The Cold Smell of Sacred Stone

by George C. Chesbro

  “Yeah. The sexual abuse is clear. I assume you notified the various social service agencies?”

  “Sure, but that’s a dead end too. There are lots of people named Brown on the welfare rolls, and lots of girls named Vicky. Welfare has no record of any Vicky Brown being reported as sexually abused—and there’s no way of knowing if the family of this Vicky Brown is on welfare to begin with. Finally, even if some agency did have an address for a family that seemed like likely candidates, the child probably wouldn’t be there.”

  “Because she’s in a secret place,” I said quietly.

  “Yes.”

  “I assume you’ve been to the police. What did your former colleagues have to say?”

  “Considering the lack of information and the fact that there’s been no formal complaint, there’s not much they can do, Mongo,” Garth replied in a flat tone. “At least not officially. They said they’d take note of it.”

  “You’d have done more than that when you were a cop, Garth.”

  My brother slowly shook his head. “No, Mongo. I’d have been upset, just as I am now; I’d have worried, and I’d have taken note of the information—but there wouldn’t have been a whole hell of a lot more I could have done, at least not on city time. The NYPD has a lot more to do than to investigate suspicious letters to Santa Claus.”

  “They could have checked out known sexual offenders.”

  “They did that for me. There are dozens with the first name Billy, or William, but no Reverends in the bunch.”

  Deciding that I wanted another drink after all, I rose from the chess table and went to the wet bar across the room. I put ice in a clean tumbler, splashed in some Scotch, swirled it around. “I can think of a certain Reverend, first name William, who’s displayed some perverse sexual behavior in the past,” I said, peering into the amber fluid as I held my tumbler up to the light over the bar. “I don’t recall his being accused of child abuse, but I wouldn’t put it past him. He’s one crazy son-of-a bitch, and history teaches that a lot of people who believe they have divine inspiration also tend to believe they have divine permission to do just about anything they want.”

  I turned to find Garth staring at me intently; it seemed I’d sparked his interest. “Kenecky?” he asked quietly.

  “Just a thought. They still haven’t found the lousy, neo-Nazi prick. Nobody’s suggested that he’s dead, so he’s still out there someplace. But your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Not always, brother; you can be a hell of a good guesser. I hadn’t even thought of Wild Bill Kenecky, and I should have. It would tie in with that demon and end-of-the-world business in the girl’s letter.”

  The gentleman we were so fondly discussing was one Reverend Doctor William Kenecky, the holder of a Doctor of Divinity degree issued by a mail-order “university” of his own devising and founder of a religious cable television broadcasting network that, before the plug was pulled, had come to dwarf the electronic resources of all the other boob-tube preachers combined. Like most televangelists, Kenecky was a Christian Fundamentalist, a so-called Charismatic of the sort who give the impression that they can’t wait to go to bed at night because they hope to wake in the morning to find the world ending, and a warrior-Jesus returned to smite the forces of Satan—meaning, apparently, sundry demons popping up from hell, all non-Christians, all non-Fundamentalist Christians, and all non-Fundamentalist Christians who had not sent money to Kenecky. Garth and I had found the Reverend Doctor William Kenecky a howl even before it came out, after he disappeared, that he had, for years, been associated with a particularly perverse group of wacko neo-Nazis whose “religious” ideology, labeled Jesus White Christian, included the curious tenet that Mein Kampf was a missing book of the Bible.

  Garth and I had never understood the appeal and success of any of the televangelists, with their obvious—to us, anyway—chicanery, overt appeal to ignorance and bigotry of all kinds, and blatant mismanagement of the dollars sent to them by people who surely needed the money more than these owners of Rolls-Royces and multimillion-dollar mansions. We’d agreed that it would take a team of anthropologists to try to make sense of this peculiarly American phenomenon of television preachers, but the appeal of William Kenecky had always been the biggest mystery of all. We had often watched his show for entertainment, much like kids watching the Saturday morning cartoons, whooping and hollering along with him as he “healed” people by smacking them on the forehead, and trying to anticipate his most outrageous—and oft-repeated—lines. But we certainly never sent him money, and were in full agreement that Wild Bill Kenecky was not a man any self-respecting God would choose as a mouthpiece; we considered him a spiritual thug, albeit a skinny one. He’d always worn black suits, and this gave his thin, slightly stooped figure the appearance of a half-finished scarecrow. We’d read somewhere that he was forty-one years old, and we’d been shocked. We’d thought that he was at least a decade older; hate, always shining clearly, in living color, in his jet black eyes, has a distinctly aging effect. We’d considered him the funniest thing on television, and had always made arrangements to tape his five-days-a-week show when we knew we were going to miss it.

