The building was small but new, with a handicap ramp running along the front and a large flagpole set in the lawn.
An elderly man wearing a Snoopy necktie and a short-sleeve dress shirt was lowering the flag when I walked up the sidewalk leading to the entrance.
According to the sign by the door, the appraisal office’s hours were from nine to five, Monday through Thursday. It was now 4:50 p.m. on a Wednesday.
I entered anyway.
A woman wearing a pair of oversize rhinestone eyeglasses and a pink pantsuit sat behind the front desk, reading a romance novel. She was in her seventies with hair the color of steel wool, done up in a towering bouffant. The nameplate on her desk read opal smith.
“We close in ten minutes.” She flipped a page.
“I need to do a search on an address.”
“Can you do that in ten minutes?” She glanced up.
“Probably.”
She squinted through the glasses. “What happened to your face?”
“I fell down.”
She didn’t say anything. A frown formed on her lips.
“Do you know a woman named Molly?” I described last night’s murder victim.
“That the person who got killed?”
“Yeah. Her.”
The old man in the Snoopy tie came inside carrying the folded flag.
“Ten minutes, Opal.” He disappeared into a room marked employees only.
“You probably should get on with your search.” She pointed to an area behind her desk.
There were six computer workstations, two rows of three facing each other, the monitors in separate study carrels so that they were shielded. Beyond the workstations were rows and rows of chest-high filing cabinets, each one topped with stacks of massive books that looked like oversize photo albums. Plat maps and real-estate records for the entire county.
“There’s an instruction sheet by each terminal,” she said. “Better get to it.”
On the opposite side of the terminal row, two legs were visible at the middle station. The feet belonging to the legs were wearing lime-green Chuck Taylors. Hannah Byrne, the journalist for the New York Times, working on her story about Russian mobsters.
I started toward the nearest terminal, one not on Hannah’s side.
“That woman who got killed,” Opal said. “Sounds like one of them from the compound.”
I stopped. “What compound?”
Snoopy Tie Guy stuck out his head, an angry expression on his face. “Damnation, Opal. You left the coffeepot on all day. Break room smells like charred ass.”
“Oh dear.” The woman patted her bouffant nervously. “I’ll be right there.”
He shook his head and disappeared back behind the employee door.
Opal stood.
“The compound,” I said. “Tell me what that is.”
“You better hurry. We close in a few minutes.” She disappeared into the break room.
I debated following her but decided I’d had enough trouble with the county government already. She’d have to come out eventually, and then I could ask.
So I strode to the nearest terminal and sat down. From the other side, I could hear the click of keys and the rustle of papers. I ignored that and went to work.
The instructions were clear, the interface surprisingly easy to use. There were three choices. Enter either the owner’s name, the address of the property, or the account number.
I clicked the button to search for an address and entered “Elm Street,” the location of the building with the nail salon, followed by the number range “1-9999.”
The machine whirred for a moment. Then the results appeared, a dozen or so properties.
It didn’t take long to identify the strip mall where I’d holed up with Suzy and the old man in the overalls.
A block off Main, 125 Elm Street. The owner was listed as Charles Harrington Boone, DVM, mailing address a street in the north section of Piedra Springs, about eight blocks away according to the mapping software that was part of the database. I copied down the address on a piece of scratch paper.
Snoopy Tie Guy came out of the break room. He went to the back of the public area and began turning off lights.
I clicked in the search bar again, this time intending to look up the address on Silas McPherson’s business card.
I entered the data. Hit “Search.”
Nothing happened. The page remained the same.
Snoopy Tie Guy continued to turn off lights, the room getting darker and darker.
I tried to refresh the page. Nothing.
Frustrated, I hit the “Back” button several times.
“We’re closing up,” he called out. “The network’s off.”
From the other bank of terminals, Hannah Byrne’s head appeared. She looked at my face. “What happened to you?”
I didn’t reply, intent on what I was seeing on the monitor. The search screen had returned to the original results, the properties on Elm Street. They must have been stored in the computer’s cache.
“You get in another fight?” Hannah asked.
I ignored her, staring at the screen.
The property across the street from Boone’s strip mall, 124 Elm, was an office building that housed a business called “Computer Repairs.” The place where the two hoods had found Chigger.
What caught my attention was the owner’s name—ZL Enterprises—followed by an address in Midland. The same name and address associated with the phone number on Silas McPherson’s business card.
“Let me guess,” Hannah said. “You ran into a door.”
Snoopy Tie Guy appeared at the end of the row of terminals. “Y’all got to leave now.”
I looked at him. “Is there any way I could stay a few more minutes?”
