in.” He thought for a moment. “And using Hazid as a password. Fast work on the castration thing, by the way, and the Revelations scan. Did you see the connections between that Russian sect and the Witnesses?”

  “A hundred forty-four thousand of them,” she replied.

  “And every one a ‘virgin.’ I wonder—could we be looking at something where being born again means being ‘virginized,’ giving up gender distinctions? Stay on it, would you?”

  “You’re not thinking Katy’s abduction was an inside job, are you?” she asked. “Like she was chosen by some high council of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society?”

  He propped his elbows on her partition. “It seems completely far-fetched,” he said, “but I’m not discounting that the Witnesses could be involved on some esoteric level. Not Silas. Not her father. But one of the
other elders struck me as a little ‘off,’ psychosexually speaking: the senior Overseer, Amos Leach. Just a feeling.”

  “You know, Raszer . . . hold on . . . ” She made a flurry of keystrokes, then turned to pull a file from the cabinet behind her. “There’ve been a bunch of pedophile claims made against the church over the last few years by ex-members. One or two prosecutions, I think.”

  “Check it out.”

  “By the way,” she said. “You’ll have to make that nap a short one. Your Detective Aquino called. You’re scheduled to interview the Parrish boy and his mother at two this afternoon. After that, he’ll take you to the evidence locker.”

  “Great,” said Raszer. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

  “Who said that? Hunter Thompson?”

  “No, that’s Warren Zevon, too,” Raszer explained. “And he is dead. Sadly.”

  “Yeah,” said Monica, eyeing his bare torso. “Now get out of here before you begin to distract me.”

  “One more thing.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “When you have a minute, update our list of freelance pilots operating out of New Orleans or South Florida. The real cowboys. Ex-CIA and the like—the guys who can thread the needle.”

  “Planning a trip?”

  “Not me,” he replied. “I’ll explain. Right now, I need to soak my head.”

  Under the scalding hot shower, the buzzing in Raszer’s head returned. He steadied himself against the turquoise tiles that lined the inside wall of the bath. Sunlight spilled through the little window above, and he squeezed his eyes shut in an effort to attenuate the pain it caused him. His pupils were fully dilated.

  The buzzing was a low-voltage hum, like that heard and felt in the vicinity of a power transformer. He’d become aware of it during an earlier investigation, the one that had taken the life of his partner, April, and now he seemed to be stuck with it. At low volume, it came across as continuous and of a single frequency, but when it got loud, he was able to make out discrete but very rapid pulses, and sometimes other frequencies. Its nature was electronic, of that there was no doubt, and he’d been concerned enough to have himself scanned for brain clots and tumors. It wasn’t until he’d related the buzz to the activity in his right eye that he’d finally made some peace with it. Raszer was slow to come to such things. As acutely in tune with the external environment as he was, he had a blind spot with regard to events in his own body.

  Years before, while Raszer was earning his PI license via a stint with the LAPD Missing Persons Unit, a young FBI agent assigned to an interstate child-abduction case had noticed Raszer’s uncanny ability to map out routes that, more often than not, turned out to be the ones fugitives took, and had given Raszer a battery of tests designed to reveal “remote viewing” abilities. Raszer’s scores were only slightly above the average. He was not clairvoyant.

  It was something else.

  With no native talent for either mathematics or chess, he was nonetheless able to “see” probabilities collapsing into events in time and in varying potential realities, and could adjust his forecasted outcomes as the factors influencing them changed. This odd faculty was at its most keen when the flaw in his eye was “active.” The knack seemed to apply only to human beings, and particularly to human beings in the exercise of their desire. He could not have employed it at the craps table, except possibly to psych out the croupier.

  Now he wasn’t sure what the buzzing signified, except that it had started when Layla Faj-Ta’wil had laid her head on his chest at 5:00 am and said, “If I could make a different world, you would be my pretty man and I would be your woman.”

  Aquino was waiting in front of the Parrish house, a run-down bungalow on the south end of Azusa. The house had the look of a long-absent father, and Aquino had the look of a man on his way to someplace else. He shook Raszer’s hand and grunted.

  “The mother doesn’t like me,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder. “I don’t think she likes anybody much. You’ll see why when you talk to the kid . . . if you can talk to him.”