  But then, nobody had ever accused either Garth or me of paddling in the mainstream of American religious or cultural thought. For millions of Americans, Reverend William Kenecky’s talk of Armageddon, the Rapture, and the ultimate destruction of everyone in the world who didn’t believe exactly as he did, seemed just the ticket in a world filled with wars America was losing, women’s rights, curse words in the movies, and satanic music played on the radio. To Garth and me, Kenecky’s paranoid fantasies were incredible and highly amusing, his show a kind of window into the open psychiatric ward that was a part of the collective American psyche. But those same millions of Americans shared his beliefs, and they’d sent him money—lots and lots of money. And, Kenecky would explain, since Armageddon was just around the corner, there was no reason for him to stint on spending that money—and he hadn’t. He’d owned a luxury car for every day of the week, mansions in the mountains and at the seashore. Palpable evidence of God’s grace, he’d called it.

  And then Wild Bill had pulled his own plug, even before his secret links with the neo-Nazis and Jesus White Christian were exposed. Charismatic, apocalypse-oriented, Fundamentalist Christians—at least the ones who supported Kenecky’s extravagant life-style—take a dim view of sex in general, and an even dimmer view of sex outside marriage or sex in any of what are, in their view, its perverse forms. When an enterprising reporter uncovered the fact that Wild Bill had, for years, been trading promises of salvation for sexual favors from both men and women, it was the end of him—or at least the end of his television empire. The exposure of his many sexual escapades, the variety of his tastes, and the voraciousness of his appetite hadn’t gone down well with his Tribulation, Rapture, and Armageddon crowd. Contributions had dried up, and—despite his feverish pleas and assurances that God had forgiven him—his member stations had dropped off one by one.

  Then, as surely as pestilence will follow drought and famine, the well-dressed, truly fearsome minions of that greatest Satan of all, the I.R.S., had come knocking at his already badly battered door, descending on him and his operations like some biblical plague.

  Thoroughly disgraced, his financial holdings seized, under indictment for tax evasion, and facing the very real possibility of a long jail term, William Kenecky had somehow engineered his own personal Rapture; he’d promptly disappeared. For six months no one had heard a peep, apocalyptic or otherwise, from him.

  Now it seemed possible that we had heard from him—in the form of a cry for help from a new and totally helpless victim; it seemed to me not at all unlikely that Kenecky was holed up somewhere and whiling away his time while waiting for the world to end by sexually abusing a little girl.

  “It’s a bitch, Garth.” It seemed like such a trivial, inappropriate thing to say that I repeated it. “It’s a real bitch.”

 
“And we have to do something about it.”

  I nodded. “What we have to do is find the girl, and then I assume the proper authorities will investigate any possible sexual abuse. And if it does turn out that ‘Reverend Billy’ is none other than William Kenecky, we might even spend a couple of quarters to telephone the F.B.I. and I.R.S.”

  “Uh-huh,” Garth said absently as he stared at the chessboard in front of him. “The authorities here in the city are already on notice; the police and Social Services are waiting to hear from us.” He paused, looked up at me. “What’s our business status right now? Are we finished with the Middle East assignment?”

  “Yeah, but we’re still busy beavers—or we will be if we try to handle all our other business while we search for the girl. I suggest we farm out everything our staff people can’t handle; if any of our clients object, we’ll explain the situation and ask to be released from our contract. I think most of them will understand. If they don’t—tough. Money certainly isn’t a problem for us at the moment.”

