“Mormons.” He put away his phone. “Do you know why?”
Neither of us replied.
“Because they’re incorruptible,” he said. “They don’t booze it up or gamble or whore around. They drink fruit juice and go to church a lot.”
“What’s your point?” I asked.
Hannah spoke before he could answer. “They used to be considered a cult.”
Throckmorton touched his nose with his index finger. “Score a point for the lady reporter.”
“They were considered America’s first domestic terrorists,” Hannah said. “And now look at them.”
Throckmorton turned to me. “I don’t suppose there’s any possibility you could just get on a bus tomorrow and head to Vegas or something?”
“Not a chance in hell,” I said.
“Considering how much of the town they own,” he said, “these Zion people obviously have a lot of money, too. That means they probably have friends in Austin. Legislators, lobbyists, you know the drill.”
I nodded. “Tell me about the Russians Chigger was contracting for.”
“Looks like they were working some kind of money-laundering scam,” he said. “Wiring a lot of cash this way and that.”
Hannah glanced at me but didn’t speak.
“If the feds are on it, that means there’s been a breach,” he said. “Something ruptured along the pipeline, raised a flag somehow.”
I remembered my first sighting of Silas McPherson. The big Bentley parking in front of the bank on Main Street.
“What if the Russians and Silas McPherson are running money through Piedra Springs?” I said. “Chigger screwed up somehow, and the Russians got Silas to clean up their mess.”
“That’s a great theory,” he said. “Except for one thing. Why would anybody be funneling money through Piedra Springs? A ten-dollar bill blows across Main Street and half the town gets a boner.”
I started to answer him but had no ready reply. He was right. Any money coming through this place would raise eyebrows to the moon and back.
The woman rapped on the window of the Suburban. She said something that was hard to understand because of the glass. Her message was clear, though: she was ready to leave Mr. Wong’s.
“I got to git,” Throckmorton said.
“Who’s president of the local bank?” I asked.
“Do I look like the chamber of commerce?” He headed toward the driver’s side of the Suburban. “Get on the bus in the morning.” He looked at Hannah. “You, too. Go back to wherever you came from.”
“Why did you tell us about Chigger and the Russians if you wanted us to leave?” I asked.
“Because I’m a nice guy?” He opened his door. “I see either of you again, I’m gonna arrest you. Just because.”
We watched his SUV speed down the road as night descended..
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
I drove this time, Hannah in the passenger seat.
We headed down Main Street, the sky above an inky black swathed in stars. The image reminded me of a half-forgotten Sunday school lesson. Yahweh’s promise to Abraham, descendants too numerous to count, like grains of sand.
I wondered how many people were at the Sky of Zion compound.
The map on the Internet indicated the prison site was pretty big, a substantial sliver of what was one of the larger counties in the state. How many acres would that be? Ten thousand? Twenty? More than that?
A gray pickup was parked in front of Earl’s Restaurant. A county squad car sat a couple of spaces over. In the front window, I could see Sheriff Quang Marsh in the same booth as last night. He was alone, drinking coffee. No sign of anybody wearing the Stetsons with the unique crease. That didn’t mean they weren’t there.
A lot of cars were parked in front of Jimmy and Dale’s, more than at the restaurant. The woman’s death less than twenty-four hours ago clearly had no impact on tonight’s business.
Our luggage was in the trunk. After seeing the two men at the Comanche Inn, we decided that we wouldn’t stay there anymore. I figured to ask Boone to put us up for the night. If that didn’t work, I’d park somewhere out of the way and we’d sleep in the car.
“Why don’t we just keep driving?” Hannah said. “By dawn we could probably be in New Mexico, away from all this.”
“Is that what you really want to do?”
She was silent as the dreariness of the town passed by. She shook her head.
“What’s your take on Silas?” I asked. “What’s his angle in all this?”
“His angle?”
“Does he really believe all that stuff about the Supreme Apostle and the thirteenth tribe of Israel?”
“Of course he does,” she said. “He has to. Otherwise why would he be living on the outskirts of nowhere?”
“So he’s condoning murder? Assuming his people are responsible for Molly’s death.”
She nodded.
“How does that work in terms of their theology?” I asked. “Ten Commandments–wise, if nothing else.”
“The ends justify the means. You ever hear of Osama bin Laden?”
I didn’t reply.
She rubbed the side of her face like she was trying to decide on the right words. Then: “Think of the Sky of Zion as a life-form, a living organism.”
“OK.” I nodded.
“What is any organism’s main goal?”
I pondered the question for a moment. “To survive.”
“Exactly. By whatever means necessary.”
I turned right on a street a couple of blocks past the bank and headed north. “So what are the means? What are they doing out there?”