“Son, I’m already gonna be in trouble for having the AC so high today.” He shook his head. “I keep the lights on much longer, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Opal mentioned a place called the compound.” I stood up. “Do you know anything about that?”
He frowned but didn’t speak. A moment passed. Then: “Opal’s not thinking too well these days.” He moved to the far wall, turned off more lights. “Don’t pay any attention to her.”
Hannah lowered her voice. “The compound isn’t something people around here talk about very much.”
Snoopy Tie Guy didn’t seem to hear her. He moved toward the front desk, where he began emptying the trash can into a plastic sack.
She pointed to the front door. “If you can make it outside without getting into a fight, maybe you and I could share a little information.”
I watched her leave. Then I approached the guy in the tie and said, “Where’s Opal? I’d like to talk to her if I could.”
“She left out the back,” he said. “Poor thing lives near Ozona—takes her a long time to get home.”
I started to say something, but he interrupted. “She has tomorrow off, too. Won’t be back until Monday.”
I thanked him for his time and decided to take my chances with Hannah Byrne.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
When I exited the appraisal office, Hannah Byrne was standing on the sidewalk, wearing a pair of Ray-Ban aviators. She’d removed her blazer and slung it over one shoulder. Her backpack hung from the other.
“What kind of cop were you?” she said.
Even though it was a little after five, the heat was still blistering, the sun high in the summer sky. Despite that, Hannah Byrne looked cool and unruffled.
“An honest one,” I said. “Tell me what you know about this compound.”
Other than the two of us, the street w
as deserted.
“That’s not what I meant.” She shook her head. “Who’d you work for?”
“Texas Department of Public Safety.” I paused, then told her my branch of the DPS.
“A Texas Ranger,” she said. “The Navy SEALs of law enforcement.”
I shrugged. “We have our moments.”
“Are you a religious person, Arlo Baines?”
That was a question I wasn’t expecting. Completely out of place, vaguely intrusive, like asking if I bet on my favorite sports team or how old I’d been when I first had sex.
I thought about Sunday mornings with my family. Church more often than not, at the insistence of my wife. Then afterward we’d go to Luby’s for lunch.
“Not anymore,” I said.
“Does the name Sky of Zion mean anything to you?”
I shook my head. “Is that the compound you’re talking about?”
She didn’t reply. Instead she surveyed the empty street. “How do people live in this town? It’s like the zombie apocalypse around here.”
I realized her Prius wasn’t anywhere to be seen. “Where’s your ride?”
“Couple of blocks over. I like to move around on foot. Get the feel for a place.”
That didn’t make much sense in a town like Piedra Springs, a tiny little place where you could smell the poverty and decay from the inside of a vehicle speeding down Main Street.
“Tell me about the Sky of Zion.”
“Let’s get my car.” She headed north, moving briskly.
Before I could react, she was ten feet away. I swore under my breath and followed. At the cross street, I caught up with her.
“I’m an atheist,” she said. “Just so we’re clear on that.”
“Good for you.”
She turned east and continued walking.
This was a residential neighborhood, not a nice one. Small, wood-framed houses with peeling paint, surrounded by rusted chain-link fences. Yards that were mostly bare dirt.
“Sky of Zion is a cult,” she said.
I didn’t reply.
“If you want to go to heaven, all you have to do is follow orders without questioning them and turn over all your possessions to the church.”
“What’s it based on?” I asked.
The line between cult and a legitimate if eccentric religion was thin. Giving all your money to the organization was a pretty big check mark in the yes-this-is-a-cult column.
“The official manifesto runs three thousand pages,” she said. “A lot of it is written in a made-up language. Their belief system is . . . oh, let’s just say it’s hard to summarize.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything. Speaking about cults seemed to energize her, and I wondered why.
“That’s a pretty big red flag, cult-wise,” she said. “An inability to state concisely what your beliefs are. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, whatevers—they can tell you their beliefs in a few seconds. Try that with a Mormon.”
The woman named Molly had seemed otherworldly. Out of place in modern times. Sheltered, but not in a good way. Her membership in a cult made perfect sense.
Hannah Byrne continued her explanation. “The Sky of Zion’s doctrine is a hodgepodge, the Old and New Testaments mixed with Star Trek.”
A Honda rattled down the street, the old man from the appraisal office behind the wheel. He didn’t acknowledge us.
“Something about a thirteenth tribe of Israel,” Hannah said. “Their descendants are the true children of God.”
A dog with a jagged scar on its side crossed the road in front of us. The animal was part pit bull and didn’t look very friendly. We paused for it to get out of the street.
“The leader is called the Supreme Apostle,” she said. “His word is law because he’s considered a deity, the Son of God.”
“What about Jesus?”