  “What’s the history here?” Raszer asked. Storm clouds were still parked along the high peaks of the back range, but on the L.A. Basin side, the sky was clear blue.

  “The boy’s father was ‘disfellowshipped’ by the JWs a couple years back, after he had a fling with the church secretary. Apparently, he didn’t repent properly, and so the wife and son were ordered to ‘shun’ him. Tough on a marriage, I would think. After six months of that, the guy split, and Mrs. Parrish—Grace is her name—blamed the breakup on the elders. Made such a stink that they disfellowshipped her, too, along with the boy, who was already running with Johnny Horn.” Aquino spat on the ground. “Like I mentioned before, the kid’s had mental problems from early on. Asperger’s syndrome, they call it.”

  “Hmm,” said Raszer. “That’s interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “I dunno yet,” Raszer answered. “Could be a link.”

  “Like a ‘walking autism,’ I’m told by the experts,” said Aquino. “At least, he was walking until he saw his buddies killed. Now he mainly sits in his room in his underwear with the shades pulled, says nothing. The mother waits on him like he’s some invalid. Be prepared. It’s weird in there, and the kid doesn’t seem to bathe.”

  Raszer cast a glance toward the ramshackle front porch.

  “Has he been treated?” he asked. “Is he on meds?”

  “He saw shrinks while the investigation was in process,” said Aquino, “but now, I don’t think so. I’ve urged the mother to get him help, but old habits die hard with the JWs—even ex-JWs. They don’t like psychiatrists. I’ll tell you, Mr. Raszer, they are the most closed-in people I’ve ever seen. Germs grow in closed places.”

  Raszer nodded. “You ever come across any of these allegations of child abuse or pedophilia involving Witness families?”

  “Not personally,” Aquino replied, “but I’m aware of them. The problem is, it all stays inside. Under church law, you can’t accuse a man without two witnesses, and where’s the second witness to an act of sexual abuse?” He pulled his car keys from his pocket. “Anyhow, Grace is waiting for you inside. I told her you’re a nice guy. When you’re done, come over to the station and I’ll take you over to Evidence.”

  “Thanks, Detective,” said Raszer. “Any word from the Horns or the Lees?”

  “They’re even less anxious to talk than this one. But I’m trying. If all else fails, we’ll pay them a cold call.”

  Grace Parrish was a fragile, tubercular-looking woman with long hair braided down to her midback. She might have been pretty once. In spite of the strain, her skin was still unlined, except around her mouth, which seemed frozen in the clench of someone suppressing tears. Raszer made her out to be about thirty-eight, which meant she’d borne her only son young and then quit. There was probably a story in that.

  She led Raszer into a sparsely furnished living room where all the seat cushions were vinyl covered. In the corner was a La-Z-Boy recliner that must have been her husband’s; Raszer could still see the impression of his body in the imitation leather. On the white walls, Raszer counted the grimy stencils of half a dozen removed picture frames, probably family photos, possibly of church-related occasions. Mrs. Parrish sat down to an unfinished cup of tea, the Lipton’s tag still hanging over the chipped rim, and motioned Raszer to a faded yellow armchair.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Parrish,” he said, “for letting me stop by. I’m sure Detective Aquino told you I’m investigating Katy Endicott’s disappearance.”

  She took a sip of tea and held the cup just beneath her chin. “You’re working for them.” Her gray eyes had been aimed into the cup until she’d said the word them.

  “You mean the Kingdom Hall,” said Raszer. “No, to be accurate, I’m working for a father who lost a daughter. The church . . . has agreed to lend its assistance.”

  “Ha!” she blurted, and set the teacup down hard. She coughed, and continued. “The only thi
ng they want is to get their property back.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean nothing,” she said. “Absolutely nothing.”

  Her voice had the ragged quality of someone continually swallowing back stomach acid, but there was a sweetness and docility in it, too, Raszer thought. She must once have been a good parishioner, a “wise and faithful slave.”

  “I sense there’s not much love lost between you and the elders,” he said.

  “Why should there be?” she said. “They drove both my husband and my son away. They just couldn’t keep their fingers out of it. None of it.”