She shook her head and shrugged, and a few minutes later, I parked in the garage at the rear of Boone’s property.
We grabbed our bags and walked through the backyard.
A full moon hung overhead. The air was cool, smelling of honeysuckle and damp earth.
Suzy sat on the back steps, looking like she was waiting for us.
“Hey.” She crossed her arms.
“Hey yourself,” I said.
“Who’s she?” Suzy pointed at Hannah, a sullen tone in her voice.
I introduced them and said, “Where’s Boone?”
“Inside.” Suzy stood. She opened the screen door and motioned me in.
I entered. As soon as I crossed the threshold, she let the door slam shut on Hannah and stalked off down the hallway.
Hannah opened the door and stepped into the kitchen. “Nice girl. Friend of yours?”
“She has trouble expressing herself in healthy ways,” I said.
We found Boone in the library, staring out the window at the darkness.
He glanced up. “Figured you’d be back.”
“We need a place to stay,” I said. “The Comanche Inn is getting a little crowded.”
“Boys from the compound?”
I nodded.
“Zealots with guns.” He shook his head. “Bad combination.”
“Will they look for us here?” I didn’t want to bring danger to the old man’s home.
He didn’t answer. He returned to staring out the window, the very same window from which Hannah had seen Caleb, a runaway from the Sky of Zion compound, while I’d been talking to Silas McPherson, a member of the Sky of Zion leadership structure.
A moment passed as I pondered the coincidence of two people from the same organization being at this particular house at the same time, as well as Hannah’s earlier comment wondering if Boone was somehow involved in helping members get away from the compound.
“You help them escape, don’t you?” I ask
ed.
He looked away from the window but didn’t say anything.
“Molly was supposed to be meeting someone,” I said. “Was that you?”
Another period of silence. Then: “All she had to do was call when she got close to town,” he said. “But I think she didn’t know how to use the cell phone we left her. The ones raised out there struggle with technology.”
“How many have you helped get away?” I asked.
“What’s it matter?” he asked. “You want to give me a medal or something?”
I didn’t reply.
“This used to be a nice part of the world before they got here.” He shook his head. “Good folks lived here.”
“Have they tried to stop you?” I asked.
“What’s it to you, son?” He rubbed the old injury on his head. “You just show up in town one day and you think you can fix everything?”
Hannah patted his arm, but he pushed away her hand.
“Suzy’s in the room at the head of the stairs, next to mine.” He headed to the door. “Plenty of other places in this house to lay your head.”
“Have you thought about leaving?” I asked.
“Piedra Springs?” He snorted. “This is my home. Nobody’s running me out.”
Boone was upstairs, his snores filtering all the way to the library where Hannah stood by the desk, leafing through the ledger that Silas McPherson had been examining. She handed it to me.
The ledger was really a checkbook, a binder with three checks on each page. The section she was holding had just stubs, the checks having been torn off and given to the payees.
“Look at the names.” She pointed to the first stub.
Joshua Johnson, one hundred dollars, written two days before.
“That’s my brother-in-law,” she said.
I scanned several more pages. All were for the same amount, made out to individuals.
“I think he’s funding the apostates,” she said.
“I thought they wouldn’t take anything from unbelievers.”
“Maybe it’s just for the children,” she said. “Maybe they trust him, and they take his money so their kids won’t starve.”
“So he helps some people escape and he gives others money to survive.” I handed her the checkbook. “No wonder he’s on Silas’s shit list.”
Hannah flipped through a few more pages. Then she put down the book and left the room, eyes welling with tears.
I waited a few moments and went to look for her.
She was on the front porch in one of the swings, staring at the moon.
“You OK?” I sat beside her.
“Why do people do this to themselves?” Her voice was quiet, choked with emotion. “What was so bad in my sister’s life that she took up with these people?”
I shrugged, not having a good answer. Why did anyone do anything? People were complicated.
“You never asked about why I’m on leave from the paper,” she said.
“What business is it of mine?”
She didn’t say anything.
“What’s past is past,” I said. “Where I come from, you’re judged by what you are, not by what you used to be.”
The burden of your history is something you can never get away from, but you shouldn’t let it color your future. Another saying of my father’s, the history prof.
“That’s quite a place you’re from,” she said.
I remembered moonlit nights like this one, sitting in the backyard with my wife and a bottle of wine, our whole lives in front of us. I wiped the tears from my eyes.
After a moment, Hannah took my hand, and we continued to stare at the night sky.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
I made sure all the doors and windows were locked. Then I found a guest room upstairs at the end of the hall.
The room had a four-poster bed with a mattress that dipped toward the middle, a moth-eaten rug, and faded wallpaper patterned with English gentlemen hunting foxes.