  “Okay,” Garth said in the same distant tone as he sipped at his bourbon. “Good idea.”

  “Garth?”

  “Huh?”

  “So now we’re going to look for Vicky Brown, and when we find her we’ll turn over any information we’ve gathered to the police and welfare people. But all we’ve got to work on is a letter with no return address, a name that’s as common as rain, references to some right-wing religious gobbledygook, and a child abuser who may or may not be a fugitive from justice. Even if the child and her abuser weren’t in some ‘secret place,’ they’d still be lost souls in one of the largest cities in the world. Sorry if I sound pessimistic. I may be a hell of a guesser, but I have to tell you that I haven’t a clue where to begin.”

  Garth turned in his chair and favored me with one of his faint, enigmatic smiles. “What are you trying to say to me, brother? Are you suggesting that this may be a difficult case?”

  “Yeah, I think I was trying to say something like that.”

  Garth drained off his bourbon, then sat back in his chair and cupped the empty glass in both hands. His smile had vanished. “Did you notice the smudges on the letter and the dirt in the creases of the envelope?”

  Suddenly my heart began to beat more rapidly. “Son-of-a-bitch! You had it analyzed!”

  Again, the faint, fleeting smile. “I pulled a few strings, appealed to old ties that bind, called in some IOUs, and got the people in the police labs to do some quick work for us—which turned out not to be so quick. I just came from there, and they’d been working on those soil samples since three thirty this afternoon. By the way, Frederickson and Frederickson is going to be getting some hefty telephone bills for a few very expensive computer linkups.”

  “But they were able to analyze it?! The dirt can tell us something?!”

  “It can tell us something, all right—but I’m not sure it’s going to do us any good. For one thing, that soil is teeming with all sorts of microbes which, according to the technicians, are quite exotic.”

  “So what?!” I snapped, making no effort to hide my impatience. “Could they tell you where it came from?”

  “Oh, yes,” Garth replied dryly, rolling the empty tumbler between his palms. “Finally. According to the experts we talked to over those phone and computer linkups, there’s only one place on the face of the earth where you’d find that particular variety of soil, and that place is the floor of the Amazon rain forest.”

  2.

  The New York Botanical Garden, located next to the Bronx Zoo, occupies two hundred and fifty acres along the banks of the Bronx River. That was where we were headed, hoping that our cabdriver could find a way through and around the traffic tieup on the Harlem River Drive so that we’d be on time for our two o’clock appointment with one Dr. Samuel Zelaskowich, the Botanical Garden’s top expert on tropical soils and plants.

  It had taken the better part of the morning to take care of our business—which in our case had meant giving it away, assigning some to our staff and farming out the rest to people in other agencies with whom we had worked well in the past, and whom we trusted to do a good job. None of our clients had been too pleased to have anyone but Frederickson and Frederickson handling their account, but all had eventually agreed to the arrangement after we’d explained the situation. Three of the corporations had offered money or services to help us in our search for Vicky Brown; we’d declined the money, told them we’d be in touch if there was any other way they could help. We were leaving in our wake clean desks and a number of very happy competitors.

  Driving us on were the haunting images of a little girl being repeatedly brutalized and sodomized in some “secret place” which we had to find, a secret place where a child played in dirt from the floor of the Amazon rain forest.

  It was rough going all through upper Manhattan, but our driver made some fancy detours once we reached the Bronx, and we arrived at the Botanical Garden with minutes to spare. We paid the driver, gave him a fat tip, then made our way through an eerie, improbable, snow-covered jungle of shrubbery and trees to the main administration building.

  We found Dr. Zelaskowich in his office—a cramped cubicle not much bigger than a walk-in closet—with his broad back and shoulders hunched forward as he bent over and peered at a computer terminal. The walls of the office were papered with an odd mixture of graphs and charts, family photographs and what appeared to be personal memorabilia. I had a sense that the big man did not feel comfortable here, and that his discomfort did not have anything to do with the confined space.