“Apparently he was just a warm-up act.” She explained that most cults were essentially devoted to one person, an outsize personality, the charismatic visionary who promised his followers a better life.
Jim Jones and David Koresh. Sun Myung Moon. L. Ron Hubbard. Outsize personas who claimed the ability to communicate with the divine, to receive messages that only they could understand. The founder of the Mormon Church, on the lam from his creditors, downloaded divine communications via golden tablets only he could understand because he had magic spectacles.
The Supreme Apostle got his messages from the sky at sunset. The colors came from God. Only he could interpret what they meant.
I looked up. Dusk was still a couple of hours away. The clouds were big and white and fluffy, huge cotton balls in the sky. Far to the south, storm clouds were gathering.
Later the sky would be streaked with color, orange and pink, red and purple, hues so vivid that in a place like Piedra Springs, far removed from the pollution of a big city, the sheer intensity would make the breath catch in your throat.
“What’s the Star Trek part?” I said.
“The Apostle came from a different galaxy on a special rocket ship. And angels are beamed around the universe.” She paused. “The icing on the cake of a postmodern cult. Technology and religion fused together.”
I was a fan of the original Star Trek, so I asked her about the galaxy and the spaceship.
“They’re a little hazy on the details.” She stopped in the middle of the block. “The important part is that the Son of God landed in a swamp outside of Ocala, Florida, in 1947.”
On the far corner, the dog sat down and stared at us. Then it licked its crotch.
“So that means the original Apostle is dead,” I said.
She nodded and explained that the mantle of priesthood fell to his offspring. This was another hallmark of a cult: the leadership function is often a family tradition, passed down from one generation to the next.
“You’re pretty knowledgeable about all this,” I said. “How come?”
She didn’t reply. Her eyes darted toward the home nearest us, a tiny place that looked like something from a third-world shantytown.
It was in bad shape, siding patched with plywood and black plastic. The roof dipped like a swaybacked mule. The front door was either open or missing. A ragged screen did its best to keep bugs from flying inside.
“The Sky of Zion and their Supreme Apostle,” I said. “What do they have to do with a pair of Russian mobsters named Boris?”
“The dumpster where they were found is across the street from the Zion’s East Coast headquarters.”
On the rotting porch sat a boy maybe two years old. He was playing with a stick and an empty soda can. He wore only a diaper, arms and legs streaked with dirt.
Hannah looked at the child. “Tell me again about the woman named Molly.”
“Why are we stopped here?”
She didn’t reply. She stood perfectly still and stared at the toddler, her expression blank.
“Do you know something about this house?” I asked.
“The Sky of Zion,” she said. “They don’t much like it when sheep leave the fold.”
A woman darted out of the home. She was probably in her thirties but looked older. She was pale and gaunt. Her hair was in a bun piled high on top of her head, the exposed skin on her face and hands as dirty as that of the child’s.
“Was Molly dressed like that?” Hannah spoke in a whisper, her voice husky.
The woman wore a filthy prairie dress that had been patched and mended too many times. Her feet were bare. She bent down and picked up the child. That’s when she saw us.
Her lips pursed, cheeks bellowing with each breath.
She pointed a finger at Hannah. “Get thee behind me, evil one.”
> Her voice was ragged, not quite a shout. The child started to cry.
“What’s wrong with her face?” I asked.
The woman’s nose was misshapen, one side appearing to be damaged.
“She tried to leave,” Hannah said. “That makes her an apostate. They’ve marked her.”
I could see now that the woman had been mutilated. A knife had been inserted into her nostril, yanked outward.
Our appearance clearly was causing her a great deal of agitation. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, chest heaving like she couldn’t catch her breath.
The child continued to cry.
The woman held out one hand, palm facing us, fingers splayed heavenward. She looked toward the sky. “Oh dear Lord. I beseech you. Release me now from this harlot of Babylon.”
“Do you two know each other?” I couldn’t imagine how, but there seemed to be a connection.
Hannah Byrne nodded. “That’s my sister.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
While I tried to absorb the fact that this reporter for the New York Times had a sister who was a member of a religious cult in this godforsaken town, another figure appeared in the doorway of the dilapidated house.
A man in his late thirties, wearing a pair of overalls that were as ragged and patched as the woman’s dress. He was pale and skinny, too, like he wasn’t getting enough to eat.
He appeared angry. He pointed a finger at Hannah. “What are you doing here? I told you to not come back.”
“Hello, Joshua,” Hannah said. “I just want to talk.”
“Words of the serpent.” He shook his head. “A forked tongue has no place in this home.”
“What’s happening with Jenny?” Hannah asked. “Is she all right?”
The woman in the dirty dress, Hannah’s sister, screeched, a sound of pain like someone had driven a nail into her hand.
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