I tossed my duffel on the dresser and went next door, where I discovered Hannah in the middle of a similar room, examining her surroundings, suitcase still in hand. Her face was haggard, bags under her eyes, skin pale. I imagined that I looked the same. It had been a rough day for both of us.
“Does your phone have service?” I asked.
She pulled her cell from her pocket and handed me the device.
“Thought you didn’t have anybody to call,” she said.
“I don’t. Be right back.” I returned to my room and sat on the bed.
Not much signal was showing on the borrowed phone, but I didn’t plan on downloading the 3-D version of Avatar.
I opened a browser, typed in the web address for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, inmate lookup.
This was something I did every week or so, whenever I had access to the Internet.
I entered my father-in-law’s name. Clicked “Search.”
A moment later, his prisoner number appeared next to his location, a low-security facility in Beaumont, Texas. Not like he was going anywhere, but seeing the information gave me a certain level of satisfaction. The bastard was incarcerated, where he belonged. He wouldn’t be released until his sixty-ninth birthday, five years from now. Upon his release from the federal penitentiary, he would begin serving a sentence in Huntsville for a different set of crimes.
I smiled, feeling just the tiniest bit better.
Hannah appeared in the doorway. “What are you so happy about?”
“A guy I know who’s in prison.”
“Did you put him there?”
I hesitated, unsure of how to answer. “It’s my father-in-law.” I got off the bed, handed the phone back to her. “So why are you on leave from the paper?”
She stepped inside and looked around. There was a sofa against one wall, opposite the door to the bathroom.
“Do you mind if I sleep there?” She pointed to the sofa.
“You can have the bed.”
She opened the closet, found a blanket and a pillow. Plopped both on the sofa and then sat down.
“I wanted to write a story about the Sky of Zion,” she said. “A long-form piece. The perspective of a family member who’s watched a loved one get sucked into the cult.”
“What happened?”
“My editor and I, well, we disagreed on the direction of the article.”
“What direction would that be?”
“She thought I was, how should I put it, losing my objectivity.”
“Did you have a breakdown in the newsroom?”
“I suppose so,” she said. “If by breakdown, you mean did I punch the bitch in the face?”
I chuckled.
“I’m not a violent person,” she said.
“Me neither. Unless somebody forces my hand.”
We didn’t speak for a period of time, comfortable in the silence, enjoying each other’s company.
“I’ve been thinking about Silas,” she said. “About how he had so much information on me.”
“My guess is he keeps tabs on all the members of the church. Friends, family, known associates. Likely weaknesses. Wardens do the same with their inmates.”
I thought about my father-in-law. He didn’t have many friends or family left. A brother in Amarillo. My wife’s sister, married to a doctor in Portland. And me.
She said, “I think I could be violent with Silas.”
The room filled with a soft hum followed by the pleasant rush of cool air as the central air-conditioning turned on.
“Me, too.”
She yawned. “You ready to go to sleep?”
I nodded, fatigued to the core, unaware up to this point in my life that it was possible to be this tired and still be functional.
She disappeared into the bathroom with her bag. A few minutes later she emerged wearing an oversize T-shirt that reached to midthigh.
We stared at each other, awkwardness overcoming our exhaustion for the moment.
She said, “You’re not some weirdo who sleeps in the nude, are you?”
I shook my head.
“My last boyfriend did that, said he was allowing his chi to flow freely over his skin.”
“Last boyfriend? As in ex?”
She nodded. “He didn’t understand why I punched my editor. Among other things.”
I went into the bathroom. Brushed my teeth. Stripped down to my boxers and a T-shirt. When I came out, Hannah was in the bed with the covers pulled up to her neck, facing the far wall.
“Turns out I don’t want to sleep on the couch,” she said. “And I don’t want to sleep alone in the other room.”
I shrugged. “Like I said, I’m fine on the couch.”
“Get in,” she said. “I’ll stay on my side.”
That gave me pause, but I turned out the lights and slid under the covers. This was the first time I’d shared a bed with anyone since my wife had died. It felt wrong and right at the same time.
We were back to back.
“You married?” she asked.
I didn’t say anything. In my mind, I saw the curve of my wife’s hip, the lines around her eyes when she laughed.
The grief came in waves. Sometimes it was just a few inches of water lapping on the shores of my mind, other times a tsunami. Tonight was somewhere in the middle. Rough seas, choppy but manageable.
“Girlfriend?”
I didn’t speak. A heaviness that was more than fatigue settled on my chest.
“You asleep already?” Hannah asked.
“Sorry, I was thinking about something else. I don’t have either. My wife, she, uh, died.”
The Devil's Country [Kindle in Motion] Page 16