  He was a big, rangy man with a high dome of a forehead which was particularly pronounced when viewed in profile. He had a receding hairline, and a wispy, light brown beard. The thick-lensed eyeglasses he had propped up on his forehead kept slipping down over the bridge of his nose, and he kept pushing them back up as he peered intently at the symbol-filled monitor above the computer keyboard. He wore a white lab coat covered with dirt smudges, and there was dirt under his thick fingernails. I put him in his early thirties, and I thought he looked rather young for the hotshot expert he was supposed to be—but then, I’d met more than my share of young-genius types during my aborted career as a university professor.

  “Be right with you,” Zelaskowich called over his shoulder when I knocked on his open office door. “Please find a place for yourselves to sit.”

  We stepped into the tiny office and, at my insistence, Garth sat down on the only chair in the room—a high metal stool which looked as if it might have been appropriated from some ice cream parlor. I leaned against the wall by the door and watched Zelaskowich punch a button on the computer keyboard with one of his thick fingers, activating a printer which began to clatter and spew out paper. The man punched a few more buttons, and a fresh set of symbols appeared on the screen of the monitor.

  “I really hate these damn things,” the man continued good-naturedly, darting us a quick glance and revealing a boyish grin. “Botanists aren’t supposed to work on computers; we’re supposed to be down on our hands and knees in the dirt. But a few months ago our board of directors got the bright idea that we should take a census of everything we have growing here, and put it all in a computer. It’s a bear, let me tell you.”

  Garth and I glanced at each other. “You people don’t know what you have growing here?” I asked Zelaskowich.

  The botanist’s glasses had once again slipped down over his nose. He pushed them back up, looked at me, and shrugged. “Oh, no, Dr. Frederickson,” he said with great gravity. “I imagine you must find that surprising, since this is the New York Botanical Garden, but the problem of identifying everything that’s here is much more complex than you might think. It’s not a matter of simply looking in the records to see what’s been planted over the years, but of determining precisely what’s growing there now. This census is going to take years, with dozens of us working on our hands and knees—and then we may miss a lot. You see, sometimes an entirely new genus can sp
ring up without anyone noticing. I mean, we have more than five hundred types of hemerocallis alone; we’re not certain, but it’s possible that we may have more than two hundred and fifty thousand varieties of plants here. You see the problem, of course.”

  “Uh … I’m not sure we do, Doctor.”

  “Well, let’s take an example. Let’s say you plant a dryopteris clintoniana next to a dryopteris goldiana; before you know it—maybe in a year or two—you may very well have an entirely new plant growing between them, a sterile hybrid we call a dryopteris clintoniana x goldiana. Now, this isn’t a separate species, but for the purpose of our census it is considered a different type of plant from either of its parents. Multiply that example by the thousands of plants we have here, and you begin to see the problem we’re up against.”

  “You’re right,” Garth said dryly. “It does sound like a bear.”

  Zelaskowich tapped a key firmly with his index finger, and the printer ceased its clatter; another tap, and the monitor screen went blank. He spun around on his stool, a satisfied grin on his face. “There!” he exclaimed. “Now I can get back to where I belong—with my plants. At least for a little while.” He rose, shook Garth’s hand, then mine. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, but I really did have to finish that little bit of mechanical business while the mood was on me. I must say that it’s quite a thrill to meet the famous Frederickson brothers, and I’m flattered that you should be coming to see me; botanists rarely get to meet real-life private detectives, especially such distinguished ones, and I must say that it’s quite exciting. Now, how can I help you?”

  “We appreciate your time, Dr. Zelaskowich,” Garth said as he rose from the stool, reached into his jacket pocket, and drew out the police lab report. He handed the paper to the young botanist. “This is an analysis of a soil sample. Can you punch that up on your computer?”

  Zelaskowich adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose, held the computer printout at arm’s length as he studied the columns of chemical symbols, grunted. “I don’t need the computer for this,” he said. “This is incredibly rich soil, teeming with microbial life. It’s certain that you didn’t pick up this soil sample in New York—not the city, and not the state. In fact, I can’t think offhand of any site in the United States where you’d find soil like this.”